A Larger Universe (9 page)

"And?" Tommy asked.

"We want to know why," the spokesman said.

"It seemed like the right thing to do.  I could help,
so I did."

"Jules wouldn't have helped you."

"Is that supposed to matter to me?"

The first Jack spoke loudly from the entrance of the room. 
"I've checked on Jules.  He has some bad bruises but nothing broken.  The
bird's been caught."

"How did it happen?" a voice called.

"As near as I can tell, the damn fool went into the
stall alone.  Jules did something the bird didn't like, and the bird kicked out
the corner of his stall.  When the bird did that, the support for the rafter
was knocked out.  Whatever Jules was doing, he paid for it.  Would’ve been
worse if the bird had kicked Jules instead of the support.  We caught the bird,
though.  It's fine."

Tommy's celebrity preceded him to his meeting with Valin. 
The corridor outside the labyrinth room was swirling with the colorful clothes
of artisans. 

"We don't get much excitement here.  Your rescue of the
other farmer was the main topic in the meal room," Valin said.

"I'm not a farmer."

"You work in their stable don't you?"

"Yes, but do I look like a farmer?"

"No, but you don't look like someone who could help me
either, whatever the lords think."

"If I can't, will they send me home?"

Valin laughed.  "You've got a funny mouth to go with
that funny body.  You'll go home when the lords are done with us, and that's
never.

"This crowd will have their fill of looking at you
soon, and we'll be able to get out of here."

#   #   #

Valin worked in a room more than big enough for ten ordinary-appearing
desks.  Nine of the desks formed the shape of a horseshoe with one end open. 
The tenth desk was against another wall.  Other than the entrance, the room had
two doors, one on each side of the horseshoe and next to a number of partially
filled bookcases.  The door on the left had a picture and the lords' word for
book.  The door on the right had a picture of a cog and the lords' word for
machinery.  Eight men sat around the horseshoe, leaving the desk at the top
empty.

"That's your desk against the wall.  Now, we'll look at
what you'll be doing," Valin said as he led the way through the door with
the picture of a book.

The room inside would have looked like the computer section
of a large bookstore if there had been more than one copy of each title.  Tommy
walked from shelf to shelf, reading the bindings.  He saw books on computer
hardware, computer operating systems, computer languages, web development,
databases, programming algorithms, logic, and any number of topics Tommy had
never heard of, except that, when he looked inside, each one related to
computers.  The shelves contained hundreds of books.  He picked a book with
CICS in the title. 
What's that?
  And another, thin, book about the
proper way to crimp the ends of computer cables.  And another about UML. 
Except for the book about crimping the ends of cables, every book he took
contained at least two hundred pages.  Some of them were over 600 pages.

Tommy turned from the shelves.  "You expect me to
translate all of these to the lords' language?  If I worked for two hundred
years, I wouldn't be able to do that."

The strange Earthling made Valin apprehensive.  He looked
nothing at all like the small boy Valin had seen in the transmission from
Earth. 

Valin had worked many years to reach his position as a
senior master, and now his position and his life were at the mercy of a lord's
whims and the unproven abilities of this alleged child.  The priest, Forset,
with his impractical station, may not have known of Valin, but the reverse had
not been true.  For many months he had been in contact with the first Jack
concerning Tommy.  He also found an interested helper in the fourth Forset, who
was eager to report Tommy's progress in learning the lords' language.

The first Jack's initial communications indicated that the
child was a weakling and would not live to begin his classes with Forset.  That
had its own dangers.  Lord Ull expected the books to be translated, and Valin's
team had made little progress.

After a time, the reports from the first Jack became
contradictory, as if Jack didn't want to believe what he was seeing.  And now
this strangest tale of all, coming from the fourth Forset, of Tommy lifting the
side of a barn and running down a giant bird.  None of this made sense, though
the creature standing in front of him seemed strong enough to perform such
tasks.

