Yankee was furious. He rushed her and the baby off to the infirmary. Her obstetrician was furious and she rushed the very healthy baby into an infant’s autodoc for a careful checkout. The baby woke up and wanted to be fed.
Yankee got over being mad. He was getting used to being married to a teen-ager. In many ways he was the father of nine children, varying in age from Nora down to his own newborn. It was quite an experience dealing with an adult child, a wild teen, three silent daughters, two shy boys, a baby, and Monk.
Sir Monk, as Yankee called him, helped out enthusiastically. Monk had always thought of himself as the man of the family when his family had been the whole human race. In that way he thought like a kzin. He had gross problems: when in control he acted kzinish, when unsure or overwhelmed he turned into a slave. He had a frightful time with English grammar and idiom but loved the computer that patiently taught him. He was happy to have an uncle. Politics confused him. His first real conversation with Yankee was about master Mellow Yellow, told in a broken mixture of spitting-hisses and English that never quite jelled into grammatical sentences-how he had saved his friend from the dungeons of W’kkai. Yankee didn’t have the heart to tell him that it was Mellow Yellow who had mind-wiped his mother and eaten boys like Monkeyshine for lunch after finishing up his experiments.
As a reward for working so hard, Yankee sneaked Monk into the Starbase simulators and taught him how to fly a starship in virtual space. There was no stopping this kid. He was a born warrior-and eventually his kzinti accent would wear off. What Yankee dreaded was the lessons in kzinti martial arts that Monk insisted on giving him, claw to claw.
So it always came as a welcome relief to change diapers and feed the tiny girl whom Chloe insisted on naming Valiance. Val pursued the simple things of life such as sleeping in her father’s arms.
Chapter 24
(2439 A.D.)
The interstellar game of “Trolls amp; Bridges” became an instant success among a certain group of the military Major Yankee Clandeboye had toyed with the name “General Staff-In-Exile” but went chicken before typing such blasphemy into the net. He put it down to his new maturity. After all, he had just turned fifty.
The game developed a different structure than he had originally imagined. It proved impossibly complicated to set up a “shadow” ARM. Instead, “Trolls amp; Bridges” evolved into a “command patch.” There were a lot of isolated officers out there for whom the command lines had failed, who were looking for the kind of “work-around” that the structure of T amp;B provided.
Normally, bypassing command lines in a military organization is a bad habit because it leads to contradictions and inconsistencies in practice. Nothing destroys an army faster than captains who have to carry out the orders of generals who aren’t speaking to each other. Nevertheless command lines are bypassed all the time through what has been called for centuries “the old boy’s network” Bypassing command lines is an art form with definite strategies, rules, and protocols.
Young men under sixty are not adept practitioners of this arcane art and are advised to seek counsel from a mentor. The game of T amp;B, in its first naive implementation, presently put its players in conflict with powerful men. Admiral Jenkins had a fit when one of his patrols received two sets of orders. He suspected the hand of Fry- though Fry was innocent-and moved in for the kill, demanding a full investigation of Starbase shenanigans.
Fry caught off guard, did his own instant investigation and found out that he had been elevated to Grand Vizier of a very weird caper that had been going on under his nose for months. He studied the rules in shock, penned a scathing rejoinder to all Starbase nitwits, reconsidered, remembered that he needed an excuse to see Nora and hastily hitched a ride to Barnard’s Star. Immediately on arrival he lectured his young fans in the sternest terms. But by then he was amused, even elated.
As Grand Vizier of T amp;B, he sat his boys down and showed them how their game really worked. With one hand he arranged to have Admiral Jenkins promoted to head up the “Jenkins Commission on Military Ethics.” Writing that report would take up at least five years of the admiral’s life. In case Jenkins got too pushy… well, there were ethical issues from his own past that he had forgotten about. With the other hand Fry used some contacts in the Wunderland House of Patricians to outmaneuver the ARM and push Rear Admiral Blumenhandler into Jenkins’ old job.
While these promotions were going through, Fry suspected that a quick review of patrol methods, desk ready might please Blumenhandler when he moved into Jenkins office to take over. The current T amp;B Grand Kzin Strategy model was laid on the table. It called for new kinds of patrol information. Then a document was compiled out of recent T amp;B items sent in by patrol officers who felt that certain unacknowledged reports needed a critical second ear. Fry added his own wish list. Gibraltar was stumbling for lack of an aggressive assessment of the Patriarchy’s smaller worlds. Finally, synthesis produced a written policy that Blumenhandler could take seriously.
“That was a lot of work.” Fry was enjoying teaching his students. He was coming to like his maverick major. “But is your stuffy father-in-law going to read it? We need an insurance policy. A personal touch. I’m going to ask him a favor. That sets me up in his debt so later on, when he needs it, he can ask me a favor.”
With Blumenhandler’s biases in mind Fry made a special request, in his own name, for patrol time to seek out the rumored kzinti stronghold, Warhead. Perhaps, while finding it, they could also locate the rumored Pierin aliens, who might then become mankind’s ally. He implied that Wunderland officers were best equipped to carry out such a mission.
Lucas Fry had no authority to issue any such orders to the UNSN patrols. But, of course, Chloe’s father, in his new capacity, did. The orders would get issued.
Over the weeks that the general was with them, Tam Claukski watched him in awe, taking notes and codifying what he saw. The old reprobate held seminars on everything that a devious officer should know about side- stepping the rules. The general was very adamant about what should go through channels, what might profitably be transmitted through the T amp;B comm lines, and what had to be aborted.
One whole day he spent with Tam manually processing messages which Tam’s procedures had been editing and routing automatically.
“Take this guy” Fry meant the message, not the sender. He used his pen as a pointer. “These three sentences are a lament to the gods and a whine about the sender’s powerlessness. The next paragraph is an outright appeal for sympathy. Then he gets angry and we have to read what is essentially a page of diatribe against his commanding officer. He wraps up his case with a conspiracy theory. Only the last two lines contain the nub of a useful suggestion. If this sadsack tried to put such a missive through normal channels, he’d get head detail.” Fry laughed. “But as I understand it, T amp;B is trying to be more than a normal channel.”
Tam grimaced. “It’s pretty hard to do something with that kind of ranting mess. I have a good semantic program that I’m training to sort and flush gripes like that”
“No,” said the general. “Flushing just dumps out the gold dust with the sand.” Fry used his pen to block the whining in red, then attached the note, “Delete.” He recast the last two lines in a larger, bold typeface, this time attaching the message, “Expand and resubmit.” He grinned. “That ought to shock the shit out of our raving victim. Make him think. Otherwise send him out on head detail.”
The next day, too early, Fry held a seminar for the Starbase coterie who had signed up for “Trolls amp; Bridges.” He combed over the T amp;B categories with a razor sharp ruthlessness. Tam saw his categories as a skeleton around which to build a defense strategy. Yankee saw them as an alternate command structure. Fry saw them as communication nodes that connected people in ways that command lines couldn’t. The general tried to explain to them why, in two months, the T amp;B team had been able to make a better strategic analysis of the rising kzinti threat than the whole apparatus of expensive ARM think tanks.
Looking out over the room, he saw that these eager officers, who would probably dominate the roster of heroes of the next war, were flattered but didn’t really believe him. They might make jokes about the ARM, but they had been brought up in awe of its secret dominion. The ARM had pulled some deadly tricks out of its hat when the kzinti seemed overwhelming. The ARM wore a mystique of invincibility, of endless cabalistic powers it could command if it had to.
So go back to basics. The general spent the next hour lecturing these neophytes on ARM’S modus operandi.
