Hunting Party

Chapter Eight

“We have a slight problem,” Heris said to Cecelia. It had not been easy to spirit her employer away along paths she knew were safe, but she managed. They were now in the ’ponics section reserved for fancy gardening. Cecelia had banished the gardeners.

“Again?” But Cecelia said it with a smile.

“Your nephew,” Heris said. “I can deal with him, but he may come running to you, if I do. Or I can try to ignore him out of existence, but he may cause the crew some inconvenience.”

“Somehow when you say ‘inconvenience,’ what I hear is much worse.” Cecelia looked down her nose as if she were wearing spectacles and had to peer over them. She reminded Heris of one of the portraits of her ancestress.

“Well . . . I can probably keep it to inconvenience.” Heris reached out to feel the furry leaf of a plant she didn’t recognize. It had odd lavender flowers, and it gave off a sharp fragrance as she touched it.

“I hope you’re not allergic to that,” Cecelia said. “It makes some people itch for days.”

“Sorry.” Heris looked at her fingers, which did not seem to be turning any odd color or itching.

“It’s got an edible tuber, quite a nice flavor.” Cecelia looked at the row of plants as if blessing them with her gaze. “I hope Bunny will trade for this cultivar; that’s why we’re growing it now. We had to replant, of course, after the . . . mmm . . . problem.”

Heris had not considered what, besides convenience, might have been sacrificed. “Did you lose all the garden crops?” she asked. “I thought they’d be unharmed.” She also wondered what this had to do with Ronnie, and hoped it meant Cecelia was thinking on two levels at once.

“We lost some . . .” Cecelia’s voice trailed away; she was staring at another row of plants, these covered with little yellow fruits. “I don’t know what they’re thinking of; half those are overripe. And they’re not fertile; there’s no sense wasting them. . . .” She picked one, sampled it, and picked another for Heris. “You’re asking about Ronnie. I’ve told you before—I’m sick of that boy. If he’s done something that deserves response, do what you will, short of permanent injury. I do have to answer to Berenice and his father later; it would be awkward to admit that I sanctioned his death. But aside from that—” She made a chopping motion at her own neck.

Heris ate the yellow fruit, a relative of the tomato, she thought, and watched Cecelia’s face. “You’re not really happy about that,” she observed. “What else?”

“Oh . . . I think what makes me so furious is that he’s not all bad. He may seem it to you—”

“Not really,” Heris said. “Remember, I told you before that I’ve seen a lot of young officers, including very wild ones. For that matter, I was a wild one.”

“You?” That deflected her a moment.

“What—you really thought I was born at attention, with my infant fist on my forehead?” It was so close to what Cecelia had thought, that the expression crossed her face, and Heris laughed, not unkindly. “You should have seen me at sixteen . . . and will you try to tell me you were completely tame?”

“At sixteen? I spent all my time with horses,” Cecelia said. Then she blushed, extensively, and Heris waited. “Of course, there was that one young man—”

“Aha!”

“But it didn’t interfere with my riding—nothing did—and nothing came of it either.” Heris couldn’t tell from the tone whether Cecelia was glad or sad about that. “But Ronnie—” Cecelia came back to the point, as she always did, eventually. “He’s got brains, and I don’t really doubt his courage. He’s just spoiled, and it’s such a waste—”

“It always is,” Heris said. “What he needs is what neither of us can give him—a chance to find out that his own foolishness can get him in permanent trouble, and only his own abilities can give him the life he really wants. At his age, such tests tend to be dangerous—even fatal.”

“But you think you can do something?”

“I think I can convince him to play no more tricks on me. That won’t help overall, most likely; he’ll blame me, or you, and not his own idiocy.”

“It’s that crowd he hangs around with,” Cecelia said. “Yes, his mother spoiled him, but so are they all spoiled.”

Heris did not argue; her own opinion was that the influence went both ways. Ronnie was as bad for the others as they were for him. But it wasn’t her nephew, and she didn’t have any remnant guilt feelings. She suspected Cecelia did. Cecelia had commented more than once on the family’s attempts to make her perform in ways they thought important; some of that must have stuck, even if it didn’t change her behavior.

Cecelia ate another of the yellow fruits. Heris hadn’t liked the first one well enough to pick another; she watched Cecelia poke about, prodding one plant and sniffing another. Finally she turned back to Heris. “All right. Do what you can; I won’t expect miracles. And I won’t sympathize if he comes crying to me.”

