Manna Page 8

  “Sandy, this is Jeri Hospah. Don’t let his attempts at humor put you off; sometimes he means what he says. Jeri, find a sack for Sandy and issue him some chits. Then fake up some paperwork that will keep the Ell-Five people happy,” Ali instructed us.

  “We saw one another on the tube last night,” I told Jeri as we touched hands.

  “Right-o! Your wish is my command, oh glorious leader.” Jeri had a slight accent, perhaps British Londoner, perhaps lower down-east American—I couldn’t place it. “I’ll take care of him.”

  Jeri chatted with Omer as he led us through the station and through a secure airlock and transfer tunnel into the Commonwealth facility. Omer obviously knew where we were going but I was so bushed I didn’t care. It was all sort of blurry and confused. I was relieved when Jeri showed me a cubicle with a sleep sack. I didn’t even bother taking off my dirty blue slacks and shirt, the only remnants I now possessed of my Aerospace Force days.

  Uncountable hours later, I awoke in the wan sleeping light of the personal compartment and was momentarily confused until I remembered where I was. I felt physically refreshed but still mentally fatigued. That’s a dangerous condition in space because little things can kill a careless person.

  Somebody had left a flight suit and a Remain-Over-Night kit. Jeri Hospah was either thoughtful or had a well-trained station crew. I took a sponge bath, put on the flight suit and slippers, and decided I might live if I could find breakfast.

  The RON kit had a pack of chits—air, meal, water, airlock cycles—as well as an L-5 facilities directory and a visitor’s card for the Free Traders’ Lounge. A note was in the kit. “Call me at 96-69-54 and I’ll chit you breakfast—Jeri.”

  “I’ll take you up on your offer,” I told him when he answered his page.

  “Be there momentarily.”

  It took only a few minutes before the hatch beeped. “Did you just get holed, or were you back-shopped that way?” Jeri said with his infectious grin as I opened the hatch and floated out.

  “After almost getting killed three times in one day and making an emergency boost to Ell-Five, it’s probably too late for maintenance. You’ll have to scrap me,” I told him. “Is my head still on? Feels like it went somewhere at Vee-sub-ee.”

  “Spoken like a space jock. We’ll pick up Doctor Tsaya and get some calories into you down at the libration point libation joint,” Jeri promised. “If breakfast doesn’t change the lead in your ass to iron in your blood, maybe Doc Tsaya has something for tired space jocks.”

  “Jeri, I’m sure she has, but I don’t think I’ll ever get it,” I remarked. “I accidentally fell on her at Karederu Center when the place blew, and she was within a millimeter of excising my family jewels.”

  “You make it sound so interesting when you use those big scientific terms,” Jeri said as we floated down the corridor together.

  Things were still nagging at me, and I carefully opened the matter with this lanky spaceman. “Jeri, you’ve apparently been with these people for some time now. How’d you get involved?”

  Jeri Hospah didn’t answer for a moment, then said, “I came to work with Ali because he asked me to. I have a job description to satisfy the Ell-Five Habitation Committee, but I staked my future on a handshake.”

  “Same here,” I admitted as we cycled through a hatch. “Can these people be trusted?”

  “Explicitly. They have a high sense of personal honor and they’ll back up their behavior with their lives if necessary.”

  “Why’d you come here in the first place?”

  “It got me off Earth. I like frontiers. I’m originally an Aussie, raised in Perth. When I was a youngster, Perth was still a frontier; now it isn’t.”

  “What’s it like to work for Ali and his family?”

  “I don’t work for them; I work with them because they made me one of them. So I work far harder than I must. I think they know what it’s like to work for somebody else from their colonial days and they’ve decided it’s better to have people working with them instead. Regardless of what makes them to do it, they’re successful at it.”

  I had to agree. They’d tacitly accepted me into their ranks without formalities. I was trusting the word of one man. In America, I couldn’t do that. I must have come from a distrustful culture.

  “By the way, Jeri, what are we in?”

  “The ComSpat module leased onto Ell-Five. That lets us use their power and lifesupport systems at a lower cost than running our standbys as primes. And we don’t have to step outside to go to town.”

