Ky said nothing as Gaspard finished preflight; he didn’t explain what her uncle had meant. She sat quietly, waiting. One thing she’d learned at the Academy was how to wait without fidgeting. She did not even put on the copilot’s headset.
Gaspard murmured into his own voice pickup—contacting traffic control, she assumed. Then he turned to her.
“Put your headset on,” he said.
“Why?” Ky asked.
“You’re visible up here.” It took her a moment to figure out what he meant. Anyone looking in—with a long lens for instance—could see her, whereas back in the passenger compartment the smaller windows had little shades.
“Damn,” Ky said, snatching the headset. It wouldn’t be enough, she knew. She shrugged out of her uniform jacket and tossed it onto the seat behind; Gaspard pointed behind her. A Vatta crew flight jacket, matching Gaspard’s, hung there. She pulled it on quickly, then twisted to see if she could shut the window shades back in the passenger compartment … but someone had already done that.
“They’ll assume a regular flight crew,” Gaspard said. “Unless you’re sitting there in cadet blue … with insignia …” Ky fumbled at her blouse collar; she’d forgotten the collar insignia, which a long lens might be able to catch. They were embroidered; she would have to turn the collar under. She did that while he signaled the ground crew, and let the plane roll forward slowly.
“Better,” Gaspard said.
Would the headset obscure enough of her face, though? She swung the voicelink up as far as possible. They were out from between the Vatta hangars, onto the taxiway. A single-engine yellow plane swung onto the taxiway in front of them. Ky looked down at the familiar checklist. If she was to be the copilot … this is what she would be doing.
They moved on. As they passed the little terminal parking lot, Gaspard said, “Do something that looks good.”
Immediately, Ky pulled up the manual checklist and reached overhead as if going through a final preflight.
“What I love about flying with you, Ky, is that you always react the right way,” Gaspard said. Ky looked at him, surprised; the grin he was aiming down the centerline of the taxiway looked genuine. “That couldn’t have looked more natural if you’d rehearsed it for days. I spotted a fire truck in the wrong place. Now … we’re going to be really exposed during takeoff and for the first hour. Since you’re already up here, and I entered for two crew just in case, you’ll have to stay here.” He paused. “I know your uncle said no flying, but someone’s got to be traffic watch, and if you can help …”
“I can help,” Ky said.
“Good. I’ll take ’er up, but you stay on the controls with me.”
Ky turned up the volume in her headset and heard traffic control give them clearance for takeoff after the little yellow plane. They paused as the yellow plane swung into position; she could see it shudder and then begin its takeoff roll. She checked the boards. This plane had every avionics gadget, and an AI autopilot perfectly capable of handling almost every contingency, but Gaspard preferred to take off and land on manual, to keep his skills current. “And because it’s just plain fun,” he said now, as he usually did. “There’s something atavistic about shoving the throttles forward myself.”
She felt the same way, as they turned into position and the power of the engines fought the brakes for a moment before Gaspard released them. She loved it all, from the acceleration down the runway to the moment when they left the ground to the steep climb out over the factory district.
Once they were a half hour offshore, at cruising altitude, Gaspard relaxed and pulled out his hotpak of coffee. “Well, girl, I’m not sure what anthill you kicked—or kicked you—but your father and uncle were certainly upset. Want to tell me about it?”
“I … can’t. Can’t fly and talk about it, anyway.”
“Fine. Let me finish this and I’ll take it back.” He swallowed quickly and relieved Ky at the controls. “Not that I’m pushing you, you understand, but.” But he wanted to know. Of course.
“I had to resign from the Academy,” Ky said.
He whistled. “Didn’t you keep your antifertility implant up to date?”
“Not that! I wouldn’t …!” She stole a glance at him.
“Sorry,” he said. “It’s just—what else could make you do it? Your family’s not yanking you out for some business reason …?”
“No,” Ky said. “I … did something stupid. It caused a stink. Such a big stink they wanted me gone.”
“You? I can’t imagine what big stink you could cause. Now if you were a bonehead like that kid who told a Miznarii priest that he was being treated unfairly and prevented from practicing his religion, and that the service was hostile to Miznarii and had a policy of putting them—how did he say it? first in danger, last in promotion—that is what I’d call a big stink.”
Ky’s heart sank. “That … was my fault.”
“Your fault? How? You aren’t even … oh shit, Ky, you were just helping someone again, weren’t you? What’d you do, get him in contact with this Miznarii?”
