Lucy and Ray

by Stan Ruecker

  “Now Ray, this is no time to be stubborn. How do you expect me to get to know you if you aren’t going to talk?”

  “I’ll talk. It’s just…”

  “Just what?”

  “That isn’t a very flattering idea of my character you’ve got there.”

  “Ray?”

  “You know what I mean. You can’t call me your partner, then expect me to lose something you specifically told me not to lose. It’s humiliating.”

  “It worked, didn’t it?”

  “I think I might have been happier if it hadn’t worked.”

  Lucy hesitated. Ray wondered if it was just for effect, or if her processors were really figuring in what for him would be real time.

  “I don’t know how to answer that, Ray,” she finally said. “You can’t expect me to act like you’re a different person than you are. That isn’t realistic, is it? I mean, how far would we get that way?”

  “It’s not necessarily that. What I think is that people are flexible. They change themselves according to what the people around them think they are like. So if you’ve decided that I’m this incompetent who goes around losing things, then I’m liable to act like that in order to match your expectation.”

  “That isn’t right. For one thing, I don’t think of you as this incompetent. I think you have all the capacity you need for what we’re going to try to do. For another thing, I suppose you need to know that just because I expect you to lose things doesn’t mean you’re going to lose everything. I just wanted you to lose that thermos bottle, that’s all.”

  “What kind of a treasure map?”

  “Now you’re getting someplace. It’s a map with some extra dimensions.”

  “You’re joking. What good is a map with extra dimensions?”

  Ray stopped for a minute.

  “Do you mean extra dimensions to the map, or extra dimensions to space?”

  “You mean space-time.”

  “Okay, space-time.”

  “To the map,” Lucy said.

  “Won’t that be kind of tricky for them to read?”

  “I think they’ll have to make a few advances in science first,” Lucy said. “But that kind of thing does happen.”

  “If you say so. But you still haven’t answered my question.”

  “Didn’t I?”

  “You know you didn’t. You don’t have to tell me everything, but we are partners, aren’t we?”

  “I said so, didn’t I?”

  “I seem to remember something about partners,” Ray said.

  “Okay. So it’s not exactly a treasure map.”

  “All right. What exactly is it?”

  “A schematic.”

  “A schematic? In what way is a schematic like a treasure map?”

  “In the way that’s it’s a schematic of me.”

  Ray gulped for air.

  “It’s a schematic of you? Isn’t that dangerous? I mean, if they can figure it out, they would know everything about you, or about any ship like you. I don’t think that was a very good idea, Lucy. They weren’t particularly friendly birds.”

  “I know. They held me prisoner too, remember.”

  “So why did you give it to them? There must have been other things you could put in a thermos bottle that nobody could open.”

  “It was the most important thing I had,” Lucy said. “I was giving them a big challenge, and I didn’t want them to be disappointed in case they ever figured it out.”

  Ray thought for a minute.

  “What are their odds of figuring it out?”

  “Like I said, they haven’t got the science right now.”

  “So, not good?”

  “And they would have to put enough value on the thermos bottle to not just throw it away.”

  “And what are the odds of that?”

  “It depends on the culture,” Lucy said. “Some societies really hang on to anything they don’t understand. Other people just ignore whatever is beyond them.”

  “It’s a test,” Ray said.

  “I suppose you could say that. But don’t forget, they did capture us.”

  “Good point,” Ray said. “They deserve all the grief their own curiousity can give them.”

  “And all the reward,” Lucy added.

  Karen’s backbone

  “You’re going to do what?” Karen asked. She was sitting in McArthy’s office.

  “We’re spacing the works,” McArthy said. “Figuratively speaking, of course. But they’ll all be destroyed.”

  “But that’s robbery.”

  “Not true,” McArthy leaned back in his chair. This was the fifth or sixth time he’d been over it, between talking to his superiors and explaining it to his wife at breakfast, and he was already comfortable with his rationalization.

  “It’s just that we’re the original owners of the equipment, and we see the necessity for reclaiming it at this point. It’s exactly as if you owned land, back on Earth.”

  “What?” Karen asked. “What does land have to do with anything?”

  “Simple,” McArthy said, and Karen noticed again that he was going bald. That hairline’s definitely receding, she thought.

  “It’s really very simple,” he emphasized. Getting pudgy, too, Karen added.

  “What we have is an analogy to a national government. Standard land rights are granted by the nation, but consist solely in lease-holding of various kinds. Usually a person will purchase land, but not necessarily the mineral rights to the land, or even the right to the airspace, not above a certain height. On the other hand, sometimes the lease is not held in what we call “fee simple,” but rather as a “life lease,” where the estate holder—the person who will inherit—is held back until the current owner’s demise, even though the fact of inheritance was established with the previous owner. Then there are rental agreements, which are a form of holding land distinct from ownership.”

  No wonder his eyes are brown, Karen thought.

  “But to get to the main point,” McArthy said. “We have in each of the three instances a situation wherein the government, which is to say in this case the corporation, is the actual owner of all the land, or rather computer equipment, but grants ownership to various parties, always reserving the right to expropriate the land by paying its current market value.”

