Lin asked for books and authors and lessons and entertainment cubes Bain never heard of before. History and science and math and literature and adventures. Poetry and plays and classical music. Harp lessons—he grinned when Lin made sure to get disks featuring that instrument.
“You'll see,” Lin said, as they finally left that section of the market.
She carried a canvas bag sagging with lesson disks. Bain had never thought there were that many different disks in the whole universe, just to teach one child. Lin barely bought a fraction of what was available.
“The more you enjoy your lessons,” she said, “the more time you'll spend learning. You'll learn faster, and you'll be a better person for it, too.”
“Couldn't I just learn from Ganfer the same way you did?” he finally dared to ask.
“I learned the hard way.” Lin shook her head. That sad, remembering look came into her eyes. “Ganfer taught me how to make repairs, how to navigate. I didn't learn the why until much later. Half his non-essential memory banks and about a quarter of the essential ones were destroyed in the accident that killed my parents. We wiped my school programs to recreate necessary ship-board function programs. They weren't necessary for our survival.” She hefted the bag and forced her lips back into a grin. “I borrow others’ lesson disks when I can, to catch up on what I missed. I'll be reading over your shoulder, you know. You didn't think I bought all this just to make you smart, did you?”
Bain laughed. He couldn't help it. The whole idea of Lin not knowing something struck him as ridiculous.
Yet he felt a hurt deep inside, feeling sorry for her. Life as a Spacer wasn't glamorous at all—not when she had missed out on so much that he took for granted.
“Here's our last stop,” she said, and led him down an aisle filled with clothing stalls.
Everything displayed was as bright as Lin's clothes. Patchwork vests and skirts in clashing colors with long fringes; long scarves with forest scenes painted on them; stripes of every possible color and combination; leather belts and boots and hats with gilded decorations; silk dresses and billowy pants; snowy white blouses with sleeves slit so that brightly colored inner shirts could show through. Bain stared at the rainbows displayed all around him, at the merchants dressed as bright as flowers and birds, rivaling the clothes they sold.
“It gets dull sometimes in space. Our ships are built for speed and safety, first. It's up to us to make them comfortable and beautiful,” Lin said, stopping at the edge of a stall. She gestured for him to look around. “If I'm going to look at you for another trip to Lenga and back, you have to get better clothes,” she said, her voice taking a scolding tone. Lin stepped back and looked Bain up and down.
For the first time, he felt self-conscious about his dull brown, threadbare pants and shirt and dirty gray boots. He felt like a mud-hen surrounded by peacocks. Bain knew Lin was teasing him, and he realized, slowly, that she wanted to get him new clothes.
It hurt. He thought about the pretty clothes his mother used to make; maybe not as bright and brilliant as clothes Spacers wore, but beautiful to him. He thought about his favorite jacket, made of patches of green and blue and purple. It had burned in the shuttle. Before he really thought about it, he knew he wanted to find a jacket just like it.
He was still looking half an hour later, after Lin had chosen and bought a blue-flowered white shirt for herself; pants in black and white stripes, solid blue and golden brown, and shirts in leaf-green, pale blue and scarlet for him. Bain felt a little desperate, knowing Lin was probably tired and wanted to head back to the ship. He wondered if he was selfish, wanting that particular jacket again. After Lin bought him lesson disks and Branda gave him the harp, did he dare ask for more that night?
“What are you looking for, Bain?” Lin asked. “I can tell there's something you really want.”
When he told her, Lin smiled, a little tired, a little sad. She looked around for a moment, and then her smile got wider.
“Like that one?” she asked, pointing.
Bain turned, and there was the jacket. Not the same shades of blue and green and purple, but close enough. It had a white collar and cuffs, and the material gleamed in the light from torches lighting that particular stall. Bain stared for a few seconds, his mouth dropping open. His mouth dropped open more when Lin walked over to the stall. In the noise of the crowd, he couldn't hear her speak to the merchant, but her gestures were clear. The man who tended the stall took the jacket down off its rack, and Lin beckoned for Bain to come over and try it on.
It fit. Lin told him not to take it off. She bargained with the man, and Bain scarcely heard their conversation. His heart thudded in his ears, and he closed his eyes, imagining that this was the jacket his mother had made for him. His eyes felt hot and wet, and he opened them again quickly, to keep from crying.
Why did he feel like crying when he felt so happy?
The jacket was warm against the slight chill of the evening. Bain hunched his shoulders to feel the material against his neck, the pressure of it against his back as they walked out of the market.
“Now you look like a real Spacer,” Lin said.
“I'll earn it, I promise.” His throat hurt from all the words he wanted to say, to thank her.
“You don't have to earn it, Bain. Being a Spacer is your right and your inheritance. The clothes are for my pride and Sunsinger's appearance, and because I want to give them to you. Friendship is something that's given freely, but it has to be guarded very carefully.”
“Friendship.” He grinned. “I wish we were back in space right now. I want to do cartwheels and bounce off the ceiling a couple thousand times.”
Lin laughed. “So do I.”
