Even when the evidence had become overwhelming, supported by so many sets of statistics and so many superbly motivated arguments that there was no ground left to stand on, teachers refused to accept the obvious truth—that they were not needed in the classroom. With the perfection of inexpensive two-way cable television in the 1970s even their baby-sitting function ceased to have value. The sad result was the infamous Teachers Riots of 2002, in which hundreds of teachers and administrators died and thousands more suffered serious injury.
(It is of course important to remember that "teacher," as it was used during the Industrial Age of Old Earth and well into the beginning of the Electronic Age, did not have in any but the most general sense the meaning that we give the word "Teacher" today.)
—Encyclopedia Galactica Fifth Edition, Volume V, p. 1134
Harvard was so exceedingly small an asteroid that its curvature was obvious at all times. Like standing on a well-landscaped billiard ball. Coyote was not quite willing to admit that it made him nervous; on the other hand, in spite of all scientific adjustments that eliminated sensations of motion, equalized gravity, and generally kept the thing suitable for Planet & Asteroid, he had the uncomfortable sensation that it ought to be easy to fall off of. The trees, for example, had a decided tilt. Those at a distance tilted away from him.
"This world," he said to nobody, "is not flat. It is round." As was of course true of all worlds with which he was familiar, but on none of the others had he longed for a safety line.
The Student who had come up behind him must have been used to this reaction. He greeted Coyote from a distance obviously intended not to startle the already-uneasy visitor.
"After a day or two, Citizen Jones," he said soothingly, "you get used to it and it seems just as big as any other place you've ever lived. All a matter of perception, you know."
"I find that hard to believe," Coyote grumbled. He grabbed his beard, for want of anything else to hold on to, and tugged at it ferociously.
"It's true, though," said the Student, smiling at Coyote as his visitor turned—carefully—to face him. "Unfortunately, since your visit is to be so brief, you won't have a chance to put my claim to the test."
"You're a kind of official greeting committee," Coyote said.
"A committee of one, Citizen. Here to welcome you to Multiversity Two. May your visit be productive."
Coyote had discovered that there was a certain angle, just beyond the Student's shoulder, at which he could fix his eyes without being able to see the horizon. He looked fixedly at the spot and tried smiling back.
"It's all right to be scared, you know," said the Student gently. "People always are. Why don't we go indoors where you can be more comfortable?"
"How much more ... outdoors ... is there?"
The Student waved a vague arm to the left, then to the right. "Just a park," he said. "A small waterfall, run by solar energy. An artificial lake for swimming. A few gardens."
Coyote braced himself, took his eyes away from the security spot, and looked around. Trees. Flowering hedges. Paths leading away, all leading downhill, under more trees. Wildflowers, mostly Old Earth varieties so far as he could tell, waving in tilted banks of purple, white, and gold.
"It's pretty," he said. "Prettier than Mars-Central. But I think you need guard rails all around it."
The Student grinned. "You'll come inside, then?"
Coyote nodded. "Please."
Ahead of them was a half-circle of large domes, connected by a tubular corridor, all of it the blinding white of pyroceramic, and relieved by no decoration whatsoever. Whoever had designed this institution of learning had not wanted anyone to be confused by its appearance.
"This," said the Student, leading the way toward the nearest of the domes, "is the College of Religious Science. There are one hundred and thirty Students living here."
"Why so many?"
The Student shrugged. "Religious Science is a popular major right now," he said.
"Any special reason for that, you think?"
He smiled, and Coyote realized that he was a very handsome young man in spite of the bizarre outfit—consisting entirely of pseudo-tattoos—that he was wearing. It wasn't easy to disregard the dozens of tattoos of yellow roses the Student had seen fit to apply to his person ... wreaths and garlands and swags and sprays of them, complete with leaves, thorns, and tastefully executed bees. The fact that his skin was a rich dark brown helped; Coyote assumed that white-skinned Students stuck to red roses. Out of the small spray that circled the Student's eyes and trailed artistically down his nose and over his chin looked a fine honest face, with brown eyes, a good mouth, and high strong cheekbones. All hidden among the foliage.