“I don’t think he will,” Heris said. “He has, as you said, some virtues.”

“Do you want to tell me what you’re planning to do, or do you think I’ll let something slip?”

“No—you wouldn’t, I’m sure. But my methods are, as before, not entirely amiable.”

“Go on, then. I won’t ask. Just see that you’re on time for your lesson—today you get higher jumps and more of them.”

Heris looked at her. “That’s one I hadn’t thought of . . . don’t use the simulator until I’ve had a chance to check it, will you?”

“Ronnie wouldn’t touch it—he’s being tiresome about horses.”

“No—not for himself or even you—but to get at me. I’ll be on time—in fact, I’ll be early, and I’ll make sure it hasn’t been tampered with.”

Ronnie had never believed in premonition; he had known himself far too mature and sophisticated for any such superstitions. Thus the results of his first touch of the keyboard, after George left, came as a complete surprise. He had thought of another glorious lark, something harmless to baffle the little captain even further. She liked to go riding on Aunt Cecelia’s simulator . . . well . . . what if it turned out to be under his control, and not Cecelia’s? He had in mind a mad gallop across enormous fences that would surely have her squealing for mercy—and to Cecelia it could still appear that nothing was wrong and the captain’s nerve had broken. He held out for some little time, letting himself imagine all the ramifications: his aunt’s scorn of those who couldn’t ride well, the captain’s fear and then embarrassment, the confusion of both. They would never figure it out, he was sure.

Then he reached for the console. He would just take a preparatory stroll around his battlements, so to speak, making sure that all his hooks were in place. . . . His fingers flicked through the sequence that should have laid all open before him, and the screen blanked.

As anyone who has just entered a fatal command, he first thought it was a simple, reparable error. He reentered the sequence, muttering at himself for carelessness. Something clicked firmly, across his stateroom. It sounded like the door, but when he called, no one answered. Imagination. The screen was still blank. He thumbed Recall, and the screen stayed blank. Odd. Even if he’d hit the wrong sequence, the screen should have showed something. He hit every key on the board, in order, and the screen stayed blank. He felt hot suddenly. Surely not. Surely he hadn’t done something as stupid as that—there were ways to wipe yourself out of a net, but his sequence had been far from any of the ones he knew.

He stared at the screen, and worry began to nibble on the edge of his concentration. He didn’t have to enter the commands here, of course—shifting control to the console in George’s or Buttons’s suite would do—but he hated to admit he’d been such a fool, whatever it was he’d done. But the screen stayed blank, not so much as a flicker, and he didn’t want to lose his good idea. The captain would have her riding lesson not that many hours later, and he wanted to be sure he got the patches in first.

With a final grunt of annoyance, he shut off his screen and went to the door. It didn’t open. He yanked hard at the recessed pull, and broke a fingernail; the door didn’t move at all. He thumped it with his fist, muttering, with the same effect as thumping a very large boulder: his fist hurt, and the door did not move.

He had flicked the controls of the com to George’s cabin when the realization first came. . . . This could not be an accident. The com was dead; no amount of shaking the unit or poking the controls made any sound whatever come out of the speakers. He flung himself at the terminal console again, determined to break through. The screen came on when he pressed the switch, but it responded to nothing he did. No text, no images, no . . . nothing.

“Dammit!” He followed that with a string of everything he knew, and finished, some minutes later, with “It isn’t fair!”

From the corner of his eye, he saw the screen flicker. Only then did it occur to him that while he might be cut off from the outside, the outside might very well be watching him. He came closer.

ALL’S FAIR IN LOVE AND WAR.

DON’T MESS WITH MY SHIP.

“You can’t do this to me!” he yelled at the ceiling. “This is my aunt’s yacht!”

The shower came on; the automatic doors that should have enclosed it had not budged, and he had to wrestle them into place. A dense steam filled his bathroom. He saw with horror that the drain hadn’t opened; water rose rapidly, then trickled out between the doors. He yanked towels from the racks, from the cupboards, and threw them at the overflow. . . . If it got into the bedroom, it would stain the carpet. . . . His mother, not just Aunt Cecelia, would be furious if he stained new carpet. When every towel was soaked, the drain opened, as if it had eyes to see, the shower stopped, and the water drained peacefully away.

