Mathilde Leclerke ran the cloth over the already-spotless kitchen bench one more time and folded it into precise quarters. Easy to keep house when the house has no-one in it, she thought with a glance at the couches never-sat-on by the fireplace-never-lit. Change the flowers, dust ... open and close windows.
Not that it should be anything to complain about, not for a woman of her age. A nice quiet life with no crying babies and no toddlers smearing honey on the walls, no adolescent boys tramping mud through the house, no dinner parties for twenty at an hour's notice.
Most housekeepers would envy her, Mathilde knew. I'd have envied myself, fifteen years ago.
Never thought I'd miss cleaning M'selle Camille's handprints off every surface less than three foot off the ground.
She sighed. Can't hold on to your own forever, let alone the others.
What was it her own Maman had said? First they make your arms ache. Later they make your heart ache.
And she was old enough to know better, too.
Still, it would be nice to -
As her thought had bespoke Fortune herself, the front door banged open.
"Ami!" It was M'selle Roth's voice, Captain Roth as she was now. "Ami? I'm home." Rapid footsteps in the hall, and then the girl herself appeared at the door.
"Ami? Mathilde, where's Ami?"
"M'selle Invelen is not here," Mathilde said.
"Did she go out?" Ciarente asked. She crossed briskly to the chiller and opened it. "She'll be hungry when she gets back, Ami's always - ugh, Mathilde. Something's gone off in here."
"No, M'selle," Mathilde said.
Ciarente began to pull things off the shelves, sniffing them cautiously. "Well, something smells terrible."
"I am quite sure I would not let anything spoil," Mathilde said. "But I meant, no, M'selle Invelen has not gone out. She has not been here."
"Oh." Ciarente paused, and then said brightly, "She's probably stopped in to see Alain on her way from the shuttle. She'll be here soon. I wonder if she'd like some - oh, this is it." She held a bowl out at arm's length, grimacing. "The vichyssoise. Ugh, it stinks."
Mathilde took the bowl. "Made fresh this morning, M'selle."
"I don't think so, Mathilde. Get rid of it, please, it's turning my stomach."
The only odors Mathilde could identify were onion and chicken, but she turned to pour the soup away. "You are expecting M'selle Invelen today? She did not call."
"I'm sure she'll be here soon," Ciarente said. "Do we have enough eggs? Ami does like Pierre's omelettes."
"More than enough, M'selle," Mathilde said. "Even for M'selle Invelen."
"Good." Ciarente took a handful of mushrooms from their storage bin and then put them back with a sigh. "Fortune, I'm tired. More jumps this week than I like to think about."
Mathilde studied Ciarente a moment. "Would you like some tea, while you wait for M'selle Invelen?"
"Coffee, I think," Ciarente said. "It's been a long few days."
"I think we may be out of coffee," Mathilde said.
"Well, tea then. Thank you." Ciarente pulled a stool over to the counter and sat down with a sigh. "It is good to be home, Mathilde. I miss this place, you know."
"We miss you also, M'selle, and M'selle Camille." Mathilde set the kettle to boil and took clump of ginger from the root cupboard.
Ciarente looked out the window at the garden. "I've all but missed summer this year. You're well? And Pierre?"
Mathilde grated the ginger and tipped it into the teapot with a handful of lemon rind. "We are both well, yes. A little creaky, these days." She poured hot water into the pot. "And M'selle Camille? And yourself?"
"Oh, Cami's Cami, as always," Ciarente said. "And I'm fine. That tea smells lovely."
"I thought you would like it," Mathilde said, pouring a mug and setting it on the counter by the pilot. "You do look a little tired."
Ciarente wrinkled her nose and sipped the tea. "Ah, worries, you know how it is? But things will be fine, now." She turned on her stool at the sound of the door opening again. "Ami?"
"No, Captain Roth." It was a man who answered, and when he came into the room Mathilde recognised M'ser Tanith Burke from the times he'd visited to check on the security arrangements. "I'm afraid not. It seems now that Commander Invelen changed shuttles on station."
"Well, of course," Ciarente said. "Interbus doesn't do planetary runs."
"No, Captain Roth," M'ser Burke said. "Changed to a different interbus line. With a ticket to Reblier."
Ciarente set her mug down with a click. "I'm afraid you're mistaken, Tanith. Amieta wouldn't buy a ticket for Reblier when she was coming down planet."
There was a little silence in the room. M'ser Burke looked at Mathilde and she made her face expressionless. She'd had decades to practice that, in this household.
"Well," Ciarente said decisively. "When she gets here, she'll be hungry." She stood up. "I think I might make a cake, Mathilde. Do we have any candied oranges? I think with a vanilla base that might be quite nice for a warm evening."
"Captain Roth," M'ser Burke said. "Commander Invelen has, we are almost certain, left the system."
Ciarente opened a cupboard energetically. "That can't be right, Tanith. It simply can't."
"If we move quickly, we may pick up her trail in Reblier," M'ser Burke said.
"She's on her way here right now." Ciarente took the flour down and set it on the counter with a thump that raised a little white cloud from the bag.
Mathilde looked at M'ser Burke, and then reached out to put her hand over Ciarente's. "I think you should listen to M'ser Burke, M'selle."
"I would like," Ciarente said a little shrilly, "to make a cake for my sister."
"I know," Mathilde said.
"So when she gets here, she'll have something to eat." Ciarente's fingers tightened on the bag until her knuckles were white.
"M'selle. If she were here, right now, what would she tell you to do?"
Ciarente stared at the flour. "She - she ... "
"M'selle."
Ciarente let go of the flour suddenly and put her hands over her face. "She said ... stop hiding, she said. Before. Stop hiding, and do something about it."
M'ser Burke cleared his throat. "The shuttle off-world ..."
"Yes." Ciarente lowered her hands, tears tracking lines through the dusting of flour on her cheeks. "The shuttle. I will tell the crew to prep the Firefly."
Mathilde picked up the cloth from the counter and began to wipe Ciarente's face, just as she had so many times before. Baby, toddler, child ...
There had been a time when she had had a solution for any problem Ciarente could bring to her. Long past, now, that time.
Long past.
Mathilde dusted away the last of the flour.
"Bring M'selle Invelen back to visit," she said. "Pierre will make her as many omelettes as she likes. D'accord?"
Ciarente sniffled, and nodded. "I will." She hugged Mathilde quickly, and then turned to M'ser Burke. "We should hurry, I suppose."
They went out together, Ciarente looking very small and young beside M'ser Burke.
But not so young, anymore.
Mathilde sighed, and began to clean up the flour. When they are little, they make your arms ache.
But she is not so little, anymore.
Thursday, August 12, 2010
Sunday, August 1, 2010
The Hope Of His Heart
It's a story told a thousand ways on a thousand worlds.
Micha Krenshaw's Folklore Compendium records seven different versions in the system of Luminaire alone, and another forty in Crux. His students, and their students, have heard it told in Domain, in Heimatar, in Solitude, in Syndicate. Different, each time.
And the same.
A girl, or a boy, it doesn't matter which, but human, that's the point of the story. A human girl, a human boy.
A door in the hill, or a gap in the hedge, or a mirror that reflects more than the face of those who look into it, or a pool of water, or a grove of trees. Whichever it may be, or something else entirely, it's always a gate - a gate from this world to another.
From the human, to the ... not.
Sometimes the human boy or the human girl finds a way through the door or the gap or the mirror.
Sometimes something else finds its way out.
They're always beautiful. More beautiful than humanly possible.
Because they're not human, that's the point of the story.
They stay a night, or two. Perhaps they come back, if it pleases them. Only if it pleases them, though. It's for mortals to take care of the feelings of those around them.
Those from beyond the hedge or beneath the hill or behind the mirror take their pleasure and their leave.
Sometimes there's a child. A human woman left with broken heart and swelling belly, a human man woken by a midnight knock at the door nine months later to find a squalling bundle on the doorstep.
A changeling child, a half-breed, to raise and love but not to keep.
Not that the human mother or father weeping by the cradle need any reminder. They're beautiful, the ones from beyond, more beautiful than humanly possible, and even the sight of them condemns a human man or woman to pine forever, that glamor forever between them and the deed of their hand, between them and the hope of their heart.
It is possible to make them stay. Stay for a time, at least. Find the animal skin they shucked to take a more human form and hide it, or slip a rope woven from a single hair around their neck, or mark their forehead with a holy symbol in oil, or ash, or blood. Lay cold iron on them.
Put a gold band on their finger.
They will stay human then, live and love in human form, at least until they search out their skin or pick apart the rope with a thorn from a rosebush planted by the light of the first full moon of spring, or gather dew on the last day of the year three years in a row to wash away the mark. And they will, always. That is one thing the stories all agree on.
They will love you, and stay with you, if you compel them, but they will never stop trying to be free.
Charles Etay watches the girl in his kitchen as she whisks a sauce and tastes it, pulls a face and adds salt. She is playing at being normal, here in his tiny apartment. She's good at it, too.
The neighbors have no idea she's a pod-pilot and Charlie suspects they wouldn't believe him if he tried to tell them the truth. That nice young Cia Roth? Never!
She is playing at belonging in his world, with more success than he has when he's a visitor to hers.
And tomorrow, or the next day, she will leave. Return to her home between the stars. Come back, as and when she choses, or summon him to her side.
He will wait, for the knock at the door, for the call, for the Interbus ticket in an envelope or the sight of her at the end of the street as he turns the corner for home. He will wait, until the time comes when she stops calling, stops coming.
And then he will still wait.
It's a story told a thousand ways on a thousand worlds.
It always ends the same.
Micha Krenshaw's Folklore Compendium records seven different versions in the system of Luminaire alone, and another forty in Crux. His students, and their students, have heard it told in Domain, in Heimatar, in Solitude, in Syndicate. Different, each time.
And the same.
A girl, or a boy, it doesn't matter which, but human, that's the point of the story. A human girl, a human boy.
