The police yelled at the rescue workers, the rescue workers yelled at the police, Hallan said, “I’m sorry, captain.”
“What,” she said in a low voice, “happened?”
“The loader jammed. I backed the truck. It just—turned up in back of me.”
Tc’a didn’t exactly drive a straight line. It was the nature of their nervous systems. “Do you have a license to drive on dockside?”
“No, captain.”
“Do you suppose there’s a reason why you don’t have a license to drive on dockside?”
“I think so, captain.”
The police were coming back. They had the tow truck hitched. “Watch your mouth,” she said. “Let me do the talking.” Out of the tail of her eye she saw Tiar and Tarras on the ramp, and Fala behind them.
And the police were on their way back to them, with their slates and their recorders. Lawyers would be next—if it was an oxy-sider Meras had backed into. One could only wish it was lawyers.
“It reproduce,” their chief said, with an expansive gesture involving his slate. “You responsible. Urtur station not.”
She drew a long careful breath. “You write your report. I write mine.”
“We got take him.”
Tempting thought. “No.”
“He not list with you crew.”
“He’s on loan. He’s a licensed spacer. I put him on the dockside. I take responsibility for accidents.”
“Captain,” Hallan objected, brim full of noble and foolish objections—her claws twitched out and her vision shadowed around the edges.
“Shut up, Meras. —I’ll need a copy of your report, officer, and I’ll pay charges on the alarm.”
Don’t even ask if anybody was injured when the section doors moved shut. Disruption of business, inconvenience to traffic, time and services of rescue workers and police …
Say about 200,000 in damages … give or take.
She signed the report as Reserving the right to amend or correct, and so on, due to language barrier and lack of legal counsel, etc., and so on. She thanked the officers, thanked the rescue workers, gave the eye to her crew lurking up in the ramp access, and smiled sweetly at Meras.
“He try fix loader,” the docker chief said.
Grant the fellow a fair mind and an inclination to speak out. She delayed for a look up at the mahe, and gave a bow of the head, and put the name in memory, Nandi, in the not unlikely event they needed a witness. “He thanks you for your support,” she said, in her best mahendi, and gave a second bow, before she took Meras by the arm and headed him up the ramp.
“I feel awful it was pregnant,” he said on the way up, and she threw him a disbelieving glance.
“They reproduce under stress,” she said. “You’re a father, gods rot you, to a tc’a! What’s lord Meras going to say to that?”
He looked horrified. Appropriately. About the time they reached Tiar and Fala and Chihin.
“It spawned,” she said, shortly. “Probably so did the chi. —Tiar, get up to the bridge. See to gtst honor!”
“Aye, captain.”
Tiar went, at top speed. That left two. “Fala, down there and take over for Meras. —Chihin, you’re on your own with the guest quarters. Get!”
The com was trying to get her attention with periodic, when-you-have-time beeps. She waited until she had gotten Meras into the airlock, and keyed into the ship’s internal system. “Tarras. You all right?”
“Aye, captain.” Chattering teeth. “Captain, the kid was giving me a fix on the loader.”
“Fix on the loader.” Two and two weren’t making four. “You get that gods-forsaken cargo out of there. I’ll hear it later.” She grabbed Meras by the elbow and steered him through the lock and down the corridor toward her office.
“Captain, I’m really sorry. I’m really—really sorry you had to take responsibility …”
“We are in one gods-rotted mess, you understand that? You understand me?”
“Captain.” From the com again. Tarras. “I’d really like to talk to you about what happened… .”
“Later!”
They reached her office and Meras followed her in. She sat, he sat, disconsolately, his big frame somewhat overflowing the chair that was designed to accommodate even mahendo’sat. She stared, he looked at the front panel of her desk, or somewhere in that vicinity. The loader had started again. Presumably they had the go-ahead from the port authority. Clank-clank. Clank-thump.
“Meras.”
“Yes, captain.”
“Do you know what you’ve cost us in fines?”
