"Where'd you get that expression?"
"Ferris, of course," Zainal said, giving her a little hug.
He closed his eyes to get on with the business of falling asleep.
It was a long while, despite her appreciation of his proximity, be-fore she could follow his example. And the morning came far too quickly.
Chapter Fourteen
Everyone was awake on the call and came out quickly to eat their first meal of the day. Then Peran went to see if Natchi had arrived with his lift as he had agreed the previous evening. Peran had sneaked a piece of good Botany bread, well lathered with honey, to give to Natchi. They had struck up quite a friendship. Natchi was there and grateful for the bread, which he said he had never tasted the like of. Peran had accessed a recipe for the stuff from the ship's library but didn't know where some of the ingredients might be had. He didn't know what "butter" was, or "flour" or "yeast."
However, Natchi knew a great many things and would work on the problem. At least they had the method to make bread and knew its ingredients. You couldn't know if you could make things until you knew what they were comprised of. Which was why Peran's father was here on Barevi-to find the component parts needed for the comm satellites and other such highly technical things, which were supposed to make a vast number of things "better." Peran already thought "life" was different and "better" when he recalled-which he did not often do-that time of his life spent without his father and being punished by his aunt and uncle for things that, for the most part, Peran didn't even know he'd done wrong. He'd warned Bazil and thus prevented his brother from receiving like measures of "corrective" discipline. Now that his father was here, it was always "better." He would have liked being with his father sooner, but life in the Masai camp had been very interesting, too, and Chief Materu fair in his judgments. He never had understood what his father, who acted in all ways honorably, had done to deserve being an outcast from his family.
Peran, with Bazil's assistance, transferred the cartons of packed beans to the lift. By then everyone was ready to go, Clime carrying the hottle of coffee left over from breakfast. He had poured a cup for Natchi, who was quite willing to drink it down with the bread Peran had given him.
"The last of the bread is in today's sandwiches," Kris announced as she deposited the basket-a hand-woven one from Botany-on the lift bed.
"Is it hard to make bread, Kris?" Peran asked, winking at Natchi. "No, but you need certain things one can't find here on Barevi." "I thought Barevi had everything," Bazil replied, eyes wide in surprise.
"Not quite everything," Zainal said, laughing and ruffling his son's hair.
"What, for instance?" Peran asked. "Milk. "
"That white stuff you made us drink. The cow's milk? From Kenya?"
"Very nutritious," Kris said firmly.
"Doesn't it come in cans, too?" Ferris asked.
"It does, but I haven't seen any here in the food stalls," Kris replied.
"What else?"
"Flour, usually fine ground from wheat or corn."
"And?" Ferris prompted since Kris's intonation suggested flour was not the final missing ingredient.
"Yeast. Which I haven't ever seen here. Yeast is a leavening, which causes the bread flour to rise in the baking. Similar, I think, to your meal cakes."
"Meal cakes. Phooey," Bazil said, having eaten too many under-and overdone meal cakes as a child.
"But you like bread," Kris countered.
"Botany bread, yes," Bazil agreed amiably, qualifying his taste. "Surely we can find a substitute for yeast, and maybe cans of milk," Ferris said.
"Quite likely," Zainal replied, noticing Ferris's speculative expres-sion. "But these are not things easily found or: acquired."
Kris rolled her eyes because Ferris was not above proving doubters wrong, and Zainal had probably just piqued him professionally. She devoutly hoped that Ferris would take the hint, and he must have, be cause he shot her a hurt, accusing look. She wondered whether she should warn Floss and Clime to reinforce her warning to curb his ac-quisitive tendencies. On the way to their stalls, she made sure to point out the triangle, where minor market offenses were punished with lashes of a particularly nasty whip. There were no such things as trials or sentences in Barevi. Corporal punishment for infractions of the market laws, like thieving, was swift and did not allow for appeals. While Ferris looked sturdier than Ditsy, his undernourished bones were fragile. She didn't want to think of him under the whip.
Chapter Fifteen
The next morning started very well indeed, with an impa-tient clutch of people waiting for them to start serving the coffee. There were even some wanting to trade, and Zainal managed to obtain a palette of truck batteries, a real prize.
Captain Harvey was attempting to repair the damage to the irid-ium comm sat they had scooped out of the skies above Earth. In her talks with John Wendell, she had learned that many of the satellites the Catteni had damaged could be repaired in situ. The one they had in the BASS-1 needed only the necessary LNB, low-noise block-down converter. They now had the solar replacement vanes that would power the comm sat once it was back in space. They had found two antenna "ears" that had been sliced off, but needed two con-necting boards so the individual units of the satellite could exchange information. The controlling mechanism, which Harvey called the mission package, had survived and was operational.
"That's the most delicate of the stuff on board," Captain Harvey told him. "It'll keep the comm sat in the orbit where we place it." She cleared her throat. "Replace it, actually, because it's already pro grammed to stay in its proper orbit: except when Catteni use it for target practice. But then, they have to practice on something, don't they, to keep their edge?"
Harvey could surprise him with some of her wry comments and Zainal tilted an amused expression up to her. He hoped they could find more relatively undamaged comm sats on their return. They also needed to build some from the spare parts in the lower cargo level.
"What're the part numbers for these needful connector boards, Captain?" he asked her, wondering yet again at the greed that had oc-casioned looters to take such unusable items back to Barevi. The mer chants could not sell everything: there had to be buyers who wanted the items. Of course, they now had them in Zainal's mission.
She yanked a scrap of paper out of her top pocket and handed it to him. "Got them from the schematics last night." She aimed the small tool in her hand at a bunch of twisted plastic on the floor. "That's what was left of them, so's you got an idea what you're look-ing for. Spiders, only you don't have spiders, arachnids, a multi-legged creature, on Barevi, do you? Once I have those to hook the system up, we can test to see if all parts are running. You can see the part numbers, loud and clear."
"I can?" Zainal cupped his ear, though he suspected she was using one of those maddening vernacular phrases Terrans so enjoyed. "You're some kidder, Emassi," she replied with a grin and a wag-gle of her elbow.
The Terrans had so many of these little sayings, cryptic comments that confused him. It was as well that his sons were being exposed to such verbal wordplay. They would be able to speak Terran very well. So far he was quite pleased with Brone. The young pilot had proved firm with them and had gained their respect. Zainal brought himself sternly back to the work at hand: he must list the numbers for Ferris, in hopes the boy could discover who owned the relevant storage shed. Zainal had also told Clune and Ditsy to be on the lookout for anyone holding parts with the FICA logo on them and briefed both Natchi and his sidekick, Erbri, a footless man whom Natchi presented as thoroughly trustworthy and who knew every alley in the market. Why didn't the Terrans assign just one worker to the completion of a project, and then one would only need to find the worker and know from which "industry"-the word came to him-he had acquired the original parts? Of course, a single man could not construct an en-tire spaceship by himself but a comm sat, once the components were collected, would be within a good workman's compass.