Owner's Share (Trader's Tales from the Golden Age of the Solar Clipper) (83 page)

Chapter Eighty-One
Diurnia Orbital:
2374-January-1

I pulled the last shipsuit out of my grav trunk, and laid it on the pile on the bed. The two trunks yawned emptily, and the cabin looked like a flea market booth had exploded in it. I snickered a little at the mess. At the point where I should have been packing to leave the ship, I unpacked everything I owned.

“I love what you’ve done with the place, Skipper.”

I turned to see Ms. Arellone standing in the door, surveying the shambles. Her eyes were no longer rimmed with dark circles but she still looked haunted. After Greta’s death, she had been wracked with the guilt of failure. I was so lost in my own fog that it had fallen to Chief Stevens and Ms. Maloney to help her through it.

I shook my head, surveying the mess. “There’s stuff in here I’d forgotten I had.”

“Are you going to get rid of it?”

I scanned the room, surveying the collected artifacts of two decades as a spacer. “Some of it,” I said. “There’s no need to carry around worn out shipsuits and boxers with no stretch left in the waist.”

She nodded at the obviousness of it and her eyes skipped lightly around the room. I tried to see the piles as she might be seeing them—the few decent sets of civilian attire, three mounds of shipsuits, and four pairs of ship boots in various states of decrepitude.

I sighed. “It’s not very impressive. All laid out like that.”

She chuckled. A small pile of objects decorated the desk, and her eyes were drawn to the collection. I followed her gaze, and a rough bundle reminded me of a task I needed to do.

I crossed to the desk, and unrolled the bundle of whelkies. “Come see what you think of these, Ms. Arellone.”

Her eyes wrinkled with curiosity as she picked her way through the mess, and then widened as I pulled the first of the small figures out of its cloth-wrapped cocoon, laying it down on the desk, and unwrapping the next. When I finished with the last, I stepped back. “What do you think, Ms. Arellone?”

Her eyes grew wide with surprise. “When you said you had a whelkie, Captain, I thought you meant a whelkie. As in one. You didn’t tell me you had a whole pile.” She never looked up from the desk. Her gaze darted from figure to figure to figure. She focused on one, and she started to reach for it, but stopped and looked over at me. “May I?”

“Of course.”

She picked up the figure, and held it up to see the purple shell at its heart. The figure was a badger resting on its haunches, sitting almost upright with its head turned to look to the left as if it had just heard a sound.

“It’s lovely, Captain.” She smiled, really smiled, not the half-formed rictus approximating a smile I had seen on her face for weeks. “What is it?”

I grinned at her. “It’s a badger. Ornery little beasts from old Earth. They’re tough enough to survive in a variety of climates and conditions, so they make excellent niche-dwellers in terraforming operations.”

“He’s kinda cute,” she said.

“He’s yours,” I told her.

She at me in shock. “Oh, no, Captain! I couldn’t possibly—”

I handed her the bit of soft cloth he’d been wrapped in all that time, and the length of red string he’d been tied with. “It’s already done, Ms. Arellone.”

For the first time in our acquaintance, I saw Ms. Arellone speechless. Her mouth opened and closed a couple of times, and she looked from me to the badger and back to me again before she was able to get her jaw under control. “Are you sure, Skipper? I was just admiring it!” She started to put it back down on the desk where she’d found it.

“Do you know the story of the whelkies, Ms. Arellone?” My question stopped her.

“Not really, Skipper. Just that they’re really rare, and are some kind of good luck charm.”

“They’re carved on a planet called St. Cloud over in the Dunsany Roads quadrant. The shamen who live on the south coast collect driftwood, and carve the figures. There’s an indigenous snail—a whelk—that lives in the tide pools, and the shells have a purple color. Some are dark purple. Some have just a bare wash of color. The story has it that the darker the hue, the more powerful the whelkie.”

She held the badger up to see the bit of shell embedded on the badger’s chest as a heart. “Is that what this is?”

“Yes, Ms. Arellone.”

“This one’s really purple. How purple do they get, sar?”

“I don’t know, but that’s on the upper end of the scale.”

She looked over at me again. “But what do they do? Power for what?”

I shrugged one shoulder. “The story is that the whelkie finds its owner, the person it’s supposed to go to. Usually it’s given out by the village shaman to somebody who needs strength or guidance.”

She arched an eyebrow skeptically in my direction.

I snorted a laugh. “Yes, well, that’s just a story.”

“Do people believe it?”

I drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly as I considered. “Some do. Some don’t. Mostly the skeptics dismiss it as religious mumbo-jumbo.”

“What do you think, Skipper?”

“I think that I’ve carried my dolphin for stanyers. There’s something soothing about holding the wood. I don’t feel like I’m influenced by some supernatural influence or anything, but perhaps it serves as a kind of centering device. A physical manifestation of focus.”

She thought about that for a few heartbeats, and then looked down at the collection on the desk again. “You must have needed a lot of guidance, Skipper.”

I laughed, and felt something cold and brittle snap inside me. “Yes, well, these aren’t my guides. They weren’t given to me.”

“Where’d you get them then?”

“Stanyers ago, on a trip through St. Cloud on the
Lois Mc
Kendrick
—back before I went to the academy. I found a guy in the flea market there who sold them to me.”

“I thought you said they had to be given?”

