Oh, great, he thought. Another political refugee, sneaking a cry for help out in the kava be-aiu. Ju^t what they neeoeS, one, more person on the overcrowded Haven. Or maybe fourteen or fifteen more people, he reflected gloomily. These Kieaanese ran to large families.
He had just inserted one earplug when his father’s yell of excitement all but pierced the other ear. “Xong who?”
“Not Hoo,” the voice on the speaker crackled, “Hoa. Ngaen Xong Hoa.”
Gerezan and Andrezhuria burst into excited babbling until Illart hushed them. Whoever this Ngaen Xong Hoa might be, they seemed to think he would be worth his space on the Haven. Markel put the vid system aside again and wriggled out of his tube. Might as well find out what all the fuss was about. He would take his vid off into one of the service tunnels later and enjoy it in peace and quiet. The desire for privacy had long ago inspired Market to explore all the nooks and crannies of the Haven -where a slender boy could fit unobserved. He knew every supposedly unusable space where outmoded equipment had been yanked out and sold for scrap, as well as the whole system of the narrow air vents and the crawl spaces designed for access to the ship’s electrical system.
The three Speakers were grinning and hugging one another when Market entered the sitting area.
“Such a pity Sengrat didn’t stay a little longer,” Andrezhuria said happily. “Then he could have heard the news ahead of everybody else!” She looked almost as young as Ximena, flushed with excitement, curly tendrils of her blond hair escaping from their severe braids to frame her face in light.
“Just as well,” said Gerezan. “Why give him extra time to think about some way to put Ngaen Xong Hoa’s research to unethical uses?”
“Oh, come off it, Gerezan. Even Sengrat couldn’t think of a way to misuse a weatherprediction system!”
Illart cleared his throat. “I’m not so sure about that.” He tapped the data screen set into the wall behind Gerezan. “Here’s the complete text of his message.”
Although still slender enough to fit into the air vents, Markel was already a good head taller than Andrezhuria. He had no trouble seeing the screen over her head. Ngaen Xong Hoa-and Markel still didn’t know who he was-requested political asylum on the Haven because he feared that one of the three governments of Khang Kieaan would misuse the results of his latest research.
“Oh, he’s just saying that to make sure we’ll have him,” Andrezhuria said blithely. “And of course we will. If he’s finished the model he was discussing at the Chaos and Control Seminar, we should be able to sell it to agri planets for enough to take care of all the Haven’s maintenance problems forever!”
“Not sell,” Gerezan said. “Rent. We keep control of the model.”
“Are we counting our chickens before they’re hatched?” Illart inquired dryly. “We don’t even know he’s still working on the same thing. He may have given up on the chaos-theory problem and turned to some other line of research entirely.”
In the brief silence that greeted this suggestion, Market finally got a word in edgewise. “Who is this Ngaen Xong Hoa, anyway?”
Illart reached out to put an arm round his son’s shoulders. “It’s kind of hard to explain if you don’t remember living planetside,” he said, “but… I guess you’d call him a weatherman.”
“And that’s all he would say about it,” Markel complained later to Johnny Greene. Even if Johnny was of the same generation as his father, he wasn’t as stodgy as the original settlers. He’d only joined the Haven a few years earlier, after a nearcalamitous escape from MME when Amalgamated had taken over the large mining company and caused huge redundancies among the specialists. In some ways Market found Johnny could bridge the gap between his father’s generation, who could remember digging and growing things in dirt, and the young people of his own generation, who had been raised in space. “What’s a weatherman, anyway? I looked it up on the ship’s net, and all I could find was some junk about solar winds. I don’t see how that’s going to make us rich!”