“Lucky you.”
“But all he ever talked about to me was Riemannian Metrics and Godel Recursives and Fiechbacker Hyperspaces-since I was two. He might be having an interesting discussion with my mother about ancient Roman politics or about ice cream flavors with his brother but whenever I would walk in the room his eyes would glaze over and he’d go into his education-of-Lura mode. He had his mind set on making a mathematician out of me. He was a research mathist at the Institute because he was a hopeless teacher. He lectured and little me listened. I couldn’t stop him, I couldn’t ask questions.
“No matter how hard I listened it was all gibberish. I loved that man but he expected me to do the differential geometry of n-space before I could count, let alone add. I wanted to be a math genius, I was desperate to please him but I wasn’t at all sure of what he did. I thought he laid kitchen floors because of a very famous piece of mathematics called Kitchener’s Tiling that he was working on when I was three. I wanted him to stop and start over, but I was too shy to tell him. He was uninterruptable! I was a very angry young girl.”
“I’m talking too much?”
“Yes.”
“But she’s going to have to learn how to communicate.”
“Oh, she can communicate, all right. A very word-oriented Chloe just isn’t listening. Didn’t Nora brush mayonnaise all over your pretty book today? How else is a non-verbal person going to tell a verbal person to shut up?”
“Should I stop seeing her?”
“Darling, you’re doing great. But I have an exercise for you to try with her that will make all the difference in the world. I’m forbidding you to use words around her- except words like ‘yikes’ or ‘ouch’ or ‘wowie’ or ‘damn’; she’ll understand those.”
“Talk like a brainless teen-ager?” Chloe was horrified. Lura smiled and broke out a second beer for herself offering one to Chloe without saying a word.
“Oh wow!” said Chloe taking one and popping the top, comprehension dawning. She took a swig.
“Remember when she was playing the Russian-egg game with her little girl? What was she saying? Watch me open the pretty egg. Look at the prettier egg inside! Take the egg. Copy what I did! Now give me the egg and I’ll copy what you did.’ All without using any words. You can’t tell me that’s not communication.”
Chloe was conceding the argument with her facial expression, if reluctantly. “She’s not ever going to learn differential geometry that way,” she said glumly.
“Yes. And she can’t wish her mother in Iowa City a happy birthday. And she has a very hard time telling a chatterbox like you to stop trying to teach her how to talk. She tries so hard to be human-but we humans insist on thinking that only language is what makes us human.”
“I’ll be good,” said Chloe. “Yikes! I forgot to tell you; we just got a box from Iowa City. Her mother sent us all her old homework. We even have her nursery school crayon stick figures with arms coming out of the ears! She drew this fantastic picture of a kzin when she was in the second grade. It is so tall it has to stoop under the top of the page. It scared me cross-eyed! I am a chatterbox, aren’t I?”
Chapter 23
(2438 A.D.)
One morning Tam Claukski eased himself into Yankee’s office, warily stepping around a wobbly pile of books, Adam’s apple bobbing. He had big plans. Before he had even found secure footing, he was proposing a gigantic simulation of a future Second Man-Kzin War that he had just thought up.
It was Tam’s immoderate imagination which had induced Yankee to steal him from Admiral Blumenhandler. Like most enthusiastic young men this prodigy was totally unaware of the size and scope of the tasks he took upon himself. Yankee liked to describe such gargantuan efforts in terms of “gallons,” an ancient flatlander measure of the amount of midnight oil that had to be burned in a whale oil lamp to get the job done. The major kept a straight face. “Well, don’t just stand there pontificating, sit down!”
“Where?”
Yankee motioned for Tam to move the VR helmet onto the pile of books. Then he took assorted reports off the controller for the wall screen so that Tam would have a way to showoff. “Fire away. You have five minutes.”
In response, Tam moved the helmet to its pedestal, balanced it, and recklessly rolled his chair up to the controller, smiling the whole while. What appeared on the screen was “several gallons” worth of an incomprehensible organization chart. Tam was rapturous. “I got hit by this bolt of lightning. For a tactician like me, Grand Strategy is a bit awesome.”
“I suppose one cure for awe is to grab a million volt line.”
“This is the first time I’ve ever been able to get a handle on the whole bag.” He raised his arms in supplication to the wall. “What do you think of that?”
“I don’t understand a line of it,” complained Yankee. “It looks like the command structure of a military org. That’s not the way ARM is organized.”
“But the ARM is peacekeeping,” admonished Tam. “We’re talking about a real war, here.”
“You realize, of course, that we’ll be well into a third war by the time you get the ARM to consider the idea that it might be a good idea to set up a study commission to plan an approach to reorganizing for the second war.”
Tam looked at his diagram in consternation. “You’re misunderstanding me, sir! That’s not a military reorganization chart. I’ve just arranged my ideas into manageable lumps. Strategy is complicated. It takes a lot of praying to Murphy. I just want to know if I’ve left anything out before Murphy clobbers me for my neglect”
“Leave it on the wall and I’ll stare at it for a while.” Yankee stared at the wall. “I hope you’re not in a hurry!”
“No, sir. You’ll have a couple of days with my masterpiece. Tonight I have to make up a strategy chart for the kzinti High Command. That’s going to be hard because they are used to making their major decisions at the local level. And we don’t have enough information on the Far Side.” He meant the worlds at the far side of the Patriarchy.
“So, you’re appointing kzinti admirals too, eh?”
“With your permission, sir.”
“That’s quite all right with me. Make sure we have a worthy Patriarch to oppose us-and put the VR helmet back on the chair when you leave.”
From time to time during the day, Yankee called up various different flies that were attached to the wall screen’s boxes. He couldn’t get the idea out of his head that these were all job descriptions. Poor Tam thought like a Von Neumann machine; he was going to linearize the graph, and then continually cycle through it, doing everything himself, Finagle help the boy.
Chloe called in to chat-a pleasant interlude. Her gossip about the Brozik industrial family primed him to turn from his routine screenwork to read up on the current economic outlook of We Made It Military budgets were tight. He had been trying to determine for a long time how much strain the crashlander civilian economy could take doing military research under the table.
The Broziks seemed to be putting all their efforts into a set of basic spaceship shells that could be finished either for civilian use or as warcraft. That meant that, in case of war, the naval assembly lines would already be in place- though Yankee wasn’t sure how much good that would do; Procyon was sitting up there with its head in the Patriarch’s jaws. Chloe’s news, direct from her father, was that Barnard’s Starbase was receiving, for test and finishing, one of the Brozik shells equipped with a Wunderland salvaged kzinti gravitic drive, courtesy of Admiral Blumenhandler. Gossip through hyperspace was faster than the military command line.
He called up his naval architect specialist to meet him for a coffee and salad. If Stefan Brozik wasn’t continually getting the right military feedback, his project could be a disaster. It was going to be damn good to get their hands on one of his shells. They could give it a workout, shake down the problems.
When he returned from the snack he rearranged some of the book piles on his floor so that he would have pacing space. The chart on the wall kept staring at him. He sighed at its supreme logic, if only he belonged to such
