A Tower in Space-Time (The Stasis Stories #5) Read online

  He turned and started toward the girls while Raffa blew a big raspberry behind him. Kaem grinned, “You ladies want to go for a pastry and a hot chocolate?”

  “We were already planning to,” Sonia said, blowing a raspberry back at Raffa. She turned and led them away.

  The three went to a little café across the street. There Sonia talked Bana into trying an espresso and Kaem ordered his hot chocolate. After some discussion, they chose their pastries and moved to a table.

  “Should we take them with us and go watch Raffa’s game?” Bana asked.

  Sonia scoffed, “We should not! As soon as we got there, Raffa would be back to badgering Kaem to play. We deserve to eat our treats in peace. Then we can go be badgered. It’s not like we’re going to be missing any world-class football after all.” She leaned forward as if divulging a confidence, “Raffa’s team isn’t very good and they’re playing against one of the top teams in their league, so it may be a… what do you call it in America? A slaughter?”

  They all laughed, but then Sonia’s phone chimed. She rolled her eyes, “It’s Raffa!” she said exasperatedly. She spoke in rapid Italian for a moment, then took an argumentative tone. Finally, she turned to Kaem. “Their… goalkeeper’s sick. Raffa’s begging you to play in his place. He says there’re no rules you need to know other than that you need to keep the ball out of the goal.”

  “Can’t one of their own players sub in at goal?” Kaem asked.

  She shrugged, “Several others also didn’t come.” She grinned at Bana, “Probably hungover.” She turned back to Kaem, “So, they’re a man short. If they put someone else in goal, they’ll be short on the field. Raffa says to tell you he’s begging.”

  Kaem rolled his eyes. “Tell him I’ll be there after I finish my pastry.”

  Sonia started getting up, speaking rapid Italian to Raffa. She picked up her pastry and espresso, waved Kaem and Bana after her, and left the restaurant.

  Sounding disgruntled, Kaem said, “I guess I don’t get to finish my pastry.” Nonetheless, he got up and went after her, slurping at his hot chocolate.

  Sonia disconnected, then looked at Kaem. “Substituting in after the game begins is a big no-no so Raffa’s begging you to come now. I played goalkeeper on my secondary school team, so I can give you some suggestions.” As they hurried to the field, she proceeded to tell him he could touch the ball with his hands, what the penalty box was, that the goalkeeper could leave the penalty box but didn’t do it often, and then reeled off rules and strategies for how to position himself depending on where the ball was on the field.

  Bana thought to herself, There’s no way he’s going to remember all that!

