Was the entire upper-officer cadre of this ship hostage, except for the high-Kirlian Captain himself? What a nest of subversion she had shuttled into! And back on Imperial Outworld they didn’t know.
So many hostages! Could one of them have salvaged the retransfer unit, planted the sabotage bomb, and then made a false report to the Captain? That seemed likely. But that meant the retransfer unit was under the control of the hostages—hardly a reassuring situation!
Could the hostages know about her? No, for if they had been aware of the threat she posed to them, they would have acted against her before this.
Slammer moved closer to her, now that she was alone. It was his way of asking for attention. That provided her with one reason she had not been bothered: she had a very able bodyguard!
Melody was becoming more adept at playing the game of twenty questions, as Yael described it. In moments she had identified the magnet’s concern.
He needed to take another walk.
They used a different route, but ran into the same type of wooden barrier. She rolled Slammer through it with dispatch. She was getting a fair picture of the geography of the inner labyrinth of the ship, though that seemed to be regarded as a military secret.
As before, this was the off-shift for the majority of the officers, so there were few circulating. Also, she now realized, Slammer selected the route to avoid people. His mission, such as it was, was his own secret.
The other magnet was hovering at the far side of the wooden passage. “Ouch!” Melody said, rendering the human equivalent of a chord of alarm. “Must we go through this again?” But she decided not to interfere. If Slammer and the other magnet got their kicks by bashing each other…
But this time there was no banging. Instead, Slammer moved aside, and the smaller magnet came close. Melody concealed her alarm. “What can I do for you, Slimmer?” she inquired brightly of the stranger.
A much smaller object circled the strange magnet, like a satellite around its primary. It hovered right before Melody.
Suddenly, like a splendid symphony of meaning, it burst upon her: a baby magnet! Slammer had had a tryst with his lady-friend, Slimmer, and now they had offspring. “Hello, Beanball,” she said.
The mother-magnet withdrew. Slammer indicated the barrier.
“So you just wanted to see your bud,” Melody murmured. “Well, I’m glad I was able to help, even if it was contrary to regulations. Here I thought you two were fighting!”
Yael laughed. “Slimmer got banged up!”
Again, Melody had to delve for the interpretation. A Solarian bang or bash was an old-style party at which too-free leeway was fostered by consumption of mind-affecting substances. The kind of thing she might have been involved in, had the hullside emergency not interrupted it. Thus a female could get impregnated: banged up. With magnets, the banging was literal; it was their mode of copulation.
“Or maybe balled,” Yael added.
Balled: reference to the Solarian male’s reproductive apparatus. “Where do you pick up all this information?” Melody inquired teasingly.
“What information?”
The girl did not even know the derivation of her terms! Melody had been drawing on her own knowledge and Tarot insights to understand the Solarian situation. “Never mind. We’d better go home.” Aloud she said: “Come on, Slammer. We’ll visit again when you want to. Goodbye, Beanball.”
But the little magnet hovered close. When Melody put her arms around Slammer to start him down the hall, Beanball remained in orbit about them.
“Now, wait,” Melody protested. “Once we cross the barrier, you can’t return to your mother, Beanball. You’d better stay here.”
The ball did not go. “Slammer, can you explain—?”
Then she realized: The little magnet was too new to travel on his own power. He was controlled by the fields of his parents. He had gone to the father when the mother had departed, probably to resume her guard duty before some officer checked on it. The presence of the baby would be certain evidence of dereliction of duty. Slammer was better able to conceal and protect his offspring. So he had come, summoned by some magnetic communication, to assume his familial responsibility.
Melody sighed. “Very well. I enabled this to occur; I must carry through.” Feeling a bit jealous, as she had never gotten to raise a bud of her own, she picked up Slammer and walked down the wooden hall.
Beanball hovered before them, held firmly by the large magnet’s field. Slammer could not move himself here, but he could still act strongly on any metal in the immediate vicinity.
At the barrier she set Slammer down and let him roll to the foot of the hollow. Beanball remained poised in air, not affected by the rotation of the larger form. Very precise magnetic control! At the far end of the barrier they resumed normal motion. Soon, unobserved, they were back at the cabin.
But Melody discovered her responsibilities had only begun. Beanball needed to be fed, and could neither forage for itself nor report to the refueling station for a handout. It was plain that the human officers did not know of the little magnet’s existence—and should not be informed. Melody had seen no other little magnets; obviously the wood barriers were intended to segregate the sexes and prevent inconvenient trysts. Magnets were indisputably loyal to their masters, but their primary loyalty had to be to their own kind, especially their children. That was the nature of any sapient or near-sapient species. Culture could be fostered only by close parent-offspring ties. The magnets obviously had a culture of their own, and interpersonal ties—which the officers of this cluster fleet chose to ignore or suppress.
Melody did not believe in slavery. The situation of the magnets made her increasingly uncomfortable. She could not blame this on the hostages, for they were obviously carrying on a tradition that was well established in the fleet. Captain Boyd himself had his magnet, and the Captain did not object to the system.
Well, she objected! At such time as she acquired the power of decision, she would free the magnets and give them self-determination. But at the moment she hardly had control of her own life.
So she kept the secret, and helped provide for the baby. She visited the magnet dispensary and acted like a foolish girl, asking for a big chunk of coal as a souvenir. It was against policy, but a little heaving of her healthy bosom caused the man in charge to overlook policy. She took the chunk to her cabin, and watched Slammer pound a fragment of it to dust. Beanball floated through this dust, guided by his father’s field, and sucked it in through almost invisibly small vents.
Then Melody picked Beanball up and set him in the nestbox she and Yael had fashioned. Yael, of course, was thrilled with the whole thing, and proved to be quite helpful with the mundane details. She cleaned up the films of ash that formed in the nest, the magnet’s waste product, and labored to locate usable metals for Beanball to ingest and grow on.
Melody appreciated these services. She tended to get bored with the routines of daily existence, and she had more philosophical matters on which to dwell—such as how much of the segment fleet was infiltrated by hostages?
Still, it was a novel development. She had set out to gain the loyalty of a magnet—and had become foster-mother to a little magnet. Some bearing that had on the situation!
8. Skot of Kade
COUNCIL INITIATED PARTICIPATING * / :: oo
:: where is dash? ::
*indisposed*
:: require election of new leadership the bird has been stalling ::