Variable Star

8

The first thing I did when I woke next morning was to sit down at my desk and summon a list of Positions Available.

There were a lot more than I expected. It had apparently occurred to the expedition’s planners that not only could nearly all the actual useful work of preparing to start this colony be safely put off until the last few years of the voyage… it probably would be anyway, humans being human. Therefore, it would be good to keep them all occupied doing some damn thing or other for the first eighteen or so years. Lots of helpful suggestions had been provided. The full list of jobs the Colonial Authority was willing to pay someone to do took well over three hours just to scroll down through at normal reading speed.

But basically most of them broke down into categories you could skim in less than half an hour, if you were a fast reader. Here’s a typical screen’s worth, which was sent in response to my query by an astronomer named Matty Jaymes:

• Refining knowledge of the location and plasma properties of the heliopause between the solar wind and the interstellar medium, on the way out of town—and then the same for the heliopause of Immega 714 when we got there.

• Again as we were leaving, helping refine our comet map of the Oort Cloud, detecting comet nuclei with radar.

• Once we were good and gone, measuring, in situ, the density, charge, mass, species, velocity, and temperature characteristics of interstellar plasma and gas.

• Continuous measurement of the orthagonal components of the galactic magnetic field.

• Continuous monitoring of the interstellar medium for molecular species. Determination of mass, composition, size distribution, and frequency of interstellar grains. Performance of interstellar erosion experiments with various models of shield configurations.

• Using the long baseline formed by the starship and Solar System to carry out high-resolution astronomical measurements with optical and radio interferometry. Performing astrometric measurements of nearby stars, extrasolar planet detection, extrasolar planet imaging, and atmospheric spectroscopy. Using the same long-baseline techniques for astrophysical measurements, for example, to image radio galaxies, quasars, and neutron stars.

(It had long been hoped that with multiple starships under way at the same time, the capability of this long baseline interferometry could be vastly enhanced by combining their observations of distant sources. It didn’t seem to be working out well: the problem in this kind of interstellar interferometry was how to agree on common time-tagging of data from probes moving in different directions at significant fractions of the speed of light.)

• Observation of low energy cosmic rays, normally excluded from the Solar System.

• Attempting detection of gravity waves from astrophysical processes such as supernovae or neutron stars, by tracking anomalies in the Doppler effect of our signals.

• Refinement of the dark matter map of the Galaxy…

…and so on. Mind you, all these are from the list of jobs Dr. Jaymes figured he could train just about any chimp aboard to do satisfactorily. But before he sent me those, he sent another, shorter list of jobs for especially smart people, with specific qualifications, which I won’t even bother to excerpt, because I didn’t understand it.

He appeared to be saying that he wanted to make an extremely intensive examination of the sun—our sun—okay, our former sun—of Sol, all right?—even as we were leaving it behind us forever at high speed. Why, I couldn’t imagine. You’d think if there was an adequately studied star in the universe, it would be Sol. Studied even from vessels receding at fractions of c, if that made some sort of difference. And information about that particular star was going to be of purely academic interest to anyone we would ever meet again. But Dr. Jaymes certainly sounded terribly concerned about it. When I told him I lacked the qualifications for his first list of jobs, he allowed his disappointment to show even through mail; whereas when I politely declined his second list, too, he didn’t seem to care one way or the other.

Now, I don’t know about you, but if I had been forced to pick one of those I just listed as my shipboard occupation, I think the option I’d have selected instead would have been euthanasia. Like any literate citizen, I love to read what astronomers have to say after years of patient data collection and astute analysis… but the actual gathering of the data was not my idea of a way to spend the next twenty years.

When I came right down to it, not much was.

It was that growing realization, about five or ten scrollings down the list, which caused me to stop and approach it from the other direction. Instead of wading through the Big List of Jobs, the sensible way to do this was to make a Small List of Jobs I would be willing to endure for twenty years, if I had to, and then see if by chance any of them were on the Big List.

By dinnertime I had settled on the following:

• Teach the saxophone. Or composition. Or music history. Or history.

But did I in fact have any pedagogic skills? Forget the skills: did I have the talent? The indefinable intangible something that would make strangers find learning from me preferable to learning by themselves? How the hell did I know?

• Conduct. Assuming an orchestra of some kind could be assembled out of five hundred people, and made good enough to be listened to by the rest.

Again: Did I possess whatever variant offshoot of charisma it was that would make musicians find watching me more helpful than listening to their own internal metronome?

