The Galorbian Knot

In moving out to the frontier on leave to be with my husband, I knew that there would be some surprises he would introduce me to, but that my arrival in that section of the frontier would also provide some surprises to him, because the Galorbians did much business in the Ventana system.

Nobody out there knew me as the big-time admiral, because another full fleet admiral had frontier responsibility, but the Galorbians knew me for another reason, and the first time a group of them met me at the market, my family was shocked to see them recognize and bow to me.

“Madame Admiral, opener of the sacred knot,” they said before passing on.

“Uh, what's going on?” my 11-year-old daughter Valerie said.

“That was nice, but weird,” Marcia said.

“It's a long story, and I'll tell y'all when we get home,” I said.

The walk home gave me time to figure this out without making a great deal of trouble because in every fleet, there is always one … one colleague that no matter how you move in life, he insists on seeing you as “just” a woman, but it was not politic to increase his embarrassment.

I was 54, and newly promoted to full fleet admiral when I was invited to the panel concerning this man's promotion to rear admiral from commodore. He had not brought his contact lenses because there was no reading involved in admiralty panels.

So there I was, fully 54 years old, but, a quarter-Vulcan, so not looking old enough to be among the admirals, but in my mind, one should figure that if I was going to the admiral side of the table, that ought to be sufficient explanation … but as we were in process, this commodore turned to me like I was some ensign and said, “I'm surprised they don't have coffee – could you go get me some?”

Admiral L.P. Poindexter took his 80-year-old body and turned a 180, faced the corner of the wall, and just started softly swearing. My good friend Admiral E.W. Lee just took off his glasses and handed them to the commodore.

“Next time you come up for promotion, a set of backup glasses will really help you if you leave your contact lenses in your quarters,” he purred in his deep Southern drawl. “You're going to be a commodore a long time for forgetting, although that's not in the preparation manual.”

“What?”

The commodore put on my friend's glasses, looked at my insignia, and then jumped out of his skin.

I just smiled, and said one thing.

“Clear the room,” I said, and everyone who was there to do the interview dutifully filed out owing to me being the highest-ranking officer there.

“Wait – what about my interview?” the commodore said.

Admiral Poindexter lost it.

“Shut up and get your own coffee, you fool! I came out here 16 hours off of my vacation to see you promoted, and you blew it because you still think it's 1950 – not 2050, not 2150, not 2250, but 1950 somewhere on Earth where you think you would have been in some corporate office ordering the secretaries around! Clear the room, Commodore – you heard Madame Full Fleet Admiral Vlarian Triefield – before I take you to the brig myself!”

“Keep the glasses, Commodore,” Admiral Lee said, “as a memoir of your brush with admiralty. Stay ready so you don't have to get ready next time – I always carry a spare pair.”

Admiral Lee actually made it hard for my orders to be followed because too many panel members were trying not to laugh and walk at the same time. He had that ancestral streak that illustrated how a mild-mannered Lee could also be a big-time killer, and moments like this were when he showed it off.

A decade passed, and the commodore was still mad. He made it his point to speak against all the women coming into the fleet, as if they were my personal minions. Never mind that he had made an enemy of Admirals Poindexter and Lee and they actually were the ones who kept hemming up his promotion to rear admiral for embarrassing the admiralty about me. This was a manhandling process in the truest sense of the world – but since Poindexter and Lee and I were not assailable to his mind and the lower-ranking women coming in were, that's where he took half the foolishness he was feeling.

The other half, unfortunately, was in trying to prove that he deserved to be an admiral and we had all wronged him. Not that it mattered to the fleet, because no matter what he did, Admiral Poindexter was going to say no until the day he died, and Admiral Lee's attitude was “I have never in my life met an individual so unready and unprepared to join the admiralty – no.” Of course he wasn't going to ask me for help … until he absolutely had to, and even then, he didn't.

Enter the Galorbian Knot – or actually, please don't because it is not good for your health to do that.

Human treasure hunters in space had been trying to get to the Galorb System since they had heard of the Galorbian Knot because of the stories about it – at the center of that swirl of energy was a treasure in gold, copper, and silver (thus making a considerable amount of rose gold, or gold alloyed with silver and copper). On a galactic scale, the treasure was thought to be the equivalent of the entire output of a couple hundred dozen of the galaxy's largest gold mines.

The trouble was navigating through the swirl of energy around this supposed deposit … the Galorbians told us that in ancient times their system had been inhabited by a people comparable in power to the Organians – at god-level by humanoid standards – and they had put up the knot not to guard the treasure at first but to make Galorb 3 habitable for the Galorbians by attracting the surface pollution of gold, silver, and copper off the planet. Galorb 2 by that time was dying, and so after the cleansing – because Galorbians are allergic to gold, silver, and copper – they had moved to Galorb 3.

What that also meant is that the Galorbian Knot is a massive attractor for metals of a certain atomic class … and that meant that the same mechanism that attracted copper only needs a little tuning to attract iron, also in that same row of the table of the elements of transitional metals.

A little tuning, of course, requires someone to tune it … and surely it had been done, because reports of steel-built spaceships caught up in the knot and orbiting it helplessly until their engines gave out were almost as old as humans discovering it. Until the fleet caught up with treasure seekers as far out as the Galorb System, there was nothing else that could happen.

And then the commodore arrived with something to prove – surely he could get the latest batch of treasure seekers out of the knot, right? He had ten first-class fleet ships with him!

