This was classic Grace. She could answer any question but rarely made it interesting. Information isn’t knowledge, as Mom used to say. I leaned left and the roller curved back toward the airlock.
That’s when I saw a light brighter than any of the stars dazzle from one of Mercy’s modules.
“Grace, what’s happening?”
Again, there was a long pause, as if she were editing herself. She’d been doing that a lot. “You should come in now,” she said, “and greet the new arrival.”
The shuttle from Mercy had docked by the time Grace recycled the habitat airlock. I scrambled out of the roller, leaving its hatch open, and sprinted for reception. Grace reported that the new crew was already past the powerwash and was finishing the bioscan. Who were they? How many? Grace was still keeping her secrets as I burst into the habitat’s reception area, sticky and out of breath. Qory waited for the big reveal by the airlock. My appearance seemed to amuse her; this wasn’t her first trade.
“What’s so funny?’
She chuckled. “Sweat much?”
“Tell me you’re not excited.”
She pushed dank hair off my forehead. “Relax.” Then Grace opened the inner airlock.
“Qory and Jojin,” she said. “Meet Orisa.”
My first impression was of size: This was maybe the biggest woman I’d ever seen, in real life or in story. She was easily two meters tall—the top of my head came to her chin. A flowing dress fell in dark indigo folds from shoulder to deck, covering her; only her head, hands, and the toes of her right foot showed. A riot of dark hair frizzed around her face. Still disheveled after the powerwash, she returned our welcoming smiles with a scowl.
Then she closed her eyes tight, as if that might make us go away.
Then she moaned.
“What?” I said. “What’s wrong?”
“Just look at you.” Orisa seemed to be in pain.
I thought maybe she’d spotted something, so I glanced over to see if Qory was all right. Same as always: a waif with a ponytail and big teeth. The body she was wearing was compact and asexual, ideal for close quarters of a starship. She had on hardsocks, green monkey pants, and a jiffy.
“What’s wrong with the way we look?” Qory said.
Orisa shook her head in disbelief, picked up a satchel made of woven cloth, and marched out of the airlock, through reception, and into the habitat. Astonished, we followed.
“Wait,” Qory said. “Are you okay?”
“No!” Orisa called over her shoulder. “I’m stuck on a dingy surveyor with a bot and a boy.” She waved her arm as she walked; the drape of her sleeve looked like a wing. “Not another coming-of-age story!”
“I’m not a boy.” Indignant, I caught up to her. “I’m nineteen years old. And this is our starship, Grace. Don’t you be hurting her feelings.”
“Oh, great.” She whirled and glared down at me, so close that I could feel the heat coming from the flush of her cheeks. “A bot has feelings, kid,” she said. “A starship has empathy mirror routines. It’s an intelligence, not a person. Didn’t they teach you anything on this bucket?”
I’d always been a little cloudy on the difference between the two, but I wasn’t going to admit that to her. “When you hurt our feelings, Grace captures our distress.”
“Distress.” She went up on tiptoes. “You want to talk about distress?” I had to take a step back.
“You’re saying we’re not good enough for you?” I channeled Darko Fleener and put steel in my voice. “You’re too good for our crew, too important for a mere survey ship?”
I thought she might stuff me down the recycler, but instead she backed off and sighed. “So, what do you do on this ship, Mr. Not-a-Boy?”
“Do?” Now I knew how Dad felt. “Do?” I’d wandered into a story where I had no idea of my next line. “I’m crew, so I stand watch and make repairs. I work out.” She seemed to expect more. “I do stories.”
“No.” Orisa turned to Qory. “Get me Mercy,” she said. “This isn’t fair.”
“Sorry.” My sister shrugged. “No help here.”
Grace broke into our conversation. “You were the logical choice. The only choice.”
“What about Plomo?” said Orisa. “The Radomirs? I’ve already done Survey service.”
“That was seventeen years ago.” Normally, when Grace used her soothing voice, it made me sleepy. “You have been sufficiently refreshed, Orisa.” Now I felt my blood effervescing with excitement.
“Mercy sends her regards,” said Grace. “We have finished synchronizing our databases and we are processing the new information to grow the infosphere. She will proceed to the mangle and we will resume our survey mission. I am pleased that you’ve joined our family. Would you like to see your rooms now?”
Orisa dropped her satchel and slumped against the bulkhead. “Shit.”
“Language,” cautioned Qory. That used to be Mom’s job, but everything had changed.
Orisa didn’t come out of her quarters for the next two days, and I felt like I was holding my breath the entire time. Things got so bad that I found myself wishing for the good old days of watch-standing and meals, stories and sleep. I tried to get back into the Fleeners, but real life was too unnerving. So instead I rolled over Grace’s surface and roamed her passageways. I took inventory of the new modules we’d received from Mercy and puzzled over those we’d sent her way. Gone were the pair of sealed cargo modules filled with various hazmats we had generated, along with the auxiliary greenhouse filled with a jungle of plants, trees, and chlorophytes that Grace had gathered on the Valcent flyby. In exchange, we’d received one module filled with replacement ice, two that were empty, and one that was almost empty except for the bumpy purple spatters on the deck that were lit with UV. Grace said that if the spatters germinated as the bioengineers on Mercy predicted, they might grow into a self-sustaining protein pond, which we could harvest for our food printers. But it would take several years before we’d know if this experiment was going to work.
I was going to miss the Valcent greenhouse: Grace had jumped the oxygen content of its atmosphere to twenty-seven percent and the air was spicy-sweet soup. One of my favorite places on Grace. It brought back happy memories of the celebration we’d had after discovering the jungles on Valcent D, back when I was eleven. That had been the last time we’d found life; our two most recent systems had been big disappointments. Qory acted like all these changes to our ship were no big deal. After all, Grace was on a survey mission and crew trades were not even the most important part of a starship rendezvous. New data had to be synced and resources exchanged if we were to grow the infosphere. Which was no doubt true and I shouldn’t have been surprised, but my only other rendezvous had been with the Hope when I was ten, a year after Uncle Feero died. Since no crew had changed hands that time, it hadn’t made much of an impression. Although, come to think of it, Qory had started morphing from my brother to my sister just after that.