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* * *
Chapter Four
The next two days went by quickly, full of hard, physical work and jammed with lessons about the internal workings of Sunsinger. Bain sometimes got up from crouching over an access panel and found he couldn't stand up straight. His back and legs wanted to stay bent, and protested with cramps when he tried to straighten his muscles. Tendons and his bones creaked like he was over two hundred years old.
He laughed at the pain. There were more than just the aches in his back and legs. He had burns and cuts on his hands from residue power in wires and crystal connections that sparked and spat shocks at him when he disconnected them. While Lin and Refuge's spaceport workers installed new equipment and repaired the outer skin of the ship, Bain checked every single connector and relay in the entire ship. For two days. That equaled hours of opening panels, unplugging and tightening and plugging in hundreds of kilometers of wires and crystal connectors and plugs and boards. The boards had to be cleaned with a tiny, hand-held vacuum canister. The crystals sometimes had sharp edges that cut his fingers in hair-fine lines. It didn't help when Lin saw his cuts that first night and scolded him for not asking for gloves to protect his hands.
“How are you going to learn if you don't ask?” Lin had said with a sigh, then a tired, lopsided grin. “I was the same way, you know. Ganfer kept silent whenever I did something stupid, just to teach me the hard way.”
“But what if you did something really dangerous?” Bain protested. He took the gloves she handed him and tucked them into the pocket of his new blue pants.
“Ganfer wouldn't let me do anything to damage the ship, but he did let me hurt myself—up to a point—so I'd learn to ask questions and examine every situation before I acted on it.”
After that, whenever Bain faced something inside Sunsinger that wasn't specifically covered by Lin's instructions or the diagrams Ganfer printed for him on thin, transparent plastic sheets, he asked. Usually, he asked Ganfer because Lin was outside the ship or in the port master's office. Ganfer didn't seem to mind, and sometimes after he answered a question, Bain could talk him into telling a story or explaining something he didn't quite understand about shipboard mechanics.
* * * *
Sunsinger l
eft Refuge late at night on the second day. Bain had been afraid he would be too tired to stay awake and help monitor the screens and gauges, but launching was just as exciting the second time around. This time, he knew what to expect. He sat back in his seat with his safety belts securely in place and thought of that panicked dash from the cargo hold to the bridge.
“What's that grin for?” Lin asked, when she glanced away from the control panel for a moment. A sudden burst of thrusters pushed her back against her seat. She grinned and rolled her eyes and relaxed into the increased gravity pulling at their bodies.
“Remembering—the last time.”
“Oh.” Her grin got wider. “Remind me to thank Toly and Ronny for that someday, all right?”
“All right.” Bain laughed. It felt odd, like the pressure of launching tried to keep the sound inside his chest.
He couldn't imagine Toly Gaber's reaction if he ever went to the orphanage bully and thanked him for scaring Ronny so that the little boy threw up in the only empty stasis seat. As a result, Bain had had to run to the bridge when Sunsinger launched from Lenga. If that hadn't happened, Bain might never have become Lin's crew now.
Toly, Bain decided, would probably think he was crazy. Bain thought he might just do it for that reason alone. What could the big bully do to him?
Then Bain wondered where he would go after this voyage with Lin was over. Would he have to go to the orphanage on Refuge and start all over, making new friends and trying to stay away from more bullies? Or would this voyage be enough training to make him an apprentice on another ship, like Lin had promised?
What he wanted, more than anything, was to stay on Sunsinger and be Lin's crew for the rest of his life.
But Lin hadn't said anything about that, had she? Bain told himself to be glad for what he did have, and not ask questions that would only ruin the fun.
* * * *
“What's wrong?” Bain asked the morning of their second day away from Refuge.
He was lying on his back, reading his first lesson disk: mathematics, to help him plot courses through the slowly shifting star fields and solar systems that made up the Commonwealth. Bain had been studying for nearly an hour when he suddenly realized how quiet the ship was. Usually, Lin and Ganfer were chatting about something or other; friends they had seen on their last stop, something unusual on the sensors, or ideas for improving the performance of a piece of equipment. At the very least, Bain expected to hear Lin complain about the new equipment that had been installed on Refuge to replace their singed sensors—but she was silent.
“Wrong?” Lin shook her head and turned in her chair at the control panel in the middle of the bridge to look at him.
The sleeping cubicles were along one side of the curving wall of the bridge. Lin had the one closest to the galley, with two empty ones between hers and Bain's. He always went to his cubicle to do his studying, though he could have studied while sitting at the control panel. Lin wanted him to separate studying from crew work. He could have gone to the empty cargo hold-turned-dormitory if he wanted real privacy—but he didn't. Bain kept the curtain of his cubicle open so that he could see everything Lin was doing.
“You look mad about something,” Bain said, when Lin didn't seem to understand what he had said.
“Not mad, really.” She brushed a strand of dark, silver-streaked hair out of her face, and grimaced. “You'd think after all these years, I'd either cut my hair short or remember to braid it when we're in free-fall. It keeps floating into my face at the worst possible time.”
“Lin,” Ganfer said, breaking his hours-long silence. “You might as well tell him. He won't give up until you do.”