“Yes.” She could hear that her voice was choked with tears.
“Um. I can understand they might be peeved with you—it’s headlined in the news—but it’s not bad enough to make you resign.”
“They think it is.”
“They’ll wish they hadn’t,” Gaspard said. “Though it may take them a while. So … you’re in disgrace, is that it?”
All the misery broke through, and she felt tears burning in her eyes. She couldn’t speak.
“Thing is, Ky, disgrace doesn’t last forever.” She caught the quick movement of his head as he turned to look at her and looked away, out the window, where a blanket of cloud lay between them and the East Shallows.
“Usually doesn’t,” Gaspard said. “Whatever stupid things you do, you can do smart ones later.”
“Somehow I don’t think so,” Ky said. “When I try my hardest, that’s when I do stupid things.”
He looked at her. “It’s not my place …,” he began.
“Oh, go on, everyone else will lecture me, too.”
“I’m not going to lecture you.” He looked out the side window, sighed, and engaged the autopilot. “Logged: all boards clear, no traffic reported or scanned. Estimated flight time three hours fifteen minutes.”
“We’ll be home in time for supper,” Ky said. Her throat closed again. It had all happened too fast. She’d awakened as a senior cadet, in the honor squad; she’d eaten breakfast at the head of a table of cadets, in charge of that table, reminding the lowly cads to sit straight on the edge of their chairs and take no sugar in their drinks. She’d eaten that scrap of lunch in the Commandant’s library as a disgraced ex-cadet, and tonight she would eat supper in the family dining room, the family disgrace come home to roost.
“You want to talk about it?” Gaspard asked. He was only ten years or so older than she was, she thought. Younger than the Commandant or her father, older than all but one of her brothers.
“You know.” Her hands moved as if of themselves. “I tried to help, and it blew up in my face.”
“You know this kid well?”
“Mandy? He’s—he was—in my diviso. Last year the cad intake officer asked me to take him under my wing. Third-years get handed a cad to baby-sit. Mandy was mine. He had a rough time, being Miznarii, but he did fairly well.” The Miznarii considered even implants immoral modifications of the basic human, so those of their children seeking higher education were always at a disadvantage. They attended only those institutions where students had to study without implant assistance, but, as with the Academy, the other students had used them before.
“As well as you did?”
“No, but—” Her voice trailed away. Who would expect a Miznarii from Cobalt Hole to do as well as she had? “Better than expected,” she finished.
“So … you give the kid a model he can’t reach, and he asks you to do him a favor, and then he backstabs you. Think he did this just to cross you?”
She hadn’t considered one way or the other. What did Mandy’s intention matter? It was betrayal even if not intended.
“I think … I think he meant to get the Academy in trouble.”
“More than you?”
“Yes.” As she thought about it, more than that, even. “I think he wanted to get the whole system in trouble. The War Department, the Academy, the military, maybe even Slotter Key.”
“Yeah. And you were collateral damage, maybe.”
“Probably.” It hurt, even so. She had thought Mandy appreciated what she’d done for him, all the hours spent tutoring and rehearsing.
“He want to sleep with you?”
Ky felt the wave of heat up her neck. “If he did, it would have been unpro—wrong of me—to have noticed.”
“If? You honestly don’t know?”
She knew, all right. She knew perfectly well why Cad Mandy Rocher had pulled off his overrobe slowly, stretching, before the underclass wrestling matches. She knew he’d wanted her. No word had been spoken. No word need be.
Gaspard nodded as if she’d answered aloud. “So he lusted after you and you repulsed him.”
“I didn’t repulse him!” Ky said. “I just didn’t encourage him.” He could stretch all he wanted and it did nothing for her; she had Hal in her mind’s eye and there was no comparison.
“Dirty little scum,” Gaspard said. Ky glanced at his face; he looked like someone about to be very angry.
“I’m sorry,” Ky said.
“Not your fault,” Gaspard said. “You’re a good girl, Ky; you always have been. Taken advantage of, and thank all the gods you don’t believe in it went no farther. You’re well out of that.”
“I thought you thought I would be a good officer …”
“I did. You would have been. But a waste, in a way.” He grinned at her. “Never mind. Just think of them all, in their stiff scratchy uniforms, while we’re flying down to the sunny isles of delight. Out of that nasty cold—”
“I like the cold,” Ky said. She did not want to think of Hal, who might be storming up the stairs to the Commandant’s office to find out where she was at this very moment …
“That’s not what you’ve said other leaves.”