  Then she remembered his phenomenal memory.

  ~~~

  When they got back to the field, the teams were already on the field and Raffa was arguing with the referee. Seeing Kaem, he waved him onward, gave him a goalkeeper’s shirt, and sent him down to the goal.

  The game started moments after that.

  Bana turned to Sonia, “Why don’t you go down and stand behind the goal? You could shout suggestions to Kaem as the game goes on.”

  Sonia seemed startled by the suggestion. “That’s not allowed,” she said with a grin, then looked back out at the field.

  The other team had control of the ball and was moving it toward team Palma’s goal. “Oh…” Sonia said, “this is going to be bad.”

  Even Bana could tell that the other team was moving the ball downfield without much trouble. Then the one with the ball kicked it across the field to a teammate who took a shot on goal.

  Kaem blocked by catching the ball.

  “Madonna!” Sonia exclaimed, “He’s so fast! I didn’t even dream he could stop that shot!”

  Kaem took a couple of steps forward and booted the ball way down field. Bana thought he was just trying to get it away from the goal area, but it came down near one of his team’s players who promptly drove toward the opposite goal.

  “Madonna?” Bana asked.

  “Oops,” Sonia said, covering her mouth. “It’s Italian…? I think you call it cussing?”

  Bana laughed, “Yes. Cussing’s very popular in America.”

  Sonia grinned, “In Italy too.” She looked back out at the field, “You guys are tricking us, right? No one could handle the ball like that without decades of experience.”

  Bana shrugged, “If it’s a trick, I’m not in on it.”

  The Palma player missed his attempt on goal and so the ball turned over to the opposing team. They promptly drove back down toward Kaem.

  Once again, Kaem caught their shot on goal and sent it far back down the other way, where, again, it landed surprisingly close to one of the Palmas.

  This set the rhythm of the game, the opponents controlling the ball and driving downfield toward Kaem where he blocked their goal and kicked it back down to one of the Palmas near the other end. The Palmas didn’t get many shots on goal and never made one. They only occasionally managed to steal the ball from the other team who controlled the ball the majority of the game. Their opponents probably averaged two shots on goal for every attempt by the Palmas, but not a single one got past Kaem.

  The only goal, astonishingly enough, was one of Kaem’s kicks that traveled the length of the field, bounced once in front of the other goalie who’d been playing downfield a way, sailed over his head, bounced again, then rolled on into the goal.

  When it was over, Bana realized Kaem had not only blocked all the other team's attempts on goal but had made the only score in the game. The Palmas surrounded Kaem in a frenzy, shouting, “Seba, Seba, Seba, and then pulling Kaem along as they left the field.

  When Bana asked Sonia where they were going, she said the team was proclaiming its need for a celebratory beer. This, to Bana’s surprise, was consumed at the same café where she, Sonia, and Kaem had earlier had their coffee and hot chocolate.

  There, Bana found herself sitting next to a man who, in English much weaker than Sonia’s, asked, “It is true you are daughter to Emmanuel Seba?”

  She nodded.

  He looked over at Kaem, “And he is son?”

  “My brother, yes.”

  “And, true, he not play football before? All that skill was… passed from father to son by…?”

  “I think the word you’re looking for is ‘inherited,’” Bana said. “And I don’t know. I’m pretty sure he’s never played socc… football before, but I have no idea how he got to be good at it, if he actually is good. After all, the only thing he did in the whole game was block shots on goal and kick them back downfield.”

  “Ah yes,” the man said solemnly. “If I do that ‘only thing’ I be rich man.”

  Raffa had arrived behind Kaem at that moment. He grabbed his cousin’s shoulders and shouted, “Yes! Listen to Marco! Quit your job, move to Florence, become wealthy beyond your dreams!”

  Kaem laughed, “Sorry. Unfortunately, I like the job I have.”

  “No!” the men nearby chorused lamentingly. This broke up into individual suggestions on how to get on an Italian tea—as if no one could believe he would pass up the chance.

  ***

  On his way to class Monday morning, Kaem mused that his mother had been correct again. Jetlag flying west wasn’t as bad as it was going east, though he still felt tired. From there, his thoughts moved on to daydreaming about how much fun their Italian trip had been and when they might be able to make a trip to his father’s homeland in Tanzania.

  In his earbud, his phone said, “You have a call from Raffaele Amato.”

  “Put him on…! Hey Cousin. Are you needing me to tell you one more time that I’m not interested in becoming a footballer?”

  “No, no, I’m convinced, even though I think you’re crazy. I’m calling because I watched your talk on Stade! Do you have enough pull to slip Amato Industries in as Staze’s European distributors?”

  Nonplussed, Kaem asked, “What’re you thinking you’d distribute?”

 
“I’m not sure. I don’t know enough about it to even suggest anything. I just know Stade has to be the opportunity of the century and I’m hoping my cousin might help us get on the inside track. Does the company have a product it’s trying to get out to the world?”

  “Um…” Kaem hesitated, “you guys make small appliances, right?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “At some point, we’re hoping to develop a home appliance that’ll put food in stasis to preserve it.”

  “Oh! Like a refrigerator?”

  “More the size of a microwave or even smaller. Just big enough you could put leftovers or a loaf of bread in stasis, then use the machine to destaze your food later. Once they’re in stasis you could store them anywhere.”

  “What about a pizza? Two of its dimensions are a lot bigger than a loaf of bread.”

  “Yeah… there are a lot of things we haven’t worked out yet. Maybe there’s a better way to make it. One thing you’ll need to help us with is a system to keep people from opening up the appliances to reverse engineer the stazer, or to use the stazer in your appliance to staze things we don’t want them stazing.”

  “Like what?” Raffa asked, sounding puzzled.

  “For instance, to make a pistol that’s small, and light as air. Or a three-meter-long, one-millimeter-thick wire that terrorists could drive into the freeway so the part that’s sticking up would wreck cars… Maybe there are other weapons we won’t want unleashed on the world. Most of the uses for Stade seem to be more in the way of defensive, rather than offensive weapons, but we don’t want to figure out that someone’s come up with some horrible weapon and made millions of them before we start trying to stop them.”

  “Oh… wouldn’t the radar that guides cars see that wire that’s stuck in the road? Stade’s supposed to be a perfect reflector, right?”

  “Maybe it would,” Kaem said. “I hope so. But a one-millimeter wire would have a pretty narrow radar profile.”

  “How are you thinking we could keep people from opening up our appliance?”

  “If we make the outer shell out of Stade and form it in one piece around the internal components, they couldn’t get in without a destazer big enough to put your appliance in. We could install a system that fries the circuit board if the outer shell disappears with a destasis event.”

  Raffa sounded doubtful, “Wouldn’t they still have a good chance of figuring it out from the fried circuit board? I know the board wouldn’t work, but you could still figure out what the components were and how they were wired up.”

  “Circuit board that burns up. Unlabeled components. Chips that break down under a load high enough to fry the board. Stazing requires some very sophisticated chips and software.”

  “Wait, couldn’t someone that wanted to build their own stazer illegally just download your patent?”

  “We’ve decided not to patent it,” Kaem said. “We’re counting on its complexity and our secrecy.”

  “Dio mio!” Raffa exclaimed.

  “Um, what’s that mean?”

  “‘My God!’ That seems crazy. Why no patent?”

  “The government here in the States can decide to make patented inventions illegal,” Kaem said. “Anything they think poses a threat to national security. Then no one can make them except the government itself.”

  “Oh…” Raffa said thoughtfully. “Well let me talk to the family about the possibilities and I’ll get back to you. Are you going to trust us with the secret?”

  “Um, sorry, no. Mr. X is a believer in the idea that if two people know it, it’s no longer a secret. We’d provide you with stazers to install in your appliances.”

  “Hmm. Someone’s going to know how they’re built. Unless he thinks he can make millions of them all by himself?”

  “Yeah,” Kaem said with a sigh. “We’ve still got to work that out… maybe you could help us figure out how to use some of your robotic assemblers.”

