“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.
Be reasonable, Megan had told her then, taking her in the circle of her arm, setting her on the edge of the bed in her quarters and trying to talk sense into her. Only one gets to be the Old Man; and you know how many try the course and fail? Maybe one in four survives the grade to get into the line; and one in fifty gets to Helm 24, up where you’re even going to sit a chair on watch; and after that, age is against you, because the sitting captains are too young. You go ask in library, Allie, how long the sitting captains are going to live, and then you do the math and figure out how long the number two chairs are going to live after taking their posts behind them, and how long it takes for Helm 24 to work up to posted crew.
Can’t I try? she had asked. And: yes, you can try, Megan had said. I’m only telling you how it is.
Maybe there’ll be an accident, she had thought to herself, with a ten-year-old’s ruthless ambition: an accident to wipe out everyone in Second Helm.
You study everything, Megan had said, when she had complained about learning galley maintenance; the Helm course fits you for everything. So if you fail, you drop into whatever other track you’re passing. You think Helm’s just sitting in that chair: it’s trade and routings; law; navigation and scan and com and armaments; it’s jack and jill of all trades, Allie, ma’am, and doing all the scut before you hand it out, and you can always quit, Allie, ma’am.
No, ma’am, she had said, and swallowed all they gave her, reckoning to be stubbornest the longest, and to make it all the way, because there was a craziness in her, that once launched, she had a kind of inertia that refused to be hauled down. She was Helm 21, and when Val retired as she was likely to, Helm 6 and on the fading edge of rejuv, she would be Helm 20, and one more Dubliner got a post as Helm 24. She walked wide among the unposteds, being Helm. It had its perks. But Lallie, over there, Maintenance 196, was Second Maintenance second shift alterday at barely twenty-one, posted main crew before her hair grayed, while Helm 21 had little chance indeed, with a possible forty years until another seated Helm decided to give it up and retire. She would be on rejuv before the list got her past Helm 20, would still be lording it over the unposteds, silver-haired and still not able to cross the line into the posteds lounge, still waiting, still working the number two bridge to stay current.
She shut her eyes, leaned back, seeing blue dock again, and soldiers in their black uniforms. They talked about opening up Sol trade, shut down since the war; about opening the mothballed stations of the Hinder Stars. They talked new routes and profits to be made—putting their hand into Alliance territory, creating a loop that would link the Union stars to the Pell-based Alliance. Trade and politics.