“No, but—all right. Yo ho for the tropics.” Her laugh sounded hollow, and he shook his head at her.
“I know it seems like the end of the world to you—that’s because you are a good’un and you care. But life goes on, Ky, and you’ll get over this. You don’t want to hear it but it’s true, just like you didn’t want to hear that there were things you couldn’t do with an airplane … but that was also true.”
“All right, all right.” She stared out at the blanket of cloud. Ahead, it frayed into puffs more and more isolated … and as they flew nearer that edge, the blue sea showed below. There to starboard, the distinctive hook shape of Main Gumbo, from this altitude a flat outline of white surf filled in with dark vegetation. She looked sunward … the wakes of ships showed clearly as darker ripples against the even pattern. In the passage between Main and Little Gumbo, a tanker surrounded by its attendants. Crawdad, beyond Little Gumbo, was a many-legged dark blot.
An hour later, the dark blue lightened as they neared the Necklace Reefs. From cobalt through every shade of turquoise, as the water grew more shallow, until at last the ragged brown tops of the reefs broke through white surf.
Corleigh showed at last: a dark line that thickened, surrounded by shallower water that looked, from this height, like bands of blue and turquoise, each shade defining a depth. They flew over the main harbor, with its guardian headlands rising sharply from the water; surf broke white on the rocks. Ky counted two cargo ships, the interisland ferry, and a thick cluster of small craft before they were past the harbor and over the warehouses of the harbor district. Beyond those, the neat little town, with its central park, a green square with the spire of the War Memorial glinting in the sun. Corleigh’s small commercial airfield had a scatter of small craft parked in a row; Ky knew that the daily Island Air service would be two hours behind them.
Inland, Harbor Valley sloped gently toward the central ridge; Gaspard banked left and Kylara looked down on the vast tik plantations between the coastal cliffs and the higher ridge with its mixed scrub. Not a monoculture: these were old plantations, interplanted with secondary and tertiary crops in a careful balance to maximize both production and resilience.
On the far side of the ridge, she knew, were the newer plantings. She had imagined bringing Hal to meet her family, on graduation leave; he was a mainlander and had never seen the far islands. She would have been explaining it to him, the order of the plantings, the yields of the different ages … She pushed that thought back.
Ahead, the island narrowed and the central ridge sloped abruptly down to end in a rumple of lower hills; she could see the outer reef’s ruffle of surf beyond them. Taller trees, the sheltering groves of the Vatta household, cloaked the landward side of the hills. Gaspard called the Vatta home field as he eased their plane down, neatly countering the predictable gusts that swept between the twin hills. Ky felt her throat close. She had been able to let her mind drift, while in the air, but soon she would have to face her family.
She stared out the window, noting that the jabla trees were in bloom, pink fluffy puffs among the darker green of the haricond and jupal. The red tile roofs of the house and outbuildings showed among the green, with a sudden flash of light from the big pool. Nearer to the runway were the office buildings, utilitarian cream blocks topped with solar panels, but neat, with a ruffle of red and blue flowers on either side of the main door.
“Give us a hand, Ky,” Gaspard said. Ky yanked her attention back to the instruments, and called out items on the checklist as Gaspard made the final approach. Then they were down, and rolling. Ky turned her collar right side out, and reached back for her uniform jacket. She was not going to come home disheveled and disorganized. By the time Gaspard had taxied to the parking line, where old George waited to hook up the tie-downs, she was ready to pass—well, not any official inspection, but any of the staff.
“Good to see you home,” George said. “You didn’t belong with the likes of them slimes anyway.”
Ky knew it would do no good to tell him they weren’t slimes. George, veteran of the Second War, loathed mainlanders. He had refused regen treatment for his leg because it would have meant a mainland hospital.
“I’ll take your bags,” George said now. “Your dad wants to see you right away.” He moved stiffly to the luggage compartment.
Ky turned to the office building. No one was coming out to meet her—normal. Were they going to pretend all this was normal? The sea breeze, moist and fragrant, lay its hand on her cheek, and she wanted to yield to it, to be soothed by it, but she was no longer the child who had left here four years ago.
Inside the front door, cooler air swirled around her. She faced a warren of desks and workstations, most occupied by obviously busy people who barely looked up as she entered. On her left, the familiar corridor led to the row of walled offices: her father’s, her uncle’s, her elder brothers’.
