A Larger Universe (31 page)

They glanced at each other, and then leaned until their
heads were almost touching Tommy's. 

"The Computer Guild has just one secret," Tommy
said, "and it's a dangerous one.  If you reveal it to anyone other than
another master of the Computer Guild, we'll probably all be killed."

Vent's eyes widened.  What had he gotten into?

Tommy continued, "The secret is so dangerous, I felt I
couldn't even tell you of its existence until you were masters of the guild. 
If that is contradictory to you, it is to me, too, but there is a way this
works.  If either of you choose, you don't have to learn the secret.  To the
outside and to the journeymen and apprentices, you will remain a master--I will
not take that from you--but to the other masters of the guild you will be a
journeyman.  The choice is yours."

Tommy stood up.  "I'm going to leave for a while.  Talk
it over, or not, but I want a decision today."

When Tommy closed the door behind him, Vent said, "This
has to involve the lords, somehow."

"I think so, too."

"He's been right about almost everything," Vent
said.

"I don't remember anything he hasn't been right
about," Sanos said.

"You know what the farmers think about him?" Vent
asked.

"Yes."

"Do you think that's possible?"

"That he's the one who will lead us back to Earth?”
Sanos responded.  He considered, then nodded.  “Yes, I think that's possible. 
Not likely, though,"

Vent stood up.  "Regardless, I've made up my mind.  I'm
going to learn the secret.  Everything that Master Tommy has done for me has
been good.  He needs us for something he thinks is important.  I'm not going to
disappoint him."

Sanos stood up after him.  "I'm not either."

Tommy had been watching from the other side of the door. 
When they stood up, he returned to the center of the warehouse and they again
sat on the floor. 

He motioned them closer.  "Have you decided?" he
asked in a whisper.

They whispered "Yes" in reply, and then Vent said,
"We have both agreed to learn the secret."

"Do you swear to keep this secret from all except other
masters of the guild?" Tommy asked.

"I do," they said together.

"Do you swear to use this secret only to protect those
in the ship, but especially the humans in the ship?"

The whispered "I do" was a little ragged.  What
did he mean?

"I'll begin imparting the secret by giving you this,"
he handed each of them a small flat device like the one he always carried with
him.  "You don't need one of these--access to any computer on the ship
will do--but if you have one, you will always have access to a computer.  To
everyone else, this will be a symbol of your status as a master of the Computer
Guild.  To you, this will give you control of the ship, should you ever need to
take it."

The faces of the new masters turned chalk white.

"Over the next several days, I'll be telling you how
this happened and what you must know.  Let's begin."

In the middle of a conversation with Vent and Sanos about
data transfer over the ship's hidden wireless network, Tommy realized he had
never considered that the ship’s drive might be doing more than just accepting
commands.  Even a printer connection sent acknowledgments back to the
computer.  The original programs had ignored or disregarded data traffic from
the drive, so he had, too.  The start of transit gave him an opportunity to
monitor what, if anything, the drive sent in response to his commands.

He placed a new screen in front of his chair on the sub-deck
to display each command sent from the bridge, as well as the response from the
drive.  He also wrote a program to record this activity in a file for later
examination.   

Commands came from the bridge for the ship to leave orbit. 
The screen showed turn followed by acceleration. 

Success!

After each command, a message came from the drive.  They
flashed by too fast for him to follow.  More data came from the drive without
commands from the bridge.  Over the next several minutes, the drive continued
to send data intermittently.  He had a lot to look at. 

From the open trapdoor above him, he heard Las, the ship commander
for the week, give the destination and the order for entry into transit. 
"When ready."

On his screen, the coordinates of the Gathering flashed by,
followed in a few seconds by an acknowledgment from his computer to the console
operator above.  After a brief countdown, the calculated arrays went to the
drive, and, through the trapdoor above him, he saw the dome change to black.  A
steady stream of data from the drive, lasting over a minute, displayed on the
screen.

This transit would take ten days.  By the evening of the
sixth day, he had gotten nowhere with the data sent by the drive.  Beyond the
form of the transfer, the usual arrays, he couldn't interpret anything. 

He sighed, and decided he might as well take a break for
dinner when an alarm sounded. 

I've heard that before
, he thought as he hurried up
the stairs.  He found a frightened young female calling for a real bridge
officer.  For a second time, an alarm signaled the early exit of the ship from
transit. 

What’s wrong with my program!

Stars appeared through the dome.  Tommy waited as the bridge
filled with regular crew. 
No point in chasing after the problems until I
know where we are.  That might narrow the search.

After a few minutes, the astronomy section established their
position.  The ship had emerged where it should be, with less positional and
velocity vector error than usual for that length of transit, but more than four
days ahead of schedule!

How had this happened?  He knew he hadn't changed his
programs.  He also knew this was something programmers always say, just before
remembering that one little modification that
could
be the cause of the
problem.  Except the only programs he had worked on since the last transit were
those that monitored data from the drive.  He didn't understand how that could
affect the ship's time in transit.

The People's Hand
's early arrival gave him time to
experiment.  With Ull's permission, he began testing the drive controls again
as he had done before, starting with insystem drive.  This time, the bridge
crew insisted on helping.

These tests showed no change in the ship's response, but did
provide a lot more data from the drive to analyze. 
And there shouldn't be a
change.  The ship moves by falling into a gravity field.  The ship will always
fall at the same rate of acceleration into a given gravity field.

The attitude controls also responded as before.  In his
original tests, he had recorded the time to turn the ship from one position to
another, and the new times were within hundredths of a second of the old.

The decisive tests might be some short transits, which he
scheduled for the following day.  He thanked his helpers and left for his
private pond. 

