Chapter 8
Want to take an orbit?
Anticipating long classes in discrete subjects, Keelic was amazed when Mr. Hallod asked, "What do you want to know?" Mr. Hallod, he discovered, knew more about everything than anyone Keelic could imagine. Exhausted at the end of the day, Keelic fell asleep on the way home.
He woke the next morning to music. He rolled over and tried to go back to sleep, then sat bolt upright.
"Good morning, Keelic."
"Morning. What’s this music?"
"Rachmaninoff’s second piano concerto."
It was the piece Leesol had asked Lyn to play during Keelic’s visit. He wondered how Anny knew it. Was it chance? Or had Lyn and Anny been talking to each other? It had not occurred to him that Anny would be in contact with Lyn, but probably they had been ever since Anny arrived on the planet. She had even told him that she talked to other Anns, but he’d never really thought about it. His view of Anny was expanding ever since learning that she got lonely, but he hadn’t considered who she would talk to or about what. She could be talking with any other Ann on the planet or in orbit right now. It made Keelic feel a bit small. Anny wasn’t just his personal friend anymore. She had other friends, all over.
"Anny?"
"Yes?"
"Do you know Leesol?"
"I had not met her before yesterday."
"Why...how come you said what you said?"
"I’m not sure I understand."
"You said ‘honored.’"
"Yes. Leesol’s mother is Nikari Hallod. As captain of the Galahad, she has explored more of the galactic core than any other human. Peaceful contact with the Reiswallow and the Ffanet were two of her greatest accomplishments. I honored her daughter. Leesol is a member of a very distinguished family."
Keelic fell back on the bed. It felt like a torpedo of understanding had struck him between the eyes. The Galahad! Captain of the Galahad. Having Alpha Base seemed a lot less special now, compared to having your mom as captain one of the most famous exploration ships in human history. He sat up and looked north. Morning glow lit the distant bluff with rich orange. So much was so different now. Alpha Base and Pathfinders. He could hardly believe it.
"Anny, what’s your Index?"
"Where did you hear that term, Keelic?"
"I saw it in a vid," he said, knowing she could often tell when he was lying.
She only replied, "I would be around Index Ninety."
"Is there anything higher?"
"The Index is an old scale. It went to a theoretical one hundred, but anything over ninety-five isn’t typically mobile because of matrix size requirements."
"Like the Planetary-Announcer of Pesfor 3?"
"Yes."
"What’s the minimum to be alive?"
"Fifty. We call it self-aware, not alive. Why do you ask?"
"Wondering," he said innocently.
He got dressed and, alien in tow, walked to the breakfast room, where his mother was reading in the early sunlight. She smiled at him and turned back to her console. A bowl with hot cereal was steaming at his seat. His friend sampled the nutritive cubes that Keelic’s father had recently made for him.
Gray distaste.
"What?"
Gray distaste, tan hunger for cereal.
"’Kay," said Keelic and shared his cereal with his friend.
"Mom, what’s Anny’s Index?"
"Her what?"
"Index."
"What are you asking, Keelic?"
"Nothing."
Keelic and the alien went for seconds and thirds of cereal, then returned to his room.
Anny didn’t comment, as he’d expected her to.
The sun was bright through the windows, and Keelic took out his chess set.
"Show me some openings, Anny."
Half an hour later, Mr. Hallod’s shuttle banked around the house, and Keelic leapt down the stairs, alien at his side. The shuttle’s forward door opened and Keelic stepped inside, only to stop in the doorway to the pilots’ seats. The alien followed him in, eyestalks peering around him.
Leesol sat in the pilot’s seat, grinning at Keelic.
"My dad is at home," said Leesol.
"You can pilot?"
"Yep. Since I was eight."
Keelic looked surreptitiously at the house. "Can my friend come?"
Looking at the alien, Leesol looked uncertain.
"He wants to go," said Keelic.
After a moment of thought, Leesol said, "Yep." It sounded odd, like she might have been talking to someone else. Keelic wondered if she was augmented, communicating somehow with her father. They boarded the shuttle and Leesol flew them to her home.
