The Great Escape Chapter 18, Part 2 of 9

The Great Escape
Chapter 18, Part 2 of 9

"First, you tell her her ideas are impossible, absurd, and against all protocol. Then you let her go ahead exactly as she wants. Lastly, you support her with personnel, materiel, and as much money as possible."

Danielle laughed, which didn't help Dean's agitation.

"Don't worry, Michael," she assured him kindly. I'll keep my new Project separate from the University."

"Go on, Danielle," Joan said. "Tell us your plan if it's not a secret."

"It's not secret," she said. "I remembered what I was doing when I first saw the Hayai C1 and was inspired to design my own - very different - motor. I promised my husband I'd design him a microwave air-suit."

"A what?" Joan asked.

"It's a combination of the air jellies you can ride on in some cities and the compressed-air gauntlet used for industrial engineering tasks.

The technology uses microwaves to compress air into a potent force field, powerful enough to provide lift or act like an exoskeleton. My suit will be a complete exoskeleton, not just a gauntlet. It will make a man fifty times stronger than usual and allow him to fly. And the best thing of all, it will compete directly with the Nakatani Corporation and piss them off!"

"Is that wise?" asked Dean Hoxton, attempting caution again. "I mean, provoking them when they're already contemplating legal proceedings against you?"

"I don't know if it's wise or not," Danielle said, "but I will work on the air-suit in my own time with my own money. No one else will be affected."

"Wonderful!" enthused Joan. "You can't argue with that, Michael."

Dean Hoxton finally got into the proper spirit of dealing with Danielle.

"Very well," he said, reverting to his default state as a long-suffering man bullied by women.

"Danielle can do as she pleases, so long as she doesn't cause me any more paperwork."

She smiled gratefully at him but made no promise regarding paperwork.

"So, what's your first move?" Joan inquired.

"I will send a message to Haruki. He must be punishing himself badly for his indiscretion. I need to tell him it's not his fault."

If Danielle had warmed to the Dean a moment ago, he would have reciprocated now, approving her consideration of the feelings of a junior colleague with whom she might have been understandably angry.

"Can I leave you conspirators to your skullduggery and get back to work?" Michael asked, standing up.

"Yes, indeed," Vice-Chancellor Joan said. "Danielle, do we have your agreement to stop working with the hyperdrive motor until we hear back from the lawyers?"

"You have."

"Then the meeting's over. Thank you all for coming."

Danielle summoned the Samothea Project team to her office and told them the astounding news.

Rosa and Li took it badly, worried about the status of their dissertations, which depended on data from the Samothea Project.

Danielle assured them:

"No work you have done so far is wasted. All the data are pertinent. However, we need to analyze the jump to Samothea in detail to correct our understanding of the anomalies in the hyperspace pathway before we risk a future jump."

"We wanted to bounce out of hyperspace one light-year from the Samothean solar system, about six light-years from the black hole. The black hole is a known anomaly, but the hyperspace pathway disruption was unexpectedly large."

"So here are my questions: Why did the traveler miss their target? Did we calculate the mass of the black hole incorrectly? Is there a gravity well near Samothea that is a stronger attractor than we calculated? Or is something else influencing the pathway?"

"We've been looking at the data all week," Li said, "and we cannot see any problem with the gravity calculations."

"All right, how powerful are the x-rays from the black hole's accretion disk? And is there any exotic matter from the same source that might affect hyperspace?"

Rosa and Li didn't know.

"So it's our task to find out. And while we're doing that, we should work out where a two-ton traveler using the same hyperdrive system on the same pathway would bounce out of hyperspace."

"Why do we need to know that?" Rosa asked.

"I'm just thinking ahead," Danielle said, but she gave no further details.

Danielle's pessimistic expectation was that the court case would take a year without any more progress on the motor, so the next traveler they sent would have to use the existing engine. A one-ton traveler could carry a comms probe but nothing more. A two-ton vehicle could carry more sophisticated measuring instruments or even a robot.

The ideal vehicle would be a fifty-ton one carrying men and machinery. However, that would require a bigger engine, a massive increase in fuel, a more prominent beacon, and far longer calculations with even less accuracy. Nothing like that could have been done for years without better information from Samothea's environment, but Danielle knew something else.

With current funding, the Project could afford only one more trip to Samothea. While the motor development was on hold, she couldn't see where new money might come from, and the first trip was only partially successful.

Rosa and Li left to finish their tasks, and Danielle wrote long messages to Earth. She had work to do and was still by her terminal hours later when the replies came in.

Jonathan Wright answered first, saying he was surprised, but it didn't affect his part of the
Project. He thought she should tell Nakagami to get lost.

