When we got back, I automatically went to my old locker in deck berthing and I was surprised to find it empty. I chuckled and headed to engineering. “I wonder how often I’ll do that,” I said to myself.
It took only a few ticks to get out of my civvies and into my shipsuit. I pulled the wrapped dolphin out of my jacket and transferred it to my pocket. The chrono said 21:00 so I headed to the gym to see if I could catch Pip. He was just coming out of the showers. “Hey! Did you buy anything good? I got those digitals. They looked great.”
“The yarn looks like the best bet,” I told him. “I bought a few skeins as samples to show you. Sean says it’s good stuff and I trust his judgment. He bought something like five kilos of the stuff himself.”
Pip slid into his shipsuit and we headed for engineering berthing. “What about the dyes?” he asked.
“I dunno. Brill was with me and we talked about it. We both came to the conclusion that the appeal would be limited, so I’m not sure how appealing it would be as a trade good.”
“What about buying some for the empty container?” he asked. “Do you think dye would be good for that?”
“It doesn’t mass much so that would be a lot of dye. I don’t know if you could get enough to make it worthwhile…or even if it would sell. Don’t they have dyes on Dunsany?”
Pip pulled out his tablet. “Let me look into that. Dunsany has a lot of textile processing. They might have dyes but they could value something in particular, like the purple or red they make here out of the snails.” He made a note.
“Did I send you a digital of the little sculptures?” I asked.
He shook his head. “I don’t think so. What little sculptures?”
“There was this strange guy with just a table. No sign or anything. The table was covered with these spectacular little wooden sculptures. Birds, fish, that kind of thing, all of them were carved out of some kind of local driftwood.” I pulled the dolphin from my pocket and unwrapped it to show him.
He stared at it for at least two ticks but made no move to touch it or pick it up. “What is it?” he asked finally.
“It’s a dolphin.”
“No, I know that, doofus!” He grinned at me. “But what is it? Some kinda local voodoo?”
“Funny you should ask. That’s what I thought when I saw them. If you see the guy, you’ll think so even more. He was…strange.”
“How much?”
“Really strange.”
He snorted. “No, how much were the sculptures?”
“Oh, that. Ten creds.”
“What did he start at?”
“Ten creds. It wasn’t negotiable.”
“Odd.” He paused and ran a finger over the end of his nose in thought. “I would have started at fifty for these. Are all of them this good?”
“Oh, yeah. I bought ten more for trade goods on a whim. They weigh almost nothing and it seemed like a good investment of a hundred creds.”
Pip nodded thoughtfully. “Interesting. What’s the inlay work?”
“He said it was a bit of shell from the beach, but whatever it is, every piece I saw was inlaid perfectly, just like this one.”
“How many of these do you think we should take? Even if he won’t haggle on the price, ten creds seems like a pretty low price for something of this quality. And it’s light enough that we could hold onto them even if they didn’t sell on Dunsany.”
“I bought ten—well, eleven actually. I gave one to Brill as a thank you gift for hiring me.”
“So you have nine more besides this one?” he asked absently, still examining it but not touching.
“No, ten. Brill gave this to me.”
He looked at me with one raised eyebrow. “I hope that’s not the local engagement ritual or anything. Could be awkward to be married to the section chief.”
I laughed uncomfortably and probably blushed. “I don’t think so.”
Mercifully, Pip did not press the matter. “So how many should we get?”
“I don’t know. I’ve got a hundred creds into them now. You wanna pick up ten of your own?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said slowly. “Lemme think about it. So hey, what’s with the tailor booth?”
“Oh, that was the funniest thing I’ve seen in a long time. Bresheu is amazing and he runs the booth like it’s an orchestra and he’s the conductor. He snaps his fingers and whatever he wants is immediately taken care of.”
“Sounds impressive.”
“You have to see it to believe it.”
“Did he have anything you liked?”
“Nothing that fit me,” I said.
Chapter 5
ST. CLOUD ORBITAL
2352-FEBRUARY-19
I left Pip going over his notes and looking into dye for Dunsany. I was tired, and it was already late, but I needed to release some of the tension that had been building all day, so I headed for the gym. After a dozen laps on the track, I baked myself in the sauna and let the day just slip away. I felt strange. When I first came aboard, I knew as little about mess duty then, as I did about working in environmental now. Perhaps less, because when I interviewed with the captain back on Neris, I did not even know what job I was applying for. The only thing I was pretty sure about was that it was likely to be dirty, boring, and unpleasant. It turned out to be none of those and I smiled to myself remembering my early weeks aboard and thinking about how much things had changed.
Way back in the beginning, I remembered Cookie telling me that I should consider what path I wanted to take before I found myself being forced down one not of my own choosing. The captain had given me a choice. I could have stayed on the mess deck, except of course, I could not. Somehow, though, I did not feel like I was being forced. At least not like the way I was when I needed to get off Neris. It just seemed as if
That thought must have been bothering me, because once I came to the realization, I suddenly felt as if a weight had been lifted. I headed for the showers then to my bunk. I had the duty in the morning and it could possibly be the last day I woke as a member of the Steward Division.
When I got back to the berthing area, I discovered that Rebecca Saltzman, a spec three in the power section, was one of my new bunkies. She was sprawled in the lower across from me. Rebecca was obviously from a heavy-G planet. Where Brill was tall and willowy, Rebecca was short and powerful. She looked like she could bench press a shuttle craft, but she also had a delicate and angelic face—heart-shaped with what my mother would have called
