In A Starship's Wake

Chapter 11: Travel Tedium

Allison glared at her computer screen peevishly, reading a few lines and not taking in a word that was in them. The forms the Teton Sector Immigration Department sent her to fill out were long. Pages and pages of questions to answer. She was three quarters done, but she'd been at it for hours and her motivation was flagging.

Still, she had to get them done. If she didn't she'd either have to go back to Temorran or keep flying around with Tyrone and Joseph. The first was a bad plan for her health; the second didn't seem so bad, but she couldn't just be a burden on the starmen forever. She filled out another answer, sighed, and rested her head on her hands.

The more questions she answered, the more sense the length of the forms made. It was perfectly reasonable for them to want all the information they'd asked for. She'd just been blind sided by how much they wanted.

There were some seeming exceptions to this rule of reasonableness. Quite a few questions were things like "do you have any ties to organized crime?" or "have you ever engaged in the forging of official documents?" You would have to be an idiot to answer anything but "no" to those questions, even if you had. She couldn't imagine Terrence or any of his underlings filling out this questionnaire and answering truthfully, because the Immigration Department would instantly deny their application.

Most of the questions weren't that hard, but a few she had to spend time thinking about to answer. Dates were particularly tricky, and she'd spent a lot of time with pen and paper working out exactly when something had happened based on other things that happened around it.

Allison realized she'd stopped reading questions again and gotten lost in pondering them. She sighed again and, with no little effort, dragged herself back to the task. She didn't want to stop halfway through and have to pick it up again later. She answered another question. Two more to go before the end of the page.

"So this is where you've been hiding since we finished checking the plants this morning." Joseph walked into the kitchen with his own computer and a coffee cup. The two starmen drank coffee well into the afternoon. "Sorry," he added as the girl jumped in her chair, "didn't mean to startle you."

"I haven't been hiding!" She ignored her increased heart rate and protested that accusation instead. "I've been right here for hours answering questions."

"Well, okay, I know you weren't," he admitted. "How are the forms going?"

"Actually it's been going well." It had been, after all, she was relatively close to done. "I'm getting tired of working on them though, I've been getting frustrated with how much there is to answer."

"They ask a lot of questions." Joseph nodded, sitting down with his coffee mug. "Have to know everything there is to know about you."

"I meant to ask you about some of them." She turned her computer sideways so he could see it and pointed out one of the questions she'd noted earlier. "Why are they asking if an applicant has ties to organized crime? If they do, they would have to be pretty stupid to admit it by answering the question honestly, wouldn't they?"

"Yeah, they would. There are some criminals that are that stupid too, but that's not really why the questions are on there. Do you know what 'perjury' means?"

"Lying under oath?" Allison was fairly sure that was the meaning. She'd had no direct experience with it, only seen it in movies or shows. It wasn't something that came up often on Temorran except for public officials or serious criminals. All too often it didn't come up for the latter.

"Right. At the bottom of those forms there's a place for your signature, and next to it there's a warning that you're under oath. It reads something like 'your signature means the information you provided is true to the best of your knowledge, under penalty of perjury.' I may be paraphrasing, but that's the important bit."