The Wrangler Berth

Twenty-four deCant had been suffering an especially obnoxious bout of space-sickness ever since the ship had begun freefing. She tried to tough it out—she was a Martian, after all, and they didn’t come any tougher than that—but her berthmates had endured one barf too many in the common room and they had bundled her off to see the doctor. Wong prescribed an antiemetic, but there was something about the case that niggled at her.

“The nausea seems to be passing?” she asked when the girl had come to the clinic for her follow-up.

“If you mean do I throw up any more, the answer’s not so much.”

Wong looked up from the patient’s chart displayed on her med screen. “‘Not so much,’ or ‘not so often?’”

DeCant’s face displayed the look that most adults receive when they ask for clarification from the young. “‘Not so often.’”

“And you’ve never had this problem before….” Not really a question, since there were no notations on her chart for space-sickness; yet Wong knew that not every illness was reported. The idea of “working through the pain” struck her as terribly foolish, as if viruses and microbes and fractures would yield to the force of a paramount will. But men and women who would never attempt to run a broken machine would shun sick call as a sign of weakness.

“Ship’s usually under boost…” deCant said.

“In port? During flipover?”

“Those are usually short…. Well, sometimes it takes a while to shift cargo when we make port, but this here’s the longest I ever been freefed, I think.”

“Can’t keep something down, if there’s no ‘down.’” Wong had been shy of joking ever since Gorgas’s rebuke following Evan’s death, but deCant was obviously hurting and Wong did not think it was the space-sickness entirely.

“It was nothing jove,” deCant insisted. “It was only at start-of-watch, anyway. Sometimes, I look at my breakfast and feel queasy, like it’s gonna make me sick.”

“You are eating, though.” It was more a demand than a question.

“Yah. Carbs. You know, high energy.” And she made a muscle of her arm that startled Wong even though she knew that deCant was a cargo wrangler. “I grew a sweet tooth the size of Olympus Mons this past week.”

Wong scratched a notation on the screen. “And the first bout of emesis—of nausea—was the fourteenth?” The ship had gone freef late the eleventh, about an hour before dear Evan Hand had passed, so why no nausea on the twelfth or thirteenth? She made another notation. “I’d like to insert a microbot into your bloodstream. It will take periodic samples so I can monitor your condition.”

DeCant frowned. “You think it’s serious?”

“Your medical record has no indication of previous space-sickness. It may be the length of time we’ve been freefing, or it may be something else. I just like to make sure.” She bounced to her console and set up the microbot parameters from deCant’s file. While she worked, she asked from curiosity why the girl was named Twenty-four. “It’s not a very common name.”

The wrangler laughed. “No, not hardly.”

Satterwaithe was standing just inside the clinic door, Wong suddenly noticed. The Third had a way of being places without seeming actually to arrive. You would glance up and she’d be there, just like that. The deck officer stood with arms crossed, radiating impatience without saying a word.

Wong dropped her eyes. She had not been aboard The River of Stars long enough to grow firm opinions about her new crewmates. Yet it seemed to the doctor as if Satterwaithe were perpetually angry and she suspected that the anger was somehow directed at her. She wasn’t sure what she had done to offend the older woman; but she was sure it was something awful—so awful that neither one of them dared speak of it.

DeCant too glanced at the older woman, then tossed her head and addressed Wong. “I’m a clone,” she said. “Isn’t that in there?” She pointed to the med comp. When Wong shook her head, deCant shrugged. “I ain’t ’shamed of it. It weren’t my doing.” She looked back at Satterwaithe standing by the door and regarded her silently for another moment before returning to the doctor. “I was the twenty-fourth embryo they decanted. Part of an experiment to rectify telomere loss.”

Wong blinked, suddenly aware of the gnawing fear in the wrangler’s heart. Clones aged rapidly due to their shortened telomeres. Why in heaven was such crucial medical information missing from the file? “Do you ever see your sisters?” she asked with professional cheer. “I’m an Only. What is it like having—my goodness—twenty-three sisters?”