After almost three years of attempting to translate the
books without this boy's help, Valin's life depended on Tommy’s doing as Lord
Ull expected.  Valin’s role in bringing Tommy here would make that certain.  He
must focus his attention on that.  Somewhere in the bulky body in front of him
must be a mind that could help them do the job Lord Ull had given him. 

"You do have a funny mouth,” Valin said, his expression
hardening.  “Either that or you think the lords are idiots, and that's not a
safe thing to think.  Your job is to teach us how to translate these books, so
we can, in turn, teach others, until all the books are translated."

"Forset told me you could already read and write
English," Tommy said.

Valin threw up his arms.  "We can, but not this
English!  Every fourth word means nothing, and many of the words we think we
know must mean something else.  When we give the books we think we have
translated to the artisans, they call them gibberish and give them back to us.

"We had the books for three months before leaving
Earth, and Lord Ull wasn’t happy with our results.”  His face twisted into a
sour smile.  “Working with a lord can be stressful.  The stress can kill
sometimes.  When my friend Berish told me of your transmission, I made him show
me the recording."

"You’re the reason I'm here?"

Valin shrugged.  "Well, yes, I suppose so.  You seemed
to know a lot about your computers.  So I suggested to the lords that you could
help us.  Lord Ull ordered the landing that picked you up."

Tommy walked through the eight artisans who had gathered
outside the door and sat down in the chair at his desk.  Valin's admission of
being instrumental in Tommy's kidnapping first brought a rush of anger, then
memories of home.  "Why should I?  Why should I help my kidnappers?  Will
helping you get me home?  What's in it for me?"  He put his head down on
the desk.

Valin grabbed his chair and spun it, forcing Tommy to lift
his head.  "You're here.  Everybody works at the tasks they are given.  If
you don't, you will be given no food, no water."

Valin addressed the others in the room.  "Return to
your tasks.  We will continue without him.  He will either help and decide to
live or not and decide to die."

Tommy turned his chair toward the desk and cradled his head
in his arms.  He felt like crying for the first time in months.  He was getting
too old to cry, wasn't he?  Hadn't he saved someone's life this morning?  That
should prove something.  What had he ever done to deserve this?  He had never
fit in, even at home.  All he had ever wanted was to be left alone with his
reading and his computer.  Now, he was stuck here, with no way home, no
computer, and nothing worth reading.  What was the point in reading or
translating computer books without a computer to work with?  His eyes were red
when he lifted his head, but he hadn't cried. 
So why do they need me?  Why
are they translating all those books?

He turned to face the horseshoe.  He had to know.  "Why
are you translating those books?  What do the lords expect to get for them in
trade?"

Valin opened the door with the picture of a cog. 
"Because we need them in order to use these."

Tommy had visited the company where his dad worked and had
seen the computer room.  That room had been clean and organized with the cables
between the computer boxes hidden under a raised floor.  The room behind the
door seemed a mad version of that, with computers sitting haphazardly about the
room and cables strewn about instead of hidden under a raised floor.  He looked
closer.  None of the cables were connected to anything and the electrical plugs
were lying disconnected on the floor.

"We have a lot more than this," Valin said. 
"We took these samples from the main storeroom to try and get working. 
That's why we need the books."  He made a rueful face.  "We're
accustomed to instruction books.  That's what we usually translate and from
many languages, most of them not of Earth.  Every machine we take has one, but
your computers have hundreds of instruction books.  We don't know what's
important and what's not.  And the lords want these computers to
function."

Tommy circled the room, examining the stacked computer
cases.  Some looked new.  Some were scratched and dented.  Tommy bent over to
look at one of these and started laughing.  "This is an IBM AT.  It must
be twenty years old.  A lot older than I am anyway.  Somebody sold you a bunch
of junk."

This sent Valin scurrying to an undistinguished point on the
workroom's wall, where he pressed his thumb hard enough to make it turn white. 
A small door slid into the wall under his hand exposing a grill and small
keypad.   After pressing a few keys, he talked rapidly into the grill.  It had
to be an intercom, the first Tommy had seen on the ship. 