  As an Aerospace Force officer, I hadn’t been encouraged to mingle with the feather merchants. There’d been little need to do so anyway, because the Aerospace Force was Big Daddy and took care of me well while in space.

  The L-5 complex was a big space station, but when you’ve seen one space station you’ve seen them all, military or civilian. Is there much difference between a military office building and a civilian office building?

  On the main hatch of the ComSpat module was a secure lock with screening. I was used to security in military facilities, but it surprised me to find it in a private one. But why not? Most businesses on Earth require a check-in screening in the lobby. “Free Space!” might be the clarion call of the private enterprise people, but that didn’t include license to barge into their business facilities.

  Ali was with Tsaya in the lounge. “My cousin’s a good doctor,” he said, anticipating my question as we joined them by tucking our legs under the table. He spread his arms which were now covered with an open-mesh dressing. “Zero-gee makes this a lot easier.”

  “You have only first-degree and a few second-degree burns,” Tsaya Stoak remarked in her quiet way. “There’s no need to hospitalize you. In fact, it’s better for you to move around.”

  “How’s The General?” I asked and I discovered I had the same sort of concern in my voice as any Commonwealth citizen.

  “I got him stabilized at Karederu,” Tsaya said. “Preventing initial shock is the most important factor in burn therapy. So I never gave him the chance to go into shock. He’s resting comfortably now with glucose and water I-V and maintaining proper urinary output. He’ll be on an oral diet tomorrow and capable of having visitors. I’ll be able to start skin grafts from cloning as soon as the third-degree burn areas become granulated.”

  Ali remarked, “You like to work out here, don’t you, Tsaya?”

  “Yes. It allows me to do things I couldn’t on Earth. For example, I can keep The General’s weight off his burned areas, and I can get total asepsis. That’s why I wanted him in the Haeberle Clinic.”

  I noticed that one member of our welcoming committee wasn’t there. “Is Ursila joining us?”

  “Unfortunately not.” Ali’s voice held a tone of disappointment. He explained, “Until you get current in our vehicles, we’re short-handed. Both Ursila and Omer are out-base right now. Pulling the Tonolia out of Vamori-Free screwed up our ship scheduling and sequencing,” Ali said.

  “Ali, it took that old computer program ten seconds to work out the new schedule,” Jeri complained. “It isn’t the computer, but the old Holerith cards are wearing out and I can’t get replacements except in an antique shoppe. Can’t we get some better software?” The man had to be kidding, and he was.

  Ali caught it and fielded it. “For shifting only twenty-three ships around ten runs? Ten seconds is fast enough. Sometimes old technology is perfectly suitable if it works. We don’t want to fall victim to the New Technology Syndrome and end up like the Aerospace Force. No personal insult intended, Sandy.”

  “No offense taken, Ali. I know what you mean, and I don’t work for them anymore.”

  We ordered from the menu console, and Jeri delivered our orders from the dispenser when they were ready a few minutes later. I knew I was all right because I was hungry.

  As we ate, I remarked to Tsaya, “I apologize for frightening you at Karederu Center. I was trying to protect you from flying debris. I really didn�
�t have anything else in mind. Your reaction, uh, rather surprised me.”

  Tsaya inclined her head and replied with the characteristic shyness she exhibited when discussing anything but her profession, “I, too, apologize, Sandy. I was rude to you. But I wasn’t sure you understood our ways yet.”

  “I don’t, but I’m learning. Out of curiosity, why did you threaten me?”

  “We’re taught to defend ourselves so we can enjoy an equality and freedom not available to many women in our part of the world,” she said, then added, “Most outlanders and tourists don’t realize what that means. In the confusion, I’m afraid my cultural indoctrination came to the fore.”

  “Does it always?”

  She smiled shyly and replied, “No, not always. Haven’t you noticed something else about Commonwealth women that’s unusual for our part of the world?”

  “Lots of things. What did you specifically have in mind?”

  “Ours is the only continent where women deliberately make themselves unattractive as a defense measure. We’ve broken with that tradition.”