Danielle was disappointed by Hyper Star Japan, which said it would heed the warning from the Nakatani Corporation and completely cease all motor development. Other tasks for the engineering team would be found. The only relief for Danielle was that no one would lose his job.

Haruki was grateful for her message. He'd been too ashamed to write and apologize before.

Stephen Oakeshott was last to reply. It had been night-time in England.

"I'm sorry, Goldrick," Stephen said, "but I can't persuade Hyper Star to take a firm stance. Now we can only grind our teeth while we wait for the damn lawyers to fight it out in court. I wish I could be more hopeful. As for new funding - yes, I got the hint - I'm sorry, but there's no chance. Things are pretty stretched now, with the investment in the motor tied up. At the same time, Hyper Star sits on their hands - and my best engineer," he added accusingly, "wasting her talents in some barbarian colony a billion light-years away."

Danielle smiled. She shook off her disappointment. There was plenty for her to do with her PhD students to supervise and, in private at home, designing her microwave air-suit.

She also contacted Yumi's brother, Itsuki Takahashi, to tell him the news and ask what he thought.

Itsuki replied the next day, saying he would try to contact Michio Nakatani again to tell him they thought they knew where Yumi might be and to ask him to call off the lawsuit. None of his messages to Michio had been blocked, but he couldn't tell if they had been read.

Her weekly report to Roger, composed at night while sleep eluded her, contained news, words of love, words of sexual longing, and a strange tale that she didn't think he'd believe. He was to hurry up and join her because she missed him and needed him more than ever.

All but four of the Woodlanders went to the Cloner Fair. It was too far for Lenta, the oldest tribeswoman, to walk. She declined the offer of a lift from the Herders and stayed home.

Shane remained in the Forest Camp with Clara, her daughter, and Parvinder, Lenta's bedmate. Together, the three women would maintain the camp while little Clara would sleep in a wicker basket or play on a reed mat on the ground.

Pepi had a stark choice. Although she adored her little sister and grandmother, the Cloner Fair was such a draw, the highlight of the year, that Sharne eventually persuaded her to go.

Angela also volunteered to stay in the camp, but Mirselene ordered her to go to the fair to consult Madam Medic. Annela hadn't passed out since the first time, but her headaches came and went every few weeks. Her sunken eyes and unnaturally quiet demeanor showed how much of her strength the illness had taken from her.

She had two kinds of pain: a dull throbbing that felt like someone was stamping on her brain and a sharp biting that felt like someone was cutting her brain with a pair of scissors. Potions and herbs helped, but even so, she often pushed her face into a pillow, wishing the pain would stop and allow her to sleep.

With lifts from the helpful Herders, the Woodlanders arrived at the Cloner Fair unusually early, a day before Haircut Day, the official opening day of the fair.

The very first thing Tamar did was run to find Wildchild.

Wildchild, the head of the Juniors, was preparing the main tent, where the Cloner Council usually entertained the Tribal Chiefs. This year, it had been given over to the nursing mothers as a crèche. She efficiently organized the three Juniors and five other girls who volunteered to perform the extra work the nursing mothers would cause.

Tamar hit Wildchild like a missile, almost knocking her down. She hugged her ferociously and refused to let her go until the Wildchild insisted she had duties to perform. They kissed, and the Wildchild promised to bring Hazel over to meet her. Tamar reluctantly allowed her friend to go back to work.

Hazel was one of the volunteers, and an hour or so later, when the crèche was ready, Tamar had the pleasure of adequately meeting the beautiful girl who made her friend so happy. She was immediately smitten. Hazel was stunning in a profound way that Tamar, herself the loveliest girl on Samothea, could wholeheartedly admire, without in the least detracting from her love for the Wildchild.

The ideal of Saxon beauty, Hazel was tall and willowy, with long flaxen hair, corn-flower blue eyes, a triangular nose, rowan-berry lips, and a peaches-and-cream complexion that modern women on Earth paid plastic surgeons fortunes to simulate.

A generous girl, Hazel, was just as pleased to meet Tamar. Fearing that Wildchild's friends might be jealous of each other was unnecessary. Wildchild herself never had any such fear.

By afternoon, the crèche was complete with children. The Juniors raised the flaps of the tent to let in the breeze. There were cushions on the floor to sit on and straw bales for a barricade so children could crawl around on the ground sheet but couldn't escape.

Seventeen of Ezra's bedmates came to the fair, carrying eighteen of his daughters. Megan caused the numerical mismatch as she bore twin girls. This explained why the petite Herder had had such a big belly and an easy delivery. Her tiny daughters, six months old, were identically beautiful and perfect. They also seemed synchronized: Megan suckled them simultaneously and usually fell asleep together.