Feron, the leader of the team that had traded for the
computer equipment and books from Earth, met Valin and Tommy at a nearby
storage compartment.  His hands shook as he opened the compartment door.  He
stood to one side as Tommy looked into the warehouse-sized room. 

Hundreds of Earth-style pallets covered the huge chamber's
floor.  Each Pallet held stacks of boxes wrapped with wide sheets of clear
plastic.

Much of what Tommy knew about specific items of equipment
came from reading and looking at the pictures in the many catalogs that he used
to receive from computer equipment retailers.  A few purchases made with his
dad's credit card had gotten him on two mailing lists and then many mailing
lists as the first companies sold their list to others.  Those catalogs had
been some of Tommy's favorite fantasy reading, full of things he would buy, if
he had the money.  He was reading a catalog the day his Dad brought up selling
his download software.  The money hadn't mattered to him, but getting the
gadgets in the catalog had.

With Valin's and Feron's help, he began unwrapping plastic
and removing boxes from the pallets nearest the door and stacking individual
boxes on the left and right side of the room:  left for outdated, and right for
at least relatively new.  When they had unloaded fifteen pallets, the aisle
between the left and right side was much closer to the right wall. 
This
could take a week
, he thought, and walked down the right wall, examining
each pallet.  Tommy had started back toward the entrance when he realized he
hadn't seen a single box of software.  He was about to reveal the futility of
what they were doing when he found several pallets of software boxes in a far
corner of the room.

Tommy hadn't told his helpers why he had directed them to
move the boxes to one of the two stacks.  With his revelation that they had
more old than new equipment, Feron slumped against one of the stacks,
scattering a few boxes to the floor.

"Will you and your family give comfort to my wife and
children, my friend?" he said to Valin.

Valin squatted down beside Feron and put his arm around his
shoulders.  "Of course.  As you would to mine."

"Will you wait until after I see them to tell the
lords?"

"You should tell the lords."

"If I do, I must do so now.  I want to tell my family
goodbye.  If you tell the lords, I'll have a few minutes to talk with my
wife."

Tommy looked from one man to the other.  "Wait a
minute.  What's going to happen to you?"

"The lords do not allow failure of this
magnitude," Valin said.  "Your feral brethren swindled Feron.  He
will pay with his life."

"How will anyone know if we don't tell them?"

Valin looked up at Tommy.  "They will know, whether we
tell them or not.  Someone will tell them, or they will find out in some other
way.  If we delay, they'll punish me, too, and our wives and children will be
punished.”  Valin’s lips pulled back against his teeth.  “You should consider
yourself.  Their anger will send you back to the stables permanently."

"Wait a minute.  Let's think this through, first,"
Tommy said.

"What is there to think about?  You have said most of
these boxes contain outdated and useless equipment.  You called it junk.  The
lords do not trade for junk."

"Well, that was my opinion.  I wouldn't have bought any
of this back home, but it's not junk if you can use it for something.  What
were you planning to do with this stuff?"

Valin looked at Feron.  "What harm can there be in
telling him?  At least the lords didn't tell us not to tell him."  When
Feron nodded, Valin turned back to Tommy.  "The lords plan to use your
computers in this ship."

"How?" Tommy asked.  "How could Earth's computers
be of use in a starship?"

"You probably think the lords use computers throughout
this ship, and that they're more advanced than those of Earth?" Valin
asked.

Tommy hadn't thought about it, but that did sound
reasonable.  How could the lords run a ship like this without computers everywhere? 
"Yes," he responded.

"You would be mistaken.  This ship does have computers,
but the fastest one, the one used for navigation, is much slower and many times
larger than those we saw advertised on your television.  The lords use other,
even slower, computers to maintain the environment and for tracking objects
near the ship.  All are larger than any of the computers in this room."