Argo’s systems could handle nearly any threat, but not the insidious barrage of ignorance that Family Bishop served up. Their lifelong habits told them to strip away and carve up, haul off and make do, confident that mech civilizations would unthinkingly replenish everything. Scarcely the talents appropriate to a starship crew. It had taken Killeen quite a while, and some severe public whippings, to get them to stop trying to harvest random gaudy bits from the ship’s operating parts.
He would have to order a general cleanup again. Once clutter accumulated, crew slid back into their old habits. The last week, distracted by the mech escort, he had let matters slide by.
Breakfast was waiting in his cramped quarters. He slurped a hot broth of savory vegetables and gnawed at a tough grain cube. The day’s schedule shimmered on the tabletop, a 3D graphic display of tasks to be done about the ship.
He did not know how this was done, nor did he care to learn. These last years had so saturated him with the Byzantine lore of the Argo that he was content to master what he had to, and leave much else to the crew. Shibo had ferreted out this particular nicety; she had an unerring instinct for the ship’s control systems. He wished she were here to share breakfast, but she was on watch already at the helm.
A knock at the door proved to be Cermo. Killeen had to smile at the man’s promptness; on Snowglade he had been called Cermo-the-Slow. Something in Argo’s constrictions had brought out a precision in the man that contrasted wildly with his muscular bulk. Cermo now wore an alert expression on a face which Killeen had for so long seen as smooth and merry. Short rations had thrust the planes of his cheeks up through round hills of muscle.
“Permission to review the day, Cap’n?” Cermo asked snappily.
“Certainly.” Killeen gestured to a seat across the table.
Killeen wondered idly if one of Cermo’s Aspects had been a starship crewman. That might explain how naturally the man adjusted to ship life. Cermo’s round, smooth face split with a fleeting grin of anticipation whenever Killeen gave an order, as though it summoned up pleasant memories. Killeen envied that. He had never gotten along well with his Aspects.
Cermo launched into a summary of the minor troubles that each day brought. They were all hard-pressed, running a huge star-sailing machine bequeathed to them by their ancient forefathers and foremothers. Though each crewman carried Aspects of former Family members—which could help with some of the arcane ship’s lore—vexing problems cropped up daily.
As Killeen talked with Cermo his left hand automatically tapped his cube of baked grain on the shiny ceramic table. Two years before, a crop-tending crewmember had been browsing among the agricultural storehouse. She had mistakenly read a label wrong and not bothered to consult with one of her Aspects to get it right. Blithely she had accidentally released a self-warming vial of frozen soil-tenders. They were ugly, slimy things, and the woman had been so badly startled that she dropped the vial. Some had inched their way to freedom before the crewwoman raised the alarm. In the rich loam of the gardens, carrying with them not only their own genes but also an anthology of lesser mites, the worms wreaked havoc.
Killeen’s rapping brought two small, squirming weevils wriggling from the tan grain cube. He swept away the tiny things and bit into the hard, tasty knot. It was hopeless to try to wipe them out now that they had spread. As well, he still objected to harming living things. Machines were their true enemy. If lesser life got out of its rightful place, thanks to human fumbling, that was no excuse to strike against the fabric of living beings. To Killeen this was not a moral principle but an obvious fact of his universe, of unspoken Family lore.
Cermo sat uncomfortably in a small chair, cheerfully jawing on about the woman’s punishment and all the supposed benefits of discipline that would unfold from it.
He should be the one carrying Ling, not me, Killeen thought. Or maybe it was easier to take a hard line when final responsibility wasn’t yours.
He had seen that years before, when Fanny was Cap’n. Her lieutenants had often favored tough measures, but Fanny usually took a more moderate, cautious course. She had kept in mind the consequences of decisions, when an error could doom them all.
It occurred to Killeen that his own hesitant way in those days might have been what made Fanny advance him up the Family’s little pyramid of power. Maybe she had mistaken that for a wary sense of proportion. The idea amused him, but he dismissed it; Fanny’s judgment had been far better than his, better than that of anyone he had ever known except for his father, Abraham. Killeen had enjoyed some success, due mostly to outright luck, but he knew he could never equal her abilities.
“The Rooks ’n Kings always grumble ’bout a whipping if it’s one their folk,” Cermo said. “But they get the point.”
“Still bitching over how I chose my lieutenants?”
He had made Cermo and Jocelyn, both Bishops, his immediate underofficers. Lieutenant Shibo was both Chief Executive Officer and Pilot. She was the last survivor of Family Knight. Though she had lived with the Rooks, everyone considered her a Bishop because she was Killeen’s lover.
Of such Byzantine issues was policy made. In the difficult days following liftoff from Snowglade, Killeen had tried using Rooks and Knights as Lieutenants. They simply didn’t measure up. He had wondered if their time living in a settled village had softened them. Still, he saw that his decisions had not been politically wise. Abraham would have finessed the matter in some inconspicuous way.
“Yeasay,” Cermo said, “but no worse than usual.”
“Keep your ear on the deck. Let me know the scuttlebutt.”
“Sure. There’s some who talk more’n they work.”
“That’s private Family business.”
“Could use a touch of the crop, I’d say.”
Experience told him that it was best to let Cermo go on for a while, exhaust the subject of crew discipline. Still, he wished he were breakfasting with Shibo, whose warm, sure silences he found such a comfort. They understood each other without the endless rattle of talk.
“—train ’em, get ’em savvy out the techtalk in ship’s computers.”
“You think the younger ones’ll do better at it?” Killeen asked.
“Yeasay. Shibo, she says—”
Cermo was always coming up with another scheme to get more of the Family trained. The simple fact was that they were hardened people and didn’t learn technical matters easily. Families traded knowhow, but their ageold tradition was as craftsmen and craftswomen, not as scientists.
He nodded at Cermo’s enthusiasm, half-listening, his attention focused all the while on the incessant ship noises. The muffled thud of heels, a gurgle of fluids in pipes, a subtle creaking of decks and joints. But now there was a lower note, coming from the rub of interstellar dust against the giant balloonlike lifezones.
The strumming sound had gathered over the last weeks, a deep voice that spoke in subliminal bass notes of the coming of the beckoning yellow star. Decelerating, Argo swooped among thickening dustclouds that shrouded this side of the coming sun. Mottled dustlanes, cinder-dark, cloaked their view of the inner planets.
The low, resonant bass note kept its unnerving, constant pitch. Sometimes in his sleep he imagined that a slow, solemn voice was speaking to him, the words drawn into a dull moan that forewarned doom. Other nights it was a giant’s drunken boom hurling slurred words at him, the tones shaking his body.
He had immediately shrugged off these rough visions; a Cap’n could not afford to harbor such gloomy and irrational thoughts. Still, the hum now came creeping into his hands as they rested on the table. As a boy he had not known the stars were other suns. The spilling fluid flow of gas and smoldering dust about Galactic Center had seemed inconsequential, forever silent and distant.