“They’re all dead,” the teenager said flatly. “All but me—and four others they never decanted.” An angry shrug. “What the hell. We was—were—an experiment. I’m only around ’cause…My fosters told me a nurse smuggled me out of the lab one night. Somebody jimmied the papers so my adoption looked legit. You need to know all this stuff?”

Wong nodded, but wondered why deCant thought that Satterwaithe needed to know as well. The Third Officer remained by the door, as impassive as a harem guard. Was she listening? She must be. “And your fosters named you Twenty-four deCant? That seems an awful—”

“They was activists. They said I should know who I was and why I was and folk’s’d look at me and maybe stop growing us for experiments. They went in the Syrtis Dome Decompression,” deCant continued without so much as a change in tone, “and I decided I had enough of Mars; so I stowed aboard the Ares Shuttle, got scut jobs around the Deimos Yards, and thought maybe I’d space out and look up my clone-mother. I ran into Captain Hand in Panic Town. He knew about me—about the cloning, I mean—and said he’d help me out. I figured the worst that could happen was I’d be the skipper’s doxy—and he was a sweet kind of guy, so maybe the worst wouldn’t be so bad.” DeCant shook her head. “God, he was a good man.” She locked defiant eyes on Wong. “He never touched me. You got to believe that. Not even after I started bleeding. I wouldn’t have minded, then; but now I’m glad he never did.”

And what was that ice pick in Wong’s heart? It couldn’t be jealousy, could it? Did she suppose that she was the only woman Hand had never taken as a lover? Why, the Middle System must be full of women like that!

After the microbots had been implanted and deCant had gone, Satterwaithe stepped forward. “I need stims,” she said. “A bottle.”

“What a sad story…” Wong was still thinking about the girl.

Satterwaithe was not. “A full bottle.”

Wong blinked and focused on the Third. “Of stims?”

Satterwaithe thought that the snake woman was a flighty sort. She never seemed to be entirely present, as if she only intersected normal space-time and the rest of her lay in some other dimension. “There’s a lot of work that wants doing. Some of us need to work extended hours.”

Wong did not reach for her console. “Stims can be abused.”

“I’m no addict.”

Wong could not bring herself to dispute the point; yet she knew how easy it was to deny reality even to oneself. “I’ll design a ’bot,” she said sternly. “It will release a controlled quantity of stimulant for a specified time period. It can be activated or deactivated by command from my console. A monitor will track your vital signs through the ship’s grid and adjust the dosage as required.”

The Third Officer shrugged impatiently. She knew what she wanted; she didn’t care how it was accomplished. “I’ll need more than one, then. One for each member of my task team. Perhaps as many as five.”

“Very well. Bring them here later today for their insertions.”

Wong was still staring in puzzlement at the door after Satterwaithe had left when a voice said, “She’s up to something.”

“Something to do with ship repair,” Wong answered. It seemed the most natural thing in the world to speak to a disembodied voice.

“Fixing the cages is the Ram’s task. The deck ain’t in it.”

Wong looked around for the source. “You’re Miko, aren’t you? Mikoyan Hidei, the engineer’s mate? I recognize your voice.”

“Yah. That’s me.”

“Where are you?”

“Here.”

Was that smirk or play in that voice? Wong studied the room and finally located the girl behind the large air-exchange grille on the aft bulkhead near the ceiling. “Whatever are you doing in there?”

“It’s just something I do. ‘Miko-in-the-walls.’ It’s sort of cozy, you know. Comfortable.”

“Comfortable! Crawling through the air ducts?” But it might be that comfort has nothing to do with the physical.

“Oh, there’s all sorts of passages back here. For maintenance and stuff. I guess when this was a luxury boat, they had passages for the stewards so they could run around without anybody seeing them.”

“And are you playing hide and seek?”

There was silence followed by a motion, barely perceptible through the grillwork, that Wong took to be a shake of the head. “‘Play’ gotta be earned.”

“Ah. Yes, I suppose. You don’t like the Third Officer very much, do you?”