  “I’ve noticed.”

  “Good, because I wouldn’t want our accidental confrontation at Karederu to give you the wrong impression.” She didn’t say anything more on the subject, but she’d given me a lot of encouragement not only for herself but also for others such as the exotically beautiful Vaivan.

  “Well, what’s our next move in the great chess game in the sky, Boss?” Jeri Hospah asked Ali.

  Ali gave him a brief run-down of what had occurred since the teleconference. “When we’ve finished here, I want to get my sister on the comm. I need an up-date on what’s happened since we left Topawa.”

  “And everyone at Vershatets will want to know about The General,” Jeri said and sighed. “It’s been like a recording; ‘How’s The General? How’s The General?’ In the Top Twenty and gaining hourly. Going gold this week for sure.”

  “I’ve already reported on The General’s condition to Vaivan,” Tsaya put in. “She told me the Karederu fire was the biggest news in the Commonwealth. It even made the international net because of The General. A lot of people wanted to know the extent of The General’s injuries.”

  “I’ll bet!” Ali growled. “Well, it’s difficult for terrorists to get to him here with all the security laid on by Landlimo Corporation.”

  I’d wondered about the strange name of the company since I’d first heard it, so I asked,”What’s the name mean? Is it an old Commonwealth word?”

  Ali shook his head. “No, that would be too easy to decipher. Do you remember a language called Esperanto?”

  “Lingual history wasn’t a strong subject at the Academy.”

  “No matter. It’s an artificial language created as an international tongue in the nineteenth century,” Ali explained. “Two things kept it from being accepted. First off, it was based on Romance languages because Europeans were running the world then, but most people don’t speak languages with Graeco-Latin roots. Secondly, like it or not, the comm/info revolution of the last hundred years made English the international language of education, business, commerce, and transportation, poor as it may be semantically and difficult as it is for people to learn. That’s always been true of the languages of conquerors and conquered.”

  “Hold on!” I objected. “We haven’t conquered anyone since World War Two.”

  “English was the language of those who conquered the world technologically.”

  “If that’s the case, it should be a combination of English and Japanese,” I told him.

  Ali shook his head. “The Japanese are like us: take the best from others, do a better job with it, and sell it by speaking the customer’s language.”

  “Point well made,” I said. “So what’s ‘landlimo’ mean?”

  “It’s an Esperanto word for ‘frontier.’ ”

  On the scrambled Landlimo Corporation conference net, Vaivan asked Tsaya when The General could come back to the Commonwealth.

  “I won’t move him for at least another forty-five days,” Tsaya maintained gently. “It’s going to take twenty days to get good cloning of his dermal and epidermal tissue, and I must do that here. Some of his burns are on joints. At his age I can’t afford to take the chance of keloid tissue stiffening them. I’m also doing a great deal of reconstructive surgery.”

  Vaivan looked vexed. “Tsaya, we need him here as soon as possible. You know the hospital here is outstanding. And Vershatets is secure so we don’t have to worry about any more assassination attempts.”

  “Any indication of who’s responsible for the other three attempts, Vaivan?” Ali asked his sister. “Did you get anything out of the crossbowmen?”

  “Unfortunately not. They were Ilkan fanatics loaded with psychodrugs. They didn’t have anything left in their minds. So we sent them back to Ilkan in a suitable manner,” Vaivan said without emotion or further elaboration. “But Abiku put the impys on alert at President’s Nogal’s suggestion because of the Karederu fire. We’ve spotted some minor troop movement in the vicinity of Khibya, but the Cape-to-Cairo Railway activity has been normal through Kulala, and there’s nothing happening on the Lipuputa or Liupp river lines.”

  I tried to follow her report by referring to the Commonwealth map on the bulkhead. It was the first time I’d had the opportunity to really study the geography of my new land.

  The Commonwealth was a typical creation of absentee rule. Its artificial borders had been determined in some long-ago and far-off conference where diplomats drew lines on maps. The southern border was the Lipuputa River which separated it from the Chibka Socialist Republic and was the only Commonwealth boundary based on a natural feature.