"Fads in majors come and go," he was saying. "Just like they do in anything else."
"Clothes, for example," Coyote observed, following him along the corridor that circled the domes.
"Clothes?"
"Mm-hmm."
"You should see some of the others."
"What?"
"If you think I'm strangely dressed, Citizen, you should see some of the others."
"It doesn't bother you to have a bee crawling up your penis?"
"What bee?"
Coyote pointed.
"That's only a tattoo, Citizen, it's not alive."
Coyote shuddered. "It would make me nervous," he said, and was rewarded by hearty laughter that indicated to him what a funny fellow he was. Him and his conservative navy blue loincloth. With a narrow white pinstripe.
He couldn't decide exactly what he thought of this corridor they were following. It showed no signs of the reckless expenditure of taxpayers' money that had been mentioned to him in his briefing for this mission. Bare synthowood floors, and rather poor imitations of washed pine, if he was any judge. Light globes suspended in suitable places. Banks of plants, an occasional sculpture flickering in a niche. Nothing ostentatious. Nothing to indicate that this was the dwelling-place of hundreds of the most brilliant citizens of the Three Galaxies.
"Where is the Dean's office?" he said abruptly, tearing his eyes away from a mobile that seemed determined to turn his head inside out. "I'd like to get this over with."
"Certainly, Citizen Jones," the Student said. "Follow the corridor on round, and you'll come to Room Thirty-nine—that's Citizen Dean O'Halloran's quarters. She's expecting you."
"Thank you, Citizen Student."
"Not at all. I'm pleased to have met you—it's not every day, after all, that one meets a specialist in Twentieth-Century Ballads."
"The Dean has wide interests," said Coyote carefully, and was rewarded with an enthusiastic nod from his guide.
"I wonder ... " said the Student.
"Yes?"
"Could I ask you a personal question?"
"There still are some?" Coyote's eyebrows went up, and he waited, but he kept on walking.
"Is it true that you own a guitar made of real Old Earth wood, Citizen Jones? That's what they told us, but Student news sources are not always as trustworthy as they might be."
"It's true," said Coyote. "My guitar is rosewood. Real rosewood, not synthowood."
"Ah," sighed the Student. "Now, that's impressive. That is impressive. Perhaps some of us could see it later, when you've finished speaking with the Dean. Or perhaps you don't have time ... "
Coyote shrugged. "If you want to see it," he said, "just go look. It's in my flyer, in a case behind the pilot's seat. Be careful, though."
"Just like that?"
"Well? Are you likely to destroy it as a protest against the eating of pork on Blythe-6 or something of that kind?"
The blossoms and leaves leaped around the young man's eyes, registering his outrage spectacularly. "Certainly not," he snapped.
"Then please help yourself," said Coyote. "And your friends as well. Carefully."
The Student actually bowed. Coyote hadn't seen anyone bow since he had had the good fortune to leave the planet Abba, that bastion of sexism and antiquated etiquette, for the last time. But he managed to bow back, and continued toward #39. The Student did seem to him to be a little odd, but not as odd as the articles in the news would have you believe. And, so far as that went, if you knew that you were one of the elitist of all elite, second in rarity only to the Communipaths themselves, one of one thousand chosen out of countless billions of prospects, surely you had a right to get a little scramble-brained about it. Common motif in Twentieth-Century Ballads was the rose-covered cottage; now we find ourselves with rose-covered Students. Time marches, of course, on.
The door of #39 had no palm-screen, no electronic eye, only a bare surface. He considered it a moment, and then knocked, at which it slid open without a sound. He stepped over the threshold and almost broke his neck.
Nobody, including the be-flowered and be-mannered Student, had bothered to warn him that there were three steps down to be negotiated on the other side of the door. Just like intellectuals to put steps in a place where there was no need for them and then cut a door high enough in the wall to justify their existence.
