Sirius Academy (Jezebel's Ladder) (4 page)

Red went back to her new dorm room to unpack. It took three
minutes, including putting the underwear into her drawers. Risa laughed at the old
Disney Princess nightshirt. “It’s a little small.”

“It still covers everything,” the
younger girl protested.

“This is college,
chica
.”

“It was the last gift my dad ever
gave me.”

“Fine, but don’t let the other
girls see. The six of us on this floor share a bathroom, and word travels.”

Red watched Spanish soap operas on
the bedroom computer screen for half an hour waiting for her food crate to show
up. When it didn’t, Red put on her goggles and a NASA ball cap. “Do you know
where I could find this TA, a guy named Zeiss?”

Risa half-heartedly doodled on her
thermodynamics homework. “Nah, but if he’s a TA, he’ll be in our meta. The guys
are in pod one. What’s he teach?”

“Math.”

“Oh . . . Z-man! He’s only been
here this semester but the mils hate his guts.”

“Why? Does he have long hair?”

“I dunno. I’ve never seen him.”

Red tried to pull up his file, but
he was too new for her to have data. “Well, any guy who pisses off a third of
the school can’t be all bad.”

As she walked around the clinic to
pod one, she scanned the web for information on Zeiss. His driver’s license
said he was twenty. The picture was a clean-shaven blond with a firm jaw who
could’ve been a German extra in a WWII movie—no ponytail. He was a
wunderkind
with several publications. The older ones were on dry topics like improving
cryptography in the age of quantum computing. He worked at the CERN physics lab
and published respectable but dull math papers. Three months ago, he was struck
by inspiration—how to use quantum entanglement to judge the speed and time
distortion of a near-light-speed spacecraft. His fingerprints vanished from the
web soon after.
Pretty good for a nat,
she thought.

The front door to his group pod was
locked. Someone had splattered the buzzer for his unit with yellow paintballs,
gluing it into the ‘on’ position. Impatient, she pulled out her Fortune
Aerospace badge and waved it over the door security scanner. She smiled when the
lock clicked open.

The TAs had two rooms each: a public
office and private bedroom. However, they shared public facilities like the
other dorm dwellers. A schedule was posted by his door.

September - December:

06:00 Teacher’s gym

07:15 Breakfast at restaurant

08:00 Armed Combat at main dojo
(with Sorenson)

09:00 Intro to Alien Tech (with Sorenson)

10:00 Intro to Quantum Theory

11:00 Lunch at restaurant

12:00 Math for Space Navigation
I

1:00  Office hours

4:00  Dissertation Research – do
not disturb. THIS MEANS YOU.

Red knocked. All the prefabricated
pod doors on the island were calibrated to 6’3”, the maximum height for an
astronaut. The man who answered was just a little taller than the opening. However,
all sense of menace evaporated with she saw his sandals and T-shirt with the periodic
table of the elements. He’d circled Carbon on the chart with permanent marker and
written ‘you are here.’ He held out a credit card and asked, “Where’s the
pizza?”

She extended her empathy. He tasted
like roast beef with brown gravy—boring but necessary. Though, the thought of
red meat was making her hungry. She shut off her empathy because her mouth
wouldn’t stop watering. “I’m a new student and Professor Horvath said you might
be able to help me.”

“I don’t tutor beginning algebra.”

“I’ve been studying Tensor Calculus
and Field Theory,” she asserted.

“Pull the other one. Who put you up
to this?”

“Check my transcript—Miranda Scarlett
Benson.”

He smiled. “Step into my office,
Miss. Leave the door open.” There were whiteboards on three walls and a desk on
the other. A few minutes of typing on his console later, he said, “Your photo
isn’t in the system yet. Do you have any ID?”

Red panicked when she saw a photo
of Jezebel Hollis on the screen. “Like blondes, do you?”

“Huh? Oh, these are my course notes
for tomorrow’s class on navigation.” He scrolled up to show the title—Hollis
Curves on Lunar Escape. “Her solution was pure elegance.”

Shaking, she passed him her Fortune
Aerospace badge and pilot’s license. “I’m sixteen.”

