The BridgeBook II: Requiem for the Blue Planetby euhal allen |
Table of Contents Chapter 5, part 2 appears in this issue. |
Chapter 5: Hearts Defined
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* * *
Cold winds blew snow over what had once been Baltimore. The gangs that had once thought they controlled the city were struggling to live day by day. With the fights and skirmishes that had filled their lives there had been no time to find a winter supply of food.
Those who had the strength headed south, often only to be killed or captured, if they were women, by the soldiers of the Confederate Union, soldiers who had only recently raised their ragged flag once more over the ruins of the White House and the bodies of the recent occupants of that place.
Only here and there were there still small groups of people willing to work together and try to survive together, knowing they could not survive alone.
Staff in the Observation Post watched helplessly as they saw the tragedies play out on the Blue Planet below.
Sadly, they recorded it all, knowing that those recordings, becoming part of the archives of the Galactic Council, would prove to those in that august body that they had been right in condemning the Blue Planet to quarantine status, thus giving others, once the force globe was in place, no chance to prove the Galactic Council wrong.
Even as those recordings were being made, the Harrigan’s Whelp docked next to Alexei’s Pride. Then Katia, a different, more forceful Katia than they had seen over the last few days, made her appearance.
The first person she wanted to see was Olga, and soon Olga was in the main office of the Observation Post receiving a lecture like none she had received since she and her mother were a very great deal younger.
As Olga left the office and met Sean getting ready to enter she said, “Do you remember how mother used to rip into us when we were kids and did really stupid things?”
Sean, suddenly feeling a little less calm, nodded his head and said, “Yes.”
Olga gave him a look that could only be interpreted as condolences and added, “Holograph or not, she hasn’t changed much.”
* * *
Charlie Phillips had never been part of any of the groups that the Shapirov Project had trained and protected. He had never learned to scout out new territories or build or govern villages or do any of the things that Li Guo-fan and the other members of the late General Chu’s university faculty could do.
Charlie did not have a great deal of ambition when it came to climbing great ladders of success. He did not read or figure as well as others, and did not mind that at all.
What Charlie could do, and the reason he was grabbed by The Project when they happened to notice him, was grow tomatoes in Alaska.
When asked, Charlie would tell you that it started the first time he had ever tasted a home-grown tomato. It was when he was making his one and only visit to what they called Oregon country when he was a lad.
He had been walking down this road and came upon a garden that had these dark green plants with these round, reddish, things on them. Never having seen a tomato before he took the courage to ask a man standing near just what they were.
At first the old guy was leery of Charlie, but after some time talking with him and finding out that Charlie was from way up north, he just reached down and picked a tomato and gave it to Charlie. Right there and then Charlie asked what that old man would take for some tomato seeds.
After a bit of bargaining, Charlie had about a quarter pound of seeds and the old guy had Charlie’s sealskin parka.
And that is what started the whole process of Charlie’s working on growing tomatoes in Alaska, and, as far as the leaders of the Shapirov Project were concerned, anyone who could grow tomatoes in Alaska was needed on Starhell.
* * *
Li Guo-fan had thought he had worked hard at the university but that had been almost a vacation in comparison to what he dealt with now. There were just too many students to teach.
Tests had been given to all new arrivals, even the females!
Those who showed aptitude for crafts were sent to him, and it became his responsibility to train the future craftsmen for the planet. The theory was good but in practice there were problems.
Since all of Li Guo-fan’s students at the university had been, at the very least, journeymen in their trades before they were allowed to come to the university’s Master’s Program, nothing elementary had needed to be taught. And, there had never been a woman among them.
Some of these new students did not know one end of a saw from another. Li had been a Master Craftsman so long that he took for granted as truths things that many of these new students had never even heard of, let alone learned. How was he to teach them?
How was he to teach the beginning things when he no longer remembered that they were the beginning things? Worse yet, his Master Craftsmen suffered from the same disability.
Dr. Jiang, who Li Guo-fan now knew was not Dr. Jiang, but Takeshi Kurihara, had said that if Li would teach these students as he would his youngest grandchildren he would remember the beginnings. But, when he tried to do that, he found that even his grandsons were beyond what many of the beginners were capable of doing.
Who could have taught his grandchildren? Their mothers assured him that the teaching had been theirs and, if one could believe such things, his granddaughters were often as good as or better than the grandsons were. Could such a thing as craftswomen be a reality?
Over his objections, the mothers of his grandchildren were asked by Dr. Jiang to teach the beginning crafts classes. And even women students were to be treated as equals and taught the crafts as if they were going to become Craftsmen themselves.
Now, on his desk there were the rankings of all the students. They were based on projects that had been done by each student in their private workplace.
Collected by administrators and given only an identifying number so that the judging would be impartial, they were then judged by the artistry and competence shown in the piece being judged. Then the projects were returned to the administrators so that their creators could be identified and the winners be rewarded. The forty-seven best project creators were to be entered immediately into the journeymen programs.
The top forty-seven projects were then displayed in the Craft Hall with the name and picture of their creators displayed with them. Ten of them were women. All of the women’s projects placed in the top half of the forty-seven projects.
Li Guo-fan, stunned by the results, had sought out “Dr. Jiang” (he did not wish to think of him as other than Dr. Jiang) and had asked him what to make of it.
Li Guo-fan lost all hope when “Dr. Jiang” said, “You have been looking to solve the problem of finding teachers for just above the beginning levels. I would think that all of these prospective journeymen would be an excellent source for those intermediate level teachers.”
