“ ‘Gifts must be repaid in kind,’ the boys’ mother told them. ‘You are good with your spears; you must catch some fish for this chief. But please be careful.’ So the boys went spearfishing, and laughed at their mother’s warning. They knew they could swim like tunas, dive like porpoises, and sail as fast as the wind. ‘We’ll show her,’ they said as they gathered firewood to cook their catch.
“But later, while they were fishing, Lap clowned around and managed to drop his spear. So the two boys swam deep, deep into the ocean to retrieve it, without bothering to check what they were swimming down into. It was a giant cave, and inside the cave lived a giant fish, which swallowed the two boys up.
“ ‘We are eaten!’ cried Tik. ‘We are in this fish’s horrible belly. It stinks like rotting fish guts. What will we do?’
“ ‘I don’t know,’ said Lap. ‘Maybe we should have listened to Mom. Maybe she’s not entirely stupid about these things.’
“ ‘I don’t want to die in this place,’ Tik said. ‘There must be something we can do. Look, I’m still holding the firewood! We’ll light a fire inside this fish.’
“The wood was wet, but the two boys were expert at starting fires, so they rubbed the sticks together until finally they burst into flame.
“ ‘Watch this,’ Lap said, and held a flaming stick against the wall of the fish’s belly. The fish jumped and struggled, flipping over and over in the water trying to rid itself of the horrible burning pain. ‘Get ready for a wild ride!’
“Using the flaming sticks, they drove the fish up out of the cave, out of the deeps, up onto the shore of a nearby island. They laughed. ‘We still have more wood. And our spears, and our grass hats. We’ll roast this fish from the inside!’ And that is what they did. Finally, the fish’s mouth opened, and they were able to climb out. And who did they find there, but the chief and his people who had given them the food!
“ ‘Your Majesty,’ they told him, ‘at the request of our mother, we have brought you a gift: a giant roasted fish.’
“ ‘Oh, my. How did you catch him?’ the chief exclaimed.
“ ‘We used ourselves as bait, and cooked him from inside. Now if you don’t mind, we would like to ask you for a ride home. We promised our wise mother we’d never swim that far again.’
“And the chief smiled. ‘You are clever boys to listen to your elders, instead of running wild. Here’s a dollar.’ ”
The next day, Bascal noticed Conrad’s Camp Friendly mural on the sail, and replaced it with a faint, kilometer-wide skull and crossbones, and then followed up by singing the crew a catchy Space Pirate Song of his own invention. And that was bad, because even the boys who’d stopped liking Bacsal took an immediate shine to his song. Instantly, it replaced the Fuck You Song as the national anthem of their doomed, cabin-sized monarchy.
Well, she doesn’t have an engine, and she doesn’t have a fax gate,
And she never had a regs inspector say that she was sound,
And with no acceleration and with no gravitic grapple
We go flying through the cabin ’less we tie our asses down!
It went on like that, for verses and verses, and it was the kind of song anyone could add to at any time. Hell, within a few hours of hearing it Conrad caught his own mouth singing the chorus.
Fortunately, bathroom duty with Xmary that day provided a chance to sort things out. Nobody questioned this, even when he closed the door, because he’d been careful all along to assign himself all the nastiest, least-desirable chores. Who wanted to mess with that? It made everything easier: not only getting privacy, but also getting people to do the work. If they saw him doing it, and saw him seeing them not doing it, well, the shame and boredom took over, and lo and behold, the chores got done.
“Bathroom duty, ugh,” Xmary said.
“We’ll get through it,” Conrad assured her, although with eight teenaged boys using it, it was an awful mess. He was tempted, not for the first time, to devise some sensors in here to catch whoever it was that was leaving actual blobs of shit in the air. In any case, it all had to be cleaned up before anyone could dream of taking a shower, and according to Xmary’s schedule today was definitely shower day.
But the session didn’t start welclass="underline" Xmary inspected some black marks on the cabin’s wooden wall, and quickly discovered they were a cartoon drawing of herself, naked and engaged in an improbable act whose details were spelled out with arrows and word balloons off to the side.
“Damn!” she said, with surprising vehemence. “Damn, damn, fuck. You boys are so mean. Don’t look at it! Get away from that!”
Conrad saw tears quivering at the corners of her reddening eyes. His brilliant response: “Hey, I didn’t do it.”
“Damn, damn,” she repeated. “This is what I get. This is the price I pay. Being leered at by little boys. This is disgusting. It doesn’t matter who I am, does it? It doesn’t matter how much I do for you people.”
Again, Conrad’s brilliance: “I’m nearly eighteen. I’m not a little boy.” But he hated the way that sounded, so he quickly followed it with, “We can find out who’s responsible. There aren’t that many suspects.”
“Don’t bother,” she said, angrily rubbing her eyes.
“Here’s a sponge,” he tried.
But she was already rubbing at the drawing with her hand. “No, it’s indelible ink. And it’s carved. Great, somebody drew this, then cut it into the log, then drew over it again. Such dedication.”
“We’ll get rid of it,” he tried to assure her.
“There’ll just be more of the same,” she said.
He shook his head. “No. Tonight, everyone gets Slop Number Two for dinner. If it happens again, they get no dinner at all. With Bascal’s help, we can enforce that.”
“I don’t want Bascal’s help,” she said quietly. She’d turned a really amazing shade of red. “I don’t want him to know about this. I don’t want it discussed.”
“Not even—”
“I don’t want it discussed. I’ll just check in here five times a day, with a paintbrush and a sanding block.”
“That shouldn’t be necessary.”
“Well, apparently it is,” she snapped. Then she waved a hand. “Just go over there or something. Clean. I’ll take care of this.”
“Okay. Okay. See, I’m going. I’m over here.”
Wordlessly, she left the room, returning a few minutes later and closing the door most of the way behind her. She busied herself with the drawing’s noisy expungement.
“You don’t know many girls,” she observed sourly.
Conrad wanted to deny that—to be snitty about it, even. Why, there were several girls at the School of West Europe who were in his general age bracket, and with whom he’d had conversations more than once. More than twice! And he saw girls out in public of course, and wasn’t afraid to smile or wave, to introduce himself or to kiss them without invitation. But he had the uncomfortable sense that this information would not impress her, or change her opinion in any way.
“I know you,” he said instead, as offhandedly as he could manage.
“How splendid for you,” was her reply.
Ouch. He gave her another minute to cool off, not wanting to touch that temper any earlier than necessary. But he did want to talk to her. More importantly, he needed to, because he didn’t have a reading on her yet, and without one he couldn’t plan a single thing that involved the crew in any way. The situation was dire.