A door in the hill, or a gap in the hedge, or a mirror that reflects more than the face of those who look into it, or a pool of water, or a grove of trees. Whichever it may be, or something else entirely, it's always a gate - a gate from this world to another.
From the human, to the ... not.
Sometimes the human boy or the human girl finds a way through the door or the gap or the mirror.
Sometimes something else finds its way out.
They're always beautiful. More beautiful than humanly possible.
Because they're not human, that's the point of the story.
They stay a night, or two. Perhaps they come back, if it pleases them. Only if it pleases them, though. It's for mortals to take care of the feelings of those around them.
Those from beyond the hedge or beneath the hill or behind the mirror take their pleasure and their leave.
Sometimes there's a child. A human woman left with broken heart and swelling belly, a human man woken by a midnight knock at the door nine months later to find a squalling bundle on the doorstep.
A changeling child, a half-breed, to raise and love but not to keep.
Not that the human mother or father weeping by the cradle need any reminder. They're beautiful, the ones from beyond, more beautiful than humanly possible, and even the sight of them condemns a human man or woman to pine forever, that glamor forever between them and the deed of their hand, between them and the hope of their heart.
It is possible to make them stay. Stay for a time, at least. Find the animal skin they shucked to take a more human form and hide it, or slip a rope woven from a single hair around their neck, or mark their forehead with a holy symbol in oil, or ash, or blood. Lay cold iron on them.
Put a gold band on their finger.
They will stay human then, live and love in human form, at least until they search out their skin or pick apart the rope with a thorn from a rosebush planted by the light of the first full moon of spring, or gather dew on the last day of the year three years in a row to wash away the mark. And they will, always. That is one thing the stories all agree on.
They will love you, and stay with you, if you compel them, but they will never stop trying to be free.
Charles Etay watches the girl in his kitchen as she whisks a sauce and tastes it, pulls a face and adds salt. She is playing at being normal, here in his tiny apartment. She's good at it, too.
The neighbors have no idea she's a pod-pilot and Charlie suspects they wouldn't believe him if he tried to tell them the truth. That nice young Cia Roth? Never!
She is playing at belonging in his world, with more success than he has when he's a visitor to hers.
And tomorrow, or the next day, she will leave. Return to her home between the stars. Come back, as and when she choses, or summon him to her side.
He will wait, for the knock at the door, for the call, for the Interbus ticket in an envelope or the sight of her at the end of the street as he turns the corner for home. He will wait, until the time comes when she stops calling, stops coming.
And then he will still wait.
It's a story told a thousand ways on a thousand worlds.
It always ends the same.
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
This Is Who She Is.
The patient was holographic and the wounds were computer generated to test her abilities, but Nerila's focus didn't waver.
This is what I do.
"How are you feeling?" Pilot asked.
Nerila blinked sweat out of her eyes, staring into the surgical field, and considered a dozen answers to that question. Busy came to mind, as did none of your fucking business.
She concentrated and pressed down with the holographically-generated retractor, sliding the illusory forceps past it and into the computer-generator incision and deciding on, "Fine. I'm fine."
Footsteps behind her told Nerila that Pilot had come into the room. "Maybe you should take a break."
"A real surgery would go for a lot longer than this." The tremor in her left hand stopped and she moved the holographic liver aside and looked for the bleed beneath.
This is who I am.
"But you're still recovering."
There. Nerila clamped the leaking vein. "That's the point," she explained to Pilot. "The chip is still learning what it needs to compensate for. I have to push it to its limits."
It took her a little longer than it should have to tie off the bleeder but the scrolling counter told her that she was still well within her margins. As Pilot pulled a stool over to the other side of the table and sat down, Nerila started to put her holographic patient back together, guts, muscles, skin.
"I need to talk to you, Nerila," Pilot said.
Nerila kept her eyes on the hologram. "So talk."
"About your son."
The light flashed, a low tone sounded. "Fortune fuck." Her left hand shaking too badly to keep its grip, Nerila only just managed to get her right thumb on the forceps before they disappeared inside the 'patient'. Pilot reached out to help and Nerila snapped "Not sterile!" as if it mattered, as if it was real.
"Sorry," Pilot murmured.
Nerila shook her hand out, made a fist, shook it again, and took a deep breath. "It's fine." When she took hold of the forceps again her grip was light and steady. "Go on."
"It's time for him to leave medical."
"Okay."
"He needs ... " Pilot hesitated. "He needs to be with someone. I mean, he needs ... care. Maybe if you ... well. There's a family, I found. The mother is crew, here. They're both Gallente, like you, like Mitch. They have two little girls already and they'd love to take care of ... your son."
Nerila closed the last of the incision. "Okay."
"But not just temporarily," Pilot said. "Manina - that's her name - she said it would be too hard. To love him and know she might have to give him back to you." She pauses again. "Nerila. They want to adopt him."
"Okay," Nerila said. The holographic patient shimmered and faded and she looked at the readout. Still a little slow there, but not so bad, all things considered.
"There's papers to sign."
"Got them there?"
Pilot blinked, looking taken aback. "Um. Yes."
Nerila held out her steady right hand, and after a moment's hesitation Pilot took out her datapad, tapped on it for a moment and handed it over.
"If you want to take some time to think - "
Nerila pressed her thumb to the screen and then signed her name. The datapad registered her thumbprint and recorded her signature, beeped once. She handed it back to Pilot. "There. Anything else?"
Pilot shook her head, eyes sad. "No. That's all."
"Then I need to get back to work."
Pilot took it as the dismissal it was meant to be. Her footsteps were still fading down the corridor when Nerila called up the next program on her list. Twenty-two year old made with penetrating wound upper thoracic ...
Cut. Clean. Mend.
This is what I do. This is what I care about.
This is who I am.
Without thinking about it she got up from her stool and turned away from the patient bleeding out his computer-generated blood on her table. Her feet carried Nerila down the hall and to the left, third door, through the decontamination lock.
This is not what I want to do.
Her legs moved without any instruction from her, under someone else's control, someone who could imagine there being anything more important than a bleeding patient on the table.
That someone could not possibly be her. It's the chip, Nerila thought, as the blast of antiseptic air died down and the doors to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit opened for her. Dr Sanik and Captain Night lied. It is a mind-control chip.
The chip walked her across the room to the incubator, lifted her hands to open the plexiglass lid, reached in to the baby inside. So much bigger already than the one other time she'd seen him, most of the tubes gone, only a few wires left connecting him to the monitors by the incubator, and his eyes following her movements now, no longer blank and blind.
This is not what I care about.
He fussed as the chip used her hands to pick him up, and Nerila heard her voice crooning soft soothing nonsense as her good right hand held him securely against her shoulder, her less-reliable left detaching the wires that led to the monitors.
Not only should she not be doing this, not when there's a patient, even an illusory one, open on her table, she doesn't have the right to. She signed the papers. He's somebody else's son.
Someone else is his mother.
Not Nerila.
This is not who I want to be.
The baby's head was soft and downy against Nerila's neck as the chip made her pick up a blanket from the chair by the incubator and tuck it around him, then turn to the door. Her feet carried her across the room, through the door, down the hall. Someone called out to her but the chip wouldn't let her stop, kept her moving out past the entrance to medical and into the main hangar.
She turned towards the exit and saw security heading her way, turned the other way and saw three medtechs hurrying after her. The chip sent her forward, diagonally across the hangar, to the huge secure container that housed Pilot's hab unit.
Nerila reached it seconds before security and the medtechs reached her. They were talking to her but the chip wouldn't let her hear, wouldn't let her hear anything but the pounding of her own heart and the little grumbling sounds of the baby breathing.
"Pilot," she said to the marine on duty at the door. "Pilot."
That was all the chip would let her say.
One of the medtechs reached out for the baby and the baby started squalling. Nerila's arms tightened around him, her body curled forward to shelter him, her head bowed over his. Her voice whispered "Don't cry, sweetling, don't cry, don't cry." Hands touched her and she crouched away. "Don't cry. Hush, don't cry." They were all around her now and the chip had no more instructions except Hold on and keep safe and don't let go.
Then space around her and another voice. "Nerila."
"Don't cry," she whispered to the baby, who was grumpy now with bemusement at the hot salty rain falling on his face. "Don't cry, please don't cry, don't cry."
"Nerila," Pilot said again, her hand gentle on Nerila's arm. Nerila raised her head to see Pilot swimming in a blurry haze, crouching beside her on the deck.
"Something's gone wrong," she told Pilot.
"I know," Pilot said quietly.
"This isn't me," Nerila explained. "It's the chip. It isn't me!"
"It's okay, Nerila," Pilot said. "It's okay."
Nerila shook her head. "No. It's not okay. It's not okay! I - "
This is not who I want to be.
This is not what I want to do.
This is not what I want to care about.
"Nerila?" Pilot prompted softly.
"I can't - " she blurted. "I can't - " I can't let go. "This isn't who I am!"
Pilot's arms were around her and her son, holding them both, holding them together, and her voice was very gentle. "Yes it is, Nerila. This is who you are."
Nerila looked down at the baby in her arms and he looked back at her with his father's brown eyes.
She took a deep breath and held it until her lungs burned for air.
Exhaled.
This is what I do.
"How are you feeling?" Pilot asked.
Nerila blinked sweat out of her eyes, staring into the surgical field, and considered a dozen answers to that question. Busy came to mind, as did none of your fucking business.
She concentrated and pressed down with the holographically-generated retractor, sliding the illusory forceps past it and into the computer-generator incision and deciding on, "Fine. I'm fine."
A light flashed at the edge of her vision, the computer's warning that she's using too much pressure with her left hand. Correcting made her fingers shake and she had to pause.
This is what I care about.
Footsteps behind her told Nerila that Pilot had come into the room. "Maybe you should take a break."
"A real surgery would go for a lot longer than this." The tremor in her left hand stopped and she moved the holographic liver aside and looked for the bleed beneath.
This is who I am.
"But you're still recovering."