“I don’t like a lot of people. Sometimes they don’t like me back, so it all works out. But that Genie Satterwaithe, she grinds me. Nothing’s ever good enough for her. I like you, though.”

Oddly, that pleased the doctor, who straightened a little at the compliment. “You do?”

“Yah. You like to help people. I think you’re the nicest one on board. After the captain.”

Wong knew the girl meant Evan Hand. Gorgas was a cold man. Nice was not among his adjectives. “Thank you.”

“That’s why I don’t think you should be with that man so much. He’s doesn’t really care for you. When we reach his port, he won’t even look back from the airlock.”

“What man?” Wong asked with false puzzlement and a smile that was two parts fear.

But there was no answer, and the shadow behind the grille was gone.

How long had that strange, elfin girl been prowling the innards of the ship, she wondered? And what sights had she watched in silence through the slits of its portals and grilles?

 

The greenhouse of a long-haul tramp is a center of color and light. Crazed by the lack of gravitational cues, the shoots and buds weave their long, wispy stems into a tapestry of green and red and yellow that slices the solar-equivalent lamplight into something approaching stained glass. At the farther end of the gallery, the color of fruit gives way, and odor triumphs over sight. There is a pungent, fleshy smell about the carniculture vats, accented but by no means countered by that of the live animals cowering in their pens. There are only a few of these, for those breeds are rare that can tolerate milligee acceleration, let alone free fall, without unreasoning terror.

(Cats, to be sure; but Cat walks where she will. There were two cats aboard The River and they had come to a reasonable accommodation with each other, dividing the ship and its humans between them. Miko had come across one of them behind the walls near the galley and called her “Queen Tamar,” unaware that Ivar Akhaturian had named the self-same puss “Anush Abur.” The cat, for what it is worth, accepted both names with equal indifference. Of the second cat, she is little seen and then only when she wishes.)

The biosystems chief had been born with the unfortunate name of Eaton Grubb and doomed thereby to a life in food preparation. The “Grubb” part was perhaps necessary by long patronymic custom, but his parents should have shown a less puckish sense of humor. He loved them dearly all his life, but they really should have called him “John.”

But that which does not kill, strengthens; or so they say. Young Eaton had developed his own sense of humor. “As a child,” he told Nkieruke Okoye one time, “I was never certain whether I was introducing myself or describing my activity.” The First Wrangler, whose milk language was not even remotely kin to English, smiled because her inner sense told her she ought to, but she did not laugh at the joke for three days, when her mind finally pierced the curtain of spelling, phonetics, and slang with which English-speakers shrouded their inscrutable tongue. She repeated the phrase to herself several times in Igbo, but Consuming Food never struck her as a reasonable name for someone, nor even as remotely funny. English, ’Kiru decided, had too many words and its speakers felt obliged to play with the extra ones.

But for whatever reason, she considered the chief the happiest person in the crew. Everyone else wanted to have what they did not or to be what they were not: to hold rank, or to avoid responsibility; to possess another, or to avoid possession; to flee the past, or to live in it. Eaton Grubb, who perhaps most deserved to have and to be more, desired it the least. ’Kiru sometimes wondered whether that was an infirmity of his or a strength.

Grubb sang a great deal. No one on the ship sang so much or so well as he. He sang while he harvested meat from the vats. He sang when he tinctured the bland “carnic” with flavorings and odorants and fortified it with vitamins and minerals. The sheep—too stupid even to know they were in ziggy—were in theory available for his slaughter when the real thing was called for; but he sang to them too and what man can slaughter those he serenades?

Okoye, her duties done for the day, kicked and listened and licked on a ginger sweetball he had made for her. Often, in the common room, Grubb accompanied himself on the concertina, but Okoye enjoyed the voice pure and unadorned, and that was why she often joined him in the galley. That and the sweetballs.

“There’s wealth to be made on the orbital trade

Working the ships and the stations.

If you man the lock at the cargo ship dock,

You can look down on all of creation,

My friend.

You can look down on all of creation.”