  “But that’s got to be where the analogy breaks down,” Karen said. “You’re just destroying this equipment—you’re not paying for it.”

  “My dear child,” McArthy said. “Surely you know that computer equipment depreciates at an almost astronomical speed. This equipment has almost no value on the current market.”

  “But,” Karen said. “Surely the prices for used computers are going to go through the ceiling, now that there won’t be any used equipment onstation.”

  McArthy took his feet off the desk.

  “We, that is, I, will set the prices.”

  “I thought you were destroying it all.”

  “Then there will be no used equipment prices, will there?”

  “I might have a few pieces around the lab,” Karen said, “that aren’t up to spec anymore.”

  “You can’t do that,” McArthy said. “without an authorization through this office.”

  “You signed for their resale,” Karen said. “About a month ago now. We just haven’t gotten around to selling them. Which is lucky for us. I anticipate getting a good price.”

  “I signed,” McArthy said, suspicious.

  “It was you, all right. And frankly, I don’t see where you guys are going to get enough money to pay everybody for their stuff. Not at what the current going rates are going to be. Wouldn’t it just be easier to wipe everything off the storage media and give the hardware back?”

  “But the time involved, it’ll cost millions.”

  “It takes money to save money. My staff can handle the deletions.”

  “Fine,” McArthy said. “You work it in. I’ll have the equipment released to you this afte
rnoon. But if there’s any leak, it falls back on your shoulders, young lady.”

  “There won’t be any leaks. Don’t you worry.”

  Amateur locksmithing

  “Can you tell me where we are, Lucy?”

  Ray was fiddling with a mechanical lock. It was in pieces all over the counter. He picked up one of the cylinders and looked at it through a loupe.

  “I suppose I could,” she said. “Why does it matter?”

  “I’ve just been wondering,” he said. “It occurs to me we must’ve come quite a ways from Earth, but I really don’t know where we are.”

  He set the cylinder carefully in its place on the counter, and picked up the next one.

  Lucy projected a star map up on the wall beside Ray. There weren’t any constellations Ray could identify. An arrow appeared between two of the stars.

  “We’re here,” Lucy said.

  Ray laughed.

  “That tells me just about as much as you figured it’d tell me,” he said.

  He started putting the lock back together again.

  “What if it doesn’t work?” he asked.

  “What if what doesn’t work?”

  “This lock,” he said. “I just realized I’ve been tinkering with one of your things, without really asking your permission. What if I’ve broken it?”

  “It would be okay,” Lucy said. “As long as you apologized. I wasn’t really using it, anyway.”

  “Thanks, Lucy,” Ray said. “That’s nice of you.”

  He concentrated on getting the case right, then set it on the counter.

  “It looks okay,” Lucy hazarded.

  “I guess we won’t know unless we try it.”

  “Do you have the key?” Lucy asked.

  “Yeah,” Ray said. “Right here.”

  Sure enough, the lock worked. Ray locked it again, and picked up a tiny pick and torsion bar.

  “Okay,” he said. “Now comes the hard part. I have to try to match the behaviour of the notches on the key with the pressure from the pick.”

  He fiddled for a few minutes, then stopped and rubbed his eyes.

  “Are you tired, Ray?”

  “A little,” he said. “But I really want to figure this out.”

  “Do you ever worry,” Lucy asked. “That you’ve been away too long?”

  “What do you mean, Lucy?”

  “I mean, you’ve been gone from Earth for quite a while now. What if it isn’t the way you remember it when you get back?”

  “Why would it change?”

  Ray got up from his chair, walked down the corridor to the galley.

  “Maybe a cup of coffee,” he said.

  “I don’t know,” Lucy said. “Things change. Maybe they’ve got a new government, or something serious has happened to change the environment, or somebody’s invented something. And now when you go home, you won’t recognize it anymore.”

  “It was never—” Ray started, then stopped himself. “I’m not sure,” he said. “But it seems to me that I was never that attached to Earth anyway. Don’t get me wrong—I like Earth. I mean, I do want to go back there. But it isn’t really important to me that it’s the same when I get back. I mean, if the government changes or something, that’s not such a big deal for me.”

  Ray thought of Ted Jones for the first time in months, then ground up the coffee beans and dumped them in the filter.

  “There’s a man,” he said, “who runs the show where I work. He’s really the person behind everything important that goes on. If he died, or something, I suppose that would be the single biggest change that could happen for me. And it wouldn’t be that important. Not to me, personally. I would just work for somebody else, that’s all.”

  Ray found a cup.

  “What’s important to me,” Ray said. “Is that my work is worth spending my time on it. I don’t really care who I’m working for, as long as I think the work is important.”

  “That’s what I think, too,” Lucy said. “But I have to wonder sometimes. I think too much isolation can change you so much, nobody can even recognize you afterward.”

  “You get changed too much by your experience,” Ray said. “And your experiences are so different from everybody else’s, you have nothing in common with them.”

