He wanted to know everything. Why hadn’t his tutor told him everything? His eyes strayed from the telescope. What was tutor Murek hiding? Why had they suddenly changed plans at Ragmuk? Was the money stick empty? Why had their credit dried up? A cautious distrust of farmen was preventing him from asking. But he intended to find out with a spider’s patience. All he had to do was feign innocence and wait for hints to flit too closely to his web. High on Eron’s priority list was an upgrade to more memory and a faster mind.
But that could wait at least until the maternal Chairman had pried him away from her telescope!
He didn’t have all the pieces yet. Was Murek Kapor this farman’s real name? Hints... slips... indicated otherwise— but he didn’t yet know why his tutor had changed names or what identity it masked. Was he running from the law? The masks out here in the empire were everywhere! If only he could see far enough, he could see the roofscape of trees that masked the Lyceum on Splendid Wisdom!
Never enough time for everything! The old witch brought out the watch cycle’s duty roster and gave him his next assignment. He sighed. No more telescope. He didn’t even plea. He knew this she-witch by now. She patted his bum with a firmness that gently propelled him off in the direction of his work.
Scrubbing gave him lots of time for further brooding. He had already deduced that his tutor’s promise of a scholarship was worthless. What could be more revealing than their accommodations for Neuhadra? His mentor and Rigone had a small double-bunked cabin, horrible enough—but he was relegated to sharing with a crewman. He dreamed of a morning sun pouring in over leafy vases of plants. Had he actually been gauche enough to grumble at his mother while she held onto his ears as he sullenly watered them? How had he failed to notice the glory of his luxurious room back in the highlands of Agander’s Great Island? Scraping centuries of neglected dirt from the encrusted walls of a dim ship’s corridor gave him a sudden respect for a mother’s taste in design and furniture and her insistence on their regular maintenance.
He was allowed to sleep only when his bunkmate was on duty-watch. It seemed to be a part of the contract Murek had negotiated that for Eron pay his way by cleaning and performing tasks too menial for a robocrab. Various parts of the ship were undergoing repair. When he dared complain, that scruffy matron, the witch, only smiled and found more work for him to do on that theory that a busy boy was a happy boy. She could afford theories like that! She wasn’t mean but he sometimes shocked her and she responded with an expression that implied You aren't by any chance under the delusion that you are, by some divine right, a passenger? Other than assigning him yucky work, the Chairman of the Bridge noticed him only when she had some ship’s arcana to teach. Like telescopes. Once she slipped him a cookie from the secret store she kept in her bra. It tasted better than the gruel in the mess.
Centijiffs added up to inamins, a hundred inamins by the gulp to hours. Watches passed. A hundred watches added up to a month. He was coming to a boil. Working with his hands, sleep, scrub, sleep, paint, sleep, hustle and defer! There was a limit to such indignity! He was the son of a Gandarian High Adjudicator!
But before Eron broke out in open revolt, Murek hastily restrained him with a curt “Do what you’re told. This is nothing. Where we’re going they have child labor contracts that make the Chairman of the Bridge look like your sainted mother.” And then his eyes twinkled but Eron wasn’t sure he was joking. “I can sell you for pocket credit when we get into port. Plans don’t always work out the way they are supposed to, and you, you little pest, ask too many questions. Yes, to answer you, I don't know exactly what I’m doing; but aren’t we still jumping by the grace of my wit? So keep your mouth full of potatoes and shut up with the whining.”
That didn’t exactly sound like master Murek Kapor knew what he was doing, wits or witless. Eron decided to postpone his revolt. They still had endless watches ahead of them to jump from one murky hell of a barren outpost to the next. That gave Eron time to plot—in his dreams—jail-breaks from dark interstellar worldlets. Would Murek really sell him into slavery? Wasn’t slavery illegal everywhere? Wasn’t this the Second Empire! The Founder help him if he had fallen back in time to the Glory Centuries of the Evil Empire!
After roundabout hyperspatial spelunking far from any sun, the tedium broken only by the trading stopovers at minor interworlds of the stellarways, the Chairman made the announcement that they had reached Neuhadra. At last! Eron was reassembling pipes that he had painfully polished inside and out. No more of such drudgery! But he wasn’t reassured. After all, this was the Planet-with-the-Child-Labor-Laws.
Eron knew his guardian had been reduced to pauper-hood—but by how much? He knew that a certain young boy was the only salable commodity that his tutor possessed— but would Murek really... ? Of course it was only logical to anticipate the worst. And then again, maybe not. It was true that he trusted Murek. Maybe he’d go along with him. Nevertheless he had contingency plans to take off on his own as soon as they hit dirt. Yes. Like a rocket on antiprotons!
But life never makes sense just at the moment when you think you have all the angles covered. The Chairman of the Bridge slipped him a last cookie from her bra. The roboskiff delivered the three of them, Murek and Rigone and Eron, to the high customs station where they were met by a golden yacht with huge decorative fins and two solicitous crewmen who bypassed them around customs procedures and brought them down to planet inside a wood-burnished cabin whose robocook served them champagne and soft-boiled eggs. With fresh egg in his mouth, Eron goggled out at the awesome twilight landscape below—which was rapidly expanding into a private spaceport between mountain peaks. It seemed to serve a single castle. Was this castle-on-a-lake the planet’s largest slave owner?
It was night and cold when they debarked. A fresh frost was on the ground, on the buildings, on the fields, on the trees, but there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, only stars. They were given electrical coats and Eron marveled that when he breathed, fog came out of his mouth. It was thin air. Their furry hats were oxygen concentrators that hid an optional face mask. Some kind of hardy bird was chirping an evening sleep call.
And wonder of wonder, stars were falling everywhere from the sky. He tugged at the brocaded sleeve of his tutor’s guest-coat.
It was Rigone who responded. “Looks like we arrived in time for a real shower.”
“Does this all the time, not every hour, but most months,” volunteered their uniformed escort, guiding them to a waiting aerocar.
“See those bright stars up there?” As they walked through the cold, Eron’s strange farman was being a teacher again, pointing toward two brilliant lights halfway up the sky and to a smaller blaze above the mountains where the Galactic Swirl powdered the horizon. The beacons looked like artificial searchlights but they didn’t move. They were stars! “Neuhadra is in a seven-system; we can’t see the other four from here. Our companions are far enough away so that Neuhadra is in a stable orbit even if it isn’t as circular as the climatologists might like—but our companions make it hard for the debris out there to settle down. That makes for good comet watching and brilliant shooting-star displays. I don’t think anyone on Neuhadra doesn’t keep an eye out for errant debris.”
“Have you been here before?” asked Eron.
“Nope, but my friend Mendor used to squawk about the sky falling when we were in school. All the time.”