"What have you done, chained him in the 'ponics to dig potatoes?" Then she held up her hands. "No, don't tell me—I don't want to know. But I shall be fascinated to see what happens."
"So shall I," said Heris. She had found him more interesting than she'd expected, in the rare moments she tutored him over the com herself. He had a supple, energetic intelligence that would have rewarded good initial training. It was a shame that no one had ever made him work before. He could have been good enough for the Regular Space Service.
* * *
Ronnie reappeared at breakfast one morning, smiling pleasantly. Cecelia, at Heris's suggestion, had begun breakfasting with the young people some days before. This way, Heris had said, the collusion would be marginally less evident. She noticed that Ronnie was clean, dressed neatly, and showed no visible bruises—of which she approved—and the sulky expression she disliked no longer marred his face.
"Well?" George said. "Tell all."
"All of what?" Ronnie looked over the toast rack and chose whole wheat with raisins.
"You said you were up to something." George looked at the others for support, but they weren't playing up. "You said you were—"
Ronnie looked at him, a bland good-humored look. "I've said many things, George, which aren't breakfast conversation. And I'm hungry." He smiled at Cecelia. "Excuse me, Aunt Cecelia—could I have some of that curry?"
Cecelia smiled back. Whatever had happened, she wasn't going to interfere with it. "Certainly. I hope you haven't been ill. . . ."
"Not at all." He engaged himself with the curry, and the variety of other edibles that Cecelia considered appropriate to breakfast with company. George opened and shut his mouth twice, then shrugged and went on eating omelet. Buttons, never very forthcoming in the morning, finished nibbling toast, excused himself, and went away; the three young women, after glancing several times from Ronnie to his aunt and back, also left. Cecelia ate her usual large breakfast, trying to ignore all the signals they were trying to pass so obviously. Finally only George and Ronnie were left, Ronnie eating steadily, as if to make up for many lost meals, and George in spurts, eyeing Ronnie. Cecelia struggled not to laugh. It was, after all, ridiculous. There was George, trying to protect Ronnie (too little and too late) from whatever horrors an elderly aunt could inflict on him. Finally she decided to intervene, before Ronnie hurt himself overeating, or George had a stroke.
"I am not planning to harm him, you know," she said to George. George turned bright red and nearly choked on a muffin.
"She's quite right," Ronnie said, in the same pleasant tone he'd used so far. "It's safe to leave us alone."
"But—but you said—"
"It's all right," Ronnie said. "Really it is. I can tell you're not hungry—why not go play something with the others? I'll be along shortly."
George, still red and coughing, managed to say that he hadn't meant to interfere and Ronnie would know where to find him. Then, with a nod to Cecelia, he got out of the room as gracelessly as Cecelia had ever seen him move.
"You are all right. . . ." Cecelia said. Ronnie's clear hazel eyes gazed into hers, a look that combined all the charm and mischief she had seen in him since birth.
"I'm fine," he repeated. "Why shouldn't I be?"
"Well . . ." Cecelia pleated her napkin, a gesture that she knew conveyed feminine indecision to the men in her family. "You were fairly cross about my new captain, and when I wasn't sure your message to me was . . . was quite true, about studying for exams, and I pressured George—"
Ronnie flushed, but managed a smile. "Did he break down and tell you I had planned some mischief? I'm sure he did. Well—so I had, but I—I changed my mind. And I did study for exams, but if I tell George that—"
"Ah. I see." Into Cecelia's mind came the faint glimmer of what Heris must have done. How she had done it still remained a mystery. But she understood this much of the psychology of the younger set. "You don't want George to know you changed your mind, or that you studied—you must have been awfully bored, Ronnie, to decide to study." She hoped her voice didn't tremble with repressed laughter on that . . . or would he think it was a senile tremor?
"It was the only thing I could do in that room without—without letting George know—" That was undoubtedly the truth, Cecelia thought. What a jewel of a captain. What a marvel. She felt like grabbing Heris and dancing her along the passages . . . and at the imagined look on Heris's face she could hardly contain her laughter. Ronnie, she saw, was looking at her with some suspicion.
"My dear, please, I'm just glad you're not sick, and that you didn't do something awful that Captain Serrano would have had to complain to me about, and that you thought better of it and made good use of your time. I have to admit I find the need to placate George amusing . . . but then I'm old, and no longer worry about the opinions of friends. When I was your age, their opinions mattered much more."
"Even you? I thought you never cared about anyone." The tone was more respectful than the words.
"I didn't care about some members of the family—and I'm not bragging about it. But I had friends—others who shared the same interests—and it mattered a great deal to me what they thought. So I will conceal from George your careful study of whatever it was you studied, and pretend to know nothing—which is in fact just what I do know."
"Thank you, Aunt Cecelia," he said. Something in his eyes made her think he was not entirely chastened, but overly polite was easier to live with than whining complaint. "I suppose," he went on, "I should ask you to let me try your simulator." His tone, again, was almost too bland, but she chose not to notice.