Still no sign of the fabled luxury. True, the walls were lined with thousands of microfilms and microfiche trays, but that could hardly be considered an extravagance here. The floor was covered with mats in a shabby synthostraw he hadn't seen in fifteen years; apparently the Dean was old-fashioned in her tastes. Or perhaps sensitive to the criticism about wasting tax revenues. And where, for that matter, was the Dean?
She came out of a window at the far end of the room, vaulting handily over its sill and extending a welcoming hand.
"Citizen Jones!" she boomed. He backed off a step. It was difficult to accept the small woman greeting him as the source of that enormous husky voice. And it was clear that Dean Shandalynne O'Halloran was old-fashioned about more than floor coverings, too; she apparently didn't concern herself with cosmetic injections. Since she wore not even a loincloth, it was vividly obvious that she sagged in all the places where women of her age had sagged in the past, before science liberated them from the gravitational effects of time.
"No," she said, "no, you're wrong."
"Mmmm," said Coyote.
"I've just been too busy," she assured him briskly. "Come the end of this term, I'll haul me off to the nearest urban medcenter and have my poor body renovated. I'm not totally indifferent to the shocking effects I have on the eye ... No, that's a lie. I take it back, Citizen Jones, I am totally indifferent. But people remind me. My Students, for instance, remind me. Faces like yours, when I meet a stranger, remind me."
"My dear Citizen Dean—"
She ignored him and dropped cross-legged to the mats beside a low table.
"A needle here, a needle there," she went on, oblivious to his discomfort, "and I'll look just like my granddaughters again. Which, I might add, is perfectly ridiculous."
"I didn't know they wore off," he fumbled.
"The cosmetic injections? Oh yes. You have to get them renewed every three years, or nature just takes its course. You don't think the powers that be would allow anything you only had to do once and for all, do you? Although I suppose circumcision does qualify that way ... But you know, if they could figure out a way to make the foreskin grow back so you had to go in twice a year for a trim, they would. Won't you sit down, Citizen?"
He joined her on the other side of the table, and was making a determined effort to look at the far corner of the room, when she reached across the bowl of fruit and took both his hands tightly in hers. He hadn't realized that breasts drooped like that, normally.
"Tell me, Citizen Jones," she said, holding his hands firmly so that he could scarcely follow his instincts to invent a pressing errand elsewhere, "don't your testicles droop? I mean, dear Citizen, would you expect them to charge on ahead of you, fully erect, making lumps in your clothing?"
Coyote closed his eyes and surrendered to his fate, and the silence grew all around them. It was a fair question, after all, and when he got back home again—assuming he ever did—he would take it up with his daughter. She had an excellent mind for this sort of thing. And then he felt his hands laid down for the useless objects that they were, and neatly arranged for him on the table, and he opened his eyes. She was looking right into them.
"Dear Citizen Jones," she said again, gently. "I've upset you. It comes of spending all my time with Students, who cannot, by definition, be upset. Perhaps we could begin all over again? We must just pretend that I did not greet you by flinging myself through a window at you stark naked, babbling all the while about my breasts and your testicles."
"It won't help," said Coyote sadly. "I could pretend. But you did do all that, you know."
"You couldn't just put it out of your mind?"
"No," said Coyote. "I don't think I could. I think we should just go on from here. Wherever here is."
The Dean sighed, and folded her hands in front of her. "I'll have to take a course or something," she said, frowning. 'Non-Students, Behavior With'. I don't run into one of you people more than twice a year, you see, and generally when I do it's at some stupid state occasion where I have to wear what is offensively known as my Academic Regalia. And at which I speak in Academic Regalian. Inter alia. Ad hoc. Cogito ergo sum. Hoc arbiter testes infinitum."
Coyote blinked. "I don't know the last one," he said.
"Of course not, I made it up. I am trying to put you at ease, in my own clumsy way—I do realize, you know, that whatever brings you here is a serious matter."
Still frowning, she produced a small file sheath, opened it and scanned it quickly, slapped it closed, and returned it to the niche under the table from which it had apparently come.
