LJ Idol 9.15: Chekhov's gun...

The run to Nisiar had taken twenty weeks. Captain N'klaus had elected to secure his helm and spend most of that time hibernative, leaving the ship in my capable control. Our passenger—a twenty-something human the Captain called "Jay" because the young man's real name was unpronounceable—chose to remain conscious and curious, and to carpe as much diem as is possible by oneself aboard an interstellar trader that's been outfitted with a killer interactive naconime system, while counting down the final days of a five-year walkabout that had taken him from home, through a good dozen or so star systems, and now, back to where he started, to Nisiar. We were now two days out from planetfall, so I initiated the Captain's wakeup protocol.

To give the Captain time to "come around," permit me to introduce myself. I'm Duke Jacobs. Or I used to be… I'm not sure who or what I am, any more.

Until a Gydra being transported to a zoological client telepathically seduced and killed my predecessor and then escaped from this ship almost on top of where I was camped, out in the middle of nowhere, I had been thinking dour thoughts about the cancer in my gut and had been casually aiming a .45 automatic at my head, considering my options. The appearance of the Gydra snapped me out of my depression, but the pistol turned out to be ineffective against the creature. Captain N'klaus blasted it and immediately offered me a job as his pilot, the catch being that I would have to shuffle off my mortal coil and allow the contents of my brain to be moved into the guts of the ship's navigation, computing, networking, information, and media system (naconime, for short). I agreed, and so here I am.

My subconscious runs all the boring but important stuff aboard the ship—like navigation and life support—without putting a crimp in my overall mental performance. I monitor the Captain's status (and communicate with him, when he's awake) through an implant, and while my conscious mind could interact with passengers, I avoid all but the simplest baby-talk exchanges, because lots of people think it's creepy to commune with a human consciousness that "lives" inside a machine, and a few even think there are brownie points to be gained by destroying the likes of me.

This setup leaves me free to pursue other skills and interests. During the run to Nisiar, for example, I alternated my time between teaching myself Yoruba and mastering Morse code.

And oh, yeah, I did keep an eye on Jay, both to make sure he stayed healthy and out of trouble, and to collect whatever information I could about his native culture, as there was pitifully little such information available in my databases. It turns out Nisiar has an almost non-existent economic footprint and even weaker spacefaring ambition. Among the gems of what I did pick up, however, was one item that appealed to my sense of art, and a second that roused the curious techie in me.

Nisiarans—and from what I could tell, the planet appeared to naturally lack ethnocultural diversity—are crazy about a traditional art form I will call tnax, the spirit of which embraces a complete rejection not only of the old chestnut attributed to Chekhov, about how, say, a shotgun introduced in Act 1 of a play must be fired before the final curtain drops, but of pretty much all stage techniques that do not engage the imagination and force acceptance of what is seen and heard, whether or not it moves the story forward. The result is tnax: a sort of cross between avant-garde art, where a minimum number of props are deliberately distributed—seemingly at random, if you don't know what you're looking at—in a three-dimensional volume, and chess, except that in tnax, the scope of what can be a piece, and what such pieces can "do" (and the associated meaning) is much broader. If I understand it properly, the "solution" to a well-composed tnax must be unique (like that of a chess problem), and once revealed, it must seem to have been inevitable (as must the denouement of a good detective story).

It was evident to me that a tnax composition requires a lot more of its audience than a mouthful or two of whatever passes for popcorn on Nisiar, and if I understood Jay's intent correctly, he had spent quite a bit of his walkabout time extensively documenting off-world dramatic material that he felt would be useful in creating new and innovative tnax compositions of his own.

The second thing I noticed…

"Good time of day, all!" announced Captain N'klaus as he stepped out of his quarters. "As you were!" he added, seemingly to nobody. He stopped in the middle of the bay and idly scratched his ample belly.

"The same to you, Captain!" echoed Jay, who was sitting at a terminal and posting an entry to his journal. "How did you sleep?"

N'klaus turned his head to look at Jay, and said: "About as well as can be expected, given the circumstances, thank you!" He paused to yawn and do a head rotation stretch, and continued, "We will be landing in two days, young man. Are you getting excited?"

"Not excited, no," said Jay, "but I will be happy to be home, certainly."

"Good," said the Captain, and then activated his implant. Status? he asked me.

All nominal, skipper, I replied, and then spent the next few minutes updating the Captain with the boring details of what our passenger had been doing during the trip to Nisiar, and mentioned, inter alia, the second thing that had caught my eye.

They've got these twinned crystals that come out of the ground in the form of a 'V', and if you fracture the 'V' into two pieces just right, and then shine light into one tip of what used to be the 'V', the light will come out the other tip with no discernible loss of intensity, and this happens apparently, even if the pieces are physically separated.

Up to what distance? asked the Captain.

Unknown. Legend says this phenomenon occurs even if the piece are on opposite sides of the planet, I replied.

And this folk tale is interesting because…? transmitted N'klaus.

Well, it's not entirely a folk tale, skipper. Jay's using a pair of these crystals as lighting for a tnax he's working on, and it's real. Kinda weird-looking, but... real, I said.

Now, that's interesting! said the Captain.

氺 氺 氺
The next day, Captain N'klaus arranged for a "traditional" eve-of-planetfall dinner with Jay—the scare quotes are there because there is no such tradition, as far as I know—and following a sumptuous repast (and generous quantities of wine), the two men got to talking and eventually, N'klaus had Jay show him his tnax-in-progress. In the middle of Jay's attempt to explain the subtleties of the art form, N'klaus expressed great interest in the crystals that were being used, and asked if Jay would be interested in selling them.

"Oh, they are not worth so much as to warrant selling them for any significant price," said Jay, "but I would be happy to give them to you, in exchange for any mental diversion you might provide me with a puzzle that consists of the minimum amount of information required to solve it."

"Can you give me an example of such a puzzle?" asked N'klaus. "Certainly you don't expect me to present you anything like a tnax!"

"No! Certainly not!" said Jay, and posed the following puzzle:

A woman returns from work, gets on the elevator on the ground floor of her residential building, rides to the 19th floor, gets off, and walks up to her apartment on the 30th floor. The next morning, on her way to work, the woman gets on the elevator on the 30th floor, gets off on the ground floor, and leaves the building. This happens every day. Why?"

I knew the answer—the woman was physically very short and could only reach up to the "19" button on the elevator panel—and transmitted it to the Captain, but he apparently also knew the answer. He didn't want to let on that he did, however, so some time passed before a solution was announced and it was the Captain's turn to reciprocate, which he did, with the following scenario:

A man is looking at a clock that displays the correct time, but he isn't sure what time it is. Why not?

"Oh, but that's a marvelous puzzle," said Jay, with a big smile. "It is a very... spare in its formulation!" Then, after a moment, he asked: "The man is not physically incapacitated, is he?"

"No," replied the Captain. "Our protagonist is a physically able person who can tell time perfectly well."

It took a little time—you should pardon the pun—but Jay eventually lit upon the solution and pronounced it to be excellent, whereupon he happily handed the promised crystals over to the Captain.

The next day, we parked our ship on Nisiar, in a field not far from where Jay's family lived. Jay picked up his luggage, bid his final farewell to the Captain, and marched out the hatch. By the time he was knocking on the front door of his family's farmstead, we were back in space, headed—said the skipper, after giving me a set of coordinates that corresponded to nothing in my databases—to a place where he and I could thoroughly examine the crystals Jay had given us without a whole lot of folks looking over our shoulder.

I could tell, from state of the skipper's vitals coming over his implant link, that he was very, very excited. Whatever it was about those crystals that had captured his attention, it was big.