Downtime

by Cynthia Felice

  “Does that include personal courtesy?”

  Jason thought a moment. Personal courtesies included access to his bar and other private possessions, mostly a euphemism for facilitating physical relationships among personnel although it was common to provide easy access to friends, too. He liked Marmion, liked the fact that he seemed not only to serve Calla well but to care about her, too. Calla’s simply calling him a good man was like vouching for him. He believed everything Calla had told him so far, but he also was certain he didn’t know everything there was to know. “Just military courtesy,” Jason said finally.

  Chapter 4

  For the second time in as many nights, Jason was sleeping fitfully, and the bed’s jelly beans were going crazy trying to keep up with his tossing. As he turned yet again he could feel the thready legs of the cerecloth comforter walking silently up his back, pulling the covering up toward his neck. The mattress beneath him was digging holes for his face and toes and plumping up under his stomach in an effort to support his spine, but he couldn’t stay still long enough for the bed to make him comfortable. He turned onto his side and punched the mattress a few times to make a mound for his head, which was faster than waiting for the jelly beans to reconfigure a mattress that moved too slowly to disturb a sleeping human. He couldn’t help thinking of how relaxed he’d be if Calla were here, sleeping soundly beside him.

  He’d supped alone, too, in his room with the lights dimmed so that he could see easily into the staging area. A few rangers and some of Calla’s stevedores had overflowed from the dining room to eat off the game tables, and it looked as if the two groups were beginning to talk. Probably about the food, Jason thought, for he’d ordered the rangers on KP to outdo themselves for their guests’ first night. Food was generally excellent on outpost planets, for the algae buds delivered each six months by the supply run were of the highest quality, more versatile than domestic market fare. And the rangers frequently reaped Mutare’s abundance to add exotic touches to the meals. There had been golden plums on his dinner plate with a few drops of precious ant honey to set off the tangy fruit, but the honey had dripped off onto his knee when he paused mid bite to watch some Praetorians enter the staging area below. Calla was not among them, and then the plums seemed bitter without honey.

  He’d finally concluded that Calla must have decided to stay on board the shuttle to eat, apparently disinclined to take advantage of the dinner break, which was sure to be the only free time available to them until the installation at the research center was complete. Praetorian commanders were known for their aloofness. What made him think that Calla would be any different after thirty years of conditioning? They were all that way because the generals were all arrogant and cold and the only way commanders could get promotions was to demonstrate what fine generals they’d be by behaving just like them. He and Calla used to talk about the career Praetorians, mocking them behind their backs and laughing at them. Or had Jason laughed alone? He tried to remember. She was always more reserved than he and had a steadying effect on him, but it hadn’t prevented her from loving him and his easygoing and sometime naively romantic ways. And yesterday, when the day’s ceremony was over, hadn’t she just walked in and flopped down on his chair as if ten or thirty years had not gone by? Well, not exactly. Practically telling him that the new facility would really be a fabrication plant for Decemvirate elixir was true to his memories of her. She’d be as honest as she could without disobeying her orders. But her casual hint to keep the miners quiet and happy while she carried out her work by lifting his restrictions on slaughtering the danae was not the Calla he remembered. He had thought she would change her mind when she actually saw the danae. Her eyes had glittered and she’d been awed, and all but ordered their slaughter be permitted. And she probably could order it. He didn’t doubt for a moment that she could pull a jelly bean out of her pocket that would relieve him of his command on Mutare. And if she did, the danae would become victims of the same greed and shortsightedness that was overwhelming the Hub, half the galactic Arm away. The danae, even he and his rangers, the miners, were nothing more than a few borrowed plumes to wave at the occasional freetraders who called at Mutare and to keep the provisions from the Hub coming from the civilian sector instead of the war chest.