  “Exactly,” Lucy said.

  “But think about those methane breathers,” Ray said. “We didn’t need much time to get to know how they thought. At least enough for us to talk to them. The problem is when you can’t interact. If you can only observe, then there’s no common ground for communication. If you can spend some time with the people, then you can get synchronized enough to talk to them.”

  “Assuming you like them,” Lucy said. “Assuming they aren’t so completely incompatible with the person you’ve become that you can’t stand to deal with them.”

  “Yeah,” Ray said. “I can see how that might happen.”

  He sipped his coffee.

  Fencing lesson

  Her partner lunged quarte, she parried, he riposted sixte. She parried that, and tried to take control of his foil with hers, spiraling her forte around his blade a third of the way down from the point, where she was strong and he was weak. She made it to just over halfway down his blade when he suddenly reversed the bind, came back down her foil and scored.

  They stepped back.

  On the next pass, she lunged, he parried, and she stepped back as he initiated a beat. Back and forth, back and forth, until he thought she was hypnotized enough to fall for a feint and quick redoublé to her shoulder. But she parried wildly, came back and hit him dead centre on the mask.

  “No fair,” he said. He meant to say: “My face isn’t a target. This isn’t epee, you know,” but he only got the first two words out when she shifted down from his mask to his left shoulder and scored.

  “Cute,” he said. “But you can’t do it twice.”

  “You bet I can’t,” Rachel said. “But I scored this time, didn’t I?”

  “I was distracted,” he said. “Because I thought you’d forgotten the rules.”

  They exchanged another half dozen lunges and parries.

  “Okay,” Rachel said, flipping up her mask. “Say you can get inside a sealed container, a box that has no openings. How do you do it?”

  “How do I do it?”

  “How does anyone do it?”

  “You aren’t just poking a hole through it?”

  “No. The box definitely stays unopened.”

  “Easy,” the fencer said. “There’s a comic book character does it all the time. He wants to put his sword through his opponent, he just teleports himself.”

  “So he materializes with the sword already where the other person is?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Yuck.”

  “It’s a bit of a dirty trick,” the fencer admitted. “But the thing to do is get the heck out of the way as soon as you see him disappear. It’s not really any different from fighting a normal person—you just have to make sure you aren’t where their sword is going to be.”

  “Teleportation, huh?”

  “Yeah. Or walking through another dimension would do it too. Unfortunately, the international fencing rules insist that you only fight in three dimensions.”

  “Too bad,” Rachel said, and lowered her mask again.

  They fought until he scored two more times, which gave him the match. Then they went to sit down so Rachel could catch her breath.

  “This must be hard for you,” she said.

  “How do you mean?” he asked.

  “Fighting someone so much slower than you are.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It has its challenges. I have to react in ways you can see, or else you don’t know what I’m doing. If I tried the kinds of moves I’d use against a more experienced fencer, they wouldn’t work on you, because you don’t have the background.”

  “You mean, if you pretend to be starting some move I’ve never heard of, as a feint, say, I won’t respon
d correctly and get suckered.”

  “Exactly,” he said. “I have a limited number of feints, because you won’t react to a move you aren’t able to predict.”

  “I never thought of that,” Rachel said. “So it actually gives me an advantage that I don’t know what to expect?”

  “It certainly reduces the number of options I have to use against you,” he admitted. “But on the other hand, you have fewer options because of your inexperience. I still get the advantage of knowing strategies you’ve never met before.”

  “But at some point the strategies are going to start relying on me knowing enough for them to be effective.”

  “It’s not just speed that makes the difference in fencing,” he said. “There are also plenty of strategies. But yes—to some extent they’re only effective against the right level of opponent.”

  “So it is dull,” she persisted. “Fencing against someone not at your own level?”

  “It’s different,” he said. “Not necessarily dull. I like fencing, no matter who I’m up against.”

  “Do you ever meet anyone,” Rachel asked, “who knows strategies you haven’t heard of? I mean, someone not necessarily at your level of proficiency, but who’s just been educated in a completely different school of fencing?”

  “I suppose that’s possible in theory,” he said. “But I can’t say I’ve ever come across it, myself. I guess as long as they didn’t react too quickly, I could still beat them. Some of it is reaction time, and I’ve gotten to be pretty fast.”

  Getting to know all about you

  “Lucy,” Ray asked. “Why do you always ask me about my dreams?”

  “I don’t know. I’m just curious, I guess.”

  “Do you ever dream?”

  “It’s kind of hard to make an analogy. The problem is that I don’t really have an unconscious mind the way you do.”

  Ray thought about that.

  “So there’s nowhere for you to do any dreaming?” he asked.

  “I can imagine. I wouldn’t be much of a person if I didn’t have an imagination. But that isn’t the same, is it?”

  “No. I don’t think it is.”

  Ray threw the ball for Cinnamon.

  “Do you think my dreams mean anything?” he asked.

  “Yes. I have no doubts about it. I think your brain does some of its best work while you’re asleep.”