Easy As Hop, Skip And Jump

Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Sime~Gen novel

EASY AS HOP, SKIP AND JUMP

Gate pass in hand, Klairon Farris surveyed the Pebble Beach standing straight and proud in the center of her landing grid. Her crew was closer to him than his own family had ever been; she'd become his home and the focus of a great part of his loyalty.

Unconsciously, he hunched his broad shoulders against an eerie feeling, a dark foreboding that whispered deep in his mind, "You shouldn't be here. You shouldn't be doing this ..."

An icy chill gripped him in spite of the warm, if somewhat greenish, light from the sun falling across his straight back. Simes were known to experience disturbingly accurate premonitions, but he'd never had one before.

Countless times, he'd been warned to yield gracefully if one ever came his way. He'd grown up with the certainty that he would yield. What was it that held him here now? Why didn't he fling the pass at the gate guard and go tell Captain Welch to get another astrogator? How dare he take the lives of his friends into his own temporarily incompetent hands?

He squinted against the wind-whipped dust of the grid field andclutched his billowing green cape around him. He was out of uniform, officially on leave, and with every right to be so. How had Welch talked him into this insanity, anyway?

The Cafe Olé, the only place on Terwhoolie specializing in human food and drink, was a dim, green cavernous room with a bar along one wall, a row of dark booths opposite and, down the center, three rows of the stretched-diamond shaped tables hewn from a moss green wood.

The "human-style decor" consisted of a flawed mirror behind the bar, and a collection of ancient calendar art, meaningless to the cold-blooded, egg-laying Terwhoolins, and practically invisible to human eyes in the gloom. Still, the Olé was frequented by human officers and crew alike because they did have a human chef ... not just a cook.

Klairon faced Captain Welch in the darkness of their booth. They had the place to themselves as there were no other human ships on the planet's single, public grid-field. Curbing his exasperation, Klairon answered his Captain's question, mildly, for the fifteenth time, "Because it's against Regulations, that's why."

Captain Welch put down his coffee cup and leaned forward across the remains of their lunch, "But I have top priority clearance to lift ship for Port In Brim. This is important, more important than any chair warmer's regulation! And you're the only astrogator within five days of Terwhoolie."

"It isn't just any one regulation," Klairon ticked them off on his fingers, "it's against the Sime Board of Standards Regulations; it's against Interstellar Trade Commission Regulations; it's against insurance regulations; it's against United Port's authority regulations; it's against Stellar Trade Winds regulations; its against the Astrogators' Union contract; and furthermore, it's against my better judgment. In this condition I'm not even allowed to enter a ship, let alone take responsibility for course plotting."

"Look, Klairon, we've been friends for a long time ..."

"That's why I accepted your lunch invitation, for a friendly chat ..." Klairon gestured at their surroundings, "this is certainly no place to discuss security matters, or the breaking of such regulations as pertain to Simes."

"I'm not asking you to break regulations. I'm only pointing out that they don't apply. The risk to the ship, the crew, the cargo, and even to your life is nothing compared to the whole planet full of people who'll die if we ..."

"Shhh ... not so loud. I told you this is no place to discuss security matters!"

Knowing that a Sime's hearing matched the Terwhoolins', Welch leaned farther forward into the gloom to whisper earnestly. "ThePebble Beach has already been modified to spray the neutralizer from orbit, the stuff is already in her tanks, and it's all there is, anywhere. Except for astrogator, we've a full crew and we're cleared to space out on the tick of midnight. If we wait for your TN-1, we'll be too late; the virus will already be killing people, and then the Affiliated Space Navy will have to take the blame for fatally careless experimentation. And then where will the dream of the unification of humanity be?

"The ASN is still an experiment itself. If it fails to keep the confidence of all the colonies, we'll be back to the bickering and 'limited' interstellar wars. And just how long do you expect they can keep In Brim quarantined without giving a reason? Where's your patriotism? Don't you want to see humanity united in peace?Y ou're human, too, or so they say."

"Of course I'm human! The Simes are the oldest mutant strain,right from Mother Earth herself." He couldn't keep a hint of pride out of his voice. "The union I'm concerned with is more basic, the union between Simes and Gens. On every planet humanity has colonized, Simes and Gens live together peacefully. If that peace were disrupted, there would be no question of interstellar peace, there wouldn't even be interstellar commerce because the Gen crew couldn't trust the Sime astrogator. The strength of the Sime-Gen union is the trust that we'll never violate our Principles of Action, never infringe safety factors.

"And the most important of our Principles are those regulating transfer denial. You're asking me to take on an astrogator's responsibility when I'm already four days past the legal limit for selyn transfer denial."

Klairon frowned, suddenly grave. "Let's face it. Simes are still able to kill Gens for their selyn, for all that it hasn't happened in hundreds of years. So I'm a cha

Klairon held up his forearms with the six tentacles–two dorsa lto touch the back of the hand, two ventral to touch the palm,and two lateral, one on each side of the arm–lying sheathed along each arm. They alone distinguish Sime from Gen. "Take a good look, sir. Do you notice anything unusual?"

"Nooo ..." Welch surveyed the contours, noting for the thousandth time how the pairs of dorsal and ventral handling tentacles, though thi

Klairon twisted the plain gold bands about his middle fingers."These are not just rings, sir. You've never seen me use attenuators before, but now, without the attenuator field around my laterals to cancel part of the selyn gradient, I would find the temptation somewhat irritating.

"It's not my fault the TN-1 who was assigned to wait for me here was accidentally trampled to death while watching the native Qwill harvest parade three days before we arrived. It's not my fault his replacement won't arrive for another week. But I am required to wait for him. He's depending on my being here, ready for him just as much as I'm depending on his coming, ready for me."

Welch leaned back with a sigh and drummed his fingers on the table just once as he thought before asking, "What's so special about a TN-1? You could go to the selyn banks, take what you need, and then the field gradients wouldn't bother you. And your TN-1 could do just as well with a QN-2."