and Deirdre both. Ma’am was retired Com 1, and kept the perks she had had in
that post, but evidently chose not to be in Council at the moment. Ma’am and
Mina deserved courtesy on boarding, and Allison worked her way across the room
and the noise and paid it, which Mina answered with a preoccupied nod, but Ma’am
grabbed her hands, kissed her on the cheek as if she had been one of the
toddlers, and let her go again, talking past her to Mina nonstop in a low tone
that involved the military and the rights of merchanters. Allison lingered half
a breath, learned nothing, strayed away again, past other hellos and the
delicate tottering of a two-year-old loose in the press.
She found a bench and sat down, lost in the forest of standing bodies, glanced
across the tops of red contoured furniture which wrapped itself up the curve of
the room: some of the unposteds had stretched out sideways on the benches with
their eyes shielded. Too much celebration, too late. The inevitable bands of
knee-high youngsters yelled and darted as high on the floor curve as they could,
occasionally taking a spill and risking being collared by one of their elders if
their antics knocked into someone. Someone’s baby was squalling, probably Dia’s;
it always did, hating the noise. The older children squealed: it was their time
to burn off all the energy, and it was part of their courage, the racing and the
play and the I-dare-you approach to undock that made a game of the maneuvers
Dublin went through. It gave them nerve for the jump that was coming, which
merchanter babies went through even unborn. These were the under fives, the
youngsters loose among them. The sixes through sixteens were up in the topside
of the cylinder, where they spent most of their dockside time (and all of it for
the six-through-nines) in a topsy-turvy ceiling-downside nursery, where a padded
crawlthrough made G reorientation only another rowdy, tumbling game. Every
Dubliner remembered, with somewhat of nostalgia, how much better that was than
this adult jam-up in the downside lounge.
They gained no numbers in a generation: the matrilineal descent of merchanters
generated new Dubliners of sleepover encounters with more concern for too few
children than too many: another was always welcome, and if one wanted half a
dozen, and another wanted none, that was well enough: it all balanced out from
one generation to the next: Ma’am and Mina and Allison Senior came down, among
others, to Megan and Geoff. Geoff had no line on Dublin, being male; but Megan
had her and Connie, which balanced out; and Connie was already taking the line
down another generation. Only rejuv kept five and sometimes six generations
living at once: like Ma’am, who was pushing a hundred fifty and had faded only
in the last decade, Ma’am, who had been Com 1 so long her voice was Dublin’s in
the minds of everyone. It still made Shockwaves, thin as it had gotten, when
Ma’am made it snap and handed out an order; and there was still the retired Old
Man, who had been the Old Man for most of Allison’s life, and seldom got about
now, snugged in his cabin that was downmost during dock, attended by someone
always during jump, listening to tapes for his entertainment and sleeping more
and more.
Allison herself… was Helm 21, which was status among the unposteds, Third Helm’s
number one of the alterday shift. What do you want to be? Megan had asked her as
early as she could remember the question. When a Dubliner was taking his first
study tapes he got the Question, and started learning principles before awkward
fingers could hold a pen or scrawl his letters, tapestudy from Dublin’s ample
library. So what do you want to be? Megan had asked, and she had wanted to be
bridge crew, where lights flashed and people sat in chairs and did important
things, and where the screens showed the stars and the stations. What do you
want to be? The question came quarterly after that, and it went through a range
of choices, until at ten: I want to be the Old Man, she had said, before she had