That caught me literally off-balance. My shoes came unstuck from the carpet, and I had to grab hold of a ceiling handrail.
“Say what?” I asked.
Not looking up at me, Jeri Lee absently played with the squeezebulb in her left hand, her right foot holding open the pages of her personal logbook. “You said that he’s never thought of anyone else in his life,” she replied. “Whatever else you might say about him, you’re wrong there, because he saved my life.”
I shifted hands so I could sip my coffee. “Anything you want to talk about?”
She shrugged. “Nothing that probably hasn’t occurred to you already. I mean, you’ve probably wondered why a google is serving as first officer aboard this ship, haven’t you?” When my mouth gaped open, she smiled a little. “Don’t look so surprised. We’re not telepathic, rumors to the contrary… it’s just that I’ve heard the same thing over the last several years we’ve been together.”
Jeri gazed pensively through the forward windows. Although we were out of the Kirkwood gap, no asteroids could be seen. The belt is much less dense than many people think, so all we saw was limitless starscape, with Mars a distant ruddy orb off to the port side.
“You know how Superiors mate, don’t you?” she asked at last, still not looking at me.
I felt my face grow warm. Actually, I didn’t know, although I had frequently fantasized about Jeri helping me find out. Then I realized that she was speaking literally. “Prearranged marriages, right?”
She nodded. “All very carefully planned, in order to avoid inbreeding while expanding the gene pool as far as possible. It allows for some selection, of course… no one tells us exactly whom we should marry, just as long as it’s outside of our own clans and it’s not to Primaries.”
She paused to finish her coffee, then she crumpled the squeezebulb and batted it aside with her right foot. It floated in midair, finding its own miniature orbit within the compartment. “Well, sometimes it doesn’t work out that way. When I was twenty, I fell in love with a boy at Descartes Station… a Primary, as luck would have it. At least I thought I was in love….”
She grimaced, brushing her long braid away from her delicate shoulders. “In hindsight, I guess we were just good in bed. In the long run it didn’t matter, because as soon as he discovered that he had knocked me up, he got the union to ship him off to Mars. They were only too glad to do so, in order to avoid…”
“A messy situation. I see.” I took a deep breath. “Leaving you stuck with his child.”
She shook her head. “No. No child. I tried to keep it, but the miscarriage… anyway, the less said about that, the better.”
“I’m sorry.” What else could I have said? She should have known better, since there had never been a successful crossbreeding between Superiors and Primaries? She had been young and stupid; both are forgivable sins, especially when they usually occur in tandem.
Jeri heaved a sigh. “It didn’t matter. By then, my family had disowned me, mainly because I had violated the partnership that had already been made for me with another clan. Both clans were scandalized, and as a result neither one wanted me.” She looked askance at me. “Bigotry works both ways, you know. You call us googles, we call you apes, and I had slept with an ape. An insult against the extropic ideal.”
She closed the logbook, tossed it from her left foot to her right hand, and tucked it into a web beneath the console. “So I was grounded at Descartes. A small pension, just enough to pay the rent, but nothing really to live for. I suppose they expected me to become a prostitute… which I did, for a short time… or commit ritual suicide and save everyone the sweat.”
“That’s cold.” But not unheard of. There were a few grounded Superiors to be found in the inner system, poor sad cases working at menial tasks in Lagranges or on the Moon. I remembered an alcoholic google who hung out at Sloppy Joe’s; he had eagle wings tattooed across his back, and he cadged drinks off tourists in return for performing cartwheels across the bar. An eagle with clipped tailfeathers. Every so often, one would hear of a Superior who checked out by walking into an airlock and pushing the void button. No one knew why, but now I had an answer. It was the Superior way.
“That’s extropy for you.” She laughed bitterly, then was quiet for a moment. “I was considering taking the long walk,” she said at last, “but Bo found me first, when I… well, propositioned him. He bought me a couple of drinks and listened to my story, and when I was done crying he told me he needed a new first officer. No one else would work for him, so he offered me the job, for as long as I cared to keep it.”
“And you’ve kept it.”
“And I’ve kept it,” she finished. “For the record, Mr. Furland, he has always treated me with the greatest of respect, despite what anyone else might have told you. I’ve never slept with him, nor has he ever demanded that I do so…”
“I didn’t…!”
“No, of course you haven’t, but you’ve probably wondered, haven’t you?” When I turned red, she laughed again. “Everyone who has worked the Comet has, and sometimes they like to tell stories about the google and the fat slob, fucking in his cabin between shifts.”
She smiled, slowly shaking her head. “It isn’t so… but, to tell the truth, if he ever asked, I’d do so without a second thought. I owe him that little.”
I didn’t say anything for a couple of minutes. It isn’t often when a shipmate unburdens his or her soul, and Jeri had given me much to consider. Not the least of which was the slow realization that, now more than before, I was becoming quite fond of her.
Before he had gone below, McKinnon had told me to activate the external missile pod, so I pushed myself over to his station and used that minor task to cover for my embarrassment.
Strapping on EMP to an Ares-class freighter was another example of McKinnon’s overheated imagination. When I had once asked why, he’d told me that he’d purchased it as war surplus from the Pax Astra Royal Navy back in ’71, after the hijacking of the TBSA Olympia. No one had ever discovered who had taken the Olympia—indeed, the hijack wasn’t discovered until five months later, when the uncrewed solar-sail vessel arrived at Ceres Station with its cargo holds empty—but it was widely believed to be the work of indie prospectors desperate for food and various supplies.
I had to cover my smile when McKinnon told me that he was worried about “pirates” trying to waylay the Comet. Having four 10k nukes tucked behind the Comet’s cargo section was like arming a gig with heatseekers. Not that McKinnon wouldn’t have loved it if someone did try to steal his ship—Captain Future meets the Asteroid Pirates and all that—but I was worried that he might open fire on some off-course prospector ship that was unlucky enough to cross his path.
Another thought occurred to me. “When he picked you… um, when you signed on as First Officer… were you aware that he doesn’t have a firm grip on reality?”
Jeri didn’t answer immediately. I was about to repeat myself when I felt a gentle nudge against my arm. Looking down, I saw her left foot slide past me, its thumb-sized toes toggling the MISSILE STANDBY switch I had neglected to throw.
“Sure,” she said. “In fact, he used to call me Joan… as in Joan Ran-dall, Curt Newton’s girlfriend… until I got him to cut it out.”
“Really?”
“Um-hmm.” She rested her right leg against the back of my chair. “Consider yourself lucky he doesn’t call you Otho or Grag. He used to do that to other crewmen until I told him that no one got the joke.” She grinned. “You ought to try reading some of those stories sometime. He’s loaded them into The Brain’s library annex. Not great literature, to be sure… in fact, they’re rather silly… but for early twentieth century science fiction, they’re…”