by Diane Carey
No hope? He wanted to show them the braeside.
But his grans had said, “Go, boy, in good health. Never turn back a gift.”
They were sweet and he was loyal to them. He saw in their eyes the joy that something had been offered him that they could never in a century provide, and with it the little fear that he might catch the bug and go off for a life in space, leaving them forever behind.
And I just might. This is a sparkling world, in space, with the stars a few steps closer.
All eyes still lingered on the cutout of air where the captain had been. He had left his impression.
“Not to worry,” the tall blond boy said. “I’m sure he’s the best of the best of the best. They all are, you know. Didn’t you read the brochure?”
“Back off, Adam,” the boy named Daniel suggested in his heavy Australian accent. “Be noyce and troy to get along, loik mommy says.”
The other boy didn’t face him, but dryly said, “You don’t know my mommy. I most definitely have no intention of ever getting to know yours.”
Dan responded with wide eyes and a fake flinch. “Eww, he hezz new intintin of ivver gitting to nyeww meen. Eww. Somebody worsh him off. Bloke passed through my fart.”
The blond boy’s heavily lidded eyes closed once, then opened again with perfect passivity, declaring that Dan’s mockery had missed its target. His gaze, when he opened his eyes, was no longer on Dan at all, but instead floated to the odd-gal-out. The other girl… Pearl.
A moment ago the cadets had stared at the empty spot where the captain had been, now they shifted attention to the one among them who was truly not “among” them. There she stood at the far end of the long salon, her back to them, rocking back and forth on her locked knees, biting her cuticles.
As mousy as a person could be without actually being a mouse, Pearl was not just thin, but pin-boned. Painfully thin, with pencil-like limbs, long hands, and twiggy fingers, she moved as if the air itself might break her, unstable as an antique bud vase on a fragile glass stand. Everything about her was dun-brown from her clothes to her dusty skin to her drab hair to her saggy eyes. She held her shoulders forward, causing her chest to seem collapsed. Though only fifteen, she already had an old woman’s hump forming on her back. Her tiny breasts already sagged inside the thin dust-blue T-shirt whose boat-neck and long sleeve only accentuated her dying-sapling physique. She was cursed with fragility, a bloodless little thing with a faint but lingering odor that reminded Ned of low tide.
She cast them, with her blushless face, only the most bleak of glances. Finally she put out both frail hands to steady herself and stepped through the companionway to begin the long awkward walk to the next hatch. She had a funny walk too, crossing her feet in front of each other, and her shoulders went forward and back, forward and back, alternating like machines.
As they watched her go, a single voice began to narrate the moment.
“I’ve heard of her.” Again, it was the tall boy with the chin-length waves of sand-blond hair, the one who was so in control of himself. He spoke in measured tones, as if doing a voice-over for a nature special. “Pearl Floy. Genetic mutations like her…they usually die in infancy.”
Ned deliberately interrupted the narration. “Mutations?”
“She’s a freak. Nature got its wires crossed. The researchers had to give her a special classification. Birds attack her and peck at her in the spring. Animals react strangely to her. They sense something.”
“Nonsense,” Robin scolded quietly. “She’s just a person. What a thing to say. How would you feel?”
“What I feel has no bearing on her,” he said. “Fifty years ago, she’d have died. Sometimes medical science does a disservice to keep something alive when nature tries to correct its errors. Some things are meant to die and we should let them. She’s had brand new diseases nobody’s ever heard of before, but she’s never had a human virus. Not one. Never had a cold, never had the flu… bacteria that reside on normal human skin just die on her. She has her own kind of bacteria.” He shifted on his feet, casual and aloof. “There’s a hypothesis that she’s not really human. She’s something weird. A throwback. They say she can’t even reproduce.” He paused for a few seconds, to let his soliloquy sink in. Then, with perfect timing, he added, “She even smells funny.”
Ned grimaced as if he’d eaten a sour bit and twisted a look at him. The other kids seemed mesmerized.