There. Nerila clamped the leaking vein. "That's the point," she explained to Pilot. "The chip is still learning what it needs to compensate for. I have to push it to its limits."
It took her a little longer than it should have to tie off the bleeder but the scrolling counter told her that she was still well within her margins. As Pilot pulled a stool over to the other side of the table and sat down, Nerila started to put her holographic patient back together, guts, muscles, skin.
"I need to talk to you, Nerila," Pilot said.
Nerila kept her eyes on the hologram. "So talk."
"About your son."
The light flashed, a low tone sounded. "Fortune fuck." Her left hand shaking too badly to keep its grip, Nerila only just managed to get her right thumb on the forceps before they disappeared inside the 'patient'. Pilot reached out to help and Nerila snapped "Not sterile!" as if it mattered, as if it was real.
"Sorry," Pilot murmured.
Nerila shook her hand out, made a fist, shook it again, and took a deep breath. "It's fine." When she took hold of the forceps again her grip was light and steady. "Go on."
"It's time for him to leave medical."
"Okay."
"He needs ... " Pilot hesitated. "He needs to be with someone. I mean, he needs ... care. Maybe if you ... well. There's a family, I found. The mother is crew, here. They're both Gallente, like you, like Mitch. They have two little girls already and they'd love to take care of ... your son."
Nerila closed the last of the incision. "Okay."
"But not just temporarily," Pilot said. "Manina - that's her name - she said it would be too hard. To love him and know she might have to give him back to you." She pauses again. "Nerila. They want to adopt him."
"Okay," Nerila said. The holographic patient shimmered and faded and she looked at the readout. Still a little slow there, but not so bad, all things considered.
"There's papers to sign."
"Got them there?"
Pilot blinked, looking taken aback. "Um. Yes."
Nerila held out her steady right hand, and after a moment's hesitation Pilot took out her datapad, tapped on it for a moment and handed it over.
"If you want to take some time to think - "
Nerila pressed her thumb to the screen and then signed her name. The datapad registered her thumbprint and recorded her signature, beeped once. She handed it back to Pilot. "There. Anything else?"
Pilot shook her head, eyes sad. "No. That's all."
"Then I need to get back to work."
Pilot took it as the dismissal it was meant to be. Her footsteps were still fading down the corridor when Nerila called up the next program on her list. Twenty-two year old made with penetrating wound upper thoracic ...
Cut. Clean. Mend.
This is what I do. This is what I care about.
This is who I am.
Without thinking about it she got up from her stool and turned away from the patient bleeding out his computer-generated blood on her table. Her feet carried Nerila down the hall and to the left, third door, through the decontamination lock.
This is not what I want to do.
Her legs moved without any instruction from her, under someone else's control, someone who could imagine there being anything more important than a bleeding patient on the table.
That someone could not possibly be her. It's the chip, Nerila thought, as the blast of antiseptic air died down and the doors to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit opened for her. Dr Sanik and Captain Night lied. It is a mind-control chip.
The chip walked her across the room to the incubator, lifted her hands to open the plexiglass lid, reached in to the baby inside. So much bigger already than the one other time she'd seen him, most of the tubes gone, only a few wires left connecting him to the monitors by the incubator, and his eyes following her movements now, no longer blank and blind.
This is not what I care about.
He fussed as the chip used her hands to pick him up, and Nerila heard her voice crooning soft soothing nonsense as her good right hand held him securely against her shoulder, her less-reliable left detaching the wires that led to the monitors.
Not only should she not be doing this, not when there's a patient, even an illusory one, open on her table, she doesn't have the right to. She signed the papers. He's somebody else's son.
Someone else is his mother.
Not Nerila.
This is not who I want to be.
The baby's head was soft and downy against Nerila's neck as the chip made her pick up a blanket from the chair by the incubator and tuck it around him, then turn to the door. Her feet carried her across the room, through the door, down the hall. Someone called out to her but the chip wouldn't let her stop, kept her moving out past the entrance to medical and into the main hangar.
She turned towards the exit and saw security heading her way, turned the other way and saw three medtechs hurrying after her. The chip sent her forward, diagonally across the hangar, to the huge secure container that housed Pilot's hab unit.
Nerila reached it seconds before security and the medtechs reached her. They were talking to her but the chip wouldn't let her hear, wouldn't let her hear anything but the pounding of her own heart and the little grumbling sounds of the baby breathing.
"Pilot," she said to the marine on duty at the door. "Pilot."
That was all the chip would let her say.
One of the medtechs reached out for the baby and the baby started squalling. Nerila's arms tightened around him, her body curled forward to shelter him, her head bowed over his. Her voice whispered "Don't cry, sweetling, don't cry, don't cry." Hands touched her and she crouched away. "Don't cry. Hush, don't cry." They were all around her now and the chip had no more instructions except Hold on and keep safe and don't let go.
Then space around her and another voice. "Nerila."
"Don't cry," she whispered to the baby, who was grumpy now with bemusement at the hot salty rain falling on his face. "Don't cry, please don't cry, don't cry."
"Nerila," Pilot said again, her hand gentle on Nerila's arm. Nerila raised her head to see Pilot swimming in a blurry haze, crouching beside her on the deck.
"Something's gone wrong," she told Pilot.
"I know," Pilot said quietly.
"This isn't me," Nerila explained. "It's the chip. It isn't me!"
"It's okay, Nerila," Pilot said. "It's okay."
Nerila shook her head. "No. It's not okay. It's not okay! I - "
This is not who I want to be.
This is not what I want to do.
This is not what I want to care about.
"Nerila?" Pilot prompted softly.
"I can't - " she blurted. "I can't - " I can't let go. "This isn't who I am!"
Pilot's arms were around her and her son, holding them both, holding them together, and her voice was very gentle. "Yes it is, Nerila. This is who you are."
Nerila looked down at the baby in her arms and he looked back at her with his father's brown eyes.
She took a deep breath and held it until her lungs burned for air.
Exhaled.
Saturday, June 19, 2010
Numb
It's an arm.
It's her arm, in fact.
It doesn't feel like it, lying on the covers of the bed, numb and immobile. Nerila reaches over with her right hand and takes hold of it, the lump of insensate flesh that she knows, intellectually, belongs to her.
She lifts it up and lets it drop.
Nothing.
Not that she expects anything. Just about everybody on the medical staff remembers when she was CMO Janianial and it didn't take too many orders in her new, slurring, voice before someone put her patient records in her hands.
Hand.
In the hand that works, still.
Her mind works. That's in the file, but Nerila doesn't need the file to tell her that. She was running through cognitive tests before they took her off the ventilator, checking the areas she came up short again and again as the fog of post-anesthesia diminished until she could say to herself Okay, honey, you're all still here.
Her mind works.
Her brain, not so much. That's in the file, but it's something else she doesn't need to read to know. Her left hand, her left leg, useless; the right side of her face numb and slack. You don't need to be a doctor to know what that means, and Nerila's a doctor.
The file has all the details. How long she was technically, clinically, dead for and just what parts of her brain are actually dead, now.
She knows what that means, even as her former staff are talking about therapy and rehabilitation.
Nerila's a doctor and she knows there's only so much functionality you can get back.
I was a doctor. She makes herself say it, silently, over and over. It'll sink in, soon. It won't hurt so much. Or maybe she'll just go numb the way her left hand is numb, and she won't feel the bruising impact of those words. I was a doctor.
Nerila's looking at the ceiling saying those words to herself when they come in, the three of them. Not medical staff, she can tell from the way they stop just inside the door. Not family, because hers is disowned or dead. Not friends, because she's a fucking junkie and junkies don't have friends.
She wants to tell them to Fuck off, whoever they are, but pushing words out of her slackly lopsided mouth takes more effort than it's usually worth, these days.
"Nerila?" It's Pilot's voice, the soft Gallente slur of it and the hesitancy equally familiar. Footsteps come to the left side of the bed, and Nerila turns her head in time to see Pilot gently take her left hand. Saying Don't bother, I can't feel it would take about five minutes, so Nerila lifts her right hand instead, waggles the fingers at Pilot in a silent It's this one that works gesture.
Pilot takes that hand as well. "Nerila, Dr Sanik is here to talk to you."
Sanik. Nerila knows Sanik, not in a have a drink together way but in the way that really matters, as far as the doctor Sanik is and Nerila used to be is concerned: she's read Sanik's meticulous case notes and she's seen the tiny, immaculate incisions left on Pilot's scalp by Sanik's surgery.
Nerila has always believed that you can tell a lot about someone by the way they cut.
Sanik comes to the bed, the other side to Pilot. The third visitor joins Pilot and Nerila recognizes him as well, Invelen's boss, former Sansha or current Sansha depending on who you listened to, Mr Happy Chip himself, Captain Silver Night.
Naqam Heavy BioIndustries.
It's not numb, the place she's been battering with I used to be a doctor. There's a flicker of hope there as Captain Night comes to stand behind Pilot and Dr Sanik starts to talk. Nerila can't crush that hope, although she tries, as Dr Sanik uses words like neural bridging and repair and functionality, as Pilot's face goes pale and paler. Trans-Cranial Micro-Controller, Dr Sanik says finally, the word that's been in the air since she started talking.
Pilot's Sansha friends want to put chips in my head.
The thought holds not even a tinge of apprehension when it's set beside And I could be able to use both my hands again.
"Do you understand, Nerila?" Pilot asks quietly. "It's not, it isn't, what, not like, it ..."
The hands holding hers are cold and sweaty and shaking. Captain Night says something Nerila can't hear, not more than a word, maybe two, and Pilot nods and swallows and falls silent.
"Dr Janianial," Captain Night says, "As Ms Roth was saying, there will be no behavioral control component to this T.C.M.C. No perceptual distortion, or personality modification. It will be purely a therapeutic device designed to replicate neurological functions that are currently impaired, and it will be locked against any tampering. You have my word on that."
