Элизабет Мун - Moon Flights

The princess in the rose garden was as beautiful as her miniature; Nigel could hardly believe his luck. Her beauty, his handsomeness… he kept wanting to finger his new black moustache and eye himself in any reflecting surface. At the moment, that was her limpid gaze.

“I can hardly believe I never met you until this day,” the princess said. “There’s something about you that seems so familiar….” She reached out a delicate finger to stroke his moustache, and Nigel thought he would swoon.

Across the rose garden, Sophora Segundiflora smiled at the young lovers and nudged Mirabel, whose attention had wandered to her own new nose job. Mirabel was bored, but Sophora didn’t mind chaperoning the young couple. Not with the great gold chain of chancellor across her chest. The previous chancellor had made his last confession the day the wizard tried out his new spells—the other had been a Stretched Scroll, which highlighted certain questionable transactions, such as the withdrawals to the chancellor’s personal treasure chest. The fool should have known better. To embezzle all that money, and then choose women warriors as the group to make up the revenues… she hoped the wizard had done something to enhance Nigel’s wits. Certainly his mother’s side of the family hadn’t contributed anything.

Meanwhile, the Ladies’ Aid & Armor Society would continue to flourish; other older warriors had decided to follow Sophora’s example and study law. Girls who hitherto had hung around the queen pretending to embroider were now flocking to weapons demonstrations. Even Krystal had been seen cracking something other than a whip.

The 1330 shuttle from planetside rotated on its longitudinal axis to slip its docking probe into the newly designed collar. Peka, watching from inside the control blister, heard in her ear the pilot’s mutter of annoyance.

“Always somebody got to make things harder. Don’t know why—”

The status lights flicked through the correct color sequence and came up all green. The station’s sensor arrays recognized the umbilical orientation, and flipped open the corresponding inboard covers.

“ I never had any accidents up here. It was somebody else—”

Peka ignored the complaint. A soothing voice from the station traffic control answered the pilot; she didn’t have to. It didn’t matter whether this pilot had had an accident; someone had. And someone’s accident was reason enough to redesign a docking collar that had allowed a ship to come in sixty degrees offline… because the tuglines that were supposed to correct an offline dock could foul. Had fouled, one coming loose to tangle in another and whack the station end of the umbilical connection, which had then popped its lid and squirted a jet of air and water at the badly docked shuttle, shoving it offline so that the aft stabilizer crumpled one of the com dishes.

In the months since the shuttles had first docked here, the incidence of misalignments had risen steadily. Stationers blamed the pilots’ carelessness; pilots blamed the workload, the hours they had to fly without a rest, the crazily shifted schedules that no human metabolism could adjust to.

Peka blamed design, which meant she blamed herself. Even though she had not designed Jacobi Station herself, she had seen the potential problem when she arrived. She had not argued hard enough; she had let the committee override her instincts, her training. Just because it was her first deep-space job, her first real job, and she didn’t want to be known as a prima donna…

“Looks good to me,” Hal said, behind her. Peka jumped; she had not heard him come in, and she hated to be surprised, even by someone she liked.

“This is only one shuttle,” she said. The moment it was out of her mouth, she regretted it; Hal looked at her as if he’d bitten into a sour fruit. “Not you,” she said, trying to soften the harshness of tone and words. “You and your crew did a fine job of getting that modification built and installed between shuttles. It’s just that one shuttle doesn’t tell us anything except that it can function right.”

“Doesn’t prove it can’t function wrong,” he said, nodding. “I do understand. Even fabrications technologists have read your mother’s work, you know.”

Peka tried not to move. If she could just freeze in place, perhaps he would never know how that hurt. Her mother, the famous engineer, whose textbooks on quality control and safety were standards in the field… I should have gone into china painting, she thought. Buggy whip-making. Anything but this.

“I guess it’s no accident that you’re an engineer,” Hal said. “And this kind in particular.”

He was going to say it. They all said it.

“After all,” he said. “Accidents don’t happen… they’re caused.” He laughed.

It might be funny to someone. It had never been funny to her. “That’s right,” she said, forcing a smile onto stiff lips. She might as well agree; no one would believe how she had fought off the family destiny. But if you have the talent, her mother had said (and her teachers, from elementary on, and the psychologists she went to, hoping for a way out). If you have the talent—that cluster of talents—and no talents whatever for other things—then it only makes sense to use those talents. Productively—one of her mother’s favorite words.

“Was it hard, having such a famous person for a mother?” asked Hal. “I mean, when you were growing up?”

She had no way to answer that didn’t sound petulant, selfish, immature, and disloyal. She had been asked that a lot, especially around the time her mother won the second Kaalin award. What people wanted to hear was more about how wonderful her mother had been, and how she had always supported Peka in her own way… and very little else.

Not about the daily frustration of living in a household where the very concept of accident was forbidden. Where every spilled glass of milk, every stain on the carpet, resulted in a formal investigation… down to the simple incident report form her mother devised for a child to fill out. To teach her responsibility, she’d said. Hard? It had been hell, sometimes, and it still was, whenever someone noticed who her mother was. Peka didn’t dare say that.

“Sometimes…” she said. “When I was too little to understand about cause and effect, you know.”

He chuckled; she must have picked the right tone for an answer. “I’ll bet she’s proud of you,” he said then.

“Reasonably,” Peka said. Again an edge had crept into her voice. She hated that edge, and the speculative look that came into Hal’s eyes. She wanted to say something to explain it away, but nothing would. She tried anyway. “I—haven’t done anything yet. Not really. She’s glad I went into this field, of course, but there wasn’t much else I could do.” That sounded lame; there was always something else, but she had limited her choices to those with good employment opportunities, a reasonable income and chance to travel. She could not have chosen to stay on one planet, could not have tolerated the monotony of a job that stayed the same month after month, year after year.

She looked out the blister, where the cargo lock had mated with the shuttle’s cargo bay. In fifteen minutes, the hold would be empty; the pallets would be snaking their way to their designated holds; in another five minutes, the shuttle would be on its way out, and shortly after that the next shuttle would be nosing in.

“Well—guess I’ll be going,” Hal said. Peka turned. He was looking at her as if he expected some reaction. She felt nothing, but a vague satisfaction that he was going to let her alone.