“If there were any way I could take responsibility—”
“Would Meras like a 200,000 credit bill?”
“I don’t think so.”
“I thought your captain was reprehensible for leaving you at Meetpoint. I begin to feel a certain sympathy for her, you know that?”
“Yes, captain.”
“I don’t have a license to drive that cart. Tiar’s been out here for forty years and she doesn’t have a license to back that cart up. Do you understand me?”
“Yes, captain.”
“I want you to understand something. We have a stsho passenger who’s already in delicate health. They are not a robust species. This stsho is occupying the cabin around the corner from here. If gtst saw you, it could tip matters right over the edge. Do you understand that fact?”
“Yes, captain.” A visible wince. “—Captain,—”
“Yes, Meras?”
“I really—really want to do right. I can do a good job—”
“Two hundred thousand worth. That’s a gods-rotted steep hourly wage!”
“I didn’t know about the license! The loader was jammed, and they couldn’t move the truck till somebody moved the cart—”
“Until a licensed driver moved the cart!”
“I didn’t know that!”
“Well, there’s a gods-be lot you didn’t learn in your apprenticeship, Hallan Meras, and you’re not doing it at our expense. We’ve got to go on out of here to Kita, from Kita the gods only know where the gods-forsaken addressee has gone to, but gtst is on a mahen ship, and from Kita our choices are Not Good. Do you follow my logic? This is no trip and no place for any gods-rotted apprentice!”
“I’m not an apprentice—I’ve got my license—”
“Got your license—I’d like to know how in a mahen hell you got your license, I’d like to know doing what you got your license, because it sure as taxes wasn’t on any dockside ops board, and it gods-rotted sure didn’t entitle you to back a cart the length of this office! You’re a papa, Hallan Meras, you’re a papa to a methane-breathing five-brained colony entity and probably to another chi who’s crazier than it is—and mama or whatever you call it when you reproduce when startled is just capable of asking his, her, or its matrix what gods-be ship its offspring’s papa is working on! Methane folk have this way of turning up in the deep dark empty and saying hello when you don’t want to see them. Methane folk have this way of navigating that doesn’t respect lanes in space any more than they respect lines on a dock! I’ve had them come near my ship when they weren’t after anything, thank you, Hallan Meras, and I don’t want to deal with them when they are! I by the gods sure don’t want to meet that mama or its offspring in deep space! Do you remotely understand why I’m upset?”
“I could—I could try to have station get a message to them, station can talk with them …”
“That’s a myth. That’s a thorough-going myth. Station can approximate things like ‘Open the hatch,’ and ‘That’s a fire hazard!’ It doesn’t do gods-be well with, ‘Hello, I’m Hallan Meras, I’m responsible for your offspring.’ They’ve been in space long before we were, and we still don’t know how to say ‘Stop it you’re in my lane,’ and: ‘My ship can’t perform that maneuver.’ You want to see a matrix brain communication? I can show you one… .” She got into comp with two jabs of a key and voiced it: “Matrix-com!”
Matrix-com came up, with the typical grid. Five rows across, output of each of five voices of its multiple brains. She hit vocal and knnn-voice wailed over the speaker, like a wind-organ, like pipes, and deep, deep bass vibrations.
Hallan winced, ears twitching with the assault, nostrils working. He shivered visibly. Then she remembered she was dealing with adolescent male hormones, which ought to give a sane woman pause—but gods rot it, he insisted he was one of the girls, that he was cool-headed, he wanted to play the game on their terms; and she slammed her hand down on the desk, bang!
“Off-comp!”
Sound stopped. And Meras was still twitching, but he hadn’t left his chair, his eyes were dilated, but the ears were trying to come upright—he was paying attention, he was listening, he wasn’t crazy.
“Captain.” Tiar—on the bridge. Magnificent timing.
“I’m in my office, Tiar. What’s the problem?”
“Just got a blip on station feed. Sun Ascendant’s just entered system.”
The answer to prayers, it might be.
Hallan looked upset. Shook his head and shaped No with his mouth. Said something else.
