Chapter 11
After another two days they passed the asteroids. Squirrel took formal pictures of them in their good clothes in front of the view port as they passed them. At dinner they told them the story of the two lovers from different families who would not eat together. It was long and involved but not too different from similar stories from a dozen other worlds. It ended with them fleeing to the heavens where they danced in reproach of parents who would not make peace.
“I hope we will not similarly anger your parents Miss Squirrel and Mr. O'Riley by marrying you!” laughed Carmencita.
“That's OK,” said O'Riley. “I haven't got any.”
“And I don't talk to mine,” said Squirrel. “So we're good.”
They stopped in mid laugh, stunned. “No parents? Surely someone wanted the blessing of an orphan?”
“State's burden,” said O'Riley. “They set quotas. We're born in batches. And the state raises us. Quite simple really. What you do with this family shite is what's weird.” There was a trace of hostility in his tone. They did not know what to make of it.
“But you were born of family?” asked Raoul of Squirrel. “Do you not talk because you are far away?”
“I have my reasons,” she said levelly.
“What could keep you from your family?”
“I have my reasons” she repeated.
“Is this normal for foreigners?” asked Carmencita.
“Mine are very far away” said José. “But my mother sent me a letter once.”
“I write letters” said M'Elise. “But they think I'm still on the Rich Kingford. So I make stuff up. We move too much to get letters back. They're on different planets though, so I send them the same letters.”
“Do their families quarrel?” asked Raoul. “Why are they on different planets?”
“Because my mom is insane and my dad spends money like Sif's hairdresser. So he unmarried her and bought a shiny new wife and daughters from some backward barbaric planet.” She smiled tartly at them. Raoul was speechless.
“You begin to see my point?” asked O'Riley.
“Do all foreigners have bad family relations?” asked Carmencita.
“No,” said Squirrel. “We're just particularly screwed up.”
They retired quickly to their room. There was no laughter after that dinner.
There was still a low level of tension running through the ship during the next day. They cut the engines, turned off the gravity and let Carmencita and Raoul play in zero gravity until they got sick. It was that night, according to Squirrel's reports on the arrangement of bed linen, that Raoul stopped sleeping on the couch.
“I guess we're doing our job,” said Squirrel.
“Yeah, being freakish enough to scare them into the conformity dictated by their society,” commented M'Elise.
“At least it's something we're good at,” said O'Riley.
“I still don't like the idea of perpetuating child marriage,” said M'Elise. “Getting married at fourteen just seems flat wrong.”
There was a sullen silence. “I had a baby girl when I was fourteen,” said Squirrel. The other two looked on stunned.
“Your parents took her,” said M'Elise after a few moments. “That's why you hate them.”
“By the saints,” swore O'Riley. “It's not like I come from a society of the baby persuasion. But if you're going to go through all that trouble no one should be able to take her away from you!”
Tears ran down Squirrel's cheek. “I was fourteen! What did I know?”
“We'll get her back,” said M'Elise passionately.
“Why? What sort of mother would a stripper make?” said Squirrel quietly.
“Despite repeated requests,” said O'Riley, “you don't seem to be doing much stripping these days.”
Squirrel shook her head. “She doesn't even know me!” O'Riley slammed his fist on the table in frustration. Squirrel cried silently.
“Write to her,” said M'Elise, quietly. “Make her know you. Do it on paper. With pen. Chicklizard blood if you have to. Make it real.”
“Like you do to your family?”
“No. That's bullshit. Everything I say to them is a lie. Might as well be computer generated.”
“Then why do you do it?”
M'Elise sighed and thought. “I don't know. Maybe because I wish I cared. Maybe because I wish they cared.”
“Hope,” said O'Riley. “If you keep going through the motions someday it might come true.”
“Maybe.”
“Do it,” he said to Squirrel. “You care, and at least you have that. I've got bugger all.” He pushed at the tabletop with his fingers. “Half the time I'm glad not to have any family. I see so much bollixed up stuff. Half the time I wish I did, when I see them together,” he glared towards Raoul and Carmencita's room.