• Act. An orchestra might prove to be beyond the resources at hand, but surely a theater company or trideo studio would form sooner or later.

Let’s just keep assuming the unanswerable question, “But did I have a particle of talent for that endeavor?” from here on.

• Direct, for either live or canned drama.

• Write, either live, canned, or prose fiction. Or nonfiction if necessary; I’d been given to understand that it did not pay a writer to be too fussy. Just possibly journalism, if it turned out that a town of five hundred souls produced enough gossip to need writing down. Herb could give me pointers.

And finally, of course:

• Play the furshlugginer saxophone. There were other venues aboard offering dining or entertainment or dancing. If I could line up enough different sorts of gigs, in different musical genres, then between that and private parties it might just be possible to make a whole entire livelihood out of my single favorite activity, pushing air out the end of a pipe.

That, God damn it, was finally something I did know I had the talent for. The crucial question however was: Did anybody care? Or rather, did enough people care that I would be able to live on my tips?

I looked back over my list gloomily, and detected a pattern. All the occupations that interested me shared two characteristics: they all might just manage to sustain me during the two decades of the voyage… and they would all become nearly worthless when we reached Immega 714. Pioneers don’t have a lot of time or energy for art, either making it or consuming it. It was unlikely that anybody would be willing to feed me just because I made a pretty noise, or made up stories, or pretended to be someone more interesting.

But what did it matter? Doubtless I would end up scratching so hard to feed myself and get warm and dry that most of those things would lose their appeal for me, too.

I brooded about it for the rest of the evening without useful result. I was about to collapse my keypad for the night when I noticed that I had incoming mail. That was odd. Practically everyone I knew lived in my room. Surely my Relativist acquaintances were all too busy for chat. Then I saw the header title, “Where are you?” and felt my pulse begin to rise as I leaped to the conclusion that it was from Jinny.

But no. Instead, it was from the Zog. My job search was over, at least for a while. Reality had caught up to me.

I wrote back that I would report at the start of shift next morning, at 0900. Then I went directly to bed and immediately to sleep, determined to be at his office no later than 0800.

I had formally reported to the Zog back on the morning of my second day aboard the Sheffield—but found now that I had almost no memory of the event, or the man. Indeed, I had very little recall of anything that had happened that day, or for that matter any of those last days we’d spent in Terran orbit. This was not surprising, for two reasons.

First, it turns out to be oddly difficult to make a human brain remember events that occurred in free fall: the sleeping brain, which does the filing, insists on treating such experiences as dreams. The phenomenon wears off after a few weeks of zero gee, but we hadn’t hung around in orbit that long.

And second, I had spent that whole period in a mental-emotional state approaching fugue—the sort of zombie numbness one must maintain during the process of sawing off the trapped limb. The Zog must have taken one look at me and realized I would be useless until we left the Oort Cloud.

With that symbolic cutting-of-the-cord, and the colossal bender with which I had marked it, and finally my musical catharsis with silver Anna at the Horn of Plenty, I had finally snapped out of my funk, rebooted my brain—just that day, really.

And several decks away, a man who had seen my vacant face exactly once, for less than a minute, had sniffed the air that morning and somehow sensed that I had finally germinated, and was ready to plant. That’s the Zog for you.

Kamal Zogby was a Marsman who made you think of Martians. He didn’t have three legs—as far as I know—but he was unreasonably tall and thin, even for a Marsman, and bowlegged, and slow moving unless he was in a blurring hurry, and he had an almost Martian distaste for sitting down or any posture but bolt upright. Also he was as taciturn as a Martian, with a similar sort of gravitas, and sometimes could be almost as hard to read. And like a Martian, the Zog never needed to look anything up.

But no Martian ever had a nose like that great ice-axe Lebanese honker of his—or many humans, for that matter. Nor did Martians have teeth anywhere near that big and white and frequently displayed. And he was unlike any Martian ever hatched in two important ways that made it possible to work for him. He genuinely cared about everybody he ever met, found them interesting. And he had a strong and subtle sense of humor.

He was not a botanist, or an agronomist, or a plant physiologist, or a hydroponicist, or an anythingist, really—not on paper, anyway. He had no degrees at all. He was just the Straw Boss.

Back on Mars, literally dirt poor, he had once kept a whole dometown in food, water, and air for twenty years after a catastrophic ecocollapse nearly wiped them out. They said if a thing could be grown, under any circumstances, he could grow it hydroponically. He could grow lemon trees hydroponically, or succulents, or even fungi.

