Ships vanished in coruscating eruptions of destructive energy while frantic commands flashed from both command vessels as each side tried to monitor and anticipate its opponent’s strategy. Vessels attacked, retreated, realigned their positions.
In a grand maneuver two dozen of the fastest Rovarik craft, which had spent the entire chronology of battle simply trying to get behind the asteroid belt, smashed into the center of the Totamite reserve from behind, cutting a broad swath through the heart of the enemy’s strength before their catastrophic intrusion was noted.
The Totamite commander looked on in disbelief as one after another of his best ships was reduced to incandescent gas. In a sputtering rage he confronted the maddeningly confident face of his opposite number and delivered himself of profound disapproval.
Whereupon Wallace Hawkins glanced up from where he was currently embroiled in a tense game of checkers with the ever placid Kahei Shimoda, and snapped, “Will you two keep it down over there?” He shook his head in disgust, returned to his game, and carefully jumped one black disc with his red one, removing the captured piece from the board with an irritated sweep of one hand.
“I swear I don’t know why those two can’t use the simulator quietly.”
Shimoda’s visage hovered moonlike over his end of the game board. He nudged a black disc forward to confront one of Hawkins’s. “They get involved.”
“Hell, it’s just a goddamn game.” Off to their right, increasing noise rose from the vicinity of the simulated interstellar battle.
“You cheated!” Iranaputra insisted loudly. He was waving his hands as he spoke. “I saw you take those two dozen ships outside the designated game boundary!”
“Nonsense.” The Retired Honorable Colonel Wesley Chapell Follingston-Heath considered the transparent dome of the simulator and the hundreds of bright lights within, the climactic interstellar battle it portrayed temporarily having been put on hold by his opponent, who’d jabbed the pause button with indecent force. He leaned back in his chair, straight and handsome as he’d been in youth, though his face was lined and his mustache and goatee and flat-cropped kinky hair mostly gone to gray.
It wasn’t just his calm self-assurance which infuriated his opponent, but also the realization that he was probably right. That didn’t prevent the determined Iranaputra from continuously trying to beat him, even though he was only a retired waste-disposal supervisor from Pandalia V and Follingston-Heath had been an officer in His Majesty’s Royal Fusiliers of the Victoria League of Worlds. As Follingston-Heath was always ready to remind his friends and occasional visitors.
Iranaputra persisted. After all, it wasn’t as if they were fighting with real ships. Hadn’t supervising waste disposal for an entire half continent required considerable organizational talents, if of a slightly different nature? Still, it was a good day when he could force Follingston-Heath to a draw. More commonly he lost.
But this time, this time, he was sure that his opponent was cheating.
“One who cheats a stranger may claim victory,” he declared loudly, shaking a finger at the much taller Follingston-Heath, “but he who cheats his friends will never achieve Nirvana. Buddha, the sixty-third book of the Teachings.”
“Piffle, Victor.” Follingston-Heath’s opponent was fond of quoting ancient scriptures and writings ad nauseam. Everyone at Lake Woneapenigong Retirement Village suspected that Iranaputra’s aphorisms were of doubtful scholarly veracity at best. But it was a difficult assertion to prove, since they usually hadn’t the faintest idea what he was talking about.
Iranaputra seemed even shorter next to Follingston-Heath. He was of slim stature, compact and dark, though not nearly so dark as his opponent. Mina thought him handsome, but then as everyone knew, Mina Gelmann had no taste. She liked everybody. Many of the male retirees at the Village envied him his straight black hair, still only lightly flecked with gray at the temples. Good follicular genes, she knew. He kept it shoulder-length in defiance of the Village’s nominal grooming regulations. The small ongoing rebellion made him feel alive.
He rose from his chair and continued to harangue the imperturbable Follingston-Heath with words and gestures, while the object of his irritation calmly folded his hands on his lap and smiled maddeningly. As usual, Follingston-Heath was immaculately dressed out in standard Victoria League off-duty uniform, the iridescent olive-green devoid of ostentatious decorations. The simulated buttons flashed in the soft lighting, and the half-high collar was stiff and straight at the back of the neck, its upper edge perfectly meeting the lowermost of FH’s white curls.
It was the retired officer’s preferred manner of dress because, as he was fond of saying to the occasional visitor struck by his bearing and language, it blended well with the woods and helped to conceal him when he sat on the shore of the nearby lake to watch the deer and moose and smaller animals who filled the surrounding forest.
In contrast Iranaputra wore a simple beige imitationmuslin open-neck shirt and pants. He liked to keep his apartment hot, and preferred to put on a jacket whenever he went outside. It was colder here in the upstate of Newyork Province than on his homeworld of Pandalia, but comfortably drier.