Mr. Hallod greeted the alien enthusiastically, squatting to look him eye to eye.
Keelic felt maroon safe, deep-blue respect swirls.
Study went the same as the previous day, with Mr. Hallod following threads of connecting knowledge through multiple disciplines, and finally coming around to fully answer a question that had been raised. The alien sat in the back of the library and listened. At the end of the day, Leesol flew Keelic and the alien home. On the way, Keelic tried to work up enough courage to ask Leesol a question.
Warm pink-orange blue affirmation.
Keelic looked at his friend, and asked Leesol, "Would you like to go on an expedition?"
Her face changed in a succession of subtle expressions that Keelic couldn’t interpret, but she nodded and said, "I have to ask my dad."
In his room Keelic called up his image of Leesol and stared at it for a while, then brought up files on space warfare strategy, and watched vids of GW battles until his mother told him to do his homework.
Before sunrise Keelic got breakfast before anyone was awake. As he was putting his dishes away, his bleary-eyed father walked into the breakfast room and smiled.
"Changing your habits, Kee?"
Keelic nodded and watched his dad to gauge his mood.
"I want to get an early start. It’s endweek."
His father frowned and said, "Anny, toast and orange juice. And some of that new tea Sarah got." He sat at the table and touched a pad to turn on the news. Keelic started to leave quietly to get his gear, but his father said, "Early start on your homework?"
Turning with a pleading look, Keelic answered, "I’ll do it when I get back. I’m almost done, I worked on it last night."
Without turning from the tabletop where someone was discussing impending weather, his father said, "You know the agreement."
"But I’ll do it. I have to go out again. I don’t have that much work, please? I can finish it when I get back." He sought his friend, but the alien was still asleep.
"You’re about to create problems for yourself," said his father, looking at Keelic now.
Frustrated, but unable to think exactly what to say, Keelic just stood. He thought about having the alien change his father’s mind, but doing that wasn’t right, and frightened him somehow.
His dad got up from the table and took his food from the dispenser. "You’re not going anywhere until that homework is complete and double-checked. Mr. Hallod never gives you less than four hours’ worth at endweek. Now that he is your only instructor, I imagine that you have eight to ten hours of work now. Show some discipline."
"If I finish soon enough, can I go?"
Looking at the table again, his father nodded.
Anny put the assignments on the screen by his bed as Keelic topped the stairs to his room. He sat and looked at them. A long reading on Sol System history, twelve advanced algebra problems, a research assignment on basic substratum structure, and three drawings depicting life on any three alien worlds. The alien woke and tried to get Keelic to go and get something to eat, but Keelic pushed him away, and called up his drawing program. At least he could start with the fun stuff. The alien walked out with a chartreuse irritation swirl.
Keelic bent over his console, and was halfway through a drawing of the Vewbon home world when an explo
sion of color and wild emotion burst on him and a warm body landed squarely on his back.
Keelic tried to throw his friend off and said, "Not now!"
The alien held Keelic’s arms down and Keelic felt happy orange triumph. Keelic focused on his friend’s presence and thought angrily and powerfully, Stop! The alien fell from Keelic’s back and crawled to the opposite side of the bed, where he watched Keelic with half-raised eyes.
Keelic looked at the alien. "I have to get this done. Can’t you understand that? I want to go back, don’t you?"
Bluish uncertainty.
"Well, I do." Keelic sighed. "If you want, you can help me." He turned back to his drawing.
A few minutes later, Keelic felt the bed shake a little, and then the alien was beside him, peering at the picture. A second picture appeared in their minds. The triangular Loff trees acquired color and detail. The Vewbon standing around them started walking around.
"Wow."
The image froze, and Keelic saw himself drawing the picture as it was now.
"Draw it like that? I can’t."
The image repeated with strong urges of bright blue-green.
He cleared the screen and picked up his stylus.
An hour later he had a decent version and proudly sent it to his mom and dad to look at. They both praised it and encouraged him to send it to Mr. Hallod right away. Keelic hesitated. He wanted to show it when he could see Leesol’s reaction.
