In Ashes Born (A Seeker's Tale From The Golden Age Of The Solar Clipper Book 1) (9 page)

BOOK: In Ashes Born (A Seeker's Tale From The Golden Age Of The Solar Clipper Book 1)
5.11Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

I looked up from my mug and into their patient faces. “I don’t. It was the wrong deal,” I said. “I just didn’t recognize it.”

Chapter Nine
Port Newmar:
2374, June 4

By the time I got back from Cookie’s, I didn’t feel like braving the post-conference party still underway in Pip’s cottage. It sounded like a good time from where I stood at my front door, but noise discipline held and the level chopped down at 2200. The noise didn’t disappear, but it fell enough that I was only distantly aware of it. It didn’t really matter. I wasn’t ready for sleep and I had a lot to do.

I started with my grav-trunks.

What did I really need out of that massive pile of collected clothing? While I’d done a rough sort back on the
Iris
as I packed to leave, I set myself the task of paring down to a single trunk.

I pulled the trunks out of their storage slots and parked them in the living room of the cottage. A handy dining table served as a sorting and folding surface, and the sofa and chairs worked nicely as places to stack stuff I wanted to sort.

Two stans later, I had a mess. I couldn’t seem to make any progress at all. Every time I thought I had a handle on it, I wound up thinking, “Well, I might want this sometime.”

In a relatively short time, clothing festooned the living and dining rooms. Some civvies. Mostly shipsuits and uniforms. All of them still fit. Probably. I’d purchased all the civvies during my shopping trips with Stacy Arellone back on Dunsany.

I looked around at the chaos and realized that I had only one physical thing from my childhood on Neris—a picture of my father as a young man sitting at a restaurant table. I’d scattered my mother’s ashes in the sea here on Port Newmar while I was a cadet. I hadn’t even kept the urn. Her portable computer was long gone. I had some digital images and the one printed photograph. I picked up the dog-eared image and looked at the smiling face of the man who had been such a mystery for most of my life. I’d stared at the back of his head for stanyers not knowing I sat only meters from him as he worked the grill in his own restaurant.

I’m not sure I’d have recognized him even if he’d turned around and stared right at me.

I surveyed the mess again, holding the photo and wondering where I should put it. Almost two hundred kilograms of stuff and the only thing I found I couldn’t replace was a photo? Not even a current photo. I had new digital images of my father and me together on the orbital at Diurnia. Something about holding the one thing that had survived, the one link to my childhood on Neris, seemed important in a way I couldn’t explain.

A cloth-wrapped bundle on the coffee table caught my eye.

The photo wasn’t the only thing I couldn’t replace. My whelkies. Christine Maloney had offered a lot of credits for the collection. I couldn’t part with them for credits. I couldn’t leave them behind. I really needed to find their owners. Or keep them safe until they found new owners for themselves. I couldn’t believe I’d overlooked them when pulling all the stuff out of my trunks. I picked the bundle up and tucked it under my arm.

I must have made quite a picture standing there in the middle of the night. The lights in my cottage blazing. Me barefoot, wearing a tatty but comfy old shipsuit with a
William Tinker
patch on the shoulder, staring around at what looked like ground zero in a clothing explosion. The realization of what it might look like if somebody was to call made me laugh. Not just little giggles but real laughter. With nobody around to see, nobody to bother, I didn’t hold it back but let it roll. After a few moments I couldn’t have stopped if I wanted.

That’s when somebody knocked on the door and I heard Pip’s voice. “Ish? You all right in there?”

I stumbled through the clothes, almost tripped on a pair of ship boots, and slipped the latch on the door, laughing all the way.

Pip’s eyes got round when he saw me and the mess I’d made. I laughed harder as he rubbernecked through the door, taking in the whole effect.

As my laughter wound down, I was able to gasp. “Come in. We need to talk.”

He took a step over the threshold. “Love what you’ve done with the place.”

“Thanks. I’m just doing a little pruning.” I leaned out to look across the path. “Party over?”

