“Uh, right” was my contribution to the conversation.
“That isn’t very likely,” Catarina said. “Ken and I are shipping out today, and it’s very unlikely we’ll be returning.”
“How saddening. But, as Bucky says, ‘A moment’s pleasurable conversation is a lit beacon on a storm-tossed night.’ “ He twitched his nose again. “How strange, I detect that you two have been quarrelling. Are you married to each other?”
“Ah, no,” I murmured.
“Pity. Well, as Bucky says, ‘Some people are just too considerate to get married.’ Speaking for both myself and Cheeves, I must say that we have been enlightened by making your acquaintance, and I am grieved that our moments together must end so abruptly.”
Cheeves tightened his grip on Beaver’s elbow, tipped his bowler, and bowed slightly from the hips. With that, they toddled off.
As they walked away, I noticed that the seams on their trousers were slightly split in back, and they had little, vestigial tails, like bears’ tails, sticking out. Beaver’s tail was wagging.
I looked at Catarina. “Bucky Beaver?”
“Didn’t you read Bucky Beaver stories?”
“Sure. I read all eleven volumes, but that was when I was nine years old. I didn’t read my horoscope this morning. Was there anything about this in there?”
“I liked the bit with the pocket watch. It reminded me of Alice in Wonderland,” she said.
I coughed, and as I turned around I almost bumped into a wimpy little guy who came up waving beads in my face.
“Hey, man, you want to buy some beads. Handcrafted, very fine. You feel the texture,” he said, passing them under my nose. The guy’s hair was cut short, but he had it spiked straight up with mousse. He had on sandals, wing-tip sunglasses, and a purple dashiki that would have gotten him arrested on aesthetic grounds on a civilised world.
“The White Rabbit, and now the Mad Hatter,” I said to no one in particular. I was beginning to get absolutely paranoid about sunglasses. “Look, uh, no thanks. I don’t want any beads.” I put two fingers in his chest to give myself enough room to discontinue the discussion.
The little guy slid right back in. “No, no! These finest kind beads. You a spacechip guy? You look like a spacechip guy. You on your way to catch your chip? You got a pretty lady friend, you need beads. Finest quality, just for you very cheap.” He put them around my neck with one fluid motion, and I noticed that he’d been eating onions.
Catarina stood by, making small noises of amusement.
I took the guy by the wrist, pulled the beads off, and slapped them into his palm.
“Yes, I’m a spaceship guy. Yes, I have a ship to catch. No, I don’t want beads. Particularly not for this particular lady friend. Especially not from you. Not even for free. Not even if you pay me. Now is not a good time to annoy me. Read my lips. No! Beads!” I wiped my hand on my pants and started to walk away.
The guy began jumping up and down, screaming bloody murder. I looked around for Catarina in time to see her slip behind him and push his shoulders down with her left hand as she pulled his arm into the small of his back with her right. She braced herself with her hip. “All right, Clyde, fun is fun. Now hand the nice gentleman the wallet you’re holding.”
“Nice lady, I honest don’t know what you’re talking about... Ouch! That hurts,” Clyde observed.
“I think it’s intended to,” I said. “Hey, that looks like my wallet.”
Catarina beamed and applied pressure. “Now, Clyde, just hand the gentleman his wallet or we’ll see if you can scratch the top of your tiny head from a north-south direction with those clever little fingers.”
“My name’s not Clyde... Ouch!”
“If your name’s not Clyde, I suggest changing it quickly,” I said, removing the wallet from his limp hand and counting the cash inside.
“Name’s Clyde! Happy to meet you gentlepersons! Sorry about the little misunderstanding... Ouch!”
The dawn crowd flowed around us, completely unconcerned.
“What’s the penalty for pickpocketing here?” I asked Catarina.
“Under Reformed Islamic law, I think the first time, they give you a warning. The second time they cut off your hand. That sound right, Clyde?”
Hunched over, Clyde nodded as vigorously as the circumstances allowed.
“You wouldn’t happen to have a prior, would you, Clyde?” Catarina purred.