"Well, Citizen Jones," she said, and all banter was gone from her voice now, "I am advised that you have been authorized to go to the planet Freeway to investigate the current religious conflict there, and that you will be masquerading as a Student in Religious Science. I have also been authorized to give you all the help I can."
Coyote was reasonably certain that wasn't all she had to say, and he was right.
"Just exactly how did you manage all that?" she snapped, leaning toward him with both hands gripping the table between them. "It will be hundreds of years before Freeway is off Novice Planet status and required to give up its anti-tourist regulations—that's Point One. Point Two: nobody, but nobody, is allowed to 'masquerade' as a Student. Doesn't happen. And Point Three: just where do they come off, asking a Multiversity Dean to participate in this extravaganza?"
She was fairly spitting sparks at him, but Coyote was used to irritated officials. He felt considerably more comfortable now.
"The question of real interest, Citizen," he said, "is not how I managed all that—but how you were induced to agree to it."
"Standoff," said the Dean, and Coyote grinned at her.
"You must know someone very, very powerful," she said.
"As do you, Citizen Dean."
As she surely did, and no question about it. The eleven Multiversity Deans had more power than any other group in the Three Galaxies. Not formally. Not in the sense that a government had power. But out of the Multiversities came the great judges, the scientists, the artists, the writers, all the intellectual and the political aristocracy; and every member of that aristocracy had a fanatical devotion to one or more of the Multiversity Deans. It was not a power to be lightly dismissed, and Coyote had the utmost respect for this chunk of a woman with the outsized voice.
"Very well, Citizen Jones," she said. "I won't torment you further. It's unbecoming of me, anyway, since you undoubtedly have orders you aren't allowed to ignore. Would you give me some sort of indication as to how we are supposed to proceed, then?"
Coyote relaxed, not that he gave a wafer-thin damn for his "orders." "I need to know how to pass as a Student of Religious Science. Or as a Student of anything, for that matter. I might add that I don't think much of this idea—I'm no intellectual, and no scholar, not by anyone's definition."
The Dean looked indifferent, both to his opinions and his protests.
"That's easy," she said. "Nothing to it. Please keep in mind, Citizen Jones, that out of all the billions and billions of people in the Tri-Galactic Federation, not one in ten thousand ever has been or ever will be in contact with a Student. Anything you do, therefore, so long as you look like a Student, should serve."
"You're sure of that?"
"Certain of it. Think of yourself; you've traveled from one end of the inhabited universe to the other, you're far more knowledgeable than the average citizen. Have you ever been in contact with a Student? Before arriving here today, that is."
"Never."
"Well, then, you see, nothing could be simpler to bring off. Once your costume is corrected, there are only two essentials. First, you have to be able to carry on a reasonably intelligent conversation if you meet someone whose educational specialty—not as a Student, of course, but through the ed-computers—has been the study of Religion."
"That's not going to be easy."
"Why not?" asked the Dean. "Why ever not?"
"Because I know nothing about the subject, Citizen Dean. The Mass-Eds gave up on me early."
"Nonsense. It's merely a matter of tailoring your so-called specialty to something you do know well. Now ... in your file I see that you spent a year in a Maklunite Cluster. Correct?"
"I turned out to be one of the worst Maklunites of all time. They had to throw me out."
"But you spent a year there."
"Sure. I wanted—I wanted very much to stay."
"What matters," said the Dean, making a vague gesture with both hands, "is that you can actually qualify as an expert on the Maklunite sect, you have actually lived among them, done fieldwork compatible with your Religious Anthropology undergraduate major. You need only go on and on about the Maklunite religion, you see. No one will expect you to know about others."
Coyote whistled. "Is that how it's done?" he teased.
She stiffened. "Certainly not!" she said disgustedly. "This is not how it is done, Citizen, this is how it is faked."