The wet towels squished under his feet; his shoes were soaked, and his trousers to the knees. Ronnie felt the onslaught of a large headache, and glared at the mess. He wrung out the towels into the shower enclosure—better than walking on the wet mess—and hung as many as he could from the racks. The floor was slick; it could be dangerous. He grubbed into the back of the cupboard and found the cleaning equipment he had never used. A sponge—dry, for a wonder—a long-handled brush, a short-handled brush, and two bottles of cleaning solution, one blue and one green. The sponge eventually soaked up most of the damp on the floor, though it still felt clammy.

He had only thought he’d been angry before. Now he experienced the full range of anger . . . anger he had not even suspected he could feel. He was so angry that for once in his life he did not strike out at walls or doors or furniture. Instead, he went back to the terminal and sat before it. As he had expected, the screen had another message line now:

YOU ARE CONFINED TO QUARTERS. YOU WILL RECEIVE ADEQUATE RATIONS

He wasn’t hungry; he didn’t care about any blankety-blank rations. . . . He filled in all the blanks he usually did not allow himself to fill, forgetting none of the expressions he’d ever heard. But he did so silently. He was not going to give her the satisfaction.

How had she done it? How had she figured it out? She wasn’t that smart; she had to be nearly as old as Aunt Cecelia. He fumed, silently, staring at the screen. Suddenly it cleared, and after a moment of blankness, reappeared in almost normal configuration. Almost, because the usual communications icon had been replaced by a black diamond.

Gingerly, as if the screen could bite him, he touched the service icon. A menu appeared: food, linens, clothing, air temperature, water, medical assistance. He thought it had had a few more items the last time he’d noticed it . . . but he hadn’t paid much attention. The servants were usually hovering; he hadn’t needed to call them. Now he touched linens. The screen blanked and displayed a flashing blue message: NOT IN SERVICE.

“What d’you mean, not in service!” he growled. In the bathroom, the toilet burped: warning. He pressed his lips together, amazed that he could be even angrier than a moment before. He was stuck with wet towels . . . what a petty revenge. That captain must come from a very ill-bred family. When he did revenge, he did it with style. He poked the board again; it returned him to the service menu. He thought of trying every single choice, but decided against it. It would only make him angrier to know that the others didn’t work either.

He backed out of the service menu and looked at the main screen. Innocent, bland, it looked back. No communications, and missing functions on other icons, he didn’t doubt. What else could he try? Information? He almost snarled at the little blue question mark, but controlled himself and put a finger on it.

The screen blanked and gave him a solid ten seconds of GOOD CHOICE before turning up the information menu. He had never tried this one before, since he’d never thought a ship as small as his aunt’s could hold serious surprises. Now, he found a choice of items he was sure had not been his aunt’s idea.

1. WHAT DID I DO WRONG?

2. WHAT CAN I DO NOW?

3. WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO?

4. WHAT DO THE OTHERS KNOW ABOUT ALL THIS?

It looked like someone’s bad idea of a strategy game. He was going to have nothing to do with it. . . . It had to be a trap . . . but after sitting there for a long time he realized he was tired, stiff, and hungry. Food had been promised, though it hadn’t arrived . . . and he did wonder just how much the little captain knew.

He pressed the first choice. In a cheerful electronic voice, the monitor said, “Good choice.” Ronnie jumped. He’d hated the more vocal teaching computers he’d happened across. This one had a particularly chirpy intonation. The screen blanked, then filled with a list which he supposed represented his errors. It was not framed in terms his Aunt Cecelia would use; what hurt particularly was the assumption that he and the captain shared a frame of reference . . . the military. In just the way that his instructors had dissected unfortunate actions of the past, she dissected his action against her. Without, it seemed, the least rancor. That hurt, too. She didn’t think of him as a rich spoiled brat—but as an incompetent junior officer, one of many. He did not like being one of many.

He was chagrined to learn that his hooks had been found and rebaited, so to speak; she had the entire conversation with George (it was played back for him) and from his own speech samples had produced com messages to the others telling them he felt like some time alone.

“Of course,” the computer voice said brightly, “they think you’re in here plotting more mischief against the captain and crew.”

“But when am I—” He stopped when he heard the water start to run in the bathroom again. Evidently, he was not meant to do any talking.

“If you have questions,” the voice said, “you may choose them from the menu when they appear.” As if that captain would know what questions he wanted to ask. But after another paragraph of careful explanation of his faults, he found a list of questions. He chose the one about the canisters, because he really couldn’t understand why repainting them had been so bad. They were just disaster-drill fakes anyway. What did it matter if one of them turned out to have red smoke, blue smoke, or a bad smell?

