Chương 79: Chapter 78: Orientation

A committee that cannot say what it does in three sentences does not know what it does. - Serevet Ban, third Convener of the Progenitor Assembly By the third Symbiotics session, Waggy came off the dish before Kara finished the word. It had taken most of a week and a now empty bag of treats to get there. One piece and warm praise for a clean recall. Nothing and the flat disappointed tone for a failure. By the fifth run he had stopped looking at the dish at all and started watching the hand the pieces came out of.

The fur scrap took longer. It was pinned under a stone and everytime it was changed, it smelled of a new animal Waggy had never met, and the first three days he simply did not hear the call once his nose was under there. Peaches stopped behind them on the second day and watched.

"Lovely," she told him, in her usual bright and cheerful voice.

"You're calling him after he's already committed. Call him as soon as he looks in that direction - you need to keep watching him. And keep the piece out of sight until he's actually turned, or you're paying him for looking at your hand."

"Ah right, that makes sense... Thanks Professor Peaches." It worked, roughly. By the end of the week Waggy was coming off the scrap most times, though sometimes he still proudly brought back the fur scrap only to return it when Kara did not offer him the treat. The covered bucket too Waggy had learned to ignore most of the time. Then there were the geese. Kara could call Waggy six times and get nothing back over the noise the geese were making.

On the last run of the week Waggy actually broke off halfway, turned, looked at the hand with the piece in it, and then went after the geese anyway. He had known it was going to take a while, but it was still a little frustrating. Vixen and the two others in the meanwhile, had been moved on to a more advanced version of this. Their assignment was the entire farm. Kara watched pieces of it between his own runs.

The routes ran along the service paths, past the feed sheds and the pens and the low buildings behind the Lifesciences coral, and the partner had to hold the line without a lead all the way through. It was going badly for all three of them, and it wasn't difficult to understand why. Kara's own course had four distractions on a relatively smaller stretch of ground. The farm had hundreds. Every shed smelled and sounded different.

There were birds in the roof spaces and cows shifting behind a gate and the wind came across the pens carrying all the scents. By the end of the week, Vitaly held through two thirds of a route one way, and then a door banged somewhere behind the feed shed and she was gone sideways into the gap between two buildings. Vixen went in running after her. Kara and Waggy were still a long way behind that, but that was no reason not to smirk at her. Vixen gave him back a look which clearly said - Seriously?

At the end of the week, he took Waggy to the Area 10 counter in the cafeteria and got him a munieru for the progress he had made so far. Waggy ate it in about the time it took Kara to sit down, then put his head in Kara's lap and stayed there, drooling steadily into his trousers. Combat arts was going very differently. Instructor Ken had given him five things to do and each one was difficult in its own right The figure of eight was fine on the right hand.

On the left, the cord went where it liked and the umbrella came round a beat late, and when Ken called for both hands at once, in opposite directions, Kara's left simply followed his right one beat too late. Ken watched it happen on the second day from most of the way across the hall.

"Your forearm's rolling to help the wrist," he said, coming over.

"So the wrist never learns it, because it never has to. Pin the elbow to your side and let it fail properly." Kara spent the next hour failing properly. It was worse and it was correct. The recovery holds were called at random and he stopped the weapon inside one beat exactly once, on the last session of the week and could not repeat it. The bell at chest height he had struck twice on the return, both times without knowing what he had done differently.

The chalked ferrule against the board he was measurably getting worse at, which Ken said was normal and declined to explain. The water bowl he had not started. He thought about Fluid State all week. It would have been absolutely perfect for this. But, he just couldn't bring himself to use it in front of fifty students. He had spent his childhood shifting communities whenever he changed visibly in public. All the children would call him a freak. Sometimes the parents joined in too.

He hadn't quite gotten over it yet, despite what he told himself. So he needed to find someplace where nobody would watch him practise. He had been thinking about it all week. The rooftop was out because Moghli had taken him somewhere he could not reproduce. He had gone looking twice, ended up in a stairwell that terminated in a locked door both times, and given up. The service galleries behind the residential blocks had maintenance traffic at hours he could not predict.

The farm belonged to Peaches and had people in it almost at all times. If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. He needed somewhere he could return to for months. He was fairly sure such a place existed. He just had to find it. The trial build took the rest of his week. The indoor stadium came back booked within an hour, which was the only part of the whole thing that went smoothly. He wrote the scoring sheets out three times before he was satisfied.

The application form went to the registry in a version so dull he read it back twice to check it still contained information. Then there were the plants. Six staged events in Round 1, four meaningful and two noise. He ran them in his head. He would need eight bodies. Round 2 called for five more. There would be twenty candidates in teams of five, four candidates and one saboteur. He could reuse some of them, though it would be an awkward conversation for the ones he didn't. Oh well.

Asking turned out not to be the problem. He put it on the committee channel on Tuesday and had nine offers by the evening, most from people who never even asked what the task was. Clearly doing something for the SDC and an afternoon of being deliberately unhelpful to a first year was an attractive proposition. Not for everyone though. Kara wanted someone he could trust to be one of the plants, so he asked Glasses, who was a little harder to convince.

"You want me to drop papers," Glasses summarised.

