The furniture was gone. You walked up steps to the floor and there was a depression full of white cushions. Besides there was a pedestal with braces going out to it, but nothing on it.
“You can vacuum,” Chihin said. “Floor, walls, everything. Steam vac. All the dust. Height could help. Are your feet clean?”
He looked. They weren’t, exactly. “I’ll go wash,” he said meekly.
“Packaged wet towel, right there by the steps.” Chihin frowned at him as he sat down on the steps and reached for it. He tried not to look at her face. He felt sick, he had felt sick ever since he had backed into the tc’a, but he couldn’t go back to that closed room, he couldn’t stand it. So he washed his feet off so no one could complain of a smudge and he looked for a place to dispose of the towel.
“Over there,” Chihin said, indicating a plastic bucket. He went and dropped it in. “You know how to use the steam vac?”
“Yes, ma’am.” He was too well acquainted with it. It was all Sahern had let him do for his first weeks aboard the Sun. He went and checked the prime, checked the water and pulled the filter screen, which he figured he ought to clean before someone else found fault with him. “Is there a sink, ma’am, or should I—“
“Bath’s in there. Sink works just like ours—it’s the fixture on the left.”
He went and washed the filter. It was different plumbing. Ordinarily he would have been intrigued, but the lump in his throat would not go away and he just tried to go moment by moment and not to think about what the captain had said, one way or the other. The captain had a right to be mad, gods, he couldn’t pay back the damage he’d cost—probably nobody in Meras clan history had ever fouled up so egregiously, so consistently.
But the docking chief had said to move the cart.
He put the vacuum back together. He took it to a corner and started there, with a racket that made conversation impossible. But he was aware of Chihin staring at him from time to time: maybe she expected the vac to explode or something; or him to do something she could fault. Of all the crew, Chihin was not in any way friendly, and he supposed by now the rest of the crew was ready to kill him. Except maybe … at least Tarras had tried to speak for him. Fala and Tiar had looked upset, as well they might, but they hadn’t hated him. Chihin—didn’t want him here. Which was why the captain had sent him to work with her, he supposed. But it was still better than sitting alone in the laundry and remembering backing into that truck, and that thing snaking back and forth in pain and battering itself against the windows, leaving bits of skin and fluid on the glass…
At least it hadn’t exploded. Nobody had gotten killed- Quite the opposite. Somebody had gotten created. He wondered how the tc’a felt.”
“The kid was trying to straighten out the loader,” Tarras said. There was still ice in her beard, melting and glistening in the heat of the downside office—Hilfy had called her up, ordered her to trade places with Fala, and the way to the dock lay through the lower main corridor and past her office. So she had both of them, Tarras and Fala, arguing with her, the loader was in temporary shut-down, pending the switch, and no cargo was moving. But she figured she might as well listen and be done with it.
“All right,” she said. “Voices on Meras’ behalf … while we’re at it.” She pushed the call button.
“Cousin. Listen in.”
“Aye,”Tiar answered from the bridge. “What’s up?”
“The loader jammed,” Tarras said, and sat down, while Fala edged a half a step further into the office, in the doorway. “The kid knew the equipment— Sun Ascendantmust use the same model. Anyway, it pulled its usual stunt, and the kid said it was the 14-can truck, when the arm positions itself: he says it’s a false signal, there’s nothing to do with the chain, it’s the arm overextending. This one model of truck has a slightly lower bed. It reaches down to get it, the arm jams, jams the chain, you back the chain—it fixes it. So if you move the truck a little farther—“