And in theory we might even have managed to survive a hypothetical total failure of the hydroponic farm—because with part of his time the Zog also oversaw an experimental two-hectare half-meter-deep dirt farm that took up an entire deck, just above the Hydroponics Deck. It attempted to mimic the conditions we expected to find on our new home-to-be, Brasil Novo, second planet of Immega 714. The hope was that by the time we got there, we would know as much about how to dirt farm there as we knew about hydroponics now. And meanwhile, if something ever went horribly wrong down on the Hydroponics Deck, two hectares of land were just barely enough to feed five hundred people. In theory.

Finding the Zog’s office, down on the Voyage Farm Deck, was easy. Gaining access was even easier, even though I had arrived well before the beginning of shift as planned. There was no execassist or persec or even door sentinel program to run interference for him. There was no door. Just an open doorway beneath a sign that read “Straw Boss.” Unfortunately, there was no Zog on the other side of it either. Or anyone else; the office was empty. I waited expectantly for his desk to tell me where he was, or at least when he would arrive, but it didn’t. So I told my own doppleganger to consult the ship system and locate him. After a noticeable hesitation, the ship politely declined to cooperate: the Zog was delisted. If he had a schedule on file it was not public. The ship declined to make an appointment in his name. It advised me to either take my chances and wait, or leave a message for him and go do something else.

I didn’t much like either alternative. Especially after looking around the office: my strong impression was that he dropped by there once or twice a week at best. So I decided to hunt around for him.

The choices were a) this, the hydroponic Voyage Farm Deck, or b) the dirt-based Destination Farm Deck immediately above it. The choice kind of made itself.

The hydroponic farm operation was as intricately choreographed, complexly layered, and densely packed as any terrestrial jungle, with trays of assorted growing things stacked up to four high in places on frail-looking frames, and a bewildering variety of different lighting, watering, drainage and airflow systems, each tailored to a different variety of crops. The longest uninterrupted sight line on that deck was about three meters—and the lighting was so weird, with LEDs, metal halides, and sodium bulbs of assorted colors and intensities competing and clashing in odd ways at different places that you wouldn’t have wanted to see much farther than a few meters in any direction anyway. The air circulation was so intense, in order to carry away the heat from all those lights, that there was a constant wash of white noise muffling all other sounds.

The farm immediately overhead, on the other hand, was basically a huge heap of somewhat modified dirt, above which a few seedlings, sprouts, and shoots should just be starting to become visible. If the Zog was on that deck, I could probably pick him out by eye very quickly. It was definitely the place to start looking. And I had a hunch it was where I would find him: where green things grew up out of soil you could plunge your hands into.

It wasn’t quite that easy, in fact. But close. The Destination Farm was designed to be as close as possible to one enormous deck, with long sight lines in nearly all directions. But it was also designed to be kept at destination-normal conditions. That meant, among other things—at least at the moment—air that was half again as rich in oxygen, slightly denser, a lot more humid, and a bit warmer than ship-normal (Terran Sealevel Standard). All of which meant, among other things, weather—specifically, fog. It was controlled somewhat by air circulation, but less than it could have been, obviously by intent. Apparently we were all going to spend our golden years on a planet that was prone to low-lying fogs and mists for at least part of the year. Brasil Novo would be a kind of Jungle World, a steamy hothouse of a place.

(It began to dawn on me that there was a lot I did not know about our destination planet—my new home-to-be. I had more or less presumed that if a whole lot of people were willing to go there, forever, it must be a nice place. It might, I thought, be well to delve into that just a little deeper.)

Another problem facing me was that since this was the deck with the most open space and the most experimental food, this was the deck where the majority of the livestock was quartered and processed. Not to put too fine a point on it, the fog stank, and rude noises seemed to come distantly from all directions, as if some mad ventriloquist had descended to fart jokes.

And finally, it was blinkin’ dark in there. Brasil Novo had a day just a hair over twenty-four Terran Standard hours long—thirty-six minutes longer. Therefore so did this deck, which meant that its day and ours diverged. And had been diverging since whenever the Zog had started its clock. It was the beginning of the morning shift everywhere else in the Sheffield, but here it appeared to be at least an hour before dawn.