“Thanks, cousin. Glad to hear that.”
“I don’t want to go, captain. I don’t want them—”
“You signed with them. You sat at their table, you slept in their shelter, they got you your license, and I don’t know what made them leave you at Meetpoint, Meras, but so far as what I’ve seen they may have run for their lives.”
Made him mad, that did. Good.
“If you want to go back to the laundry, you stay there. If you want to go back to the passenger cabins and help Chihin paint and patch, feel free. I’m not turning you over to station police, and being the righteous fool I am, I’m not identifying Sun Ascendant to the tc’a. We’ll handle it. But I’ve done everything I’m obliged to do for somebody I gathered out of a jail he by the gods got himself into. I’ve got 41 messages in ship’s files for my aunt at this station; I’ve got 156 for me, most of them from people trying to use me to get to my aunt for favors they want; and here comes one of my aunt’s devoted admirers who just really badly wants into my crew, because he just really badly wants it, that’s why. —Well, so does half the universe, Meras. And I’d suggest you give up and go home if meeting my aunt is what you want; or if being a spacer is what you want, focus down and use your head on problems before you kill somebody. I’d suggest you give up on the Manual of Trade and start reading the licensing and operations manual. It may keep you out of the next hot spot you land in. —And give my regards to Tellun Sahern. Minute your ship makes port you’re going over there.”
Ears were flat. Really mad. Better. Maybe he’d survive in Sahern, in far space.
“Go on,” she said. And he got up and bowed and left.
Which didn’t make her happy. Nobody could be happy, who had a 200,000 credit charge pending against her ship, a cargo half unloaded, a distraught stsho dignitary in the crew lounge, and a course change pending to Kita Point, a gods-forsaken dot in the great empty, after which, as she had said to Meras—limited options.
“Ker Chihin,” Hallan said, hesitating in the open doorway. “The captain suggested I help.”
“I don’t need anything backed into,” Chihin said shortly, and Hallan winced. The room was all white. The furniture was gone. You walked up steps to the floor and there was a depression full of white cushions.
Besides there was a pedestal with braces going out to it, but nothing on it.
“You can vacuum,” Chihin said. “Floor, walls, everything. Steam vac. All the dust. Height could help. Are your feet clean?”
He looked. They weren’t, exactly. “I’ll go wash,” he said meekly.
“Packaged wet towel, right there by the steps.” Chihin frowned at him as he sat down on the steps and reached for it. He tried not to look at her face. He felt sick, he had felt sick ever since he had backed into the tc’a, but he couldn’t go back to that closed room, he couldn’t stand it. So he washed his feet off so no one could complain of a smudge and he looked for a place to dispose of the towel.
“Over there,” Chihin said, indicating a plastic bucket. He went and dropped it in. “You know how to use the steam vac?”
“Yes, ma’am.” He was too well acquainted with it. It was all Sahern had let him do for his first weeks aboard the Sun. He went and checked the prime, checked the water and pulled the filter screen, which he figured he ought to clean before someone else found fault with him. “Is there a sink, ma’am, or should I—”
“Bath’s in there. Sink works just like ours—it’s the fixture on the left.”
He went and washed the filter. It was different plumbing. Ordinarily he would have been intrigued, but the lump in his throat would not go away and he just tried to go moment by moment and not to think about what the captain had said, one way or the other. The captain had a right to be mad, gods, he couldn’t pay back the damage he’d cost—probably nobody in Meras clan history had ever fouled up so egregiously, so consistently.
But the docking chief had said to move the cart.
He put the vacuum back together. He took it to a corner and started there, with a racket that made conversation impossible. But he was aware of Chihin staring at him from time to time: maybe she expected the vac to explode or something; or him to do something she could fault. Of all the crew, Chihin was not in any way friendly, and he supposed by now the rest of the crew was ready to kill him. Except maybe … at least Tarras had tried to speak for him. Fala and Tiar had looked upset, as well they might, but they hadn’t hated him. Chihin—didn’t want him here. Which was why the captain had sent him to work with her, he supposed. But it was still better than sitting alone in the laundry and remembering backing into that truck, and that thing snaking back and forth in pain and battering itself against the windows, leaving bits of skin and fluid on the glass… .
