The Bright Black Sea (7 page)

'I understand.'

'Times are no better along the Boulevard than they
are in space,' she continued. 'I'll have to decide whether to stick
it out, or call it quits. If too many of us stay, we'll all
starve... And if not, what am I to do? I suppose I could go down to
the Amibon coast. I know enough spaceers, so maybe I could find a
partner. But in six months or a year he'll be off again, and where
would I be?'

'I'm hearing it may be four to five
years
just
to turn the slump around and ten to recover...'

'Bloody Neb, you're kidding me mate. Guild
unemployment credits won't last that long and I'll end up
supporting a beach combing chump.'

'Hardly fair. We can be tamed. When domesticated,
tramp spaceers can be quite handy around the house, cook, clean,
repair appliances. Besides there's always work for rocket pilots,
systems techs and even engineers. And I'm sure you could manage a
poor spaceer, my dear. Though you could probably make a better
career move than finding an out of work spaceer to partner
with.'

'Perhaps, but I know spaceers...'

'Suppose you do. Well, don't go by what I say.
Haven't a clue, myself. My firm has a young second class scholar in
economics who's making these predictions, but I'm not sure it's
anything better than a guess at this point.'

She considered that in silence for a moment and
looked up with a smile on her mechanical face. 'Well, thanks mate,
you've given me something to think about. Can I give you my badge
id? When you're free, as you'll likely be, look me up.'

'Sure,' I said and pulled up my sleeve where I was
wearing the com link so that she could use her finger to transfer
that data.. 'And let me have your purse, Lyrath. I owe you for the
heat...'

'Thanks Captain. Not necessary. It's on the house.
I'm not in the furnace business. Yet.' she added.

'I insist. A little offering to the Neb for surviving
my first voyage as Captain.'

'Well for luck , Captain. Thank you. You're sweet,'
she said, presenting her little purse.

I punched in a credit amount on the keypad and
authenticated it with the chip in my finger insert. 'Have a meal
delivered while you do your laundry.'

'You're over generous, Captain. I can't accept that
for... a little heat.'

'Well if you find me derelict on some bench along
Star Gate a few months from now, I'll expect you to take me home
and nurse me back to health and happiness.'

'Right. I hope to see you before ...'

'Maybe. Till , fair orbits, Lyrath,' I said with a
smile.

I nodded to the flier pilot who had been hanging in
the middle distance waiting, and boarded the flier he indicated was
his. I gave him Min & Co's address and we lifted off into the
fog. Like companion avatars, fliers can be flown remotely, but on
Calissant, as on many worlds, passengers prefer to ride fliers with
pilots onboard. The theory being that they'll fly a bit less
carefree if they have to pay the consequences along with
passengers. I doubt it. Most flier pilots are ex-spaceers who are
flying taxis because they were never overly concerned about
consequences. However this was just a short hop up and over a few
kilometers and what the fog hid didn't overly concern me. We
touched down on a rooftop landing stage in less than a minute. I
punched in the credits and slipped out into the dense dampness
forty stories up just as another flier landed. I crossed the
landing stage to the rooftop lobby and summoned the lift. I stepped
aboard as the door opened and stood in the door to hold it for the
other flier's passengers.

Through the clearsteel lobby wall, I watched a
strange, slim, bird like figure absently make her way into the
lobby from the gloom. At first glance I thought she was an avatar,
her legs seemed too long, too slim and she was barefooted as well.
But as she approached I realized she was not an avatar, though her
legs were indeed, intricately mechanical. Her head was bowed, her
hands in her coat pockets, she walked, lost in thought.

I felt a dart of pity. Though perhaps sympathy is the
more appropriate word.

Only after stepping into the lobby did she look up,
quietly startled to find me watching her from the waiting lift.

I find it impossible to connect the right combination
of words to describe what I caught in her eyes for a single second.
There was sadness, perhaps loneliness, or a quality of being lost,
a remoteness, or perhaps it was quietness, and, I felt, an unspoken
appeal... She blinked and her eyes were well guarded, showing
nothing.

