The acceleration couch was a sort of narrow bed that turned into a coffin. Sides went up and a top slid over it, lights came on inside and there was a hiss of air, and then I floated. I didn’t understand it, because I expected to be pressed down by the acceleration. I had forgotten about the kzin gravity-planer, which all ships, human and kzin, now carried. I counted two minutes by pulse beat until a bell rang, a green light flashed and the top and walls slid down again. I looked around, thought, got up and ran to the door. I opened it, and there was Marthar, just about to knock on it.
“We’re in space!” I told her.
“Really? I thought we were underwater. Golly, aren’t you a clever little doofus?” she said, flippantly. “Are we going to explore?”
We walked down the corridor that held our cabins into a great space with a ramp in the middle of it leading up. The floor was soft but smooth, a bit like a dojo. Marthar’s claws would have torn shreds out of the one at school, she had to wear funny shoes that covered them up when she went into the dojo, but here her claws had no effect. It meant that we walked very quietly.
“Just over a standard gravity,” she remarked.
“Oh, that’s it. I felt sort of heavy, as if I’d eaten too much. I suppose that explains why the floors are soft and spongy; it’s in case we fall down. I guess the gravity is because the ship’s accelerating. It’s the right direction. How long before we get to use the hyperdrive?”
“Think, doofus. What’s the acceleration of gravity on Wunderland?”
“Almost eight meters per second per second,” I replied promptly. “Everyone knows that.”
“Then we are accelerating at about ten meters per second per second, a tad over a standard gravity.”
“I guess so.”
“And how far do we have to go before space is flat enough to use the hyperspace thingy?”
“Um, I dunno. About a thousand light-minutes at a guess. Call it sixteen thousand million kilometers roughly.”
“And how long would it take us to cover that distance?”
“You’ve screwed up all the units,” I complained. “It’s a distance of sixteen times ten to the twelve meters. And at a constant acceleration of ten meters per second per second we’ll be there in, um, the square root of thirty-two times ten to the sixth seconds. Which is nearly six million seconds. Or something under two thousand hours, which is over two months. It seems a long time.”
“Well, there’s your answer. But what assumptions have you made?”
“You’re not my teacher, you pest. That’s what the teacher always says. What assumptions are made in that analysis? and usually it thinks of twice as many as I do.” I complained.
“Well, now you can see why it matters.”
“Alright, the big one is that we assume we are accelerating at ten meters per second per second just because it feels as if we are. Given the technology we got from the kzin gravity-planer, we might be going ten or a hundred times that and never notice. That’s why I was floating in the acceleration coffin, I suppose.”
“Good, doofus. In fact, not a doofus at all. I’m proud of you.”
She jolly well should have been, I thought. This subject was definitely Hard, and I was better at Soft. So far.
“We need a map of the ship. How do we attract the ship’s attention, I wonder?” Marthar looked around for a way of talking to the ship. Her phone dinged. She looked at it.
“Gosh, it heard me. That’s the Valiant calling. Hang on, I’ll put it on loud so you can hear her too.”
“Hello, Marthar, this is Valiant here. I put my name in your phone, and in Peter’s also. Just click on zero at any time if you are not in a public area or your own cabin. I can always hear you there unless you ask me to close down. You want a map? You have that on your phone too. Try the ship application. Goodbye.”
“When did she mess about with our phones? No, never mind, Valiant, I wasn’t talking to you. Gosh, it’s worse than being at home and having Redroar or one of the other servants always hanging around. You’ve no idea how good it was working at your place, Peter; at mine I had the sensation of being followed around every minute.”
I suppose being sort of royalty must have problems. You don’t think of the drawbacks, only the advantages, but I hadn’t thought of Marthar as being special. You don’t wrestle with people if you think of them as royalty, even when it takes them only a second to throw you. I suppose once in a while I realized how important her family was, but I soon forgot. She was just my best friend, Marthar, who argued and fought with me and treated me as a sort of pet rabbit.
“Valiant, how long before we go to hyperdrive?” I asked.