She reached under the table again and pulled out a microfiche packet. "This," she said, tapping it softly against the table, "is a selection of abstracts, prepared by me personally, from all the basic texts that you would have been expected to read as an undergraduate in Religious Anthropology and a graduate Student in Religious Science. You won't learn anything from them, but you will acquire the necessary names, dates, titles and so on ... enough information to keep you from making a total ass of yourself so long as you are speaking only to amateurs. Should you, by some freak of fate, find yourself confronted by an expert, become ill. Faint. Fall off a parapet. All clear?"
Coyote took the sheath from her and slipped it into his pouch. "I'm grateful, Citizen," he said, and he meant it.
"And your Bureau, whatever its benighted identity may be, is presumably also grateful?"
Coyote all but batted his lashes at the lady. "Where," he asked blandly, "do you get these strange ideas? Perhaps you need a vacation from your duties."
She snorted, a sound that came from somewhere around her ankles and expanded in magnitude as it worked its way up.
"Then," she said, "there is the second crucial matter. You're going to Freeway—it says in your file—to complete your doctoral dissertation, in which you are going to compare the Maklunites to the religious rebels on Freeway."
"I am going to do that?"
"It says so, right here." She pointed under the table, where the source of all these things she kept materializing was presumably located.
"That's all very well—"
"Very simple," she said, cutting him off with a wave of her hand. "Let us consider the situation, as you would have considered it. You in your role of graduate Student in Religious Science, that is. On the one hand we find the Maklunites, a kind of splinter religious movement dedicated to a set of principles running counter to the mainstream of contemporary society. On the other hand, on Freeway we find a similar splinter movement, led by one Drussa Silver and calling themselves Shavvies. Superficially they share many, many similarities. The same love ethic. The same contempt for material goods. The same renunciation of technology. Et cetera, et cetera."
"But—"
The Dean raised one finger beside her cheek in the ancient gesture of Teachers, and he stopped.
"However," she continued, "although the Maklunites have spread throughout the Three Galaxies, establishing their Clusters far and wide, they have had little or no effect upon the cultures of the Federation. The Shavvies, on the contrary, although confined to a single small and backward Novice Planet, are about to bring the culture of that planet crashing down about them."
She stared at him, and he considered the possibility that he was expected to say something significant and stared over her head. It was rude, no doubt, but it was self-defense.
"Curiously," she said then, "nobody cares about the Maklunites. Let them spread to the outermost of the Extreme Moons ... no one pays any attention. Their compulsion for service is, in fact, a great convenience. But let the Shavvies threaten turmoil on one poor little planet, and what happens?"
She struck the low table a blow with her fist that overturned the bowl of fruit and set apples and pears and some varieties he didn't even recognize rolling across the floor.
"What happens," she hissed, "is that this is taken so seriously that pressure is brought to bear on me—on me, Citizen Coyote Jones!—to help you stop Freeway's piddling little religious commotion!"
There was nothing at all that he could say, of course, and in such circumstances he had learned long ago to rely on silence. He felt the tickling sensation above and just back of his right eye that meant the Dean was trying mindspeech, and he carefully maintained a face meant to convince her that he felt nothing at all. It wasn't much of an exaggeration, since she could have kept that up for hours and the tickling would have been all the communication that took place.
The shadows were reaching across the floor toward them, through the open windows, and the sky was full of moons, real and faked. He could smell a heavy flower scent, but could not identify it.
"Your special skill, Citizen Jones," she said finally, "must be an ability to simply wait."
When that provoked no response, she sighed heavily and went on.
"Your specialty," she said, "is the effect of religion on cultures. Your dissertation topic is an explanation of this curious difference in effect between the Maklunites, whom you really know about, and the Shavvies, whom you are there to investigate."
He was beginning to see it clearly now, and he was pleased.
"It will work," he said, nodding his head. "I wouldn't have thought it was possible, but I believe it will work.
You're as much the strategist as they say you are, Citizen Dean."
"It will work," she said grimly, in no way impressed with his little compliments, "so long as your tattoos are right."
"What tattoos?"
"Your pseudo-tattoos, my friend! They must be right."
"I don't have any."