“Yes, well, that was before I knew what they were, and I bought ten of them for private trading goods. I just have never been able to sell one.”

“Some trader you are, Skipper!” she twitted me even as she held her badger up close to her face.

I chuckled.

“So? How long have you been lugging these around?”

I tried to add up the stanyers and couldn’t. “Since before the Academy. Maybe twenty stanyers.”

She blinked in astonishment. “That long?” She looked closely at the shell turning it so the light gleamed on it. “Do you suppose it’s still got power?”

I shrugged and grinned. “As much as it ever did, probably.”

She gave me one of her exasperated glances, and then nodded at the collection on the desk. “Looks like you’ve got your work cut out for you.”

I looked at the remaining figures. “My work?”

She nodded, perfectly straight-faced, and zinged me. “At the rate you’re giving these out, you’ll be an old, old man before you’re done.”

I laughed then, for what must have been the first time in weeks, maybe a stanyer. The warmth of it accelerated the thawing inside me that the daily sessions of
tai chi
with Chief Stevens had started.

She looked pleased with herself, and that felt good, too.

“What’s all this jocularity?” Ms. Maloney asked from the doorway. She wore a smartly tailored business suit, and had just returned from a business meeting ashore.

“Ms. Arellone has been pointing out how old I’m getting,” I told her.

“Seasoned, Captain. Not old,” Ms. Maloney told me with a grin of her own. She saw the spread of whelkies on the desk and she gasped. “Great merciful Maude! How many of those do you have?”

I shrugged. “Well, that’s my entire collection not counting this one.” I pulled the dolphin from my pocket. My eye snagged on the seabird that had belonged to Greta. I picked that one up from where it rested beside my console. “And this one.”

She snickered but crossed to lean down and look at the figures. “You’ve got more whelkies in one place than I’ve ever seen before.” She frowned as she examined them. “This might be the largest private collection in existence outside of St. Cloud.”

She looked up at me with a speculative grin. “Wanna sell ’em?”

I shook my head. “No, these aren’t for sale.”

“Pity,” she said and resumed her study, carefully looking at each one. When she finished her examination, she stood and raised a hand to her mouth with a pensive frown. “There are at least two if not three different artists’ work there. Do you know who they were?”

I shook my head. “I thought they were all by the same guy.”

She shook her head. “I don’t think so.” She pointed to the seabird and the dolphin that I held. “Those two are obviously different from each other, but look at the details around the eyes for these.” She pointed out two on the desk.

I leaned down and looked closely. “Some don’t have eyes.”

She shrugged. “That’s my point. The details are different even though they all have a similar kind of overall technique with a smooth flowing line.” She pursed her lips and shook her head. “No, I’m pretty sure that there are at least three artists here, and a fourth counting your seabird there.”

I looked at the whelkies in my hands—the dolphin’s smooth wood burnished to a high sheen from my constant handling of it over the stanyers, the seabird’s stylized feathers giving the piece unique texture in the carving. I looked up to see Ms. Maloney looking at the dolphin, a slight frown of concentration on her face. I held it out to her. “Would you like to see it?”

She nodded, and I handed it to her. She did what every other person who ever held it had done. She held it in her hand, and stroked the smooth back with the ball of one finger tip. She then held it up turning her hand back and forth to watch the light shine on the wood and across the shell.

“This is a spectacular piece, Captain.”

Ms. Arellone watched curiously from the side, and I could see her looking at the dolphin, and then at Ms. Maloney’s face.

“Would you like to have it?” I asked, surprised by the question as much as she was.

Her eyes went wide in shock. “Captain?”

I nodded at the dolphin. “That whelkie? Would you like to have it?” I nodded at the collection on the desk. “You can have any of them you want, if there’s one there you’d like.”

She glanced at the collection again even as her fingers curled around the dolphin and she turned back to look at me. “But, Captain, this is yours!”

I shook my head and held up the seabird. “This is mine now. You can have the dolphin, if you like.”

“You can’t be serious, Captain. This is priceless!”

I thought about that for a few heartbeats, watching her face, seeing the dolphin already cupped protectively in her fingers. It had been with me for twenty stanyers, seen me through the academy, and all through my career up through the ranks. Somehow, it seemed fitting to leave it with her.

Something in that moment—letting go of the past, accepting a future where I might spread my wings and fly where I wanted to go instead of being maneuvered and manipulated into taking the actions that would define my life—something in that moment clicked into place with a nearly audible snap. I felt my lips curling into a smile. The warmth of it helped to melt the ice inside me and the light of it lifted me in a way I couldn’t explain.

“Yes, I am, and it is,” I said. “But since I’m no longer your captain? Please. Call me Ishmael.”

Other Works

Quarter Share
Half Share
Full Share
Double Share
Captain’s Share
Owner’s Share

South Coast*
Cape Grace**

Fantasy Books by Nathan Lowell

Ravenwood
Zypheria’s Call
The Hermit of Lammas Wood
* Available in audio (itunes and podiobooks.com), print and ebooks coming soon
**Forthcoming

If you enjoyed this novel, you will be happy to learn…

While
Owner’s Share
is the final volume in the six book
Trader’s Tales from The Golden Age of the Solar Clipper
, there are more stories from the Deep Dark on the way. Watch for
Seeker’s Tales
and
Smuggler’s Tales
coming soon to an ebook vendor near you.