บท 22: 3.06

I had never been a particularly good dancer. Back on Earth, I'd never had much time to practice, or been particularly agile either. Too tall, too awkward, not athletic enough. And yet there had been a few melodies to which I'd danced enough to remember the steps instinctively, to enjoy going through them without the worry of missteps. Not songs either - words had just felt rough and silly to me when paired with notes - but classical pieces I would flow through at my own pace, no thoughts spared for anything but the beauty of music.

Astra, I was now finding, was a great dancer. Talent, genetics, perhaps even race... the memories of her out-dancing her rivals in many formal gatherings in Kuat were a jarring reminder that this body had been my own for less than three years. I could even recall a slightly older, more popular, auburn-haired girl making a scene after Astra bested her during a dancing competition, which had been just silly. I'd never cared about the things popular girls did even in high school and this Lira Blissex girl in Astra's memories couldn't have been thirteen back then. A chuckle and a shake of my head and the memory faded away as my attention returned to the flow of steps, my awe at how natural dancing felt outshining every other thought. Twist and turn, a thrust of a hip here, a casual lean there, arms swinging in loose, almost languid motions where they were supposed to be, every pace, every leap, every roll performed effortlessly when I felt was right - and it was. My world was an endless sandy beach with no obstacle in any direction, my path a casual stroll with my eyes closed as I took in the sound of crashing waves, smelled and tasted the salt in the air, touched the soft, grainy sand beneath my feet, felt the contrast between the warmth of the sun and the chill of water droplets on my skin. I wanted this to go on forever.

"Stop!" Which naturally was when a dry, humorless voice interrupted, ruining everything. "The experiment is over. Please power down your gear and evacuate the testing chamber."

Sighing, I banished the inviting vision and pulled the face-concealing helmet off my head. With my eyes no longer covered, the fifty-foot wide chamber with the arena-like depression, uneven floor, and half a dozen floating, ball-shaped drones, unfortunately, replaced the beach as my reality. The stun-stick in my hand was already deactivated, a training accident months earlier mandating a remote off-switch in the observation deck outside. With slight surprise and mounting elation, I failed to see the cause of the said accident, or sense her anywhere in the facility. Aurra Sing was not here, and that put a wide smile on my face. For once dancing around with the energy and exuberance of my body's physical age (averaging it with the age of the rebuilt parts, certain critics might say) I got to the Arkanian scientists poring over the recording machines and computer analysis of my performance in record time.

"Well?" I demanded impatiently, jumping from one foot to the other with residual energy. Exercise felt good for biological reasons; adding the absence of fatigue, my elation at the unexpected success, and an opportunity to needle my dour bodyguard was enough to bring out the child in me - which was fun. "How did I do?"

"Consistently, Lady Andrim," the head researcher said with a frown. The aging Arkanian had skin and hair like bleached parchment, eyes like polished marble, and a bedside manner that would make Severus Snape proud. "By which I mean you continue to be arbitrarily contrary. The preliminary data of your physical progress appear to overshoot predictions by fifty-seven percent, an unacceptable and frankly impossible margin."

"I thought doing well was a good thing?" I shot back at the almost ghost-like old man. Frail though he seemed, he turned around amazingly quickly for a middle-aged ex-athlete back on Earth, let alone someone in his sixteenth decade leading a sedentary lifestyle. But that was Arkanian eugenics and body augmentation to you.

"The results might be impressive but they do science no good if they are not repeatable, or make sense." He growled at the data-filled screen as if that would make the numbers therein conform to his expectations. Naturally, they didn't. "Thermal and bioelectric sensors tracked your metabolism during the exercise, young lady. A fifty-seven percent higher performance would require a hundred and forty-nine percent increased metabolic output, which was not observed at all." He looked down at me from the impressive (for a Pleistocene fossil) height of six feet ten inches, nine inches taller than I'd been in my previous life. "Which you should be thankful for; your body couldn't have disposed off the waste heat for such activity at this point of your development leading, in the absence of intervention, to a slow and agonizing death by heatstroke."

"Very funny," I said drily before cheerfully disregarding his not so subtle threat and bringing up the subject I knew he hated. "Have you reconsidered your opinions on the Force yet?"

"Blind superstition and hokey religion have no business in academic progress!" he didn't quite roar - then again, he was probably too old to do so. Damn, another failed attempt at discovering whether full-blooded Arkanians could blush. At least I was being scientific about it; plenty of repetition for statistical analysis.

"I suppose precognitive reactions to randomly generated stimuli constitute blind superstition too?" Well, I had been deflecting blasts from the training remotes blindfolded so he was half-right.

"It is possible your particular genetic makeup has led to the development of pattern recognition far beyond humanoid norms, producing such results." He folded spindly arms over his thin chest and scowled. "You would hardly be the first organism with non-standard senses or unusual mental abilities."

"Remind me again of the computing power predicting an hour-long skirmish would take? Especially since the droid combatants involved depend on environmental entropic harvesting for randomness rather than pseudorandom algorithms?" I snorted derisively. "Since my brain isn't the size of the galactic core, such explanations are physically impossible. Even if they weren't, my body still produced more energy than was chemically stored in the fat and carbohydrate reserves it expended so it's a moot point." I shrugged. "The Force is very real. Its existence isn't a matter of belief since its results are observable. It's the results themselves that are subject to belief and emotion."

"Reality is objective, not subjective," he argued, but I felt it was more for the sake of arguing. He was angrier at the test's results invalidating his beliefs than me for insisting on the Force's existence. "If the Force is real, where are the instruments and the readings that directly measure it?"

"You do remember all science is a theory, right? The world works as it works, not as our assumptions say it should. If those assumptions don't fit, it is they that must change." This whole discussion was beginning to annoy me because it was one I'd had many times with my original father in some fashion. Set in his ways, he, too, refused to grasp things like the Uncertainty Principle. "You know what? I'm done arguing. You'll change your mind in the experiments to come. Or you won't. I'll get to train either way rather than spend time denying what is self-evident. Now could I have my results, please?"

I couldn't wait to show Aurra how I'd handled six training remotes to her five. It was the first time I'd done anything combat-related better than her, after all.