freedom more than comfort. Loss of land. Confiscation of property relatives, children. Terror. Taxes. Death. Running like a fox in the hunting parks. Soul-breaking work in slave camps with strange imported slave races. And Outsiders selling military might. Wunderland had suffered a fundamental reality shock.
No parents want their children to be as naive as they once were when they were young. And so the older generation founded quasi-military groups and inducted their children-building bard-won wisdom into institutions that couldn’t forget “Will our children be ready for them?” Were there others out there?
Chloe was not interested in a military career. She had grown up in a military family without a mother. Her babysitters had been petty officers and sometimes burly marine sergeants. Her fantasies were about a landholder’s castle on Wunderkind, or a run-down artist’s studio in a twenty-second-century ranch house on the French Somme. (She’d walked through a virtual seventeenth-century French house and didn’t like the plumbing.)
In her dreams she fell in love with Wunderkind statesmen, or crashlander explorers, or Jinxian scientists or deep space artists. In one of her recurring fantasies she lived with a musician who worked with his instruments in a great house on Plateau at the void edge of Mount Lookitthat overlooking the Long Fall River where it broke out into the tallest waterfall in Known Space. The man with a view.
Flatlanders both repelled and fascinated her. Earth was so crowded! It was like Tiamat turned into a whole planet! And flatlanders had such odd jobs-like reconstructing ancient Portuguese caravels dredged up from a watery Pacific grave. Her best flatlander fantasy was filled with the laughing Romans and Italians of a rosy Naples where the sun was always setting on a golden bay; she was one of a saucy menagerie of teen-aged girls held prisoner by a gay old Neapolitan classics scholar who was a sexual athlete and wit. The fantasy had lasted her a delicious week until she got bored with Italian men and moved on to the Chinese Imperial Court.
Whatever her dreams of civilian splendor, in real life she fell madly in love with military men. And so it was natural that at the age of seventeen, in total revolt against her father’s military life, she should declare her independence by joining a military organization so that she could pursue her one-sided love affair with a handsome older officer of the UNSN.
Chloe was devastated when Major Yankee Clandeboye was transferred to Barnard’s Starbase, something that Admiral Jenkins had demanded and something that fitted nicely into one of General Fry’s more nefarious schemes. She sent her major letters, five in all. He replied once. That short note was signed with the scrawl, “Fondly, Yankee.” It was all the encouragement she needed.
In a state of euphoria, with his short note tucked in her bra, she just happened to notice a recruiting ad. The Young Woman’s Auxiliary needed twenty girls who were looking for a disciplined and rewarding experience at Barnard’s Starbase. The “discipline” didn’t appeal to her but the “rewarding experience” did. Being only seventeen, she needed her father’s permission. The rear admiral objected and fought a losing war for three days before surrendering. He signed her away for a two-year contract and groaned.
Chloe, of course, had not told her father about her intentions toward the forty-nine-year-old Yankee, knowing that there were limits to Admiral Blumenhandler’s permissiveness. To her father Yankee was just another one of those men upon whom she practiced her flirtation skills. The rear admiral, used to command, and respecting Yankee as a competent officer and gentleman, sent the major an almost pleading letter to take his daughter under his wing and see that no harm befell her. In effect the plea amounted to an order.
So at Barnard’s Starbase it was very easy for her to find a need for counseling and to fall into small mishaps for which she needed extracting. Often they ate in the cafeteria together, a bleak humongous hut of “temporary” wartime construction. She told him horror stories of the matron who was her first officer and he sneaked her into some of the private beer parties, where she flirted outrageously with all of the men. That made him feel safe.
Barnard’s Starbase was not Known Space’s best posting. It was built hastily in secret during the war as a staging area for raids into kzinti space, at a time when a major worry was that the Outsiders might go on and sell hyperdrive technology to the Patriarchy for a handsome sum. The UNSN needed safe bases about which the kzinti knew nothing.
