Marie said… your father’s temper. Marie said… your father’s manners. Your father’s behavior… And he tried to cure it in himself, he tried not to lose his temper and he tried not to be rude, and all the other things Marie attributed to his genes.
Aunt Lydia said most people could pattern themselves off positives. He learned to avoid negatives. Aunt Lydia said he had to define himself, by himself.
And most of all… not do things that pushed Marie’s buttons.
But maybe—it was a dangerous, undermining thought, and he worked all around it for a moment—maybe, even remotely possibly… there might even be another side to Austin Bowe. Maybe Marie’d pushed his buttons, the way she had other people’s, and things had just blown up.
Not to excuse what happened. Nothing could do that.
But maybe what she’d told Mischa and what Mischa had told her might have confused the facts.
And he didn’t know why Marie should have gotten the entire truth from Mischa. He never had.
And… more and more dangerous a thought… if there was another side, considering the position he was in, it did make sense to ask Bowe’s side of things. And even if it was bad… and even if he couldn’t accept it… considering he was stuck here, considering he had somehow to get along with this crew…
Such as they were.
… he’d learned what happened when you (Lydia’s saying) poisoned the water you had to drink from.
He didn’t know where this ship went. The rumor-mongering They who ran rampant on Sprite said it didn’t stay on the charts, that it found Mazianni ports somewhere in the great dark Forever.
He could handle that, he supposed. If all Corinthian did was trade with them, he could justify that… after all, nobody had a guarantee the goods that Sprite brought to port didn’t end up being cheated over and run through illegal channels. They weren’t responsible. It wasn’t immoral. Illegal, highly, but it wasn’t like they were doing anything that cost any lives…
He began to sink slowly into the mattress surface. That was the passenger ring engaging as Corinthian went inertial at its outbound velocity.
A v far more than most merchanters handled. Light-mass cargo, he thought, staring bleakly at the sound-baffling overhead. Had to be light mass, relative to the engine cap. You wondered what they were hauling.
Luxuries was the commonest low-mass article. Food-stuffs that wouldn’t compress. But generally, Viking exported high-mass items, so you hauled heavy, and took the light stuff for—
A siren blew three short bursts. Disaster? he wondered, taking a grip. His heart had skipped a beat. His thoughts went skittering over every horizon, leaving nothing but the wide dark, and the cosmic chance of a high-energy rock in their path.
Then over com, a woman’s voice, accented with a ship-speak he didn’t recognize.
“We are inertial for the duration, in count for departure. Count now is… sixty seconds, mark.”
His heart found the missed beat, thudded along in heavy anticipation. It was real. They were going. He reached for the panel with the white diamond, got the drug out, the needle-pack—shivering-scared, until he had that in his fist. If you didn’t have that you didn’t come out of jump whole, you left pieces of yourself… that was what the universal They also said, and if you were curious on that topic… they had wards on certain stations where they sent the kids that experimented with hyperspace, and the unlucky working spacers that for some emergency or another hadn’t had a pack in reach.
“… count is twenty and running.”
He had it. He had it. He was all right, as all right ran, on this ship.
“… fifteen.”
He thought about Marie. He thought he loved her.
(He didn’t, really, but Lydia said he wasn’t going to be capable of it, yet. Like the prince in the fairy story, he was going to be crazy until somebody loved him… )
But if he had loved anybody it was Marie, and he hadn’t loved anybody, if not her, and right now the place where Marie ought to fit—felt like a twisty hollow spot, filled up with anger and hurt where she’d lied to him and ducked out on him, and absolute terror that he’d never see her again and never know what had happened to her.