Tripoint (16 page)

“Thomas
Bowe
-Hawkins.”

Tried to make her blow her composure. But she knew what she was going to do, now. She knew. And when she knew, she smiled at him, cold and immovable as a law of physics.

“Pell,” she said, “and we make a profit on the run. Or get yourself a new cargo chief.”

“It’s no bet.”

“I’m not betting. I’m telling you. If it’s not Pell—get yourself another cargo chief. I quit. I’ll find a way to Pell.”

“You’re out of your mind, Marie.”

“So you’ve said. To everyone in the Family. But you know how this ship was doing before, and how it’s doing now. Cold, hard numbers, captain,
sir. I
know what I’m worth. I’ve got the numbers for Pell. No question I can make our dock charges
and
come up in the black. Swear to God I can. Or I kiss you all good-bye, right here.”

“Marie, this isn’t even worth talking about. Go cool down.”

“Cold as deep space, darling brother, and dead serious.”

“That ship could be meeting some Mazianni carrier right out there at Tripoint in two weeks. We could run right into it.”

“For
what
? Bowe told them he’d have a kid to trade them? They do those deals in the deep dark. Mazian’s ships don’t come in this far.”

“We have rendezvous with our regulars, we have people’s lives you’re proposing to disrupt, appointments—”

“We’ll get back on schedule. We’ll all survive a little sexual deprivation.”

“Try a sex life! It’ll improve your mental health!”

“Mon-ey, Mischa. Mon-ey. Or poverty. Skimping to make ends meet, the way we did when dear Robert was running the cargo section. Because he
will
be, again. Make your choice.”

“You don’t sit on this ship and not work.”

“You weren’t listening, Mischa, dear, I said I was leaving the ship. I’ll find a way. I’m damned good. And
good
ships anywhere it wants to.”

“As hired crew. You
think
you’d like your shipmates on a hired-crew ship. Earn your way in bed, why don’t you?”

“Because I don’t have to. I can have passage on a Pell-bound ship in four hours, captain Hawkins, you watch me, because the numbers are in my
head
, and I’ll use ‘em, you’d better bet I will. I’m crazy Marie, aren’t I?”

“You’re talking like it.”

“Fine! I’ll put it to a vote in the Family,
captain
, sir, which of us this ship wants to have making the decisions. I’ll tell you even Robert A. will vote to keep me, because
he
doesn’t want the job back, he doesn’t want to lose his creature comforts. Neither do any of the seniors, and the juniors can’t touch me! Let all the Hawkinses decide. I’ll challenge you for the captaincy if I have to. And I have the right to call a vote.”

“And make a fool of yourself! Everybody knows—”

“I’m sure you’ve told them often enough. Poor Marie. Poor crazy Marie. Poor crazy Marie who’s the reason this ship runs in the black—”

“Poor crazy Marie who’s the reason we lost Mariner for fifteen years! Poor crazy Marie who lost her nerve the only time she ever snagged a man, and started a riot that damn near ruined us! Anything you make for us is payback, sister, for what you cost us in the first place.”

“Any trouble you had is because you sat on your ass for forty-eight hours. If you’d had the balls to do something before they got stupid drunk, I could have gotten out of there. But physicality just isn’t your job, is it?”

“Maybe if you’d had a sex drive you could have handled what you asked for, damn you—duck out on us, ignore every piece of advice, no, you had to have your own pick, didn’t you, and now he’s got your kid? It’s not my problem.”

“Ask a
vote
, Mischa. Or I will.”

Mischa didn’t want it. That was clear. He stood there. And finally walked off across the bridge and stood staring at nothing in particular.

There were advantages to owning nothing, having nothing, wanting nothing in your life, except one man’s hide.

And he couldn’t have her kid.

Couldn’t dispose of her kid. Or keep him.

That added something to the equation. She wasn’t sure what, hadn’t expected that reaction in herself, was still trying to understand why she gave a damn.

Because, she decided, if she’d had to hand one individual aboard
Sprite
over to Bowe for a hostage, it wouldn’t be poor, people-stupid Tom, who was the first Hawkins to try to take her side in twenty some years.

Even if he had screwed it beyond all imagination.

