Wibbly Wobbly, Timey Wimey
Chapter 9: The Assistant to the Traveling Secretary’s Jeremiad
Chapter 9: The Assistant to the Traveling Secretary’s Jeremiad
Jaina Ende-Dogor took a languid sip of water and then, as if recoiling from the taste, spit it back into her bottle. She then poured it back into her mouth and threw the bottle into a recycling bin in the underground seat of the Interplanetary Commission on Portal Operation. As it made its way down the bin, it made a clanging noise.
Jaina never knew why she did that. A nervous tic, she presumed.
If you had asked her outright, she would have said that the butterfly circus had moved on from her stomach and the jumpsuits with their high-tech visors didn’t bother her anymore. But she never dealt with bureaucracy well, even at the university level, much less at an interplanetary level. And, well, burly monochromatic security officers moving in unison didn’t exactly inspire a welcoming feeling.
The topic of discussion for Jaina’s second visit also didn’t help her nerves on the inside. When she had convinced the ICPO to stop traffic from the portal before, they hadn’t given her very much time to come up with a solution. Transit between Sonnel and Rushmore generated big bucks, after all, and Jaina did empathize with the travelers separated from their families and their gainful employment by the stoppage. But she didn’t have any good answers for the ICPO, only a gut feeling that something had gone wrong. She had simulations, sure, but those didn’t prove anything, and the witness statements that she had contradicted her hypothesis.
“I’m not behaving very much like a scientist here,” she muttered to herself. The evidence would disprove her hypothesis, so she should move on and test another hypothesis. And the heuristics from the investigator’s toolkit weighed against her, too: she didn’t really have means, she didn’t really have motive, and she didn’t really have opportunity. Heck, she didn’t even have a suspect. That really came before the means/motive/opportunity triad.
Would she admit defeat here, at the gates of the ICPO, without even trying to make a case for a further portal suspension? No. But she didn’t really have a leg to stand on, and she certainly expected defeat.
Two jumpsuits arrived to escort her into the commission room, and she took a deep breath to prepare for the anticipated. Not the inevitable, she thought. Not the inevitable.
***
Luke Longstar thought the practice with Andrew Arrowsword had gone well. Despite some snickering, the team did seem willing to take him back, and despite the new age difference, Andrew seemed really excited to rejoin the team. Andrew gave him the impression that nothing really happened in Sanford, so he appreciated the opportunity to get back into the thick of things. Fair enough, Luke thought.
Dealings with the Cenian FA, on the other hand, went less swimmingly. In fact, they had started to go south.
As soon as they got word that Luke aimed to put Andrew on the team, he got a sternly worded message from some underling or other imploring him to reconsider his decision. The flunky had opined that Andrew had passed his physical prime ages ago and probably had some mental illness from being stuck in Sanford. It would be disastrous, nay, catastrophic to once again put Andrew Arrowsword at the helm of the Cenian NT’s ship.
The message sounded rather presumptuous, Luke thought, and strangely antagonistic. Who was the assistant to the traveling secretary to make a big deal about player selection? Frankly, it raised his hackles. Again, who the fuck was the assistant to the traveling secretary to make a big deal about player selection?
Luke thought he might want to do some digging into the assistant to the traveling secretary, and perhaps the traveling secretary, and perhaps the traveling secretary’s boss. Why would they hate Andrew Arrowsword so much, to the point of sending an invective-laden jeremiad his way? The Cenian NT’s manager wanted the answer — not only to figure out if the Cenian FA would mess with the upcoming World Cup qualification campaign, but also to figure out if it had anything to do with his earlier troubles with the Cenian FA.
Figuring out an angle of attack, then, would be his first priority.
***
Jaina emerged from the ICPO room dejected.
Of course, she knew this would happen. She knew that the ICPO would look at her paltry evidence that somebody had sabotaged the portal to put AT7093 closer to the machinery and laugh her out of the room. Figuratively. They laughed her out of the room, literally.
Well, at least one councilor did. The Drawkian male who had given her such a hard time at the earlier hearing, who had in fact voted against the proposal to close the portal for a trial period. He snickered at her incredibly weak argument, snickered when she concluded, and snickered at her paltry responses to the inevitable questions.
“Who would have done something like this?” they asked.
“I don’t know,” Jaina answered.
“Why would have some mysterious entity have done something like this?” they asked.
“I don’t know,” Jaina answered.
In the end, the ICPO voted unanimously to reopen the portal, ruling the case of AT7093 to be a case of unexpected technical malfunction based on the witness testimony. They would send a repair squadron posthaste, and when the repair squadron finished, they would reopen the portal to normal traffic. Travelers would breathe a sigh of relief, commerce would continue, money would roll into merchants’ coffers, everybody would win.
But Jaina still felt that something was afoot, and she vowed to find out exactly what had gone afoot. Of course, that was easier said than done, especially given her misadventures so far. She vowed to do it anyway.
***
Luke seemingly checked his watch every twenty seconds at the café, located a stone’s throw from the Semicircle and therefore frequented by government types wearing baggy suits and conservative ties. In his baggy suit and conservative tie, Luke would fit in. And he figured that his contact in the Cenian FA would fit in too.
Vera Kimeln had worked at the Cenian FA for her entire career, essentially. She and Luke had known each other for so long, he had forgotten where the two had met. In the twenty-two years that had vanished from Luke’s life, Vera had retired from the FA, but she knew the bureaucracy’s ins and outs better than any person that he could think of. And she was an expert in dealing with the organization’s internecine politics.
“Five minutes,” a gruff voice said from behind Luke.
Luke turned around and smiled. “Vera,” he said. “Good to see you. You look good.”
“For an old woman?” Vera said with a smile. “I probably jumped for joy when I saw on the news that you had finally come out of that godforsaken portal.”
“Yeah,” Luke said. “Want any coffee?”
“I can’t scarf anything down in five minutes,” said Vera. “As much as I’d like to.”
“Well, let’s cut right to the chase then,” said Luke. “Why does the Cenian FA hate Andrew Arrowsword so much?”
Vera’s face contorted into a frown. “I’m not sure I can tell you why,” she said. “But I can tell you when, at least. It started nearly twenty-two years ago.”
“Right before we came back from Drawkland?”
“Right around then.”
“The plot thickens.”
“Why didn’t I know this before?” asked Luke.
“I didn’t find out until recently,” said Vera. “But there was definitely an anti-Arrowsword faction starting back around World Cup 80.”
“Fuck,” said Luke. “Fuck.”