Despite all these handicaps I found the Zog within a minute or two of my arrival. I had heard him laugh once before, and heard him now from a few hundred meters away. That got me started in the right direction, and luck took me the rest of the way. If that’s the word I want: he was at the goat quarters, one of the riper of the animal enclaves. Goats just are not happy unless you give them some equivalent of a cave or shed to hide in at night, even though there’s nothing to hide from… and then it concentrates the smell wonderfully. Maybe that’s what they like about it.

Admittedly they are worth a bit of smell. A goat eats ten percent as much as a cow, but produces twenty-five percent as much milk. And many, among them me, say it tastes better than cow’s milk. It’s also easier to digest.

“Ah, Joel.” He looked up from a hoof he was trimming and gave me a slow once-over, beginning and ending at my eyes. He had done that the first time we’d met, too. I wondered why I didn’t find it offensive. When he was done, he smiled with his whole face. “I’m very glad to see you’re in better spirits.”

“Director Zogby, I want—”

“Zog, please.”

“Zog, I appreciate your understanding and patience, this last week. I needed to work some things out, and I have.”

“I can see that. You’re ready to come to work.”

“Yes, sir.”

“This is Kathy—she’s a Marsman like me, new to farming.”

Intent on my new boss, I had almost completely tuned out the companion holding the goat for him. She was about my age, slim, fit, and extremely uncomfortable holding a goat. We exchanged polite noises.

“Kathy, Joel’s from Ganymede. He has a lot of farming experience, dirt and hydro both. You’ll be his assistant.” She nodded, too busy to keep eye contact.

I took a deep breath. I was not looking forward to this next bit, but there was no sense putting it off any longer. “Uh, Zog, perhaps I should correct one small mis—oh, shit.”

The sentence aborted in that odd way because I had just seen what she was about to do. There was no time for me to say anything to stop her—and it wouldn’t have helped anyway, because there was nothing she could do about it. She couldn’t have gotten a hand free without being kicked. There was just time for me to drop to my knees, cup one hand behind her head, place my other index finger just below her nose, and press hard. She let out a yelp and tried to shake free, but I wouldn’t let her until I was sure the job was done. Then I released her at once and backed away.

“I’m very sorry, Kathy,” I said. “I had to do that.”

She was staring at me as if I’d grown fangs. “Why?”

“It’s the only sure way I know to stop someone from sneezing.”

“What?”

“Excuse me just a minute, Kathy,” Zog interrupted. “Joel, what was it you were just about to say?”

“Oh. Uh…”

“You were going to correct something?”

“Why shouldn’t I sneeze if I want to?”

“You really don’t want to sneeze in a goat shed,” I told her. “Look, Zog, I—”

“Why the hell not?”

“Kathy, please, he’ll explain in a minute. Go on, Joel. Correct what?”

“No, wait a minute, Zog,” she insisted. “That hurt.”

“I know,” I said, “and I’m really very sorry.”

“No, you’re not.”

I started to argue, and stopped. “You’re right. I kind of feel like you had it coming, for not knowing what you’re doing. And now I’m also a little annoyed at you for presuming that I don’t. If you’d—”

“Joel,” Zog cut in firmly, “I understand that you’d rather have that conversation. First, though, we’re going to have the one where you tell me just what misunderstanding on my part needs to be corrected. Kathy, pipe down and let her go.”

She sighed in exasperation and released her hold on the goat, which sprang up and trotted to the far end of the small shed, limping slightly on its half-trimmed hoof. I turned to meet the Zog’s eyes. Irritation was in them, but compassion as well. “Well, look, what you have to understand—”

Kathy sneezed.

I think it was at least half deliberate, a gesture of defiance. Her hands were now free; she could have done as I’d just shown her. Instead she sneezed. And not just a ladylike little choof, either, but a breathquake that might have snuffed out a blowtorch.

Unfortunately, a human sneeze apparently sounds very much like the word for “Run for your life!” in Goat.

So we all got very busy there for a while.

When things settled down a bit, I poked my head up and found that I was in the corner of the shed farthest from the exit. The original exit. I had begun to congratulate myself on my good instincts when I realized there were now several brand-new exits, one of them less than a meter from my head. A goat hoof can be a weapon of terrifying power, and a partially trimmed goat hoof could only be worse.

Then I discovered Kathy, underneath me. Maybe my instincts were okay after all.

I rolled off her, intending to ask if she was all right. Instead I let out a squeal and kept on rolling. Killer monkeys—

But, no. Within a revolution or two I had seen that what was dangling from the ceiling was not the huge ape my brain had first decided it was seeing, but someone with considerably better instincts than mine. Only by luck had Kathy and I managed not to be in the path of a fleeing goat—but none of them had been running up. Zog let go of the rafter and dropped back to the floor. He landed just beside Kathy, and lifted her to her feet with one big hand. “Are you all right?” he asked, and she ran a quick inventory and assured him she was.