He nodded, still scanning the room, eyeing a pair of jeans that had gotten thrown over a lamp. “Conference done for another stanyer. We’ll do it again next year. Probably.”

“Good. Good. We need to talk.”

He nodded. “Yeah, we do, but perhaps we should do it when you’re sober and it’s not the middle of the night.”

“I’m perfectly sober.” I didn’t help myself with another little giggle.

He raised one eyebrow at me. “All right. How about when I’m sober and it’s not the middle of the night?”

I glanced at the chrono. It read 0135. “Where does the time go?”

He shrugged and grinned at me. “Time flies when you’re havin’ fun. You gonna hit the floor tomorrow at 0600?”

I used an elbow to clear off a corner of the table and put the package of whelkies and the photo down. “Planning on it.”

“All right. I’ll get some sleep and sober up a little. Knock on my door when you get back and we’ll go find some breakfast.”

“Sounds good.”

He picked his way back across the mine field of discarded clothing toward the door. At the threshold he turned to me with a grin. “This mean you’re gonna be my captain?”

“Yes. No.” I shook my head. “Maybe.”

“I’m not that drunk, Ishmael. You sure you’re not?”

“Positive. I’m not going to be your captain. You can’t win that bid with what you’re planning to spend. The breakers will take it for scrap value now that they know they can get it cheap. Ninety million won’t cut it.”

His grin faded and his brows came together above his nose. “Then what do we need to talk about?”

“I’m not going to be your captain. I’m going to be your partner.”

“What?” He shook his head. “I must be drunker than I thought. Partner?”

“We’ll hash it out tomorrow but you can’t win that auction with your level of resources.”

“And you can?”

I shook my head. “Not by myself. If we pool our funds, we can outbid the breakers and still have enough left over to refurbish the ship and get her crewed up and ready for space.”

His grin came back. “Just like old times!”

“Go sleep. I need to try to get a nap in before Margaret Newmar wrings me out again in a few stans.”

He nodded and only stumbled a little bit getting out the door and closing it behind him. A few moments later I heard his cottage door close in the silence of the early, early morning. I made one last survey of the room and blew out a deep breath before slapping the light switches and shuffling off to my bed.

I had no idea what I’d do with the mess out front, but the mess inside me felt a little less hopeless for the first time in a long, long time. I zipped out of the shipsuit and crawled between the sheets, letting the garment fall to the floor as forgotten as a snake’s shed skin. I’d no sooner closed my eyes when the brassy tones of reveille pulled me back from dreamland.

I didn’t groan when I crawled out and stepped into the shower. It wouldn’t have done any good, and I really wasn’t the kind to groan when there was nobody around to appreciate it.

I felt almost human when I stumbled into the living room to find a pair of shorts and a fresh ship-tee. I felt a little exposed padding naked and damp through the cottage, but managed to find enough clothing to wear for my workout among the piles of “what do I do with this?”

I slipped out of the cottage and struck out for the studio. The fogginess inside my head burned off as I crossed campus. The fresh morning air, cool and damp, pulled the last of the sleep from my muscles. When I got to the studio, I was ready to go and started my warmups immediately. I had to struggle to push the coming discussions with Pip out of the way and focus on the movements and my balance, but within a few ticks I found my pace and relaxed into the discipline.

“Good morning, Ishmael.”

“Good morning,
Sifu
.”

“Rough night?” she asked.

I ended my warmup cycle and turned toward her. She stood at the edge of the floor, her head turned slightly to one side in a birdlike gaze.

“Short night. I didn’t get to sleep until nearly 0200.”

“Ah,” she said and nodded. “What were you doing up so late? Or should I not ask?”

I smiled. “Pruning.”

She beamed. “That’s what it is. I knew you looked different this morning. I should have realized.”

“Different?” I almost laughed. “How can you tell?”

She shook her head, that same quirky smile on her lips. “Something about your stance. It’s looser, more balanced maybe. Your posture has changed. You’ll find the chi flows better today, I think.”

Her answer surprised me. “Really?” I looked down at my hands and arms. “I haven’t noticed it with my warmups yet.”

