“You should have been a pilot, Edie.” said Rick teasingly. “That snap roll was just sick. No wonder you wanted twitchy.”
“I thought you’d wanted to see me transported by slow boat, after that first business?”
Edie and Rick proceeded down the hallway, leaving the subs parked in the rather large docking bay. Edie was still a bit shaken from her near-disaster, and she continued, “I swear, Rick, it’ll never happen again…”
“Hang on, hang on, kitty!” soothed Rick. “That was my fault. I should have remembered you were new here. Obviously nobody told you that there is half a mile or more of air space surrounding the water, and you thought you were going to be traveling underwater. We always refer to them as subs…”
“I wouldn’t have guessed they’d stay in the air, even,” noted Edie. “Those tiny wings- it’s pretty incredible they’re even capable of flight at all.”
“Remember the gravity is somewhat lower than you’re used to… and you’ve seen how fast the subs are in air. There aren’t any obstructions to worry about. Oh- one thing? You did notice the grid pattern on the roof?”
Edie nodded. “What about it?”
“Learn it. Remember I said no loops?”
“You did. The sub won’t stand the G-forces? That seems hard to believe.”
“No. How shall I put it?” said Rick. “Well, on Earth the ‘ceiling’ of an aircraft is the point at which air density isn’t enough to support the weight of the aircraft.”
Rick grinned, but there wasn’t much humor in it. “Here the ceiling is what you smash into approximately a third of the way through your loop.”
Edie winced. “Right. So there’s no way at all to pull off a loop?”
“Forget it. Don’t even think it. Not even at low loading, when there’s a bit more airspace. What you gain in air space and lowered gravity you lose in air density. There simply is not enough room to come close. By the way, it’s smart to not try loops with the bipes up on the surface either. Those are just barely capable of it in the right spaces, but you have to be dragging the ground at the start and effectively stall out at the apex. Nine out of ten attempts end up hitting the glass…”
“Glass?” blinked Edie. “You’re putting me on.”
“So all right, layered achromatic ceramic composite. Am I over your head yet?”
Edie blinked. “Okay, so glass. I always thought that was artistic licence on the TV shows, and then when I got here I was thinking paint and little lights hanging from the roof. You’re saying all that is transparent?”
“Yeah- you get whole cooperatives of oppies together and they can finance anything. Ask me sometime how they keep it from hazing with normal cosmic dust and micrometeorites. It’s pretty outrageous- anyway, here we are.”
A fugitive smile played around Rick’s face as he ushered Edie in through the surprisingly large doors. When she entered, she understood his amusement. He’d watched the reactions before.
Edie’s eyes widened in disbelief and scanned up, down, around, taking in the dizzying array of networked computers, identifying component after component as stuff she thought she would never see, blinking at the shocking size of the fiber-optic networking lines linking it all together… she tried to estimate the total power of this setup, and found herself unable to even guess at it… and finally, she realized she was holding her breath, exhaled, and looked over to see that Rick’s fugitive smile was now a very amused grin.
“Welcome to Christmas Morning,” he said.
Edie took a deep breath. “Yeah, that’s for sure. This is incredible!” She smirked. “That’s not bad. Christmas Morning. That’s a good one.”
“No, seriously. That’s its name. Christmas Morning. I’m not a programmer type, but what else would you call it? Look…” he said, and hunted through some printouts, coming up with some sort of purchase order, and handing it to her.
Edie read it. “Fiber junction strip, optical gating at twelve gigs a second, requisition for Christmas Morning LV5 network subassembly. Wow. There’s no price?”
“If you have to ask, you don’t even get to read the specs,” grinned Rick. “They don’t call it Christmas Morning for nothing. The catalogs and data sheets you get here don’t include prices. You just pick what’s best.”
Edie’s eyes widened, and she shivered a bit involuntarily, which Rick did not miss.
“Hmmmm,” grinned Rick. “I might have known. I shouldn’t have given you the backrub, I should have brought you here and shown you the networking. You’re smelling nice.”
Edie flushed. “Then I need to get back to my room. Damn it. Why are there no other people here?” She kept a wary eye on Rick, but it was plain he was just being verbal again.
Rick seemed not to notice her brief outburst. “Because most of the work is done remotely. You could do it in your room, but it’s better to team up with the other programmers, get to know them, meet them face to face. Peter doesn’t want gnomes hiding in holes.”
“I suppose not,” noted Edie. “That’s okay with me, I can play it either way.”
“Since there currently isn’t anyone here,” said Rick, “do you want to just go straight home now?”