She hesitated a moment outside the door to her father’s office, then tapped, and opened the door.
Her father looked up from his desk as she came in. “Kylara, beshi … you look like you must feel.”
“I’m all right.”
“No, you’re not. Come here—” He came out from behind his desk and held out his arms. Ky leaned into his embrace. “Shhh, shhhh,” he murmured, though she had made no sound. He smelled of the tik plantations he must have walked around that morning, a complex scent she had known forever.
“I didn’t know,” she said, into his shoulder. “I thought I was helping …”
His shoulder twitched. “Do you remember your fifth birthday party?”
How could she ever forget when they kept bringing that up? She had pushed Mina Patel into the wading pool, and Mina had contrived to fall crooked and cut her head on the one place the rim’s padding had worn away, because she’d kept her hair bows on, in spite of Ky’s advice to take them off or they’d get wet. And it had been for a good cause, because Mina had been tormenting her little sister Asha, who was afraid of the water, and was about to push her, when Ky shoved Mina. Mina had grabbed at Asha when she overbalanced, so they’d both screamed and Ky had been sent inside, at her own birthday party, to sit in glowering misery in her room while her friends ate her birthday cake and her mother—her own mother—made a fuss over Mina Patel.
“You have to learn to think first, Kylara,” her father said now, his hands on her shoulders pushing her gently back so he could give her That Look.
“I did think,” she said. “At least, I thought it was thinking …”
“Well … I’m sure you meant well,” he said. “Now we have to figure out what to do with you—”
She had thought of that, in the last moments before landing. “I could go to the university and finish a degree,” she said. “I have almost enough credits—”
“No,” he said firmly. “We can’t have that. You can’t be here; there’s too much publicity.”
“I could go to Darien Tech, over on Secci …”
“No. It’s out of the question. I’ve already decided—” He paused as someone tapped on the office door. “Who is it?”
“Me.” Ky’s older brother Sanish opened the door and put his head in. “Are you busy—oh, Ky. You’re here.”
As if he didn’t know. As if they didn’t all know. As if he hadn’t come to gloat, in a big-brotherish way.
“Come on in, San. I was just telling Kylara what we came up with.”
“You were in on this?” Ky asked. She could feel her neck getting hot.
“All I did was look up figures,” San said, spreading his hands. “Don’t blame me.”
“We weren’t going to tell you until after supper,” her father said. “But since you are here a little early … and after all, your mother wants her time with you …”
Her heart sank. While she’d been sitting, bored and miserable, in the plane on the flight out, they’d had time to plot out her whole life, probably. Just like when she was thirteen, and they’d decided that a trip in space as an apprentice on a Vatta freighter would get that nonsense about the military out of her head.
“We think it’s clever,” her father said, with a glance at San that told Ky exactly who he thought was the clever one of the family. Not her, of course. “You’ll have a chance to prove yourself, and you’ll be well out of the way.”
Out of the way. Like a naughty child. She was not going to cry. “Well, what is your marvelous idea?” she asked in a voice that even she could hear sounded sulky.
“We’re sending you out to the Rift with a ship going to salvage,” her father said. “You’ll have a cargo on the way out, sell the ship, then come back commercial. Altogether it should take at least eleven months, and by then things will surely have died down.”
Ky glared at her father and older brother. “You’d think I’d blown up a ship,” she said.
“Don’t be overdramatic, Ky,” her father said. “No one’s accused you of anything like that. We’re trusting you to do family business. It’s an honor—”
“No. You’re sticking me in a corner. Hiding me—”
“We could do that well enough by giving you a job in inventory control right here at the tik plantations. Be reasonable, Ky.”
“But—I’ll be gone months and months—maybe years. And it’s boring—”
“The heat will be off you by then, and it may not be boring. You’ll be heading out into the Borderlands.”
“Maybe.” Ky glared, but she already knew she would take the job. What other choice did she have? “I guess it’s all right.”
“Good. You’re taking the Glennys Jones to Lastway. We’ll send you some help. Gary Tobai for loadmaster, Quincy Robin as crew chief.”
“Dad, they’re old.”
“They’re experienced. You need that. New captains—”
“Captain! You’re making me captain?”
“Were you listening? I offered you the ship.”
“I thought you meant as shipping agent or something. I don’t really know how to captain—”
“You have a license.”
“I have a license, yes, but I haven’t done it. I haven’t worked on a commercial ship since Tugboat … er, Turbot.”
