The next ten days were hectic. Between catnaps, he worked endlessly with the Akiran mission, ironing out the details. They signed a contract. The news spread like a nuclear excursion: Jotar Plaek was going to build his crazy ship. Those were good days.
He found it easy to be with Kasumi, anticipating her grace when he was away from her and marveling in it when she came to him. There was something exquisite about just letting things happen, not investing energy into making them happen. He was good for her. Unobtrusively encouraging her initiative, he brought out a hidden boldness and confidence. Once when they were eating together in a cafe, she struck up a conversation with an Engineer at the next table and took him with her for the rest of the afternoon, letting Jotar fend for himself. Jotar was pleased that because of him she had become more of a woman than she'd ever been before in her life. When he was most content he would think that it was a good thing for Lager that they all pumped the blood of their mothers; he imagined Lager as a very quiet Eden with its Eveless men waiting for the apples to fall before they ate.
One day Kasumi was swimming nude at a river bend. She came to him and asked him to towel her off. He smiled at her. She smiled at him. Each felt aroused. Each refused to make the first move. It was like being a Technician. Love. A woman. Contentment. No worries. He took her to the meadow where he had first seen Akira and finally their chemistry drove them to become lovers. They whispered sweet nothings all night and licked at the dew in the morning with their tongues.
When the dew had melted but the grass was still rosily lit, she recited a poem by Akihito from the almost sacred Manyoshu.
"I
was wandering
Among flowered spring meadows
To pick violets
And enjoyed myself so much
I slept in the field all night."
The work orders went out, financed by Akiran funds. Countermanding orders were issued by the government's APCT and Jotar flew to the capital to straighten out an administrative mess caused by some lunkhead who couldn't understand an outworld investment in a project which had been turned down by the Lagerian Aerospace Technical Oversee. He got through the fracas by a compromise which required him to hire a watchdog staff to prevent the leakage of Classified Skill and Craft Forms. LATO then issued a Duty Liaison requiring computer-filed abstracts of all progress down to the Work Action Order level.
Within four days of assembling the new staff a minor Liaison Engineer panicked at the new methods of manipulating positive and negative mass fabrications and the project was temporarily halted—Injuncted for a Retro Study. That lasted twelve days. Jotar managed a Reactivation Order but the renewed research had to be transferred to deep space where facilities weren't equipped to handle it. Jotar spent forty days building a new space factory.
Then they ran into real fabrication problems which no simulation could have anticipated. Each glitch was solved but every solution seemed to generate new troubles which had no obvious source. Jotar found to his horror that he wasn't a hardware man. He brought in consultants and that cost money.
Finally some key parts arrived for the drive assembly but they had been fabricated to normal starship specifications which weren't good enough in the new configuration. Jotar sued and was countersued. He won the case but was sued from another quarter for nonpayment because he had neglected to transfer funds, and, alarmed, the government froze funds to cover work orders which had as yet not been issued. He hired lawyers. They sent him a bill.
In 200 days Jotar had gone through all of his Akiran capital. He had promised twenty ships. Not one was remotely finished. In desperation he turned to sex. He didn't think that Third Director Gail Katalina would even remember him, considering her reputation, but he was wrong. She returned his call within two kilosecs.
"Of course I remember you! You're the Engineer with the most beautiful eyelashes on Lager! I'll send an executive plane for you. Can you pack today? I'll meet you at the Jongleur Gardens. My husband won't be there. I may be late, but that will give you time to make yourself beautiful."
The executive cruiser was prompt and polite and like all high level government roboplanes did not take orders from the passengers. It had been instructed to fly the scenic route through the Lebanor Pass, which it did—skimming the mountains' treetops at a speed never less than 500 meters per second. Jotar kept swallowing his heart.
For all that haste he arrived at the Jongleur mansion to find himself alone. He was put up in the master bedroom with a wooden fire blazing. He was fed delicious food by invisible robocooks and told not to wear his uniform by an invisible robovalet who provided him with lavish clothes of a cut which might be worn on stage but never in public. He swam. He read. He tried on clothes and practiced entrances and lines and charm. That night he slept alone.