He checked her credentials. “Pilot,
huh? I guess we know why Horvath sent you to me.” When she cocked her head, the
young man explained, “Pilots have been skating for too long around here. People
give them a few extra points and look the other way when they bend the rules.
Not in my classes. Space doesn’t grade on a curve, Miss. Our number-one
directive at Sirius Academy is the safety of the astronauts.”

She struggled to hold back a smile
as he built up steam on a favorite rant.

“The ancient Romans had a test for
new bridges: the engineer who built it lay underneath while the first wagon
went across. That avoids a lot of sloppy work from . . . Is something funny?”

“No. I just figured out why the
mils paint-balled you. And I’m on your side. No one rides for free.”

Mollified, he admitted, “The paint
was for something else. Switzerland has mandatory military service, and I was
exempted for unspecified reasons.”

“None of my business.”

“Thank you. Common courtesy isn’t always
common.” Then he continued reading her transcript. “Miss Benson, you seem
bright and highly capable, but you’re still lacking a few prerequisites.”

“Call me Red. Transcripts don’t
tell the whole story.” She took off her goggles to give him the full effect of
her cute eyelashes. When he didn’t melt, she guessed why the mils hated him—gay.
She added, “I’ll solve any problem you give me.”

“I’ll take that bet,” he said,
disappearing into his private quarters. Rummaging through the papers on his
desk, he returned with a problem. “This one. I’ll give you three hours, and you
can use my whiteboards. If you prefer pencil, I can . . .”

Red rolled her eyes up into her
head and went into a computation trance. He caught her before she fell out of
the chair and carried her to his bedroom. Laying her on the comforter, he
checked her heart rate and breathing. As if this were a drill, he hit the red
button at the base of his badge. “Dr. Marsh.”

Five seconds later, a man answered,
“Problem?”

“Student with spontaneous
catatonia—navel staring. Female, age sixteen.”

“Crash team’s on its way,” the doctor
said, already running.

“Should I open the emergency hatch
on the ceiling?”

“No, just open the front door for
us. ETA two minutes.”

Zeiss pulled the power cord on his
personal computer, shoved his stack of files into a drawer, and spun the
combination lock on his file cabinet. He didn’t have time to put all the loose
papers away. He propped each door open with nearby math books as he rushed to
the front airlock.

****

Red opened her eyes in Zeiss’s bedroom.
It was even neater than the office. The only personal touch was a large framed
photo of a pale older woman and a smaller framed photo of a gorgeous blonde
with wavy hair. There was a game board with polished white and black stones on
the nightstand—Go, they called it. Red wobbled to the desk to grab paper and a
pen. She barely noticed the red pins in the map of the island above his
computer. She was almost done writing the answer to the math problem when the
TA came back to check on her. “Is this a prank? Students trying to find out
what I’m hiding in here?”

She was having trouble focusing. “That’s
the answer, right?”

“You faked a seizure and grabbed it
off my desk. This took me two days.” He flipped over the answer on the desk.

She shook her head. “No, see, you
kept all the variables. I plugged in approximations to three digits.”

He checked quickly. “You’re right.”

“It’s a gift.”

When her nose bled onto the floor,
he lifted her back onto the bed. “You’re an active. Quantum trio?”

“I can’t tell you,” she said
weakly. “I think it’s sweet you have a picture of your mom.”

Into the phone, he said, “Doc, she’s
back among the living, but she’s overextended herself with a mental page.”

“Roger. Make her lie down and give
her fluids. ETA in under one.”

“Affirmative. Do you want a bottle
of apple juice, tea, or milk?”

“Whatever you have handy that’s
sealed. Water would be fine,” she replied.

“No, part of the first aid for your
condition involves raising your blood sugar.” His utter calm helped to soothe
her.

“Tea.”

“Black or herbal.”

“Herbal.”

He pulled a bottle from the cooler and
handed it to her. “Japanese plum tea.”

“Ooo, this is good.”

Dr. Marsh tapped on the door. Zeiss
nodded to him. “I’ll wait outside so you can have your privacy.” He closed the
door to his bedroom on the way out.