“Or you won't give up,” Lin muttered. She scowled at the sensor dome in the middle of the ceiling.
Ganfer really wasn't ‘there’ in the dome—he was everywhere in the ship. The link collars Lin and Bain both wore had little green blinking lights that flashed in time with Ganfer's words, and helped the ship-brain monitor their physical condition and provide closer communication.
“It's those plague samples we brought back from Lenga,” Lin said.
“Lin—” Ganfer tried to interrupt.
“The plague samples,” she repeated, a growl in her voice. “I'm angry that the scientists couldn't find anything before we left. Find a cure, I mean.”
“But there wasn't time,” Bain said. He unhooked his sleeping net and floated up a little until he stopped himself. He turned so he faced her. “We were only on Refuge a few days. Doesn't it take scientists a long time to study a new disease and find out what makes it work, so they can find out what'll kill it?”
“The boy has more sense than you do,” Ganfer said.
“Thank you very much, O Bucket of Bolts,” Lin grumbled. She shrugged and tried to smile at Bain. “I know that—in my head. My heart is still angry.”
“That's not all,” the ship-brain said.
“That's all the explanation either of you is going to get,” she retorted. “You go back to looking for signs of those slip-streams, and you—” she pointed at Bain, “get back to your lessons.”
“Slip-streams?” Bain asked.
“They're like Knaught Points, but they help us go faster,” Ganfer explained. “They're really only fables. Like stories of using black holes to travel backwards in time.”
“But we've run into some odd occurrences out here that make me think they might be real after all,” Lin said.
She got up and floated over to the galley. Bain watched her, hoping she would put hot chocolate in the heater and offer him some. She only got herself a sipper bottle of water.
“If we can prove they're real, we'll get a nice big finder's fee and our names in the scientific history books, and we'll speed up rescue operations even more.”
“If,” Ganfer said with a sigh.
“I never heard about slip-streams before,” Bain said. Maybe if he got Lin talking, he wouldn't have to study his math lessons for a little while longer.
“That's because it's one of those stories from pre-Commonwealth days—from the Downfall—and people don't want to remember what the universe was like before the Commonwealth.”
“Bad?” He turned off his reading screen and took the lesson disk out.
“Before the Commonwealth, all civilization was governed from one central world. Supposedly Vidan.”
“Every planet was a colony of the central world. There were no independent planets and no Conclave,” Ganfer interrupted in a pompous tone.
“Yes, the Conclave.” Lin rolled her eyes and sighed and grinned at Bain. “Don't you dare think this is going to cancel your math lessons for the day, Chobainian Kern.”
Bain flinched and put the lesson disk back into the slot. He didn't turn on the screen, though.
“Back before the organization of the Commonwealth, Vidan was pretty much in chaos. Lots of petty chieftains and minor kingdoms that were always fighting. People didn't even have powered ground vehicles. They walked or rode boats or used gliders in the air currents, or rode horses.”
“You make it sound like Humans jumped from horses to spaceships in a generation,” Ganfer said.
“All right, so history isn't my strong suit. The point is, Bain, Vidan was in chaos. Before that chaos, there was a star-spanning civilization a lot like the Commonwealth, but it fell apart. There are so few historical records, we're not really sure Vidan was the central world back then. We only know that it survived when most colony worlds were destroyed in the fighting or disintegrated without technical support or food supplies. The worlds that make up the Conclave today are the remnants of those lost colony worlds. The technology was a little different. How do we know?” Lin said, holding up a hand to stop Bain from asking the question ready to burst from his lips. “Because every once in a while we find bits and pieces on deserted worlds. It works like what we have now, but not quite the same ... And we think that the fairy-tales of slipstreams were either their version of Knaught Points, or something the
y generated with their own ships to go faster between star systems. Or, a naturally occurring space-time warping that they learned how to use.”
“And Spacers want to find it before anyone else?” Bain guessed.
“Of course. It's a matter of pride.” She sat up straight and tilted her head back in a haughty pose, her mouth turned down in a scowl like Sourpuss Malloy had worn. Then Lin grew somber. “It would help if we could go faster between Knaught Points, just to help all the people who need help while they need it. Even with Knaught Points and bigger and faster ships, we still get there just a little too late.”
“We're doing the best we can, aren't we?”
“Of course we are.” Lin managed a sad, tired little smile. “Fi'in asks nothing less than our best.”
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* * *
Chapter Five
That night, Bain woke from a sound sleep to hear Lin and Ganfer arguing.
Not really arguing like he thought of arguing—voices raised and nasty words spilling out and bouncing around the room, with sharp edges to cut everyone who heard them. But they were still arguing.
Still half-asleep, Bain only knew Ganfer wanted Lin to do something and she refused.
“You're afraid of Chief Malloy,” the ship-brain accused quietly. Ganfer sounded like he whispered.
Bain woke up a little more and realized Ganfer was only talking through the link around Lin's neck. Now he knew they were talking about something that had to concern him. Ganfer only talked through collar links when the conversation was either private or could cause trouble. The rest of the time he spoke through the speaker in the sensor dome in the middle of the ceiling.
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