“What would I say?” asked Squirrel.
“How old is she? Seven?” said M'Elise. “It isn't hard to write to a seven year old. It's not like writing to your mother. She's not going to care about how much money you make or what you do. Tell her about the fabric you bought, the flower design you made, how happy you were with your hair the other day.”
Squirrel dried her eyes. “OK. I'll try.”
The next day was the insertion maneuver into orbit around their target gas giant. This involved a very close pass and vigorous use of the engines. Given the scale of things, the maneuvers were not hairsplitting or volatile. Large bodies had very predictable courses and, unlike transitional space, the physics of such interactions were very well known.
So José was the only crew needed on the bridge and the two guests took to the other stations and watched wide eyed as the enormous giant drew closer and closer. Great bands of color resolved themselves into turbulent streams of clouds of ever more textured hues. And, as they drew closer again, even more streams of turbulent whirlpools of colors were revealed. Like a living oil painting, it filled the whole view port at closest approach and in addition to the breadth of the spectacle, depth was suddenly revealed as layer over layer upon layer of clouds could be seen in the gaps between the fractal woven streams.
And as they swung around onto the night side the show did not end. Lightning storms of titanic magnitude coruscated through the various layers illuminating the depths and silhouetting what had been the colorful surface bands.
By the time they achieved their orbit, Carmencita and Raoul realized they were ravenous. M'Elise took the shift and heated up a late lunch/early dinner for them. “That was one of the most spectacular sights I've seen,” said Carmencita, zipping through the highlights of the day's journey on the galley screen.
“Yeah,” said M'Elise. “Giants really screw with your sense of scale. I've seen a few. There are a lot of trade points around giants.”
“Is it for the view?” asked Raoul. “I can't imagine growing up under the shadow of one.”
M'Elise shook her head. “There's only a relatively narrow band around a star where it's easy to live. Your system is lucky to have a planet there. It's even luckier when you have a giant there. Each of its moons is like a whole world in the sweet spot.”
Raoul nodded and looked a little embarrassed. Carmencita had brought up the lightning storm again. She pressed her fingers to the screen. “It is hard to believe this is bigger than our entire world.”
“Scale” M'Elise said simply. “Space is all about scale. Work out how far you've traveled in your life. You know, to work and back, to the store and back, visiting relatives. It will be dwarfed by how far you've traveled since you set foot on this ship. And that will be dwarfed by the distance I've traveled since I set foot on this ship.”
Raoul adsorbed this slowly. “I wish I could travel like you do” he said with some amazement.
“No you don't” she said uncharitably. “You've got your family, your wife. You care about them. Stay at home. The universe doesn't care. They galaxy is large and full of people. The first empire spread far and wide before collapsing
under its own weight. We've done it all again at least twice. Possibly more. We don't know. We probably never will.
“The only way all of those people out there can deal with scale like that is by not caring. There are rules and regs to define how to deal without dealing. They will grind you up and spit you out looking like everyone else because there is no other way to deal with scale.”
She pointed at the screen. “If we pushed our ship to the maximum velocity and crashed headlong into the giant there, how far off its orbit do you think it would be deflected?” Raoul shrugged. “Less than any instrument built by humanity can measure.” She let that sink in. “The universe doesn't care. So stay where you are. Be happy with what you have. The distance you travel does not equate to wisdom or knowledge.” She lapsed into silence.
Feeling awkward she got up and made more espresso. She served them fresh cups and cleared away the old ones. “Sorry,” she apologized eventually. "Old travelers get like that.”
“You are not old!” said Carmencita.
“It's not the years, it's the mileage,” said M'Elise.
“I, for one, could do with less years and more mileage,” said the old man, wandering in.
“Grandfather! Please join us,” said Raoul, moving to make room for him. He did so, making a great show of sitting with his stiff back. He looked pointedly at the espresso machine and M'Elise. She rolled her eyes and began to prepare a cup for him.
“Miss M'Elise was saying the universe is too large for family,” said Carmencita. “But that can't be so. You must have a wife, children, grandchildren?”
