her go; they couldn’t get undocked… all those people trying to get aboard. Fire
broke out. And that part of the station went, that’s all. Exploded, blew the
nose shell off.”
Fifty-six aboard. Father, mother, cousins, remoter relatives. A world unto
itself, Estelle. He had his own, however damaged. He had a family. Hers was
dead.
She said nothing more, no word of grief for her loss or of relief to have been
spared, to have stayed behind from the voyage. She gave a few more convulsive
breaths, hugged him, turned, dry-eyed, to put a second dinner in the microwave.
She sat down, ate, went through all the normal motions. He forced his own meal
down, still with a disinfectant taint in his mouth, reckoning it clung all about
him. He succeeded finally in catching her eyes looking at him. They were as
stark as those of the refugees. He found nothing to say. He got up, walked
around the table and hugged her from behind.
Her hands covered his. “I’m all right”
“I wish you’d called me.”
She let go his hands and stood up, touched his arm, a weary gesture. Looked at
him suddenly, directly, with that same dark tiredness. “There’s one of us left,”
she said. He blinked, perplexed, realized then that she meant the Quens.
Estelle’s folk. Merchanters owned names as stationers had a home. She was Quen;
that meant something he knew he did not understand, in the months they had been
together. Revenge was a merchanter commodity; he knew that… among folk where
name alone was a property and reputation went with it
“I want a child,” she said.
He stared at her, struck with the darkness in her eyes. He loved her. She had
walked into his life off a merchanter ship and decided to try station life,
though she still spoke of her ship. Four months. For the first time in their
being together he had no desire for her, not with that look and Estelle’s death
and her reasons for revenge. He said nothing. They had agreed there would be no
children until she knew for certain whether she could bear to stay. What she
offered him might be that agreement. It might be something else. It was not the
time to talk about it, not now, with insanity all about them.
He simply gathered her against him, walked with her to the bedroom, held her
through the long dark hours. She made no demands and he asked no questions.
ii
“No,” the man at the operations desk said, without looking this time at the
printout; and then with a weary impulse toward humanity: “Wait. I’ll do another
search. Maybe it wasn’t posted with that spelling.”
Vasilly Kressich waited, sick with terror, as despair hung all about this last,
forlorn gathering of refugees which refused to leave the desks on dockside:
families and parts of families, who hunted relatives, who waited on word. There
were twenty-seven of them on the benches near the desk, counting children; he
had counted. They had gone from station main-day into alterday, and another
shift of operators at the desk which was station’s one extension of humanity
toward them, and there was nothing more coming out of comp but what had been
there before.
He waited. The operator keyed through time after time. There was nothing; he
knew that there was nothing, by the look the man turned toward him. Of a sudden
he was sorry for the operator too, who had to sit out here obtaining nothing,
knowing there was no hope, surrounded by grieving relatives, with armed guards
stationed near the desk in case. Kressich sat down again, next to the family who
had lost a son in the confusion.
It was the same tale for each. They had loaded in panic, the guards more
concerned for getting themselves onto the ships than for keeping order and
getting others on. It was their own fault; he could not deny that The mob had
hit the docks, men forcing their way aboard who had no passes allotted to those
critical personnel meant for evacuation. The guards had fired in panic, unsure
of attackers and legitimate passengers. Russell’s Station had died in riot.