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By Root 380 0

navigator and engineer. Bernice had met people like him before. Sometimes it seemed that the frontier was made up of people like Errol, making ends meet by living in isolation, far away from cities, culture and life. Errol himself seemed content with his three-room life. He was a tall, thickset man in his late forties. He kept his head shaved, and was dark-skinned, although he still managed to look sickly pale – the effect of spending so much time under artificial light or behind the shielded glass of the bridge? Bernice wondered. One side of his face was pitted with a smattering of pockmarks, as if his head were a moon displaying the impact strikes of a shower of meteors. Bernice tried to guess at their origin.

Some strange frontier infection perhaps? The pushing back of the frontier had resulted in people stumbling across new diseases and bacteria.

Errol seemed entirely unselfconscious about this disfigurement. Despite his height, he moved with a crablike grace through the low passageways of his ship. Bernice had enjoyed watching him make the preparations for the journey. Despite the clutter and mess, there was a kind of crazy method to his madness.

Tameka slumped down into a low couch and began to reapply her eyeliner, carving thick black lines beneath her eyes, continuing them past the edge of her eye and up towards her eyebrow.

She worked slowly and carefully, her whole attention focused on the task. Bernice smiled warmly as she watched her student. There was something ridiculous about putting on make-up while locked up in here for the three-day voyage. But then Tameka’s make-up wasn’t about looking attractive. It was part of who she was. As important to her as her name. Bernice remembered a series of disastrous hairstyles from her own youth and grimaced.

Bernice heard Emile moan. ‘Ah, I’m bleeding.’

The acceleration of lift-off had given him a nosebleed. Bernice handed him her handkerchief and he looked at it blankly for a moment before gingerly dabbing at his nose.

‘I’ve got blood on my shirt.’

She ran her hand through his bleached blond hair. His dark roots were well established. ‘All right?’ she asked.

He nodded. ‘I’ll survive.’

‘Good show.’ The sooner she got the two of them back to Dellah and the safe, cloistered walls of St Oscar’s University the better.

Emile’s necklace was twisted around the collar of his shirt, its small wooden beads digging into his fleshy neck. She unknotted it and examined the small image of an oak tree which hung from it. It was unfamiliar to her, although something about the necklace suggested religion. That was it: it reminded her of a rosary.

‘The Natural Path,’ Emile whispered and looked a bit embarrassed.

‘Right,’ Bernice said and let the necklace drop back on to his chest. There were millions of religions scattered across the galaxy. From those that offered a bit of reassurance and meaning in all this uncertainty to those that claimed that they alone knew the secret truth about life. Emile didn’t seem to want to talk about it, so she smiled and left him.

Bernice had long ago decided that the secret of life was that there was no secret. All that you needed to know about life was there for you to see. All you had to do was open your eyes and recognize what you already knew.

She thought about Jason. It was the opening-your-eyes part that was usually the hardest.

Feeling a little disheartened, Bernice made her way to the bridge, cautiously ducking around the piping and light fixtures which threatened to knock her brains out. Errol was sitting upright in the high-backed pilot’s chair, silhouetted against the starscape visible through the glass bubble of the bridge. Bernice caught her breath at the beauty of it.

A window on to space.

Errol was reading something in his lap, one foot idly swinging to and fro. When he saw Bernice coming he smiled and dropped the ’puter terminal on to an instrument bank and turned and nodded a welcome.

‘Everyone survive takeoff?’

Bernice paused in the entrance to the bridge. There was barely enough room for two in the glass sphere. She