“Two hours, forty-three minutes and ten seconds, mark.” Valiant had a woman’s voice, not old exactly but not young either.
“Alright, we can go and find a few places,” Marthar said. “The map is cool. We can go up to the next deck and see the view from the ship.”
Marthar ran up the ramp to prove she could handle higher gravity, and I walked more sedately after her. The next deck was full of screens, but nobody was there. One screen showed our trajectory in the Alpha Centauri system; we were headed north of the ecliptic at an angle of about thirty degrees, and we were not far from Alpha B already. We were somewhere over the asteroids of the Serpent Swarm. From here it looked rather like the rings of Saturn, only orbiting Alpha A instead of a planet, and fainter, and more a crescent than rings, for it was denser on one side. And sort of skewed because we were not heading directly north. North, if you are a landlubber, is the direction from which the planets of a star look as if they are going in the positive direction, that is, counter-clockwise.
There was a back view which showed Wunderland, but it was only a point of light. We found out how to magnify the image until it filled the screen, and looked down at home. Well, sort of. München and Thoma’stown were the other side of the world, so it was not terribly interesting, really. I thought I might have felt sentimental about leaving our world, but discovered I didn’t. Marthar is as sentimental as an old boot, so it would be deeply suspicious if she expressed any sentiment, but she didn’t either. I just felt excited to be in space for the first time in my life.
We looked ahead in the direction the ship was travelling, hoping to see the swirl-rift, but it was much too far away, or maybe hidden behind some dust clouds. There are more of those than you’d think if you didn’t know some modern astronomy, and didn’t understand why the galaxy rotated a fair bit faster than it ought to if you count only the stars you can see.
“Valiant, where is our tutor?” Marthar asked.
“In crew territory, at the sign of the Spy-Glass,” Valiant replied promptly. “Eight decks down. You can get there by elevator.” This time she just talked to us directly, not by the phone.
“I was planning to avoid him, not go looking for him,” Marthar whispered at me.
I doubted if whispering would fool Valiant; the voice didn’t seem to come from any particular place, it was vaguely like what you’d think ghosts would sound like, female ghosts.
“Valiant, is there anywhere we can try out what zero gravity feels like?” I asked. I mean, we were in space. If you can’t practice floating and being weightless in space, where can you do it? And I’d already had a small amount of it in the acceleration coffin, so it didn’t sound like an unreasonable request.
Valiant told us to go to the recreation room two decks up, which she said could be made weightless if we wanted since there were no other occupants yet. So we did, and it was absolutely glorious. It was a huge room. There was equipment for playing games of all sorts, but it was all safely stowed away and we certainly didn’t need it. The walls and the floors were padded and soft here too, which was just as well because we did a lot of bouncing off them. We yelled and shrieked like small children as we zoomed around until we were out of breath and energy, and just floated companiably. You might think it is hard to just float, and it takes a bit of careful estimation: you have to bounce
off opposite walls with the same but opposite momentum, bump into each other and then hang on. The same momentum meant that Marthar had to be going a lot slower than I did, because she has twice my mass. Getting back is easy, even if you drift apart, because you can swim. Not very fast, it is true, but you can swim together in a reasonable time. And if there’s two of you, each of you jumps off the other. You sure get to believe in Newton’s laws this way.
“What’s next, chimpy?” Marthar asked. Note that I am the one asked to provide new ideas and things to do when she gets bored. I suppose she’s better at the critical thinking, that is, pulling apart all my brilliant ideas and giving clear incisive explanations of why they won’t work, right up to the point where they do.
“It’s coming up to the flip trick, the transition to hyperdrive,” I pointed out. “Less than half an hour. I dunno where we should be for that, probably back in our cabins.”
“Correct, Peter,” Valiant broke in. “The likelihood of anything going wrong is infinitesimal, but I don’t like the thought of broken, mangled bodies about the place in the event that I have to perform an emergency maneuver. It’s so untidy.”
