Nightfall_at_Algemron

She shook her head. "No. It's weird, but I had a wonderful childhood." Angela laughed. "I mean, 'it's weird' in the sense that it seems like no one else I know has had one or has a good relationship with their parents now. We always got along really well, our family, even my brother and me. Well, I had to thump him sometimes, but you assume you're going to have to do that with your brother so that he'll at least come out vaguely human." Angela grinned a little. "Since I went out on my own into the big world, I see the kind of things other people have gone through." She shook her head. "I see how they suffer or suffered, and I say, 'God, I was lucky not to have that happen to me. How did I luck out? What did I do right?' It doesn't seem fair, somehow."
She sighed. "This looks like just more of the same, but even now, look at the group of us. Enda. well, you'd know more about her history than I would. Grawl, though. Chucked out from among her own people, almost without a thought, for being the runt. Helm." She paused. "I get a feeling Helm's childhood wasn't exactly a joyous romp. Just say the words 'parent' or 'child' around him and watch him
stiffen up. The doctor." She shrugged. "Mechalus are kind of a mystery to me. Do they have children or send away for a kit?"
"A little bit of both, I think."
"Well, there's no telling how Delde Sota took the process. They keep retrofitting themselves until they get it right, the mechalus—isn't that the idea? No telling how much of her 'original engineering' is left then. She might just have done a valve and ring job on herself or a complete rebuild." Angela shrugged. "Anyway, in terms of human childhoods, I seem to have come off unusually well. I look at the people around me and wish I could patent the process somehow and sell it."
"You'd be rich pretty quick," Gabriel said.
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They sat there quietly for a little while, sipping at their kvass. Down the hall, Grawl was twanging away at the rhin and producing astonishing dissonances that continued to sound more like drive malfunctions than anything else.
"How do you put up with that?" Gabriel said.
"Mostly I don't," Angela said. "Mostly she does it when I'm asleep."
"How could you sleep with that going on?"
Angela shrugged. "If she did it while I was going to sleep," she said, "I'd never get there. Afterwards, you could detonate a force grenade in here and I'd just sort of go 'uh' and turn over." She smiled, rather sheepishly. "It's one of the reasons I was glad she agreed to team up with me. You don't want to know the kind of volume levels I had to set my ship's alarms for when I was alone to wake me up if something happened during my downtime."
"I'll make a note to shout at you if you doze off," Gabriel said and fell silent for the moment.
You'd know more about her history than I would, Angela had said. Gabriel could have laughed at that but was in no mood. He still knew so little about Enda. She had her own privacies, which even after all this while he was unwilling to probe.
All this while, Gabriel thought. How long have I known her now? A year?
It's just been such a busy year. but once again Gabriel was left thinking of how many questions he had to ask her and wouldn't but still wished he had answers to.
He and Angela talked a good while more, mostly about inconsequential things, but Gabriel came back again, eventually, to his father. "The one thing I should have said to him," Gabriel said with something of an effort, "is that I loved him, and I didn't want him to worry, but I didn't say that. And I think he meant to say it to me, despite it all. and he didn't say it either."
"That's hardly your fault," said Angela. She shook her head and sighed. "Anyway, you can still drop him a note next time you shift some data."
Gabriel shook his head. "Anything I send him is going to be intercepted," he said. "He might never see it. He doesn't seem to have seen messages I sent him very early on."
"Well, what if it is intercepted?" Angela said. "So the snoopies discover that you secretly love your dad.
If that information confuses them, so much the better. The hell with them, anyway."
Her belligerence surprised Gabriel a little. "They've been putting you through all kinds of grief," Angela said, seeming annoyed. "No harm for you to annoy them back a little. Maybe they need to be jolted into thinking of you as something besides some kind of inhuman murderer."
Gabriel thought about that. "I'd be more worried that they might try to use the information against me somehow, or against him."
"Sounds like they've already tried everything they could in that regard," Angela said. "From what you say your old man said, it didn't take. Look, it's your choice, Gabriel, but whatever happens, someday this is all going to be over, and you'll be able to come back again. You want to make sure you have someone to come back to." She stretched.
Gabriel nodded. "Your weapons in order?" he said.
"Grawl's checked everything out," Angela said. "I'm going to double-check in a while. We don't have anything that could remotely be considered contraband, and everything but personal arms is going to be locked up while we transit the system—except the ship's armament, of course, but it sounds like we won't be there that long."
"I want to do some provisioning there," Gabriel said, "things that could attract attention if I picked them up here. Long-life supplies, some exploration gear. we may be gone for a while."
She grinned a little. "You've caught the bug," she said. "Just as well I sold you that contract, I guess. You sure made it pay a lot better than I did."
Down the hall, a soft chirping noise began and started to escalate. "Comms," Angela said, and then raising her voice, said, "Communications, reroute to sitting room. Yes?"
"Angela, it is Enda. I was wondering if Gabriel was over with you."
"Hi, Enda. Yeah, he's here. Hey, I have that list for you. I'll send it back with Gabriel when he heads home."
"I'll be right back, Enda," Gabriel said to the air. "All right."
Gabriel finished his drink then stood up and stretched. "Maybe I will," he said. Angela blinked. "Will what?"
"Send that message." He looked thoughtfully at her. "As for the snoopies. maybe a little confusion will be a healthy thing."
Angela smiled slightly as he turned away. "Maybe so. See you later."
They lay bathed in light, and all the voices sang in the stillness there, and never an unharmonious note was heard.
They do not know.
They do not know, chorused the others.
It was not really a song, at least in terms of sound being involved, but sound was just another form of interaction which they understood well enough to use when the need arose. They preferred their own methods: silence and the interweave of thought and long lithe movement, however confined. All life was movement inside confinement, until that frightening time came when the walls of the world broke, and they went hunting another world to live in. Fortunately, such times rarely lasted long. The universe was full of worlds in which to live. Sometimes they resisted, but the resistance was never able to last long.
Right now, the warm light of this particular world bathed them all, and they lay luxuriating in it while they considered their business. It was leisurely work at the moment, though the wisest of them knew that soon there would be need to speed the pace a little. Things were changing outside. The plan was moving forward by indirect means, as they themselves moved—long slow strokings of body against body in the tangle, while thoughts wove and curled about one another, while ramifications slid forward through time and became manifest.