I felt embarrassed, an intruder in a private moment,
and she may well have felt it too. And resented it. She took a
swift survey of me with now guarded eyes, nodded slightly, and said
quietly, 'Thanks, mate.'

'My pleasure,' I replied and stepped into the lift,
off to one side. She followed me in.

I punched in floor 27. She glanced at it and kept her
hands in her coat pockets. The doors closed and the car
dropped.

I could not read her age. It's hard to pin down even
an approximate age between the first three decades of youth and
well into the second half of one's second century. Only the
accumulated experience seen in the eyes and carriage give a clue as
to age. Her eyes lacked the look of age, but her face was rather
worn and thin, her hair pulled tight and tucked under her cap. She
was, however, a spaceer, a fellow pilot, judging from the pilot's
wheel pin on her cap. I didn't see a company badge, but the
expensive cut and quality of her uniform style coat suggested she
was employed by one of the big passenger or freight liner
companies. Since most of the offices in the building are devoted to
interplanetary trade she was not out of place.

We spent the few seconds in the lift without further
words, she looking straight ahead. The lift's abrupt slowing to a
stop at floor 27 made me glad I'd strapped a pair of braces on my
legs before coming down. In theory, daily workouts and electro-sim
treatments should keep one fit enough to handle Calissant's .93
standard grav. But I wanted to attend my tasks without getting too
tired or resting too often, so I was wearing a thin, powered
exoskeleton under my trousers to take a some of the load off my
legs.

It was only as the door opened and she started out
that it occurred to me who she had to be.

I'd never met Tallith Min. I saw her parents
occasionally when they visited Miccall aboard ship and so I didn't
pay too much attention to their accident at the time. For spaceers,
things like that always happen far away and awhile ago – a remote
event. It greatly affected Miccall however. He never was quite the
same afterwards.

On learning that Tallith Min was now in charge of Min
& Co, I'd talked to the old gang who knew her and her parents
far better. As a child, she had sailed aboard the
Lost Star
with her uncle, Captain Vinden, and she and the old gang have
gotten together at various times over the years since , but they
could offer no useful insights. I did know she was the fourth pilot
of a Zenith Line freighter at the time of the accident, so she knew
the trade from our point of view.

The accident that killed her parents was quite
unusual – a space boat with a dead man at the controls smashed into
the Mins' boat at the edge of space above Calissant's Trimeta Sea.
Tallith was piloting the Min's boat and managed to nurse the
damaged craft down to an island beach crash landing. It was found
however, that her parents had been instantly killed and the landing
left Tallith more dead than alive. She'd spent the better part of
the last two years recovering on the planet of Kimsai, amongst the
mystic Taoist adepts – widely known for their healing skills –
where her older brother, an adept, looked after her.

Too late to say anything, I hung back, drifting down
the passageway at a leisurely pace. I was, however, right, in my
guess. She strode into the clearsteel walled office of Min & Co
at the end of the passageway like she owned the place. Several
gentlemen and a lady rose as she entered to greet her.

I waited until they disappeared into her office
before thoughtfully pushing though the clearsteel office doors,
fearing I'd seen too much in that unguarded second.

Ensly Mirrior is a small, quiet, grey and dour woman.
I sat watching her slowly plow through my accounts and wondered if
she was born for this work or if the work made her so. Speaking
from personal experience, dealing with ship captains is not for the
faint of heart, so dealing with ship captains and their accounts
must be pretty grim work.

I'd had a brief interview with the office manager,
Phylea Kardea, who welcomed me home, congratulated me on my modest
success, and said Tallith Min hoped that I'd stay to meet with her
when I finished my accounts. I was passed on to Ensly, who handles
the
Lost Star
accounts and we set out to reconcile my
verified accounts with their records.