“She’s on the ship for a reason, right?” asked the girl with cornrowed hair. Leigh was her name. “She has some kind of skill that got her a bunk here?”
“Some pathetic talent,” the tall boy accepted. “They let inadequates into this program sometimes. It’s an egalitarian program to include lessers.”
“Maybe she’s not a throwback,” Ned spoke up. “Maybe she’s the next stage of humanity. That’s how evolution happens.”
The tall sophisticate turned a superior gaze on him. “How would you know? You haven’t quite evolved, have you? Why don’t you get a haircut?”
Ned gave him the disarming shrug and puppy-dog happy face that was the definition of his personality, blinking out from under the dark mop whose value had been called to point. “I’m Ned. What’s your name?”
The elegant boy made use of his height by stepping closer to Ned, just enough to prove he could actually look down at him. His deeply set eyes and square face made Ned think of the portraits of eighteenth century nobles in a gallery, with their powdered hair and confidence of separation.
“You don’t need to know my name,” he said.
A few seconds passed.
Only after a calculated pause did the tall boy break off the withering gaze and stride out of the cabin, through a companionway that led to the aft section of the ship. Where he was headed, no one knew.
Ned stood there with his pride in a puddle—or at least the other kids thought his pride was in a puddle. In fact, he was unflapped. He knew that after this voyage he would never see that boy again, and he had no reason to answer to him.
He looked at the others and made a silly grin. “Guess he put me in my place, eh?”
“Aren’t you embarrassed?” Dylan asked.
“Why?”
Stewart spoke for the first time today. “He thinks he’s better than you.”
Ned shrugged. “Maybe he is.”
Leigh looked down the companionway. “That’s Adam Bay. He pretends he’s somebody.”
“Doesn’t seem to want to be here, does he?” Robin commented.
“’Oy’ll tell yer, mate, ’e’s a thermodynamics wiz,” Daniel explained with his thick Australian accent. “Bloke thinks this expedition is a waste of his toyme.”
Leigh added, “We all worked the two whole years to earn this, but he just automatically got in. On just the mention of his name. They sent a limousine to his house.”
“If he doesn’t want to be here,” Ned asked, “why did he come?”
Dan said, “His father made him.”
“Well, he should do as his father wishes.”
Robin sidled closer and quietly asked, “After we clean the whole ship, then what?”
“Then we’re going to a circus!” Dan declared. “You can ’ave cotton candy and royde an elephant!”
Leigh sighed in a disgusted way. “We’re going to rendezvous with another ship and take on their cargo.”
“Another ship?” Ned echoed. “Way out here?”
“Way out here,” she said. “It’s called the Virginia.”
* * *
“I want the loose fastenings completely re-fitted. No more temporary fixes on those. Weld in new titanium plates to screw them down into. I also didn’t like the turning quadrant to starboard when we tried to stabilize for orbit at the last station. Check those thrusters and improve that radius. We also need to get on the relief valves. They should’ve been done last week. And get Luke on that pinhole corrosion in the starboard flank bay. I don’t like having a thousand little holes where there aren’t suppose
d to be any perforations at all. He’s been putting it off. I want them filled with the new polyester resin compound, then polished flush.”
“Stuff smells awful.” Dana followed Captain Pangborn into the charthouse while making notes on her portable office, the mate’s handheld datapod.
“Breathing is optional,” the captain said. “Getting the job done isn’t. Luke isn’t the one to be worried about smelling bad.”
Uneasy with the talk about her shipmates, Dana shifted the subject. “This cadet program picks one student from a series of specialties, so these kids are the top of their lines. Adam Bay’s specialty is thermodynamics. I hear he’s quite an advance runner in the field. All the adults are jealous. And they were child stars themselves.”
“Child stars always fizzle out early.”
Inside the charthouse, the captain moved past the dazzling navigational theatre as if it didn’t exist, and punched a code for hot beverages into the embedded dispenser next to the chart desk. “Coffee?”