  ~~~

  Raffa disconnected just before Kaem stopped at his usual coffee shop. Although in his case, since he didn’t drink coffee, it should be called a hot-chocolate shop. He took a bear claw pastry to go with his chocolate and started for the campus, not having arrived early enough to dawdle at the café.

  He passed a young woman on the sidewalk. As he did, she looked up at him. “Hey, how’s your laptop?”

  Recognizing the coffee spill girl, he said, “Hi Ronnie! The laptop’s fine.”

  Her eyes widened, “How’d you know my name?”

  “You wrote it next to your phone number.”

  “Oh, good. I was afraid you were some kind of pervo stalker, tracking me down through nefarious means.”

  “Well, shucks,” Kaem said, “and here I was hoping you left me your name and phone number so I could call you…” he stumbled, unable to think of any actual witty banter about what he might’ve called her for, then finally said, “… to see if you wanted to go to dinner.” Dinner! He thought, embarrassed, I’ve got to come up with something more interesting than dinner to invite women to do!

  “You haven’t even introduced yourself!” Ronnie said, frowning as if appalled by his boorish manners. “Besides, you can’t invite a lady out to dinner this early in the morning!”

  “Sorry,” Kaem said, “I’m Kaem Seba.”

  Putting out her hand, she said, “Ronnie Marinca.”

  He shook her hand, said he was pleased to meet her, then frowned. “I didn’t realize there was a designated time of day for asking people out. When would I—”

  With a grin, she glanced at her watch and interrupted, “Not until at least 8:30 a.m.”