"Of course. Some of your friends—Bunny's children, and Raffaele—have been using it; I made up a schedule so that we don't interfere with each other."
"And the captain," he went on. She noticed the tension in his jaw which he probably thought he'd concealed. "Is she coming along well?"
"Oh, yes," Cecelia said. "It's too bad she didn't start earlier; she'd have been competitive in the open circuit. As it is, she'll be a reasonable member of the field once she's had some real experience." She smiled at the look on his face, mingled of mistrust and envy. "You'd be good too, I'm sure, if you spent the time on it she has. You're the right build."
"But I'm not horse-struck," Ronnie said. "Just as well; Mother would say you'd contaminated me."
"Well, make a try at it. You might like it better than you think. The family brought you up to think it was ridiculous, and all because my parents wanted me to marry someone for a commercial alliance, and I wanted to ride professionally. Whether I was right or wrong doesn't affect the nature of the sport."
"All right." He held up his hands, as if in defense, and Cecelia realized her voice had risen. That old quarrel with her parents and her uncles could still make her angry. If they had not been so ridiculously prejudiced, she would not have been that defiant: she would have quit in another year or so, certainly after losing Buccinator, and married someone. If not Pierce-Konstantin, someone reasonable. But they had tried to have her barred from competition, when she was leading for a yearly award; she had rebelled completely.
It occurred to her that she had more in common with Ronnie than she'd imagined.
* * *
Most major space stations followed one of three basic, utilitarian designs: the wheel, the cylinder, and the zeez-angle for situations requiring specific rotational effects. When Heris called up the specs for Sirialis, which all her passengers called "Bunny's planet," she felt she'd taken another giant step into irrationality. A blunt-ended castle tumbling slowly in zero-gravity? This time she didn't ponder it alone; she called her employer, and sent along a visual of the Station where Cecelia had said they would dock.
"Is there an explanation, or do I just assume civilian-aristocratic insanity?" she asked.
"Insanity isn't a bad guess," Cecelia admitted. From the tone, she was neither surprised nor insulted by Heris's reaction. "There's been a certain—oh—eccentricity—in that family
for some generations. Some of us think that's why they got so rich so fast; they've got monetary instincts where the rest of us keep our common sense. This Station, though—let me see if I can explain it."
"No one," Heris said, watching on her own screen the display of crenellations, towers, stairs, arches, and cloisters, rotating but somehow not making sense, "no one could explain this." Her eye tried to follow the progression of one staircase up to a square tower, which was suddenly not where it should have been. . . . The staircase had to be going down. Someone, she thought, must have made an error in the display.
"It began with Bunny's great-great-uncle Pirdich," Cecelia went on, ignoring the comment. "They'd just managed to recover the worst the original colonists had done, and the lords of the Grande Caravan had been teasing them about how impossible it was. He wanted to make a statement."
"That Station is a statement?"
"Of sorts, yes. He decided that having overcome what everyone said was an impossible problem in reclamation, he would celebrate it by building an impossible space station. Bunny's family's been overfond of the early modern period of Old Earth all along; this Station is built to look like a design by an artist of that period. I don't know the name; visual arts is not my thing. It is strange, isn't it? And if you think it's impossible, wait until you see the internal configuration and the fountain in the central plaza. Everything in it is taken from the work of the same person, and it's all delightfully skewed."
Delightfully was not the word Heris would have picked. In her experience, design problems in space stations caused everyone grief, especially captains of ships docking there. Creativity should be subordinate to efficiency. "Are all three stations like this one?" she asked. If not, maybe she could talk Cecelia into docking somewhere other than the prestigious but clearly impractical Home Station.
"Of course not. Once they had one unique impossible station, they wanted each one different. Here—" From Cecelia's desktop to Heris's the new visuals flashed: one like a stylized pinecone, in silver and scarlet, and one that looked like a worse mistake than the others, as if someone had dropped a pile of construction material onto a plate with a glob of sticky in the middle. "I think that's the worst," Cecelia said. "It's a Dzanian design, very neo-neo-neo, and the fault of Bunny's aunt Zirip, who married a Dzanian, and insisted that her family's fondness for Old Earth was pathological. You can't take anything very big into it, because the parts that stick out are nonfunctional; the docking bays are all nestled among them. There's only one berth for a decent-sized ship, and that's where they do cargo transfer. Zirip thought it was cute, she told me once, because it made for intimate spaces. But Zirip is also the one who converted the closet in her room into her bed and study, and used the room itself for a dance studio. Up until then, I'd thought the oddness in that family rode the Y chromosome."
Heris pitied the captains of cargo vessels loading and unloading there, but supposed they got used to it. "And the . . . er . . . pinecone?"
"Symbolic. So they told me. I've been there once, on a family shuttle; the docking facilities are lovely, but I got very tired of green and brown and the same aromatics all the time. It has the most capacity, and most guest yachts will dock there." At the end, that had the smug tone of someone who knew she was docking at a more prestigious slot; Heris sighed. She knew what that meant—no hope of talking Cecelia into using another station.