His comunit chimed. Ronnie leaped for it. This time the voice that came out was the captain’s.

“You asked about the canisters,” she said. “Do you know the chemical compounds in each?”

“You—no.” He had caught his first angry response in mid-leap.

“Then you are not aware that some of the compounds are toxic, and some are flammable?”

“They are?” He could not have concealed his surprise if he’d tried. They were for drills—the label said so—and things used in drills were harmless, weren’t they?

She had a human chuckle, which he didn’t want to admit was pleasant. “Tell you what—I’ll put the contents up on your screen in detail. Did you have any system in mind when you repainted those canisters, or did you do it at random?”

“Well . . .” Ronnie tried to remember. “Mostly I did them the color of the ones in the next box. That way I always knew which ones I’d done. There were a few, though, that were loose, and I just made ’em all orange with a brown stripe. Most of those were blue and . . . and two green stripes, but one was white and gray.”

“Then you switched the box labels?”

“Yeah . . . how’d you know I’d repainted them?” He had been so careful; he could not believe she’d noticed.

“How do you think I knew which storage bay you were in with George?” she asked. He had no idea. He’d assumed she’d messed with all the storage bays. “Think about it,” she said. The com went dead. He didn’t even bother to try calling out again.

The screen had changed; now it was full of chemical formulas and reaction characteristics. Ronnie fought his way through it. He was actually supposed to know most of this; he remembered having seen it in class. But he had never had a good reason to put it together. He caught himself muttering aloud, and gave the bathroom a nervous look, but the toilet didn’t burp. “ . . . oxidizes the metallic powder and . . . gosh!” The stuff would really burn. Really burn. “I could have built a damn bomb!” he said, almost gleeful for a moment. Silence mocked him. He didn’t need a warning roar from the plumbing or a smart remark from the computer to point out that setting off a bomb on a spaceship in deep space was not an intelligent thing to do, and setting one off without even knowing it was, if possible, stupider.

He felt cold, almost as cold as he’d felt when he realized he’d intruded on the bridge during jump transition. If the captain had picked another canister—the gray and white one he’d painted orange and red, rather than the blue and gray he’d painted black and green—it could have been a real emergency. A real disaster. A real—another look at the screen to confirm it—end of the whole trip. For everyone.

“I’m sorry,” he said to the silent cabin. “I didn’t mean to cause any real trouble.”

Instead of an answer, the screen changed yet again, to show a transcript of what he’d said to George, every word. It looked worse, far worse, in glowing script on the screen. It looked as if he had indeed wanted to cause trouble—to harrass and humiliate the captain, to frighten and divide the crew. “I didn’t mean it that way,” he said, but he knew he had meant it that way, back when he thought it was safe to mean it that way.

The food, when it came, was bland and boring.

Heris climbed off the simulator after a vigorous ride across country on a large black hunter; every time she took the helmet off, the simulator startled her with its metal and plastic parts. Cecelia nodded at her.

“Very good indeed. You’ll certainly qualify for one of the mid-level hunts. Depending on who’s here, you might even be with me for a run or two.”

“Are you sure you want to drag me along?” Heris asked. “I know it’s not—”

“It’s not common, but it’s not unheard of, and anyway I do as I like. It’s one of the perks. Bunny won’t mind, as long as you can ride decently and don’t cause trouble, which you won’t. I’ll enjoy having you to talk with—there are few enough single women, and I’m past the point where the men want to talk to me.”

Heris was not sure she liked the assumption that she herself was also past that point . . . but it was true, she wasn’t on the prowl. She wasn’t over losing her other ship yet—though she could now think of it as “the other ship” and not the only one—and she would have to get her crew—and certain members of it—out of her mind before she could respond to advances. If anyone made them.

“What’s the matter?” Cecelia asked. “Don’t you want to go? Would you rather hang around Hospitality Bay with the other captains?”

“No!” She said it more forcefully than she meant to. “I’m sorry—the thought of those other captains has haunted me all along. I hate that. And yes, I would love to see what an estate set up for fox hunting looks like. It’s just—I didn’t want you to think you had to do it, because you said it in front of Ronnie.”

“Nonsense. I said it because I wanted to; Ronnie’s opinion is unimportant.” Cecelia looked hard at her captain. “And by the way, how is that young man?”