In interstellar trade the preferred credit transfer
method is the Unity Carter Central Bank's CreditTokens, issued and
monitored by the Directorate of Machines. But as that relies on the
Sentient Directorate, which, while absolutely reliable, makes
humans nervous, CreditTokens are only used when reliable human
financial links are not available. In our interplanetary trade we
relied on a web of interplanetary financial institutions that used
a system where each transaction was authenticated by both parties
with a set of codes, one of which is radio transmitted and the
other delivered on a physical drive. Credits change accounts in a
complex chain of inner-bank transfers only after being verified by
both codes. My transactions were routinely transmitted to Min &
Co via radio-packets, but the second, physical drive versions of
those transactions needed to match the transmitted codes to
finalize the credit transfers. These transactions had to be found
in our two ledgers and reconciled to complete the transfers. In
theory it should be a simple matter of merging the two accounts,
but in practice, it's not. At least it wasn't for me. Miccall had
always handled the financial side and his and Min & Co's
conventions were unfamiliar to me. As a result, entries appeared
under different headings and sometimes names in our two files.
Tracking them down took a focused effort for more than two
hours.

Halfway through Illynta signaled to say Dyn had
wrapped up his affairs. I told them not to wait, I'd take a shuttle
up when, or if, Neb help me, I was ever able to find my way clear
of these Neb blasted accounts.

Fortunately, as grim as Ensly looked, she was patient
(or resigned) and we worked our way through the accounts without
harsh words. As the process was drawing to a close, I began
thinking about my next meeting and asked her what she thought of
our new boss. 'Nice enough. Doesn't say much. Has a lot to learn,
but Phylea is confident,' was her assessment.

'Do they get along? I'd imagine Phylea has had to
step back, after running Min & Co for several years.'

'Phylea's been running the firm for twenty years,'
Ensly replied. 'The Mins brought in the clients and kept them well
dined and happy. Phylea ran the actual operation. The accident was
a tragedy, but it did not affect our operation much. The trade
collapse is another story. We'll get by, thanks to the small ship
traders whose business is now booming. They need bookkeepers and
shipbrokers to keep everything straight. Still, we're moving down
to the less expensive 5th floor in three weeks and half the staff
will likely be looking for other employment before it runs its
course.'

'Aye, don't know what I'll be doing tomorrow.'

'Don't go in for accounting,' she replied blandly
without looking up.

I laughed. 'Damn, that was my best hope.'

'In that case you're bound for a Guild sleeper,' she
replied drolly and hurried on. 'Hard times even for the owner. Sold
off her parent's estate, including the Primecentra flat and the
country house. The people in her office are buying her yacht.'

'Why?' Calissant does not have private banks, loans
are handled by the Ministry of Credit, which in fact, extends
little credit, mostly short term loans so that almost no one is in
debt on Calissant. Selling off didn't seem to make sense.

'No credits to squeeze out of the business and the
Ministry of Death wants its cut now. More to the point, the estate
must be divided three ways – there's a sister on an Outward Survey
mission and a brother on Kimsai with shares coming. We'd not fetch
anything in a sale at the moment so the easiest way to settle the
estate was to sell what could be sold, divide the proceeds and put
the credits in a Ministry account.'

'Has to be hard for her...' at which point Kardea
appeared in the door and asked if we were done.

Ensly nodded. 'I can finish up without the
Captain.'

I stood, thanked Ensly for her patience, promised to
do better if ever given the chance again.

She mimicked holding her breath and rolled her eyes,
and said very seriously, 'Good luck, Captain.'

I laughed. Ensly had her hidden depths.

I tried not to take that Good luck as a warning and
followed Kardea to Min's office. She knocked and waved me in,
closing the door softly behind me.

The entire outside wall was deck to ceiling
clearsteel, which, on a clear day would offer a panoramic view of
Port Prime from over the lower buildings lining Star Gate
Boulevard. On this afternoon in early spring, however, it was a
merely a sheet of soft pale light etched with water droplets and
rivulets. On my left, a wide clear desk faced the clearsteel wall,
the softly glowing desktop the office's only other illumination. To
my right, a setting of chairs and a sofa. Tallith Min, standing, a
slim, strange silhouette against the grey afternoon light, turned
as I was shown in.