“It’s either that or the fact that you’re wearing one blue and one green sock,” she said.

I looked down to find my feet clad in different colored socks inside my tai chi slippers. “Yes, I might not have actually finished pruning last night before I was interrupted.”

She nodded, her lips pursed. “That would make sense. Mr. Carstairs called, no doubt.”

“Actually, he did.” I shrugged. “He came to find out if I was all right. I’m not a night owl as a rule, but I started late in the evening and just got carried away.”

She nodded again. “I can see how that would happen. Well, we should get to it.” She bowed to the floor and we began the morning’s lesson.

For some reason I kept messing up Four Corners. We’d worked on it for days and I had thought I’d gotten the movements down. That morning, dealing with the complexity of the forward and backward movements and the shifts to each of the four directions seemed beyond my ability to grasp. After I missed it twice in a row, she called a halt.

“Tea,” she said. “Your socks have you thinking about your feet and not focusing on your balance.”

I looked down, dubious that such a minor thing could be causing my problem, but it seemed as likely as anything. I had no better explanation so simply started my cooldown.

“Not today. You’re not overheated. Come sit while I brew.”

Surprised, I took my place at the table and watched her graceful, practiced movements filling the kettle, measuring the tea, and setting it to steep when the water boiled. “You know the water boils at one hundred and two degrees here?” she asked.

“Really?” I shook my head. “I thought it always boiled at one hundred Celsius at sea level.”

She shook her head. “Earth standard measure that’s been adopted as a standard. Same as the standard hour.” She lifted the kettle off the burner and rested it on the warming stone.

“I knew about the hour. Sixty standard minutes each of sixty standard seconds, each measured by so many vibrations of a subatomic particle in some kind of matrix that I knew once to pass the test but have never had to deal with again.”

She smiled. “Newmar’s atmosphere is just enough denser that it raises the boiling point two degrees. It’s one of those things that we take as it’s presented and don’t think about. The difference is small, barely noticeable unless you measure.” She poured the water over the tea, one of her blacks with a strong herbal component. “That’s why I let the water cool, just slightly, on the stone before pouring.”

“That helps the infusion process by keeping the temperature low enough to infuse the water without sublimating the volatiles?”

She smiled at me. “You paid attention in chemistry class.”

“I like good coffee. Water temperature matters there, too.”

While the tea steeped, she glided to the cup rack. “Which cup would you choose for yourself today, Ishmael?”

“The simple white one you gave me the first day.”

She pulled it out of the rack. “This one?”

“Yes, please.”

She selected another one for herself, a plain china mug that I might have found on the mess deck on almost any freighter in the fleet. Flat on the bottom and nearly cylindrical in shape.

She placed them on the table and poured the tea.

“How did you remember which cup?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I always look to see what cup you pick for your students and visitors. You never seem to pick the same cup twice, which always made me think you remembered which cup they’d had before.”

“You found that remarkable even though you remembered well enough to believe that I knowingly picked a different cup each time.”

“I guess I never thought of it that way.”

“You’re an excellent observer, Ishmael. You pay attention to details.”

“Thank you,
Sifu
.”

“Yet sometimes you overlook the most obvious. That doesn’t always work in your favor.”

I looked down at my cup. I thought of Greta and how I’d been blinded by my own biases, my own dogma. “True.”

She sipped her tea and placed the cup back on the wood with a hollow thump.

I glanced up and saw her regarding me with as serious an expression as I’ve ever seen on her face. She almost always had a smile or a near smile.

BOOK: In Ashes Born (A Seeker's Tale From The Golden Age Of The Solar Clipper Book 1)
5.11Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Seduction Becomes Her by Busbee, Shirlee
The Prince and I: A Romantic Mystery (The Royal Biography Cozy Mystery Series Book 1) by Julie Sarff, The Hope Diamond, The Heir to Villa Buschi
Supervolcano: Eruption by Harry Turtledove
A Place Beyond Courage by Elizabeth Chadwick
In Pieces by Nick Hopton
Sizzle by Holly S. Roberts
The Great Santini by Pat Conroy