Chapter 7
Bunny knocked on Yana’s door early the next morning. “I’m heading out to SpaceBase. Can you come now?” Yana had had very little sleep, between the ride out to the hot springs and back, and staying up late to record the poem. That had stimulated her far beyond her expectations; she had been unable to rest, kicking herself for not confronting Sean Shongili last night when it would have made sense. Now, except for a lingering twitchy nervousness, the encounter seemed hard to believe. She was both glad and sorry that he lived so far away: glad because she would not have to face him; sorry because there would be no chance meetings, no possibility of seeing him unless one of them deliberately sought the other one out.
What the hell! She had better things to do. She hauled herself out of her bunk and pulled on a uniform blouse that still bore insignia. She hadn’t removed her rank from her fatigue jacket yet either, and she slipped it on under her parka.
“Are you feeling better this morning?” Bunny asked owlishly as they set out down the river.
“As opposed to what?” Yana snapped.
Bunny didn’t seem offended; she just smiled and said, “Well, you were so upset over that Giancarlo making you burn the fish and then …”
“When you left me, I was doing fine, wasn’t 1? Was that supposed to change?”
Bunny glanced away from the river road and over at her, then back again. She looked disappointed.
Yana heaved a sigh and leaned back in the seat. She would have preferred to sleep until they reached SpaceBase. “I’d like to know who it is who’s keeping a log of my activities and guests-then I could set the record straight when necessary. I’d hate for the whole village to be wrong about something. And that cough medicine of Clodagh’s should be a controlled substance, by the way.”
“He really likes you, Yana,” Bunny said.
“Buneka, I’m not going to discuss this with you,” Yana said firmly, settling herself and closing her eyes. After a few moments of not sleeping, she asked, “He hasn’t always been by himself, has he?”
“Sean? Oh no, he used to have lots of girlfriends when he was traveling around the world. He almost married Charlie Demintieff’s sister Ruby once, but she changed her mind at the last minute and married a guy from Baffin Point instead. How about you? Lots of old boyfriends?”
“Bunny!”
“Well, but have you had? We know all that stuff about each other.”
“I’ve had a few boyfriends, I guess you could call them, yes.”
“Anybody serious?”
“My husband,” Yana said shortly, not wanting to dig into her memories of Bry so soon after talking about Bremport. Couldn’t these damn people leave anything alone? And why did she feel like she had to answer anyway? “He died,” she said shortly.
“At Bremport?” Bunny asked almost reverently.
“No. Not at Bremport. Ten years ago. During a shuttle malfunction. Bunny, 1 really don’t want to talk about it. Now then, what was the name of Diego’s friend again?”
As Yana suspected, entering the base from the outside was different from being inprocessed through the cattle chutes. In places like this, with little of intrinsic value on the premises-by Intergal standards anyway-personnel were bored and security was lax.
“Whew, this is a hard, ugly-looking place,” Yana said to Bunny as they pulled up to the gate.
Bunny’s mitten described an arc around the perimeter. “There used to be lots of little businesses around here: bars, pleasure places, shops for the soldiers. Sometimes they’d bring in extra equipment that wasn’t actually needed and trade it for something to send to families on other colonies or stations. But about a year ago, that all stopped and the company had the whole corridor bulldozed and you had to be a soldier or have a pass to come onto the base. We found out later about Bremport.” She shrugged. “The elders were glad when the base closed. They said the soldiers were corrupting us, but heck, half of them were from here anyway, and related to us, so when their families were allowed out here, lots of us could go into the shops and buy cloth and other stuff that never makes it out to our store.”