Jacobi Station had been designed to handle outsystem transport, offering more docking and storage space than Janus, the first-built primary station. Peka had arrived before any direct docking of FTL ships was possible. She’d had to travel from starship to station in a little twelve-person hopper, sweating in her p-suit and entirely too aware of the accident rate of near-station traffic in overcrowded situations.
Someday these wide corridors would bustle with traffic; the blank spaces on either side would be filled with shops, hotels, restaurants. Only one was out here now, a pioneer branch of Higg’s, the universal fast-food chain. The concentric blue, green, and purple circles promised that its limited bill of fare would be the same as—or at least reminiscent of—that in every other Higg’s. A bosonburger… an FTL float… Dirac dip… the names were so familiar they didn’t sound silly anymore, and only third graders got a kick out of realizing that they meant something else.
Ahead, a green arch confirmed that the Perrymos was docked safely, its access available. Beyond that arch, the waiting area with its array of padded chairs in muted colors, and a TranStar employee at a desk, a young man whose shaved skull had been tattooed with the TranStar logo. Peka blinked; she hadn’t realized anyone was that much of a brownnose.
“May I help you?”
“I’m here to meet—” My mother tangled with the name, and Peka felt herself flushing, but she got out the more formal “Alo Attenvi.”
“Oh yes. Are you her daughter? She said her daughter was here… you’re lucky to have a mother like her… she doesn’t look old enough….” Peka refrained from violence and waited until the torrent ceased. The man finally quit talking and picked up the shipcom to ask for her mother.
“You’re early,” her mother said, stepping out the access hatch. “Would you like to come aboard and see my cabin?”
“No thanks.” Be trapped in a small space—no doubt immaculate—with her mother?
“Lead on, then,” her mother said cheerfully, and started toward the corridor herself. Peka had to scurry to keep up. Lead on, indeed. She stretched her legs—she was as tall as her mother—and caught up. This was her station, and she would lead the way.
“Do you like it out here?” her mother asked at dinner. They were seated in one of the little alcoves of Fred’s Place, at present the only independent eating place on the station. Since it was two decads to payday, they had the place to themselves except for another pair of passengers from the Perrymos.
Peka nodded, and hurried to swallow her mouthful of fried rice. “It’s… stimulating,” she said. That seemed the safest adjective. Her mother looked up at her.
“Is that all? What about men… are you meeting anyone interesting?”
“They’re fine, Mother, really.” She hadn’t talked to her mother about boys—men—since her sixteenth birthday, when her mother had taken her in for her first implant. I won’t pry, her mother had said, and she hadn’t. It was too late to start now.
“Well… have you heard from your father lately?”
“What brought that up?” she asked, before she could censor it. No question that her mother would notice the hostility.
“Sorry if it’s a touchy point,” her mother said, brows raised. “I only wondered… at one time, I recall, you said you didn’t want to hear from him again.”
“I don’t.” Peka tried not to let the anger out, but it was stuck in her throat, choking her. “I haven’t heard—since graduation, I think.” A graduation her mother had not attended because she was consulting somewhere, in another system, and couldn’t come back for just that day. She had understood even then, but it still rankled.
“I wish you’d tell me what upset you so,” her mother said. Of course her mother didn’t understand; her mother had had a wonderful father, a father who was there. She could not tell her mother what her father had said, those damning words that had put an end to the last of her childhood innocence, her trust. “Please,” her mother said quietly. “It’s been several years, you say. It’s still bothering you. You need to get it out.”
She had never been able to resist that voice when it was quiet and reasonable. She would have to say, but she didn’t have to say it the way he had said it. “He said it was—that I was—just an accident.”
Her mother’s face paled to the color of the tablecloth. “He said what?”
Anger surged out of control. “He said I was an accident!” Peka yelled. “An accident. The great engineer who doesn’t believe in accidents had… an… accident!” From the corner of her eye she saw heads turn, the other two diners glancing quickly toward her and away, and leaning to each other. A waiter paused in midstride, then dodged through the kitchen door.
“No. You were not an accident.” Her mother had flushed now, unbecoming patches of red on her spacer-pale skin.
“Right.” With that great blast, all her strength left her; Peka wanted to sink through the chair into the deck and disappear. She could not look across the table.
“I… loved him,” her mother said, in the same even, reasonable tone. “Louse though he was, in many ways, I did love him. He was everything I wasn’t. Irresponsible, spontaneous, gregarious… just being around him was like an endless party. And he liked me. Loved me, within the limits of his ability…”
“Love is responsibility,” Peka said, quoting. She ran her finger around and around the plate. “Love is acts, not feelings or words.”
Her mother sighed. “I taught you very well. Too well, maybe. Yes, that’s the kind of love parents must have, to be parents together… and any parent to a child, to be a good parent. Anything less won’t survive, won’t sustain the child. But there’s a… a chaotic quality, an incalculable dimension. I fell in love with him, and he with me, and together we engendered you—”
“By accident,” Peka insisted.
“No. Not on my part.” A long pause. “It’s—it’s difficult to explain, and harder now because those feelings are so far back. But—I wanted a child. Wanted his child, his genes mixed with mine, to temper my own rock-ribbed values. He said he wanted a child too, but—as it turned out, he didn’t.”
“He has others—” Peka remembered their pictures, a row of pretty children standing in front of a wide white door.
“Yes. And a compliant, sweet wife who brought them up while he voyaged from system to system.”
“You know her?”
“I met her, of course. Court-ordered family therapy, to determine whether you should be removed from my custody and given to him. Luckily—or I thought it was luckily—his wife was pregnant with twins and didn’t want you. You couldn’t possibly remember, but you were a very imperious three. You explained to the judge that it was rude to drink in front of others without offering them anything. You explained to the therapist when she tried to give you a developmental test that you didn’t make guesses… you either knew the answer or not, and it was foolish to pretend otherwise. She said you were too rigid, and Tarah said she couldn’t possibly handle you and the twins she knew she was carrying.”
Peka thought she did remember the therapist, but not Tarah. She didn’t pursue it. “But if he says I was an accident, why was he trying to get custody?” Peka asked. She had no clear idea of how family law worked, but surely the parent suing for custody had to want the child.
“I don’t like to say,” her mother said, lips tight. Peka knew that look; it was hopeless. But years of training and practice in following chains of logic led her there as if by a map.