  To some extent the Dilkon Range formed the western boundary, but the summits were anywhere from 50 to 100 kilometers east of the border. The northern border with the Ilkan Empire was totally artificial, merely surveyors’ lines across the Dilkons and the barren Ilkan Desert north of the Liupp River.

  The state of affairs in the Ilkan Empire and the Kingdom of Malidok was evident by the abandoned railways. Colonials had left the area with an extensive and well-run railway system. Only the Commonwealth had maintained and expanded it to transport the natural resources they’d exploited to build the country.

  “Vaivan, we may be wasting time considering a military attack on our borders,” I said, indicating the map as I spoke. “The Commonwealth’s wide open for about a hundred kilometers between the northern border and the Liupp River, but the Ilkan Empire probably can’t mount an attack there because they don’t have the road or rail networks to provide logistic support for such an operation. They’d have to use air, which means they’d need aerospace superiority.”

  “They haven’t got it.”

  “I didn’t think so. On the other hand, the Malidoks have a rudimentary road and rail system, but the only place they could really press us is through the Dilkon passes; so don’t worry about them,” I said, indicating the map as I spoke. “And the Chibkas won’t force a crossing of the Lipupta River on the south because the south bank is swampy. So our critical border segment is in the northwest where the Rhodes Cape-to-Cairo Railway goes through Kulala. Either the Emirate or the Ilkans would fight there because we’re at a disadvantage; we’d have to conduct logistic support over the Dilkons even though there’s a railway through the pass.”

  Vaivan raised her eyebrows, then remarked to her brother. “Ali, since The General’s incapacitated for a few weeks, Sandy should take over as our military liaison to both the Commerce Congress and the Defense Commission.”

  “Good idea.”

  “But I don’t know a thing about the Commonwealth’s military plans!”

  “You just outlined them for us.”

  “Then what’s this proposed job about?”

  “As Landlimo deputy military director, you’ll interface with Commissioner Abiku and his induno staff who handle the nuts and bolts. This is necessary because they’ve got to defend a free-market system
without interfering with it,” Vaivan said. “Unlike the American military, ours is subservient not only to civilian control but also to the needs of commerce.”

  I sighed. I was getting in deeper and deeper. “Let me think about it. There’s a lot of time because we’re not going to be attacked immediately. Our neighbors don’t have any excuse other than territorial greed. They’re weak or they’d have invaded long before this,” I went on.

  “You may know commercial history, but I know the military history of this region.”

  “Very well, we won’t worry about invasion,” Ali concluded. “But we’re fighting an economic war. Wahak, is there any indication the boycott’s effective yet?”

  Wahak Teaq looked at hard copy in front of him. “Not thus far. Vaya reports activity atthe Free Space Port has been normal and expects this to be the case for a week or so because it’s not economical or practical for shippers to divert cargo en route. Trip Sinclair has refined his estimates to sixty-two percent once the system has a chance to react. That’s the worst we can expect in terms of economic pressure.”

  I noticed on the map a symbol located northwest of the city of Oidak with electric transmission line symbols leading from it to other parts of the country. “Are you sure? Who owns the powersat that feeds the Oidak rectenna?”

  “Commonwealth Glaser,” Vaivan replied.

  “Who owns that company?”

  “About a hundred stockholders here, in Madras, and in Hong Kong.”

  “That’s a critical facility. What happens to our reserve if someone disables the powersat?”

  “It provides less than ten percent of our baseload,” Wahak said and went on to explain that Commonwealth Glaser’s primary business was building and operating powersats for outland customers, and there were customers cued-up for increased output as it was built.

  ComGlaser had twelve ten-gig units on line and was selling power to other low-tech nations.

  There were three more units going on line in the near future. The Commonwealth was using powersat energy internally to keep Commonwealth technology current. Commonwealth Glaser’s operating profits were retained earnings used to build more units. Until ComGlaser could satisfy all customers, the abundant Commonwealth coal reserves would be used to generate internal baseload. “We’re bootstrapping, Sandy.”