Even though the porridge contained plenty of raisins and honey, the four who were going into the city poked at their bowls and wore glum expressions.
Ilika looked around the table. “This is the last trip. Our food stocks are looking very good. Relax, enjoy the day, visit, eat tarts, pick up a few things that look good, and come back safely. You all made good decisions yesterday, and I have no doubt you will again today. Tomorrow we fly the Manessa Kwi.”
Smiles crept onto their faces.
Kibi took a deep breath. “I have an announcement. We’re going into the city by the grassland trails so we’ll be familiar with them. I don’t yet know which way we’re coming back. But I promise, we will get back.”
“This demo,” Ilika began, “shows what the pilot would see if she was guiding the ship from the surface to a station in orbit.”
Mati heard conversation among the simulated crew members, but couldn’t understand a word. She watched the screen, and soon felt the hum of powerful engines. After floating upward, the ship began to move forward, faster and faster. Beautiful red-rock canyon walls streaked by on both sides, then the surface of an ocean, dotted with forested islands, zoomed by beneath the ship. Finally they angled up and the sky slowly darkened to star-studded velvet. Mati grinned with delight as the simulated ship slowed and approached the glistening orbital station, like a cluster of jewels floating in space.
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“Ready to go to work?” Ilika asked when the demonstration ended.
Mati nodded excitedly.
“First, close your eyes and picture all the things you need to make Manessa fly.”
Mati, seated in her pilot’s chair, soon frowned with guilt. “Except for Kibi, it seems like everyone’s working for me!”
“That’s right. And even Kibi would have little purpose if it wasn’t for you.
The others will be primarily listening for instructions, and only occasionally making requests themselves. You are different. As soon as you have the flight objective from the commander, you will be calling on others for information or actions. That’s called flight command. The pilot always has flight command, regardless of who is in command of the ship.”
“Let me see . . . from Boro I need engines . . .”
“And Boro needs a little time to get those engines fueled and warmed-up.”
“From Rini I need topographics and weather . . .”
“And he needs time to scan the terrain, update the ship’s memory, and select the best format for the information.”
“From Sata I need charts and a flight plan . . .”
“She needs lots of time to do that, but will usually have it ready beforehand. In an emergency, you can fly without a plan, of course.”
Mati was thoughtful for a moment. “I have to ask for all that, every time?”
“No. At first, I’ll prompt everyone. As they gain experience, they’ll do most of it automatically. But it remains your responsibility to make sure you have what you need.
“Mostly you’ll use flight command for unexpected things. If you suddenly realize you need a different engine to avoid crashing into a mountain, you don’t have time to ask the commander. You just yell ‘I need . . . whatever,’ and the engineer gets it for you as fast as possible. If you ever give a bad flight command, I’ll butt in and fix it.”
“I think I understand.”
“You’re going to learn two engines today, the same two Boro has studied.
The first is the anti-mass drive. It lets you go up, hover at a constant altitude, or come down slowly and gently. Here are your controls and indicators,” he said, pointing to an area of her console. “Seven power levels, but we’ll just use
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level one in simulations today and in flight tomorrow.”
“Boro! Anti-mass drive, level one!” Mati commanded, grinning.
Ilika went to the engineer’s station, made some selections, and mimicked Boro’s deep voice. “Anti-mass drive, level one, warming up.”
Mati giggled, and could see the proper control group on her console light up blue-green. “When that’s green, my engine’s ready, right?”
“Exactly. Wait if you can, use it sooner if you need.”
“There. It’s green.”
Ilika returned to Mati’s side and made another selection at her console.
“Here’s a simple landscape.” A three-D projection appeared in front of Mati’s main display screen, and her flight control extended itself. “Only that one engine is being simulated. See what it will do.”
“This is like some I’ve already done.”
“But now the exact response and feel of the anti-mass drive is being simulated, not just movement.”
Mati found she could control the engine’s power in fine steps from barely-perceptible floating, to a moderately rapid climb. Soon she discovered it took more power to hover at lower altitudes, and the memory of a lesson came to her. “Um, um . . . inverse square law?”
“Yes. Gravity is a form of radiation.”
Mati smiled as she took another step toward being a real pilot. But, she soon discovered, she was powerless to make her simulated ship move over the land in any direction.
Pica sat wide-eyed as the four shipmates filled her in on the doings of the religious orders. They only left out the fact that they were the cause of it all.
They broke bread and ate cheese together, and reminisced about that fateful day when Ilika, with Pica’s help, had tested them from morning until evening.
“I could have predicted you four would wind up on Ilika’s crew. I must admit I don’t understand how poor crippled Mati could pilot a ship.”
“Shall we tell her?” Rini asked.
Boro and Sata nodded. Kibi thought a little longer, then nodded also.
“In Ilika’s . . . country . . . there are healers who can fix her knee so she’ll be
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able to do everything!”
“Okay,
now I understand!” Pica said with a smile.
“She’s doing her first training session today,” Rini added.
“Wow. It’s still a little hard to imagine Mati up there on the deck, in the wind and sun and spray, wrestling with the ship’s wheel.”
The four crew members grinned, but said no more on the subject.
“This simulation has more . . . what do you call it when you can’t get going, or you can’t stop?” Mati asked.
“Inertia,” Ilika replied.
“Yeah. Much more inertia than my other simulations.” Mati frowned slightly as she pushed the flight control forward, then waited several seconds for the simulated ship to pick up speed.