“Perfectly healthy.” That was true, if incomplete. He wasn’t even that bored, because she had him doing the work he should have done in his basic classes. Math, chemistry, biochemistry, ship systems, military history, tactics. . . . When he kept his mind on it, all his plumbing worked and his food arrived regularly, and the lights worked. When he threw a tantrum—and he hadn’t thrown one in the last several days, was he learning?—he found himself dealing with other problems, and the work still to do afterwards. “He may be rejoining you shortly, if you’ve no objection.”

“What have you done, chained him in the ’ponics to dig potatoes?” Then she held up her hands. “No, don’t tell me—I don’t want to know. But I shall be fascinated to see what happens.”

“So shall I,” said Heris. She had found him more interesting than she’d expected, in the rare moments she tutored him over the com herself. He had a supple, energetic intelligence that would have rewarded good initial training. It was a shame that no one had ever made him work before. He could have been good enough for the Regular Space Service.

Ronnie reappeared at breakfast one morning, smiling pleasantly. Cecelia, at Heris’s suggestion, had begun breakfasting with the young people some days before. This way, Heris had said, the collusion would be marginally less evident. She noticed that Ronnie was clean, dressed neatly, and showed no visible bruises—of which she approved—and the sulky expression she disliked no longer marred his face.

“Well?” George said. “Tell all.”

“All of what?” Ronnie looked over the toast rack and chose whole wheat with raisins.

“You said you were up to something.” George looked at the others for support, but they weren’t playing up. “You said you were—”

Ronnie looked at him, a bland good-humored look. “I’ve said many things, George, which aren’t breakfast conversation. And I’m hungry.” He smiled at Cecelia. “Excuse me, Aunt Cecelia—could I have some of that curry?”

Cecelia smiled back. Whatever had happened, she wasn’t going to interfere with it. “Certainly. I hope you haven’t been ill. . . .”

“Not at all.” He engaged himself with the curry, and the variety of other edibles that Cecelia considered appropriate to breakfast with company. George opened and shut his mouth twice, then shrugged and went on eating omelet. Buttons, never very forthcoming in the morning, finished nibbling toast, excused himself, and went away; the three young women, after glancing several times from Ronnie to his aunt and back, also left. Cecelia ate her usual large breakfast, trying to ignore all the signals they were trying to pass so obviously. Finally only George and Ronnie were left, Ronnie eating steadily, as if to make up for many lost meals, and George in spurts, eyeing Ronnie. Cecelia struggled not to laugh. It was, after all, ridiculous. There was George, trying to protect Ronnie (too little and too late) from whatever horrors an elderly aunt could inflict on him. Finally she decided to intervene, before Ronnie hurt himself overeating, or George had a stroke.

“I am not planning to harm him, you know,” she said to George. George turned bright red and nearly choked on a muffin.

“She’s quite right,” Ronnie said, in the same pleasant tone he’d used so far. “It’s safe to leave us alone.”

“But—but you said—”

“It’s all right,” Ronnie said. “Really it is. I can tell you’re not hungry—why not go play something with the others? I’ll be along shortly.”

George, still red and coughing, managed to say that he hadn’t meant to interfere and Ronnie would know where to find him. Then, with a nod to Cecelia, he got out of the room as gracelessly as Cecelia had ever seen him move.

“You are all right. . . .” Cecelia said. Ronnie’s clear hazel eyes gazed into hers, a look that combined all the charm and mischief she had seen in him since birth.

“I’m fine,” he repeated. “Why shouldn’t I be?”

“Well . . .” Cecelia pleated her napkin, a gesture that she knew conveyed feminine indecision to the men in her family. “You were fairly cross about my new captain, and when I wasn’t sure your message to me was . . . was quite true, about studying for exams, and I pressured George—”

Ronnie flushed, but managed a smile. “Did he break down and tell you I had planned some mischief? I’m sure he did. Well—so I had, but I—I changed my mind. And I did study for exams, but if I tell George that—”

“Ah. I see.” Into Cecelia’s mind came the faint glimmer of what Heris must have done. How she had done it still remained a mystery. But she understood this much of the psychology of the younger set. “You don’t want George to know you changed your mind, or that you studied—you must have been awfully bored, Ronnie, to decide to study.” She hoped her voice didn’t tremble with repressed laughter on that . . . or would he think it was a senile tremor?

