A sharp, herbal scent lifted to the ceiling.
“Mom,” he said.
“He can wait,” she said. “Sit here with me a moment.”
He stepped over the cases and sat beside her on the bed. She looked at him, all over his face and into his eyes, and raised the hand holding her cig and rubbed his hair.
“Oh, Ryan, this horrible color.”
He didn’t know what to do, but the gesture made his eyes suddenly fill. So he looked at the floor.
She said, “Maybe this won’t be so bad after all.”
“What,” he said. “My hair?”
“Don’t be like that.”
“Why should we listen to him? Why do you listen to him? You never did before.”
“Because those were battles. This is a war and I—” She smiled, took a delicate drag from the cigret, and breathed out a cloud. “I can’t win wars against your father. Look what he does for a living.”
“Why did you marry him?”
He’d often asked, and never got an answer. He thought she owed him one now. Or his father did. But she was here.
“I was in love with him,” she said.
“Amazing. I don’t think he cares if anybody even likes him.”
She gave him a look. “He was in love with me. Is that so hard to believe?”
“You’re asking that now?”
She sighed, a resignation he’d never seen in her. “We were both possessive people. Young and territorial. I didn’t want him to go anywhere else and when it came down to it, he didn’t want me to go anywhere else—with anyone else. So we lived apart, that was understood because of our jobs, but ultimately we had something keeping us together. Marriage, and then you. That was the theory, anyway. It wasn’t a good one and my mother—” Now she laughed, but it was a tired kind of amusement. “She thought I was ruining my life with an unknown quantity. He had quite a reputation in the military even then. A hunter-killer pilot, you know. And ruthless. So to my mother… it was worse that I even got a child with him. I guess maybe I did it just a little bit out of spite…”
He wondered if she realized what she’d just said. But she smoked and watched the door and he knew she had no idea. She didn’t even look at him to examine the fallout.
Even her confessions couldn’t do anything but build another wall. He wished he could grab her arms and yell, Don’t you want me? Why don’t you make him listen so I don’t have to go? But she had made him go to Earth too, had stood behind him and pushed him to that planet “for his education” and here she was again, letting him go.
Maybe it was easier for her to love him if he wasn’t always around, a reminder of her own actions and the battles she kept losing.
She wasn’t looking at him, even though she must have felt his stare on the side of her face.
Mom, he thought. Mom.
“My mother really despised the fact your father had no past,” she said to herself. “She was suspicious of it.”
The old elite families on Austro, of which LO Lau was a part, liked a solid say in who their children brought into the lineage. His mother could’ve chosen any number of rich businessmen or politicians, but instead she’d gone slumming. He’d heard it enough times, in various disguises, from Grandmother Lau. He knew his mother had loved the captain to put herself in that position to be ostracized. Any respect paid her by the elite of Austro Station was earned. But what had happened to the love his parents had shared over time? Damaged only by distance?
“Haven’t you asked him?” He was tired. His sleep had been interrupted. She seemed tired too, sitting here with honesty and without agenda. Without Sid. “About his past?”
“He only lets me know what he wants me to know,” she said.
At the end of it not even a son kept her solely as the captain’s. And maybe the captain had lovers on the ship too.
He guessed he’d find out now.
“You’re going to comm,” she said finally, as if giving in. “Promise me.”
She hadn’t exacted an oath when he’d left for Earth three years ago.
He had to touch her hand. Just lightly. “I’m going to come back, Mom.”
She didn’t answer. Maybe that was her fear. That ship had swallowed a husband, after all.
She hugged him in private and kissed him on his cheeks more than once, both hands in his hair as if she wanted to shake him with her emotion. But she didn’t. Her hold slipped from his face and she kept herself in, then she helped him pack the rest of his cases and his guitar. He tried not to stare at her smaller hands packing his private wear into the cases. Her rings shone, but the skin on the backs of her hands was thin, the veins showing through in narrow blue channels, like water under ice.
It was a quicker job with both of them packing, though he didn’t care to rush for his father. His mother didn’t say anything now; they took his gear out to the foyer where the captain waited with his two jets and Sid, who was looking at everything but at the captain.
The captain scrutinized Ryan’s five cases next to Sid’s single duffel and said, “Are you mad? Pick one.”
One?
One case. One carryable thing to place his whole life in.
“Cairo,” his mother said, “give him a break.”
“He’ll only need one. The ship has everything else.”
The hell it did. He wanted to pick up one of his cases and throw it into his father’s chest, but instead he took them all back to his room and dumped things out and exchanged other things until he had his one case, the one with his underwear. He lifted that and his guitar case and went back out and glared at the captain, but the captain wasn’t looking at him.
His mother said, “If anything happens to him on your boat…”
The captain said, “I’ll comm you.”
“I suppose you’ll be incommunicado, and I’ll have to explain to people where my son is.”
“Song, it’s not anybody’s business where he is. Lie if you want.”
“I can’t lie straight out to the public.”
“Can’t you?”
They stared at each other. The male, blond jet said, “Sir.”
“Go ahead,” the captain said.