Since that first bath that Ull had interrupted, Tommy had
been going to his Nesu quarters each day before dinner to bathe.  He made the
pond his own by adjusting the temperature to warmer than The People liked, and
by not adding fish.  Immersing himself in water was his only luxury from being
a lord.

The private chambers included an elevated pool fed by a
simulated spring.  The People surrounded their upper pools with foliage,
creating a cozy nook for privacy, but that wasn't one of his needs.  He had,
however, asked the farmers to plant a few shrubs from the Commons around the
main pond, just to make it more “Earth-like.”  He also raised the temperature
of the elevated pool above that of main pond to create something his parents
had always wanted: a hot tub. 

He dropped his clothes by the small pool, and submerged to
his neck.  The steaming water drew a long "Ahhh" from his lungs. 
This had become a necessary part of his day.  After a good lather from the soap
he kept beside the pool, he was ready for a rinse and swim.  He grabbed his
clothes, pulled himself into the waterslide that drained into the main pond,
and slid on his back, naked and soapy, with his clothes held over his head. 
Just before splashing into the pond, he threw the clothes on the bank so they
would be dry and ready for him when he finished.

A turn and flip of his legs took him to the bottom and
another turn to the top again.  When his head broke the surface, he circled the
pond.  After ten fast laps, he rolled over on his back and began a leisurely
stroke.  He would never be able to swim as well as the Nesu, but this was a
great addition to the weight exercises.

He felt good about the restoration of these ponds, although
that had been one of his simplest tasks.  The Nesu needed to spend much of
their time in the water.  If they had been forced to continue crowding
together, all this luxury for one person would have been too much, no matter
what else he had done.  They were lucky to have been near a water planet,
though.  The ship needed a large volume of water to fill all of the new Nesu
living spaces.

It hit him.  The ship had taken on water--a huge amount of
mass.  Someone would be able to tell him how much.  The insystem drive had no
relationship to mass, but the attitude controls should.  Turning required the
manipulation of an object's angular momentum, and, if he remembered correctly,
mass was a component of that.  Given a more massive ship and the application of
the same turning force, the ship should have turned more slowly, but it
hadn't. 
The drive ignores the laws of angular momentum,  but maybe mass has
something to do with transit time.
  He turned over and swam for his
clothes.  If he hurried, he could do one transit test before the shift changed.

A definitely human, female voice interrupted his roll onto
the bank next to his clothes.  "I have a clean change of clothes for you
Lord Tommy, if you prefer," she said in English.

"What?" he yelped, as he shoved himself back into
the pond.  He surfaced spewing and shaking water out of his eyes.

The female that stood on the bank near the door was no
artisan or farmer girl.  He felt his face get hot, even with his naked body
beneath the cool water of the lake.  She was tall--he couldn't tell for sure
from the lake's surface, but at least an inch taller than he was.  Unlike the
humans below the commons, her face had high cheekbones and fit his idea of
proper proportion to her body.  She wore a dark orange tunic, calf-length and
cinched at the waist like those of the warriors he had seen, except her
weaponless belt emphasized curves instead of muscular shoulders.  And she had
the first noticeable breasts he had seen since being kidnapped. 

A sudden chill prickled his skin.  A close-fitting metal
band circled her neck.

"Who are you?  How did you get in?  What're you doing
here?" he sputtered as he swam toward her.

"I'm here to serve you, Lord Tommy."  Her gaze was
on the floor in front of her feet.  "I was sent by Lord Ull."

That made no sense to him.  "We'll see about
that," he said.  "Turn around and hold those clothes out behind
you."

Her swirling turn drove him away from the bank with the
stink of rancid cooking grease and stale sweat.  The warrior men he had been
close to were a lot cleaner.

She held a towel behind her with her other hand as he
climbed out of the water.  He used it to hurriedly dry, then pulled on the
clothes. 

Clean clothes were better than the ones he had sweated in
all day.  But where had she gotten these?  He had never brought a change of
clothes here. 

"Wait here.  I'll be right back," he said. 

He walked to the other side of the pond to get his dirty
clothes and transfer the items in the pockets. 

The small metal cylinder designating his status as one of
The People felt icy.  He looked down at it, then across the pond where she
stood, unmoving, exactly as he had left her.  Her neck band glinted in the
light.  The cylinder's power had just become a lot less abstract.

His eyes seemed locked on her as he walked back.  He had
never paid much attention to girls or women before, except maybe for his mom. 
He had to pay attention to her.  The girls below the commons didn't seem like
girls at all, not the ones he knew about anyway.  Actually, he couldn't
remember ever having thought much about girls.  He was thinking about this one
now, and his reaction made his knees tremble.

He stood behind her and tried to get himself under control. 
He kept noticing things, and that wasn't helping.  Her hair was a dusky brown
and cropped short below her ears, leaving a long neck exposed.  Her arms and
calves were slender but visibly muscled, as were her shoulders, which were
wider than those of anyone below the Commons.  He couldn't see the hands she
held clasped in front of her, but her feet were long and slender in sandals. 
He felt sweat roll down his back.  "Did Lord Ull happen to say why I
needed your services?" he finally asked.

"Only that a lord should have servants, and you have
none."

Why does Ull think I need servants?
  "Your
people are warriors, aren't they?"

"The men are, Lord Tommy.  The women must learn to
fight in case we're needed, but our main tasks are to cook and clean, rear
children, and perform service for the lords and the men in other ways."

His head throbbed.  "Other ways?"

"The lords trust us to watch over their kits." 
Her hand came up to touch the ring circling her neck, her long fingers
lingering there for a moment.  "And the lords give us to the men, as I've
been given to you."

For a moment, Tommy could think of nothing to say. 
"You were given to me?  Is that what you meant by being sent here to serve
me?"