“Hot chocolate, please,” Dana accepted, though she really didn’t want any. “They’re an interesting bunch of kids. Lots of different backgrounds. Leigh is an astronomy major specializing in nebulae and cosmic dust clouds.”
“She’s the Jewish one? The one with the cornrows in her hair?”
Dana looked up. “Is she? Does it make a difference?”
“Not to me. She’s blond, is all. Doesn’t look Jewish.”
“She has a strong personality, likes to cook, and she wants to be a rabbi and study the Torah… or a cosmographer… or a linguist in French.”
“Ah, to be young and uncommitted.”
“Mary’s speciality is electricity. She wants to go into power systems for non-terraformed outposts and colonies.
Then there’s Pearl Floy… she’s… different. But she apparently has some unique talents.”
“She’s the ugly one with the eyes like an owl, and she’s got those eyebrows that hover as if she’s always asking a question? And the teeth with spaces between all of them?”
“Uh… yes… She’s just at an awkward stage. She’ll grow into—”
“The Cobb coils!” He snapped his fingers. “I knew there was something else. Don’t let Luke do those. He’s too ham-handed. Put somebody else on it.”
“Cobb coils,” she murmured, and tapped it into her datapod.
Pangborn leaned back on the chart desk, crossed his ankles, rested his elbow on a folded arm, and blew softly across the surface of the coffee. He scanned the working consoles, data readouts, and happily purring banks on the nav theatre as the ship streaked through space on preprogrammed auto-pilot. The beautiful bank of color-coded screen frames and displays was comforting.
“What ‘unique’ talents?” he asked.
“Pardon?”
“The weird girl.”
“Oh, I’m not sure yet,” Dana admitted. “She hasn’t told me and there’s nothing on her bio. I could read through it again and look for hints.”
“Why don’t you just ask Nielsen? He’s the education officer. Doesn’t he know?”
“Apparently not. Pearl doesn’t speak much to the other kids and I get the sense that she really hates the other girls. She keeps looking at Adam Bay, keeps trying to stand next to him, or she just lingers behind him. But she never talks to him or tries to get his attention. If he ever looked at her, I think she’d wither.”
“Sounds like a twist of bottled neuroses to me. I’ve been in space twenty-two years and I’ve never seen anybody with truly ‘unique’ talents.”
The beverage dispenser hummed cheerfully and began to fill two hefty mugs marked with “UMIAK,” sitting side by side in the cubby. They warmed Dana with the aromas of coffee and frothy chocolate, a scent of ski lodges and office work, transforming the chamber into something essentially human despite being so far from Earth.
Dana bobbed her brows in what she hoped he would take as passive agreement. “The Australian boy, Dan, got the Emerald scholarship for transonic acoustics. He’s self-confident and cocky, but I’ve noticed he accepts criticism exceptionally well and doesn’t take it personally. Stewart, the quiet, happy boy, is going into theoretical chemistry.”
“That kid with the dopey smile all the time?
“He did a terrific year-long study on making ships airtight. He invented a new atomic-sized-powder nano-alloy bonding film. He plans to become a caulking specialist for spacefaring vessels and containers.“
“Then he’s on the right ship.”
“Then there’s the short boy named Dylan—he’s a good sport. He’s into magnetology for—”
“Thanks,” Pangborn said abruptly. “Doesn’t matter.”
He became much more interested in watching the last spurts of coffee drop into the big blue mug.
Dana put the datapod down. This was the fourth time she’d tried to familiarize him with the cadets, and the fourth time she’d failed to keep his interest.