  He hadn’t eaten much of his dinner, torn between wanting to see her again and afraid that when he did he’d be more confused than ever. And now he could not sleep because not seeing her provided no answers at all, and even a state of confusion would be better than wondering what would have happened if they hadn’t let themselves slide ten and thirty years down the time spiral. Timekeeper, is this your way of punishing me for leaving her? But she didn’t want me to stay. She never asked me to stay!

  Jason heard the beep from the flatscreen across the room and his eyes flew open. It couldn’t be important or the beeping would have continued and grown loud enough to awaken him. Even so he sat up. “What is it?” he asked.

  The jelly beans in their transparent jar of liquid nitrogen started glowing as they came to life at the sound of his voice. “A message awaits you from Commander Calla,” the voice synthesizer told him.

  “Read it to me,” Jason said.

  “Call me when you awaken,” the synthesizer said, and the jelly beans’ color mellowed.

  “Return the call,” Jason said anxiously. She must still be awake, for the message had not been sent more than seconds ago. He started to get up but the lights were coming up for visual pickup and Calla’s face was already resolving on the flatscreen when he remembered he was naked beneath the comforter. He settled for swinging his legs over the edge of the bed and casually pulling the corner of the comforter over his loins. “What is it?”

  She stared silently for a moment into the flatscreen and for a moment he was sure it had been a mistake to call her back before he’d dressed, or at least thought to cancel the visuals, but his response had been reflexive. No, he thought, that wasn’t true either. Ten years ago he wouldn’t have covered himself at all. But then he realized that her stare was contemplative, not pensive or disapproving, and he didn’t know whether to be surprised or relieved that her way of conveying her mood to him had not changed during this ten or thirty years. Whatever had caused her to send the message was troubling her greatly. He waited as patiently as he could for her to tell him what.

  “I just finished reading your reports,” she said finally. “I’ve been reading them since late afternoon.”

  “You said you were going to read them last night,” he said.

  “Last night I read the parts that interested me, the parts I knew interested you. I read the sections on the danae’s life cycles and behavior, and I went to bed early because I wanted to see them in the morning. Today I read everything else and I know what you must be thinking.”

  “Oh? What’s that?”

  “That I care nothing about your work here on Mutare, that I didn’t recognize your effort in those carefully thought out mining restrictions.”

  Jason nodded. “And now what do you suppose I’m thinking?”

  “I hope you realize I’m as concerned as you that the increase in human population on Mutare could be detrimental to the danae.”

  Jason shook his head. “I’m not sure I can believe that, Calla. Not while I’m wondering what occupied your time between the Hub and Mutare for three months so thoroughly that you just got around to reading the planet reports today. You should have known everything about Mutare before you left the Hub. Else how could you know Mutare was suitable for your project?”

  “I read the abstracts. You had written them, and I knew they could be trusted. Mutare is just outback, not so far that we’d waste a generation of time transporting equipment from the Hub, but so unattractive because of the radiation that the project’s secrecy could be maintained.”

  “You must have been in a hurry, or you would have read every word.”

  “The decision was not mine alone,” Calla said, “and besides, others read
the detail reports. There was even an impact study, I believe, though I didn’t read that either.”

  “Whatever it was you were doing must have been fascinating.”

  Calla’s lips pressed into a thin line of stubbornness, and she crossed her arms across her chest. The fingers of the visible hand still looked long and delicate, unjeweled, which was unlike so many of her rank but which was typical of Calla. “My dear boy, I am doing my best to apologize for my work being far more important than yours and to tell you that even though I may not even yet have a full appreciation for what you’re doing here I am not without sympathy for it. You’d do better to use my precious time by filling me in on any pertinent details than to pry into matters that don’t concern you.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said with some real dismay because the golden worlds on her shoulders had flashed in his eyes. But mostly he felt the sting of that word “boy” in his heart like he would feel a dagger, and he couldn’t help some sign of defiance. “What would you like to know, Commander?”

  “Your reasons for permitting the miners to take three danae galls off world with them. Why not two, or five?”