There's something Nerila needs to ask, not about Captain Night's promises because right at that moment being a True Slave would be a fair trade for being able to get up off this bed and pick up a scalpel and do the one thing, the only single thing ever, that she's always been absolutely, unquestionably good at. The question she needs to ask is a different one, but heaving it up off her tongue is heavy lifting, the words sliding around her mouth.
Pilot tries to help, Fortune fuck her, she always tries to help. "Your son, Nerila, Dr Sanik can help him too. It's more complicated, but he could - "
Nerila shakes her head. I don't care about the brat. Do what you want to it.
"It's your choice, of course, Nerila, as his mother. If you don't want, well. But Dr Sanik says - "
"Shut. Up." The words are slurred but clear enough to make Pilot blink, her wide blue eyes showing hurt, and Nerila knows she's being unfair.
Fuck fair. Fair isn't that bastard Mitch sweet-talking me into bed and knocking me up, fair isn't Pilot's bitch friend deciding she knows what's best for me, fair isn't seven months of vomiting and backaches that ends with the brat trying to kill me.
Fair can go fuck itself.
The words come out eventually. "How much. Fuction?"
"With therapy and rehabilitation, you could be looking at close to one hundred percent," Dr Sanik says.
"And your son, too," Pilot said.
Close to one hundred percent.
There's a lot that can fall into that gap that close describes. The fine motor control that can slip an ace out of a deck of cards, for one thing. Or keep a scalpel steady.
But close is better than this. Close is a chance.
"Yes," Nerila says. It sounds more like esh, even to her, but Dr Sanik nods.
"There is a team on standby," Sanik says. "We can start as soon as you're prepped for the surgery."
"And your son, Nerila?" Pilot asks.
"Don't care," Nerila says.
"You don't mean that. He's - "
"I. Don't. Care." Her right hand answers her will, pulls free of Pilot's grip. Her left lies limp, and Nerila closes her eyes against the sight.
Pilot, though, Pilot doesn't quit things when she thinks she's right. "Well, medically, though, Nerila. What would you say, as a doctor? Do you want to see his ... chart, is that what it's called?"
"No." She's seen the brat's chart. Seen the brat, too, wheeled down the hall to the N.I.C.U. they have set up for it, by med-techs who couldn't imagine she wouldn't want to and who couldn't understand her attempts to protest. Hooked up to wires and monitors and feeding tubes and oxy-mix.
No, Nerila doesn't want to see the chart. No, she doesn't want to hold the baby. No, she doesn't want to make the decision.
"Nerila?"
Pilot's not going to leave this alone, Nerila can tell. She's going to sit there holding the hand that doesn't feel like mine asking me to make a choice about the baby that doesn't either until she hears what she needs to.
Fine.
"Yes," Nerila says. Esh.
The answer makes Pilot smile, happy, and let go of Nerila's hand so the techs can start prepping her for surgery.
That makes it the right answer, as far as Nerila's concerned.
As far as the brat's concerned ... ?
She can't find it in her to care.
It's her arm, in fact.
It doesn't feel like it, lying on the covers of the bed, numb and immobile. Nerila reaches over with her right hand and takes hold of it, the lump of insensate flesh that she knows, intellectually, belongs to her.
She lifts it up and lets it drop.
Nothing.
Not that she expects anything. Just about everybody on the medical staff remembers when she was CMO Janianial and it didn't take too many orders in her new, slurring, voice before someone put her patient records in her hands.
Hand.
In the hand that works, still.
Her mind works. That's in the file, but Nerila doesn't need the file to tell her that. She was running through cognitive tests before they took her off the ventilator, checking the areas she came up short again and again as the fog of post-anesthesia diminished until she could say to herself Okay, honey, you're all still here.
Her mind works.
Her brain, not so much. That's in the file, but it's something else she doesn't need to read to know. Her left hand, her left leg, useless; the right side of her face numb and slack. You don't need to be a doctor to know what that means, and Nerila's a doctor.
The file has all the details. How long she was technically, clinically, dead for and just what parts of her brain are actually dead, now.
She knows what that means, even as her former staff are talking about therapy and rehabilitation.
Nerila's a doctor and she knows there's only so much functionality you can get back.
I was a doctor. She makes herself say it, silently, over and over. It'll sink in, soon. It won't hurt so much. Or maybe she'll just go numb the way her left hand is numb, and she won't feel the bruising impact of those words. I was a doctor.
Nerila's looking at the ceiling saying those words to herself when they come in, the three of them. Not medical staff, she can tell from the way they stop just inside the door. Not family, because hers is disowned or dead. Not friends, because she's a fucking junkie and junkies don't have friends.
She wants to tell them to Fuck off, whoever they are, but pushing words out of her slackly lopsided mouth takes more effort than it's usually worth, these days.
"Nerila?" It's Pilot's voice, the soft Gallente slur of it and the hesitancy equally familiar. Footsteps come to the left side of the bed, and Nerila turns her head in time to see Pilot gently take her left hand. Saying Don't bother, I can't feel it would take about five minutes, so Nerila lifts her right hand instead, waggles the fingers at Pilot in a silent It's this one that works gesture.
Pilot takes that hand as well. "Nerila, Dr Sanik is here to talk to you."
Sanik. Nerila knows Sanik, not in a have a drink together way but in the way that really matters, as far as the doctor Sanik is and Nerila used to be is concerned: she's read Sanik's meticulous case notes and she's seen the tiny, immaculate incisions left on Pilot's scalp by Sanik's surgery.
Nerila has always believed that you can tell a lot about someone by the way they cut.
Sanik comes to the bed, the other side to Pilot. The third visitor joins Pilot and Nerila recognizes him as well, Invelen's boss, former Sansha or current Sansha depending on who you listened to, Mr Happy Chip himself, Captain Silver Night.
Naqam Heavy BioIndustries.
It's not numb, the place she's been battering with I used to be a doctor. There's a flicker of hope there as Captain Night comes to stand behind Pilot and Dr Sanik starts to talk. Nerila can't crush that hope, although she tries, as Dr Sanik uses words like neural bridging and repair and functionality, as Pilot's face goes pale and paler. Trans-Cranial Micro-Controller, Dr Sanik says finally, the word that's been in the air since she started talking.
Pilot's Sansha friends want to put chips in my head.
The thought holds not even a tinge of apprehension when it's set beside And I could be able to use both my hands again.
"Do you understand, Nerila?" Pilot asks quietly. "It's not, it isn't, what, not like, it ..."
The hands holding hers are cold and sweaty and shaking. Captain Night says something Nerila can't hear, not more than a word, maybe two, and Pilot nods and swallows and falls silent.
"Dr Janianial," Captain Night says, "As Ms Roth was saying, there will be no behavioral control component to this T.C.M.C. No perceptual distortion, or personality modification. It will be purely a therapeutic device designed to replicate neurological functions that are currently impaired, and it will be locked against any tampering. You have my word on that."
There's something Nerila needs to ask, not about Captain Night's promises because right at that moment being a True Slave would be a fair trade for being able to get up off this bed and pick up a scalpel and do the one thing, the only single thing ever, that she's always been absolutely, unquestionably good at. The question she needs to ask is a different one, but heaving it up off her tongue is heavy lifting, the words sliding around her mouth.
Pilot tries to help, Fortune fuck her, she always tries to help. "Your son, Nerila, Dr Sanik can help him too. It's more complicated, but he could - "
Nerila shakes her head. I don't care about the brat. Do what you want to it.
"It's your choice, of course, Nerila, as his mother. If you don't want, well. But Dr Sanik says - "
"Shut. Up." The words are slurred but clear enough to make Pilot blink, her wide blue eyes showing hurt, and Nerila knows she's being unfair.
Fuck fair. Fair isn't that bastard Mitch sweet-talking me into bed and knocking me up, fair isn't Pilot's bitch friend deciding she knows what's best for me, fair isn't seven months of vomiting and backaches that ends with the brat trying to kill me.
Fair can go fuck itself.
The words come out eventually. "How much. Fuction?"
"With therapy and rehabilitation, you could be looking at close to one hundred percent," Dr Sanik says.
"And your son, too," Pilot said.
Close to one hundred percent.
There's a lot that can fall into that gap that close describes. The fine motor control that can slip an ace out of a deck of cards, for one thing. Or keep a scalpel steady.
But close is better than this. Close is a chance.
"Yes," Nerila says. It sounds more like esh, even to her, but Dr Sanik nods.
"There is a team on standby," Sanik says. "We can start as soon as you're prepped for the surgery."
"And your son, Nerila?" Pilot asks.
"Don't care," Nerila says.
"You don't mean that. He's - "
"I. Don't. Care." Her right hand answers her will, pulls free of Pilot's grip. Her left lies limp, and Nerila closes her eyes against the sight.
Pilot, though, Pilot doesn't quit things when she thinks she's right. "Well, medically, though, Nerila. What would you say, as a doctor? Do you want to see his ... chart, is that what it's called?"
"No." She's seen the brat's chart. Seen the brat, too, wheeled down the hall to the N.I.C.U. they have set up for it, by med-techs who couldn't imagine she wouldn't want to and who couldn't understand her attempts to protest. Hooked up to wires and monitors and feeding tubes and oxy-mix.
No, Nerila doesn't want to see the chart. No, she doesn't want to hold the baby. No, she doesn't want to make the decision.
"Nerila?"
Pilot's not going to leave this alone, Nerila can tell. She's going to sit there holding the hand that doesn't feel like mine asking me to make a choice about the baby that doesn't either until she hears what she needs to.
Fine.
"Yes," Nerila says. Esh.
The answer makes Pilot smile, happy, and let go of Nerila's hand so the techs can start prepping her for surgery.
That makes it the right answer, as far as Nerila's concerned.
As far as the brat's concerned ... ?
She can't find it in her to care.
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Conversations on the Utopian Ideal: Twenty Three
People say starship pilots become their ships, when they're plugged in to the pod.
It's as true as any simple explanation of a vastly complex process affected by a thousand thousand variables can be, which is to say, not very.
