No, she answered, following the gray-carpeted corridor toward the bridge. She no longer even noticed how strange it was that it rose in front of and behind her, disappearing in back of the ceiling. Scuff, scuff, scuff went her feet. She amused herself by scuffing in patterns when she walked; short-long, long-short. But I have you.
She felt the weight of his contemplation, the flow of ideas and the texture of his emotion, because he permitted her to feel them. A little bit wonder, a little bit pride, a little bit fear. “The ease with which you say that is going to worry people, Genie,” he said, quietly. “They won't understand it. They won't understand why having me in your head, why relying on me to know what time it is, doesn't worry you.”
Then they're pretty silly. You never bother me when I want to be left alone, and you're always there when I need you. Unlike Leah. Unlike Jenny, who had always come and gone with very little rhyme or reason. Unlike Papa, who had always been worried about Genie because she was sick, and now that she wasn't sick, wasn't worried anymore.
Genie's mouth twitched. She didn't miss the cystic fibrosis. Really, truly. Not at all.
Even if she did miss not being invisible sometimes.
“Still,” he said. “You might want to keep it to yourself. Until there are more people like you. People can be mean when they don't understand things.”
Richard, she answered dryly, as she reached her destination. I know that. Do you think you're talking to a child? He didn't answer. She grinned to herself and held her left hand up to the ready room door sensor so that it could read the control chip implanted under her skin. The door chirped softly and slid open. Genie went inside, and Richard “stayed behind.”
He'd be there if she wanted him. But for now, he did her the courtesy of letting her walk away.
Patty didn't look up when she stepped into the pilots' lounge-slash-ready room. As Genie had guessed, the older girl was bent over an interface plate, her fingers twisted through brunette hair, holding it out of her face like a heavy curtain. “Shouldn't you be in bed?”
“I'm always in bed,” Genie said. “I've spent more of my life in bed than anybody needs to. Whatcha working on?”
“Differentials,” Patty answered, and tucked her hair behind her ear. A few strands snagged on a silver earring shaped like a leaping dolphin; she disentangled them with a bitten fingernail, wincing. “You want something to drink?”
Genie shook her head and hunched down on a stool, tapping at another interface panel on the desktop without any haste, with one finger only. She leafed through her homework files and sighed. She was ten months ahead of the curriculum, and still bored. Leah would have offered to show her how the differentials worked; Leah always did most of her homework with Genie, and bragged to Papa that Genie was smart enough to handle it.
Leah had used to, anyway.
Patty looked up from her homework again, caught Genie's eye, and looked away quickly. Patty's mouth twisted; her expression said creepy kid, but Genie was too lonely to get up and leave, even if she knew Patty didn't want her there. Genie put her chin down on her fists and sighed, studying a too-easy problem in spatial geometry that floated in front of her nose. Sometimes she liked to pretend she was invisible.
Sometimes she just suspected she really was.
1:15 AM
Sunday September 30, 2063
HMCSS Montreal
Earth orbit
The smaller lounge wasn't as private as the pilots' ready room, but Patty didn't feel like being that close to the bridge right now. Besides, if she was in the ready room, she would just start doing homework, and she didn't feel like doing homework.
And furthermore, she'd told Genie she was going to bed, because otherwise Genie would have hidden that big-eyed look behind her hair, never meaning for Patty to see it, and Patty probably would have broken into a thousand pieces all over the ready-room floor. And she didn't really need a crying jag.
Especially not when she was trying to be strong for Genie, and what she really felt like was moping about ostentatiously. Preferably somewhere where somebody could yell at her for it and make her feel suitably misunderstood. But that wouldn't be professional. And it would embarrass her grandfather. And disappoint her mother, if her mother…
Well, anyway. Which was why she was standing in the lounge, pretending to look at the magnified view of the shiptree in the holoscreen nearest the porthole. Which didn't help, so she closed her eyes and pressed her face against the crystal. It wasn't cold, though; the Montreal was bathed in sunlight, though it was the middle of the night and the ship, lightly staffed as she was, seemed almost deserted. And that was the problem, really.
Because Patty didn't want hero worship. Or sympathy. Or to be treated like blown glass.
All she really wanted was for somebody to yell at her, like a normal person with a normal family and normal problems. Like she was getting a C in physics or moping over a boy or…
Anything, really. As long as it didn't involve people walking on eggshells around her. She pushed herself away from the too-warm glass and went to get a disposable of lemon water from the dispenser. She was still fussing with the panel when the wheel on the entry started to spin, undogged from the outside, and the hatch came open.
Jeremy Kirkpatrick folded his long body almost double to peer through the hatchway, and then stepped over the knee knocker quickly and stood up inside the lounge. “You don't mind if I join you, I hope.” He paused for a moment before he closed the hatch, giving her a chance to say no.
“I don't mind,” she said, and finally fought the dispenser into producing her drink. “I'm not very good company, though.”
“I just came to look at the ship.” He dogged the hatch and walked past her, stopping where he could contemplate both the screened and the naked-eye views. The magnified one had the advantage of not spinning.
Patty bit the tip off her disposable. Dr. Kirkpatrick — no, Jeremy—folded his arms together and shoved his hands into his opposite sleeves. “Be nice to be telepathic about now,” he said.
“It doesn't help.”
He glanced at her, brow crinkling. “You can feel them, too?”
“Sort of.” There's a bright answer. She waved her left hand in a lopsided infinity symbol. “When Alan lets me. It doesn't make any sense, what they think, though. It's just like—”
“Muttering?”
“—traffic noise.” Which wasn't quite right either, but the best she could do. She stayed a few steps behind Jeremy, looking past his shoulder rather than standing beside him.
She wasn't expecting him to turn and fix her with a complicated stare. “You're up late. Aren't you lonely up here?”
“I'm a pilot.” She covered her expression by taking a drink from the bulb. “It's my job.”
“Huh.” He looked back out the window. “I hear you're a very good pilot, too. But they sure start you kids young.”
“Most of them even younger than me.” Like Genie. Who would probably be Leah's age when they did the surgery on her, and…
Jeremy let that hang there for a while without comment, spreading his long-fingered hand against the glass. “I'm just surprised you don't have… I don't know. What do girls your age have?” It could have been insulting, but the way he said it, it wasn't. Soft and thoughtful, like he was actually trying to remember what he'd been like at seventeen. But then he kept talking. “Boyfriends, and best girlfriends, and—”