“Good night?” someone asked. She blinked placidly at another unposted who had been with her in Tiger’s last night
“Yes,” she said, thinking about it for a moment, drew in a breath and favored Curran with a thoughtful glance. “What happened to yourself?”
Curran grinned. That was all. The lift arrived, and seniors went on first; there was room for the three of them, herself and Deirdre and Curran, and a jam of others after that. The lift whisked them up to second level, and they lost the juniors, who were bound for their own territory; it stopped again on main, and they let the seniors off first, then followed through the corridor into the main lounge, into the din of laughter and conversation in a room as big as most station bars, curve-floored and with the float-based furniture now tilted out of trim with the ship’s geometries. Posted crew and seniors gathered in the lounge beyond, and Allison wove her way through the center standing area to the archway, looked inside to find her mother, Megan, who was posted scan 24.
“I’m back, she hand-signed past the noise, the gathering in the two lounges. Megan saw her and walked over, across the white line into the unposted lounge to talk to her. “I worried,” Megan said.
“Huh. I’m not about to miss the bell. Have a good stay?”
“Got some new tapes.”
“Nothing else?”
Her mother grinned and went sober again, irrepressibly reached out and straightened her collar. “The number ones are still in conference. We think we’re going to get undocked on schedule. The military’s talking to the Old Man now.”
“No question about clearance, is there?” She straightened her collar herself, minor irritance. “I thought that was settled.”
“Something about some papers on the cargo. Trans-Line protocols. Viking stationmaster is insisting we re-enter Union space via Viking; we make no promises, and the military’s backing us on it. The bell’s going on schedule, I’m betting.”
“I don’t see it’s Viking’s prerogative.”
“Balance of trade, they say. They’ll raise a fuss all the way to Council.”
She frowned—glanced about as a heavy hand came down on her shoulder; it was her mother’s half-brother Geoff, dark-bearded, brows knit. “Allie,” her uncle said, “you mind how you go on the docks.”
“He was safe,” Allison said.
“Huh,” Geoff said, and looked past her at Megan. “Mind this one, Meg. Did that fellow ask questions, Allie? Did you answer any?”
“He wasn’t curious and no, nothing he couldn’t get by asking anywhere. I asked the questions, Geoff, sir, and I was soberer than he was.”
“Stay to Names you know,” Megan said. “Nowadays particularly.”
“Ma’am,” Allison said under her breath. “Sir.” Drew breath and ducked past with a pat on the shoulder as her half-sister Connie showed up to report in, relieving her of more discussion. There was no great closeness between herself and Connie, who was pregnant and occupied in that, whose study was archives and statistics. “Lo, Connie,” and “Hello, Allie,” was all that passed between them. Curran was closer, Geoff was, or Deirdre, but Megan loved freckled Connie, so that was well enough with Allison who moderately liked her, at the distance of their separate lives. “Hello,” she said to Eilis, who made a touch at her as she passed through the crowd; and “Ma’am” to her grandmother Allison, who on rejuv was silver-haired, sterile, and looked no more than forty (she was sixty-two). And there was greatgrand Mina, Scan 2, who also looked forty, and was twice that—seated crew, Mina, who was back in unposted territory talking to Ma’am herself, who was sitting down on one of the benches—Ma’am with a capital M, that was Colleen, whose rejuv was fading and who had gone dry and thin and wrinkled, but who still got about in the lounges during maneuvers despite brittle bones and stiffening joints. Ma’am was the point at which she was related to Curran and Deirdre both. Ma’am was retired Com 1, and kept the perks she had had in that post, but evidently chose not to be in Council at the moment. Ma’am and Mina deserved courtesy on boarding, and Allison worked her way across the room and the noise and paid it, which Mina answered with a preoccupied nod, but Ma’am grabbed her hands, kissed her on the cheek as if she had been one of the toddlers, and let her go again, talking past her to Mina nonstop in a low tone that involved the military and the rights of merchanters. Allison lingered half a breath, learned nothing, strayed away again, past other hellos and the delicate tottering of a two-year-old loose in the press.
She found a bench and sat down, lost in the forest of standing bodies, glanced across the tops of red contoured furniture which wrapped itself up the curve of the room: some of the unposteds had stretched out sideways on the benches with their eyes shielded. Too much celebration, too late. The inevitable bands of knee-high youngsters yelled and darted as high on the floor curve as they could, occasionally taking a spill and risking being collared by one of their elders if their antics knocked into someone. Someone’s baby was squalling, probably Dia’s; it always did, hating the noise. The older children squealed: it was their time to burn off all the energy, and it was part of their courage, the racing and the play and the I-dare-you approach to undock that made a game of the maneuvers Dublin went through. It gave them nerve for the jump that was coming, which merchanter babies went through even unborn. These were the under fives, the youngsters loose among them. The sixes through sixteens were up in the topside of the cylinder, where they spent most of their dockside time (and all of it for the six-through-nines) in a topsy-turvy ceiling-downside nursery, where a padded crawlthrough made G reorientation only another rowdy, tumbling game. Every Dubliner remembered, with somewhat of nostalgia, how much better that was than this adult jam-up in the downside lounge.
They gained no numbers in a generation: the matrilineal descent of merchanters generated new Dubliners of sleepover encounters with more concern for too few children than too many: another was always welcome, and if one wanted half a dozen, and another wanted none, that was well enough: it all balanced out from one generation to the next: Ma’am and Mina and Allison Senior came down, among others, to Megan and Geoff. Geoff had no line on Dublin, being male; but Megan had her and Connie, which balanced out; and Connie was already taking the line down another generation. Only rejuv kept five and sometimes six generations living at once: like Ma’am, who was pushing a hundred fifty and had faded only in the last decade, Ma’am, who had been Com 1 so long her voice was Dublin’s in the minds of everyone. It still made Shockwaves, thin as it had gotten, when Ma’am made it snap and handed out an order; and there was still the retired Old Man, who had been the Old Man for most of Allison’s life, and seldom got about now, snugged in his cabin that was downmost during dock, attended by someone always during jump, listening to tapes for his entertainment and sleeping more and more.
Allison herself… was Helm 21, which was status among the unposteds, Third Helm’s number one of the alterday shift. What do you want to be? Megan had asked her as early as she could remember the question. When a Dubliner was taking his first study tapes he got the Question, and started learning principles before awkward fingers could hold a pen or scrawl his letters, tapestudy from Dublin’s ample library. So what do you want to be? Megan had asked, and she had wanted to be bridge crew, where lights flashed and people sat in chairs and did important things, and where the screens showed the stars and the stations. What do you want to be? The question came quarterly after that, and it went through a range of choices, until at ten: I want to be the Old Man, she had said, before she had hardly gone out on a station dock or seen anything in the universe but the inside of Dublin’s compartments and corridors. The king of the universe was the Old Man who sat in the chair and captained Dublin, the Number One mainday captain, who ruled it all.