“It was the only thing I could do in that room without—without letting George know—” That was undoubtedly the truth, Cecelia thought. What a jewel of a captain. What a marvel. She felt like grabbing Heris and dancing her along the passages . . . and at the imagined look on Heris’s face she could hardly contain her laughter. Ronnie, she saw, was looking at her with some suspicion.

“My dear, please, I’m just glad you’re not sick, and that you didn’t do something awful that Captain Serrano would have had to complain to me about, and that you thought better of it and made good use of your time. I have to admit I find the need to placate George amusing . . . but then I’m old, and no longer worry about the opinions of friends. When I was your age, their opinions mattered much more.”

“Even you? I thought you never cared about anyone.” The tone was more respectful than the words.

“I didn’t care about some members of the family—and I’m not bragging about it. But I had friends—others who shared the same interests—and it mattered a great deal to me what they thought. So I will conceal from George your careful study of whatever it was you studied, and pretend to know nothing—which is in fact just what I do know.”

“Thank you, Aunt Cecelia,” he said. Something in his eyes made her think he was not entirely chastened, but overly polite was easier to live with than whining complaint. “I suppose,” he went on, “I should ask you to let me try your simulator.” His tone, again, was almost too bland, but she chose not to notice.

“Of course. Some of your friends—Bunny’s children, and Raffaele—have been using it; I made up a schedule so that we don’t interfere with each other.”

“And the captain,” he went on. She noticed the tension in his jaw which he probably thought he’d concealed. “Is she coming along well?”

“Oh, yes,” Cecelia said. “It’s too bad she didn’t start earlier; she’d have been competitive in the open circuit. As it is, she’ll be a reasonable member of the field once she’s had some real experience.” She smiled at the look on his face, mingled of mistrust and envy. “You’d be good too, I’m sure, if you spent the time on it she has. You’re the right build.”

“But I’m not horse-struck,” Ronnie said. “Just as well; Mother would say you’d contaminated me.”

“Well, make a try at it. You might like it better than you think. The family brought you up to think it was ridiculous, and all because my parents wanted me to marry someone for a commercial alliance, and I wanted to ride professionally. Whether I was right or wrong doesn’t affect the nature of the sport.”

“All right.” He held up his hands, as if in defense, and Cecelia realized her voice had risen. That old quarrel with her parents and her uncles could still make her angry. If they had not been so ridiculously prejudiced, she would not have been that defiant: she would have quit in another year or so, certainly after losing Buccinator, and married someone. If not Pierce-Konstantin, someone reasonable. But they had tried to have her barred from competition, when she was leading for a yearly award; she had rebelled completely.

It occurred to her that she had more in common with Ronnie than she’d imagined.

Most major space stations followed one of three basic, utilitarian designs: the wheel, the cylinder, and the zeez-angle for situations requiring specific rotational effects. When Heris called up the specs for Sirialis, which all her passengers called “Bunny’s planet,” she felt she’d taken another giant step into irrationality. A blunt-ended castle tumbling slowly in zero-gravity? This time she didn’t ponder it alone; she called her employer, and sent along a visual of the Station where Cecelia had said they would dock.

“Is there an explanation, or do I just assume civilian-aristocratic insanity?” she asked.

“Insanity isn’t a bad guess,” Cecelia admitted. From the tone, she was neither surprised nor insulted by Heris’s reaction. “There’s been a certain—oh—eccentricity—in that family for some generations. Some of us think that’s why they got so rich so fast; they’ve got monetary instincts where the rest of us keep our common sense. This Station, though—let me see if I can explain it.”

“No one,” Heris said, watching on her own screen the display of crenellations, towers, stairs, arches, and cloisters, rotating but somehow not making sense, “no one could explain this.” Her eye tried to follow the progression of one staircase up to a square tower, which was suddenly not where it should have been. . . . The staircase had to be going down. Someone, she thought, must have made an error in the display.

“It began with Bunny’s great-great-uncle Pirdich,” Cecelia went on, ignoring the comment. “They’d just managed to recover the worst the original colonists had done, and the lords of the Grande Caravan had been teasing them about how impossible it was. He wanted to make a statement.”

“That Station is a statement?”

“Of sorts, yes. He decided that having overcome what everyone said was an impossible problem in reclamation, he would celebrate it by building an impossible space station. Bunny’s family’s been overfond of the early modern period of Old Earth all along; this Station is built to look like a design by an artist of that period. I don’t know the name; visual arts is not my thing. It is strange, isn’t it? And if you think it’s impossible, wait until you see the internal configuration and the fountain in the central plaza. Everything in it is taken from the work of the same person, and it’s all delightfully skewed.”