“That time lag makes it easy to over-control,” Ilika explained.
“Yeah. But only when I’m not under-controlling!”
Ilika
laughed.
Mati worked with the atmospheric thrusters at their lowest power setting.
Ilika watched for a minute. “Find a hill you can go all the way around, and pick an unusual tree.”
“Okay. Here’s one.”
“Your task is to fly around the hill, and then come to a full stop right over the tree without undershooting or overshooting.”
Mati tried it, and laughed when she coasted right past the tree even with full reverse thrusters.
“Once you can nail that three times in a row, you will have passed your first thruster lesson.”
She smiled up at her captain, and then pushed the flight control forward for another try.
Ilika went over to the watch station and requested a local scan. The number of people near the little lake was up to six, and none of them were his crew members.
Sata and her friends stepped into Doko’s Inn about an hour before most people would arrive for dinner. They found a large table in the common room
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already set with seven places. After helping each other to unshoulder their bulging rucksacks and set them by the wall, they got comfortable, leaving spaces around Sata so her family members could sit with her.
Soon father, mother, and brother came bustling out of the kitchen carrying trays with greens, bread and cheese, and ale. They arranged the trays on the table and greeted their daughter with hugs and handclasps.
“No, no, no!” Doko boomed with a smile. “This is all wrong! Sata is at the head of the table today, not me!”
Sata grinned and blushed as she moved over.
“Your pack looks so heavy!” her mother said with concern.
“Not really. Mostly dried fruit and spices and things. And remember, I’ve been carrying a pack all summer. I can carry almost as much as Boro!”
Doko
laughed.
Mosa had noticed how friendly Boro was with her daughter. “Sweetie, you get your own bunk on the ship, don’t you?”
“Of course. I get half a nice, roomy cabin.”
“You . . . um . . . share a cabin with . . .”
“With Mati. Remember the girl with the crutch? She’s our pilot now!”
Mosa was visibly relieved.
The lad who now worked at the inn served the rest of the meal. First he brought spiced meat and pot herbs, followed by cooked greens with soft cheese.
Sata, Boro, and Rini did a good job of answering all the questions put to them, without revealing the qualities of the Manessa Kwi they couldn’t talk about, and that wouldn’t make sense anyway.
Kibi, however, was very quiet. She enjoyed the tasty meal, but was pondering how they would get home. They had already heard from several sources that the religious orders were planning some “holy” action in the hills to the east of the city. Their sources, whether Pica, Tori, the friendly guard in the marketplace, or Sata’s parents, always brushed it off, assuming they would be going west to return to their ship. But everyone thought it would take place very soon, probably that night.
Finally, a large pudding covered with berry sauce was brought to the table.
As Sata savored spoonfuls of the delicious dessert, she exchanged glances with
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her mother, her father, even her brother, and tried to keep tears from forming in her eyes.
Then she looked at Boro, Rini, and Kibi, none of whom had parents to visit, and her sad face quickly changed to a smile.
Her mother sensed the mixed emotions her daughter was feeling. “We are so proud of you! We want you to journey far and see the whole world . . . and
. . . maybe someday you’ll settle down with some nice, sweet man.” She glanced at Boro again.
It wasn’t long before hungry customers began to fill the common room.
The fifteen-year-old lad, currently working alone, stood at the kitchen door with a tinge of fear in his eyes as people started demanding food and drink.
Sata shared a last embrace with each of her family members as they rose to return to work, and was then left to finish her meal with her fellow crew members.
Deep Learning Notes
The pilot has flight command to avoid bothering the ship’s commander with minor details, and to shorten the decision-making path during emergencies.
This shows the difference between a professional working team, which must deal with reality in an efficient manner, and a bureaucracy, which is designed to conserve power and status. On a professional team, decisions are made as close to the people who must carry them out as possible. In a bureaucracy, the longest possible decision path usually results in the most power and status.
The Inverse Square Law states that, for any radiation from a “point” source, that radiation “spreads out” so its intensity varies inversely with the square of the distance. For example, an object one meter from a light bulb will receive a certain amount of light. An object two meters away will receive 1/4 as much, and three meters away, 1/9 as much. What fraction of the one-meter light will an object four meters away receive? Ten meters?
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Although science has not yet discovered exactly what gravity is, it acts like a form of radiation. Therefore, the closer to the planet a ship is, the more gravity it will receive, and the more work its engines will have to do to counteract that gravity.
Inertia: the tendency of matter to maintain its current relationship to the gravity centers of the universe. On or near a planet, the most powerful gravity center is the planet itself. Therefore, we usually experience inertia as the tendency of matter in motion to remain in motion, and matter at rest to remain at rest. Any change in motion (acceleration, deceleration, or change of direction) requires work (applied energy).
Mosa experienced a moment that is difficult for most parents, the realization that even though her daughter was present, she had already “left home.” In our modern world of laws and rules, we have codified the age at which this may or should happen, and it varies from 9 to 21, depending on the culture, with 18 being most common. In a medieval or older culture, the precise age was not so much a concern, but rather the ability of the youth to survive in the world, and to find work, training, a marriage partner, etc.
Even though Mosa felt protective of her daughter, she was wise enough to notice when Sata needed some validation for the path she had chosen. A less mature, more self-centered parent might use her daughter’s mixed feelings to sabotage the opportunity her daughter had arranged.