Damn him.

—iv—

DREAM OF THE DARK AND NOWHERE, a lonely and terrifying no-thing, abhorring the fabric of the ship, and the ship almost… almost violating the interface.

The ship lived a day or so while the universe ran on for weeks, while the ship’s phase envelope was the only barrier between you and that different space. You rode it tranked down, ever so vaguely aware of your own essence. When you were a kid the grownups admitted that the monsters you dreamed in transit were real, but (they said) the captain could scare the monsters off, because a kid believed in his imaginings, and a kid believed in adults just as devoutly.

But kid or adult, the mind painted its own images on the chaos—

Marie had told him pointedly there wasn’t anything to meet out there but a body’s own guilty conscience: if he minded what he was told he’d be fine and if he didn’t he’d go crazy and be all alone with his misdeeds forever. He’d told that to the other kids and scared them. Aunt Lydia had said he was too smart for his own good. Aunt Lydia had said captain Mischa should have a talk with him, but Mischa had just said don’t carry tales and don’t talk about the dreams and don’t make trouble, boy.

He dreamed about Marie sometimes. He’d dreamed about Mariner and the bar and the drunken men before he was twelve, then—it was between Fargone and Paradise, and he’d felt different things about Marie, sometimes scary, sometimes erotic, weaving back and forth in unpredictable ways, about all the things he’d heard happened, and about the things he’d read in tapes he wasn’t supposed to have.

But he stole them, all the kids did, and they’d all tangled up…

That was only normal, aunt Lydia had said, when she’d found out. It was the first time she’d ever used that word about anything he’d done, and in spite of that, he didn’t
feel
normal. You didn’t have dreams like that about your mother and feel normal.

But Marie had said, with rare (for Marie) calm, that he was growing up and he was confusing things, which was, for once, a better explanation than aunt Lydia gave. Marie gave him tapes, too, deep-tape, the same quality you used for school.

Only the tape gave him dreams and for a long time he dreamed about a robot, a wire-diagram woman who wasn’t anybody in particular. She had a metal face, and he used to want her to sit on the end of his bunk and talk to him, not about sex, finally, just about stuff and about things he liked to do and where they traveled. She was a friendly sort of craziness, that lived in Marie’s apartment and in his own quarters. Sometimes she had sex with him. And sometimes she just talked, sleeping by him, about ports they might go to someday.

But the metal-faced dream had died when he’d slept with his
Polly
crewwoman. Or she’d gotten Sheila’s face and become Sheila Barr, because the metal girl didn’t ever come back again. He could just see her sort of standing forlornly behind Sheila’s shoulder, looking a little curious and a little like the expression he saw in mirrors…

So maybe his wire-woman had become him, in some strange way.

But he’d damned sure never told Sheila who he dreamed she was, and never admitted it to aunt Lydia, who was so firmly, devoutly, desperately attached to other people’s sanity.

Marie might have said, on the other hand, Hell, at least she won’t get pregnant, and probably wished his wire-woman good morning at the breakfast table and asked did she want tea.

That was the way Marie had dealt with his childish fancies, made fun of them and sometimes fallen in with them. She said they were all right, she’d introduce them to hers sometime, and that had scared him, because he didn’t think he wanted to meet Marie’s dreams, in this space or any other.

But sometimes—often—you felt a sexual dream coming when you were falling into jump. Psychs like aunt Lydia always said, Don’t do it,—particularly if you aimed at being operational crew, because if you ever got into that habit, it happened too easily and you might not come back in time to handle operations… addictive, they said.

Nothing about the experiences was real, of course, except your own side of the experience, and that felt very real—when you were coming out of hyperspace, every representation the senses made, the brain had to find some symbol for, so things would always appear chaotic.

And it could be sex. It could be very good sex. Or, for no reason at all, it could become a very disturbing nightmare, out of symbols a brain started calling up from some closet of the half-awake mind. Though sex was the most common.

So of course if you were a stupid kid who’d heard from his peers about fantastic trips, you tried flying that way a couple times, getting yourself off by the time-tested methods until you scared hell out of yourself at least once, ended up on deep trank for maybe the next two trips, and learned to do math problems instead while you went null.

