had died, shot down in the commonroom and on the bridge; and some of them had
been taken away for slower treatment.
But three of them, himself and old Mitri and Cousin Ross, had lain there in the
blood and the confusion because they were half dead—himself aged ten and
standing with crew because he had slipped around the curve and gotten to his
mother’s side. They had not died, they three, which was Ross’s doing, because
Ross was mad-stubborn to live, and because after they had been left adrift, Ross
had dragged himself from beside the bunk where he had fallen on him and Mitri,
and gotten the med kit that was spilled all over where the pirates had rifled it
for drugs. That was where his mother had been lying shot through the head: he
recalled that all too vividly. She had gotten one of the boarders at the last,
because they had given the women the two guns—they needed them most, Papa Lou
had said—and when Papa Lou vented the children his mother had shot one of the
boarders before they shot her, got an armored man right in the faceplate and
killed him, and they dragged him off with them when they left the ship, probably
because they wanted the armor back. But Aunt Jame had died before she could get
a clear shot at any of them.
Here they had fallen, here, here, here, twelve bodies, and more in the corridor
rightward, and himself and Mitri and Ross.
Those were his memories at times like this, fatigued and mind-numbed, or cooking
a solitary meal in the galley, or walking past vacant cabins, sights that washed
out all the happier past, everything that had been good, behind one red-running
image. Everywhere he walked and sat and slept, someone had died. They had
scrubbed away all the blood and made the plastic benches and the tiles and the
plating clean again; and they had vented their dead at that lonely nullpoint,
undisturbed once the pirate had gone its way—sent them out in space where they
probably still drifted, frozen solid and lost in infinity, about the cinder of
an almost-star. It was a clean, decent disposal, after the ugliness that had
gone before. In his mind they still existed in that limbo, never decayed, never
changed… they went on traveling, no suit between them and space, all the starry
sights they had loved passing continually in front of their open, frozen eyes—a
company of travelers that would stay more or less together, wherever they were
going. All of them. Only Ma’am and the babies had gone ahead, and the others
would never overtake them.
Mitri had died out on the hull one of the times they had had to change Lucy’s
name, when they had run the scam on Pan-paris, and it had gone sour—a stupid
accident that had happened because the Mazianni had stripped them of equipment
they needed. Ross had spent four hours and risked his life getting Mitri back
because they had thought there was hope; but Mitri had been dead from the first
few moments, the pressure in the suit having gone and blood having gotten into
the filters, so Ross just called to say so and stripped the suit and let Mitri
go, another of Lucy’s drifters, but all alone this time. And he, twelve, had sat
alone in the ship shivering, sick with fear that something would happen to
Ross, that he would not get back, that he would die, getting Mitri in.
Leave him, he had yelled at Ross, his own cowardice, before he had even known
that Mitri was dead; he remembered that; and remembered the lonely sound of Ross
crying into the mike when he knew. He had thrown up from fright after Ross had
come in safe. Another lonely nullpoint, those points of mass between the burning
stars that jumpships used to steer by; and he could not have gotten Lucy out of
there, could not have handled the jump on his own, if he had lost Ross then. He
had cried, after that, and Mitri had haunted him, a shape that tumbled through
his dreams, the only one of Lucy’s ghosts that reproached him.