Grubb liked the old songs, the ones from the early days, when all of space had snuggled close to the breast of Mother Earth, and Mars was just an antic notion. The building of Leo Station and Goddard City and Tsiolkovskigrad; the first lunar mines at Artemis and Selene; the pearly necklace of powersats, the heroic fight against the asteroid rain. The time when three men had dared the Long Orbit to Calhoun’s Rock with nothing more than a chemical reaction for their motor. A time of raw energy and simple truths. Fortunes had been made in deed, and fortunes broken.

There was no discontent in this love of his for a golden age. Genuinely humble, he viewed the world with a childlike awe and, accepting whatever befell, inherited the world often enough that the more cynical among the crew suspected his humility to be a sort of vice. Grubb was happy where he was and when he was, but he would have been as happy elsewhere and elsewhen. He really did know that the times he sang of had not been so rosy or sanitary as the songs made out, nor the truths quite so simple. There had been bodies in orbit, as there had earlier been bodies beside the trails of Siberia and Gansu and the American West; but if one must sing, why not sing of life the way it ought to have been? Myth could bear more truth than Fact.

“From the STC link up to geosynch

And from Goddard to Helios Light.

The habitats spin and the dockhandlers sin

As they soar through the starry night,

My friend.

As they soar through the starry night.”

The song faded and Grubb sighed as, his feet anchored in stirrups for the leverage, he kneaded the carnic mass, working it to the right consistency for Fowl Matter. His eyes lost their focus and grew distant and he sighed again. Okoye had long decided that Grubb was the ship’s canary. When he stopped singing, it was time to worry.

“What is it, Mr. Grubb?” she asked. He had often asked her to call him by his first name, but Okoye had a firm sense of propriety and thought that he was secretly pleased that she used the honorific. There was little enough politeness in the world that she would not diminish its store. She had been raised in Afikpo, where the young knew to respect their elders.

“There is something wrong with the ship,” Grubb said.

“Mr. Bhatterji and Miko are working on the engines. They expect—”

But Grubb shook his head. “It’s not her engines, ’Kiru, it’s her heart. It’s been torn out of her. Haven’t you noticed how things have changed since Evan died?”

She had, in fact. Something of a dispirit had settled on the crew. With Hand’s death had come a feeling that they were now adrift; and who could say that Ship, picking up the cues, was not adrift for the same reason? Even for those who had disliked the man—and Okoye knew there were some—Hand had been at the center of their personal universes.

Now here is the curious thing about the late Evan Dodge Hand. Though he had been vapor for nearly a week, each member of his erst-while crew felt his presence. A Heisenbergish sort of captain, he had survived the opening of his casket, and in being no longer anywhere in particular was now somehow everywhere in general.

“We’re still readjusting,” she ventured. “It is being just bad luck all these things happening together.”

“Bad luck.” Grubb again ceased his kneading. “When has there never been bad luck?” He twisted in the stirrups and looked at her over his shoulder. “Have you ever played bounce ball, ’Kiru? Have you ever missed a return and said it was just a bad bounce?”

’Kiru never had—missed a return, that is—and so had never needed an excuse, but she knew what Grubb had meant to say and so she simply agreed. There were no bad bounces, only missed opportunities. One might fail the return, but that was hardly the fault of the ball.

 

Twenty-four deCant sought out Okoye later in the common room, while the First Wrangler was screading Pandya’s Cold, Gray Shores, a picaresque roman à clef of Pandya’s husband and their friends and the very first sail that had ever flown. Okoye had read it four times already, and never the same way twice as she followed the hyperlinks among the texts. “’Kiru,” deCant said. “’Kiru, do you have time today to help me shave my head? My hair is growing out too long and I need to chop it back.” She rubbed her short brush flat, but the strands rose again and trembled like grass in an uncertain breeze.

“It’s not so long,” Okoye said.

“Oh, but why wait? I like to keep it short so it doesn’t get in my way. I wish I had hair like yours. You never have to cut it. It just grows in those tight little curls.”