The two men continued to argue, prompting Hawkins to bawl at them a second time. As he did so, Shimoda reached out to place thick fingers on his friend’s wrist. A statistician by trade, he’d spent his whole life working with numbers. A widower for ten years, his two children and several grandchildren gladly piddled along on Yushu V secure in the knowledge that their estimable grandfather was happy and content in retirement on Old Earth. Their respective professions also involved work with numbers, prompting Iranaputra to comment on several occasions that there must be a heretofore-overlooked gene for math.
Shimoda took the jokes with a smile, as he did most everything else. His considerable girth was a matter of personal choice, since medication was available which would have enabled him to divest himself of his excess avoirdupois. He chose not to make use of it, content with, as he put it, his “expanded capacity for living.” Not to mention his lifelong passion for sumo.
As a young man he’d wrestled professionally on the side, never advancing beyond the local semi-pro leagues. But he still kept in shape … or out of it, depending on one’s cultural perspective. It seemed an odd avocation for a statistician, but the ring allowed him a means for expressing his frustrations outside the workplace, and he’d made good use of it for many years.
Six feet tall, he weighed more than Iranaputra and Hawkins combined. With his bald pate and pale skin he looked like a giant ambulatory billiard ball. His appetite challenged the Woneapenigong Village kitchen staff, which in addition to other specialties always made sure there was plenty of sticky rice around for Shimoda to snack on. Lake Woneapenigong was a “B” class retirement village—not top level, but better than average—and the staff took pride in a satisfied clientele. Shimoda did use medication, however, to stave off complications from potential arteriosclerosis and related diseases.
No one ever saw him excited. His tolerance was admirable, and despite his bulk he’d never had a stroke. He kept up with his sumo, though in order to do so he had to make regular visits to the provincial capital at Albany to find any worthy opponents in his weight and age bracket. One was a true professional, who was careful with him, and the others talented amateurs for whom the sport was a useful discipline.
Certainly he was no less healthy than the easily agitated Iranaputra or the perpetually dour Hawkins. To maintain the latter’s equilibrium, Shimoda would sometimes allow his opponent and friend to beat him at checkers, though not frequently. Not that Hawkins was a bad player: he was simply impatient, too often moving pieces around out of anger and frustration, perversely neglecting his own skill. Hawkins was not a happy man.
He was also, along with Gelmann, a native Earther, born in a poor district of Baltimore. Of them all, he’d traveled the shortest distance to retire. In his forty years of local work lay the source of his sarcasm, which even his best friends could but rarely alleviate. Unlike those who saved to retire to Earth, Wallace Hawkins could not afford to retire anywhere else.
“Why bother anyway?” he often said. “Isn’t this the best place?” His friends felt sorry for him.
Hawkins had spent his whole life in the Park Service, helping to replant the Amazon, revegetate the Himalayas, cleanse the Great Barrier Reef, excoriate toxic waste from the Siberian steppe, and repopulate the vast herds of Africa. He’d been all over and had seen more of the planet than even wealthy tourists, making filthy places clean again, fit for visitors and retirees. Under his skillful direction flowers and corals bloomed, the land became green, the waters blue.
Wallace Hawkins had had a hand in the creation of more natural beauty than most human beings, and the result had made him bitter.
He hated it all: the fluorescent-jade Irrawaddy, the glistening Andes, the windswept, bison-trod Great Plains, and the newly pristine coral reefs of the Caribbean. On more than one occasion he’d loudly declared that if given a choice he’d have taken a bulldozer to the lot. He’d participated in ecological resurrection not out of love for the planet or the natural world, but because it was the best job he was able to get upon completing his education, and he’d stuck with it down through the decades lest he lose his valuable accumulated seniority.
Not that he minded the dirt or working all day in isolated places with heavy equipment and powerful chemicals. He’d grumbled and griped his way through a long and respected career. Never married either, though there’d been a string of lady friends, especially in the early years. That surprised neither his friends nor his enemies. It was obvious to anyone who knew him that Wallace Hawkins would have been an impossible man to live with.
When career was said and done, he’d retired. On Earth, not because it was his first choice, but because unlike Shimoda or Follingston-Heath, he couldn’t have afforded to go anywhere else. He’d chosen upstate Newyork Province because it was cool and comparatively cheap, and he was heartily sick of the kind of hot, humid locales where he’d toiled for so many years. Also, it was relatively untouched by the global landscapers. The lake, the trees, the mountains, stood pretty much as they had for thousands of years, untrammeled by the hand of man and therefore not in need of his well-meaning cosmetic attentions.
Hawkins hated what Earth had become, and the fact that he’d had a hand in making it that way.
“Earthers used to be tough,” he was fond of reminding his friends whenever the opportunity arose … and sometimes when it didn’t. “We’re the ones who settled the worlds. We’re the ones who sent people all over to hell and gone, using only the resources of one small, self-abused planet. All the leagues and alliances and independents were born here. Now we’re just a damn picnic area and old fogies’ home. A place for people to gawk at and moon over and retire to. Snooze World.”
