“You mind?” she asked, on the train of what she had already asked.
So it came. “Let me work it out this time,” he said. “You’re supposed to be on alterday. Suppose you take your time off and go get some sleep. You’re going to have to take her after jump.”
“Look, I’d like to go through the setup.”
“Did I tell you who’s setting up the schedules on this ship? Go on. Get some rest.”
She said nothing for the moment, sitting with her back to him. He stayed where he was, adamant. And finally she turned on the auto and levered herself out of the cushion. Offended pride. It was in every movement.
“Cabins are up the curve there,” he said, trying to pretend he had noticed none of the signals, trying to smooth it over with courtesy. It hurt enough, to offer that, to open up the cabins more than the one he had given to his sometime one-man crews. (“I sleep on the bridge,” he had always said; and done that, bunked in the indock sleeping area, catnapped through the nights, because going into a cabin, sealing himself off from what happened on Lucy’s bridge—there was too much mischief could be done.— “Crazy,” they had muttered back at him. And that thought almost ways frightened him.) “Take any one you like. I’m not particular. —Curran,” he said, turning from Allison’s cold face—and found all the others looking at him the same way.
(“Crazy,” others had said of him, when he occupied the bridge that way.)
“Look,” he said, “I’m running her through the jumps this go at it. I know my ship. You talk to me when it gets to the return trip.”
“I had no notion to take her through,” Allison said. “But I won’t argue the point.”
She walked off, feeling her way along the counter, toward the corridor. He turned, keyed in and took off the security locks all over the ship, turned again to look at Curran, at the others, clustered about the console where they were installing the new systems. He had offended their number one’s dignity: he understood that. But given time he could straighten comp out, pull the jump function out of Ross’s settings. And the other things… it was a trade, the silence Ross had filled, for live voices.
Putting those programs into silence—sorting Ross’s voice out of the myriad functions that reminded him, talked to him—(Good morning, Sandy. Time to get up…)
Or the sealed cabins, where Krejas had lived, cabins with still some remnant of personal items… things the Mazianni had not wanted… things they had not put under the plates. And the loft, where Ma’am and the babies had been…
“Curran,” he said, daring the worst, but trying to cover what he had already done, “you’re on Allison’s shift too. Any cabin you like.”
Curran fixed him with his eyes and got up from the repair. “That’s in,” Curran said. Being civil. But there was no softness under that voice. “What about the other one?”
“We’ll see to it. Get some rest.”
We. Neill and Deirdre. Their looks were like Curran’s; and suddenly Allison was back in the entry to the corridor.
“There’s stuff in there,” she said, not complaining, reporting. “Is that yours, Stevens?”
“Use it if you like.” It was an immolation, an offering. “Or pack it when you can get to it. There’s stuff left from my family.”
“Lord, Stevens. How many years?”
“Just move it. Use it or pack it away, whichever suits you. Maybe you can get together and decide if there’s anything in the cabins that might be of use to you. There’s not that much left.”
A silence. Allison stood there. “I’ll see to it,” she said. She walked away with less stiffness in her back than had been in the first leaving. And the rest of them—when he looked back—they had a quieter manner. As if, he thought, they had never really believed that there had been others.
Or they were thinking the way other passengers had thought, that it was a strange ship. A stranger captain.
“Going offshift,” Curran said, and followed Allison.
Neill and Deirdre were left, alone with him, looking less than comfortable, “Install the next?” Neill said.
“Do that,” Sandor said. “I’ve got a jump to set up.”
He turned, settled into the cushion still warm from Allison’s body. Lucy continued on automatic, traversing Pell System at a lazy rate.
Of Norway there was now no sign. Station was giving nothing away on that score.
A long way, yet, for the likes of a loaded merchanter, to the jump range. Easy to have set up the coordinates. He went over the charts, turned off the sound on comp, ran the necessities through—started through the manual then, trying to figure how to silence comp for good.
(I’ll get it on tape, Ross. For myself. Lose no words. No program. Nothing. Figure how to access it from my quarters only.)
But Ross knew comp and he never had, not at that level; Ross had done things he did not understand, had put them in and wound voice and all of it together in ways that defied his abilities.
(But, Ross, there’s too much of it. Everywhere, everything. All the care—to handle everything for me—and I can’t unwind it. There’s no erase at that leveclass="underline" not without going into the system and pulling units…
(And Lucy can’t lose those functions…)
“We got it.” Neill was leaning on the back of the cushion, startled him with the sudden voice. “Got it done.—Is there some kind of problem, there?”
“Checking.”
“Help you?”
“Why don’t you get some sleep too?”
“You’re in worse shape.”
“That’s all right.” A smooth voice, a casual voice. His hands tended to shake, and he tried to stop that “I’m just finishing up here.”
“Look, we know our business. We’re good at it.”
“I don’t dispute that.”
Deirdre leaned on the other side of the cushion. ‘Take some help,” she said. “You can use it”
“I can handle it”
“How long do you plan to go on handling it?” Neill asked. “This isn’t a solo operation.”
“You want to be of help, check to see about those trank doses for jump.”
“Is something wrong there?”
“No.”
“The trank doses are right over there in storage,” Neill said. “No problem with that”
“Then let be.”
“Stevens, you’re so tired your hands are shaking.”
He stared at the screens. Reached and wiped everything he had asked to see. The no-sound command went out with it. It always would. It was set up that way.
“Why don’t you get some rest back there?”
“I’ve got the jump set up,” he said. He reached and put the lock back on the system; that much he could do. “You two take over, all right?” He got up from the chair, stumbled and Neill caught his arm. He shook the help off, numb, and walked back to the area of the couches to lie down again.
They would laugh, he thought; he imagined them hearing that voice addressing a boy who was himself, and they would go through all of that privacy the way they went through the things in the cabins.
He should never have reacted at all, should have taken the lock off and let her and the others hear it as a matter of course. But they planned changes in Lucy; planned things they wanted to do, destroying her from the inside. He sensed that And he could not bear them to start with Ross.
He was, perhaps, what the others had said, crazy. Solitude could do that, and perhaps it had happened to him a long time ago.
And he missed Ross’s voice, even in lying down to sleep. What he discovered scared him, that it was not their hearing the voices in Lucy that troubled him, half so much as their discovering the importance the voices had for him. He was not whole; and that had never been exposed until now—even to himself.
He did not sleep. He lay there, chilled from the air and too tired to get up and get a blanket; tense and trying in vain to relax; and listening to two Dubliners at Lucy’s controls, two people sharing quiet jokes and the pleasure of the moment. Whole and healthy. No one on Dublin had scars. But the war had never touched them. There were things he could have more easily said to Mallory than to them, in their easy triviality.