Текст книги "Tripoint "

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

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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 hewasn'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 wasdoing 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, shewas 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 Pollyspacer, 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…

She won't look at you, Rodman had said.

But she did. She had. She waltzed him into a sleepover for fourteen straight days and darks and showed him things he'd never gotten out of tapes or holocards—he came back knowing things the cousins didn't, he quickly found that out, and set Rodman's nose mightily out of joint when the youngers listened to him as one who Knew.

So he got a reputation, such as it was. And proved he could still beat hell out of Rodman, one on one. But he still froze up, getting dates when Pollywasn't in port, which, God, he didn't want Rodman or anybody else to find out… he managed. Looks helped, he had that over Rodman, by some, and brains, but it didn't cover everything, and on some liberties he just hung out, disappeared a night or so, claiming he was missing Sheila, which was true, for different reasons.

Silver figure turned dark in his dream. Wasn't Sheila he was meeting, then, on that dock. For a moment he was scared it was Rodman. The whole image started coming apart on him, and Sheila's dark-haired, lanky self went strange, indefinite, separated from him by a gridwork of steel bars…

Pale, then. Capella's blonde, brazen flash and try-me attitude, Capella standing there with her bare arms resting through bars he recalled he wasn't dreaming, with the bracelet of stars evident on her wrist. It wasn't the freedom of the docks he was in, he was in a box he couldn't get out of, and an exposure that let the whole ship come and stare at him if they liked.

Capella gave him an I-don't-give-a-damn rake of the eyes, leaned there, enigma like the fatal holocards. Her hands were death and life together, the serpent and the equation that cracked the light barrier, the bracelet no honest spacer wore…

"Get up," she said, this apparition. "You can do it. Take a walk."

Nobody could. Not really. But in his dream he unbuckled the restraints and got up, and walked part of the way.

The bars weren't there.

"Well, well," she said, "Christian's older brother. How are you?"

Colors washed to right and left of him, red and blue and into infrareds and ultraviolets, a tunnel at the black peripheries of his vision. He daren't come any further. Christian wasn't his friend. This woman wasn't. This dream was destructive. He could make it go away.

But Capella came to him, a series of advances without movement, Capella's arms came around his neck, and Capella's mouth was on his. They weren't standing. They were on the bed. A voice spoke faintly, or he remembered it, about waves being everywhere, or particles being the same, all the while he was feeling waves of another kind and carried along a wavefront of mindless, endless sensation.

(Don't do it in jump, the senior cousins said, or you'll go crazy.)

He was shivering again. Was living it again, a physical spasm that climaxed and quit, leaving him cold. Didn't want it. Did. He was paralyzed in the between of choices. Wasn't sure he could get that high again, it was like a drug, that was what they said, wasn't it? You'd never be able to do it realtime, you'd freeze up?

Everything spun, a whirlpool of primal urges, a coming and going of sound so deep it hit the base of the brain and the base of the spine.

"It's all right," Capella said, out of that sound. "You can't fall."

Liar, he thought, gasping for breath, feeling the abyss behind his head, as if he could just, if he shut his eyes, pour himself through the bottom of his own brain and fall forever. He felt himself sliding, sensations flowing one after the other across his skin… colors that crawled across the room, splashes of color that whipped away into the dark and withered and slipped away, in laughter, in a crashing great energy that broke in waves of grating, murmurous sounds.

Hard, slim body against his, riding the waves of compressing subspace, then spiraling violently, over and around and down, voices echoing in his ears, louder and louder, bodies involved with his, multiplying with the voices that were the music, the erotic and the horrific tangled and snarled into each other. He gained a moment of escape and it wasn't Capella, it was Marie clawing at him, it was a band of drunken spacers, it was the spacer with the snakes, half purple and green, hands he couldn't escape, violence and need twisting through him and around him until the waves of force flooded up into his brain, twice a hundred hands and twice again the arms and legs that closed about him, one layer onto another in a mathematical, sequential blur.

Until he was inside the living universe, endless interlace of rhythmic filaments that were living flesh and human minds, thunderous sound, violence over with now,—until he realized the waves were his own heartbeat and space became one screaming edge inside him, that fall through the back of his head…

It was his body in the dark, or all the ship hurtling into an annihilating spin, tearing his hands from grips and tearing the ship apart, bolt groaning away from plate, and everything rushing away from center…

—v—

RED DREAM, COASTING THE INTERFACE, dream of red violence and dark, anger that had no destination until now. Until now it had always just been, and carried its own energies, destruction and creation, tearing apart a life and making a new one.

But this time it had a place to go and something to reach for.

Spritewas running fifteen days behind him, with a full hold, headed for a sink of dark matter, three points that danced a complex pass around a common center, a pit in space-time into which all realspace matter that passed this way was damned to fall.

System of failed stars, potential unachieved, radiating masses forever tagging each other, like Spritewith Corinthian. But the numbers added right this time. Cosmic rendezvous. Union.

Consummation.