Okoye fought an impulse to brush a hand across her own scalp. She made no response but followed the other wrangler across the room. Personal comments made her uncomfortable. Not that Twenty-four’s compliment had been intrusive, but Okoye did not often talk about herself, or indeed much at all. She was a solitary sort, quiet and reserved and this made her more than a little strange to those like deCant, for whom solitude was something like a disease to be cured. Okoye knew that deCant was less concerned with her hair than with being alone.

Sometimes Okoye did not know exactly what she knew—she only felt it as a sort of premonition—but she would look up one day or search her heart and there it would be: Knowledge that she could not possibly have. Perhaps it was only a very refined intuition, built up from observation and her deep knowledge of body language learned from the sisterhood. Or perhaps it was a kind of telepathy. Her mind was a still, quiet pool of water, and if the thoughts and emotions of others could in some unfathomable manner leak out, they would surely cause ripples there.

The clone fastened herself into the sling by the vacuum duct and Okoye turned the suction on; then she rummaged in the drawer for the shaver. “Down to the scalp?” she asked.

“Drive them nubs into hiding,” deCant agreed, “so they’re a-feared to show their face for a while.”

DeCant spoke foolishly, Okoye thought, because she was young. It was as if silence horrified her as much as solitude and she felt driven to fill it up with words. Even random, foolish words. The accusation was probably unfair, so Okoye did not voice it. Some people just liked to chatter. Others preferred quiet. Odd, that the two of them had found themselves in the same berth. She turned the shaver on.

Or not so odd. Though one could no longer ask Hand.

“I think I may have found my clone-mother.” DeCant spoke matter-of-factly. Okoye wondered how anyone could blurt out such private matters, even to a friend—and the Igbo girl did consider herself a friend of the young clone; indeed, of anyone who would accept her friendship. She even felt an affection for Moth Ratline, and he was a very hard man to like. She made a noncommittal noise, but that was not needful because deCant simply kept talking.

“I weren’t sure for a long time, but Cap’n Hand know’d I was a clone when he signed me on for cabin boy, and he wanted to help me, so he must’a been trying to find my mother.”

Okoye wasn’t sure how well that string held together as a syllogism, but she said nothing while she ran the shaver across the girl’s scalp. She wondered, were she herself a clone, would she have been so anxious to find some woman whose only connection was an egg dropped off in a lab? The act must have meant far less to the donor than it had come to mean to Twenty-four deCant. “The donor might not even know,” Okoye said.

But that had been said before; and the answer—“A DNA screening doesn’t care if someone remembers”—had become a sort of mantra. But there were thousands of women in the Middle System; even more under Mars and Luna and in the habbies; billions on dirty old Earth. Okoye did not point out the practical difficulties of needle hunting in a dozen such haystacks. It wouldn’t have mattered. If deCant couldn’t see the impossibilities herself, no one could possibly point them out to her.

That Hand had intended to help deCant, Okoye did not doubt. There was her own situation as case in point. But that such “help” meant locating an egg donor, she doubted very much. Yet she was loathe to destroy hopes, even illusory ones—especially illusory ones. And so she maintained a silence into which deCant could pour her words.

“I been thinking on it hard these last two years,” deCant said. “First, I thought maybe my ma would be at one of our ports o’ call, but now I think she’s here on board and the cap’n was just waiting for the right time.”

Now that caused Okoye’s shaver to skid off the scalp! “Ms. Satterwaithe?” she said, for who else would have been on Mars fifteen years ago or more? “But you’re not at all like her!” Surprise could let the words pop out, even from her quiescent throat.

(Miko, hiding in the closed-off stewards’ accessway, was better at holding hers in, and only a small squeak escaped her, which Okoye thought was a briefly seized bearing in a distant air-circulation fan. Half the squeaks and bumps the crew had been hearing for the past four and a half months were from Miko-in-the-walls.)

“She’s old and I’m young. I’m trying to find a picture of her when she was young.”

“I don’t think she’s the picture-saving sort.”

“There must be something in Ship’s deeby, if I only knew the access codes.”