Half a dozen Cloner, Farmer, and Miner women also brought their cloned daughters to the crèche. Now, the cloning kits were replenished, there had been a baby boom among the home tribes, and a dozen more women were pregnant in Cloner City and on the Farms.

A young mother who approached the crèche hesitantly that first day was Gerta, Belena's daughter, who had been in the Cloner City when her mother was banished from the Mariner tribe. Now, she shared her mother's exile among the Farmers. Gerta was spotted by Cressi, who ran over to say hello and bring her back to sit with the Mariners. There was no animosity toward Gerta because of her mother's crimes, but they were happy to see her again after a year, making a friendly fuss about her daughter.

Thus, it became a lively crèche, a point of interest to all the women at the fair, who loved to see their population grow and their planet thrive.

However, Belena herself kept away from the fair, avoiding the tribe who rejected her.

Ezra spent a long time greeting his friends and bedmates from the three tribes and meeting the women of the Cloner, Farmer, and Miner tribes. He learned that Kalyndra, Devon, and Thalassa had stayed behind to look after the Mariner Settlement, and Solange,h, a, and a half-dozen Herders had stayed behind to look after the dairy herds and flock.

He thought he knew why Solange stayed away. While she was suckling her daughter, Solange handed over the chieftainship of the tribe to her deputy, Galatea. Staying away was her way of showing confidence in the acting chief, letting her perform the negotiations for the Herders without interference.

Another thing Solange did that Ezra admired was persuade Judith to attend the Cloner Fair.

When the woman who snatched Tamar as a baby learned that Eloise and Tamar would attend this year's fair, she thought it best to avoid it. However, Solange would not countenance guilty self-denial and told Judith to go and enjoy herself and face whatever consequences.

She was right, as usual. The dreaded meeting happened on Haircut Day when Eloise and Tamar joined one of the queues for a seat under a tent roof and the attention of a Cloner woman with scissors. Judith was there already, three lines over, waiting her turn.

"Mum," Tamar said with innocent enthusiasm, "Judith's here!"

Eloise looked at where Tamar pointed. At that moment, Judith happened to see them. She looked down, unable to meet Eloise's eyes.

"Come on," Eloise said, taking Tamar's hand and leading her out of their line. They walked over to where Judith stood.

"Hello, I'm Eloise," she said.

"Oh, God!" Judith exclaimed. "I'm so sorry. I can't ask you to forgive me. I've no excuse for what I did, but please don't hate me because I truly love your daughter."

Eloise absorbed this with a judicial nod.

"That is what Yael told me, and I believe her," she avowed. "Yael is intelligent, adventurous, and good-hearted. You brought her up well."

This was true magnanimity. Judith was humbled. She bowed her head a moment.

"I'm sure she inherited all her good qualities from you," Judith replied, "and I'm to blame for her bad habits ... not that she has any, of course," she hastily corrected. Then she corrected again: "Except that she picks her nose."

"I do not!" Although not too vehemently, Tamar protested, being an honest girl.

"I'm afraid you do, Darling," Eloise said, "and you didn't inherit the habit from me."

"Anyway, how else am I supposed to clear my nose when it's blocked?" Tamar demanded, somewhat contradicting her earlier denial.

The two women shared a smile and looked benignly at the girl they both loved while the women in the haircut queues shuffled past them unnoticed.

"Yael is a lively girl, but I'm not lively ..." Eloise said.

Judith held her breath. It might well be her fault that Eloise was sedated, having been in mourning for her daughter for fourteen years.

"So I don't know whether or not to blame you for making her into such a chatterbox."

"It is my fault," Judith admitted.

"Oh, Judith!" Tamar exclaimed. "No one can blame you just because I like talking so much.

Remember, I did the talking for two."

"I have the idea you would have talked for two even if Wildchild hadn't been so quiet," Eloise said. "You haven't talked any less since Wildchild left to be a Junior."

Tamar smiled guiltily.

"Anyway," the girl argued, "what's so wrong with being lively?"

"Nothing, Sweetheart," Eloise said, stroking her daughter's hair.

"You're perfect as you are, Yael," Judith said, then regretted it. She had no right to lay a judgment on another woman's daughter.

"Quite right," Eloise said after a very short pause. "Though we mustn't make her big-headed."

The same generosity made Judith ashamed, especially the word 'we,' which implied that she and Eloise somehow shared Tamar. Tears began to collect in her eyes, and Eloise saw and changed the subject, giving Judith something else to think about.

"How long do you think Yael's hair should be? She wants to cut it to here," she said, indicating Tamar's neck, "but I prefer it down to here at least." Eloise stated the skinny girl's shoulder.

"Her hair is so beautiful - yours is too, Eloise - that I wish she wouldn't cut it at all," Judith said.