Apart, the ship and the pilot exist, separate entities. When the intricacies of Jovian technology join them in a union more intimate than any imagined in the world of the flesh, one does not become the other.
The pilot is not the ship any more than the ship is the pilot.
But it is true enough that when the neural links slide home into the pod-jacks and the connection goes live a pilot is no longer themselves entirely, either, not the same self that walks on two feet through the corridors of the station, that sees only what can be revealed by limited human eyesight, the self contained entirely by a frame of flesh and bone.
A pilot in pod gains and loses with each transit of the barrier between metal and mind. Loses and gains with each journey back.
Capsuleers differ in the way they negotiate the constant demand of their profession to cross again and again from the self of the flesh to the self of the stars. Some reject the idea of unity between themselves and their ship as much as they can, and talk instead of controlling their ship as if pod technology is only a more efficient version of the Captain's bridge chair. Some regard their ships as if they were bodies to be put on and taken off, as casually as anyone with access to cloning technology puts on and takes off the body of their birth, declaring that their self is contained entirely in their intellect, whatever physical architecture it may be hooked up to at any given moment.
Both may be right. Or neither.
Cloning teaches us that the mind must be separate from the brain, that the self must be separate from the body it inhabits. If that is true, then the capsuleer makes the ship they wear themselves as thoroughly as anyone wearing a vat-grown body has made that biomass lattice their own even before the slow colonisation of their DNA.
But not everyone believes it is true. Some hold that something essential is lost with that first transliteration of memory and personality from flesh to flesh. Other say they believe no such thing, but hoard and protect their first body behind steel walls and security screens sufficient to keep even CONCORD out. The mind is the self, true, but the mind is the product of the brain, with all its intertwined and ceaselessly firing neurons responding to every twitch and tingle of the body that houses and shapes and changes it daily.
Except for capsuleers, who regularly, even eagerly, switch off the sensations of their flesh and switch on the carefully calibrated information flow from the thousand systems of their ship.
A pilot in pod does not become their ship, but perhaps in the intangible alchemy that technology provides, pilot and ship together become, temporarily, a single self, a mind created by the biological reactions of a human brain to mechanical stimuli fed directly into the cortex.
As complex as the technology of the pod is, the human mind is more complex still. For many pilots, their sense of control or habitation, of ownership or union, varies widely between one ship and the next. Different makes and models, different specifications and capabilities, all affect the comfort - or lack of it - of the pilot in the pod. And other intangible considerations, too: more than one pilot has been known to complain that this Vagabond, this Falcon, this Megathron, is just not as comfortable as the last.
Many a Chief Engineer has spent hours hunting for undetectable flaws and cursing their employer's eccentricities.
This pilot, though, had no such sense of nagging incongruity as he stretched his consciousness out through the kilometers of corridors and ducts of his Chimera-class carrier. This ship was not new, not unfamiliar. It was, in fact, home, in the pod or out of it, and the flood of information that poured through the pod implants was a background hum as reassuring and unnoticed as the beat of his own heart.
The ship had a heart, too, although the core life-support processors didn't beat, but hummed a steady whirr. Air hissed through vents and was drawn back again, washed through the scrubbers, pumped past the green leaves of the plants in the hydrobays and sent on its way again. Across the ship, machinery kept up its pace while redundant systems were in various stages of power-down or maintenance cycles.
The bipedal carbon-based components of the ship performed their tasks with the same reliable consistency, or moved through the rest and recreation stages necessary to peak efficiency. In one compartment, staff from engineering discussed improvements to the capacitor output mix over a game of cards; in another professions of undying love were offered and received; the muffled Rat-tat-tat. Rat. Tat of marines at pistol practice came from the range. A woman was singing as she switched out relay circuits in the cargo hold, a child was crying quietly in compartment 1583C, a med-tech sighing with relief as he looked at a test result ...
For the ship, all these sounds were of equal importance, or lack of it: non-operational background noise, of far less relevance than the hum of the capacitor or the whine of the shield buffer.
But the ship was not just a ship, when the human pilot was in pod, just as the human pilot was not only human when he was encased in the ship's embrace.
A child crying.
Responding to the pilot's interest the ship's systems sorted and ordered the flood of information with a new set of priorities. The sound was separated out from the quiet babble picked up by sensors all around the ship, identified, pin-pointed.
The neural links withdrew and the pod seal opened. The pilot slid through the decanting chamber and to the floor below, enduring the indignities of the process stoically. Jets of warm water sluiced away the pod-fluid before a blast of hot air dried the moisture from his skin. A uniform, immaculately pressed, was laid ready. Mere moments after that single anomalous sound had caught his attention, the captain stood before the door of compartment 1583C.
He pressed the call button by the door frame. "Camille? It's Silver. May I come in?"
At Camille's assent, muffled but intelligible, he keyed the door open.
The room, with its profusion of vegetative artwork, was of course familiar. The small red-headed girl sitting in the far left corner, hugging her knees to her chest, was less so.
"Camille, it's past twenty-three hundred. Shouldn't you be asleep?"
Camille sniffled without looking up. "Couldn't sleep," she said.
"I see." Silver paused. "Do you think you might be better able to sleep if you went to bed?"
The girl shook her head. "I feel better here," she said.
"I see," Silver said again, although in fact he did not, in more than the strictly literal sense, see. "Do you mind if I join you?"
"Yes," Camille said. "I mean, no. I don't mind." She shuffled herself sideways a bit, making room for him in the narrow wedge of space between Commander Invelen's desk and the wall.
Silver lowered himself down to sit beside her, his back to the ventilation duct, the faint hum of the life-support processors distantly audible under the gentle hiss of air, the constant whirr of the Utopian Ideal's heart, not, of course, a human heart that beat a steady rhythm but an artificial heart that hummed steadily without pause, much as -
I see.
He hesitated, and cleared his throat slightly. "I imagine you miss your sisters quite a bit. Cia. And Ami."
"I'm not crying," Camille said.
"I can see that," Silver assured her.
"And even if I was, sometime even marines cry." Camille sniffled again and wiped at one eye with her sleeve. "But I'm not."
Silver offered her his handkerchief. "Certainly not."
"Thanks." Camille took the handkerchief and blew her nose.
"You're welcome."
Camille blew her nose again. "I'm a bit worried about Ami," she admitted softly.
"Cia will take good care of her."
"I know," Camille said with a sigh. "Cia's good when you're sad. It's nice she's good for something." She held out the handkerchief to him. "Thanks."
"Ah, you should keep that. In case you need it again," Silver said quickly.
"Okay." Camille tucked the handkerchief into her sleeve.
"When you can't sleep, at home, what do you do?" Silver asked.
"Cia usually makes me hot chocolate," Camille said.
"And that helps?"
Camille nodded. "Yeah."
"I'm sure the officers' mess could send up some hot chocolate, if you wanted," Silver said.
"It's okay," Camille said sadly. "It wouldn't be the same. I think I'm just going to sit here for a bit."
Silver nodded. "Do you mind if I sit with you?"
"No," Camille said. "That'd be okay."
"Good."
Camille sighed again, and shuffled herself a little closer to Silver. "Silver?"
"Yes, Camille?"
"Cia said you're not very used to little kids."
"I suppose that's true," Silver said.
Camille leaned her head against his shoulder. "It's okay, though. You don't need to worry about it. I'm nearly nearly-ten, and when I'm ten I'll be nearly big enough to start training to be a marine, and that's practically almost grown up. So don't worry. I won't be a kid much longer."
"I will," Silver reassured her, "do my best not to worry about it."
"Good," Camille said, and fell silent again.
A thought brought up the interface for Silver's internal neocom, another created a memo for the Facilities and Maintenance division. Work order: Commander Invelen's quarters, compartment 1583C. Temporary relocation of bed to far left corner of compartment, adjacent to ventilation duct. Work to be completed next main-day shift.
He let the interface fade from his vision and glanced down at the top of Camille's head, her ginger hair a vivid contrast to the dark blue of his uniform. The slow regularity of her breathing and her limp weight indicated that she had fallen asleep.
Given the lateness of the hour, that was not unexpected.
What Silver had not expected was his own discovery that he did not, altogether, mind.
It's as true as any simple explanation of a vastly complex process affected by a thousand thousand variables can be, which is to say, not very.
Apart, the ship and the pilot exist, separate entities. When the intricacies of Jovian technology join them in a union more intimate than any imagined in the world of the flesh, one does not become the other.
The pilot is not the ship any more than the ship is the pilot.
But it is true enough that when the neural links slide home into the pod-jacks and the connection goes live a pilot is no longer themselves entirely, either, not the same self that walks on two feet through the corridors of the station, that sees only what can be revealed by limited human eyesight, the self contained entirely by a frame of flesh and bone.
A pilot in pod gains and loses with each transit of the barrier between metal and mind. Loses and gains with each journey back.
Capsuleers differ in the way they negotiate the constant demand of their profession to cross again and again from the self of the flesh to the self of the stars. Some reject the idea of unity between themselves and their ship as much as they can, and talk instead of controlling their ship as if pod technology is only a more efficient version of the Captain's bridge chair. Some regard their ships as if they were bodies to be put on and taken off, as casually as anyone with access to cloning technology puts on and takes off the body of their birth, declaring that their self is contained entirely in their intellect, whatever physical architecture it may be hooked up to at any given moment.
Both may be right. Or neither.
Cloning teaches us that the mind must be separate from the brain, that the self must be separate from the body it inhabits. If that is true, then the capsuleer makes the ship they wear themselves as thoroughly as anyone wearing a vat-grown body has made that biomass lattice their own even before the slow colonisation of their DNA.
But not everyone believes it is true. Some hold that something essential is lost with that first transliteration of memory and personality from flesh to flesh. Other say they believe no such thing, but hoard and protect their first body behind steel walls and security screens sufficient to keep even CONCORD out. The mind is the self, true, but the mind is the product of the brain, with all its intertwined and ceaselessly firing neurons responding to every twitch and tingle of the body that houses and shapes and changes it daily.