Hewas there in the space where all space touched. Marie dreamed his ship brushed hyperspace at this very instant, occupying the same space-time. He was that close. He had to feel her breathing, had to feel her anger and the high and the power it gave her… the energy of the ship became one hollow, drunken roar, I am, I am, I am, against a universe otherwise void. She reached orgasm with it, multiple times, with the thought that he didn't consent to her being there, he didn't consent to her knowing about him what he'd thought was secret… he didn't consent to her tracking him and making herself an inseparable, inescapable part of his life every day, every hour since their meeting…

Dear Austin. I love you the way you loved me.

Look over your shoulder now, you son of a bitch.

—vi—

THEY WERE ALIVE. THEY EXISTED again. That was always the first assessment when the ship dropped into Einsteinian space and linear time.

But it wasn't right. He shouldn't be lying on his side, face against the wall.

On the deck. The tiles were cold under his arm and his hip and his knee. Cold air traveled over bare skin. He was half out of his clothes. His skin stung, raw with scratches.

He moved, panicked at the queasy sensation of coming out of jump, and knew he shouldn't be loose like this… a ship exiting jump might have to take emergency action, he wasn't belted, he could break his neck… he didn't know where he was, room was a meter too wide as he rolled over, but he scrambled on his knees, saw the bunk and the restraints and scrambled in, breath hissing between his teeth as he struggled to get the first belts fastened, instinct in a spacer-brat as sure as the fear of falling.

Snap. Lock fastened, upper legs, snap, the one across his chest, snap. He was all right then, hard-breathing, at least telling himself he'd beaten disaster if it came.

Except it wasn't Sprite. Except it wasn't his quarters he was in.

Bars beyond his feet. Walls he remembered, now, in dismay.

Corinthian.

Heart started a dull, leaden panic, telling him that his danger wasn't past. And he didn't know what could have happened to put him where he waked, against the wall, except maybe they'd exited subspace before this and he'd unbelted too soon… he still felt the last racketing of sex through his blood and brain, last echoes of a bad trip and a nightmare to end all. His skin felt raw, coveralls mostly unzipped, he didn't know how he'd done that, either, but he'd gotten up, maybe started to go to the shower and fallen.

Hell of a dream. He lifted his head to look at himself and saw red scratches all over his chest, his pale blue coveralls had bloody specks, from a subspace hallucination.

Healed and half-healed scratches, and lately-made ones? Not all recent.

Scratched himself, was what he'd done. He felt embarrassed as hell, and hoped to God there wasn't an optic spy somewhere, or a tape record.

He couldn't face it, if there were. He let his head fall back, just to let his blood flow back to his brain and let the walls stop rippling in his vision. He'd exerted too much just now in getting back to his bunk. He'd broken into a clammy sweat, and the air circulation felt cold, stinging salt in the scratches.

Worse, he felt a wave of nausea and told himself he'd been a double fool, first exerting himself to get back in his bunk and then not getting to the nutri-packs on priority, because sneaking up his veins right now was the grandfather of all sick headaches.

He triggered the e-panel one-handed. He clawed the packs out of the wall-storage onto the mattress and ripped one open, hands shaking, fumbled out the sipping tube, valved so you didn't have to raise your head to use it, thank God. By the small time it took to do that much, the pain that wasn't quite pain yet was building up as pressure in his temples and behind his eyes, an old, old acquaintance. And to keep it company, his stomach was behaving under its own precarious rhythm, as if some bone-deep jolt out of hyperspace hadn't left his consciousness, or quit running over his skin in waves of fever heat and clammy sweat.

Sweat had soaked his clothes. Sometimes you got the brain stem confused, pushing too much, too fast. Sometimes the confusion could go into arrhythmia, breathing disorders, serious business if you were by yourself and you didn't get medicals, which he was, and wouldn't get, and nobody was going to be walking down the corridor out there looking to take care of anybody until the ship had dumped down to system speed—wholly unlike a Hawkins fool he could name who'd unbelted, thinking he was in his own cabin, got up and fallen on his ass. Thing to do until help was available was calm down, breathe deep, drink the fluids and keep it down. Ship wasn't his friend. But they didn't want him dead.

Three swallows. Long period of deep breathing. Three more swallows. Somebody would eventually check on him. Just hold on.

The ship skimmed the interface again. Major pulse, momentary grey-out.

Then red, red, red, and red, dammit! then green flashes… splashes of sound and vibration…

The stomach tried to turn itself inside out. Terror… did that to you.

Capella. Guy with the snakes. Green and purple snakes. Crawling all over him. Capella andthe snakes, climbing up his legs, holding him down, the bars weren't there anymore.

Sensation that wasn't part of any subspace dream he'd ever had…

Sexual high, and raw terror.

Then down again. Skuzzy, scarred walls. Mattress under his back. Nice, safe bars, between him and the nightmares.

Breathe. Drink the fluids. Don't throw up.

Please, God. He didn't want their medics. Didn't want their crew in here, didn't want that grid opened…

Next sip. Didn't see any snakes, didn't feel them slithering around him.

Couldn't remember what it felt like now. It had been vivid, before.