"But she's resolved," Eloise insisted, "so we can only advise."

Again, the word 'we' was used as an invitation to influence Tamar. Judith was becoming overwhelmed and needed another distraction, which Tamar provided.

"Mum, we've lost our seats in the queue," she complained. "Come on, or we'll have to wait all day!"

"All right, Darling," Eloise said. "Judith, will you join us?"

"Yes, come on, Judith," Tamar insisted before Judith could politely decline, as she thought she should. Tamar led her by the hand back into the queue, saying:

"How short do you want your hair, Judith? Mum is cutting hers very short. She says it'll be cooler, but I like it short because it'll dry quicker. Carlin and I have a way of hunting pigeons by camouflaging ourselves with mud and leaves, but it always takes ages to get the mud out of our hair.

I know I could wear a hat, but it is the leather one you gave me, and it has a big brim. Have you met Aunt Adarna? She's Mum's bedmate. She's very kind and sexy. She's pregnant. Ezra knocked her up at his first attempt."

The girl rattled on happily as they slowly inched further in the queue toward the haircutters, not allowing Judith to reply until she stopped momentarily to breathe.

"How about a woolen hat?" Judith suggested returning Tamar to an earlier part of her monologue. Then you could put leaves in it."

"Oh, what a good idea. Mum, I want to buy a woolen hat and one for Carlin."

"We'll see the prices first, Darling," Eloise cautioned. "People say everything at the Fair will be dearer than last year."

"Eloise, would you allow me to buy a woolen hat for Yael?" Judith asked. "I know the women who knit. They'll give us a discount, and because it doesn't need to be brightly colored, it'll be even cheaper."

Eloise thought for a moment. She had been generous to Judith so far and appreciated it. She couldn't imagine Tamar wanting to return to the woman who snatched her, even if she bought her a hat.

"I'm sorry," Judith said, misreading Eloise's silence. "It's inappropriate. I shouldn't have suggested it."

"I'm buying it myself," Tamar said positively. "I've got things to trade."

Finally, Eloise answered.

"Thank you, Judith. Please buy Yael a hat, and you will buy one for Carlin."

The second day of the Cloner Fair was known as 'Market Day,' when the market officially opened. Although the food stalls were open every day, Market Day was significant because of all the eager bargaining, like the first day of the January sales. With money in their pockets or goods to barter, the women were keen buyers.

It would have been better to wait until the last few days of the fair to make their purchases because no one wanted to take home unsold goods, so there would be discounts, but there was always the danger that the best stuff would already have gone, so no one took the chance. Market Day was always exciting, with bustling, haggling, queue-jumping, shouting, and jostling for goods. It was usually good-humored, and it only occasionally broke into squabbles.

Yumi arrived at the crèche on Market Day, having been busy with Madam Scientist and her young assistant, Crystal. She was happy to release Hayate to care for the other mothers and stroll around the stalls. The other mothers found Hayate fascinating. They wanted to hold him and, for some reason, smell him. They were also keen to see what he did differently from their daughters.

One noticeable thing was that, where the girls were mainly content to sit and play, Hayate wanted to be moving. He crawled with fantastic speed toward the entrance and had to be rescued if he got trampled on by arrivers and leavers. Each time he was placed back in the middle of the tent, he turned around and took another break for the exit.

Eventually, they blocked his path with a straw bale, and Hayate had to content himself with crawling full tilt at people's legs, which kept him amused all day.

On day three, the tribal chiefs and the Cloner Council started their meetings. Five days of meetings were planned, and they were intended to resolve inter-tribal disputes, hear legal complaints, and discuss matters of importance for the whole community. The chiefs mostly bickered over prices.

Now that the Cloners no longer had a monopoly on children, the outer tribes thought they could buy back some old-Earth luxuries from the Cloners. They were disappointed because the Cloners wanted to raise the prices of cloned animals for the Farmers and Herders, who would pass on the price rises to the Mariners and Woodlanders, keeping the relative wealth of the tribes the same.

The argument went around in circles without an agreement in sight, and Ezra invited as a courtesy and accepted the invitation only out of politeness, getting impatient. Instead, He'd visit the crèche to see his daughters or wander around the market stalls with his bedmates. At the end of the first morning, he asked if he was needed.

The chiefs happily let him go. There was even a little relief when he left because they could now have the fun of a good haggle without the fear of embarrassing themselves in front of a disapproving man.

Now, Ezra spent as much time as he could in the crèche. He enjoyed sitting on a straw bale, watching or holding his daughters, whom he loved passionately. When he looked at the women enjoying themselves and sharing their children, he thought this was what a female society should be: maternal, communal, chatty, and playful.



To be continued