Clyde was beginning to sweat somewhat. “Yeah, man. They got me. It was a frame, all the way. The cops, they don’t like me.”
“I understand. Do we?” I asked.
“Hey, man, just one break, that’s all I need. You let me go, I walk the straight and narrow all the rest of my days. I never even look at another wallet. Honest, pretty lady friend. You let me go, I even give you the beads. Just one break.”
“What do you think?” I asked Catarina.
“Just this once.” She propelled him forward with her knee. “Listen, Clyde, the nice gentleman and I are about to catch a ten o’clock shuttle to board the Rusty Scupper. If I even see you before we board that shuttle, they’re going to call you ‘Lefty.”’
“Hey, man, I thank you from the bottom of my heart and the tops of my toes. I thank your mothers and your fathers. I thank your grandmothers’ maiden aunts...” Clyde said, salaaming in the street.
“Here, take these,” I said, scooping up the beads and tossing them to him. “Just keep out of the bottom of my pocket.”
We watched Clyde make a rapid disappearance. “I’ve had weirder days than this, but not sober,” I said. “Is it me, or do you attract lunatics?”
Catarina didn’t say anything, but she tucked her arm in mine, and we resumed our progress down the street.
“You were pretty good back there. I suspect I’d better be very nice to you. Where did you learn that?”
“Oh, out and about. Can we stop in here? I need to buy a few things,” she said, pointing to one particularly dilapidated shop that was just opening. She managed to spend half an hour in there without buying a thing, but I figured I owed her one. We also stopped off at an all-night florist so I could have them mail Harry a bunch of dead petunias.
...And the Bad News Is,
the Captain Wants to Water-Ski
Between Clyde and picking up Catarina’s things and making sure the all-night florist didn’t bill me for long-stemmed roses, we were the last ones to arrive at the shuttle. Davie Lloyd was waiting by the forward lock, wearing his usual impatient grimace. “Damn it, Ken!” he said. “I thought I told you to be on time!”
“Hey, chill out, dude,” the shuttle pilot told him. “You got another fifteen minutes before I start running the meter.” Periodically shuttling us down to planets for relaxation and mayhem and back up again costs Davie like hell, but it’s guaranteed in our contracts and keeps us from tearing the ship apart.
“What’s our hurry?” I asked.
Ignoring me, Ironsides asked Catarina her name and launched into his welcome speech in between glances at his watch as we moved her stuff on board.
“Hello, ah, Lindquist? Welcome aboard. Name’s, ah, David Lloyd Ironsides, and I’m the captain. You, ah, know Ken. You’re, er, shift-partnered with him.”
He rubbed his chin and tried not to look in her eyes. “Ken, ah, told us about your, ah, disorder. Er, we’ll be sure you get the finest medical attention when we hit Brasilia Nuevo. Now, there’s just a few things I, ah, want to make sure you understand. I run a tight ship and a happy ship. You got a problem, you see Bernie and he’ll let me know. All my rules for running the ship are in the Standard Operating Procedure. I want you to read it and memorise it. Ah... I don’t see a copy here. Where’s Bernie?” Boo-Boo, of course, was still aboard ship where we had left him.
The shuttle pilot studiously ignored us. Annalee McHugh and Rosalee Dykstra were forward with Spooner and Frido Kundle, figuring our ship’s departure. My shipmates were not a sociable group at the best of times, but they ga
ve every indication of suspecting one or both of us of carrying plague, which may not have been a bad idea. Dykstra looked up. “Bernie’s still on the ship.”
“Well, where’s a copy of the SOP?”
“Not here. Besides, Bernie hasn’t gotten the new one written yet.” Dykstra was basically a quiet woman, but she was built like a linebacker, and she didn’t take much from Davie Lloyd.
Ironsides pouted. “What do you mean he hasn’t got the new one written? Well, what about the old one?”
“That’s the one Annalee trashed,” Dykstra said. Annalee McHugh grunted something that might have been descriptive.
“Uh, okay. Ah, Ken will tell you what our Standard Operating Procedures are. You and he are the swing watch. Well, ah, like I say, happy to have you on board and if you have any problems, mention it to Bernie.” He stumped off to a seat.