Okoye, having already gushed her few words, fell back into silence. She doubted that anything must be simply because deCant wanted it so, although in this way the clone really was like Satterwaithe. But Okoye could not imagine the Third Officer as an egg donor. Selling eggs for money did not lie on the woman’s orbit; and the altruistic advancement of medical science was in another bubble universe entirely. Besides, if deCant were Satterwaithe’s clone, Dr. Wong would surely have said something.

Or…Okoye did not like to think ill of another, but Wong did not have a very high opinion of her own skills and she might have good reasons for holding that opinion.

Speculation was bootless. Were problems solvable by worry, this would be a carefree ship, for Okoye worried to excess. About Ratline. About Wong. About deCant. Perhaps that, and her habitual quietude, was why others often came to her. She was a heat sink for their emotions. They might not expect her to solve anything for them, but at least they were assured of a listening. There was something about the long fall of words into the deep well of Okoye’s mind that comforted them. Maybe it was the distant splash.

So she didn’t just shave deCant’s head as she listened to the girl chatter. She rubbed the scalp and massaged the neck and shoulders. Okoye wished her friend would give up her hopeless search. It risked toppling over into an obsession, and obsessions could consume entire lives, and not only those of the obsessed. Fire had a way of riding the wind, of leaping fences and running wild. Twenty-four would be much happier if she could accept herself and, more importantly, accept the deaths of her fosters. But Okoye knew that such advice would be rejected. If people did not much expect solutions from the lips of their friends, still less did they welcome them.

When the shaving was done and the girl had talked herself out—and Okoye had paced herself so that the two coincided—Twenty-four said, “I always feel so much better when you do my hair. All tingly and relaxed.”

Okoye, putting the equipment away and turning off the vacuum, said, “Thank you.”

DeCant turned and gripped Okoye’s wrist. “No, I should thank you. For helping me with my problem.”

The Igbo girl was startled by the genuineness of the thanks. Twenty-four had come into the commons deeply anxious, but now radiated calm and purpose. Reviewing the one-sided conversation in her mind, Okoye could not see where she had helped at all.

After deCant had left to exercise in the spinhall, Okoye returned to her novel. Yet she found it difficult to concentrate. In Pandya’s long-ago, quasi-fictional world, the moral dilemmas seemed so clear-cut. Why was reality always a muddle? She thought she ought to speak with Dr. Wong or Third Officer Satterwaithe. She did not want to make trouble for Twenty-four, but that she ought to speak to someone was clear. Yet the one person in whom she knew she could have confided was now dead. Twenty-four’s search for her egg donor was doomed to fail, and that was bad enough; but there was an infinitesimal chance that it might succeed, and that would be worse.

 

Ivar Akhaturian was soft and round, like dough not yet baked hard. As Least Wrangler, he deferred to everyone on board. He always assumed that others knew better than he what he ought to do. When his mother pocketed the bounty and told him to go with Captain Hand, he had obeyed without a second thought. And later, when Third Wrangler deCant had told him to come with her, he had obeyed with equal thoughtlessness. It wasn’t in him to defy authority and, since he ascribed authority to any and all others, he seldom defied anything. Only in play did he show initiative, and there he could dream up endless activities by which the four wranglers could amuse themselves in the interstices of Ratline’s attention.

Evermore called him a wink and said that deCant had a leash around his johnny-come; but while Ivar might be young, he was not so young as to confuse envy with truth. Rave’s problem was very simple. He was horny for Twenty-four, but the Martian had chosen Ivar over him. Sometimes Akhaturian wished that the older boy would not tease him so much, but thought that if he persevered, Evermore would eventually grow tired of the sport. In this, he underestimated Evermore’s capacity for invention.

Twenty-four was the most wonderful and beautiful woman Akhaturian had ever known, save only his mother; and his mother had never made him feel good in the way that Twenty-four did. Just to think of her made him stiff; though that Twenty-four might have a hardness of her own he never considered. Operant conditioning is what Dr. Wong called it. Associate pleasure with a face and soon the face alone gives pleasure; but the doctor was a lonely and bitter woman and had her own operant conditions to worry over. Akhaturian would never have believed her, anyway. He thought he was in love.