  Kaem glanced at his watch and snorted. It was 8:29. “Ah, well, give me a minute and I’ll do it right.” They walked in silence a little way, then he rechecked his watch and said, “Would you like to go to dinner with me?”

  “Where?”

  Jeez, Kaem! Think these things through! he thought, stifling his initial impulse to invite her to the Cavalier Buffalo. He might like the food there, but he felt pretty sure it wasn’t an appropriate place to take a first date. To Ronnie, he said, “How about Molly’s?”

  “Molly’s?” Ronnie asked with a twinkle in her eye, “Are you inviting me over to an old girlfriend’s place and begging her to make us dinner?”

  Kaem grinned back at her, “I wouldn’t do that until the second date. I was suggesting a restaurant named ‘Molly’s.’ I think it’s a nice little restaurant, though it has kind of a weird menu.”

  “It’s a date,” she said, eyes still twinkling. “I’ll meet you there. Date and time?”

  “Friday at seven. I could pick you up?”

  “Friday at seven is fine. I don’t tell strange pervo stalkers where I live.” She turned to a different sidewalk and gave him a wave back over her shoulder, “See you there.”

  “I’m not a strange pervo stalker,” Kaem called after her, trying to suppress his laugh long enough to sound indignant.

  “Sure you’re not,” she called back.

  As he continued toward the physics building, he thought, So, I’m crazy about Arya but she won’t have much to do with me. Lee wants to go out and I like her, but I’m just not that interested in dating her. Dez is scary and wonderful but hardly ever in Charlottesville. And Ronnie makes four. Is that too many, or is it not enough since I don’t seem to be able to… don’t seem to be able to what?

  Is the only thing I don’t like about Lee the fact that Arya’s been pushing me on her?

  He decided he didn’t know.

  ***

  Wilson Delbet had been moved down to Staze East so he could more easily work on the energy storage project. For a few days he’d shuttled back and forth to Charlottesville, but then he’d packed up his stuff and moved into a room in one of the empty farmhouses down at Staze East. Because temporary workers could stay in them rent-free, almost all the farmhouse rooms on the campus itself were full. All the motels in the area were full and farmers were renting empty rooms in their homes at a premi
um. So, Wilson was lucky to have the room even if it was small and he had to share a kitchen and bathroom with others.

  But it pissed him off. He thought Staze should’ve arranged better housing.

  Today he was finally scheduled to cast some Stade with Lanis, so he’d finally learn a little more about the process he’d been commissioned to steal. He’d gotten a few minutes alone with a stazer and could say with confidence that there was little to learn from looking at one. It had a jack for a power cord, a USB jack, and two separate sockets, one that looked electrical and one that looked fiberoptic. Without seeing a stazer in use, he couldn’t say much more, but it did have a set of screws in the bottom, so at worst, he could just sneak in one night and open one up. A set of pictures of its innards—circuit boards, transformers, and power supplies—should presumably go a long way to satisfying his primary employers’ desire to know how they worked.

  He met Lanis in the enormous, diffusely-echoing, underground chamber Lanis had been in charge of building until recently. The space tower took off from a huge pivoting box in the main chamber. The walls were completely covered with panels of dimpled Stade, suggesting the stuff wasn’t expensive if you knew how to make it yourself. A stack of the 1.5 by 3 meter panels stood in the corner, so he studied them while he waited for Lanis to arrive. Only a millimeter thick, they had slots on one edge and fins on the other that let them be fit together. There were twenty-centimeter troughs along the panel’s edges that puzzled him.

  Lanis arrived while he was still looking at them, so he asked what the troughs were for.

  “Plumbing and wiring,” she answered.

  “Oh…” Wilson said, immediately seeing how pipes and wires could be run in the troughs and covered with plates that would screw into the holes in recesses along the troughs. That’d let you modify your wiring and repair your plumbing without dismantling the wall… Which, he realized, would be important since you couldn’t cut into a Stade wall like you could one made of sheetrock. “Um, I can see having troughs like this for a house, but in an industrial setting like this?”