Cecelia Holland - Floating Worlds

He stopped at a hatchway. “This is the crew’s quarters. The Hole. We’re going to Saturn first.”

“Let me see.” She pulled on the wheel in the hatch. He opened it, and she put her head inside, into a long dim room in which the Styths slept wrapped in their bedrugs like bats in their wings, attached by their feet to the wall.

“When we get there,” Ketac said, “we use the Planet’s fields to brake and fall into orbit, so we can supply up.” He pushed the hatch closed. She turned toward him. “Then we use the fields to boost back to cruising speed and head for Uranus. My father calls that a counter-inertial equivalency system.”

“Oh.”

“My father is the best engineer in the fleet. Ask me something else.”

She led him along the corridor. “Ketac, I don’t understand anything you’re saying. I wouldn’t understand it in the Common Speech.” They came to another hatch: the supply room, lined with computers, their checkerboard faces blinking in three colors. He refused to take her into the men’s toilet. While she was still hunting for arguments, a bell rang somewhere down the corridor.

“That’s the end of my watch,” Ketac said. His hair floated on end around his head. “You’d better go back to Pop’s cabin now.”

She backed away from him. Backing up was easier than moving forward. “Go on, do as you please. I’ll be all right.”

“Paula, this is a warship. You can’t wander around—”

“Thank you.” Head-first, she went into the black-white corridor, twisted to change direction, and flew down through the cool dim tunnel.

Ketac had not shown her all the ship. There was a tiny observation room in the nose of the ship, just big enough for two people. Saba took her there, shut the hatch, and pushed a button in the wall. The black wall over her head split down the middle and folded back on either side, and she was looking into the depthless black of space.

“Oh.” She put her hand out. Her fingertips grazed the cold plastic of the window.

He stretched his legs out past her, along the foot of the window. His shoulders packed the end of the little pyramidal room. She looked out at the clouds of stars. With difficulty she made out the rectangular constellation Gemini.

“Can I see Uranus?”

“Uranus is on the other side of the ship. Scorpio sector.” For navigating the sphere of the stars was divided up into sectors according to the major constellations. He pointed with his little finger at a bright white spark in the long box of Gemini. “That’s Jupiter.” His claw ticked on the plastic. “Castor and Pollux.” He pointed out the two bright stars at one end of the rectangle and the fainter pair at the other end, butting against the Milky Way. “The Star Gate. The Mouth of Hell. Gemini is called the House of Hell. Half the time Uranus’s pole axis points to the Sun, but when the Sun enters Gemini the pole slips and starts to wander.”

On Uranus the polar axis lay close to the plane of the ecliptic. The star shell was the same, but their astrology would be totally unlike hers.

“I used to dream about space,” he said. “Before 1 ever saw it. I dreamt I crawled up and up through the Planet, until I came to the surface, outside of everything, and I floated away.”

“A nightmare?”

“No.” He said a word she did not know. “It was a good dream. It was a good feeling. My father was space-drunk. He used to say he could bring his body back to Matuko but his heart stayed in deep space.”

The starlight shone on his face. She took hold of his sleeve, fingering the thick material. There were thin dark gray stripes in the light gray ground. “What do these mean?” She ran her thumb down the diagonal stripes sewn on his forearm cuff.

“Rating stripes. Subtenant, lieutenant, commander, master commander, master.” He put his hand on her stomach. “Then there’s general and master general, which nobody ever gets.”

Directly below her Tanuojin’s voice said, “Saba, call the bridge.”

She rolled out of the way. He reached for the speaker tab in the wall. “Bridge.”

“Akellar, Ketac is tearing up Uhama in the Tank.”

“Damn him.” He left. Paula shut the hatch to keep out the light. She lay in the air staring out at the black fields of space. The stars eased her mood, scattered thick past counting over the window, unimaginably distant. After a while she found the switch that hooded the window again. She went out to the ship’s glossy tunnels.

There was another place Ketac had not shown her: the brig, off in a corridor of its own above the number six engine, in the tip of one wing. Saba threw his son into this jail for fighting with Uhama. Two bells rang: the beginning of the middle watch. She wrapped herself in a blanket and Saba rolled them both in the thick rug of his bed, and they slept, attached to the wall by a ring near their feet. The shag fur made her nose feel dusty. The big Styth slept with his arms around her. She wondered what Matuko would be like and shut off her curiosity. If she went with expectations she would only confuse herself. She put her face against the sleeping man’s bare shoulder.

At three bells he went to the bridge. The Tank was crowded and she did not go in. She went to the library, but Tanuojin was there. She wandered around the halls, bored. At the end of the black and white corridor, under a storage hatch, she found three little fish swimming behind a round window in the hall.

She searched around the ship and found five more fish bowls. The little fish were dull gray, with spines on their backs. She went into the blue corridor and down the short wing tunnel to the brig.

The pounding of the engine below vibrated the air. The heat was terrific. At the blind end of the tunnel, Ketac hung upside down, his eyes closed. His skin was oily with sweat. She went back out to the arrow tunnel and down to the galley.

Two men crowded it. One was Marus, Tanuojin’s helmsman. She watched outside for them to leave.

“One thing about Sril,” Marus said. “He does all his fighting in the ship, where it doesn’t matter he isn’t big enough to see over his old woman’s ass.” He came out past her, ignoring her, as all Tanuojin’s men did. She got a tube of water from the galley wall and went back to the brig.

Ketac was staring at the wall. The side of his face was deeply scratched. There were rings set into the wall, but he did not seem to be tied.

“Here,” she said.

He jumped, his hands flying up. “Paula.” His voice croaked. He tore open the tube and sucked out the water. Soaked dark with sweat, his overalls were open down to his crotch. The racket jangled her; she felt gritty.

“Thanks, Paula.” He squeezed the last of the water into his mouth.

“I’ll bring you another.”

He followed her around the bend to the hatch. “Stay here—don’t leave me alone here.”

“The hatch isn’t locked. You can leave.”

He scrubbed his face with his hands. “I promised my father I’d stay here.” His voice was raw. “He’d tie me if I left.”

“I’ll bring you something to eat.” She went out to the cool, quiet tunnel beyond.

When she came back, he was floating in the blind end again. He beamed at her, relieved to see her, and grabbed the tube of water.

“Thanks. Nobody else has even come in here.”

The vibration set her teeth on edge. The boy hung sidewise in the air. The tip of his forefinger was bloody and scabbed over, the claw broken off deep in the quick.

“What are those fish for?”

His teeth mashed through a mouthful of food tablets. “They’re scouts. If the hatches leak they die.” He drank the rest of the water. Bits of plastic wrapping floated around him.

“How long will you be here?”