“Tell you, kid, you got to do what he says. He don’t never take no. Shoot you first. I seen him do it.”
“For what?”
A couple of blinks as Tink sized him up. “Guy carried a knife topside. You don’t ever do that. That’ll get you dead.”
“I’ll remember that.”
“You bridge?”
“Cargo.” Quick lie. He didn’t want them to know he was computers.
“You sign on?”
“Is there any other way to get onto this ship?”
Tink thought that was funny. He had an infectious grin. One canine was a brighter white than the rest of his teeth.
“Is there?”
“Yeah. Happens.”
“They do much of that?”
Tink’s face went slowly sober. He looked one way and the other down the corridor as if to see whether anyone was listening. And there was people-noise from the left-hand direction. “Sometimes. But listen, however you got here, you don’t skip ship. Work here’s permanent. No matter how you come. Hear? You don’t skip.”
“What do they do if you try?”
Tink’s face screwed up as if he was short of description. Then Tink looked down the corridor and straightened away from the bars.
“Food’s not bad, though,” Tink said, a little louder. “They give you a big allowance dockside. Can’t fault the pay at all.”
“Glad of that.” He was standing with the tray in his hands. Tink went away and talked to somebody down the corridor, and he went back to his bunk, kicked the cable out of his way and sat down to his after-jump snack—which was a sandwich-roll and a cup of something he couldn’t identify, but the sandwich-roll wasn’t at all bad.
Tink wasn’t so bad, either, he decided. No matter if he flashed on Tink’s tattoos in bad dreams, it was a good sandwich and the drink really wasn’t half bad, either, after you got the first swallows down and got used to the flavor.
That was the only good part of being here, except the ship was in one piece and he was.
Barely.
Jump space was an unsettling experience, no matter how many times you’d done it and how you’d acclimated, you were always a heartbeat away from crazy and-or dead, and, God, people could do odd things, coming out of it.
Had to have been on the down-slide, when they were making drop. Medics said you couldn’t move, during jump, something about long motor nerves being just too slow to coordinate in the feedback to the brain and inner ear, or some such crap that probably made sense to the physics people and the medics, but there was still a lot the medics didn’t know, according to the folklore, or couldn’t make clear, even to people who didn’t want to believe the fools. The science people were still arguing whether brains could remember anything happening during jump. Or whether events could happen in hyperspace that affected realspace matter. Consensus said if anything seemed to have had an effect on something that belonged in realspace, namely human brains, it was nothing but a sequential memory screwup, like in a witness situation, where nobody could agree on what happened first, or what colors somebody was wearing. Further you got from it, the less certain the memory was.
Meaning you only thought you’d done it, or you’d done it before or after jump and only deceived yourself how and when it was in relation to other things.
But myth regularly took over where medics left off, and probably all over human space, they told about Grandiosa and the night-walker, how this crewman had gone crazy during jump and could move, and went out and bloodily murdered his shipmates until Grandiosa got crazier and crazier and people wouldn’t trank down and went crazier and crazier…
Then the night-walker changed the jump coordinates and screwed up the navigation and ate all the rest, that he’d hung in the ship’s food locker.
Bogeymen. Ghost stories. Kids’ lofts were full of them. They were all stupid stories, probably told them about water-ships on old Earth, or on the old sublighters, and there was no Grandiosa on record anywhere, older cousins said so.
The fact was, in jump you were always naked to forces that you didn’t understand and that physicists couldn’t measure because physicists couldn’t measure without instruments and instruments didn’t work there, or at least didn’t produce consistent results. You couldn’t stay awake and aware through it no matter what, and it was too much like dying, crossing that boundary, which a long-hauler spacer did, six, seven, eight times a ship-year.
He didn’t want to think about it. He heard Tink’s voice, down the corridor, talking with several somebodys. He’d finished his snack and he was sweaty and cold, now, he wanted a shower if they’d just stay stable.
Supposing the shower worked, which he couldn’t expect, considering the bars and the cable and all—nobody was interested in his comfort.
Then he looked at the cable on his wrist and realized he couldn’t get his clothes off.
“Damn!” he said, and wanted to throw the tray against the bars.
In the self-same moment he was aware of a shadow against the grid.
A woman stood there, the way Capella had, in his dream.
Not Capella. Dark-haired, the same stance… but not the same. And not a dream.
He got off the bunk. His visitor was wearing the same green coveralls he’d seen on Corinthian crew dockside… professional woman, he thought, cool, businesslike. Had to be an officer. Maybe medical, come to check on him.
“Are you all right?” she asked, with the kind of accent he dreamed he’d heard before, somewhere, maybe the intercom, he wasn’t sure.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, and her mouth quirked. A pretty mouth. He was respectful, but he wasn’t dead… he felt this strange, sandpapered-raw sense of nerves with her, a consciousness of his own skin, scratch-scored and sensitive in intimate places, and didn’t even know what about her demanded his attention. He just…
… reacted. And stood there embarrassed as hell.
“Christian’s brother, huh?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She seemed amused. “I’m not ma’am.”
On some ships there was only one, senior-most, matriarch. And she clearly wasn’t.
“Sabrina Perrault. Sabrina Perrault-Cadiz. Saby, for short. Tink says you’re Cargo.”
“Yes, ma’am. “ It was his lie. He had to stick by it. At least it was something he knew. He was going to ask about the trank, before somebody forgot…
“Thomas. Is that what you go by?”
“Tom.”
“Tom Bowe-Hawkins. I’m sorry you got snatched. I really am.”
“Thanks.—I take it you’re Medical?”
“Not me. No. Cargo.”
His lie caught up with him. Called his bluff. He knew stuff from Marie, but that was all he knew.
“It’s not a bad ship,” Saby Perrault said.
He didn’t know what to say to that. Couldn’t argue. Any ship you were born on, he guessed, wasn’t an unbearably bad ship, if it was the only one you ever knew.
“I guess,” he said. “You could tell the captain I’m not a fool. You could let me loose. I’m on this ship, I assure you I don’t want to sabotage anything.”
“Not my say,” she said, with a lift of the shoulder. “But I’ll pass it along.”
“You ever talk to the captain direct?”
“Sure. You want me to tell him something?”
He was sorry he’d asked. He didn’t want to. He didn’t know why he’d opened his mouth. But Saby was the least threatening human he’d met aboard and he wanted to know where the chain of communication was. “Yeah.” He tried to think. “Say hi. Love the food. Tink’s a human being. The bunk’s lousy.”
Saby laughed.
“I’ll do that. Anything you particularly need?”