  At least she hadn’t asked why any at all, which told him she really had understood that forbidding the hunts completely would simply have forced the miners and even his own people into breaking his law. The temptation was just too great. “Three,” he said, “is a damn fine nest egg back in the Hub. It’s enough to retire on forever if it’s invested well and you live that long, or it buys a few years of riotous living. But it’s not quite enough to finance a full-scale exploitation back here.”

  “So, any less and you’d have them poaching and have to punish them, and any more and you’d have more than you could handle because the pirate types might become involved.” She nodded thoughtfully for a moment. “You’re also keeping the prices up for crystallofragrantia by keeping them in short supply. Or don’t you care?”

  “If it goes down, it will be because there’s a glut in the market, which also means a bloodbath here on Mutare.”

  “How many galls do you own?”

  “None.”

  “But you found the first one, and were the first to realize what it might be.”

  Jason shook his head. “Miners have been picking up crystal on Mutare for centuries. I was just the first to realize they came from the danae. I sent it back to the Hub for analysis. I never found one just lying on the ground; this area’s pretty well picked clean by now. And I can’t kill a danae to acquire another, not after knowing Old Blue-eyes and Tonto.”

  Calla nodded, then shook her head as if to say she could not hunt the danae either, though Jason knew she had hunted live game in the preserves back in the Hub. She had eaten her quarry’s flesh, too, just to prove to herself that she could do it if she ever found herself in circumstances that required such barbaric practices. Jason had preferred to wait for such circumstances to arise, and hoped they never did. But they had, and he had hunted and eaten flesh, and he’d felt no remorse or revulsion when his hunger had been satisfied. There was a fair amount of meat on the danae, and he knew that some of the miners had tried eating their flesh but found it not to their liking. Bitter, despite the perfumed fragrance it gave off while cooking.

  “I don’t think we can do any better than to impose your mining restrictions on my people as well,” Calla finally said.

  “Unchanged. No more than three kills?”

  “Yes, unchanged. It will force them to be careful and selective. I’ll give you the registrations for our weapons, and we’ll use your armory for recharging. Who is on your shooting board?”

  “Me,” Jason said, and Calla frowned. Requiring explanation for each instance of discharging a weapon on an outback world was unusual in itself, but having only one officer listen to the explanation and pass judgment on it was highly irregular. “It permitted me to make decisions out in the bush, kept the schedule clean. My people were satisfied with it.”

  “They know you and trust you. My people don’t.” She was looking into the lens of her flat screen expectantly, the gaze not quite true since the bed Jason was sitting on was at the side of the room.

  “Perhaps you’d like to join me on the board, Commander,” he said wondering how much of his time was going to have to be given over to formal administrative duties like shooting board meetings. As it was, he’d discharged such duties with a minimum of ceremony by looking at the flatscan of the target every time someone needed a recharge and either verifying that the target had been an uncontrolled species or tallying the kill if it were a danae and the hunter admitted the kill. The flatscan was made every time the trigger was pressed, and since both weapon and scanner worked at the speed of light, judgment was simple: if the target was within the crosshairs, it was either dead or wounded. But if the target was a danae, and especially if it was a wing shot, the hunter might claim a miss because the danae could fly with a wing and a half, hole up for a few days and be none the worse for the wear thereafter. When there was time, Jason verified the miss by personally going out and locating the wounded danae . . . or finding the body. There had been a dozen such incidents spread among one hundred people and over three years. Calla’s contingent would bring the population at the station to over six hundred. There wouldn’t be time to do it right, not even if Calla took on half the responsibility. But he said nothing. It was not so bad as it might have been if she’d continued to insist on increasing the quota.

  “Well,” Calla said, “I think that’s about all we can do tonight. I’ll make sure all my people are completely informed about the regulations, though I’d be surprised if any of them didn’t know already since they seem to know about the crystallofragrantia.”

