David Brin - Senses Three and Six

Hell, I give her strength and stability and loving and a good deal more. It’s a fair trade.

Gray eyes, her eyes, laughing at me over her bright silver flute, making me grin and stumble over the chords—my fingers made schoolboy clumsy by the lightness of my heart …

Gray eyes—cool ivory keys and a silvery flute …

Duet …

As I approach the table she looks up and smiles shyly. “Did you have a nice walk?”

“Yeah, it was fine.”

There are questions in her brown eyes. No denying I did act unusual, earlier. But now I realize that I don’t have to explain anything. Give it a rest and in a few days or weeks I’ll start giving in a little to her curiosity. Chuck will explain a little. Minor stuff. No hurry.

Why not?

We talk about little things and spend a lot of time not talking at all. I check IDs and make sure nobody’s molesting anyone in the men’s room.

The Boys are back on stage playing quiet songs, as I return from one of my rounds and find Elise talking to Alan Fowler at our table.

Damn.

Alan’s a nice, friendly grad student who’s much too bright for his own good. He met Chuck at a dirt-bike race and sort of adopted him and Elise. Chuck insults him all the time, calling him a useless egghead, but he never seems to get the hint.

I come up behind Elise. She is very animated.

“…not sure I understand what they hope to accomplish, Alan. You mean you could actually mine asteroids efficiently enough to make a profit selling refined metals back to Earth?”

“That’s what the figures show, Lise.” Alan winks at me but Elise doesn’t notice.

“You mean even after transportation costs are taken into account? Can you amortize costs over a reasonable period?”

Chuck frowns. What is this? He doesn’t like hearing words like these from Elise. Who does she think she’s fooling?

Alan grins. “Easily, Lise. Less than a decade, I’d guess. Of course, in the beginning it’ll be water for propellants well be after. But later? Well, imagine twenty years’ worldwide platinum production coming from just one small asteroid! Why, we could easily go back to the days of the sixties and seventies when there was so much of a surplus that liberal ideas could flower…”

I can’t help snorting in disgust. Chuck votes redneck.

The secret Ark Project was responsible for over half of the mysterious inflation that hit the nation in the late seventies… Big endeavors, pipelines, bombers, space shuttles, went through design change after design change, all attributed to poor planning .

And yet the engineers involved were the very same who had brought the Apollo Program in ahead of schedule and under budget .

How could such incompetence appear out of nowhere? Bungled, rebuilt nuclear power plants, reworked and retooled factories, new equipment wasted and tossed away .

Nobody bothered to check what happened to the original parts… the “flawed” equipment that had to be replaced… no one knew but a few in the highest places that the leftovers were taken to a cavern in Tennessee. Pieces of experimental windmills and redesigned submarines, prototype bombers and cancelled shuttles, the bits all cleverly fitted together into… into great globes… into beauty and eventually .

Sure, Alan, look to space for salvation from economic woes .

The Project was responsible for most of the mysterious inflation that hit in the late seventies … A great nation’s wealth, thrown in secret down a rat hole .

Dream on …

Elise notices me and her words stumble to a stop. But she recovers quickly. She grabs my arm as I sit down beside her.

“Why didn’t you tell me Alan got accepted!” She tries to sound accusing but is too excited to make it stick.

I shrug. The kid had only told me about his “good luck” this morning. Chuck had offered perfunctory congratulations but had better things to do than spend all day gushing over the young idiot’s long-range suicide plan.

“Aw, come on, Lise.” Alan grins. “It’s only a preliminary acceptance. They’re going to put me through a wringer like boot camp and final exams put together. Probably the only result will be three months lost from my research, and a permanent empathy with my experimental rats!”

“Don’t be silly!” Elise glances at me quickly and gives in to her natural instinct to touch his sleeve in encouragement. “You’ll make it all the way. Just think how proud we’ll all be to say we knew you when!”

Alan laughs. “I’ll tell you what would help. What I really need is some coaching from the Zen master here.”

He jerks his thumb in my direction.

Elise takes a fraction of a second to check the expression on my face. To me it feels stony, numb. I’m irked by this need of hers to constantly worry about my reaction, even if she’s been doing it less lately.

I’ve never abused her. So Chuck growls! So what! She can do or say anything she wants, for crissake!

She laughs a bit nervously. “My bear, a Zen master? What do you mean, Alan?”

Alan grins. “I mean that one of the reasons I hang around this big grump is because he’s the closest thing to a real guru I’ve ever met.” Alan looks at Elise. “Have you ever watched him while he’s fixing a bike?”

“Are you kidding? He has a Harley torn apart in the living room. I’ve tried and tried—”

“No. I mean really watched him! Closely! He touches every piece and meditates on it before he does anything at all to it. No part is in its place out of tempo. I used to ask him to describe what he feels when he’s in that state, but he’d just get mad and tell me to go away. Finally, I realized that the yelling was a sermon! It’s suchness he’s concentrating on. Or Tao or Wu or whatever you want to name it, only naming isn’t where it’s at, either.”

I shake my head, muttering, “Crock of shit.” And I mean it, too. Chuck and I are in total agreement.

Alan just laughs. “I once read a book about a meditation system just Tike the one Chuck uses. It was pretty popular about a decade or so back. Only I never believed it until I met Chuck. I don’t suppose he ever read the book. He just does it.”

Alan sighs. “And that’s what I have to learn, to pass those tests in Houston. If I could move with grace and concentration like he does when he’s fixing bikes, I’d be a shoo-in. I tell you, Chuck should be the one trying for astronaut!”

And that will be quite enough! Elise’s smile fades as I growl.

“What a load of bull, Alan. I’m no… Zan master, if that’s what you call it, and I sure have better things to do than get fried in one of those money-wasting, man-killing bombs they keep setting off down at Vandenberg! If you want to be popped up like a piece of toast you just go right ahead, but don’t “enthuse” all over me, okay?”

The damned kid just keeps grinning.

“ There ! There it is again! That expression on his face. It’s the same one he had this morning when I stopped by to tell him I might get a crew slot on the space station.”

Alan’s expression turns inward a bit, puzzled and not afraid at all to show it.

“It’s as if he knew something I didn’t,” he murmurs. “As if he thought all that was somehow child’s play.”

If Alan were sitting just a little closer, I know I’d strangle him. If a bright young idiot like Alan Fowler can see through Chuck… what about Them ?

My face is made of sleet-swept granite. I don’t move, but let the world turn beneath me.

Child’s play. Indeed.

Imagine a year of rumors… of strange lights in the sky …