“I’m sorry if I squashed you,” I said, getting to my own feet.

She shook her head. “No problem. You know how to use your elbows.”

I found myself blushing.

And her blushing back. “Besides,” she went on quickly, “if I’d only listened to what you were trying to tell me—”

“No harm done,” Zog said. “Except to the shed.” He glanced around at the damage and sighed. “It was guaranteed goat-proof.”

“I’ll bring it back to the store,” she said.

He shook his head. “Traveling at relativistic speeds voids the warrantee.”

“Figures.”

“I’ll go round them up,” I said.

“We all will,” Zog said.

“That’s okay,” I said. “I’m the new guy. And I really should have taken the time to explain to Kathy why—”

“We all will,” Zog insisted. “Once we patch this shed together well enough to hold them again.”

And of course he was right. Catching a goat is just barely possible for three people working together; I doubt any two of us could have caught even one. The hairy little bastards led us a merry chase. A goat can leap pretty well even in terrestrial gravity; in one-third gee they begin to seem more like large birds than mammals. Large smart birds, with offensive armament.

By the time we were done, I was thoroughly exhausted, and quite understood why many cultures have used goats to represent Satan. I left the shed and flopped down not far from the entrance, with my back against an intact section of wall. Zog took a seat beside me—with noticeably less effort, even though he had nearly twenty years on me—and Kathy dropped into a tailor’s seat facing us. The three of us sat in silence for a while, Kathy and I because we were getting our breath back, and Zog because he had nothing to say.

Finally Kathy frowned, shifted position slightly, reached beneath her, and removed something. She held it out on her palm to examine it. A slightly squashed goat berry. I managed to choke off the giggle and to slap on my poker face, but it took me a few seconds, and I was sure she’d heard me at it. She looked up, our eyes met, I waited to see if she would flare up at me—

It so happens that the average goat turd is just the size, shape, and color of the data beads used to hold video or audio programming. When she took it between thumb and forefinger, and pretended to be trying to insert it into the docking slot on her wrist CPU, it wasn’t what you could call a hilarious jest. But it was excuse enough for a tension-releasing blurt of laughter from both of us.

“That music sounds like shit,” Zog said, and we laughed harder.

After a while we went back inside, and Zog had Kathy and me finish hooving that goat together, and pass out treats to all of them, to calm them down and by way of apology for our carelessness. Then we left, and Zog said, “Joel, I believe you were about to correct a small misunderstanding on my part about your background.”

Ah yes. “Well…” His eyes met mine, and I heard myself say, “Not a misunderstanding. I lied, Zog. Not about dirt farming—but pretty much everything I put down about my experience in hydroponics is pure goat berries. I’ll come in real handy in twenty years, when we all start doing this kind of farming on a large scale, at our new home. But right now, you’re going to need short words and long patience.”

He just nodded. “Why did you lie?”

“It was the only way I had to get a berth aboard the Sheffield. And I really wanted one.”

I’d been sweating this moment for days now. He nodded again, and that was the end of it. “We’ll begin your education in hydroponics tomorrow. For now follow me,” he said, and took us on a grand tour of that deck.

It really was a wonder, a Garden of Eden such as no planet had ever seen, designed and constructed so that the local light intensity of any given square meter of that vast area could be varied from zero to noon in Baghdad, with equivalent control of humidity, airflow, O₂ and CO₂ content, and some other factors I forget. Those crops that were able to thrive on a twenty-four-hour light cycle (or other variant) could do so, without disturbing the slumber of the ones nearby who liked things the old-fashioned way. Those that were reasonably happy in the different conditions that obtained on our destination planet were already enjoying them, and all the rest would, hopeably, be successfully reconditioned to enjoy them over the course of the next two decades.

The goats notwithstanding, the staple meat aboard the Sheffield besides chickens was not chevon but rabbit—low fat, a milder taste than chevon, and easier to cook. (You couldn’t subsist on rabbit alone—not enough vitamins A or C—but we weren’t trying to.) They’re less fussy eaters themselves, too, happy to live on alfalfa with a pinch of salt, which both upper and lower farms produced in plenty. Each doe and her litter took up about a square meter of living space—but a stackable square meter—and about twelve times that in alfalfa; the yield works out to about 150 kilos of boneless meat per hectare per day.

