Testa’s grin froze, his eyes narrowing. Then he chuckled mirthlessly. “Sure, Joe. Will a Tier One release make you happy?” Tier One was the lowest level possible.
Joe returned an equally insincere smile. “It’s the Guys we want to keep happy, remember?”
Testa let out a theatrical sigh. “Like you’d ever let me forget. OK, I’ll go Tier Two. Will that repair the terrible damage I’ve done?”
Joe figured he’d pushed Frank as far as he dared. “That’ll be fine. Send Petra the authorization and I’ll check with her on the specifics.”
“Will do, Chief.” Testa went on out the door without even a cheerio or toodle-oo.
“Must be the foreplay is over for now,” Joe said softly, finally taking a sip of his tlat. It had gone cold, which made it bitter and undrinkable. He went to dump it out and brew another cup.
After all, he did have a fresh supply.
It was delicious. He probably would have enjoyed it even more if he’d known precisely what it was costing.
Petra Davidovitch looked up from her design table when Joe stepped into the cool shade of the domed structure everybody called the Shop. A mischievous smile lit her pale face as she pulled her loupe off her head, leaving her curly, whitish blond hair corkscrewed in all directions.
“Hiya, handsome,” she purred, tossing her head and adjusting the tab of her coveralls slightly downward to reveal more of her cleavage. “You here on business or pleasure?”
“Hi Petra,” Joe answered with a shy smile. “Did Frank get hold of you?” Although happily married to Hakim Khassa, who ran the site testing lab and doubled as medic, she always greeted Joe like a femme fatale looking for a fling. He always pretended he didn’t notice. Although she was fairly attractive in a wiry, flat-chested, tomboy sort of way, he wasn’t going to let himself get into the double trouble of messing with someone who was married and worked for BCT. He even had BAA guidelines to back him up on this sensible course of nonaction.
“Business, huh?” she said with a rueful grin. “Yeah, he authorized a Tier Two release. Was he being bad again?”
“Same old thing, letting his gatherers stray onto the Coverture.”
She shook her head. “Ah, greed, thy name is Testa. You must’ve had him over a barrel to get a Two.”
Joe stared at her, realizing she was right. “I guess so,” he muttered. The fewer and lower value the releases Frank made the better his balance sheet looked. That Two had come awfully easy.
Petra grinned and shrugged. “Hey, his loss is your gain. I’d been hoping a Two would come up and tinkered together something I think the Guys are going to love. Check this out.” She led him back to a tarp-covered worktable. “The Guys are nuts about glass, right? It’s a tech they never discovered, not being fire users. Corrective lenses were like a revelation to them.”
“They sure were.” One limitation of the imar bodies the Guys inhabited was that they were farsighted. The big predators’ eyes were designed for spotting prey at a distance and were uncannily acute in that range. But once things got within a meter or so fine detail was lost—anything that close was as good as eaten anyway. The Guys had never considered the possibility that good near sight was even possible; outside an imar their sight was even worse than that. Joe had been the one to figure out their vision problem, and big tough reading glasses for every Guy had been the trade on which the treaty had been founded.
Petra laid her hand on the tarp. “Their distance vision is several times better than ours. But I got to thinking, what if they could really see far off stuff. So—” She whipped the tarp off with a flourish.
On the table were two heavy-looking, meter-long tapered tubes offset in the middle and connected by some sort of lever mechanism. He stared at the thing a moment, then laughed. “Petra! You made them binoculars!”
She buffed her knuckles on her coverall. “Dead on. What do you think?”
Joe looked her creation over more closely. As with everything she fabricated, it had been designed with care and precision, and crafted to be both sturdy and beautiful. “These are great! But they’re so big! How much do they weigh?”
“About twenty kilos. Cybonic ones would have been lighter and easier to produce, but I know the Guys are fascinated with glass and lenses. The prisms alone weigh two kilos each. Fortunately weight isn’t much of a problem with this crowd. A Guy can handle these babies like they weigh nothing at all.”
Joe shook his head in amazement mixed with increased respect for her skills. “The Guys already have a fairly sophisticated astronomy. Do you realize what these will do for them?”
“That’s why I made ’em. Now these babies are Tier Two material, sure as shit. I couldn’t show them to any of the Guys until I got a release. Now I need one to help me make final adjustments. I sort of had to guess on collimation and focal length—again, cybonics would have been easy to make self-adjusting, but these just seemed somehow right.”
“They are. They’re perfect.”
“Almost worth having your borders violated for, huh?”
Joe gazed at her a moment, but saw no sign of that having been the sort of sly, insinuating remark Frank might have made. She was simply stating her belief that what she’d built would redress the violation in spades. And it would.
“Pretty close, anyway. I’ll ask Longo to come give you a hand. He’s one of their oldest sky-hunters, and already worships you for fixing it so he can see to make smaller charts.”
“Send him around any time this afternoon. We’ll get these tuned up and I can have a second pair made by tomorrow.” She winked. “The way I figure it, Tier Two means we owe ’em two pair.”
Joe took her hand and kissed it, both to express his admiration and to keep her guessing as to whether her flirting was making a dent. “Petra, you’re a wonder. I can’t thank you enough for taking the time and trouble to think up something that will actually enrich these peoples’ lives.” That last sounded like mushmouthed diplomatic boilerplate, but it was true.
She ducked her head modestly, almost shyly. “No big deal. It’s just as much a treat for me to be fabbing something other than weapons and tin mirrors and cooking pots and crap like that. The Guys are good people. They deserve nothing less than the very best we have to give them.”
Joe kept his smile, but his pleasure faded. “Yes they do,” he agreed.
It was late, but Joe was still up, slouched in one of the office easy chairs, drinking tea and gazing moodily out at the night-shrouded landscape. Three of Marguy’s five tiny moons were in the sky, providing a soft, somber light. Off in the distance a faint reddish glow marked the place where the Guys had a fire going. Fire was a new thing to them, and they still hadn’t come to a consensus on what sort of terms it should be accepted. Most nights Nab, the Guy who had taken it on himself to study this strange human import, lit a small blaze. Others would come and go, studying it, contemplating it, communing on it and its implications. These deliberations—and there was no better word to describe this slow, cautious process—might go on for several more months before a decision was made.
He knew he should be able to consider the day a success. Frank’s violation had been fairly redressed. Soon, if not already, Longo and his fellow skyhunters would be seeing things until now hidden from them, and so coming that much closer to understanding the cosmos around them. That was no mean gift.
Yet a sense of unease alloyed with his usual nagging self-doubt had been shadowing him since Petra’s parting comment that afternoon. When his day’s work was done he’d tried to lose himself in playing Bug Hunt, but his concentration had been so bad he’d made himself quit before he got even further behind.