Thorby thought. “Why, the Family. Everything depends on who you are in the Family.”
“Not at all. His ship.”
“Well, when you say ‘ship’ you mean ‘family.’ ”
“Just backwards. If a Trader becomes dissatisfied, where can he go? Space won’t have him without a ship around him; nor can he imagine living on a planet among fraki, the idea is disgusting. His ship is his life, the air he breathes comes from his ship; somehow he must learn to live in it. But the pressure of personalities is almost unbearable and there is no way to get away from each other. Pressure could build up until somebody gets killed . . . or until the ship itself is destroyed. But humans devise ways to adjust to any conditions. You people lubricate with rituals, formalism, set patterns of speech, obligatory actions and responses. When things grow difficult you hide behind a pattern. That’s why Fritz didn’t stay angry.”
“Huh?”
“He couldn’t. You had done something wrong . . . but the fact itself showed that you were ignorant. Fritz had momentarily forgotten, then he remembered and his anger disappeared. The People do not permit themselves to be angry with a child; instead they set him back on the proper path . . . until he follows your complex customs as automatically as Fritz does.”
“Uh, I think I see.” Thorby sighed. “But it isn’t easy.”
“Because you weren’t born to it. But you’ll learn and it will be no more effort than breathing — and as useful. Customs tell a man who he is, where he belongs, what he must do. Better illogical customs than none; men cannot live together without them. From an anthropologist’s view, ‘justice’ is a search for workable customs.”
“My father — my other father, I mean; Baslim the Cripple — used to say the way to find justice is to deal fairly with other people and not worry about how they deal with you.”
“Doesn’t that fit what I said?”
“Uh, I guess so.”
“I think Baslim the Cripple would regard the People as just.” She patted his shoulder. “Never mind, Thorby. Do your best and one day you’ll marry one of those nice girls. You’ll be happy.”
The prophecy did not cheer Thorby.
Chapter 9
By the time Sisu approached Losian Thorby had a battle station worthy of a man. His first assignment had been to assist in the central dressing station, an unnecessary job. But his background in mathematics got him promoted.
He had been attending the ship’s school. Baslim had given him a broad education, but this fact did not stand out to his instructors, since most of what they regarded as necessary — the Finnish language as they spoke it, the history of the People and of Sisu, trading customs, business practices, and export and import laws of many planets, hydroponics and ship’s economy, ship safety and damage control — were subjects that Baslim had not even touched; he had emphasized languages, science, mathematics, galactography and history. The new subjects Thorby gobbled with a speed possible only to one renshawed by Baslim’s strenuous methods. The Traders needed applied mathematics — bookkeeping and accounting, astrogation, nucleonics for a hydrogen-fusion-powered n-ship. Thorby splashed through the first, the second was hardly more difficult, but as for the third, the ship’s schoolmaster was astounded that this ex-fraki had already studied multi-dimensional geometries.
So he reported to the Captain that they had a mathematical genius aboard.
This was not true. But it got Thorby reassigned to the starboard fire-control computer.
The greatest hazard to trading ships is in the first and last legs of each jump, when a ship is below speed-of-light. It is theoretically possible to detect and intercept a ship going many times speed-of-light, when it is irrational to the four-dimensional space of the senses; in practice it is about as easy as hitting a particular raindrop with a bow and arrow during a storm at midnight. But it is feasible to hunt down a ship moving below speed-of-light if the attacker is fast and the victim is a big lumbering freighter.
The Sisu had acceleration of one hundred standard gravities and used it all to cut down the hazard time. But a ship which speeds up by a kilometer per second each second will take three and one half standard days to reach speed-of-light.