home, the hall with the dishes stowed in the clothing lockers and the living
room which was bedroom by night, with boxes lashed in the corner, Downer
wickerwork, with what should have gone into the hall lockers.
They lay in the bed that was the daytime couch. And she talked, lying in his
arms, for the first time in weeks talked, late into the night, a flow of
memories she had never shared with him, in all their being together.
He tried to reckon what she had lost in Estelle: her ship; she still called it
that. Brotherhood, kinship. Merchanter morals, the stationer proverb ran; but he
could not see Elene among the others, like them, rowdy merchanters offship for a
dockside binge and a sleepover with anyone willing. Could never believe that.
“Believe it,” she said, her breath stirring against his shoulder. “That’s the
way we live. What do you want instead? Inbreeding? They were my cousins on that
ship.”
“You were different,” he insisted. He remembered her as he had first seen her,
in his office on a matter involving a cousin’s troubles… always quieter than the
others. A conversation, a re-meeting; another; a second voyage… and Pell again.
She had never gone bar-haunting with her cousins, had not made the merchanter
hangouts; had come to him, had spent those days on station with him. Failed to
board again. Merchanters rarely married. Elene had.
“No,” she said. “You were different.”
“You’d take anyone’s baby?” The thought troubled him. Some things he had never
asked Elene because he thought he knew. And Elene had never talked that way. He
began, belatedly, to revise all he thought he knew; to be hurt, and to fight
that. She was Elene; that quantity he still believed in, trusted.
“Where else could we get them?” she asked, making strange, clear sense. “We love
them, do you think not? They belong to the whole ship. Only now there aren’t
any.” She could talk of that suddenly. He felt the tension ebb, a sigh against
him. “They’re all gone.”
“You called Elt Quen your father; Tia James your mother. Was it that way?”
“He was. She knew.” And a moment later. “She left a station to go with him. Not
many will.”
She had never asked him to. That thought had never clearly occurred to him. Ask
a Konstantin to leave Pell… he asked himself if he would have, and felt a deep
unease. I would have, he insisted. I might have. “It would be hard,” he admitted
aloud. “It was hard for you.”
She nodded, a movement against his arm.
“Are you sorry, Elene?”
A small shake of her head.
“It’s late to talk about things like this,” he said. “I wish we had. I wish we’d
known enough to talk to each other. So many things we didn’t know.”
“It bother you?”
He hugged her against him, kissed her through a veil of hair, brushed it aside.
He thought for a moment of saying no, decided then to say nothing. “You’ve seen
Pell. You realize I’ve never set foot on a ship bigger than a shuttle? Never
been out from this station? Some things I don’t know how to look at, or even how
to imagine the question. You understand me?”
“Some things I don’t know how to ask you either.”
“What would you ask for?”
“I just did.”
“I don’t know how to say yes or no. Elene, I don’t know if I could have left
Pell. I love you, but I don’t know that I could have done that—after so short a
time. And that bothers me. That bothers me, if it’s something in me that it
never occurred to me… that I spent all my planning trying to think how to make
you happy on Pell…”
“Easier for me to stay a time… than for a Konstantin to uproot himself from
Pell; pausing’s easy, we do it all the time. Only losing Estelle I never
planned. Like what’s out there, you never planned. You’ve answered me.”
“How did I answer you?”
“By what it is that bothers you.”
That puzzled him. We do it all the time. That frightened him. But she talked