Another Window
Officers’ Lounge
USS Khitomer, high orbit over Velora Prime
The officers’ lounge overlooked Velora through three tall observation windows.
Below, the planet’s cloud bands drifted slowly beneath the ship. From this altitude the resonance towers were invisible. Only occasionally did a faint pulse of light ripple through the atmosphere, as though the planet were remembering something in its sleep.
Most of the tables were empty.
A pair of engineers argued amiably over gravimetric calibration near the replicators. Somewhere farther aft, someone was practicing cello—not performing, simply repeating the same four measures until they no longer sounded like practice.
Commander Hale sat near the window with a cup of tea, a data slate she had stopped reading several minutes earlier, and a paperback book.
Captain Arden arrived carrying another mug.
“You disappeared.”
“I wanted quiet.”
He noticed the book.
“Vonnegut?”
She nodded.
“I’ve only just started.”
He smiled.
“So you’re about to become suspicious of everyone.”
She laughed.
“I reached one paragraph that made me stop.”
She opened the book.
“Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before… He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.”
She closed the book gently.
“I’ve been wondering why the resentment.”
Arden looked out toward the planet.
“Not why the ignorance?”
“No.”
He sat opposite her.
“Good.”
For a while they listened only to the cello.
Finally Arden spoke.
“The first time I read that passage, I thought it was about education.”
“And now?”
“I think it’s about accounting.”
She frowned.
“Not financial accounting.”
He reached for the corner of her slate and drew two columns.
What I Paid
What I Expected
“We all keep ledgers.”
Under the first column he wrote:
Years.
Study.
Discipline.
Loss.
Sacrifice.
Then beneath the second:
Wisdom.
Arrival.
Certainty.
Completion.
“I don’t think the resentment comes from remaining ignorant.”
He rested the stylus beside the slate.
“I think it comes from discovering that reality never agreed to the exchange.”
Hale read the two columns again.
“The payment was finite.”
“The expected return wasn’t.”
He nodded once.
“The books don’t balance.”
Silence settled comfortably between them.
The cello began again.
After a while Hale reached for her own tablet.
“I listened to one of the Federation political broadcasts while we were waiting outside Conference Chamber Three.”
Arden smiled.
“I wondered why you brought Vonnegut.”
She looked genuinely surprised.
“They’re the same conversation?”
“Perhaps.”
She turned the tablet toward him.
“The speech was angry.”
He didn’t look at it.
“That’s normal.”
“It attacked its opponents.”
“Also normal.”
She waited.
He still didn’t reach for the tablet.
“What else?”
She searched for the sentence.
“It didn’t seem satisfied with criticizing its opponents.”
“No?”
“It seemed… irritated that people still had the freedom not to agree.”
Arden looked up.
He leaned back without speaking.
Almost half a minute passed.
Then he said quietly,
“Watch what the anger is aimed at.”
She waited.
“Anger at losses is normal.”
He paused.
“Anger at the possibility of future losses is the diagnostic.”
The words remained between them.
She read them silently once before asking,
“The possibility?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t understand.”
He stood and walked toward the observation windows.
Velora turned slowly beneath them.
“When we were in the conference chamber today…”
He did not turn around.
“…what was Renn really trying to remove?”
“The stabilizer.”
“No.”
She thought.
“The uncertainty.”
He nodded.
“He wanted the spectrograph to guarantee legitimacy.”
Another pause.
“He wanted tomorrow to stop being uncertain.”
She watched the cloud layer below.
“The instrument wasn’t being asked to understand the field.”
“It was being asked to close it.”
The sentence surprised both of them.
After a while Hale said,
“The politician wanted the electorate to stop being uncertain.”
“And the student?”
She looked down at Vonnegut’s book.
“He wanted learning to stop being uncertain.”
Arden smiled faintly.
“The instruments change.”
“The ledger doesn’t.”
Another long silence.
The cello had finally reached the end of the phrase.
Neither officer noticed.
“I’ve begun wondering,” Hale said quietly, “whether we mistake every good instrument for a machine that can finish something.”
Arden looked back toward the conference deck.
“The spectrograph.”
“The Constitution.”
“The classroom.”
“The election.”
“The book.”
Each object hung in the air for a moment before the next appeared.
None of them had been built to eliminate uncertainty.
Only to help people move through it.
Hale closed the paperback.
“The universe seems strangely unwilling to honor receipts it never issued.”
Arden laughed softly.
“No.”
He looked once more toward Velora.
“It seems content to let tomorrow remain open.”
Outside, the planet continued turning.
Inside, the conversation quietly joined the many others that had begun aboard the Khitomer—not because anyone had solved something, but because another pattern had become visible.
WE&P by: EZorrillaMc&Co
Travel in Life 