What was left of the rabbits was fed, along with each day’s dining-hall waste, to chickens. They too insist on a dark stinky home, like goats. But it’s safe to enter it even with a head cold, and the reward is four or more eggs per colonist per week, plus fried chicken.

And finally there was fish—the last stop on the tour. Marsbred fish, as productive as the rabbits in terms of protein, and less trouble to care for. As we were strolling there from the chicken run, Zog told us that one of the very few stabs at genetic manipulation the Prophets had ever approved was an attempt to breed a chicken that would reliably lay an egg a day—the Holy Ones liked eggs. “The Church’s breeders were successful, technically,” Zog said, “but unfortunately the resulting chicken was literally too dumb to eat. If you want to take that as a metaphor for the True Church’s whole approach to science, you’re pretty astute in my opinion.”

“God,” Kathy said, “what a shitstain in history.”

“Middle Ages were worse,” Zog said.

“Maybe—but we could have had immortality by now! We could have beaten cancer by now. We might have had telepathy by now.” She sounded angry.

“We have telepathy,” Zog said mildly.

“Sure, terrific. But only in identical twins, and fewer than four percent of them—and we don’t have the faintest idea how they do it, or why they can and the rest of us can’t.”

“True. There remain mysteries to be solved.”

“It’s infuriating.”

She really seemed upset. I decided to distract her with a diversionary anecdote. “Let me tell you both my very favorite mystery,” I said. “You reminded me of it just a second ago, Zog, and it’s related to what you’re talking about, Kathy. Kind of, anyway.”

She didn’t answer. “Go ahead, Joel,” the Zog said.

“I ran across this in a book. Just before the Hiatus, natal medicine got so good that they were sometimes able to save babies born so prematurely that they had not yet even developed the sucking reflex. And now that the Prophets are all finally holding services in Hell, we can do that again: rescue babies that are, in the Zog’s colorful phrase, too dumb to eat.”

“How?” Kathy asked. “Force-feed the poor things?”

The Zog shook his head. “They’d never learn, then.”

“No, they train them to suck,” I said.

Kathy frowned. “How? If something is too dumb to figure out that eating is pleasant, what the hell do you reward it with?”

I smiled. “Music.”

Her face smoothed over. “Oh, I love it.”

“Rhythm?” Zog asked.

“You’d think so, but no,” I said. “Melody. The little buggers will work hardest to bring about repetition of a favorite scrap of melody. That’s how hardwired love of music is, in the human brain. It predates survival instinct.”

“It doesn’t seem reasonable,” Zog said. “How would a brain evolve so?”

I spread my hands. “Ask God. I just work here. All I know is, it’s my very favorite mystery.”

“You like music, too?” she asked. “I like it a lot.”

“What kinds?”

The question seemed to puzzle her, but she gave it a try. “Audible.”

She liked everything? It seemed to me, in my sophistication, that people who liked everything must understand hardly anything. I was eighteen, all right?

“For the past hour I’ve been thinking this place could use a banjo player,” I said.

“There are two listed,” she said, “and one other who isn’t. They’re all pretty good.”

“How do you know that?” I asked.

She shrugged. “I did a data search for musicians, way back on Terra, and listened to all their audition recordings. I also asked the ship to alert me anytime someone makes live music, and let me listen in if they haven’t put privacy seal on it. I discovered at least half a dozen unregistered musicians that way. In fact, the best musician I’ve heard aboard so far was unlisted. He came aboard at the last possible minute, so they waived his audition.”

I opened my mouth, closed it again.

“What’s his instrument?” the Zog asked her.

“Saxophone. I sat in with him, remote, for a few numbers. I wanted to introduce myself afterward, but by the time I got the system to give up his phone code, somebody he was sitting with put a heavy privacy shield on the whole table.”

“Have you tried him since?”

My kindly wristband produced the chip-chirp indicating a watch alarm. Today’s shift was over. Saved by the chip. “Zog,” I said, “I really hate to act like a clock-watcher on the first day I’ve bothered to show up, but I really do need to—”

“There are things we need to talk about,” he interrupted.

“I know. Uh… I could meet you somewhere in a couple of hours. Your office?” I shifted my weight from foot to foot as if I badly needed to pee.

“Go. Our AIs will work something out.”

“Thanks Zog nice to meet you Kathy see you both tomorrow.”

I fled.