Edie gave him a look. “I think that would be best. You aren’t looking for an excuse to stay here longer? I’m impressed. And surprised.” She turned and began padding out the door, her tail restless and lashing about to betray her mood.
Rick followed, and he kept at an ostentatious distance from her side, looking irritated. “Look, can we talk for a second here?”
Edie stopped, flustered. “How do you mean, talk?”
“Better still, you listen. I’ll talk. Edie, you are EI. You go into heat. It’s not that hard to spot if you know the signs. You’re not in it right now… yes, I can tell that too! However, you are typical EI in that you’re on a hairtrigger. You don’t act like a healthy EI feline, instead you repress it and wind up with all your nipples standing up over computer networking widgets.”
Edie bit her lip, rather hard. She hadn’t noticed, but she didn’t have to look to know he was speaking the truth. She didn’t dare try to adjust her fur to cover them better. Hopefully only the top pair were showing- it still made her want to turn her back on the fox.
“Obviously you come from some very repressive place, and it’s warped you… hold it, I’m not finished! You don’t seem to understand that I personally have five different cats I can turn to if I please. I don’t intend to watch everything I say around you for fear of upsetting you. My personal opinion is that you should get a grip, figure out that this is not Earth and you don’t need to be ashamed of your perfectly natural drives.”
Rick glowered at her in sheer exasperation. “However, I can make one thing much simpler for you. I wouldn’t screw you if you begged me. Understood?”
He turned and stalked off. Edie was speechless for a moment, then hurried after him, alarmed. “You’re not going to leave me here? I don’t know my way around!”
“No,” said Rick more calmly. “I’m going to lead you back to quarters. Then you will go your way, and you’ll run back to your room and soak yourself in disinfectant, and I will go mine.”
“Why are you so furious?” stammered Edie. “I’m not used to being yelled at like that. I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“You did.” said Rick quietly. “You brought an attitude here that I thought I’d escaped, and you threw it in my face. I am not furious. Actually, that’s a lie, I am furious, but it’s not at you directly. I’m furious at the people who took a delicious, sensuous feline who was born to make love, a beautiful girl-cat with silky grey fur and green eyes and a body that will haunt my dreams, someone who could flare up incandescently at my touch alone… and these people taught her shame. And she came here, and she tried to teach me. Be offended at what I just said. I don’t care.”
Edie tried to say something in response, but Rick wasn’t listening and she didn’t even manage a coherent word. When they reached the subs again, he said “You do remember the drill? I can run over it again if you forgot anything.”
Edie nodded, then shook her head, and managed, “I remember, you don’t need to go over it again.”
Rick looked carefully at her, as if assessing her mood and deciding whether she was fit to fly the sub. His eyes were chilly. Finally he shrugged. “You need to do something about that shiver, kitty. If I was you I’d know what to do, and thank God I’m not. But you ought to be able to handle getting back to quarters.” With that, he turned and got into his sub, and the canopy lowered over him.
Edie found some comfort in getting into her sub and doing likewise. The canopy lowered like an insulating shield. Rick’s voice was dispassionate and businesslike over the speakers. “Ready?”
“Go ahead,” said Edie steadily.
When they got back to the main docking area, Rick directed her to a specific spot to park the sub, saying that she should try to use that spot whenever she returned here. It was a bit out of the way, and as she walked back to the entranceway it was plain that Rick was already gone. Edie wasn’t sure how she felt about that. It was a relief not to see him, but knowing that he felt the same way about her was not reassuring. She walked slowly back to her room, locked the door, and spent a minute just looking at herself in the mirror. Then she blinked, shook her head like a cat, and began to tidy her fur and cover the signs of her vulnerability, as she had done thousands of times before. The ritual of it soothed her, calmed her nerves- there was something very protective and safe about it all. It didn’t demand anything from her.
When she was decent again, without a hair out of place, she padded over to her boxes and suitcases and dug in them, hunting for her tea. Finding it, she decided that now was as good a time as any to put away some of her belongings, and foodstuffs seemed like a good place to start. The tea brewed cheerfully on a ceramic burner as she organized the cupboards according to her habitual system, and by the time her tea was done she’d moved everything to the cupboards, with an approving nod at the roominess and luxury of her accommodations.
As she was finishing, there was a knock at the door, and, opening it, she was startled to see Peter standing there. She tried, in a glance, to discern what his purpose was, but it was no good. The man was too calm- it was impossible to read him.
“Is it all right if I talk with you a little bit, Edie?” he said.
Edie gulped, her heart beginning to pound. “Rick.”