Director Katalina arrived late the next afternoon. Her hair was white. Her face was lined by the act of smiling so many times at the victories of her ruthless rise. She hugged Jotar, pinched his bottom and handed him her briefcase. Her two female executive secretaries followed closely to stay inside the shadow of her power.
At dinner she had a videophone beside her wine and continuously interrupted their trivial conversation by answering calls that came in to command her attention. She'd be kidding him about the time he fell overboard on the yacht and switch into an animated discussion with some disembodied voice concerning the credit rating of the Amar Floating Peoples who did not qualify as a solar system, and as quickly come back to comment on the bouquet of the wine.
Once Jotar made the mistake of letting the conversation wander around to the subject of starships. She gazed at him with true adoration while he spoke, so he spoke with increasing fire and clarity.
She cut in. "Your intelligence makes you
so sexy
I can't stand it anymore!" And with that thought she pulled him off to the bedroom where she called up her secretaries, instructing them to handle all incoming communication.
First she undressed Jotar. Then she posed him for inspiration. Then she took out her paints and began to decorate his body while he watched in the mirror-screen. Whenever she asked for his advice he praised her. His ear itched.
She became so enthusiastic about her masterpiece that she called in her secretaries to help photograph him for her collection. They took endless photographs, developing them with different dyes, cutting, distorting, reposing him. He was pleased that she was pleased.
Once her assistants were dismissed, Director Katalina had him carry her to the bed. "Do you remember how I like it, you big beautiful rascal?"
He did. By morning he was suffering a bad attack of anxiety. He had done everything conceivable to please her and she had never given him an opening. In desperation he decided to serve her breakfast in bed. He knew a recipe he was sure the robocooks didn't know because Kasumi had taught it to him, but he got caught in the kitchen by one of the secretaries who hadn't bothered to robe herself.
"Hi, big boy."
"Hi."
She began to fondle him.
"Look, I'm just trying to get some breakfast for her."
The secretary spoke some commands. "Let the robocook do it. I'd like to have you for a moment. I'm much younger than she is."
"The robocook isn't up to this particular dish."
"You don't understand, boy. I'm her
executive
secretary. Everything she acts on goes through
my
hands. You have to please me, too."
"I don't think she'd like that." He didn't dare remove the executive hands from his belly.
"She'll never know a thing, pretty boy. It'll only take us half a kilosec."
He got back to the kitchen while the just prepared breakfast was still hot, and carried it up to the Third Director, cursing the robocook and the secretary. The old woman smiled at him. She pulled him down and kissed him.
"You want something, don't you? What is it?"
Oh thank Newton!
He sat down on the bed and composed himself.
"It's about your starship project, isn't it? You're broke. See, I know everything. You want money to continue. Money, money, money—that's all an Engineer ever thinks of."
"Sometimes," he said.
"What makes you think I'll give it to you?"
"All I wanted to tell you was that my starship is important to Lager."
She laughed. "We sell every starship we can make. Your venture isn't important for Lager, it is important for you."
Well, I tried.
She laughed at his misery. "You fool! What would I be if I couldn't do favors? Don't worry. I'll handle everything. It will be all right."
He made love to her in gratitude and she enjoyed his total giving of himself.
Back at his central office, he waited three days. The government put him in bankruptcy to save him from the responsibility for his mistakes. They took over the project of building his ship. The sudden loss of control shocked him: he had an office but no command lines. His faith in the power of sex was shaken.
Then Kasumi timorously announced that she was pregnant.
Jotar did his best to get the State to take over his debt to Akira but the reorganized project refused to underwrite Akiran interests. With that blow Kasumi's father and three of his closest associates committed suicide.
