“Hal, come see this.” He looked where she pointed. “If the bulk handler’s out of service, they’ll push it around here to work on it, and its back panel can bump into this—” she meant the control nexus for the docking collar modification. “Over time, those bumps could shift it enough to allow interference.” She looked around the whole compartment. “First, we’ll need a safety stop on this bulkhead anyway—we don’t want something the mass of that thing bumping it. In fact, we need a double stop, one on the deck and one on the bulkhead.” Hal nodded, and made a note.
“We’re still going to need to reroute things, but I think it should be the other lines. That’s not as bad as it looks—here—” She had sketched it out for him. He took the pad and frowned a moment, then nodded.
“Yes. I see. It takes a bit longer, but it avoids the problem entirely. It’s not a patch but a redesign. Good. Thanks, Peka.”
“You’re welcome,” Peka said. “It’s my job…”
“If you wouldn’t mind—could you come back and give us a go-ahead when we’ve got the rerouting done and the stops in? Just in case?”
“Of course—got an estimate?”
“Couple of hours, I think. If that’s too late—”
“No… you’re already working over shift. Just give me a call; I’ll have my beeper this time.”
Peka led the way out; she signed her mother off the site, and they turned in their p-suits at the section storehouse. Now she was hungry—the dinner she hadn’t eaten left an empty hole in her midsection.
“I don’t know about you,” her mother said, “but I’m still hungry. Is there any place where we can get dessert?’
“Fred’s is the only thing, other than the company mess hall. And they’ll be through serving dinner by now.”
“Ah. Fred’s, then—if you don’t want to come, don’t worry about me. I can find my own way.”
“No… I’ll come too, but I need to go by the office first and log the changes we’re making.”
“Who was that very officious young man who interrupted us?” her mother finally asked, as Peka entered notes into her workstation.
“Einos.” Peka considered her options and made a clean breast of it. “I’ve been going out with him—to the limited extent that’s possible on this station.”
“Oh.” Her mother chewed that over in silence.
“It’s not… um… serious,” Peka said. It might have been, but at the moment she wanted to wring his neck.
“Good,” her mother said. “I mean, it’s your own business, but—backstabbers don’t reform.”
“Then how did you fall for my father?” Peka said, shocking herself. Her mother gave her a look she could not read. “Or was that an accident?”
Her mother laughed. “I thought so, at the time. Not my fault, I told myself. Could happen to anyone, bolt from the blue, I told myself. You weren’t an accident, but he was, I told myself.”
“And now?”
Her mother sighed. “I had years, Peka, to argue that out with myself after you were born, after he left. What is an accident? The effect of a cause you didn’t recognize, you didn’t anticipate. That’s what I was taught, and that’s what I had to face. Why did I fall in love with a bright-eyed, laughing, charming young prince with honey-colored curls and blue eyes?”
“Hormones,” said Peka drily, amazed at her own temerity. Her mother’s laugh this time was almost a bark.
“Excuses,” she said. “Not hormones—that would explain falling in lust, maybe, but not what I felt, for that man. Animals have reasonable ways to choose mates, or the species dies. It was no accident… it was the direct result of my family and my beliefs. Because deep down, I let myself think it was no accident, but that other form of causation, destiny.”
“Destiny?”
“Fate. Luck. Or, in my grandmother’s vernacular, the will of God. Her God, at least, was wont to impose his will pretty firmly—or so she said when imposing it on me. I wanted to believe that there was some supernatural intervention which could get me out of the logical trap I’d built for myself… which could rescue me—”
Peka saw it all, in one flash of insight. “And so you blamed me,” she breathed. “For proving it wasn’t that at all, and you had after all done it to yourself…”
“Good grief, no!” That with enough force, enough stunned surprise and horror, to convince. “I never blamed you. You were the one good thing that came out of it.”
“But you always said—”
“I didn’t want you to make my mistakes, of course. That’s all. I had my family’s mistakes to avoid: women who had married obvious losers out of duty to some social scheme, women who had buried their brains in the waste recycler. A family—a culture really—which believed that accidents not only happen, it’s almost impious to prevent them. After all, how can you work up a good case of blame-and-guilt if there are no accidents?”
Peka had never heard this. She wondered if she were being cozened; her mother had always been smarter. But her mother went on.
“You asked one time why we never visited my relatives that much—I know you thought I disapproved of them.”
“Yes…” Peka said cautiously.
“I was scared of them,” her mother said. “I can’t—even now—talk about my grandmother’s beliefs, her influence on me, without getting a cold sweat.”
Her mother? Her famous, much-honored, much-published mother? Still that twitchy about people from her past? That didn’t bode well for Peka’s own middle and old age. She didn’t say that.
“It was all reaction,” her mother said. “And it always is, generation after generation, and you don’t know it before you’ve gone and had children and started another daisy chain of complication. Accidents have causes. Actions have consequences. I reacted to my family, and—by no accident, but the logic of human development—fell in love with your father. Wanted his child—you cannot know how much, or how dearly, until you want a child of your own. Brought you up to avoid my mistakes, and presented you with the opportunity to make your own, equally grave ones.”
“Like what?” Peka asked, her mouth dry.
Her mother looked at her, that appraising dark eye that had been scanning the inside of her head forever. “So far, my dear, you haven’t… but I can’t assume you won’t. The thing is, you aren’t an accident: neither in your conception, nor in your birth, nor in your upbringing, nor in your self as you are now. You are the result, the consequence, of causes and actions which, if you know them, may allow you more leeway than most. At least you understand—really understand—how causation works.”
“You’ve made me,” Peka said.
“I gave you half your genetic material and all your early training,” her mother corrected. “But you began making yourself from the joining of egg and sperm—and you withstood a good bit of my influence even as a small child.” She grinned, the most relaxed look yet. Peka had always known that grin meant the storm was nearly over; her mother’s good humor, once aroused, lasted far longer than her tempers. “And the further you go, the more you will be your own creation.”
“Another safety expert,” Peka said, not quite as a question.
“Not like me,” her mother said. “I didn’t hover, while you were in college, but they kept telling me—and I’ve looked at your work here. You don’t solve the same problems the same way I do. You have a… a quirk, a twist, to your work that I find startling—but very elegant, once I understand it.”
“You do?” Peka couldn’t keep her voice from squeaking. She choked back the Really? Really? that wanted to beg for more.
“Yes,” her mother said. She wasn’t looking at Peka now; she was looking at the plots on the wall. “Look at this—this collar redesign. I’d have changed it from the annular orifice to a linear slot, perhaps with one end square—something different from the other end. That would have meant redesigning the shuttle docking probe and the collar, classic lock-and-key design. Your solution would never have occurred to me.”