Love meant mooning and moping and writing the number 24 over and over and thinking seven times a minute about being with her. Sublimation wasn’t in it. His work suffered, but only a little, as he was perfectly capable of wrangling cargoes and imagining Twenty-four’s naked breasts at the same time. He handled both tasks with neophyte awkwardness, but he was eager to learn.

And there was this one odd thing about his deference. Because he expected others to know more and to be the best, everyone he worked with did that work just a little bit better. When he asked Okoye questions about cargo wrangling, she was surprised to realize how much she herself had mastered in five short years. When he studied navigation with Corrigan, the Second found a vaster (and unexpected) store of patience within himself. When he told Grubb how delicious the food was, Grubb studied his essences and fragrances with greater diligence. Even Twenty-four found her search for casual pleasure shading over into something else. What it came down to was this: The little dook was so eager and so grateful and he so obviously expected that all would go well that no one wanted to disappoint him.

So a paradox had emerged even in the short four months that Akhaturian had been aboard. Without ever leading, he had become a leader. It was Okoye who first noticed this and puzzled over it for some time. There was nothing timid about Ivar Akhaturian. The boy would tackle the most dangerous task serene in the confidence that no one would order him to work he could not handle. If he ever found his center, Okoye thought, Akhaturian could be a captain as fine as Evan Hand had been. Indeed, for a time she wondered whether Ivar were not ndichie—Hand’s soul returned in an unlikely package—save for the fact that the boy had come before the man had gone, and Hand’s maw would undoubtedly reincarnate as an elephant, it was that large a thing.

Akhaturian feared Mr. Ratline as he feared little else, and with good reason; for Ratline was perfectly willing to throw people into situations they could not handle should the needs of the moment so ordain. It was the eternal scowl that frightened the Least Wrangler: that inward-turning, smoldering glow, as if anger had been carved into the man’s face with a red-hot knife. Akhaturian took to avoiding the cargo master whenever he could, and soon learned the byways and cubbyholes of the labyrinthine ship. He became quite good at avoidance, a skill admired and envied by the others in the berth. A quick eye could oft mark him swimming up a gangway scant moments before Ratline would crawl down another. He became so adept at it that Ratline sometimes forgot that he even had a fourth wrangler.

The contract with his mother had specified an education as well as an employment. Ratline was content that Hard Knocks be the instructor and that learning grow from experience. He never missed an opportunity to quicken the boy’s knowledge, but he always waited until the occasion required it. No use lecturing, he once said to Corrigan (who had worked up an elaborate instructional curriculum pursuant to the contract), not until the kid is ready. They always learn more if they come and ask. It had been said of Ratline that he cared nothing for any man or thing—but he cared about his young charges, and protected and even nurtured them in his own harsh and sour manner. It was this facet of the man that Okoye had sensed and it was why she, of only two on board, harbored anything like affection for him. For she had once learned an important lesson from an ancient European folk tale about a magic island, a young woman, and her monstrous host; and the lesson was this: that a person must be loved before he becomes lovable.

“I don’t understand,” Akhaturian said one day and, as it was the phrase with which he was most likely to begin a sentence, no one in the common room paid him any attention at first. They were, all four of them, bone-tired from having replaced the lithium valve under Ratline’s falcon-like supervision and, like a puddle on sunbaked earth, the question needed time to soak in. Finally, although she hesitated to ask a question with so many possible answers, Okoye said, “What don’t you understand?”

“Everything,” said Evermore, doing the lad’s answering for him. DeCant, leaping to her bedmate’s defense, gave the older boy a scowl and said, “He’s new,” which was not quite the same as denying the charge.

“I mean about the balk line,” Akhaturian said. “Why do the engines have to be back on line before then? At the speed we’re going, we’ll actually reach Jupiter sooner than we planned.”

“Dummy,” said Evermore. “That’s just the problem.”