Marsh checked her over. “When’s the
last time you ate?”

“Seventeen hours.”

“Last period?”

“Nine days ago. Normal cycle is
twenty.”

“Last time you took your
suppression meds?”

“This morning.”

When he finished, the doctor
concluded, “We need to put a monitor on you, overnight at a minimum.”

“That’s invasive,” Red objected.

“We need to re-baseline you and
adjust your regimen for this unique environment. Your instructions were to go
to the clinic first. Sometimes authorities say things for a reason.”

“Is mental processing harder here?
It felt like I was sucking a golf ball through a straw.”

“We need to reduce your meds
slowly, all of them. For most of the mental disciplines, it’s safer here to
learn, quieter. Do you know what a Shambhala zone is?”

“I’ve seen
Lost Horizons
,
but I’m not sure how that applies,” she admitted.

“For our purpose, it is a place of
perfect harmony. There are seven known areas on Earth where the influence of
the Collective Unconscious is muted, where the ocean of mental human noise gets
shallower, calmer.”

“Destructive interference, low
population?”

“Mostly. But this island is the
only zone that doesn’t belong to a hostile nation or spend most of the year
below zero Celsius.”

“Why does it move?”

“You’re not cleared for that
information yet,” the doctor said reflexively. “What matters is that brilliant
men like Dr. Lazlo are freed from the horrors of Ward Seven.”

Red knew the name of the high-security
asylum, the boogey man for all people with mental talents. Lose your balance
and you too could be drooling on the floor. “The instructor? What happens if
the island engines stall and we stop moving?”

“Don’t mention that possibility to
Lazlo. He has enough phobias. The island has eight sides, instead of six like
normal space construction, in order to provide higher redundancy for the
engines,” he said, lowering his voice. “What Shambhala means for you, young
lady, is that we can finally take you off the hormone suppressors. Here, in
this garden, we can afford to let you grow up without fear that you’ll burn out.”

He let the promise hang in the air.
Her eyes sparkled with the possibilities. She could be normal in this place.

“But,” he said loudly to get her
attention. “This episode was a warning. With your family history, you should
listen. You’re tapping the talent too much too soon. You need to learn more of
the foundations so you have a better springboard to leap off.”

She reached for her survival knife
out of instinct. “You know who I am?”

“Don’t worry, this room is secure. I’m
not stupid, young lady. A little hair dye doesn’t fool me. You were the first
documented human born with the alien talents these people came here to learn. As
the lead researcher in xenopsychiatry, we teach from your case history.”

“There are others?”

“Before you and since. But most of
our modern therapies are based on the way your body adapted to the talents. The
others went through the mandatory training to prepare them, rather like high-altitude
climbing. You’ll need a period of no-thought and recuperation in addition to
the monitor. Professor Horvath was explicit on this matter.”

“Trina has a monitor, too. So
that’s like the pot calling the kettle black,” Red grumbled.

“You’ll need to come back to the
clinic for tonight.”

“Don’t tell Z who or what I am,”
she begged, exercising the pinky-wiggle talent she’d inherited from her father.

He sighed. “Ethically, I couldn’t
if I wanted to.”

“Thank you. I need to keep my cover
here,” Red explained. “I don’t know what happened; I use quantum computing all
the time.”

“You borrow computing power from
others. Till now, almost everyone in your life, including your bodyguards, has
been an active. Your instructor is the opposite.”

“He’s a nat.”

The doctor shook his head. “Mr.
Zeiss is unusual. We call them non-emitters. A small number of people think in
different ways. Professor Sorenson needs this trait in order to be touched by
another person. They can be trained to dim their mental noise further with
practice. I’m told Mr. Zeiss can sneak up on an empath without causing a
ripple. His calm demeanor may have just as much to do with that.”

“Wait. How does this work? Is he
born with it like those people who were immune to the plague?”

The doctor smiled. “Ongoing
research. My theory is that he’s more focused and uses more of his processing
power than most. There’s not much left for you to steal. Once outside this
room, there’ll be no discussion of these theories.”

She nodded.

“Do you need someone to carry you?”