“Probably not, but you could come close.” Cecelia extracted the first cube and fed in another. “This is what fox hunting is like—in fact, this is a cube I made three years ago.”
“You made—?”
“Well, I used to be under contract with Yohsi Sports. They’d mount the sim-cam in my helmet, and I wore the wires as well. . . .”
Heris felt that she’d fallen into another layer of mystery. What, she wondered, was “wearing the wires” and what did it have to do with a sports network? But she was tired of asking questions that must sound stupid, so she simply nodded. This time the cube was not of Cecelia riding, but from the rider’s viewpoint. . . . She saw the green grass blur between the horse’s ears, saw a stone wall approaching far too fast . . . and then it was left behind, and another appeared. Little brown and black and white things were running ahead, yelping, and other horses and riders were all around.
“Those are the foxes you’re chasing?” she asked finally, as field and wall followed wall and field, apparently without end. There were variations, as some fields were grassy and others muddy, and some walls were taller or had ditches on one side, but it seemed fairly monotonous. Not nearly as interesting as the varied challenges of the cross-country. Cecelia choked, then laughed until she was breathless.
“Those are hounds! The fox is ahead of the dogs; the dogs find the scent and trail the fox, and the horses follow the hounds.” Then she quit laughing. “I’m sorry. It’s not fair, if you’ve never been exposed to it, but I thought everyone knew about foxes and hounds.”
“No,” Heris said, between gritted teeth. Some of us, she wanted to say, had better things to do with our time. Some of us were off fighting wars so that people like you could bounce around making entertainment cubes for each other. But that was not entirely fair and she knew it. It probably did take skill to ride like that, although what the use of that skill was, once you’d gained it, she still could not figure out.
“Here.” Cecelia handed her yet another cube. “This is the text of an old book on the subject, and since it’s one of the few left, you might want to look at it. Bunny’s designed his entire hunt around it, even though we know that it predates the twentieth century, Old Earth, and things must have changed afterwards.”
Heris looked at the cube file labelled “Surtees” with suspicion. Apparently she would be expected to watch it on her own time. Historical nonsense about horses struck her as even more useless than current nonsense about horses.
“And to be fair, I think it’s time I schedule my first lesson in shipboard knowledge, or whatever you want to call it. Do you have time for a student later today?”
Cecelia was, after all, her employer, and she was making an effort to share an enthusiasm. Heris thought of all the things she’d rather do, but nodded. “Of course. When would you like to start?”
“Well . . . after lunch?”
“Fine.” Food always came first. But then, it should.
“You could eat with me,” Cecelia said, “and give me a head start. I don’t even know what you want me to learn.”
Meals with the owner. Heris started to grumble internally, then remembered that she’d already had meals with the owner . . . and it hadn’t been that bad. “Thank you,” she said. “I am at your service.”
Heris had no equivalent of the riding simulator to help Cecelia, but she used the next best: the computer’s three-dimensional visuals.
“This is a very nice hull,” she said. Always start with the positive. “You’ve got a fair balance of capacity and speed—”
“But my captains always said it was a slow old barge, compared to other ships,” Cecelia said. “A luxury yacht can’t be expected to compete—”
“You and I both know your former captains had other reasons,” Heris said. “It may be a luxury yacht, but we use a very similar hull for—” She stopped herself in time from saying for what, exactly, and managed to finish. “For missions that require a fair turn of speed. And you’ve got the right power ratio for it; whoever designed this adaptation chose well. Now—let me highlight each system in color, and you can begin to learn how it works.”
Cecelia, Heris found, was an apt pupil. She had a surprising ability to grasp 3-D structures, and spotted several features Heris had meant to mention before she could bring them up.
“Yes—you do have waste space there; that’s a design compromise, but it’s not a bad one. Look at the alternatives. If you ran the coolant this way—see—you get this undesirable cluster of conduits here—”
“Oh . . . and that’s supposed to be at a constant temperature—”
“Yes. Now, let’s add the electricals.”
They both lost track of time, and Cecelia’s deskunit finally beeped with a reminder about dinner. She looked surprised. “I didn’t—this isn’t really dull at all. I could learn this.”
“So you could. I’m glad I didn’t bore you.” Heris stood, and stretched. She would need a hot bath, to get the kinks out this time. “I’ll be going—I’ve got some crew business to take care of.”
“Well . . . thank you. Tomorrow, then?”
“I’ll look forward to it,” Heris said, hoping that could be taken for both sessions, though she was not in fact looking forward to more riding. But fair was fair, and Cecelia was as diligent a pupil as she could wish.
After a few days, Heris found herself enjoying the riding instruction more than she’d expected. The soreness wore off; she had good natural balance, and a lot of experience with simulators. It was less monotonous than the usual exercise apparatus in the crew gym, or swimming against the current in the pool. And she could not have asked for a more attentive owner. Cecelia had her own way of thinking about the various systems, relating them more often to equestrian matters than Heris thought necessary, but if she could understand better that way, why not? At least she was learning, paying attention . . . and in the future that might save her life.
Still, Heris had not forgotten the need for emergency drills. She herself gave a training session to the house staff and a separate one to Cecelia. Cecelia suggested letting Bates hand out the assignments to the young people, and Heris agreed. She had managed to avoid young Ronnie successfully so far.
That first unannounced shipwide drill would have made a good comedy cube, Heris thought later. She had entered the specs into the main computer the night before, using an event function that kept the time from her as well. It should have been simple: a single small fire, in one of the fire-prone areas. But very little went as planned. The alarm went off at 0400, ship’s time. Heris, fairly sure what it was, nonetheless responded as she would to any emergency. Those crew members she thought of as the best arrived at their emergency stations within the time limit; the others straggled in late, in one case three minutes late. (“I was in the head,” mumbled the guilty party. “Havin’ a bit of a problem, I was.”)
Cecelia logged in within the limit, as did Bates and the cook (who, spotting the faked “fire,” promptly put an upturned garbage container on it: the right decision). Four of the young people sauntered in to their assigned stations late (but flustered) and two did not appear at all.
“They have to be somewhere,” Cecelia said, when Heris told her.
“Oh, they are. They’re in the number five storage bay, ignoring the whole thing.”
“But they can’t—who is it?”
“Ronnie and George,” Heris said, having no more patience with them. “Since you gave them their assignments, via Bates—”
“I’ll be glad to ream them out, but are you sure they heard the alarm in there?”
“All compartments have a bell. No, they’re hiding out, for purposes of their own. One thing I could do is put a scare into them. They think this is just a stupid drill . . . but they don’t know what the supposed emergency is. If I dump power in there . . . take off the AG, or lose a little pressure . . .”