* * *
Administrator Tinker was excited at the reports that at least the waters being inserted into the planet’s equatorial area were not freezing over, and that some of Earth’s fresh-water life forms were starting to adapt to the new conditions and reproduce. It was now projected that these life forms would start to become a somewhat significant source of oxygen recycling within ten years.
He wished it were sooner. News from Katia and Cyr was not good. The force globe would soon cut all but a trickle of contact with Earth and, should the Galactic Council gain knowledge of the existence of Starhell, it would not be many years, should they desire to search for it, before they found its system.
When that happened, the planet had to have a thriving ecosystem without technological boosts being evident from space. Administrator Tinker was just happy that the invention of the Doors had been made by their people and had not been shared with the Galactic Council.
Only those who needed to know of their existence had that information. Others, besides the immigrants from earth who had no way to reveal any guesses as to how they had gotten to Starhell, had been brought here through the Doors that handled ship traffic. They were under the impression that the trip had been to a nearby star. They would be shocked if they knew that the actual location of Starhell was across the galaxy from Galactic Council space. Still a determined search, if it were lucky, could traverse the distance in a matter of only a couple of years.
Setting the report down, the Administrator smiled to himself as he thought of the consulting appointment he had that evening with Natasha Borisovna. It seemed that he had found a great many questions that only she could answer and that meant that she was very often invited to dine with him and help him gather much needed information for the cold-weather village projects that he had become so interested in as of late.
* * *
Grand Minister Pwirkavi had not had a good day. First there was the altercation between the Councilors over the funds to be allocated for the new Institution for Galactic Art, with the Archaists seeking to control the entire west wing for displays of ancient art and the Tommarists wanting to use the museum areas to encourage new artists, saying that there were more than enough museums for the old stuff.
Then the Galactic Chronicler’s report on the strangeness of the figures dealing with the Cernon Sector and how they were too perfect, as if someone was hiding something. That was just the information for the opposition to use to gain the Grand Minister’s Office.
And, now, as if things were not bad enough, the et Sharma of the Blue Planet had not communicated with her overseeing office for some time. When a request for information and an update on the Final Report was sent, the answer came back signed by the former et Sharma, Jonkil, saying that he was filing in, for a short while, because Me’Avi et Sharma was ill; a very unusual thing to happen, not unheard of, but very unusual.
Then, when the Great Concert Hall’s board of directors sought information from Maestro Vertraumer as to a completion date for the Requiem an answer came back that he, too, was ill and not up to answering the inquiry as of yet.
“Now,” the Grand Minister thought, “comes the final blow,” as he looked at the cost of the ship that was built for Grand Minister Shapirov’s holographic persona. The ship was not so expensive, but the computational equipment was outrageous.
‘How’, he had wondered, ‘had such a thing been approved in the first place, and without my knowledge?’ Then he looked at the authorization forms and found that it had been added into the costs of the force globe modules for the Blue Planet. It was hidden in the module inspection budget, and everyone had been so glad that it was finally being done that it had been passed without any debate. Worse yet, he, the Grand Minister, had signed it without reading it.
That is without reading it until one of his administrative assistants had seen that little paragraph turning the ship over to Katia Shapirov’s holographic persona when the module inspection had been finished.
Everyone knew his admiration for Grand Minister Shapirov and now, with these things happening to undermine the closing of the books on the Blue Planet, a charge of favoritism and corruption could be leveled against his administration.
The Grand Minister was beginning to feel that Katia Shapirov had been fortunate in dying when she was so popular. Not that she had done it on purpose, but, once done and her accomplishments recorded in a time of grief over her loss, no one would ever really blame her for things that happened under her watch.
* * *
Me’Avi et Sharma had never known such anger in her life. She was the et Sharma for the Blue Planet. How dare these people lock her in her quarters? How dare they imprison her with servants and that crazy composer? Someone, some day, would pay for this.
A little sparkle of light precluded the appearance of Katia Shapirov into the room as Me’Avi et Sharma made mental plans for her revenge on those who had had the temerity to humiliate her so. She was brought out of it by Katia’s first words.
“Well, granddaughter,” she said, “we have come to quite an impasse, have we not? I am truly sorry that we have had to treat you as we have, but if we are to save our people it must be done.
“Our people, our world must not die. No one, not even the Galactic Council has the right to ask us to stand by and see it destroyed.”
“You are with them?” Me’Avi asked. “How could you, a former Grand Minister of the Galactic Council, be with them? How could you choose those people down there, those barbaric savages, over your real people?”
“Those people down there, savage as they may seem, are our people. That world down there, Earth, is our home. It is where we started, it is the home of our hearts,” replied Katia.
Me’Avi et Sharma, standing as erect as possible, said in a prideful tone of voice, “Dreamer’s World, our new Earth, is where our people are. You led them there yourself. You helped them to grow there into a people that has become an accepted addition to the civilization of the galaxy.
“Because of you, many of our people have become Councilors in the Galactic Council. Because of your example our people are respected members of galactic society. How can you throw that away for some barbarians and a worthless old planet?
“The real Katia Shapirov, the one who died at Feltus II, my real grandmother would not have been involved in such a thing.
“Get out! These are still my quarters. I am still et Sharma of the Blue Planet and I demand that you get out!”
Katia, the beginning of tears in her eyes, nodded sadly to her granddaughter and faded from the room.
To be continued...
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Copyright © 2005 by euhal allen