Except for capsuleers, who regularly, even eagerly, switch off the sensations of their flesh and switch on the carefully calibrated information flow from the thousand systems of their ship.
A pilot in pod does not become their ship, but perhaps in the intangible alchemy that technology provides, pilot and ship together become, temporarily, a single self, a mind created by the biological reactions of a human brain to mechanical stimuli fed directly into the cortex.
As complex as the technology of the pod is, the human mind is more complex still. For many pilots, their sense of control or habitation, of ownership or union, varies widely between one ship and the next. Different makes and models, different specifications and capabilities, all affect the comfort - or lack of it - of the pilot in the pod. And other intangible considerations, too: more than one pilot has been known to complain that this Vagabond, this Falcon, this Megathron, is just not as comfortable as the last.
Many a Chief Engineer has spent hours hunting for undetectable flaws and cursing their employer's eccentricities.
This pilot, though, had no such sense of nagging incongruity as he stretched his consciousness out through the kilometers of corridors and ducts of his Chimera-class carrier. This ship was not new, not unfamiliar. It was, in fact, home, in the pod or out of it, and the flood of information that poured through the pod implants was a background hum as reassuring and unnoticed as the beat of his own heart.
The ship had a heart, too, although the core life-support processors didn't beat, but hummed a steady whirr. Air hissed through vents and was drawn back again, washed through the scrubbers, pumped past the green leaves of the plants in the hydrobays and sent on its way again. Across the ship, machinery kept up its pace while redundant systems were in various stages of power-down or maintenance cycles.
The bipedal carbon-based components of the ship performed their tasks with the same reliable consistency, or moved through the rest and recreation stages necessary to peak efficiency. In one compartment, staff from engineering discussed improvements to the capacitor output mix over a game of cards; in another professions of undying love were offered and received; the muffled Rat-tat-tat. Rat. Tat of marines at pistol practice came from the range. A woman was singing as she switched out relay circuits in the cargo hold, a child was crying quietly in compartment 1583C, a med-tech sighing with relief as he looked at a test result ...
For the ship, all these sounds were of equal importance, or lack of it: non-operational background noise, of far less relevance than the hum of the capacitor or the whine of the shield buffer.
But the ship was not just a ship, when the human pilot was in pod, just as the human pilot was not only human when he was encased in the ship's embrace.
A child crying.
Responding to the pilot's interest the ship's systems sorted and ordered the flood of information with a new set of priorities. The sound was separated out from the quiet babble picked up by sensors all around the ship, identified, pin-pointed.
The neural links withdrew and the pod seal opened. The pilot slid through the decanting chamber and to the floor below, enduring the indignities of the process stoically. Jets of warm water sluiced away the pod-fluid before a blast of hot air dried the moisture from his skin. A uniform, immaculately pressed, was laid ready. Mere moments after that single anomalous sound had caught his attention, the captain stood before the door of compartment 1583C.
He pressed the call button by the door frame. "Camille? It's Silver. May I come in?"
At Camille's assent, muffled but intelligible, he keyed the door open.
The room, with its profusion of vegetative artwork, was of course familiar. The small red-headed girl sitting in the far left corner, hugging her knees to her chest, was less so.
"Camille, it's past twenty-three hundred. Shouldn't you be asleep?"
Camille sniffled without looking up. "Couldn't sleep," she said.
"I see." Silver paused. "Do you think you might be better able to sleep if you went to bed?"
The girl shook her head. "I feel better here," she said.
"I see," Silver said again, although in fact he did not, in more than the strictly literal sense, see. "Do you mind if I join you?"
"Yes," Camille said. "I mean, no. I don't mind." She shuffled herself sideways a bit, making room for him in the narrow wedge of space between Commander Invelen's desk and the wall.
Silver lowered himself down to sit beside her, his back to the ventilation duct, the faint hum of the life-support processors distantly audible under the gentle hiss of air, the constant whirr of the Utopian Ideal's heart, not, of course, a human heart that beat a steady rhythm but an artificial heart that hummed steadily without pause, much as -
I see.
He hesitated, and cleared his throat slightly. "I imagine you miss your sisters quite a bit. Cia. And Ami."
"I'm not crying," Camille said.
"I can see that," Silver assured her.
"And even if I was, sometime even marines cry." Camille sniffled again and wiped at one eye with her sleeve. "But I'm not."
Silver offered her his handkerchief. "Certainly not."
"Thanks." Camille took the handkerchief and blew her nose.
"You're welcome."
Camille blew her nose again. "I'm a bit worried about Ami," she admitted softly.
"Cia will take good care of her."
"I know," Camille said with a sigh. "Cia's good when you're sad. It's nice she's good for something." She held out the handkerchief to him. "Thanks."
"Ah, you should keep that. In case you need it again," Silver said quickly.
"Okay." Camille tucked the handkerchief into her sleeve.
"When you can't sleep, at home, what do you do?" Silver asked.
"Cia usually makes me hot chocolate," Camille said.
"And that helps?"
Camille nodded. "Yeah."
"I'm sure the officers' mess could send up some hot chocolate, if you wanted," Silver said.
"It's okay," Camille said sadly. "It wouldn't be the same. I think I'm just going to sit here for a bit."
Silver nodded. "Do you mind if I sit with you?"
"No," Camille said. "That'd be okay."
"Good."
Camille sighed again, and shuffled herself a little closer to Silver. "Silver?"
"Yes, Camille?"
"Cia said you're not very used to little kids."
"I suppose that's true," Silver said.
Camille leaned her head against his shoulder. "It's okay, though. You don't need to worry about it. I'm nearly nearly-ten, and when I'm ten I'll be nearly big enough to start training to be a marine, and that's practically almost grown up. So don't worry. I won't be a kid much longer."
"I will," Silver reassured her, "do my best not to worry about it."
"Good," Camille said, and fell silent again.
A thought brought up the interface for Silver's internal neocom, another created a memo for the Facilities and Maintenance division. Work order: Commander Invelen's quarters, compartment 1583C. Temporary relocation of bed to far left corner of compartment, adjacent to ventilation duct. Work to be completed next main-day shift.
He let the interface fade from his vision and glanced down at the top of Camille's head, her ginger hair a vivid contrast to the dark blue of his uniform. The slow regularity of her breathing and her limp weight indicated that she had fallen asleep.
Given the lateness of the hour, that was not unexpected.
What Silver had not expected was his own discovery that he did not, altogether, mind.
Saturday, May 22, 2010
Conversations on the Utopian Ideal: Twenty Two
Isala Haya had, in twenty-five years of service, seen it all.
He'd waited on Captain Katamara as a junior steward on the Blue Star the night the Captain had dined with Ruunuken Vulli and Tsilo Ralttilo, and never breathed a word of what he'd overheard. He'd poured wine for Mens Reppola without spilling a drop, pulled out chairs for C.E.O.s and pirate lords and podders with equanimity, and even, in the recent years of his employment as Captain Night's chief steward, Sansha.
But spirits and ancestors, there are some things nothing can prepare one to see at the Captain's table.
It wasn't Captain Night's guest's spectacular black eye - there had been plenty of occasions when Commander Invelen had eaten her dinner with an icepack handy for whatever bruises she'd acquired that day.
It wasn't the less-than-impeccable table manners, either - customs differed throughout the Cluster and no Chief Steward worth the salt in the Captain's silver salt-shaker would turn a hair even if a dinner guest picked up the finger bowl and drank it.
But of all the things Chief Haya had seen in his long and varied career, a small child at Captain Night's table had to be the most unlikely of them all.
Unlikelier still, the girl seemed quite at home, black eye and all. Haya himself had never exchanged more words with Captain Night than the minimum required for food and wine to be ordered and delivered, and if the ancestors love me they'll keep it that way, but Miss Camille Roth chattered away at the Captain as if he were, well, a normal person.
In three years of waiting on the Captain's table, Haya had observed many things about his employer: that he had impeccable manners; that he not only ordered, but also appreciated, wine of exquisite quality and breathtaking expense; that no reason short of a hull breach would see him appear in the officer's mess wearing informal attire.
And if Captain Night treated the crew with slightly distant formality, if he sometimes went days at a time without leaving his capsule, if he had the unsettling habit of occasionally looking through his Chief Steward as if the presence of another human being was a momentary distraction from the contemplation of warp vectors and jump points, well, what else could be expected?
The Captain was a capsuleer. He was immortal, impossibly powerful.
He was most definitely not normal.
The little girl's apparent blithe disregard for that simple fact unsettled the foundations of Haya's universe, but what rocked them to their core was the fact that Captain Night didn't seem to mind.
None of his internal turmoil showing on his face, Chief Haya inclined his head in acknowledgment of the Captain's order of seafood for himself and a cheeseburger for the child and took himself back to the galley to recover his composure a little.
"... say sister," one of the junior stewards was telling another as they washed the fine china dishes that no cleaner drone could be trusted with, "But do the math, right? No-one knows where she - "
"Mister Makkura," Haya said frostily. "There will be no gossip in my kitchen while the Captain's at table."
"No, chief!" Makkura said quickly.
"Kaalioka Trefin, quickly now. And a cheeseburger."
Haya watched closely as the food was prepared, but as usual, could find nothing that fell short of his exacting standards. At the head of a small procession of junior stewards, he returned to the officer's mess.
"You know what is very important, when you fly fighters?" Captain Night was saying to the little girl as they entered.
"What?" she asked.
"Picking your fights very carefully," Captain Night said.
Haya decided that he had clearly either inadvertently eaten something with hallucinatory side-effects or the Sansha invaders' rumored wormholes led, in fact, to an alternate reality, because the only other possibility he could think of was that Captain Night was, in fact, imparting avuncular advice to Commander Invelen's eight year old adopted sister, and that clearly wasn't happening.