The old man snorted. “My wife is dead, at least as far as I’m concerned. And good riddance to the witch. My spoiled children are ungrateful and my grandchildren are worse.”
She looked shocked. “Do you never see your grandchildren?”
“Oh, I'm sure we'll be seeing them sooner than I like. The galaxy isn't big enough to get away from them for very long.” He sipped his espresso. “But our morose exec is right about one thing. You shouldn't listen to us go on about the galaxy and all that. It will just depress you. God knows it depresses me.”
“I'll be on the bridge,” said M'Elise, leaving.
The next day the José Fabuloso set down on one of the larger of the satellites surrounding the gas giant. It was an airless ball of ice broken only by age old impact craters and pressure ridges.
José suited up with Carmencita and Raoul to go out and explore the surface. Their shouts and laughter could be heard over the ship's comm as they made huge leaps and tumbles in the low gravity.
“At least someone is having fun” commented Squirrel. She sat in the galley with M'Elise and O'Riley, staring at a blank piece of paper. The old man puttered away making himself a sandwich.
“Grandpappy paid enough” said O'Riley. “They should be.”
“No, I mean José.” They listened to him giving advice on how to turn flips while leaping through the lack of air.
M'Elise picked her head up from her folded arms and listened for a bit. “Yeah” she said. “He's always happy. Happy-go-lucky. Lucky-go-happy. That's our José.”
“The worst I can remember him has been when we've run out of Solar Corona,” said O'Riley. “Even then, he was just mildly disappointed.”
“Happy like a child,” said M'Elise, absently.
“What's he got to be so happy about?” Squirrel asked.
“He's captain of his own ship and crew,” said M'Elise. “It's what we all dreamed about in the Merchant Marine.”
“A stolen ship. Forged crew. On the run. You can't be forgetting little details like that,” said O'Riley.
“I'm not,” said M'Elise. “I never do. Keep's me up at night. I was just saying it looks good on paper. I guess he forgets about the details.”
“Anyone who is satisfied with Solar Corona has to be easy to please” snorted O'Riley.
They all listened to him laugh after a failed landing and protracted tumble. “It's like he's doesn't have a care in the world” said Squirrel. “I wish I could be like that.”
“He's either very stupid, or very smart,” said the old man.
“He's happy. We aren't,” said M'Elise. “You do the math.”
They spent another day bouncing around another moon before moving to the ring system. There they used jet packs to move from one ice hunk to another under the massive expanse of the gas giant. After that it was time to turn the ship back towards Mérida.
Raoul and Carmencita broke out special food they brought, forgotten till now, and cooked up an expansive dinner for the whole crew. Their enthusiasm and wonder at what they had seen was infectious and began to lift the spirits of the crew.
José replayed recordings of past landing and let them choose the stunt they were to return by. Squirrel traded dance moves with Carmencita and O'Riley introduced Raoul to some stronger spirits.
Between ferreting out José's speeding ticket collection and administering analgesics from the pharmacy M'Elise kept to the bridge. The old man joined her, bringing a bottle of absinth he had been gifted with. “I thought you might like a drink.”
“Yes. But why did you bring that?” she asked.
He sat at the second station, poured a glass and held it out to her.
She shook her head. “I've had enough to last my lifetime.” She considered again. “And my children's lifetime. And their children's lifetime. Maybe then.”
“Suit yourself. More for me.” He took a sip and grimaced in a satisfied way. He leaned over unashamedly to see what she was looking at. “Oh. News feed. Anything interesting?”
“Not yet,” she said. “Any day now though.” She paged through several more feeds.
“What's getting you then?”
She looked at him unbelievingly. “Hello? We're implicated in taking out the Port Newark orbital.”
“You,” he corrected. “Oh. Just look.” He pointed at the scrolling information. “Disasters happen all the time all over the place.”
“Yes. Life sucks. Your point?”
“You were talking about scale. The universe doesn't care and all that. Well sometimes it works in your favor. No matter how bad it is there is something far worse in the next news feed.” He winked at her and left the bridge. She was not reassured.