McHugh poked her head up. “Don’t mind him. He’s just ticked off because we’re about seventy kilos overweight even accounting for the extra weight of your stuff. We haven’t posted a revised watch schedule yet, but you and Ken are going to be the swing watch. You’ll have about twenty minutes to freshen up before you’re due on.” Watches on the Scupper were eight hours on, three days out of every four. Swing watch took a stint from whoever was off.
As we buckled in, I told Catarina, “When we get off watch, I’ll help you move Elaine’s stuff out. Then we can try and fumigate.”
She smiled that little crooked smile I was already learning to dread. “As in, ‘Many are called, but fume are chosen’?”
I sunk my head in my hands. “Oh, God. That’s not even funny.”
“I know.” She patted my arm. “But it worked.”
“Did your shipmates figure out you were a vamp before or after they decided to dump you? While I’m thinking about it, I can’t remember what ship you said you were from.”
“Actually, Ken,” she replied, “I didn’t say. And I would just as soon not.” This pretty well ended the conversation as the shuttle took off.
We did a standard, fuel-efficient approach. I could see Catarina peering intently at the viewscreen as the Rusty Scupper came into view. She wasn’t much to look at. They built her to a standard configuration to save on construction costs, and she looked more like a spacegoing shoebox than anything else. Although she’d seen better days, you could still see where Blohm und Voss had ionised the plating to outline the holds. Number One hold was a very small one underneath the crew area. Holds Two, Three, and Five were spaced evenly along the ship’s length to carry bulk goods, and Number Four was rigged with subdivisions to carry everything and anything else. The Scupper was a tired little lady, and her makeup could have used touching up, but she was home.
When we connected, I showed Catarina to Elaine’s sleeping space and left her to try and figure out where to start cleaning.
I took a quick shower. Then, belatedly recollecting everything I’d ever read about vampires, I put on a large crucifix and stopped by the galley for several cloves of garlic.
When I arrived on the bridge, Boo-Boo was gone and Catarina was already checking out the panel. “Welcome, Cinderella. Your carriage awaits,” I said, sliding into the other command chair.
“You want me to drive?” she asked. The crucifix caused her to smile. A few short seconds later, the garlic caused her to throw up.
“Sorry,” she said, “it looks more like a miscarriage. I didn’t think garlic would affect me like that.”
“That’s okay, I didn’t like this shirt much anyway,” I said, pulling out a tissue and dabbing at it. Either you trust somebody or you don’t. She took the board while I found a place for the garlic and my shirt in the disposal chute.
After we traded off freshening up, I sat back to watch her. She was good, much better than I had expected. A ship handler’s job on an older ship is mostly making sure nothing important ceases to function, which can be a little tricky on a bucket like the Scupper. It was obvious she knew what she was doing.
“It really does take two people to keep this can functional, doesn’t it? Have you thought about putting in Madsens?” she asked as she ran through the preflight check-down.
“We’ve even thought about doing proper maintenance. What we really need is to tear out what we’ve got and do a refit.”
“And?”
I shrugged. “Davie Lloyd can barely meet operating expenses and make payments on the loan.”
“I see. What happens when income ceases to match outlay?”
“I suppose sooner or later something vital is going to break that Davie can’t afford to get fixed. I hope I have a new ship by then.”
“Oh.” She punched up a malfunction check. “Ken, I don’t mean to sound critical, but your diagnostics look like they’ve been put together with paper clips and chewing gum. Although I can’t tell for sure, I’d swear your vibration damper is miscycling. Want me to take a look?”
“Sure. You’re probably right. We can take it apart after we get out of orbit. It looks like Bernie left everything else green. At least nothing is flashing red, and I don’t see anything he fudged. You meet Bernie?”
“Very briefly. He reminds me of a skinny Sancho Panza. He was out of here in a hurry.”
“Bernie—alias Boo-Boo—is a hypochondriac. He collects nostrums to cure various imaginary ailments. If his friends think he’s psychoneurotic, it’s not too difficult to imagine what the rest of us think. He usually has so many imagined ills that I suspect he doesn’t take short odds on catching real ones.”