He was coming out of it. Winning against the pulses that sent him back to illusions, and physiological…

Shit. Shit…

God. God, God, God…

Calm. Quiet. Breathe.

Easier if you had the output of instruments in front of you. Lying here scared stiff and with the sweat chilling in the current from the air ducts… you didn't know where the ship was… you didn't have any information what was going on, they didn't even signal you…

He wasn't used to that kind of sloppiness. Wasn't the way Sprite did business. Made him mad.

Wasn't used to the signals when they did give them. Damn sirens. No human word out of anybody. Wasn't a way to run a ship.

His biological father was in charge up on this bridge. Marie wasn't down in cargo. The condition of the universe had done a total reverse. He wasn't going back. Ever. He didn't know where he was going. His head was starting to ache, right between the eyes.

Second… or was it third…? skip at the interface.

Long, long skip. Erotic feelings ran up and down his body, found center… God, he couldn't stand it. Couldn't stop it.

Scratches healed and otherwise… both? How did you dothat to yourself?

He shut his eyes, pressed fingers against the sinuses. Kept feeling the scrapes on his skin, stinging with the sweat, aftermath of pure stupidity. He tried to be mad. Mad was the way to get through things. Marie said.

Stupid thing to do. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Hell of a nightmare. Jerk off in jump-space and you were lucky you didn't do worse… deserved everything he got, absolutely, he'd learned better, if he could just stop the physiological reactions…

Maybe the trank was a brand he hadn't used, and he was having a drug reaction, he didn't know. He damned sure meant to ask, if he could find anybody on this ship disposed to care about details like that.

Long quiet, then. But you couldn't trust they weren't going to dump down again, you couldn't trust anything. Just try to make the feelings go away.

The siren blew two blasts, then. God, how was he supposed to know what it was? Impending evasive action? Impending impact with a rock? Considering the headache, he wasn't sure he gave an effective damn.

But after the echoes died, he heard that indefinable stirring of life in the ship's guts that meant definitive all-clear, distant, ordinary sounds, confirming the ship was about its routines, safe, and crew was moving about.

Safe as this ship ever was. Safe as the crew could make this ship. Not for him, maybe. But at least they were alive together. At least it was down to human motives and human reasons.

His father's ship.

His father'ssay-so and his father'sset of laws, amen.

He lay there and drank the nutri-packs, two of them, before his stomach decided it wasn't going to heave everything up, and before his head decided it wasn't going to explode. He let the belts go when he'd come to that conclusion, lay still with one knee up and an arm under his head, finding no reason to venture more than that. The noises in the ship now were noises he understood, mostly, somebody banging around with a service panel, checking on filters or plumbing. Somebody was shouting at somebody else about schedules, except you didn't shout obscenities like that down Sprite'scorridors. It occurred to him he'd never heard a stream of profanity like that in his life, and Marie was no prude when she was pissed. It actually attained meter and art.

Another voice then, jolted him… familiar voice, voice he wasn't going to forget—along with the beating he'd heard before they left port. "Get your ass out of there!" came near and clear, and he thought he'd move, if that voice was yelling at him.

Memory of something hitting flesh and bone. Vivid as the other side of jump.

Wasn't sure the guy had lived through it. If they cycled the airlock while they were out here in the dark between stars… that might tell.

Body trade, he said to himself. Marie thought so. The cousins did. Live merchandise and dead spacers, you couldn't depend there'd be a great deal of care which, on certain ships, on ships that didn't mind selling out other merchanters: whole ships blown because somebody'd spilled the numbers and set somebody up, back in the War; and they said, the hunters were still picking targets, little ships that just might not make port again—ships with irregular routes, minimal crew, no great atrocities, no known Names, like a Family ship. Just the little, marginal haulers… easy to pick off.

A rattle sounded in the corridor, then, something metal bumped the wall just outside, where someone was walking, and in sudden fright, he remembered the cable and didn't wait to be snatched off his bunk by the wrist. He got up to one knee on the bunk as the noise-maker showed up with a hand-carrier and a stack of covered food trays.

The guy with the snakes. The drunk with the chocolates. He watched apprehensively as the guy shoved a tray through an opening in the gridwork, clearly expecting him to come into his reach and take it from his hand.

"You actually the captain's kid?" the guy asked when he did venture over to the bars.

"Tom Hawkins," he admitted, and took the tray, not willing to give the man any provocation—the tattooed arms were as thick as most men's legs, the fingers that gave up the tray were thick with muscle and callus.

"Tink," the snake-man said.

"Tink?"

"Name's Tink. Cook's mate. How-do."

"Glad to meet you. " He wasn't, not even halfway. But what did you say? And the guy didn't act crazy.

"You must've pissed the captain off real bad."

"I guess." What could you say to that, either? The guy when he wasn't scowling had a rough, but downright gentle kind of face. And still scared hell out of him.

"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'twant 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 couldhappen 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 Grandiosaand the night-walker, how this crewman had gone crazy during jump and couldmove, and went out and bloodily murdered his shipmates until Grandiosagot 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 Grandiosaon 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 Corinthiancrew 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."