But they were still made of steel, and steel was made of iron.

At that point, there was not a full fleet admiral assigned that far out into the frontier, so the question of how to do a rescue was bounced around until it came to me, the fleet's highest-ranking science officer who just happened to be a full fleet admiral.

Admiral Lee is still laughing heartily at the tape of the commodore's reaction when he realized who had been sent to rescue him – the man was outdone and was sure he was a goner, but I am a professional first, and, I was equipped in a way that no one else beside a telepath would be ... my Vulcan heritage has given me mild telepathic ability, so I knew instantly that the ancient beings who had put up the Galorbian Knot were still present, and had tuned the knot to keep thieves from stealing.

I also instantly realized there was no hard core of treasure; the whole thing was a complex manifestation of energy and gravity to keep every particle of metal from blowing back to the surfaces of the Galorbian worlds in the star Galorb's abundant stellar winds. The knot was where it was because the system needed all that bulk to stay in Galorb 3's orbital path for the gravitational relationships in the system to work right.

There was not enough time to do the science that would be necessary to shield a steel ship to keep it out of the Galorbian Knot; owing to the forms of energy involved, we only had a week at best to rescue any living beings caught up in it.

Nonetheless, I felt the presence of the keepers of the Galorbian Knot, and I extended my mind to them as soon as we were in reasonable range. They responded with surprise – so many minds had touched theirs as intruders bent on greed. I felt them gently probing my thoughts as my fleet approached the knot and stopped at a safe distance.

“Admiral,” said Captain Chin, “we are at all stop. Awaiting orders.”

I made my way to the bridge, taking my time so I could retain my concentration. I was being tested – the keepers knew I collected gems – and had put the thoughts into my mind of how beautiful that treasure might be and how it might be mine. I kept pushing those temptations out, and re-focusing on my purpose. By the time I made it to the bridge, the pressure ceased, and there came great peace.

Officially, there was nobody to talk to about the Galorbian Knot; my flagship had already hailed the commodore to get a status report of the ships with him and the ones they had gone to rescue, and I was handed the report when I reached the bridge. I took my time looking at it, and it told of the sheer incompetency and lack of preparation of everyone that had gotten caught up. I felt the indignation of the keepers about it and their reproach of me as representative of the same fleet.

I did not argue. I reached back in my mind to how I would have talked with humility to anyone I care about had I personally offended them, because of my concern for those caught up … more than 5,000 souls.

“Admiral … the knot is changing form … it appears to be opening … .”

… and in three hours, the whole thing had completely changed shape and revealed itself as something of a hole in the wall...

… and in another hour, the fleet ships and those they had gone in to rescue flew past that wall, released.

The practical side of this whole adventure was that it was at last revealed that there was no treasure core, so this was the last incident of rescue there ever needed to be. We stayed and studied the knot as it showed its empty center while beginning to return to its usual swirl, but that was that.

Guess who was not satisfied with this outcome? The commodore held it together while present, and I didn't embarrass him on the spot because staging a rescue by approaching the knot and tractoring the ships to be rescued out was not on the surface a bad idea.

But see, the man sank himself when it came time for the news to get involved.

“Well, it was good of Admiral Triefield to come, but she really didn't do anything: I was the one who led those ships out.”

Never mind his initial report and the scientific reports. I just laughed it off because it couldn't be explained without letting more people into my personal business with telepathy than I wanted to know about it.

I also knew that 90-year-old Admiral Poindexter was going to give up the last ten years of his life swearing and coming out of three-quarter-retirement to make sure meticulous Admiral Lee put all the details together to end the commodore's whole career after that.

What on the surface was not a bad idea was a terrible idea, and any captain or commodore could have turned to a junior science officer and just pulled the history of the Galorbian Knot and known that. At this point, the commodore was a danger to the fleet, because he was no more prepared than he had been at his first interview to rear admiral. It wasn't just that he hadn't brought his contact lenses: it was that he hadn't used them to see that I was on the panel of admirals reviewing him for a promotion, and thus seeing who I was as the only woman on the panel. When he failed to recognize me, we all knew he had not prepared at all for the interview.

The ironies of life: the commodore was a bad fleet officer but now has discovered his stride as a business owner. I suppress his name in this record because he did take all those hard lessons and apply them and is doing well, and I have nothing against him or his family such that I want to ruin the legacy he is making for himself now.

As for me, I was not quite done with the matter of the Galorbian Knot … there was no gem in the center of it, but I was in my quarters the night before we left the system when this gorgeous hunk of gold materialized out of a swirl of rose-colored energy:

I said aloud: “My oath and my charter do not allow me to accept personal gifts from any of the beings I encounter while on duty, although I thank you so much for thinking so much of me.”

It was a female voice I heard in response as the gem disappeared.

“This was the last test, Madame Admiral, and you have passed it. We heard you because you came in service to your people to us in perfect obedience to your duty, with no thought of personal gain. We will not insist that you take our personal gift, but receive our love, and thanks, and honor, forevermore.”

She and her colleagues apparently explained the matter to the bodied Galorbians … so forevermore, I would be the “opener of the sacred knot.” I have not yet met a Galorbian who fails to instantly recognize me and reverence me, and in retrospect, I realize that who I am has been impressed upon their minds.

This just reminds me to not be worried about who does not see me and instead keep smiling while I do what I need to do … I need to only be seen by the people I need to be seen by!