The jets opened the doors and went out, then the captain motioned Ryan out. He glanced behind him, over the captain’s shoulder and past Sid at his mother as she stood on her marble floors and watched him, arms folded. Controlled and contained. Sid looked back, following the captain, and Ryan saw his mother’s eyes shift.
Tears.
Then the Marines shut the doors and Ryan turned around.
“What about her?” he said to the captain. “She needs to be safe too.”
“She’ll have double the security, trust me. Besides, you think I could convince her to come aboard Macedon?”
He doubted his father would want her about the ship. It was barely believable that his father wanted him there.
They walked down the plush hallway, rode the lev in silence. His father pulled up his hood and handed Ryan a black cap. It needed no explanation. Ryan put it on and tilted the brim low, so by the time they exited the lev they looked like a bunch of low-merch crew returning home from a long layover.
He stared at the jets’ backs, the man and the woman, the man with his blond ponytail and the woman’s spiked tousle, talking together as if they weren’t paying attention to every person that passed by, moved, or stood in a hundred meter radius. Ryan’s gaze dropped to the deck and he tried to breathe normally, tried not to think of a gun aimed at his back or his head, or a girl at his feet with blood running out in little rivers toward him. The lance of lights and the smell of smoke and ash, a crumbled building and the heavy beat of music. He blinked. He breathed. He stared at the deck. It was his last glimpse of Austro for who knew how long, but he kept his eyes about a meter in front of his feet.
He wanted to sail. He needed to sail for this.
His father took the case from him, walking abreast, so Ryan just held his guitar, a bl
ack heavy shape in his hand that he could swing if anybody came too close. He listened to the people around him, but he didn’t hear a word they said.
He felt abducted.
Eventually they passed a squad of meedees idling on the concourse in Module 7. Waiting with caffs and booze and close equipment to capture faces unawares. The transsteel arch of the general dockside entrance stood opposite the meedees, trafficked by citizenry and maintenance workers and merchant crews. Military personnel didn’t often pass through these doors. There were closer exits on the military docksides, around the ring, where most of the meedees probably checked on a regular basis. Especially now.
Their undercover group walked, unhurried. And he wanted to run. His palm burned from his grip on the guitar case handle. One word to reveal them and the meedees would stampede. They passed the ramped locks of a dozen different merchant ships and cruiser lines. And nobody stopped them.
He couldn’t feel relieved—yet. Not until they reached the military sector and stopped by the two station Marines that stood at the entrance. It was illegal for anyone to loiter here, so they were free of meedees. The jets flashed their ship tattoos and passed their right wrists over a handheld scan to authenticate the nanocodes in the tats. Then the captain did the same and spoke to one of the Marines in a low voice. The Marine looked at his scan, then across at Ryan and waved him forward. Ryan glanced back as Sid followed and ran one of his tags through, even though they knew him on sight.
Sid met his eyes for the first time since leaving the residence and Ryan was selfishly glad his bodyguard was with him. One familiar face. Even though that face right now was as blank as a stranger’s; he didn’t want to be here either.
Then it was up Macedon’s ramp. Two jets on guard met them and nodded to the captain. Jets in uniform, armor, and holding rifles. They didn’t look human, animated, or capable of laughter. Ryan moved on leaden feet through the outer lock, a dark green maw with paint-chipped gold and laser scars marring the edges. The inner lock looked much the same and he tried not to trip on the thresholds. Finally he landed up in a long corridor on the main deck of his father’s ship.
The smell hit him first. Cold, recycled air with a spike of metal and rubber. The perfume of deep space.
The corridor winding on either side of him was an unending snake of gray and black, jungle-striped at the levs by yellow. No markings anywhere else to tell what was what, unless you counted the paint code on the intestinal ceiling. It was a narrow world, a bullet that encased and confined him.
The cold air went up his nose, down his throat, and swirled in his gut.
The captain said, “Take Corporal Sidney to jetdeck and get him squared away.”
Sid moved to the jets. Ryan stared after him but Sid didn’t look back like he usually did. Ryan felt his father standing beside him, watching him watch Sid.
It sparked him enough to face the captain. “So where do I go, sir?”
“With me,” the captain said, without comment or reaction to the tag, which Ryan hadn’t meant with respect. They started to walk. The captain still carried the case.
Ryan thought about turning around and running back out the airlock and down the ramp. But it was the kind of thought you had when you knew you’d never do it.
He followed his father into the lev at the end of the corridor. The light was stark white and unflattering even to the walls. His father said, “Command crew deck,” and Ryan stared at the red bar above the door as it blinked, and refused to talk. If he opened his mouth there’d be an outpouring of profanity.
The captain didn’t initiate conversation anyway.
They listened to the hydraulic whine as the lev ascended the decks. It was a noisy, irritating beat, unlike the cushioned silence of station levs. The doors opened with a growl. The deck on the new corridor was a well-worn sheen separated in squares by black gripmat. They passed two and three people in black battle fatigues, but none of them looked at him, only nodded to the captain. These were his new neighbors.
The captain stopped at a door, pulled out his tags, and ran one through the lock slot. When the door opened into the room Ryan saw a blue couch, a coffee table, a small kitchen to the left. All about the size of his closet on station. It was his father’s room.