Didn’t want to go into jump seeing the brig around him.

Didn’t want to think about piracy and ships getting blown.

Didn’t want to wonder about Marie. That was a deep, deep mental pit he didn’t want to excavate on this trip. He tried equations, tried programming problems, and he kept losing them, kept finding fantastical bits of nonsense running through his head… childhood rhymes and Rodman’s poetry, Tommy’s a
Corinthian
, Tommy’s a
Corinthian
, lock him up with iron bars, iron bars, iron bars, then throw away the keys…

London’s bridge is falling down, so leave them alone and they’ll come home, pretty maids, pretty maids all in a row…

Pack of holo sex cards turned up in his study cubicle. Aunt Pat found them. Marie said, So? What’s new? But nobody believed he hadn’t put them there.

He wasn’t stupid. If he had them, he wouldn’t have left them there, in the study cubicle, for Roberta R. to find, next session. Roberta cried and said he was a pervert.

Pervert, pervert, pervert, Roberta said to him when they met in the corridors, and somebody wrote it in ink on the cubicle desk, where he’d find it…

Incest, aunt Lydia informed him severely, isn’t a nice word, Tommy. Do you understand incest?

He hadn’t. He didn’t. Aunt Lydia explained it.

Sex isn’t a thing we think about on-ship, ever, ever, ever, Tommy, we don’t tease our cousins that way. We don’t think thoughts like that, now do we understand, Tommy?

He understood, all right: he went and bloodied Rodman’s nose for what he understood, which settled one bit of business, and got him tagged as a bully, this time, but he still hadn’t got it. He understood some of the pictures, when aunt Pat showed them to him and accused him of putting them there, but he’d been so stunned by the images that his guilty curiosity couldn’t muster a defense… he couldn’t quite identify some of the images as body parts until he was older, but he could still play back that memory like a tape in his head, and after that, just to figure it out, he told himself, he kept sneaking looks at books he wasn’t supposed to have and tapes he wasn’t supposed to see, trying to resolve what he’d only half-guessed, and getting feelings aunt Lydia said
he
wasn’t supposed to have. It was what That Man had done with Marie. It was his beginnings. And the feelings became his, not That Man’s, and he couldn’t leave it alone, and couldn’t stop thinking about it, until he
was
doing it in jump, and the nightmares and Marie’s stories all tangled together.

He came out screaming and aunt Lydia said he’d better have deep trank next time. Marie said somebody’d better watch him and he couldn’t come home like she’d planned, she had to be on duty. Kids went through that sometimes, Lydia said, meaning nightmares in jump. They got over it or you had to leave them on some station—he wasn’t supposed to hear that part, and Marie got mad and said if he had a few less of Lydia’s theories he’d be saner.

So he resolved to keep his mouth shut and not to have the nightmares again, because being left on station was the worst one… he only had Marie, and Marie wouldn’t leave him, Marie had told aunt Lydia go to hell and keep her advice to herself. He’d been terribly proud of Marie, then, and told himself Marie did really want him, she just wasn’t good at showing it. So he did calculations the way the seniors told him to, next time.

It didn’t work, quite, but he kept his mouth shut about it.

He lived. You didn’t die from dreams.

Ship was going
up…
You could feel it, a strange feeling, like everything was spreading wider and standing still when there wasn’t any referent for still…

Think about Sheila,
she
was his safety-valve when his mind started free-wheeling and the ship went strange, think about meeting Sheila… he could see her down the dockside at Mariner, silver-flash coveralls, small figure in the distance, near the huge gantries, the way he’d first seen her, his
Polly
spacer, who never talked about him, never listened if he did, sometimes, slip. She told jokes, she made fun, she said she liked him, never would love him, forget that crap, that was too serious, and most of all she taught him to calm down, laugh a little, and let her do some of the instigating, that was what she said.

She was older, Sheila Barr was, and she’d told him once how she occasionally thought about having a kid, and kept changing her mind. She didn’t want that commitment, but she wanted the immortality. He’d never thought about either. He’d been busy surviving his own childhood when he took up with Sheila Barr, hadn’t been ready in the least for immortality, just desperately—a little vindication with the guys…