It was built on a rocky Mars-sized world glaciated with ices and dark hydrocarbons, the moon of an inhospitable planet of about eight Earth masses. The Base was conveniently at the edge of the Barnard’s Star system, far enough inside Barnard’s singularity to be immune from surprise hyperdrive attack, but close enough to it so that UNSN ships could quickly reach hyperspace launching distance. Inward there were two gas giants for an ample supply of hydrogen and helium, and a thin belt of rubble for heavier metals. The original intent had been to make Barnard’s Starbase an independent manufacturing center but other priorities and the end of the war left the manufacturing centers incomplete. Postwar budget restraints meant that temporary facilities were still in use, even the original construction bunkers.
Yankee’s main job, again, was training. General Fry had singled out Barnard’s Star as a nucleus for fomenting dissatisfaction with ARM policies. Without a kzinti threat there was little purpose in Barnard’s Starbase. Men need a purpose. Where better to do some long-range thinking than on a base which had been designed with a possible hyperdrive kzinti threat in mind? Here men were liable to find their purpose in preparing for a hyperarmed Patriarchy.
Yankee found his charge to be an often pleasant diversion. She listened to his worries and never hesitated to give an off-the-wall opinion on any subject. That irritated him but it often forced him to explain strategic concepts about which he was not himself clear. He began giving her research assignments, even requisitioning some of her official on-the-job time. He was delighted to find that she had inherited her father’s sense of strategic thoroughness. What she had inherited from her mother, he did not know. Her mother had been killed swinging an axe at a kzin, and she certainly seemed to have that kind of aggressiveness.
The crisis in their relationship came unexpectedly. They were in the Starbase’s honor library-their infocomps were not powerful enough to do the particularly difficult and tedious weapons tradeoff analysis that Yankee needed.
He was in a bad mood, which killed her enthusiasm. She only meant to tease him enough until he laughed so that they could get back to work. It was easier to be gay and irreverent than bored.
Glibly she began to mutate the weapons discussion into free-flowing nonsense. It eventually blossomed into a free-for-all about ancient Japanese pornography. She was doing her brush strokes in the air and faking geisha flirtations about which she knew nothing-and he was richly enjoying himself pretending to be a sake-saturated teen-aged samurai on his first groping visit to the pillow world of a light-gravity planet. At least he was giggling like a teenager. She was so fascinated-she’d never seen him so wonderfully foolish-that she couldn’t stop provoking him. It was true, she thought, that being alone in a public place brings out the devil in men. The devil keeps whispering that someone may walk in and that makes it impossible not to be silly. Even she felt silly and dangerously bold.
Though the eight terminal booths were empty, the library was heavily used-but mostly accessed from distant terminals. They were alone and they were likely to remain alone. For no sane reason they decided to rob the library of Kakabuni’s Instructive Erotica, though robbing was entirely unnecessary in a library that took less than a second to copy a chip into a personal infocomp. Their crazy mood told them that they had to own the Starbase’s only copy of Kakabuni. To get at it they needed to unlock and pull out one of the hundred sliding ROM doors- something that only the librarian was supposed to do. They managed to slide out the chip-rack but their chip was near the floor and required a chip-puller that they didn’t have so they made love on the floor with their clothes on instead. He even put his arm around her when he walked her back up through the maze to her dorm.
The next day she woke up anxiously because she’d never done something so stupid in her life! On the floor! In her clothes! She faked sickness and did not report for work. All morning on the day after the next day she kept telling herself that her mother was brave enough to swing an axe at a kzin (even though her bravery had killed her). She found a way to wander up and down a corridor that Yankee would have to pass through, carrying a package so that she could pretend to be delivering messages.
She saw him coming before he saw her and tried to duck behind a support pillar but it was too thin. The package stuck out. She looked the other way in panic.
“Hi, Chloe,” he said.
“Oh. You.” She tried to bat her eyes but they froze. “I’ve been sick.” Sick? She saw him seeing her wan and in crutches and desperately cast around for a more appropriate bright conversation. Yankee, damn him, wasn’t saying anything. Food was all she could think of. Even Murphy couldn’t get you in trouble with food. “Lunch?”