“That’s why we’re sending along someone with experience. You’ll do fine, Ky. All you have to do is be guided by Gary and Quince.”
All she had to do was listen to her elders by the hour. But a ship—even an old wreck like Glennys Jones, and a captain’s listing—made up for a lot. “All right … thanks, Dad.”
“That’s better. Now, go over to the house. Your mother’s waiting. Oh, and we’ve scheduled your implant replacement.”
She knew better than to suggest a quick comcall instead, but she dreaded what her mother would say.
Sure enough, she had scarcely come through the door when her mother started in. “Kylara, how could you? You were just getting to know that nice Berlioz boy, and now—”
“Mother, I didn’t—”
“And look at you! You haven’t a bit of makeup on! How can you expect to find a young man if you go around looking like some tough off the docks?”
“Mother, please—”
“And your father says you’re going away for months, and I’ve had no time at all to take you around … If you’re out of circulation too long, you know, people will forget about you—”
“That’s the idea,” Ky said. Though if Charley Berlioz forgot about her that was all to the good. Despite her mother’s prodding, she had no interest in Charley. It was Hal … except now it wasn’t, almost certainly.
“Well, it’s all very well on the political side, but on the matrimonial side, it’s a disaster. They’ll go and marry unsuitable girls, rather than you, and Slotter Key is not exactly full of eligible boys.”
“Mother, I’m sure that eventually—” At least her mother was still harping on marriage into some civilian family; at least she hadn’t caught on about Hal, whom she would not have considered suitable.
“Well, we have to do something about your clothes.” Her mother started off down the hall; Ky trailed behind, feeling the same reluctance she had so often before. She knew what spacers wore, and what ship captains wore, and she knew, without waiting for her mother to say so, that those simple outfits were not what her mother had in mind.
“Even if you are in the wilds of the Borderlands,” her mother said, opening Ky’s closet. Ky could see that someone had already unpacked her luggage and put things away. “Even there, you must be prepared to present yourself properly. Perhaps even especially there.”
When her mother was in one of these moods, it was easy to forget she was also a professional engineer of considerable reputation. It was the family background, Ky thought: being the eldest daughter of a socialite—for Grandmother Benton was still making news in the gossip columns with her endless string of admirers.
“Not this. Not this either,” her mother said, flinging clothes to one side. “I know you thought you’d spend the rest of your life in uniform, dear, but surely you had more sense than this—” She held out an outfit in rust and green which, Ky had realized only after paying for it, made her look like someone a day away from death.
“Sorry, Mother,” she said.
“I don’t care what your father says, you simply must get some suitable clothes.” She eyed Ky up and down. “You aren’t shaped like anyone else in the family, worse luck. I can’t just tell you to put some meat on your bones. You have meat; it’s just not …”
“Mother!”
“Oh, be reasonable, Kylara. You’ll be representing the family; you must have clothes and they must fit. I’m not saying you’re ugly or misshapen; you’re just not …” Again her voice trailed away. “Well,” she said, after a moment’s awkward silence. “Measurements first and then we’ll see what we can order. Shops here on Corleigh are useless, but if something can be delivered to the ship before you leave, that will do.”
The last thing Ky wanted to do was stand in the middle of the room while her mother ran a clothes scriber over her, but she stood in the middle of the room while her mother ran a clothes scriber over her anyway. Halfway through, with her mother tut-tutting about the way the uniform had concealed what was after all an acceptable shape, it began to be funny. She wasn’t ready for it to be funny—for anything to be funny—but a bubble of laughter caught in her throat and she could feel the corners of her mouth turning up. Here she was, back home being measured for clothes yet again, clothes that would, she was sure, turn out to be impractical and uncomfortable.
“What are you laughing at?” her mother asked, from knee level, without looking up. Her mother always knew, without having to see Ky’s face, when the ill-timed laugh demon caught her in the throat.
“Nothing,” Ky said, sulky again.
“It’s not funny,” her mother said, scribing her lower legs, her ankles, her feet.
It was, though. Everything else in the universe was horrible, but this one thing was funny.
The dinner chime saved her from unseemly giggles; her mother stood abruptly. “You’ll want to get out of that,” she said, without specifying what that was. They both knew.
Ky took off the uniform she had been so proud to put on that morning, stepped into the ’fresher briefly, and put on loose slacks, blouse, and overrobe for dinner. She left the remnants of her past on the bed. Someone would take them away, clean them, fold them, put them somewhere … She didn’t care where.
