easy as from a page.
Number two, she thought of him. And she caught herself thinking it with a stab
of cold, that that was how it was. There was a man who had this ship, and there
was a working unit of Reillys who knew each other’s signals and had no need of
explaining how it worked, who looked down familiar perspectives and knew what
they were to each other and where all the lines were. Number two to her: it fell
that way in seniority by two days, two days between her and Curran, between her
and a man who would have been as good, at least in his own reckoning. Who could
not have gotten them what she had gotten—
—not the same way, she could reckon him saying, raw with sarcasm.
But Curran never saw any way but straight ahead. Would never have blasted them
out of their inertia. Would never have taken any chance but the one he was born
with: dead stubborn, that was Curran. And it was his flaw. Possibly he knew it.
It was why he was loyal: the same inability to swerve. It was a different
loyalty from Deirdre’s, which was a deep-seated dislike of a number one’s kind
of decisions; or than Neill’s, which was a tongue-tied silence: Neill’s mind
went wider than some, so it took him longer to put his ideas together—a good
bridge officer, Neill, but nothing higher. She knew them. Knew what they were
good for and how the whole worked, stronger than its parts. She looked down from
where she sat and their reflexes all went toward each other and toward her in a
sequencing so smooth no one thought about it.
She was number one to them. To Curran she had to be. To justify his taking
orders and not giving them, she had to be. And the others—it all broke apart
without herself and Curran at their perpetual one-two give and take. Curran was
jealous of Stevens, she realized that all in a stroke, a jealousy that had
nothing to do with sex; with a pairing, yes; with a function like right hand and
left. For her to form another kind of linkup, taking another man in a different
way, in which an almost-brother could not intervene, in which he had no
place—What was Curran then? she thought—too proud to settle to Deirdre and
Neill’s partnership, and cast out of hers in favor of a stranger met in a
sleepover. He had to go on respecting her judgment: that was part of his
rationale. But that left him. That flatly left him.
She cast a second and sidelong look at her cousin, settling deeper into the
cushion, folding her arms. “I’ll think of something,” she said.
“Going to eat?” he asked after a moment.
She looked at the elapsed time. 1101. She nodded, got out of the seat and walked
off toward the galley.
A cold sandwich, a cold drink from storage… mealtime, as they reckoned time
aboard, from the time of their arrival at the nullpoint. There was no need to
force a realtime schedule on tired bodies, no need to reckon realtime at all
except in communications, and they were getting no more of that. They had become
introverted in their passage, disconnected from other time-scales. And there
was, when all the movement and human noise was absent—a silence that made her
eat her sandwich pacing the small floor space of the galley; that sent her eye
to the vacant white plastic tables and benches of the galley mess, and her mind
to spacing out the number that could have sat at the tables-Thirty. About
thirty. Double that for mainday and alterday shifts, a ship’s crew of about
sixty above infancy. And the vacant cabins and the silences…
She had expected a lot of 1 G storage on the ship, a lot of the ring given over
to cargo. Customs would expect that. It was a question how far customs would
break with courtesies and search the cabins: more likely, they contented
themselves with the holds and did a tight check of the flow of goods on and off.
A perfect setup for a smuggler, nested in a ship like this, with a good story