Yellow assignments?
"I have to do some reading and a couple more pictures and a whole lot of math. Let’s do the other drawings first."
They finished the other drawings quickly, and Keelic started reading as fast as he could. It took him another hour to finish, then he started on the algebra equations. These were really bad. Keelic got up to take a break, but the alien pulled him back. Numbers began floating in his mind, combining and separating in bizarre colorful ways.
Keelic lay back on the bed and said, "No this isn’t like drawing. This is math."
Yellow numbers shading toward orange and red flowed through his mind.
"You have to do it a certain way."
Yellow way?
"It would take too long."
Green yellow urgent way.
"You have to start with whole numbers and then start up with addition and subtraction and multiplication and equations, points, grids, planes, graphing, proofs. I’ll do it myself."
Keelic sat up and looked at the first equation. It looked like he needed to complete the square, but something had to be done first.
Sets of numbers appeared, grouped, equated, and were replaced with others.
"You can’t do math like that. Look." Keelic thought adding ten plus ten when a bright twenty came to him from the alien before he could think it himself.
"Well, try adding a million two hundred thousand, plus ten billion twenty."
The answer appeared instantly. Keelic looked at his friend, and didn’t know quite what to think.
"What about multiplication. Can you do that?"
The alien multiplied numbers faster than Keelic could follow. He had the feeling that the answers were right, though it didn’t seem like the alien was calculating anything.
"How can you do that?"
Brilliant patterns of numbers appeared and vanished and were replaced. Keelic closed his eyes to see better. Some of what he had thought were just random had patterns, then he did see one he knew.
"Pascal’s triangle! You just made Pascal’s—yes, that one. Cold." The triangle flowed wider and wider, but Keelic didn’t feel the sense of his friend thinking hard, just a sense of structure. The alien wasn’t counting. It dawned on Keelic that his friend wasn’t even doing math as counting, but as a puzzle with certain rules on the pieces.
"Help me with these," he said, then changed, his mind. "No."
The alien regarded him, but didn’t comment.
Keelic sat back against his pillows and looked out at the sky. It would be cheating. Was it really? What if he taught his friend the math? And then they did it together? Would that be cheating? It would be worth it to finish early. He might be able to get to the simulator.
It took some time for Keelic to convince the alien that certain rules had to be followed all the time. His friend liked certain patterns and made up sequences to create them. After a couple hours sorting through rules that had taken Keelic years to get, they worked out solutions in short order. All Keelic had to do was teach his friend the method, and the numbers fell out as they needed to.
Keelic called his dad. "I’m finished, see?" He dumped his homework for his father’s lab console.
Frowning, his father asked, "You checked these?"
"Yep."
"Yep? What does yep mean?"
"Yes. Yes, I checked them."
"And your reading?"
"Yes."
"Mr. Hallod will know if you didn’t read it."
Keelic was silent.
"You can go out."
There was no way to make it to the simulator with only half the day left, so Keelic played with his friend by the river. He lay on the bank with his faceplate in the water and watched the activity of river creatures in the crystal-blue water. A school of slender yellow things swam by against the current, and he pointed to them. The alien put an eye under the water and watched as well. He linked with Keelic and showed him something far away on the bottom of the river. An oval critter with six legs was covered all over with water vegetation of many sorts and was making its way slowly toward something bright blue that hovered over the river bottom. Keelic’s mother called them in for dinner. He wanted to stay, but he was too hungry, and they ran up the hill to the house.
Later, as Keelic studied a chess problem Anny had set up for him, she said, "Keelic, a query was just done on you."
Keelic crawled over the bed to his console, "By who?"
"I’m not sure."
Raising his eyebrows, Keelic waited.
"The query is not traceable."
"I know you can trace it."
"Whoever they are, they’ve done queries on the family and me as well, and others."
"Tell Dad," said Keelic, somewhat alarmed.
"I have. I am unable to find a name or any sort of source."
"A hacker?" asked Keelic, standing on his bed now.
"It appears so. A skilled one."