Delightfully was not the word Heris would have picked. In her experience, design problems in space stations caused everyone grief, especially captains of ships docking there. Creativity should be subordinate to efficiency. “Are all three stations like this one?” she asked. If not, maybe she could talk Cecelia into docking somewhere other than the prestigious but clearly impractical Home Station.

“Of course not. Once they had one unique impossible station, they wanted each one different. Here—” From Cecelia’s desktop to Heris’s the new visuals flashed: one like a stylized pinecone, in silver and scarlet, and one that looked like a worse mistake than the others, as if someone had dropped a pile of construction material onto a plate with a glob of sticky in the middle. “I think that’s the worst,” Cecelia said. “It’s a Dzanian design, very neo-neo-neo, and the fault of Bunny’s aunt Zirip, who married a Dzanian, and insisted that her family’s fondness for Old Earth was pathological. You can’t take anything very big into it, because the parts that stick out are nonfunctional; the docking bays are all nestled among them. There’s only one berth for a decent-sized ship, and that’s where they do cargo transfer. Zirip thought it was cute, she told me once, because it made for intimate spaces. But Zirip is also the one who converted the closet in her room into her bed and study, and used the room itself for a dance studio. Up until then, I’d thought the oddness in that family rode the Y chromosome.”

Heris pitied the captains of cargo vessels loading and unloading there, but supposed they got used to it. “And the . . . er . . . pinecone?”

“Symbolic. So they told me. I’ve been there once, on a family shuttle; the docking facilities are lovely, but I got very tired of green and brown and the same aromatics all the time. It has the most capacity, and most guest yachts will dock there.” At the end, that had the smug tone of someone who knew she was docking at a more prestigious slot; Heris sighed. She knew what that meant—no hope of talking Cecelia into using another station.

Instead, she looked again at the information for inbound ships. It might look like a peculiar sort of castle in the air, but it had modern, well-designed docking bays. The guidance beacons, the communications and computer links, the lists of standard and on-request equipment and connectors: all perfectly normal, exactly what they’d had at Takomin Roads. She wondered who in the family had had the sense to design the practical part.

“What sort of facilities does it have for off-duty crew?” Heris asked. She knew this was going to cause an explosion, and it did.

“What do you mean, off-duty crew? The crew goes to Hospitality Bay, as I explained earlier.” Cecelia sounded annoyed.

“Milady.” That formality should get her attention. Cecelia was susceptible, Heris had discovered, to very severe courtesy. “You have an entirely new set of environmental components, and the run here from Takomin Roads was just long enough to break them in—not long enough for this crew to be what I consider well trained. I want a standing watch aboard—”

“The Stationmaster won’t like it; everyone sends their crews down to Hospitality Bay, and the ships are secured. What do you think, that rustlers or smugglers or something will come aboard?”

Heris didn’t answer that, although she thought that leaving a ship uncrewed at a private station made it very easy for smugglers to do what they’d already done to Sweet Delight. She waited. Cecelia was not stupid; she would think of that herself in a few minutes. After a silence, Cecelia’s voice came back, unsubdued but no longer angry.

“I see. You do think exactly that. And someone did put whatever it was in my scrubbers.” It had now become “my” scrubbers, Heris noted with amusement. At least she knew what scrubbers were. Cecelia went on. “Did you ever find out what that was?”

“No,” Heris answered. “And I doubt we will, unless it comes to court. My point is that we need a standing watch aboard; if you authorize it, the Stationmaster will agree.”

“But what about the expense? And the crew expects their vacation at Hospitality Bay—won’t they be angry?”

“Look—what if a pipe breaks while you’re planetside, and floods dirty goo all over this carpet? You don’t like the lavender plush any more than I do, but imagine the mess. Imagine what your sister would say. As for the crew, that’s my problem; if they’re angry, they’ll be angry with me. Time they earned what you pay them.”

“You’re determined, aren’t you?” That with a slightly catty edge.

“Where your safety and the integrity of this ship are concerned, yes,” Heris said.

The Stationmaster required all the weight of Cecelia’s patronage to change his mind. “It is not the usual procedure at all,” he said. “We have that procedure for a reason; we can’t have idle ships’ crews roaming about the Station getting into trouble.”