Maybe Valiant is smart enough to have a sense of humor, and maybe she isn’t. We went back to our cabins just in case she wasn’t. Maybe that was the idea. There was something of the schoolteacher about Valiant, though that’s a terrible thing to say, even of another computer program.
I was a bit muzzy after we changed to hyperdrive, so I was late to join the others. I found Marthar along the end of the hall, sitting at a table with the Judge and the Doctor. Tables and chairs just appeared when you asked Valiant for them. Of course, they were made of hyperbaric matter—the fuzz, and it could be summoned up at will and shaped into anything you were prepared to program. I haven’t decided what to do with my life yet, but fuzz metaprogramming is definitely a possibility. Another is designing proper teacher programs that tell you a bit about why they say some of the weird things they do.
“Hello, Peter,” the Doctor greeted me. “We’ve been trying to talk Marthar into going to find your new tutor and starting schoolwork, and your absence was her best excuse for deferring it. So now she hasn’t got one.”
“You just want to go on wrangling, and you think I’ll listen to you and store the awful things you say and bring them up later,” Marthar retorted.
“True,” the Doctor admitted, blowing smoke at her from his pipe. “And you’d learn a deal of disgusting bad language from the Judge if you stayed. So better you go off and talk to your tutor instead.”
Marthar looked thoughtful. “He used to be a spacer, as I recall. So maybe he’ll know some bad language himself. Although, I’ve never really grasped the concept myself. What’s the point of having words too awful to say?”
“Oh, there are no words too awful to say, just words you mustn’t use too often, in case you wear them out,” the Doctor laughed. “Now get along with you, we’re going to sample the ship’s beer.”
So we went looking for our tutor. Valiant told us he was still at the sign of the Spy-Glass, so it sounded as if he spent a lot of time there. We went down eight levels to find him, and also to find why spy glasses had to have signs.
To my surprise, the Spy-Glass was an inn, and its sign was an old-fashioned telescope stuck up outside it. Inside, kzin crew were sitting around tables, drinking rum. I suppose it was some sort of space-farer subculture thing. We wandered in, and collected some odd glances, but nothing else happened.
There was a sort of mine-host, a big kzin with fur that was a sort of golden chestnut, neatly trimmed; he looked like a giant teddy bear more than a kzin warrior. His right leg was prosthetic, a metallic and ceramic thing, and it didn’t match his natural leg very well, so he sort of hopped a bit as he moved around spryly enough. For one moment, I wondered if he was the one that the Captain had feared so much, but it was impossible to believe that, because he radiated good nature and affability, joking with some of the customers, and warning them when he thought they were in danger of becoming intoxicated. A very different character from the ghastly crew I had seen. Also he didn’t have the silver blaze on his chest that the Captain had warned me of, and it would have been a bit of a stretch to call his fur red. He saw us and came over to us with the ear flick of humor.
“Good day t’ ye, young kits, and what brings you to crew country? For ye’re plainly officer types, I’ll lay to that.”
I was quite pleased to be thought to be an officer type, although he probably meant that to Marthar, who was certainly poised and confident, but then, she always was. And he could see her ear-tattoos.
“Sir, we are looking for a Mister Silver, for he is our tutor, and we thought we would find him here,” I said.
“Well, ye’ve found him at one stroke, young master Peter Cartwright, Lady Marthar Riit. For I’m Silver himself, at your service, and pleased to make your acquaintance. It’s a fine time we’ll be havin’ the three o’ us, I’m thinkin’.”
He offered his paw for me to shake, or at least a small part of it, for of course it was far too big for me to hold it all. Then he shook hands with Marthar, bowing low. She looked up at him steadily. He opened his eyes wide and put his head on one side as he returned her gaze with a twinkle in his eye. This was a mannerism which we later found he had frequent recourse to, the head tilt and the wide open eyes. They were tawny and black, and only a little bloodshot, but enough to make it clear he was an old space-farer.
“Sit ye down, sit ye down, and I’ll find some juice for ye, a broth for the lady and a lemonade for the gentleman, if that should suit ye?”
