"Huh? About what?"
"About yourselves, about what you want." Rydra's eyes moved back and forth between the screen and the man and boy beside her.
"Well, huh . . . ?" Calli scratched his head. "Pretty," said Ron. "I want her to be pretty." He leaned forward, an intense light in his blue eyes.
"Oh, yes," said Calli, "but she can't be a sweet, plump Irish girl with black hair and agate eyes and freckles that come out after four days of sun. She can't have the slightest lisp that makes you tingle even when she reels off her calculations quicker and more accurate than a computer voice, yet still lisping, or makes you tingle when she holds your head in her lap and tells you about how much she needs to feel—"
"Calli!" from Ron. And the big man stopped with his fist against his stomach, breathing hard.
Rydra watched, her hand drifting through centimeters over the crystal's face. The names on the screen flashed back and forth.
"But pretty," Ron repeated. "And likes sports, to wrestle, I think, when we're planet side. Cathy wasn't very athletic. I always thought it would have been better, for me, if she was, see. I can talk better to people I can wrestle with. Serious though, I mean about working. And quick like Cathy could think. Only . . ."
Rydra's hand drifted down, then made a jerky motion to the left.
"Only," said Calli, his hand falling from his belly, his breath more easy, “she's got to be a whole person, a new person, not somebody who is half what we remember about somebody else."
"Yes," said Ron. "I mean if she's a good navigator, and she loves us."
". . . could love us," said Calli.
"If she was all you wanted and herself besides," asked Rydra, her hand shaking between two names on the screen, "could you love her?"
The hesitation, and nod slow from the big man, quick from the boy.
Rydra's hand came down on the crystal face, and the name glowed on the screen. “Mollya Twa, Navigator-One." Her coordinate numbers followed. Rydra dialed them at the desk.
Seventy-five feet overhead something glittered. One among hundreds of thousands of glass coffins was tracking from the wall above them on an inductor beam.
The recall-stage jutted up a pattern of lugs, the tips glowing. The coffin dropped, its contents obscured by streaks and hexagonal bursts of frost inside the glass. The lugs caught the tramplateon the coffin's base. It rocked a moment, settled, clicked.
The frost melted of a sudden, and the inside surface fogged, then ran with droplets. They stepped forward to see.
Dark band on dark. A movement beneath the glaring glass; then the glass parted, melting back from her deep, warm skin and beating, terrified eyes.
"It's all right," Calli said, touching her shoulder. She raised her head to look at his hand, then dropped back to the pillow. Ron crowded the Navigator-Two.
"Hello?"
"Eh . . . Miss Twa?" Calli said. "You're alive now. Will you love us?"
"Ninyini nani?" Her face was puzzled. "Nikowapi hapa?"
Ron looked up amazed. "I don't think she speaks English."
“Yes. I know," Rydra grinned. "But other than that she's perfect. This way you'll have time to get to know each other before you can say something really foolish. She likes to wrestle, Ron."
Ron looked at the young woman in the case. Her graphite colored hair was boy short, her full lips purple with chill. "You wrestle?"
"Ninyi ni nani?" she asked again.
Calli lifted his hand from her shoulder and stepped back. Ron scratched his head and frowned.
"Well?" said Rydra.
Calli shrugged. "Well, we don't know."
"Navigation Instruments are standard gear. There won't be any trouble communicating there."
"She is pretty," Ron said. "You are pretty. Don't be frightened. You're alive now."
"Ninaogapa!" she seized Calli's hand. "Jee, ni usiku au mchana?" Her eyes were wide.
"Please don't be frightened!" Ron took the wrist of the hand that had seized Calli's.
"Sielewi lugha yenu." She shook her head, a gesture containing no negation, only bewilderment. "Sikujuweni ninyi nani. Ninaogapa."
And with bereavement-born urgency, both Ron and Calli nodded in affirmative reassurance. Rydra stepped between them and spoke. After a long silence, the woman nodded slowly. "She says she'll go with you. She lost two-thirds of her triple seven years ago, also killed through the Invasion. That's why she came to the Morgue and killed herself. She says she will go with you. Will you take her?"
"She's still afraid," Ron said. "Please don't be. I won't hurt you. Calli won't hurt."
"If she'll come with us," Calli said, "we'll take her."
The Customs Officer coughed. "Where do I get her psyche rating?"
"Right on the screen under the filing crystal. That's how they're arranged within the larger categories."
The Officer walked back to the crystal. "Well"—He took out his pad and began to record the indices. "It's taken a while, but you've got just about everybody."
"Integrate," Rydra said.
He did, and looked up, surprised in spite of himself. "Captain Wong, I think you've got your crew!"
VI
Dear Mocky,
When you get this I'll have taken off two hours ago.
It's a half hour before dawn and I want to talk to you, but I won't wake you up again.
I am, nostalgically enough, taking out Fobo's old ship, the Rimbaud (the name was Muels' idea, remember). At least, I'm familiar with it: lots of good memories here. I leave in twenty minutes.
Present location: I'm sitting in a folding chair in the freight lock looking over the field. The sky is star specked to the west, and gray to the east. Black needles of ships pattern around me. Lines of blue signal lights fade toward the east. It is calm now. Subject of my thinking: a hectic night of crew hunting that took me all over Transport Town and out to the Morgue, through dives and glittering byways, etc. Loud and noisy at the beginning, calming to this at the end.
To get a good pilot you watch him wrestle. A trained captain can tell exactly what sort of a pilot a person will make by observing his reflexes in the arena. Only I am not that well trained.
Remember, what you said about muscle-reading?
Maybe you were righter than you thought. Last night I ran into a kid, a Navigator, who looks like Brancusi's graduation offering, or maybe what Michelangelo wished the human body was. He was born in Transport and knows pilot wrestling inside out, apparently. So I watched him watch my pilot wrestle, and just looking at his quivers and jerks I got a complete analysis of what was going on over my head.
You know DeFaure's theory that psychic indices have their corresponding muscular tensions (a restatement of the old Wilhelm Reich hypothesis of muscular armature): I was thinking about it last night. The kid I was telling you about was part of a broken triple, two guys and a girl and the girl got it from the Invaders.
The boys made me want to cry. But I didn't. Instead I took them to the Morgue and found them a replacement. Weird business. I'm sure they'll think it was magic for the rest of their lives. The basic requirements, however, were all on file: a female Navigator-One who lacks two men. How to adjust the indices? I read Ron's and Calli's from watching them move while they talked. The Corpses are filed under psyche-indices so I just had to feel out when they were congruent. The final choice was a stroke of genius, if I do say so. I had it down to six young ladies who would do. But it needed to be more precise than that, and I couldn’t play it more precise, at least not by ear. One young lady was from N'gonda Province in Pan Africa. She'd suicided seven years ago. Lost two husbands in an Invasion attack, and returned to earth in the middle of an embargo. You remember what the politics were like then between Pan Africa and Americasia; I was sure she didn't speak English. We woke her, and she didn't. Now, at this point, their indices may be a mite jarring. But, by the time they fight through learning to understand each other—and they will, because they need to—they'll graph out congruent afoot down the logarithmic grid.