“Somebody must have said something on the way up, because he was wearing a white mask and rubber gloves when he scampered off.” She checked the power flow. “What do you do for exercise around here?”
“Coincidentally, Number One hold is empty, and it’s the exact size for a racketball court. You play?”
“A little,” she admitted.
“Well, let’s take a shot at it after we get off duty and get your stuff squared away. Watch out here, the thing that looks like it ought to be the thrust fluctuation gauge isn’t. Yeah, that’s what you’re looking for, there. Oh, I ought to warn you, we get together Sundays for dinner.”
She tipped me a one-finger salute in acknowledgement, flashing her scar.
“I’ve been meaning to ask about your hand. Did you, ah...”
“A big fish. I acquired the scar before I caught McLendon’s, if that’s what you want to ask.”
“It seemed tactless of me to ask. A fish?”
She tightened for a moment and then relaxed. “A little work for a travel magazine a few years back. I convinced them to let me do a layout on spear fishing by moonlight.”
“That sounds interesting. I didn’t realise you were nautically inclined,” I said, fishing for background.
She looked at me and smiled. “I suppose I ruined a promising literary career by starting out wrong.”
“How so?” I asked, snapping up the bait.
“It was a shark and stormy night...” she intoned.
The hair on my arms started to rise. I used to have a cousin living down the street from me who liked to make puns. He moved to Luxembourg when I was twelve, which may have saved his life and kept me from embarking on a brutal life of crime at a tender age.
She stretched and handed me back the panel. “Ken, I wish you could see the way the muscles in your face just go kind of limp. You know, I really think I ‘m going to like it here. I brought some chocolate chip cookies—you want a nibble?”
Most of the first week went quietly, at least as far as Catarina was concerned, as we headed for our jump hole to Brasilia Nuevo. Meals turned out to be the biggest problem; McLendon’s was an unforgiving bug. Meat, dairy products, and almost anything else worth eating either gave her hives or ended up on the deck. Even slightly overripe fruit made her nauseous. I could empathise; finding Rosalee’s leftover Stir Fry Surprise in the refrigerator has much the same effect on me. We had spin and were underweight—a full gravity—or we’d have bee
n cleaning up forever.
Fortunately, she’d stuffed about a hundred kilos of her own provisions in her locker—chiefly chocolate chip cookies and Leopard Milk brand liquid-protein diet supplement—to stretch out the fruit and vegetables we had on board. I was used to cooking for myself, so we managed. She wasn’t bad as company, either. It was nice to have somebody on board who could discuss important things, like dinosaurs—although after six months of O’Day I’d have taken a vampire who washed under her arms any day.
Sunday dinner was her first real exposure to the rest of the crew. Davie Lloyd and Bernie had a slightly larger central living area in their cabin than the rest of us so that we could lower from the ceiling a table big enough to gather around. I was chef, as usual, and elected to make pasta. Catarina could manage hers plain with a little oil, and I whipped together a cream sauce with basil for everyone else. I threw in some salad and fresh bread, and a couple of bottles of Merlot wine I’d picked up.
McHugh had the conn. Catarina tried to volunteer; I had to explain that Annalee really didn’t want to eat with the rest of us.
The remaining five of our shipmates gathered together seemed a little more psychotic than usual. With O’Day gone, I had figured that the air would be a little clearer, but Annalee and Rosalee had had a couple of loud, screaming fights, and Bernie had been skulking about like a whipped dog.
Boo-Boo hadn’t been his usual disgusting self. He only tried to feel Catarina up once with his rubber gloves, and he desisted when she bounced his pointed little head off the deckplates. Even Wyma Jean Spooner, normally the cheeriest soul on board, looked as though she’d been crying, although Frido was his normally insufferable self.
Under the circumstances, dinner was more awkward than usual. Ironsides, Boo-Boo, and Dykstra concentrated on chowing down and wouldn’t meet each other’s eyes, while Wyma Jean picked at her food—which in itself was enough to make me uneasy. Frido was doing all the talking, and most of his remarks were about himself and directed at Catarina.
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