Quarters. And the walls weren’t walls, they were bulkheads. And this wasn’t a door, it was a hatch.
A door was a door, dammit, you opened it and walked through it, and damn it all anyway.
“I’m staying here?” He didn’t follow the captain inside.
“You can sleep here or out in the corridor, your choice.”
“Why can’t I stay with Sid? On jetdeck?”
His father set down the case by the kitchen island counter and looked at him. “Because you’re staying here. Jetdeck isn’t a good place for you to be right now.”
“Why not? Too many symps running around?”
He couldn’t stop his mouth. His father stared at him, standing so still in the middle of that small living space that Ryan expected him to lash out any second from an eruption of restrained energy.
But he didn’t say anything. He went instead to the shiny kitchen and detached a bottle of dark pink juice from the cold shelf clamps on the wall. “Do you want a drink?”
“How come your own ship isn’t safe?”
“I didn’t say it wasn’t safe.” He poured a glass. “I just said jetdeck wasn’t a good place for you to be right now.”
“Why not? Sid’s there.”
“I want you here, Ryan. Not among my jets.”
“What, you think they’d be a bad influence on me?”
His father sipped, then set the glass down on the counter. “No, I think you’d irritate them to the point of violence. They aren’t as patient as I am. Now are you going to stand in the corridor until dock break?”
“I don’t know. Does it have bathrooms?”
“I’m going to go on bridge in five minutes. When I leave I’ll be locking my hatch. So you either get your butt in here or stay outside until I come back.”
He picked up his guitar case and stepped inside, over the damn raised threshold, and pushed the hatch shut behind him. And looked at the captain to be told when to breathe. He put that all on his face and he watched his father read it.
“You can have my bedroom. It’s there.” His father pointed toward a black sliding screen. “Bathroom’s also behind there. Feel free. We’ve already been here a few hours but I want a quick turnaround. I plan to break dock in a half hour and I expect you to stay here for that, in bed and secure. You’ll know when it’s safe to move.”
He wondered if he ought to raise his hand before asking a question. “What am I supposed to do?”
“You brought your mobile, didn’t you? Play with that for the time being.”
“What, no dollhouse?”
His father set the juice bottle back in its clamps, opened a drawer and placed the used glass in, upside down on a rack, then shut it and slid down a lock.
“There’s food as well. Whatever you use, you clean.” He went to the hatch.
“If I have the bedroom, where are you going to sleep?”
Maybe it was a dumb question, but it had only one right answer as far as he was concerned, and he wanted to hear it.
The captain actually laughed at him. Out loud. “Don’t look so worried, I’ll take the couch for the time being.”
“Don’t let me inconvenience you.”
His father opened the hatch and looked at him, paused. “You’re not an inconvenience, Ryan.” He stepped out, said over his shoulder, “For your own safety, don’t wander the corridors until I get back or you’ll get lost.”
The hatch shut.
Ryan stared at it.
The silence on a docked ship could crush you into the deck.
It felt like somebody else was standing here, because it wasn’t him, there was nothing familiar, not even the emotions battling through his chest—the tight feeling of absolute loneliness and lack
of purpose. The dislocated absence of thought.
This ship was nothing like the cruiselines he’d leaped in when he went to Earth and back. No accommodating officers whose only job was to see to your comfort. No cabinet full of exotic liqueurs.
Or were there?
He set down his guitar case, glanced around at the plain blue furniture, the faux wood, the colorful art prints bolted to the bulkheads, and the tiny space he now had to share with his father for an indefinite amount of time.
Booze would be good.
He went to the kitchen to hunt, tapping open drawers and cupboards. The captain had a disappointing lack of junk food, but Ryan found a quarter-used bottle of vodka at the back of the cold rack and spun it around so he could dislodge it. And the pink juice too. He poured the juice into the vodka bottle and shook it up a bit, sipped. The hit went straight to his brain, burned all the way down like a streaking meteor through a planet well, with a tangy-fruit aftertaste. He coughed, sniffed, and wiped his eyes. Took another smaller sip and coughed a little less. It would do.
But he needed to sit. Exhaustion threaded through his limbs. He sank down on the couch and put his feet on the edge of the table. For a long while he just sipped and peered absently between his knees at the objects on the table until he finally began to see them.
An image cube and some miniatures—three pyramids and a sphinx. Egyptian. Cairo. That was the association.
Funny.
He nudged the larger pyramid with his left boot. It seemed to adhere to the table by magnet. Odd. Then he remembered that a ship in battle could lose gravity if the nodes were damaged, more easily than a station the size of Austro ever would.
The image cube was lit from below. He leaned over and plucked it from the table, and looked inside at the three-dimensional images.
They were all of him. Him and the captain. He remembered that one outside of Siam Star. How his father had hugged him as if he were going to run off.
He tossed the cube on the couch and got up, bottle under his arm, and took his cases into the bedroom. The second closet. Was there a difference? His bathroom at home was bigger than this room, which had just enough space to squeeze from one side of the bed to another in order to get to the bathroom door. The bed was a double, at least, with a surprising set of dark blue silk covers and pillowcases.
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