We sat down and he brought us some drinks, and then, with a big sigh, reclined on a footch. He looked from one to the other of us.
“And when d’ye want t’ start the tutorin’?” he asked. “To my mind, d’ye see, there’s more t’ be gained by your findin’ out about the ship an’ the crew than on learnin’ regular algebra an’ sichlike. Ye can do that anywhere. An’ anyway, book learnin’ has some limitations. It’s a preparation for life that I think ye should be after, not a preparation for bein’ a learned academic, which is a very different thing, I’m thinkin’, bein’ closer to a preparation for death.”
I was most heartily in favor of this approach.
“We planned to figure out how the Valiant works, because it looks like a bridge between Hard and Soft,” Marthar told him.
“Arrgh, that’s close thinkin’, m’dear, and I approve. Mind you, the same might be said o’ studyin’ the crew.”
He said this without a flicker of his ears, so I wasn’t sure what he meant, but just then my eye was caught by a movement from the back of the room. One of the kzin had risen stealthily and was gliding towards the door, and I recognized him. It was the orange-furred kzin who had been with the pirates back in Thoma’stown! I gasped and the other two turned to me. I pointed.
“It’s him. It’s one of the pirates. I know it.”
The figure had slipped out as I said it, but Silver’s response was like lightning. “I know not who he is, but he hasn’t paid his score. Claws, be after the sthondat, find him and test him. Ef he’s one o’ K’zarr’s crew, I want his pelt, see to it. And either way I want his score settled.”
Claws was a kzin who obeyed Silver instantly and was out of the door with his wtsai out within seconds.
“Are you sure, Peter? I didn’t see him, but it doesn’t seem very likely,” Marthar objected.
“Best be safe rather than sorry,” Silver said firmly, and I was comforted to think our tutor had our interests to heart. He might look like a gigantic teddy bear, but there was nothing slow or uncertain about him. “Claws will check him thoroughly. Ef he’s a regular Hero, he’ll come to no harm, but were he ever with K’zarr, why, Claws will find out and will take care of him, I’ll lay to that.”
We took Silver’s picture on our phones, so we would be able to see instantly if he called us, and he took ours. He seemed unenthusiastic about having his picture ta
ken, but stood up for it so we would have the top half of him. He explained that he was shy about having his prosthetic leg in the picture, and he moved as Marthar took the picture, so he came out a bit blurred, but mine was fine. This seemed a bit strange to me, for I had never known a kzin to be shy about anything. Then he took our pictures for his phone, which was four times the size of ours. So we parted on good terms, with instructions to set about finding out as much as we could about the Valiant and reporting back to him within two days. He told us where to get a copy of the ship’s plans, and that the first thing we should do was familiarize ourselves with the fire-fighting equipment (all dread fire in a spaceship) and next the location of the gun-mountings, their local control and the central control on the bridge. He suggested that after that, we talk to Arrow. Marthar asked if he’d like to come with us, but he demurred, explaining that a humble tutor would hardly be allowed in with the officer types, but that if we just asked out of curiosity, we would probably get access.
“No need to mention me at all, at all,” Silver explained. “Just say you have a taste for finding out all about spaceships, and one day you’d like to fly one, and who knows? One day indeed, Peter, ye might.”
“We’d better report this to my father,” Marthar said slowly. “Peter’s seeing one of the pirates, I mean.”
“Indeed we must,” Silver said approvingly. “And we shall do it now while the story is still fresh in our minds.”
So we went up eight levels, with Silver amazed that he could lose the score for three glasses of rum and not know the kzin. “For I can vouch for the most o’ the crew, and ye may lay t’ that. They are a fine set of kzin, and the men are as good, or very near. Why, I wouldn’t be here to tell ye were it not for that Claws, who saved m’ life on Karador once, or was it Damask? Or maybe Venth. Anyway, one o’ the places where there’s many a bad creature, and me a poor innocent space-farer wi’ no idea o’ the wickedness of some o’ the legal entities about.” I’d heard none of those names before, but as I said, the kzin Empire was big, and no human approached knowing all about it.
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