“That is as it should be,” Shimoda would tell him. “It is only natural that development and expansion should take place on and proceed from the outer worlds, recently settled and burgeoning with fresh life and energy and new ideas. There are twenty-four worlds in the First Federal Federation, fifteen in the Keiretsu, even seven in the good ol’ LFN. Earth can’t compete with them and shouldn’t try. In a violent argument Earth couldn’t stand up to a strong independent like Pandalia, much less one of the leagues, and it shouldn’t have to.”
“Yeah, I know,” Hawkins would reply. “That’s what bothers me. Not only have we used up all our resources, we’ve exported all our determination as well. Least I’ve got you guys. You ain’t much, but you’re a piece better than most.”
Shimoda and Gelmann, Follingston-Heath and Iranaputra, accepted his backhanded compliments and ignored his insults because they thought they understood him and the source of his frustrations and anger. But most of all they felt sorry for him, because not many other residents of Lake Woneapenigong Village would have anything to do with him. They had retired in search of peace and contentment, and Wallace Hawkins was a font of bilious recrimination.
He was also a pretty decent checkers player, Shimoda had discovered. Not great, but better than most. Sadly sumo left him cold. “Sorta like watching icebergs calve,” Hawkins had growled once when asked his opinion of the sport.
Follingston-Heath adjusted his state-of-the-art monocle, which he wore not only to improve the poor vision in his right eye (a problem surgery could not help) but also because he liked the look of it. A strong, ultrathin wire ran from a corner of the monocle to the battery pack clipped to the underside of his collar. In addition to improving normal vision, the device also allowed him to see reasonably well at night, and could be adjusted to provide up to 8x magnification.
At the moment it was focused on Iranaputra, who was standing and leaning over the game dome, shaking his finger so hard at the retired soldier that Follingston-Heath was certain it must fly off and strike him in the chest. Beneath his hand the dome had darkened, its hundreds of simulated warships having vanished into memory as if they’d never existed.
Which of course they never had, except as abstract gaming representations. Armadas of that size were impractical to build and maintain. Likewise, the Totamites and Rovariks were also figments of the two men’s respective imaginations, conjured simply to fight battles of a size and scope without precedence in interstellar combat.
Mina Gelmann sat off to one side and watched the two men argue, her sketch pad propped at an angle on one knee as she tried to capture in facile pencil the essence of the confrontation. Not of the imaginary war fleets but that of her two friends. She hummed throatily to herself as she worked.
Despite her advanced age, she was still quite an attractive woman, her petite figure largely intact. Nary a week went by that she didn’t have to deal with a proposal from one of the Village’s unmarried male inhabitants. That was why she chose to hang with Shimoda and Iranaputra, Follingston-Heath and Hawkins. Like her, they were also single, but they regarded her as a friend, not a subject for marriage or conquest. Their company acted as a shield to fend off otherwise irritatingly persistent, unwanted suitors. She was grateful for the friendship and privacy her friends afforded her.
Not that she had anything against men, as she’d proven on repeated occasions. She simply wasn’t interested in a permanent partner. The occasional romantic assignation, however, often with younger visitors to the complex, was not to be rejected.
The pencil flashed and danced. If she liked the result, she’d transfer it to storage later. She was a moderately accomplished artist, which had helped ease her way not into a career in fine art, but into one in robotics. Her artistic soul tended to manifest itself in her hair color, which she changed weekly. Presently it was an electric red-orange, so that she looked like a votive candle fled from its holder.
Her friends encouraged her to draw, not only because the results were always interesting and admirable but because it kept her quiet. If Mina Gelmann had a drawback, it was her tendency to offer relentless unsolicited advice on any subject. She was kind, caring, concerned, thoughtful, and mothering. One consequence of this talent was that she could send a grown man screaming from the room inside of an hour, much to her own honest bewilderment. She was just so damn nice. All one could do in her presence was listen, and listen, and smile, and nod, listen some more, and when courtesy finally allowed, slink away fast, moaning softly.
When she retired, her colleagues at work gave her a paid ticket to Earth, out of gratitude and relief. It was a solo ticket, because Mina Gelmann had outlived three husbands.
She even got along with Hawkins, who could outtalk and outshout any demagogue but who was utterly baffled by her unflagging concern. Her unvarying kindness in light of his insults and acerbic commentary usually reduced his blustering to a discordant mumble.
Thanks to his sumo and Zen training, Shimoda could tolerate her longer than most, though if he lingered too long in her presence, he had a tendency to develop a distinct twitch of the left eyebrow. Follingston-Heath simply tuned her out, as a good soldier would tune out any battlefield noise. She knew when he was ignoring her, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that he gave the appearance of listening.
Iranaputra had the hardest time, often seeking cover behind Shimoda’s bulk or FH’s height.
Still, she was a steadying influence on the four men, much as a ton of wet concrete would serve as a steadying influence on a quartet of butterflies.