Dinner on the wide veranda … Father, Mother, and Sanish. Ky slid into her usual seat, facing the garden. Candles flickered in the evening air. Someone had gone to the trouble of preparing a festive meal—they had had, she realized, the hours she was in the air to put it together. The haunch of ’lope, boned, stuffed, and rolled, in a pastry crust. The stuffed grape leaves. The “tower of heaven” salad. Once again her body surprised her with its insistence on refueling; she ate ravenously but barely touched the wine.
Her father and San talked of island politics—not the labor dispute, but such things as the proposed new desalinization plant, the possibility of a branch of the central university on the island, the state of the waste recycling facility at Harbor Town. Ky listened as if to a debate on the vid; it all felt unreal. Too many changes too fast.
“We have to have enough time to get her some clothes,” her mother said suddenly. Her father and San stopped in the midst of telling each other what an idiot Councilman Kruper was.
“How long?” her father asked.
“I can get clothes offworld,” Ky said.
“No,” both her parents said. Her father sighed.
“Ky, you’re going to be a Vatta captain; you will represent Vatta Transport. You have to start out with something suitable. But Myris”—he turned to his wife—“it has to be quick. Three days.”
“Impossible,” her mother said. “We don’t have a fabricator here; we’ll have to go to Harbor Town and that’s—”
“Less than an hour by plane. Glennys would have left tomorrow, but I put a hold on her. We can’t delay; we have delivery commitments.”
Delivery commitments were, her father had once said, a natural force. Vatta Transport’s default rate on delivery commitments was the lowest in the industry and one reason for their wealth.
“Five,” her mother said.
“Four. Absolutely no more. And she doesn’t need much. Captain’s uniforms, shipboard and port. Not much more than that.”
“Kylara, we’ll start ordering after dinner,” her mother said. “Bond Tailoring will have to do. I’d much rather you used Siegelson & Bray, but they can’t possibly do it in less than a week …” Her mother glared at her father.
“Four days,” her father said. “You have the measurements; you can start without her. Tonight, Ky, we’ll go by the clinic and get your implant in—that’ll let you sleep on it so you’ll be in cycle in the morning. All loaded with the current codes and everything.”
She had not had an implant since she left for the Academy—cadets weren’t allowed them. She was used to doing without, though she had missed her implant a lot that first year at the Academy. She was not sure she wanted one again. But she needed the extra capacity, with all she had to learn in a hurry. She shrugged. Better an implant insertion than more talk about clothes. “I’m ready,” she said.
Insertion went easily; the implant access port still met all the specs, so all she needed was the device itself. She expected the moment of nauseating disorientation, the strange visual auras, the itch in her nose. Before she could access the implant, she had to go through the initialization protocols—the longest part of an insertion—and then the implant unfolded in her mind like a flower, each petal a gateway to another database. The displays flickered past, the communications links—now activated only for the clinic units—let her answer the questions without speaking aloud.
“Checks out,” the medic said finally. “Any problems at your end?”
Ky blinked at him. They both knew—because she was sending it—that she was seeing him with a vibrating pink halo, and they also knew this was a transient visual phenomenon common to implant insertions, like the other sensory auras she was having—the smell of freshly ground pepper, the echo effect to all sounds. It would be gone after a good night’s sleep, during which time the implant and her biological brain would have some kind of serious discussion without her consciousness around to kibitz. “No problems,” Ky said, aloud this time.
“Good. Call me at once if you experience sensory auras tomorrow, or any difficulties with coordination, balance, after one hour from now. My recommendation is that you go to sleep as soon as you can.”
“I will,” Ky said. Her father took her back to the main house, where she staggered only a couple of times going down the hall to her room. She remembered her first insertion experience very clearly; she had been seven, getting a child’s school expansion kit, and she had insisted that her balance wasn’t affected, she didn’t need to lie down and take a nap … all the way to the ground when she fell off the pony. I’m fine, she’d said, lying on the ground and looking up at a pony hazed in a supernatural golden glow, its wings waving gently in the breeze. My pony has wings, she’d said. No one had believed her. She’d woken from that nap with a bruise on her rump and her brothers prancing around the room waving their arms, pretending to be flying ponies.
Enhanced memory was one side effect of implants and their insertion. She pulled off her clothes, put on a gown, turned off the light, and lay down.