Instead, she looked again at the information for inbound ships. It might look like a peculiar sort of castle in the air, but it had modern, well-designed docking bays. The guidance beacons, the communications and computer links, the lists of standard and on-request equipment and connectors: all perfectly normal, exactly what they'd had at Takomin Roads. She wondered who in the family had had the sense to design the practical part.
"What sort of facilities does it have for off-duty crew?" Heris asked. She knew this was going to cause an explosion, and it did.
"What do you mean, off-duty crew? The crew goes to Hospitality Bay, as I explained earlier." Cecelia sounded annoyed.
"Milady." That formality should get her attention. Cecelia was susceptible, Heris had discovered, to very severe courtesy. "You have an entirely new set of environmental components, and the run here from Takomin Roads was just long enough to break them in—not long enough for this crew to be what I consider well trained. I want a standing watch aboard—"
"The Stationmaster won't like it; everyone sends their crews down to Hospitality Bay, and the ships are secured. What do you think, that rustlers or smugglers or something will come aboard?"
Heris didn't answer that, although she thought that leaving a ship uncrewed at a private station made it very easy for smugglers to do what they'd already done to Sweet Delight. She waited. Cecelia was not stupid; she would think of that herself in a few minutes. After a silence, Cecelia's voice came back, unsubdued but no longer angry.
"I see. You do think exactly that. And someone did put whatever it was in my scrubbers." It had now become "my" scrubbers, Heris noted with amusement. At least she knew what scrubbers were. Cecelia went on. "Did you ever find out what that was?"
"No," Heris answered. "And I doubt we will, unless it comes to court. My point is that we need a standing watch aboard; if you authorize it, the Stationmaster will agree."
"But what about the expense? And the crew expects their vacation at Hospitality Bay—won't they be angry?"
"Look—what if a pipe breaks while you're planetside, and floods dirty goo all over this carpet? You don't like the lavender plush any more than I do, but imagine the mess. Imagine what your sister would say. As for the crew, that's my problem; if they're angry, they'll be angry with me. Time they earned what you pay them."
"You're determined, aren't you?" That with a slightly catty edge.
"Where your safety and the integrity of this ship are concerned, yes," Heris said.
* * *
The Stationmaster required all the weight of Cecelia's patronage to change his mind. "It is not the usual procedure at all," he said. "We have that procedure for a reason; we can't have idle ships' crews roaming about the Station getting into trouble."
"They won't be," Heris said. "They'll be busy learning the new systems recently installed on this ship. During their shipboard rotation, they will have very little time to roam about—and if you insist, I can confine them to the ship, although I would prefer to allow them a moderate amount of time off. Lady Cecelia expressly requested that the crew be thoroughly trained—there had been incidents—" She didn't specify, and he didn't ask.
"Yes, but—we really don't have facilities . . ."
"Six individuals at a time aboard," Heris said. "No more than three offship—"
"Only three?" the Stationmaster said. Heris smiled to herself. She had won.
"Yes. They'll be standing round-the-clock watches, and they have a lot of work to do; I would prefer, because of that, to let them get their meals on the Station, rather than also detail a cook—"
"Oh . . . I see. Lady Cecelia's credit line?"
"Of course: the ship's account, with a limit—" She had to put a limit, or both the Station vendors and the crew would be likely to cheat.
"I would suggest thirty a day per person," the Stationmaster said. She haggled him down to twenty; she had already called up the vendor ads and knew her people could eat well on fifteen.
Next she had to tell the crew. She did not expect much trouble, and they listened in respectful silence, although she noticed some sideways glances. The new members, who had never been to Hospitality Bay, were glad enough to rotate in and out. Those who were accustomed to idling away a planetary quartile on full pay might have complained, but remembered the departure of the pilot. Heris hoped some of them would decide to quit; she knew she could do better. When she called for volunteers for the first rotation, Sirkin and the newest crew members got their hands up first—exactly what she'd expected. She had planned shorter, more frequent rotations (over the protests of both Cecelia and th
e Stationmaster) on the grounds that unused skills quickly deteriorated. In fact, there were crew members she didn't want to leave in the ship too long.
By the time they docked—without incident: the peculiar-looking Station turned out to be well designed where it mattered—Heris had the roster settled, and enough work planned to keep the standing watch alert. She had scattered her new and most trusted crew among each rotation . . . and hoped that would keep any remaining smuggler-agents from doing whatever they might otherwise do. Then it was time to pack her own kit, and prepare to accompany Lady Cecelia's entourage to the planet.
* * *
"You were right," Heris said to her employer, as she came out of the droptube into the central area of the Station. "I don't believe it." The ornamental object in the middle had as many eye-teasing impossibilities as the station itself, and in addition offered the appearance of a stream of water flowing merrily uphill. That alone wouldn't have been upsetting: everyone had seen inverse fountains or ridden inverse scare rides, since the invention of small artifical gravity generators. But this one flowed uphill without a substrate, burbling from one visible guide channel to another through the empty air. "It's a holo, right?"
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