Citizen of the Galaxy by Robert A. Heinlein

Asleep, he dreamt of Pop and of Sisu, all mixed up. At last, with Grandmother shortened and a raider bearing down. Pop whispered, “No more bad dreams, Thorby. Never again, son. Just happy dreams”

He slept peacefully then — and awoke in this forbidding place with gabbling fraki all around him. Breakfast was substantial but not up to Aunt Athena’s high standards; however he was not hungry.

After breakfast he was quietly tasting his misery when he was required to undress and submit to indignities. It was his first experience with medical men’s offhand behavior with human flesh — he loathed the poking and prodding.

When the Commanding Officer sent for him Thorby was not even cheered by seeing the man who knew Pop. This room was where he had had to say a last “good-business” to Father; the thoughts lingering there were not good.

He listened listlessly while Brisby explained. He woke up a little when he understood that he was being offered status — not much, he gathered. But status. The fraki had status among themselves. It had never occurred to him that fraki status could matter even to fraki.

“You don’t have to,” Colonel Brisby concluded, “but it will make simpler the thing Colonel Baslim wanted me to do — find your family, I mean. You would like that, wouldn’t you?”

Thorby almost said that he knew where his Family was. But he knew what the Colonel meant: his own sib, whose existence he had never quite been able to imagine. Did he really have blood relatives somewhere?

“I suppose so,” he answered slowly. “I don’t know.”

“Mmm . . .” Brisby wondered what it was like to have no frame to your picture. “Colonel Baslim was anxious to have me locate your family. I can handle it easier if you are officially one of us. Well? It’s Guardsman third class . . . thirty credits a month, all you can eat and not enough sleep. And glory. A meager amount.”

Thorby looked up. “This is the same Fam — service my Pop — Colonel Baslim, you call him — was in? He really was?”

“Yes. Senior to what you will be. But the same service. I think you started to say ‘family.’ We like to think of the Service as one enormous family. Colonel Baslim was one of the more distinguished members of it.”

“Then I want to be adopted.”

“Enlisted.”

“Whatever the word is.”

Chapter 16

Fraki weren’t bad when you got to know them.

They had their secret language, even though they thought they talked Interlingua. Thorby added a few dozen verbs and a few hundred nouns as he heard them; after that he tripped over an occasional idiom. He learned that his light-years as a trader were respected, even though the People were considered odd. He didn’t argue; fraki couldn’t know better.

H.G.C. Hydra lifted from Hekate, bound for the Rim worlds. Just before jump a money order arrived accompanied by a supercargo’s form which showed the draft to be one eighty-third of Sisu’s appreciation from Jubbulpore to Hekate — as if, thought Thorby, he were a girl being swapped. It was an uncomfortably large sum and Thorby could find no entry charging him interest against a capital share of the ship — which he felt should be there for proper accounting; it wasn’t as if he had been born in the ship. Life among the People had made the beggar boy conscious of money in a sense that alms never could — books must balance and debts must be paid.

He wondered what Pop would think of all that money. He felt easier when he learned that he could deposit it with the Paymaster.

With the draft was a warm note, wishing him good business wherever he went and signed: “Love, Mother.” It made Thorby feel better and much worse.

A package of belongings arrived with a note from Fritz: “Dear Brother, Nobody briefed me about recent mysterious happenings, but things were crisp around the old ship for a few days. If such were not unthinkable, I would say there had been a difference of opinion at highest level. Me, I have no opinions, except that I miss your idle chatter and blank expressions. Have fun and be sure to count your change.

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