The comforting conviction that he had simply lost touch with a reality that nevertheless retained its accustomed shape and was waiting for him to rejoin it, let Haya view with equanimity Captain Night agreeing with Miss Roth that indeed, biting was an option when one was losing a fight, although more general strategies were also useful to have. It carried him through half-heard snatches of conversation about gardening and it withstood Miss Roth asking the Captain Did you always know who you were going to be? Like, when you were my age? and the Captain actually answering. It wavered a little at Captain Night reassuring Miss Roth that in his opinion, she didn't need to be afraid of growing up to be an accountant.
It buckled completely when Captain Night gave his dessert order.
Chief Steward Isala Haya was a seasoned officer. He inclined his head in acknowledgement, turned precisely on his heel and strode into the galley to relay the order. He stared down the junior stewards with a glare that said the first person in my galley to comment will be scrubbing pots until the end of time. He supervised the preparation of the dessert the Captain had chosen and its delivery to the table. When the Captain and his guest had finished their meal, shaken hands with all the formality any Deteis could desire, and gone their separate ways, Haya oversaw the clearing of the table and the careful cleaning of the irreplaceable cutlery and crockery.
Then he dismissed his juniors, and locked the door behind them.
In twenty five years of service Chief Steward Isala Haya had never once taken even the smallest liberty with the ship's stores or the Captain's property.
There is, he thought, as he took down a bottle of the Captain's least expensive hak'len and poured himself a precise single measure, a first time for everything.
For drinking the Captain's liquor.
For eight year olds at the Captain's table.
He tossed the hak'len back, shuddering a little at the alcohol and a little at the memory.
For two chocolate milkshakes.
With, spirits help me ...
With extra chocolate.
He'd waited on Captain Katamara as a junior steward on the Blue Star the night the Captain had dined with Ruunuken Vulli and Tsilo Ralttilo, and never breathed a word of what he'd overheard. He'd poured wine for Mens Reppola without spilling a drop, pulled out chairs for C.E.O.s and pirate lords and podders with equanimity, and even, in the recent years of his employment as Captain Night's chief steward, Sansha.
But spirits and ancestors, there are some things nothing can prepare one to see at the Captain's table.
It wasn't Captain Night's guest's spectacular black eye - there had been plenty of occasions when Commander Invelen had eaten her dinner with an icepack handy for whatever bruises she'd acquired that day.
It wasn't the less-than-impeccable table manners, either - customs differed throughout the Cluster and no Chief Steward worth the salt in the Captain's silver salt-shaker would turn a hair even if a dinner guest picked up the finger bowl and drank it.
But of all the things Chief Haya had seen in his long and varied career, a small child at Captain Night's table had to be the most unlikely of them all.
Unlikelier still, the girl seemed quite at home, black eye and all. Haya himself had never exchanged more words with Captain Night than the minimum required for food and wine to be ordered and delivered, and if the ancestors love me they'll keep it that way, but Miss Camille Roth chattered away at the Captain as if he were, well, a normal person.
In three years of waiting on the Captain's table, Haya had observed many things about his employer: that he had impeccable manners; that he not only ordered, but also appreciated, wine of exquisite quality and breathtaking expense; that no reason short of a hull breach would see him appear in the officer's mess wearing informal attire.
And if Captain Night treated the crew with slightly distant formality, if he sometimes went days at a time without leaving his capsule, if he had the unsettling habit of occasionally looking through his Chief Steward as if the presence of another human being was a momentary distraction from the contemplation of warp vectors and jump points, well, what else could be expected?
The Captain was a capsuleer. He was immortal, impossibly powerful.
He was most definitely not normal.
The little girl's apparent blithe disregard for that simple fact unsettled the foundations of Haya's universe, but what rocked them to their core was the fact that Captain Night didn't seem to mind.
None of his internal turmoil showing on his face, Chief Haya inclined his head in acknowledgment of the Captain's order of seafood for himself and a cheeseburger for the child and took himself back to the galley to recover his composure a little.
"... say sister," one of the junior stewards was telling another as they washed the fine china dishes that no cleaner drone could be trusted with, "But do the math, right? No-one knows where she - "
"Mister Makkura," Haya said frostily. "There will be no gossip in my kitchen while the Captain's at table."
"No, chief!" Makkura said quickly.
"Kaalioka Trefin, quickly now. And a cheeseburger."
Haya watched closely as the food was prepared, but as usual, could find nothing that fell short of his exacting standards. At the head of a small procession of junior stewards, he returned to the officer's mess.
"You know what is very important, when you fly fighters?" Captain Night was saying to the little girl as they entered.
"What?" she asked.
"Picking your fights very carefully," Captain Night said.
Haya decided that he had clearly either inadvertently eaten something with hallucinatory side-effects or the Sansha invaders' rumored wormholes led, in fact, to an alternate reality, because the only other possibility he could think of was that Captain Night was, in fact, imparting avuncular advice to Commander Invelen's eight year old adopted sister, and that clearly wasn't happening.
The comforting conviction that he had simply lost touch with a reality that nevertheless retained its accustomed shape and was waiting for him to rejoin it, let Haya view with equanimity Captain Night agreeing with Miss Roth that indeed, biting was an option when one was losing a fight, although more general strategies were also useful to have. It carried him through half-heard snatches of conversation about gardening and it withstood Miss Roth asking the Captain Did you always know who you were going to be? Like, when you were my age? and the Captain actually answering. It wavered a little at Captain Night reassuring Miss Roth that in his opinion, she didn't need to be afraid of growing up to be an accountant.
It buckled completely when Captain Night gave his dessert order.
Chief Steward Isala Haya was a seasoned officer. He inclined his head in acknowledgement, turned precisely on his heel and strode into the galley to relay the order. He stared down the junior stewards with a glare that said the first person in my galley to comment will be scrubbing pots until the end of time. He supervised the preparation of the dessert the Captain had chosen and its delivery to the table. When the Captain and his guest had finished their meal, shaken hands with all the formality any Deteis could desire, and gone their separate ways, Haya oversaw the clearing of the table and the careful cleaning of the irreplaceable cutlery and crockery.
Then he dismissed his juniors, and locked the door behind them.
In twenty five years of service Chief Steward Isala Haya had never once taken even the smallest liberty with the ship's stores or the Captain's property.
There is, he thought, as he took down a bottle of the Captain's least expensive hak'len and poured himself a precise single measure, a first time for everything.
For drinking the Captain's liquor.
For eight year olds at the Captain's table.
He tossed the hak'len back, shuddering a little at the alcohol and a little at the memory.
For two chocolate milkshakes.
With, spirits help me ...
With extra chocolate.
Conversations on the Utopian Ideal: Twenty One
The girl was eight years old but she had a black-eye worthy of a heavy-weight prize fighter and a scowl that wouldn't have been out of place on the face of a Civire bouncer. An air of don't-want-to-be-here radiated off her like heat shimmer from warp-core housing, and had been since Inola Toras had dragged her off a Brutor boy a year older and twice her weight and marched her into the empty classroom.
The boy was on his way to medical. By the time the sixth sense for trouble that Inola had developed over twenty years of teaching had sent her down the hall to the lunch-room at a run, Commander Invelen's sister's excellent impression of a small, red-headed whirling dervish had done considerable damage.
Not the first fight Irt Kalur has been in, Inola thought, but quite possibly the first he's lost.
"Miss Roth?" Inola asked the small bundle of resentment sitting in front of her. "I asked you a question."
Camille Roth folded her arms and sighed. "I know."
Inola folded her own arms. "Are you going to answer it?"
"No."
Inola's sigh was internal, twenty years of teaching having given her more than a little self-restraint when it came to dealing with miniature miscreants. "Miss Roth, that's not an acceptable response. Why were you fighting?"
Camille shook her head. "That's not any of your business."
"Children fighting in my classroom most certainly is my business, Miss Roth."
"We weren't in your classroom."
Strictly speaking, true. "You were in the lunchroom after you were in my classroom, and that's not an excuse. And I know you've only been here a few days, but that's not an excuse either. What would Commander Invelen say if she heard you'd been fighting?"
"She'd ask if I won," Camille said.
Quite possibly true, Inola thought, given some of the rumors about the Commander. "I think she'd be unhappy you got in trouble. We don't allow fighting here, Miss Roth."
The little girl stuck out her chin and said stolidly, "Then I guess you better punish me."
"I need to know what happened to know who deserves punishment, and how much. Did Mr Kalur start it?"
"I'm not saying."
"Miss Roth. Camille. I know that when you come to a new place, it can be hard to fit in. Sometimes the other kids want to make sure you know who the boss is, yes? Is that what happened?"
Camille's expression didn't change. "I'm not saying."
"If you don't tell me what happened, I'll have to punish you both."
"Good," Camille said.
"You want me to punish you?" Inola asked.
Camille rolled her eyes. "If you don't, the other kids will think it's because of whose sister I am."
Ah ha, Inola thought. "Is that what happened? Mr Kalur thought you were getting preferential treatment because you're Commander Invelen's sister?"
"No. And I'm not saying."
"If the other kids are teasing you, I can make them stop, if you tell me."
"Ms Toras," Camille said patiently, "If I tell you, then I'll be a tattletale. And they will stop, now. I proved he was wrong."
"Mr Kalur? Proved he was wrong about what?"
"About Ami. I proved he was wrong on his body."
Inola blinked. "On his body?"
Camille sighed again and gave Inola a pitying look. "He's Yushkal clan," she said, clearly thinking that explained everything.
It took Inola a moment to dredge up what she knew about Irt Kalur's clan background, and then Camille's words made sense. Yushkal clan, one of the Brutor clans with a long tradition of trial by combat. "He said something about Commander Invelen and you challenged him to prove the truth of it with a fight?"
"I'm not saying," Camille said, but her expression gave her away. "And it wasn't true, anyway!"
"What wasn't true?" Inola asked gently.
"She's not a Sansha!" Camille burst out, glaring at Inola. "Ishukone made her arms, not the Sansha! And she hasn't let the crew down, either, that's not fair! It's not her fault! She's the best XO ever and it's not because she's Silver's girlfriend!"
