“Yes, captain.”
“Do you believe I’m joking?”
He looked the captain in the face, a very pretty face it was, and a very serious and dangerous one.
“No, captain,”
“Do you want to spend a year down there?”
“No, captain. But if I could help in any way—“
“You don’t help!” She jabbed the forefinger in his direction and he backed up. “You don’t offer to help me, you don’t offer to help my crew, you don’t offer to help our passenger. You never saw anything, you will never remember that you saw anything in the stsho’s cabin, and if you ever do remember you saw anything you’ll forget it forthwith. Do you follow that?”
“Yes, captain.”
“With luck someone will come through here and I can send you home.”
He hoped not. He truly hoped not. He knew that the captain was angry and that she had absolutely good reason.
“I want more than anything,” he said, “to help. I don’t want to go back to Anuurn. I never want to go back to Anuurn.”
“We can do better,” she said, “without your help. Stay out of it, do you hear me?”
“Yes, captain.”
With which she walked out. And shut the door. He sat down again. It was not an uncomfortable place to be. And he didn’t get his hopes up. She’d said—there might be another ship. He truly hoped not. He hoped he would have another chance.
He sat down and thought and thought how he might have done differently about the accident; and the stsho; and how he could, still, if he could just get one break, prove to the captain that he was qualified—if they would just let him work cargo. He wouldn’t back up any more trucks. But they wouldn’t believe that. He wouldn’t be in any corridors he wasn’t supposed to be in. But Chihin had told him go there. So he’d thought it was safe…
Maybe Chihin had set him up. But he didn’t want to think so. She’d been fair, about him startling her. She’d taken shots at him, but everybody did. He didn’t want to think Chihin had done it to him. And she certainly hadn’t been responsible for the truck. That was all his doing.
Tiar brought him supper soon after, which was stew. Tiar asked him if the captain had explained things to him and he said that she had. Tiar said don’t take the captain too seriously, and said that the captain yelled when she was upset, but that she was fair when she calmed down.
“I’m sorry about scaring the stsho,” he said, and Tiar said it wasn’t hard to scare the stsho, the harder problem was keeping it happy, which they had to do. And Tiar said he’d done all right, except not to take any chances, even if it seemed people were yelling at him—don’t let them rattle him or make him move faster than he could think.
In other words, he thought, Calm down. It was what women said to misbehaving boys, stupid boys, who at about thirteen started having shaking mad temper fits, and their sisters said, ‘That’s all right, just calm down, Hallan,’ and papa got irritable and refused to have him around any more, and youngest sister said, ‘Try to think, Hal, just use your head about things, everybody feels like that.’
(Then oldest sister said, after he was sixteen, ‘He thinks too much. He can’t survive out there.’ Or at home either: papa had told him get out, the girl his sisters had tried to fix him up with said he wasn’t a match for her brothers, and his sisters had spent all their savings to get him a ticket to station, to a place they’d never seen, and hadn’t any interest in going to; but it was everything he wanted, and they gave him that very expensive chance—for which he adored them. He couldn’t come back and be sent down in disgrace they’d know about, to an exile he’d die in, because he’d trained himself to be here, that was all, and he’d rather die here than there.)
He didn’t have much appetite for the stew Tiar left him. But he told himself that was male temper too, upsetting his stomach. He told himself stop it and think how he was going to feel in an hour or two; and how if they were going for jump this soon, he had to get the food down, as much as he could make his stomach take.