The captain took the steaming mug of coffee to the chart desk, where he kept his favorite condiments, and doused it with so much milk and honey that it really wasn’t coffee anymore. As in ships since the beginning of seafaring, the charthouse was a mini-quarters for the captain and mate, their own bunks off the flanks on either side, right nearby. Hardly a glamorous place, the charthouse was nonetheless comfortable, warmly lit, and efficient, manic in its neatness. The usual clumsy mix of wood, metal, plastics and electronics, the small area was like the inside of a brain case, rimmed with little square monitors that represented every part of the ship, every compartment, and the inner guts.
Pangborn was comfortable here and spent almost all of his time here, reading in his private wardroom, which wasn’t much bigger. Dana was happiest when Pangborn was reading. She trusted her own experience and training, but he didn’t seem to. She knew it wasn’t personal— he didn’t really trust anybody to be entirely up to his standards. A maddening trait, since the crew was willing to do whatever he wanted and he always seemed satisfied with their work and didn’t ask for more, but somehow he communicated that everything they did was just adequate. She was getting used to it and learning to ignore it.
Only when his coffee was flavored to his tastes did Pangborn reach back and hand her the mug of hot chocolate.
“This new trick better work.” He sniffed, flexed his shoulders, and looked at his reflection in the dark liquid. “Elite teenagers and two proletariat charity cases… if I don’t increase the ship’s income on this passage, I’ll have to apply for redesignation and go through a major refit. These runs are getting so safe that the rates’ve dropped like bowling balls. Too many free agents getting into the game, too many ships… now I have to stoop to this. Ferrying pre-pubescents.”
Dana made a subdued eyebrow-shrug. “They earned their passage, Captain, fair and square. Years of scholastic achievement led to this. They’ve been given the chance to jumpstart great careers. They have full-ride scholarships at Emerald University which they completely deserve.”
“Not all of them.” He pocketed one hand, leaned back against the edge of the huge embedded fish tank, and inhaled the coffee. “Not the Manx shepherds. Those two are too troglodytic to know an opportunity when they step in it. I wish these voyages were long enough for cryo-sleep. I’d slap all those imps in crates for the duration. Then I’d go kill the publicity agent who turned my ship into a brat camp.”
“At least we’ll have something to do, teaching these kids. It’s more interesting than cargo runs between established colonies.”
The captain made a forced and mirthless grin, showing the slight gap between his front teeth. “A duty I’ll joyously hand over to you and Nielsen, which I’m sure you will execute masterfully.”
Dana paused and this time looked up, not sure how to frame the question she knew had to be asked. She turned her body to be square with his. Maybe her posture would do some of the talking. “You… won’t be participating in any of the sessions?”
His intense eyes gripped h
er. “You expected me to?”
“Well… it’s your call, of course.” She tried to let the uneasy moment pass. It didn’t. “You might think about reviewing the contract with Ultraspace. They chartered the trip and sponsored the contest that got the Menzie kids in. If I recall correctly, there’s a clause in there about command participation. Lessons from a fully licensed ship’s captain is required for their complete accreditation.”
He gestured at her with his coffee cup. “You have your captain’s license.”
“Yes… but… I’m sure they intended that the captain of this ship participate. I would’ve inferred that from—”
“You check. Ultraspace can charter anything they want, spend its money any way they please, I don’t care. When we’re out this far in space, who’s to say what happens and what doesn’t? If we satisfy the minimum requirements, nobody can call us on it. You handle it. And also check that port quarter mooring cleat before we raft up with Virginia. I heard a shudder in the tilt-lock.”
“Oh… will do.” Dana turned away from him. Having him see her expression wouldn’t help anything at all.
“Have you read this cargo manifest?” he asked.
“The animals? Yes, I’ve read it.”
“Hell of a list. Clones, hybrids… whole farms… endangered species… new species… old species…”
While Dana pretended to busy herself with clerical minutiae so she didn’t have to communicate with his eyes, Pangborn flexed his spine and warmed his hands on his coffee cup. He rolled the cup between his hands, so the word “UMIAK” kept coming in and out of his fingers.
“Too bad they’ll all be asleep,” he commented. “Might be fun to watch.”
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