TGoaW-36

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==Chapter 36 - The Glow of a Worm inside a Child's Eye==
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What do you get for a boy who can have anything...
Liz sat in the 'machine shop' area of the Tabiranth, just off the port access to the Flight Deck, where three Blackwasp class Drone Aerospace fighters and two SB-27D (Dual Control Trainers) were parked.
Must be a gift, worth no more than twelve thousand kroner...no, a gift that costs no more than twelve thousand Kroner.
Her current pressure suit cost more than that, and it wasn't even made of custom materials.
what do boys like? It was a strange question for Liz, She'd kind of never bothered to think of it, simply assuming all boys were more or less like her Brother Henry.
Weapons were 'out' and even if she was skilled enough, she couldn't fabricate a custom blade without knowing a lot more than she presently understood.
her other tools, made as part of her 'Arts and Crafts' education, were also inappropriate for a boy who was going to grow up to manage a portion of an empire larger by a million to one greater than her own inheritance-a task that still demanded she learn ins-and-outs of administration and bureaucracy, history, and politics.
None of which were nearly as much fun, as orbital mechanics, thrust ratios, or KF Physics.
The book says a gift must be personal, relevant, and unique to have meaning.
It would be easier if she were going to attend the birthday of a girl, like Arthur's sister, Yvonne...but she wasn't.
"It must be thoughtful and tasteful, but it has to appeal to boys." she muttered.
The puzzle was impossible...
Puzzle.
Boys like puzzles, don't they?
It would have to be something compact, because space is always limited and volume needs to be kept free for emergencies. It can't have loose parts, because those foul environmental systems and get into places they shouldn't, and it needs to be challenging without being boring.
Something nobody else has done, because it must be unique.
Scratch that, If I can think of it, someone else has thought of it. The personal touches can make it unique.
She went to the modeling screen and began laying out a three dimensional model of a four dimensional theoretical shape...
By dinner time, she was working out the 'art' portion using interstellar cartography files from Tabiranth's navigation database. the parts would shift according to crude modeling of jumpship calculation, and the image displayed would show a different system for each solution.
Simple, interesting, a puzzle, and solvable.
It will take most of the rest of the trip to actually put the pieces together after fabrication and tuning, but the materials didn't cost anywhere NEAR twelve thousand Kroner, and it was a puzzle that was made of the most fascinating thing in the universe-science.
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