"They're not marked into the skin like a real tattoo," she said impatiently, "they're just held by static electricity. You have no reason to look as if I'd suggested ritual mutilations."
"You really feel they're necessary?"
The Dean sat bolt upright and stared at him, eyebrows at maximum elevation.
"My poor Citizen," she said, "without tattoos you haven't a prayer of passing as a Student, no matter what my strategic skills on your behalf. People know nothing else about Students except the fairy tales they read in news bulletins, but they do know that they cover themselves with tattoos. I'll choose them myself ... I can imagine what you'd do. One blue diamond in mid-chest, or something equally preposterous. I'll have a Student bring us a selection, as well as something to eat and drink."
Coyote was surprised. "The Students do that kind of thing themselves?"
"Why? Did you think they didn't? Who do you suppose does the work around here?"
"Not the Students, surely."
"Ah, but yes it is the Students—surely. Most surely. They do almost everything, so long as they are here. If they didn't, we'd be developing elitists, who would then take their elitism into our governments, our ed-programs, our hospitals, and our arts—and that would not do. History has ample evidence as to where that leads." She reached up to push a stud on the wall behind her head, and he saw her eyes flicker briefly in open mindspeech, presumably with someone better at it than he was.
"It won't take long," she said. "Among the skills we develop here is efficiency."
Coyote pulled a big cushion from a pile of them set against a near wall, and made himself more comfortable, pleased that she did not see fit to bring in any lights to supplement the moons. Certain muscles of his body responded to the rearrangement with pleasure, and he smiled a general sort of smile, aimed at all things within radius.
"It's nice here," he said. "I like it. Inside, I like it. Outside, I dislike it very much."
The Dean chuckled. "Most people do at first," she said.
"You have real Teachers here?" Coyote asked lazily, making polite conversation while they waited. "Live ones?"
"Of course."
"Real ones, like they had back in the days before the Education Riots. Standing at the front of a room before a bunch of Students, talking."
"Yes," she said, "just like that. How does that strike you? Would you like to make an impassioned speech against the practice?"
"Do you hear a lot of those?"
"Certainly. 'Damned waste of the taxpayers' money! Archaic anachronism!' 'Let's put everybody on the edcomputers and use the Multiversities for ... ' I don't know. I think grain warehouses was the suggestion I heard most recently."
"But you don't think you're wasting money."
"Have another of those pillows, Citizen Jones," said the Dean. "The blue ones are the most comfortable. No. No, I don't think we are wasting money. I think that what we do here is more important than anything else done, anywhere else, by anybody else, in all the known universe. Does that answer your question?"
A soft "Ping!" behind him spared him from trying to achieve a suitable reply. A tall pitcher appeared, amber in the moonlight and beaded with frost, and a basket of hot sandwiches. Eating utensils, napkins, mugs ... and a long, narrow mysterious box. The Student responsible for it all was gone with a speed that reminded him of the way the Dean whipped files in and out.
"You see?" she said. "Efficient, as promised. Help yourself."
"Citizen Dean, is that beer?" he asked hopefully.
"Certainly." The Dean poured them each a full tall mug. "Only beverage fit to drink anymore, to my mind," she said. "Synthetic wines ... phaugh ... enough to make a person gag. You like beer?"
Coyote rubbed his hands together, lifted the mug, took a long, cold draught, and let his face speak for him. Bliss. He was a happy man.
"Look at these, Citizen," the Dean was saying. "Aren't they spectacular?"
She was holding out the mysterious box to him, open now, and he looked into it curiously. The pseudo-tattoos that filled it were packed in layers between sheets of static-resistant clear plastic, and there was quite an assortment of them.
"I'm keeping the loincloth," he said firmly, "and this is a very good sandwich."
"Glad you like it—it's one of our best. Mostly protein, it can be fixed in two minutes flat, and it doesn't spill all over you when you're studying. The perfect sandwich. However, as to the loincloth—"
"I'm keeping it," he said. "I mean that. And I'll have no insects crawling up my penis, or snakes twining round it, or flowers blossoming out of the tip. My anatomy gets quite enough attention all on its own, without working at making it conspicuous. And my loins, dear Citizen Dean, are going to be girded up with conservative navy blue cloth, as always. No garlands of posies."
