But ship design was what was primarily occupying her and the rest of the Group at the moment. All these mails now piled up on Maj’s “desk” involved last-minute changes to the craft — suggestions and alterations, ideas picked up and immediately discarded, rude remarks about other people’s ideas (or one’s own), bad jokes, fits of nervousness or excitement, and various expressions of scorn, panic, or self-satisfaction. The Group had picked a side to align itself with in the Battle, had made some new friends and some new enemies, and was, Maj judged, pretty much ready to get out there now and go head-to-head with some of the Archon’s “Black Arrow” squadrons. Their own “Arbalest” ships were both effective and handsome — a point about which, considering the quality of the rest of the game, Maj had had some concern.
Most designers who simply adapted astronomical photos from the Hubble and Alpher-Bethe-Gamow Space Telescopes for their scenarios wound up, despite the sometimes spectacular nature of the images, with backgrounds that looked hard and cold. Maj wasn’t sure what Oranief had done to his “exteriors,” but they somehow looked hard and warm. It was an unusual distinction, this ability to make space, already beautiful enough, look even more so, to make blackness more than just black, but also dark and mysterious, and either threateningly so-so that you looked over your shoulder nervously while you were flying — or kindly so, so that you hung there in the darkness with a feeling that something approved of you being there. However Oranief did it, the effect of Cluster Rangers, the sense of depth in a game, of it all meaning more somehow than it looked as if it did, was like nothing else on the Net, and people had been flocking to join the sim as a result. Maj was glad that she and the Group had gotten in early, since there was talk of the designer closing down admissions soon and limiting the number of users to those who had already signed up.
She sighed and put the last mail aside, a panicky voice-mail from Bob, who had been complaining that he wasn’t sure the camber of the wings on the Arbalest craft was deep enough. Maj recognized this for what it was — last-minute nerves. “Mail routine,” she said.
“Running, boss,” said her work space in a pleasant, neutral female voice.
“Start reply. Bobby, baby,” Maj said, “if you think I for one am going to support you in yet another change of design the day before the balloon goes up, you’re out of your mind. We have a beautiful ship. We are going to beat the butts off the Black Arrows when they come after us.” When—the thought made the hair on the back of Maj’s neck prickle a little, for there was something inhumanly nasty about the way the Black Arrows flew — too quick to be affected by G’s, too merciless in the aftermath of an attack. There were rumors in the game that the Black Arrow craft were flown by the undead…and it was equally rumored that Free Fighter squadrons should do anything to avoid being taken alive by their enemies, lest they get that way themselves. Not that we’ve seen that many squads survive an attack by them in the first place, she thought. “So just weld your spinal vertebrae together for the time being and play the man. We’re going to be fine. Signed, Maj. End mail.”
“Queue or immediate send?” said Maj’s workspace.
“Send.” She sighed, glanced up. “Time?”
“Nine sixteen P.M.”
“Oh, gosh, and the Muf is still up,” Maj said to herself. She got up, plucked the icon-sphere of the last e-mail from Bob out of the air, picked up the remaining ones from where they lay on the table, and strolled over to the “filing cabinet” where she kept the Cluster Rangers material — a virtual “box” the shape of an Arbalest fighter. She pulled up the canopy of the fighter and stuffed the little message spheres down into it, then closed the canopy and took one last look at the fighter’s design. The beautifully back-slanted wings were perfect, even though they were more often than not superfluous. The fighter spent most of its time in deep space. Still, the group had designed into the ship the ability to go atmospheric if necessary — it was intended to be an ace-in-the-hole. Not many designers retained that capability, opting instead to use shuttlecraft or transporter platforms for their on-planet work. In the upcoming Battle, conditions were ripe to exploit the ship’s versatility.
“‘Camber,’” she muttered. “Bob needs his head examined.”
She turned toward the “door” into the Muffin’s space and headed through it. Muffin was still sitting on her rock and reading to the dinosaurs — one particularly large stegosaur was looking over her shoulder, while chewing a mouthful of grass.
Do they really eat grass? Maj wondered.
“And the woodcutter said—”
Maj peered over the Muffin’s shoulder briefly. “Come on, you,” she said. “Bedtime.”
There was a general groan of annoyance from the dinosaurs. Way up above her, a tyrannosaur bent down and most expressively showed its teeth. “Yeah, you, too,” Maj said, unimpressed, waving a hand expressively in front of her face. “Wow, when did you brush last?”
“It’s not my fault,” the tyrannosaur said. “I eat people.”
“Yeah, well, you could try flossing in between meals,” said Maj, wondering once more who was doing the programming for these creatures. They were somebody’s sim and theoretically came from someone who had been qualified to write sims for small children, though at moments like this Maj wondered exactly what those qualifications looked like. At any rate, she doubted they were doing the Muffin any particular harm. Her little sister was in some ways unusually robust.
“I didn’t finish the story,” the Muffin said, annoyed.
“Okay,” Maj said. “Finish it up. Then bedtime.”
The Muffin opened her book. The dinosaurs leaned down again. “And the woodcutter chopped the wolf open, and Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother fell out. Then the woodcutter took great stones and put them in the wolf’s belly, and sewed the wolf up again, and threw it in the lake, and it never came back up. And the kindly woodcutter took Red Riding Hood home to her mother and father, who cried and laughed when they saw her, and made her promise never to go into the woods alone by herself again.”
The Muffin closed the book, and the dinosaurs stood up around her with a kind of sigh of completion. “Good night,” Muffin said to them, and there was a chorus of grunts and hoots and growls, and they all stalked off among the trees, where darkness began to fall.
Maj suddenly began to wonder why she had been bothering to worry about the saurians. Chopping wolves open, stuffing them with stones, and throwing them in lakes—?! I don’t remember that being in the story I read. But then it had been a long time ago…. “All done?” she said to the Muffin, picking her up.
“All done,” said Muffin. The virtual landscape faded away, replaced by Maj’s little sister’s bedroom.
Maj got the Muffin into her pajamas and put her in bed. “What did you make of that story, small stuff?” Maj said.
“I didn’t make it. It was there.”
“I mean, what do you think it meant?”
“That you shouldn’t go into the forest by yourself, or talk to strangers,” the Muffin said. “Unless you’re a grown-up, or you have an ax. And it’s very bad to kill people, or eat people. Unless you’re a dinosaur and can’t help it.”