Radicand tried not to tiptoe into the galley. Nor could she quite control the swagger in her step as she collected her late breakfast—or was it an early lunch, she wasn’t quite sure—from the sideboard and brought it to the mess table. She even sat down directly across from her sister, which she felt was either a sign of growing maturity or great foolhardiness, she had not yet formalized her conclusions. Of course, with everyone who was still on board the Judy busy doing mission critical tasks, there was no one else to sit with.
“I don’t suppose you would like my advice?” asked Pari, with a twinkle in her eye. She had finished her meal, but was using the long empty table as a desk to spread out a wide swath of official looking paperwork.
Foolhardiness, she thought to herself, but bravely looked up from the fascinating contents of her tray, “Hm?”
“Would you like my advice?” repeated the Admiral.
Radicand rolled her eyes, “I thought the sex lives of consenting adults were none of your business. You’re not going to sit there and tell me you micromanage that aspect of your crew’s lives, too?”
“I was going to advise that you set up shop on the Shark, actually, and see if they left anything behind that might allow you to crack the pirate’s codes,” cooed Admiral Jones. “But if you want to talk about boys, Annie, you know my door is always open to you…” Joshua, sitting on the table next to Pari let out a huge belch, and grinned at Radicand.
“You would be completely insufferable if it weren’t for that monkey,” grumbled the younger woman, handing the furry creature a chunk of mango from her plate.
“I know,” sighed Pari, resting her head in her hand, “I think I’ve been up here alone too long. Everyone I work with knows me as their professor at best and their Admiral at worst: I’m expected to have a wise answer in every predicament. Your visit has really shaken up my orderly world. I think it’s good, but it’s bringing out a side of me I had forgotten I had.”
“Mean and vindictive?” suggested Radicand sweetly.
“I was going to say playful,” ground out Pari. They locked eyes, each woman an unblinking force of nature, confident in her own powers. Then they both erupted in giggles. Joshua continued masticating his mango with every sign of pleasure and ignored them entirely.
Radicand finally wiped the tears from her eyes and hiccupped. “Yes, I think me spending the afternoon on the Shark would be an excellent use of my deductive powers. Is it empty at the moment?”
Pari smiled, “A handful of volunteers from the Mostly Harmless and a few experts from other ships have spent a little time there; they have not brought anything interesting to my attention, yet, but we’ve all had rather a lot on our plates and there’s been no sense of urgency in their search.” Radicand hummed thoughtfully to herself, her fingers tapping on her thigh. While lovemaking was an extremely pleasant form of physical exercise, her brain was feeling underutilized lately.
“I think I’ll check in with Brian, first, if it’s all the same to you. He’s given me a lot of data about the current flock, and I’ve got some searches I want to try. Not that I think I’ll find that much worth crunching: you keep a ridiculous amount of data on paper,” said Radicand, indicating the forms her sister had collected with mock disdain.
“I know; it’s a terrible habit. I think I got it from Father.” The unexpected reference to their parent threw Radicand, and she almost choked on her coffee.
“Was he particularly attached to paper?” asked Radicand instead, “I admit I don’t remember that about his personality.”
“Not paper, no. But don’t you think he was rather fond of collections for the sake of collecting? I remember the garage was full of old servers, in between the gun safe and the push mower. He liked to accumulate things, he wouldn’t let anything go.” Now Pari leaned over the table, taking her sister into her confidence—though the only other ears in the room were too busy looking for signs that more mango would fall from heaven to take notice of her urgent words.
“Sometimes I worry that my impulse to collect ships in my flock stems from that same hoarding tendency. I worry that it’s neither prudent from a safety standpoint nor practical for whatever larger cause we’re living for. I have this… sense… we are so close to something. And for the life of me, I can’t tell what it is.
“What did they think they were doing, turning to me to lead them towards some promised land? I’m not Moses; I have no burning bush to encourage me!” This last would have come out as a wail, if Pari had let a wail escape her lips in the last fourteen years.
“I never thought the bush was that much of a signpost,” pointed out Radicand, flailing around for some words with which to reassure her older sister. “’I am who I am,’” is hardly a clear indication of where to go or what to do.”
Pari twiddled her pencil between her fingers, and shot a look at Radicand, “You know, Captain Teasel is a veritable font of exotic information on Christian theology.”
Radicand shifted uneasily on her bench, “That’s… nice?”
“She says that phrase, ‘I am who I am’ is only one way to translate the original Hebrew.”
“And our Jewish brothers and sisters, I’m sure, delight in all manner of deep meanings for the phrase,” said Radicand, giving her last chunk of fruit to the extremely appreciative monkey. Her mind was already latching onto the Shark’s slippery databanks. Surely they would give her some important insight into what the pirates thought they would get out of their ill-fated attack. Maybe there she would find a burning bush, or at least a talkative RAM… Some concrete data point to signal the next step in their strange adventure.
“She says,” continued Pari, softly, “It can also mean, ‘I will become what I will become.’” Radicand frowned. She could not leave her sister contemplating her path without some gift from their own culture. Yet could her sister hear the ninety nine names of Allah and be comforted?
In the end she turned to Rumi, as she always had, “I only know what the poet said, ‘You have said what you are. I am what I am. Your actions in my head, my head here in my hands with something circling inside. I have no name for what circles so perfectly.’”
Pari blinked, “How is that supposed to comfort me or tell me what to do?”
Radicand shrugged, “Even Rumi could not name perfection. Maybe you don’t have to be perfect, either.”