Kasumi called. Jotar refused to see her. He wanted to see her but he couldn't face her. He began to drink heavily. He disconnected his communicator. Finally he put his furniture and library in storage and disappeared. Nobody knew where he was because he was on an island beachcoming with a woman who had run away from her husband but would probably go back to him when her money ran out. They had met at a cafe in the Pleasure Basin and she had coaxed him into chucking it all with her.
One day while this woman helped him carve out an outrigger, the roasting sun at their naked backs, he told her about building the galaxy's greatest space canoe, a tale he embellished with truth, lies, puns, and emotion. The idea seemed hilarious to him, a fantasy laid on him by his mother when he was too young to reject it. The trouble was he wasn't
sure
it was a fantasy. Then for months he didn't think at all. He speared fish.
His woman left him, having learned more about canoes than she wanted to know. He drifted and another woman picked him up. Lusena was a distortion photographer who took pictures and fed them into a special computer. He was fascinated. By playing with the commands and selecting out only those image distortions that caused an emotional resonance the photograph evolved in color and pattern until it became a setting from one's private dream world. Jotar showed Lusena's art to everyone, raving about it for kilosecs. Lusena had a haunting dream world. All that came out when Jotar tried it were pictures of grotesque pinheaded women or elabyrinth long starships that faded complexly into the sky. Time passed.
Jotar was being supported by two waitresses from a local pub in their houseboat when his sister found him. Brother and sister, each seeded by a different Engineer, fought for days. They ranted themselves into a good mood by sunset whereupon he'd cook the three women a sumptuous meal, stews boiled in beer, beer cakes, beered chicken casserole, and the four of them would reminisce about childhood during the cool of the evening. In the morning the fight would start again.
She sneered at his unwillingness to drive ahead against all obstacles. She derided him for being ruled by the considerations of inferiors. She described what they were doing to his ship in his absence. She flattered his genius for seeing the piece of the puzzle that escaped all other eyes. She goaded his pride. She won. He went back to work.
When he returned to the project he was astounded that he was still respected. Genius had its prerogatives. He was astonished that he still believed in his ship with an insane passion. He worked hard. The ship had what he'd always wanted—government sponsorship. He was now willing to be humble when they told him that the fabrication problems needed research and time.
Half a kiloday passed before he realized that, even working, he had no control over the drift of the project. A whole kiloday passed before he saw the trend of the drift.
The project Engineers were solving problems creating solutions closer to something they already knew. As the total solution began to emerge, Jotar panicked. He ran in seven directions trying to trace down the individual decisions. He got passed from Engineer to Engineer to Craft Guild to Economist to Production Manager to Beer Hall.
Finally Keithe Walden took him hunting. Walden was the man in charge since the bankruptcy, an older Engineer, jowls sagging. He could make ten thousand men play choo-choo train in unison. They had it out in a duck blind with bugs buzzing around their heads.
"Keithe, I think you're full of meadow-muffins."
"Jotar, if you were redesigning a woman, you'd take off the breasts for streamlining . . ."
"Would I!"
"You'd take out the kidneys because they smell. You'd . . ."
"Now look! I like women the way they are!"
"No you don't. You'd have a thousand improvements if you thought about the problem for a kilosec. What changes would you make?"
"They'd be practical changes. I'd put in a servomechanism so that a woman could control her ovulation. Shreinhart showed that the immunological system could be vastly improved if it had better data processing capabilities. There's no reason bones should break or get brittle with age—there are much better materials. I think it is shocking that, kilogram for kilogram, solid state devices have more storage and logic capacity than neural tissue. How about an electromagnetic sense? And women certainly should have a penis to piss with."
"You could go on and on, couldn't you?"
"Probably."
"That's what I mean. Then you'd start to fool with the genes so this new woman could reproduce herself—and you'd be in big trouble because of the incredible cross-correlative interdependence of the genetic interaction. Evolution is a slow thing. You can only change marginal things in something as complicated as a woman or a starship—and each change has to be proved out over generations before you can make the next incremental change. A man has 98% of the genes of a chimpanzee, remember that. You want too much change, too soon. You have to start with what you have."