"Dear me, but you're vehement about it," she said mildly, looking at him over the edge of her beer.
"I am that," he agreed. "I surely am."
"Very well, then, we'll have to do something to offset the conservatism. Stand up, please."
And she proceeded to do him up, head to foot, as a Pokka Flame-tree. Orange roots wound round his ankles and feet and disappeared under his soles, silver-and-white-striped bark wound round his arms and legs, and despite the interference of his heavy beard and moustache, she managed to add at least a dozen scarlet blossoms. The crowning touch was a pita-bird, colored like the rainbow, perched over his left eyebrow.
Coyote looked at himself with disgust and said a few words on the subject, but the Dean was adamant.
"Do you want to look like a Student, Citizen Jones, or don't you?" she demanded.
"Do you realize," he grumbled, "how easy it would be to pass yourself off as a Student? Easiest blooming—and I do mean blooming—disguise in the Three Galaxies!"
"Mmmmm ... not so easy as you think. Not without help."
"Why not?"
"Up until the first time you tried to use your credit disc, or any other kind of identification, you'd be all right. At that precise moment the Central Computers would punch in for an electronic roll call of all Students, and all of a sudden there'd be one thousand and one, and the other thousand all accounted for."
"At which point?"
"At which point Fed-robots would come from more directions than you were aware existed. At a speed ... oh, roughly that of narrow light. And you'd be in one of the biggest troubles there is, Citizen."
Coyote frowned, set down his sandwich and his beer, and opened his mouth to speak, but she raised that finger again and stopped him.
"In your case," she said, "in your very special and mysterious case, the computers have been reprogrammed to accept you. You'll have no trouble, Coyote Jones—no trouble at all."
When the man had gone, armed with all the vocal information she had been able to provide in so short a time, plus a micro-xerox of her own copies of Shavvy rituals and sacred documents, and the file of basics, Dean O'Halloran sat by her window watching the trees cast patterns across the sloping lawns of Harvard. The problem she faced was anything but academic.
She had more than enough power to do whatever she wanted; that wasn't the difficulty. The difficulties were twofold. First, she had no idea why Coyote Jones was being sent to Freeway, and she had good reason to be distressed about that gap in her knowledge. The second difficulty was more abstract: how was she to fit what she felt must be done into the framework of what her religious convictions would allow her to do? Having Coyote Jones shot, which appealed to her in a way she found shocking, was clearly not the solution. Stopping him from reaching Freeway—stopping him completely—was clearly impossible, given the lofty source of the pressure being exerted to send him there. Violence was forbidden to her no matter what she planned, and complete inaction was not within the bounds of her own tolerance.
As was her habit in such situations, she made lists. Lists of the problems, lists of the possible solutions—ranked for their varying degrees of outrageousness—lists of the steps necessary to effect those solutions, and lists of the advantages and disadvantages of each. It took a little time, but when she got to the end of the process, she had answered her own questions.
Delay. Delay required no violence—only interference—and she had at her disposal an assortment of ways to create delays. Virtually endless delays, if that should prove necessary. And it might. She needed time to find out what sort of danger the man represented. He was handicapped; that was certain. She had tried half a dozen times to reach him by mindspeech and it had been like addressing a wall, or a rock. And yet, if he had not been special in some way, he could not have been sent to take part in this venture ... which was what?
But she would have to move quickly now. Very quickly. The liner with Coyote Jones aboard, suitably disguised as a Student in all his horticultural glory, would be docking at Phoenix-One within three hours. Unless she could manage to wangle a long period of circling in orbit, a longer wait for landing clearance, perhaps a bit of trouble with the landing mechanisms that nobody would be able to locate for quite a while ...
The Dean spent five more minutes putting together another list; this time it was a list of names. Then she went to her comset and began making calls.