Markel jerked awake, shivering. He wasn’t going to think about his father, Illart, floating forever in absolute cold and darkness, empty eyes gazing unseeingly on the stars that he had loved. He wasn’t going to think about anything except the immediate practical problems of surviving another day on the Haven without getting caught.
Huddled in another cramped position, he worried at the problem with his conscious mind. A person could get warm enough in the heating vents that led to the food center. He would try that in a little while, but he didn’t dare now; he was so tired, he might fall asleep in the vent and be scalded to death when the steam blasted through to clean and sterilize it. He would have to wait, and if he timed it right, he might be able to nip out of the vents and steal some scraps of food from the recycling bins. His body needed protein to supplement the fresh greens he stole from the working ‘ponies tanks in tiny nips and pinches.
And he needed to steal a blanket from somewhere. Due to recent events, there should be enough to spare now … enough blankets and warm clothes for anybody. He wondered if one of Nueva’s lieutenants had moved into his family’s old quarters, or if he dared try and make it back there to get some of his clothes… . No, not his clothes, that might make them suspicious. Illart’s. They knew his father was dead-everybody knew, had seen… .
Markel struggled soundlessly against the dream of space, the cold and the brightness of distant suns and the pressure of his own blood exploding outward; he snapped out of the nightmare once more and felt his heart thumping in his chest. It had all happened so fast, almost as quickly as the dreams that trapped him whenever he tried to sleep.
Only three, no, five shifts ago he had been safe in his own quarters, and the only thing that worried him about the quarrel between Illart and Sengrat was that Ximena would take her father’s side. She’ll never look. at me now, he had thought-as though she had ever noticed him before! But he’d been a child then. Five shifts ago. Or was it six? It seemed terribly important to remember.
Somebody had to remember. Somebody had to tell the truth, counteract the lies they meant to spread about… about the ones who could not speak for themselves anymore. The ones who would never be warm again.
The quarters Markel had shared with his father were spacious by Haven standards, as befitted Illart’s rank as one of the three Speakers of the Council. Naturally there were separate sleep bunks for the two of them, with their own carefully engineered storage areas for personal belongings; any citizen among the Starfarers was entitled to that much space, and any working citizen, or parent raising small children, was also allotted a private sitting space and a desk console.
But nobody else Markel knew, even Third Speaker Andrezhuria, had a space so large that all three Speakers could sit down at one time without even feeling crowded. Where else, except in a public hall, could a person enjoy such luxury? Market could never understand his father’s wry comments about how his rank in Council as First Speaker bought him almost enough room to swing a cat. But then, Markel’s only knowledge of cats came from the vids he called up on his personal console, and he never had figured out why anybody would want to swing one.
The Old-timer generation was full of quaint sayings like that, like their insistence on calling a period of two and a half shifts a “day.” Ximena said it was better just to humor the old folks and not to demand explanations for all their quaint old folk sayings.
Anyway, it wasn’t the presence of the other two Speakers that had made the sitting area so crowded that Markel had retreated to his sleep tube with his personal console; it was Sengrat. Really, Markel thought, it was Sengrats overinflated ego that seemed to fill up all the space and use up all the oxygen. The man had a voice like a file going through sheet metal; once you started letting it get to you, it could saw through earplugs and ruin your enjoyment of a good classic music vid. Markel blinked twice to stop the vid. No sense in letting his pleasure in the ancient music be ruined by irritation at Sengrat. He would just wait until the visitors left.