Oh.
Inola pulled out the chair from the desk nearest to Camille's and sat down, used to compressing herself into a piece of furniture made for eight-year-olds. "Honey, no-one thinks that about your sister."
Camille blinked hard, tears trembling on her eyelashes. "They say it."
"This is the first time you've lived in a crew, isn't it?" Inola asked.
"Cia has crew!"
"Your other sister, Captain Roth? She has crew, but do the two of you live with them, do you go to school with their kids, like you do here?"
"No," Camille admitted.
"Well," Inola said. "A crew is bigger than a family, but it's not like a station, either. People know lots of other people, especially someone like Commander Invelen. She's in charge of everybody, right, after Captain Night?"
Camille nodded, and unfolded her arms long enough to swipe surreptitiously at one damp cheek.
"And sometimes grown-ups, they say things they don't mean. And they don't think that kids overhear them, or they think their kids know they aren't serious, but the kids don't always know. Right?'
Camille nodded again.
"So you don't need to take it to heart, something like that. It doesn't mean anything. You just ignore it next time."
"There won't be a next time," Camille said, with a certainty that could easily have belonged to her sister.
"There won't be a next time for fighting, either. Will there, Camille?"
Camille heaved a sigh. "I'll try," she said. "I do try, you know, Ms Toras. But it's a lot of work, sometimes."
Inola let herself smile. "I know, honey. It's a lot of work for everyone, sometimes."
Camille nodded.
"You tell a teacher next time someone says something mean, okay?"
"Oh, it'll be okay," Camille said. "Irt is the leader. That's why I picked him."
Kalur is the leader, Inola thought, studying the girl. Headed for a good career as an NCO, if he can learn to control his temper rather than letting it control him. "Do you want to be the leader, Camille? Is that why you fought him?"
Camille rolled her eyes again. "I am the leader, Ms Toras. They just don't know it yet. How are you going to punish me?"
"I think this time we'll say that a warning is enough, Camille, since you're new."
"No!" Camille said indignantly. "You have to punish me! If you don't, it won't work!"
"I see," Inola said, and she did. The formal curriculum for the children of Captain Night's crew focused aptitudes and trained skills, but there was an informal curriculum that the teachers kept an equally close eye on. Who leads, who follows. Which ones make peace, which ones get their friends working together, which ones can't suffer fools ...
The ever-shifting relationships in a class of five-year-olds settled and hardened as time passed, under the teachers' watchful eye. By the time they graduated, their files would have reports on the intangible complexities of personality as well as their academic achievements, making sure they were slotted in to the right place in the massive human machinery of the crew.
And in that process, the ideas of settling things yourself versus tattling to the teacher, of being the defiant martyr as opposed to the teacher's pet, those ideas carried a certain weight.
"All right, Miss Roth," Inola said. "Report here at zero seven hundred tomorrow morning for cleaning duty. You'll be making this classroom shine every morning before the other students arrive, and you'll clean up after them when they leave at the end of the day."
Camille nodded. "Okay!" she said. "Can I go?"
"Yes. Go on to medical and get your eye looked at before dinner."
"I will!" Camille stood up. "Thanks, Ms Toras! I'm sorry I caused you trouble, but you know. Sometimes you just have to."
Inola turned in the under-sized chair to watch the girl leave. For a moment longer, she sat looking at the door.
I am the leader.
They just don't know it yet.
Inola shook her head, and unfolded herself slowly. They might not know it yet, she thought.
But they will.
The boy was on his way to medical. By the time the sixth sense for trouble that Inola had developed over twenty years of teaching had sent her down the hall to the lunch-room at a run, Commander Invelen's sister's excellent impression of a small, red-headed whirling dervish had done considerable damage.
Not the first fight Irt Kalur has been in, Inola thought, but quite possibly the first he's lost.
"Miss Roth?" Inola asked the small bundle of resentment sitting in front of her. "I asked you a question."
Camille Roth folded her arms and sighed. "I know."
Inola folded her own arms. "Are you going to answer it?"
"No."
Inola's sigh was internal, twenty years of teaching having given her more than a little self-restraint when it came to dealing with miniature miscreants. "Miss Roth, that's not an acceptable response. Why were you fighting?"
Camille shook her head. "That's not any of your business."
"Children fighting in my classroom most certainly is my business, Miss Roth."
"We weren't in your classroom."
Strictly speaking, true. "You were in the lunchroom after you were in my classroom, and that's not an excuse. And I know you've only been here a few days, but that's not an excuse either. What would Commander Invelen say if she heard you'd been fighting?"
"She'd ask if I won," Camille said.
Quite possibly true, Inola thought, given some of the rumors about the Commander. "I think she'd be unhappy you got in trouble. We don't allow fighting here, Miss Roth."
The little girl stuck out her chin and said stolidly, "Then I guess you better punish me."
"I need to know what happened to know who deserves punishment, and how much. Did Mr Kalur start it?"
"I'm not saying."
"Miss Roth. Camille. I know that when you come to a new place, it can be hard to fit in. Sometimes the other kids want to make sure you know who the boss is, yes? Is that what happened?"
Camille's expression didn't change. "I'm not saying."
"If you don't tell me what happened, I'll have to punish you both."
"Good," Camille said.
"You want me to punish you?" Inola asked.
Camille rolled her eyes. "If you don't, the other kids will think it's because of whose sister I am."
Ah ha, Inola thought. "Is that what happened? Mr Kalur thought you were getting preferential treatment because you're Commander Invelen's sister?"
"No. And I'm not saying."
"If the other kids are teasing you, I can make them stop, if you tell me."
"Ms Toras," Camille said patiently, "If I tell you, then I'll be a tattletale. And they will stop, now. I proved he was wrong."
"Mr Kalur? Proved he was wrong about what?"
"About Ami. I proved he was wrong on his body."
Inola blinked. "On his body?"
Camille sighed again and gave Inola a pitying look. "He's Yushkal clan," she said, clearly thinking that explained everything.
It took Inola a moment to dredge up what she knew about Irt Kalur's clan background, and then Camille's words made sense. Yushkal clan, one of the Brutor clans with a long tradition of trial by combat. "He said something about Commander Invelen and you challenged him to prove the truth of it with a fight?"
"I'm not saying," Camille said, but her expression gave her away. "And it wasn't true, anyway!"
"What wasn't true?" Inola asked gently.
"She's not a Sansha!" Camille burst out, glaring at Inola. "Ishukone made her arms, not the Sansha! And she hasn't let the crew down, either, that's not fair! It's not her fault! She's the best XO ever and it's not because she's Silver's girlfriend!"
Oh.
Inola pulled out the chair from the desk nearest to Camille's and sat down, used to compressing herself into a piece of furniture made for eight-year-olds. "Honey, no-one thinks that about your sister."
Camille blinked hard, tears trembling on her eyelashes. "They say it."
"This is the first time you've lived in a crew, isn't it?" Inola asked.
"Cia has crew!"
"Your other sister, Captain Roth? She has crew, but do the two of you live with them, do you go to school with their kids, like you do here?"
"No," Camille admitted.
"Well," Inola said. "A crew is bigger than a family, but it's not like a station, either. People know lots of other people, especially someone like Commander Invelen. She's in charge of everybody, right, after Captain Night?"
Camille nodded, and unfolded her arms long enough to swipe surreptitiously at one damp cheek.
"And sometimes grown-ups, they say things they don't mean. And they don't think that kids overhear them, or they think their kids know they aren't serious, but the kids don't always know. Right?'
Camille nodded again.
"So you don't need to take it to heart, something like that. It doesn't mean anything. You just ignore it next time."
"There won't be a next time," Camille said, with a certainty that could easily have belonged to her sister.
"There won't be a next time for fighting, either. Will there, Camille?"
Camille heaved a sigh. "I'll try," she said. "I do try, you know, Ms Toras. But it's a lot of work, sometimes."
Inola let herself smile. "I know, honey. It's a lot of work for everyone, sometimes."
Camille nodded.
"You tell a teacher next time someone says something mean, okay?"
"Oh, it'll be okay," Camille said. "Irt is the leader. That's why I picked him."
Kalur is the leader, Inola thought, studying the girl. Headed for a good career as an NCO, if he can learn to control his temper rather than letting it control him. "Do you want to be the leader, Camille? Is that why you fought him?"
Camille rolled her eyes again. "I am the leader, Ms Toras. They just don't know it yet. How are you going to punish me?"
"I think this time we'll say that a warning is enough, Camille, since you're new."
"No!" Camille said indignantly. "You have to punish me! If you don't, it won't work!"
"I see," Inola said, and she did. The formal curriculum for the children of Captain Night's crew focused aptitudes and trained skills, but there was an informal curriculum that the teachers kept an equally close eye on. Who leads, who follows. Which ones make peace, which ones get their friends working together, which ones can't suffer fools ...
The ever-shifting relationships in a class of five-year-olds settled and hardened as time passed, under the teachers' watchful eye. By the time they graduated, their files would have reports on the intangible complexities of personality as well as their academic achievements, making sure they were slotted in to the right place in the massive human machinery of the crew.
And in that process, the ideas of settling things yourself versus tattling to the teacher, of being the defiant martyr as opposed to the teacher's pet, those ideas carried a certain weight.
"All right, Miss Roth," Inola said. "Report here at zero seven hundred tomorrow morning for cleaning duty. You'll be making this classroom shine every morning before the other students arrive, and you'll clean up after them when they leave at the end of the day."
Camille nodded. "Okay!" she said. "Can I go?"
"Yes. Go on to medical and get your eye looked at before dinner."
"I will!" Camille stood up. "Thanks, Ms Toras! I'm sorry I caused you trouble, but you know. Sometimes you just have to."
Inola turned in the under-sized chair to watch the girl leave. For a moment longer, she sat looking at the door.
I am the leader.
They just don't know it yet.
Inola shook her head, and unfolded herself slowly. They might not know it yet, she thought.
But they will.
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