  Jason nodded and sat back a bit on the bed. The legs of the cerecloth had pulled the comforter halfway up his thigh because the bed’s jelly beans knew he was no longer supine and were instructing all the bedclothes to smooth out and look neat. “Just crystal will do on Mutare,” Jason said. “I told you this morning, it’s the only crystal we talk about here.”

  She nodded absently, and Jason hoped she would sign off now. He felt terribly disadvantaged with her behaving so much like a Praetorian commander while he was naked. If protocol permitted, he would have ended the conversation now, but though he was governor of Mutare, she outranked him and the prerogative was hers. Her face was contemplative again, her sable eyes slightly closed. Almost pretty, he thought involuntarily; the flatscreen forgave many of the unflattering details of her age. He watched her get up from her chair, her coppery head slightly bowed now as she started to pace. Jason’s fingers clenched the edge of the cerecloth; he liked to pace, too, and he’d have given a lot to be able to do it now . . . to do anything now except sit motionless at the edge of his bed. The lens followed her back and forth for the three steps the shuttle’s bridge permitted, the sound of her limping step echoing off the polished slate walls of his room. At last she stopped and faced the lens, hands behind her back.

  “Jason, do you think the danae are sentient?”

  “I never said that.”

  “No, you were very careful not to draw any conclusions. But I had the oddest feeling when I was reading the sections that described their behavior. Sometimes it was absolutely clear they were an lower animal species, but sometimes . . . well, the cooperativeness you described in shaping the kiosks; it was almost as if there was a builder among them directing the work.”

  Jason shrugged. “Even bees have specific labors.”

  “Then that wasn’t what you were trying to say?” she said staring straight into the screen. “There’s nothing more to them than a hive of bees that have food gatherers and guards, an organized colony of avians?”

  “I didn’t say that either,” Jason said. He sighed. “It’s too early to draw conclusions, but my theory is that some individuals may be sentient, but not the danae as a group.”

  “But how can that be?”

  Jason lifted his hands to gesture that he did not kn
ow; the spidery legs of the cerecloth started racing up his thigh. The jelly beans knew they weren’t dealing with a sleeper any longer and they wanted the bed to be neat. He grabbed the comer and pulled it back. Calla noticed and smiled, but she didn’t offer to cancel the visuals so that he could do likewise and relax. “I only know that some of them appear to be intelligent, beyond what a colony organization might provide them. The smart danae hide their eggs with great care, the wild lay them anywhere. The survival rate to nymph stage is significantly higher among the smart danae. They seem to have figured out that our sidearms are dangerous; Old Blueeyes won’t come near the garden when I’m armed. The wild ones have not made the distinction.”

  “So Old Blue-eyes and Tonto are smart, but then, you’re fond of them and spend more time with them. Maybe they’ve just picked up a little more than the others because they’ve had some opportunities the wild ones haven’t had.”

  “Just Blue-eyes. Tonto is not very bright, though he’s not really wild anymore. My theory is that he’s learning how to be intelligent.”

  “You did say he was Blue-eyes’ offspring. It may be quite normal for them to care for their young for a period of time; such care is normal for many species, sentient or not.”

  “But I don’t think it has anything to do with Tonto’s being Blue-eyes’ own offspring. They bond, but from what I’ve observed, it’s not usually with their offspring. It’s friendship, and rarely between a wild one and an intelligent one.”

  “Mates then. It’s not unusual for animals to mate with their own family members.”

  Jason shook his head. “As near as I can tell they mate once in a lifetime, physically mate, I mean, which is separate from the bonding. They’re promiscuous as hell for about six or seven hours in the early spring. You’ll see it in a few weeks if you’re lucky. They fly to about three-thousand meters and fuck anything in sight, wild and intelligent alike. The ova they deposit in each other is enough to last a lifetime. They come back to the forests exhausted. Within a week, the fallopian tube shrivels up and drops off; they never use it again. The ovaries stay intact, but any more ova produced are apparently absorbed by the body. The male organ is internal. It fertilizes one egg about every two weeks. I’ve been able to verify all that with autopsies on the kills.”