Expendable - James Alan Gardner [26]
Leave-Taking
I spent too long drying my hair and trying to get it to fluff properly. It should have been cut weeks ago, but I refused to have it done on ship—the Jacaranda barber felt she had the right to comment on my appearance and make suggestions to improve it. (“All it would take is the right kind of makeup, not really heavy, just some pancake, and we could soften that color a lot. What if you wore your hair over to the side like this? Well really, Festina, I’m just trying to help. If you’d just make an effort, you could hide it so scarcely anyone would notice.”)
Rushing, rushing, and I was nearly out the door when it occurred to me I might not see this room again. The thought chilled me. My collection. Two thousand, three hundred and sixty-four eggs, catalogued, mounted, polished.
And if I died? Perhaps the captain would let the crew traipse through my quarters and take whatever appealed to them, manhandling my treasures, breaking them, laughing at me for collecting useless dead things.
Or perhaps Harque would come with a garbage hopper and throw in all my eggs, smash, smash, smash, and they would be jettisoned into space, shot out through the Sperm tail like trash and Explorers.
No.
No.
Surprising what can give you the will to live.
My Will
But I was an Explorer, a good Explorer, and therefore a realist. I didn’t have much time, but I keyed the computer for audio input and dictated the following. “Instructions: lock the room and do not open until you register my voice print or Yarrun’s. Confirm?”
It beeped once, then responded, “Confirmed.”
“If anyone overrides my instructions by asserting that I am dead or Lost on Landing, you will immediately inform Captain Prope and Fleet Central Records that I bequeath my egg collection and all personal effects to…”
To whom? My parents were dead. Yarrun would be my second choice, but he was about to go Oh Shit with me. Perhaps I could leave everything to my old crush Jelca…but no, a classmate told me he had gone Lost three years ago; she hadn’t known the details. No other friends came to mind. No one really….
“I bequeath my collection and personal effects to Admiral Seele. Confirm?”
“Confirmed.”
There. Everything to my first Admiral, the one who wept and tried to hold my hand. It was a bequest Prope and Harque wouldn’t dare ignore. And Seele cared for me in her way. As good a way as any.
I wondered if she belonged to the High Council now. I wondered if she had been the one who picked me to take Chee to Melaquin. If so, receiving my collection would unsettle her.
It would seem like some kind of gesture.
In the Halls (Part 2)
While I was asleep, the day shift had come on duty. The corridors were now filled with crew members striding along, wearing self-important airs that told the world they had Things to Do. Most pretended to be so absorbed by their obligations that they didn’t notice me; those who couldn’t pull off such obliviousness doffed self-conscious salutes to me without meeting my eyes.
As I passed open hatchways, I heard snippets of conversation. The crew seemed bursting to tell each other that Admiral Chee was on board. (“A real admiral, but he’s here incognito, so keep it secret.”) Each of them had a theory why Chee was here: Prope was going to be court-martialled; Prope was going to be promoted; the League of Peoples had decided humanity was mature enough to receive another technological “gift,” and the Jacaranda was taking the admiral to pick it up.
Once in a while, the gossipers noticed me and instantly went silent. Before I passed out of earshot, their babble began again with, “I’ll bet she knows.”
And yet no one spoke directly to me. No one asked if I had news. It was as if I were encased in glass walls that no one could break through—not them, and not me.
Even now, that’s how I remember the Jacaranda.
First Sighting
On the bridge, Harque sat at the pilot’s console and occasionally tapped a key to make course corrections. Chee frolicked behind him in the captain’s command chair, swivelling left and right as far