She had been sure she wouldn’t sleep, but the moment her head hit the pillow, she was out. She woke, remembering no dreams, at first disoriented because sunlight played on the opposite wall from the garden window in her room—and she expected instead the cold dim light of a winter dawn in the capital. Misery hit her again, and she rolled over, burying her face in the pillow. Her career. Her hopes. Her friends. Hal … he wouldn’t even know what happened. She hadn’t actually started crying when something landed with a thump on her back.
“Rise and shine, lazybones,” came her brother’s voice. “You’ve got to hit the books.”
Ky rolled out of bed, threw the offending roll of towels back at her brother—wet, he must have just come in from swimming—and stalked into the ’fresher with as much dignity as possible. Her implant offered the time, the temperature, the humidity, water temperature of the ’fresher, her own pulse and respiration if she wanted it. She didn’t. She ate a hasty breakfast in a corner of the kitchen, and then settled down to the pile of data cubes her father had left for her to read. Everything there was to know about Glennys Jones, about the route she was to take, everything she needed to know about the Vatta Transport codes. At intervals her attention drifted to her disgrace, but she yanked it back to the matter at hand. She could not think about it … any of it … without going to pieces. If she was to be a cargo ship captain, she had better things to do than feel sorry for herself. The implant fed her accessory information whenever she asked. She was deep in the revised space regulations applicable to licensed carriers Class C and below when her father and brother came home for lunch.
“How’s it going?” her father asked.
“These are done,” Ky said, pointing to that stack. “I’m into space regs. Why on earth did they restrict Class Bs from carrying nutrient components? Seems to me that’s what they’re ideally suited for.”
“Politics,” San said. “But I’m not supposed to say that.”
Her father gave San a look. “P & L,” he said. “They’ve moved into nutrient component production, over on Chelsea. They transport the stuff very efficiently in purpose-built Class Ds; they’re just protecting their investment.”
“Closing out competitors, both producers and shippers,” San said.
“San.”
“They’re our competitors; I don’t see why we can’t be plainspoken at least at home,” San said.
“They’re also our friends. You might have married the girl—”
“Not me,” San said.
Ky watched this interchange with interest. San arguing with her father? That was new.
“Lunch,” her father said firmly, leading the way to the veranda. At midday, it was shady, breezy, scented with roses and jasmine. Her mother didn’t appear. She often skipped lunch with the family. Ky wasn’t hungry—she’d done nothing all morning but read—but she picked at a salad. Her father frowned at her. “You should get out a little, Ky. If you don’t eat, your mother will pester me.”
“I need to finish these,” Ky said.
“Not today. I didn’t think you’d be half so far along. Take the afternoon off.”
Two hours later, Ky lay stretched on a towel by the pool. An hour’s swim had worked out kinks she hadn’t realized she had, and now she dozed in the warm shade. Her father had been right. She had needed the break.
“Kylara Vatta, what do you think you’re doing?” That voice, harsh as a parrot’s cry, nearly sent her rolling into the pool in a defensive maneuver. Aunt Gracie Lane. Aunt Gracie Lane, who disapproved of idleness at any time, and also had strong views on appropriate bathing costume. “Anyone could see you!”
Anyone who was a member of the family, or a guest. Possibly a lascivious gardener peeking over the wall of the pool enclosure, but certainly no one else.
“I’m resting after swimming, Aunt Gracie,” Ky said.
“You’re lazing about doing nothing useful,” Aunt Gracie said. “Get some proper clothes on and get busy. You’re supposed to be helping your mother arrange your wardrobe.”
Her mother, just coming to the pool behind Aunt Gracie, shrugged.
“Yes, Aunt Gracie,” Ky said, scrambling to her knees with the towel clutched to her.
“I would have thought the Academy would teach you some discipline, but clearly … I suppose that’s why you quit.”
Too many things wrong with that to argue. Ky held the towel between her and Aunt Gracie’s disapproval, and sidled around, pricking herself on one of the gardenia bushes, to back gingerly toward the house. The moment Aunt Gracie transferred her gaze to something else, she whipped the towel all the way around her and scuttled for the veranda. Some things never changed.
Clad in slacks and shirt, she emerged from her room to hear Aunt Gracie’s voice down the hall. “—do something about that girl, Myris, you’ll be sorry! I can’t believe you and Gerard are actually letting her go off alone, unsupervised—”
Ky thought of running away, sneaking out through her window, but Aunt Gracie would certainly have something to say about that, too. It was going to be a very long four days. Three point three eight, her implant said.