As I’ve told you, I didn’t really like Balcescu much, and I usually don’t give a crap for other people’s self-pity, but I suddenly felt sorry for him. Don’t ask me why — he wasn’t any worse off than the rest of us — but I did. A little.
“Mr. Balcescu, how old do you think I am?”
The reaction was slowed by alcohol, but when it came he looked mildly startled. “How old are you? My dear Mr. Jatt, how the hell should I know? Ten? Eleven but small for your age?”
“Has it ever occurred to you to wonder why a Confederation cruiser would have an able-bodied shipman ten or eleven years old?”
“But you’re…you’re a cabin boy, aren’t you?”
“That’s the name of my job, yes. But I’m a legit grade CS6 shipman, bucking for grade seven. I’m forty-three years old, Mr. Balcescu. I’ve been shipping out on Confederation ships for twenty-five years.”
His eyes went wide. “But…look at you! You’re a kid!”
“I look like a kid, but I’m just about your age…right? Although right now you look about ten years older. You look like crap, in fact.”
He straightened up a little, which was what I’d intended. “What happened to you? Is it some kind of genetic thing?”
“Yeah, but not in the way you mean. My parents were Highfielders — they were subscribers to Reverend Highfield’s generation ship. You may have heard of that — the Highfielder movement started up about the same time the X-Malkins were splitting off. My parents’ church said that the Confederation system was full of sinners and was doomed to be destroyed by the Lord, so they planned to send their children away to find another home outside the system, somewhere far away across the galaxy. And to make sure we’d be able to survive on ship as long as possible, they worked with geneticists to retard our aging processes — see, they started this project before we were even born. That was supposed to give us an advantage for a long haul trip — keep us small, easy to feed, revved-up immune systems. So don’t worry about me, Mr. Balcescu — I’ll hit puberty eventually, but it won’t be for another twenty or thirty years. I’m looking forward to sex, though. I hear it’s a lot of fun.”
“What…what happened?” Balcescu was listening now, all right. “Why didn’t you go?”
“Do you remember Katel’s World?”
For a moment he couldn’t place it. Then he went a little pale. I see that a lot when I tell people. “Oh my God,” he said. “Those were your parents?”
“My folks and about a thousand other Highfielders. And of course a few thousand of their children. That’s why the Confederation went in, to protect the children. But as you probably remember, things didn’t work out so well with that. I was one of about eight hundred that were rescued alive. I grew up in an orphanage, but I always wanted to see the big black — I figure it’s sort of what I was born for. So here I am.”
He stared at me. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Don’t know, exactly, Mr. Balcescu. I hate to see people lose track of what’s important, I guess. And I hate to see people make assumptions. And I definitely don’t like to see people being underestimated.”
“Are you saying I underestimated you?” He sat up and wiped his hand across his face. “Well, I suppose I did, Mr. Jatt, and I apologize for…”
“With respect, Mr. Balcescu, I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about you underestimating yourself. Instead of sitting around listening to weepy music and feeling sorry for yourself, there must still be useful work you can do. You figured out what those aliens were saying — what else can you figure out about them?”
When I left with the empty wine glasses he was drinking his coffee and staring up at the ceiling as if he was thinking about something real. The music had started again, Don Giovanni and his doomed pursuit of pleasure. Oh, well, better than the caterwauling modern stuff, I guess.
Honest, I’ve got nothing against art. I hope I’ve made that clear. I just don’t like moping. Waste of everyone’s time. “Life’s a banquet,” as good old Rosalind Russell said in one of those ancient films I like, “and most poor suckers are starving to death.”
The thing that finally made it all happen was Doc Swainsea’s report. I don’t know what happened between her and Balcescu, but after the night I saw her she pretty much disappeared from social life on the ship, spending something like twenty hours a day in her lab. I know, because who do you think brought her meals to her, cleared away the old trays, and tried to get her to sleep and take a sonic occasionally?
Anyway, it happened during one of the meetings where I was off duty and my roomie Ping was serving at the bridge conference table — he gave me the lowdown the next morning. Doc Swainsea was just finishing up her final report. The energies she’d been able to analyze in the destruction of the Malkinate ship and the Hub lighter were like nothing else she’d seen, she told the captain and the others. The wreckage was like nothing else she’d seen, either. The projection mechanism had to be like nothing she’d seen. And she’d been in touch with a xenobiologist on one of the other trapped ships and he agreed that the projected apparition looked like nothing he’d seen, either. If it was an image of a real life form, it was one we hadn’t come into contact with yet.
“Extragalactic, most likely,” was Balcescu’s one contribution, Ping said. Nobody argued, but nobody seemed very happy about it, either. Then the odd part happened.
Doc Swainsea closed with one last point. She said that in analyzing the projection she’d discovered a regular pulse of complex sound buried deep in the roaring, blaring audio, at a level too low for humans to hear without speeding it up. It didn’t sound anything like the speech Balcescu had translated — in fact, she wasn’t sure at all that it was speech, although it seemed too regular and orderly to be an accident. She said she didn’t know what that signified, either — she just thought she should mention it. Pim said she looked exhausted and sad.
And just at this point Balcescu got up and walked out.
When Pim told me I couldn’t help wondering what was going on. Was it something to do with that evening the two doctors had spent together, the one I’d walked in on? It had just looked like a less-than-satisfactory date to me, but maybe my lagging biochemistry had betrayed me — maybe there had been something more complicated going on. Pim said Doc Swainsea had looked surprised too when Balcescu left so abruptly, surprised and maybe a little hurt, but she didn’t make a big deal of it. That upset me. I really liked Doc Swainsea, although the difference in our ranks meant I didn’t get to talk to her much.
I didn’t have much time to think about Stefan Balcescu, though. That morning as I came on duty, right after I talked to Ping, we heard that five Malkinate cruisers had attacked the jellyfish ship. The black starfield around Rainwater Hub looked like a Landing Night celebration back home — fireworks everywhere. But silent, of course. Completely silent. The X-Malkins were obliterated in a matter of minutes.
Things got a little crazy after that. Some of the passengers who were supposed to be in deep sleep staged a sort of mini-mutiny. We didn’t do much to ‘em once we put an end to their uprising — just put ‘em back in cryo where they were supposed to be in the first place. One of the passenger cabin CS4s turned out to be the sympathizer who’d let them out, and he wound up in cryo himself, except in the brig. Captain Watanabe knew she had a lot of unhappy, worried shipmen on her hands but she also wanted to make sure she did the right thing. The problem was, at that moment nobody believed anything good could happen from staying near Rainwater Hub: everybody figured if we were going to take years getting home, we might as well get started. But the captain and some of the other Confederation officers hadn’t given up yet — and strangely enough, the one who had convinced them to hang on was Stefan Balcescu.