"Yeah, drop them, and then pick them up. Just leave one behind and then make your way out."

"That's it."

"Then Round 2, five days later. You're one of the saboteurs." Kara pushed the script across the desk in the shared workspace.

"Three beats - at four minutes, nine minutes, and then fifteen minutes. Every team gets the same three, at the same times, done the same way." Glasses read it. Pip was on his shoulder, working through his hair with both hands and finding nothing in it.

"Why me?"

"I need at least one person who I know will do it right. And I can have a discussion with afterwards about some of the candidates. Unless you want to take care of Pip, Vitaly and Waggy while it happens. Then I'll ask Vixen." Glasses considered that.

"Hmm... Well alright. Let's do it." He moved Pip's hands out of his hair.

"Send me the timings and don't talk to me during it."

"Awesome, thanks!" The first years arrived the day before the orientation. Kara had thought this was unusual, because his own year, everything had happened a week later than this. He had walked in seven days behind everybody else and the committee orientation had happened almost immediately after, and he had assumed since then that this was simply when it happened. So he had asked his eternal source of knowledge - Glasses, about it.

Apparently, in a normal year the second years came back a full week ahead of the first years, and that week existed so the committees could get their trials built before there was anyone to run them on. His year had not been a normal year. The dungeon had gone wrong at the end of the one before it, and the second years had come back late, on the same transports as the first years, into a University still deciding what it would say publicly.

They had needed that week to assemble the orientation and the selection rounds from nothing. Kara had arrived a week late into a schedule that had also slipped a week, the two errors had cancelled, and he had spent a year believing the calendar worked one way when it worked another. On the evening of the orientation, he made his way to the outdoor stadium. The notice about the orientation had gone out the previous day and all the committees had their fixed slots.

The outdoor stadium held all the first years with room to spare. Eleven chairs stood in a line on the stage at the near end, and the first years came in in loose knots and filled the lower terraces and did not stop talking. Kara took the far chair. Ten committees. Eleven people, because Disciplinary always sent two. Their student head went by Cardinal.

She had arrived first and taken the centre chair, and she greeted each person on the stage by committee rather than by name as they came up the steps, with a small nod each time. Kara got, "The Demonstrations Committee." He returned it and sat down. The vice head was a tall man, heavy through the shoulders and neck, who went by Piston. He shook hands. He was the only one on the stage who did. Kara had seen four of the other ten before, all of them in one class or another, and had never spoken to any of them.

They talked among themselves while the terraces filled, mostly about rooms and numbers and who had lost a booking to whom. Then the Animal Affairs representative turned round in his chair.

"Hey - aren't you the one who came in with the animals?"

"Yep, that's me."

"Everyone saw it. Two of them." He laughed.

"Vixen explained it of course. Lucky doesn't even begin to cover it. What are the odds? A supervised placement and they hand you a pair of rare ones." Kara just smiled and nodded.

"Which programme, though?" the rep went on.

"Just out of curiosity." Kara knew what answer to give. He had heard Vixen give it four times and it worked when she gave it - small and dull and naming nobody, and he was not at all sure it if he would be able to do it right. Everyone on the stage was looking at him now and the pause was just starting to stretch into uncomfortable territory.

"Kado." Piston leaned across from two chairs down.

"Your booking for the pens on the tenth. Is that confirmed, or is that you telling people it's confirmed?" The rep turned.

"It's confirmed."

"Are you sure?"

"I thought we booked it," the sports committee rep pitched in.

"Wha- I hadn't filled out the form yet, but I'd told Professor Peaches about it."

"Well, too bad. Sports has it now." Piston sat back.

"Sort it out before the first years start asking you things you can't answer." The rep disappeared into his interface, muttering. Piston caught Kara's eye and gave him a small smile. Kara nodded back and Piston was already looking at the terraces. The orientation started over the next few minutes. Disciplinary went first, as they always did.

Piston delivered it and he was good - the terraces were quiet inside a minute and stayed that way, and he got a laugh in the middle that Kara was fairly sure had been placed there deliberately. Cardinal sat behind him with her hands folded and her chin slightly raised throughout. The rest went along the line. Introductions, some of them running well past their time, and then the desk where queries could be brought, and the channel to reach out on, come and find us, and we are here to help.

Kara wondered briefly whether he should have set up a desk. Then he thought about the eight plants, the five scripts, the scoring sheets, the ambidexterity drills, and two geese, and stopped wondering. He went last. He walked to the front of the stage and let the noise settle before he started.

"The Student Demonstrations Committee is responsible for arranging demonstrations, safely and seamlessly, from some of the most powerful and influential people on our planet. We will take one first year, out of everyone who applies. A form goes out when I sit down. If you want to be considered, fill it in tonight." He waited two seconds.

"It closes at midnight and it does not reopen." He sat back down. Cardinal was watching him with her eyebrows raised. The forms came in all evening. Ninety-one by the time the cafeteria closed, ninety-eight in the last hour, one hundred and four when it shut. Five had left the interest field blank. They were filtered out. At two minutes past midnight, he sent the location to all of them. The indoor stadium. Tomorrow, one hour after the last session.

Come alone, bring nothing, the trial begins half an hour after you arrive. Only the last part was untrue.