“They won’t be,” Heris said. “They’ll be busy learning the new systems recently installed on this ship. During their shipboard rotation, they will have very little time to roam about—and if you insist, I can confine them to the ship, although I would prefer to allow them a moderate amount of time off. Lady Cecelia expressly requested that the crew be thoroughly trained—there had been incidents—” She didn’t specify, and he didn’t ask.

“Yes, but—we really don’t have facilities . . .”

“Six individuals at a time aboard,” Heris said. “No more than three offship—”

“Only three?” the Stationmaster said. Heris smiled to herself. She had won.

“Yes. They’ll be standing round—the-clock watches, and they have a lot of work to do; I would prefer, because of that, to let them get their meals on the Station, rather than also detail a cook—”

“Oh . . . I see. Lady Cecelia’s credit line?”

“Of course: the ship’s account, with a limit—” She had to put a limit, or both the Station vendors and the crew would be likely to cheat.

“I would suggest thirty a day per person,” the Stationmaster said. She haggled him down to twenty; she had already called up the vendor ads and knew her people could eat well on fifteen.

Next she had to tell the crew. She did not expect much trouble, and they listened in respectful silence, although she noticed some sideways glances. The new members, who had never been to Hospitality Bay, were glad enough to rotate in and out. Those who were accustomed to idling away a planetary quartile on full pay might have complained, but remembered the departure of the pilot. Heris hoped some of them would decide to quit; she knew she could do better. When she called for volunteers for the first rotation, Sirkin and the newest crew members got their hands up first—exactly what she’d expected. She had planned shorter, more frequent rotations (over the protests of both Cecelia and the Stationmaster) on the grounds that unused skills quickly deteriorated. In fact, there were crew members she didn’t want to leave in the ship too long.

By the time they docked—without incident: the peculiar-looking Station turned out to be well designed where it mattered—Heris had the roster settled, and enough work planned to keep the standing watch alert. She had scattered her new and most trusted crew among each rotation . . . and hoped that would keep any remaining smuggler-agents from doing whatever they might otherwise do. Then it was time to pack her own kit, and prepare to accompany Lady Cecelia’s entourage to the planet.

“You were right,” Heris said to her employer, as she came out of the droptube into the central area of the Station. “I don’t believe it.” The ornamental object in the middle had as many eye-teasing impossibilities as the station itself, and in addition offered the appearance of a stream of water flowing merrily uphill. That alone wouldn’t have been upsetting: everyone had seen inverse fountains or ridden inverse scare rides, since the invention of small artifical gravity generators. But this one flowed uphill without a substrate, burbling from one visible guide channel to another through the empty air. “It’s a holo, right?”

“No—it’s real, in its own way. You can put your hand into it and find out.” Cecelia looked entirely too pleased with herself. Heris argued with her mind, and her stomach, and did not put her hand into the water. She was not going to ask how the illusion had been accomplished. Cecelia grinned. “I can tell you won’t ask, so I’ll give you a hint: Spirlin membrane.”

Heris was very glad she hadn’t put her hand in; it could have been embarrassing. Spirlin membranes, suspended in water, increased surface tension dramatically. They were also highly adherent to human skin, which often reacted with the Spirlin chemistry by fluorescing for days after the contact.

“I . . . see.” Heris looked around. This area of the Station seemed to consist of gardens designed to the same weird standards as the Station itself and the fountain. Steps, low walls, terraces with seating arrangements that argued visually with each other—that seemed determined to flow from angular to curved, and back to angular, or, in some cases, to suggest by forced perspective the incorrect size or distance. Planters suspended at unnerving angles, all full of strange plants pruned to look like something else. When she looked up, Heris found herself staring into the canopy of another garden, looking down onto the heads of people walking along—she swayed, disoriented for a moment. Cecelia grabbed her arm.

“That one is a holo. I should have warned you—sorry. Almost no one looks up.”

After that, Heris had no idea what kind of shuttle they would find in the bay . . . but although it was more luxurious than commercial or military models, it looked much the same on the outside, and brought them to the surface safely. Lady Cecelia’s party had it to themselves; Lady Cecelia and Heris in the forward compartment, the young people in the main compartment, and Lady Cecelia’s maid and a few other servants in the aft section. Once well down in the atmosphere, the cabin steward served a full dinner; by the time they landed, shortly before sunset, Heris had almost reconciled herself to being a passenger.