Peter smiled a little. “You’re sharp. You’re also panicking- stop. Hear me out before reacting.”
Edie let him in, and sat on her bed, looking up at Peter, who chose to stand. She didn’t trust her voice, and let him speak first.
“Rick is one of my best pilots,” began Peter, “and one of my biggest headaches. He just sent me a note about you. It seems you really got to him. That’s rare, and it only happens when I get somebody new who doesn’t exactly approve of his lifestyle, and he makes a play for them. Are you with me so far?”
Edie nodded.
“Just out of curiosity, did you lecture him?”
Edie shook her head.
“Settle down, okay? I don’t give up on a person easy. If I did, Rick would have gone long ago. However, he is not gone, and you are very new, and you’ve got him as insecure and tense as I’ve ever seen him. Did you play along for a while and then switch on him?”
“No,” said Edie. “Not really. He gave me a backrub, and I stopped it right there. Nothing else.”
“You do understand that on this ship you would not have been punished or ostracised for going on from there?”
“Are you implying what I think you’re implying?”
Peter gave her a look. “Hold it right there, okay? I’m not implying anything. You just assumed that I was telling you what was expected of you. I now know what happened to Rick, from hearing the tone of your voice just then.”
Edie shut up, and Peter continued. “I don’t expect you to break the habits of a lifetime and pounce on Rick, or anybody for that matter. What I expect is that you will learn to get along with the other people here- even Rick- without unthinkingly hitting their weak points every time you turn around. This is in the first day, Edie, okay? To be fair, I knew as soon as I saw you that Rick would go after you, but I didn’t know how you would react.”
Peter was not pacing, but he gave the impression that he ought to be pacing. “You could have been jaded and cynical about your world’s standards, in which case you might still be in bed with him, or with somebody. Or you could have been mature and self-confident, in which case you’d have gently rebuffed his backrub. Instead, I find that you are inexperienced in dealing with the off-duty aspects of this place, that you gave him mixed signals, and suddenly one of my best pilots is getting haughty and trying to tell me my job, and you are his scapegoat. That’s not a crime, okay? But I’ll tell you this- I’m going to give you plenty of time and patience. And you are going to learn tolerance. Or you are going to be eased out of here very gently, for your sake and the sake of the others here.”
Edie gulped, a very small and frightened sound, and Peter, hearing it, dropped to a crouch, at eye level with her. He looked earnestly into her eyes. “Edie, calm down. I don’t give up on people easy, and I really believe you can handle this, okay? I’m just telling you right up front that you can’t let it slide forever. Get used to this ship. Get to know some of the people who you have more in common with. You’ll be less threatened if you know you have friends here. If you feel like you’re the only one with, I don’t know, morals or whatever you want to call it, then you’re going to be hell to deal with because you’ll be defensive all the time. You need to do better than that. I’m not asking for it overnight- I won’t even put a deadline on it. Just know that you need to work on this. Think of it as an order from the ship’s master. It is.”
Edie waited a little, her head spinning. You have no idea, she thought to herself. “Is that all?” she asked, very politely.
Peter betrayed the hint of a smile. “It’s more than enough. I’m asking you to look at the habits and attitudes of a lifetime. I think you can do that, but I’ve been wrong before. There will be plenty of time to wait and see.”
With that, he quietly stood, nodded at her as if to say ‘You understand, of course’, and walked calmly out, gently closing the door behind him. Edie stared at the door for a moment, then sprang to her feet and started pacing, shaken. After a few circuits of the room, she shook her head as if to clear it, and was out the door, heading for the Cafe. Maybe there was somebody there who wouldn’t turn her nerves to violin strings.
As she entered the Cafe, she hesitated a bit- it was even more crowded than before, a constant babble of voices washing over her, the varied tonalities of cats and foxes and squirrels and wolves chattering away to each other. The lights seemed a little dimmer than they had been earlier. Every now and then, a strange voice of one sort or another would appear in the chatter, leaving her to guess what sort of totemized person had spoken. Could that one be an avian of some sort? And what of the snakelike hissing voice, or the startlingly low rumble that might be anything from a dragon to a bear? Clearly there were people here with illegal body mass… no, it would not be illegal here.
She very nearly turned to leave, but then there was a brief lull, and in it was a dryly humorous tonality she recognized, then a unconcerned laugh that soothed her nerves just hearing it. It could only be Alice. Edie couldn’t see the usual table Alice and her friends sat at, but judging from the location of the sound that was where they were. Edie cautiously entered the room, slinking silently past oblivious crowds of people, and made her way to the table in the corner.