At least it hadn’t exploded. Nobody had gotten killed. Quite the opposite. Somebody had gotten created. He wondered how the tc’a felt.
“The kid was trying to straighten out the loader,” Tarras said. There was still ice in her beard, melting and glistening in the heat of the downside office—Hilfy had called her up, ordered her to trade places with Fala, and the way to the dock lay through the lower main corridor and past her office. So she had both of them, Tarras and Fala, arguing with her, the loader was in temporary shut-down, pending the switch, and no cargo was moving. But she figured she might as well listen and be done with it.
“All right,” she said. “Voices on Meras’ behalf … while we’re at it.” She pushed the call button. “Cousin. Listen in.”
“Aye,” Tiar answered from the bridge. “What’s up?”
“The loader jammed,” Tarras said, and sat down, while Fala edged a half a step further into the office, in the doorway. “The kid knew the equipment—Sun Ascendant must use the same model. Anyway, it pulled its usual stunt, and the kid said it was the 14-can truck, when the arm positions itself: he says it’s a false signal, there’s nothing to do with the chain, it’s the arm overextending. This one model of truck has a slightly lower bed. It reaches down to get it, the arm jams, jams the chain, you back the chain—it fixes it. So if you move the truck a little farther—”
“The docker chief said he’s heard of it,” Fala said. “It’s something they say on the docks but the companies won’t investigate. Doesn’t happen until the equipment gets a little wear on it, and then it’ll happen if the play that gets into the joint works far enough to the right where the sensor bundle runs through, and that bias only happens when you get a whole lot of fifteen-year-old Daisaiji 14-canners in a row. Which you get on Urtur, they got more of them than anywhere, because they made them here. And it only happens if some driver parks short. That’s why it comes and it goes.”
She couldn’t help but be interested in the purported solution to the loader glitch, if it was the answer—it sounded iffy to her; but most of all she didn’t want to hear it
was Meras who had the information. She’d worked up a perfectly good, justified fit of temper, from which Meras could learn something that might keep him alive, and she didn’t want any extenuating circumstances.
“So the thing jammed,” Tarras said, “and the docker crew wanted to move the truck, and somebody’d parked a can-hoist in the way—”
“Probably why the truck parked short,” Fala said.
“And the kid said it was the truck, so the chief started yelling about moving the truck,” Tarras said. “He was pretty hot, so the kid—just got in and backed it up.”
“Without a license.”
“Captain,” Tarras said, “the length of the truck, it had to move. Isn’t a spacer working freight hasn’t stepped aboard and moved a hoist a few—”
“I haven’t. I don’t want my crew doing it. You let the dockers do their job, you don’t lay a hand on their equipment, we got a special handicap, f’ gods sake, Chanur’s got too many enemies who’d like to sue the hide off us, you understand?”
“Understood,” Tarras said sullenly.
“But,” Fala said, “it was only cosmic bad luck the tc’a was back there—”
“Luck! Methane loads come in on oxy side all the time at Urtur, and we got tc’a going back and forth on business oxy side, and it had business which is now complicated by an offspring! We can only hope we don’t get company our next trip out. Luck be damned!”
“Aye, captain.”
“Captain,” Tiar said, “begging your pardon, but he’s young. Haven’t any of us made mistakes?”
“He can make them on Sahern’s deck, and welcome to him. Enthusiasm is one thing. We can’t afford his enthusiasm. Besides, his ship is here—”
“They didn’t do him any favors, cap’n. That’s their teaching? They take a kid on for an apprentice, and he’s got a little of this, a little of that? I asked him stuff on ops. He knows this board real well, doesn’t know how it relates to the main board. That’s ‘Sit here and watch the colored lights, kid,’ that’s what they gave him.”