“You should ask Mr. Corrigan,” Okoye suggested. “He knows navigation the best.”

“Not as well as Hand did,” Evermore said, “but Hand is gone and I don’t have time to explain.” Akhaturian could admit to ignorance with utter conviction. Evermore could not, but this was not because he pretended to know more than he did. It was self-deception and not conceit. That sort of blind confidence can lead one to tackle jobs not yet mastered, although for that very reason can also lead to their mastery.

“You see, we’re moving between two fixed points…” Mr. Corrigan explained when Akhaturian had tracked him down to the bridge, where he was computing the ship’s position by dead reckoning. (This was a procedure in navigation akin to book inventory in materials management. It was a number that ought to be true, but seldom was.)

“But Jupiter isn’t a fixed point!” Akhaturian protested. “And neither is Achilles. They’re both moving at, uh, at fourteen kiss.”

Corrigan laughed. It was always more difficult to explain such matters to the wellsprung than to the spaceborn. “We only call them fixed points, because they don’t move relative to each other. Achilles sits in a stable cusp which is always the same distance ahead of Jupiter. We boost partway, coast for a while to save on boron, flip, then brake. But it takes the same energy to slow us down as to speed us up, so the de-boost has to start at the balk line—in our case, at two hundred and sixty-three million klicks out—or we’ll be going too fast to enter HoJO—that’s High Jovian Orbit—unless,” and this he could not help but add, “we find an additional source of deceleration.”

Corrigan took Akhaturian through the calculations, step-by-step; that is, he held an extended conversation with Ship in its avatar as navigational computer. The Second Officer conceptualized the problem and the neural net did all the donkey work. Akhaturian learned how to calculate velocities and bearings and boron usage. Then, Corrigan let the Least Wrangler run practice problems, taking an imaginary River back and forth among Jupiter, the Trails, and the Leads. Akhaturian rather enjoyed it. “I am the captain!” he declared at one point and Corrigan smiled (or tried to).

“It takes more than knowing how to point the ship to be a captain,” he said with more than a touch of black choler. “It takes knowing where and why to point it.”

 

“Hey,” said Akhaturian when he had returned to the wranglers’ common room, “I bet you don’t know why The Riv’ is shaped like a disk.”

Rave Evermore was taking apart his belt phone. There was nothing wrong with it. He was just curious how it was put together. “Of course, I know,” he told the Least Wrangler, without looking at him.

“Oh.”

Nkieruke Okoye dimmed her screader and looked up. “I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me?”

Akhaturian bounced over to her side and, inevitably, deCant joined him there. Unnoticed by any but Okoye, Evermore shot them a look that the Igbo girl recognized as one of envy, though of whom he was envious she was not sure. “It’s because The Riv’ used to be a magnetic sail,” Akhaturian said. “Mr. Corrigan told me. That mast on the foreward hull? It used to anchor a super-loop sixty-four kilometers in diameter, way back when. They made the ship so it would fit inside the shape of the magnetic field the sail created, because the charged particles—you know, the solar wind—they sleet off the field—Mr. Corrigan says that gasses in the field can glow with different colors—but there’s two hot spots—the auroral spots, Mr. Corrigan called them—where the particles curve in, just like on Jupiter—and on Earth too I suppose—and they didn’t want any part of the ship to sit in the hot spots or the ‘vanilla’ belts. That’s why the mast is only a couple hundred meters long. So the ship stays well inside.”

Okoye considered that this entire pronouncement had been delivered without a second intake of breath and smiled at the lad. “That’s very interesting,” she said, and did not correct his pronunciation of “Van Allen belts.” DeCant beamed. “Isn’t Ivar smart?” she asked the sidereal universe.

Afterwards, Evermore approached Okoye and asked her if what the boy had said was true and, on being told that it was, nodded sagely. “Yah,” he said, “that’s what I would have guessed, but you’ve been on board more years than the rest of us. I’m surprised you didn’t know.”

Okoye smiled at him too—which was all that Evermore had really wanted—and neither did she correct him on his own misapprehension.