Chapter Five
Neither of my brothers were with Omaara. she was using our spot: that place three quarters of the way down the bench where if you sat on just the outer third of the seat, you could become invisible. The fisheye from inside couldn’t see you there, and it was just slightly too far to trigger the motion detector for the security cameras. It was where Dorian and I would wait armed with squirt guns when Jules was due back from an out-hull jaunt.
How did someone like her even know about it? She didn’t have any older siblings to waylay or younger ones to conspire with.
Omaara was fourteen, with tan skin and black hair pulled into a ponytail and curled. Metallic black and silver hair tinsels matched her overlong fake eyelashes. For the first time, I wondered whether her mom over on Daphnis Station knew that her fourteen-year-old daughter wore heavy makeup with fake eyelashes all the time now. Omaara kept her lengthened lashes down for most people, but I got the full direct glare. So I could tell she’d been not just crying but sobbing. Superficially, she still managed to look flawless with a pristine white T-shirt under new blue coveralls. She would have seemed ready to take her pod out for another week or two without any trouble, if she hadn’t been trembling.
My hand-me-down brown coveralls sported holes in the bottoms of most of the pockets and all the seams were tattered. My T-shirt had also been originally white, but it had been stained, bleached, and re-dyed until it was most charitably called a pale gray, not that you could see it. My zipper was all the way up. I’d forgotten to pack a clean change of clothes in my coming-home bag. And my own hair hung limp as dead rats’ tails in short greasy braids all over my head. I got through the elevator doors and set down my bag. It felt normally and depressingly heavy here in the full gravity part of the station.
I wobbled along like a toddler just learning to walk. I hadn’t been out for that long, but my legs felt like I’d gained thirty pounds in the last few days and had lost every bit of my muscle tone.
Xavier never wobbled like this when I met him after his frequent piloting sessions out-station.
I hadn’t expected to actually need to do the in-pod exercises because when I did zero-gee work, I never had issues with muscle tone. But zero-gee work often involves carefully moving and stopping large masses. And you didn’t spend a week in microgravity to do it. I was an idiot, again. Of course, I needed to have done something to keep my body from becoming overcooked pasta.
Xavier never had this issue. But then, Rockworths are known for constantly exercising.
It was no surprise that Omaara’d got in ahead of me and was already changed and showered. Maybe she’d already been home and come back. She and her dad live at one of the Dockside apartments. The tears on her face made me want to punch her. Omaara could cry on command and did whenever it’d help her. Even my own parents would take her side as soon as the waterworks started.
I hated my sympathy sometimes but just because she didn’t care at all about me didn’t mean something awful couldn’t have happened to her. People who fake cry also for real cry too.
The only thing I wanted to do was get home as quickly as possible with as few people as possible smelling me and start figuring out what it was going to take to rebuild my pod. That and I needed to get Chameleon checked out to make sure he hadn’t been hurt.
I was going to give Dorian a lecture about hiding a live creature in the pod with me.
That was supposed to be something you work up towards. Xavier had been talking about getting a bird or maybe a hamster.
I wobbled another couple steps. I was not going to go talk to Omaara. I was not going to find out what she could possibly be upset about when it was my pod that was a mess. I was going home by myself. I started walking downspin so it’d be a tiny bit easier and headed for nearest foot path home.
Her footsteps fell in behind me, in even smooth footfalls like she’d made time for regular exercise on her pod. But I could hear her sniffling as we walked.
What was she crying about really?
Yeah, her dad had been on the roster with Mr. Aanderson when we first left station, but it wasn’t reasonable to blame grown-ups for a kid installing an extra bit of code on their pod. Prof. Azul hadn’t even checked the logs, and he was our tutor for the whole thing. He was the responsible adult so everyone would blame him if they needed anyone else to blame.
Omaara was so neurotic about contractees being blamed for this or that.
A few times she wasn’t wrong. But her dad wasn’t at risk. Not over this.
Her family wasn’t getting deported from Chawla, even if I did dislike her enough to wish that on them. Besides, they’d just move to Daphnis if they didn’t like things here.
Right?
Besides, it wasn’t Mr. Ulbadine’s fault, Mr. Aanderson’s fault, or Prof. Azul’s fault that my pod malfunctioned. I was responsible for my own craft.
“Calypso, I’m so glad you are okay,” Omaara called out. “I was so worried you’d killed yourself out there. They should never have let you take out a pod that you hadn’t built yourself.”
Her face looked so much like she really was concerned for me that I turned into an idiot and believed her.
Her voice dropped. “You okay?”
“Yes,” I said.
Delight flashed across her face. She stepped forward quickly. With a soft whine the elevator exit camera turned back to point at the door and the active recording light winked out.
“It’s recorded now. You saying yes to not building that trainee pod. And I’m going to share that clip with every single kid on this station and they will show it to their parents if your horrible family tries to blame this on my dad, Calypso.”
“I built a pod twice, and Prof. Azul approved me rebuilding Susu’s,” I snarled back too late. She was right. The recording probably wouldn’t have caught her soft question about me being okay. And her tear-streaked expression of concern hadn’t been in view. It would look like I’d boldly confessed to not doing my own work, and when people checked, they’d see that I’d been flying with a waiver.
“Yeah, you rebuilt it badly,” she said, “and my pod recorded the collision avoidance maneuver Ladybug failed to execute properly. That wasn’t the standard piloting response. It was a Rockworth maneuver but tweaked so that it didn’t actually work. You let Xavier put test code on your pod when he should’ve put in on a remote, didn’t you? But your dad is going to blame mine for not noticing that you ran bad code.”
I could’ve turned around and punched her in the face like I had when we were ten. But I knew, absolutely knew, that she’d scurry back into some camera’s range, maybe after biting her own lip so it bled. I wasn’t making that mistake again. I was just going home.
“I already told your dad it wasn’t a problem.” I whirled back to face her. As we’d walked a camera for a Dockside maintenance closet had come into range. It pivoted to track me, recording light on. I wanted to rant about how other people besides me signed off on Ladybug and how they hadn’t noticed that the code didn’t merge properly with the other built-in piloting software. And even that somebody else had tweaked something to mess with me, because I was sure that the Rockworth kernel couldn’t have messed it all up that badly—I swallowed that. Not on camera. “The stuff that went wrong is already on record as my mistake. It’s over.”
Omaara moved up to walk next to me, her back to the camera. She wasn’t actively crying anymore. Her lips compressed slightly in that micro expression she does when she’s a steaming fireball of rage but feels she has to smile and pretend she’s not.
“Yeah, Dad said. But people can be—uggh.” Her nose wrinkled and I could tell she’d gotten a good whiff of me. “Let’s get you home.” She held out a hand when I started to turn. “Where’s your stuff?”
I groaned and wobbled around as I carried my things. I set the burlap bag with Chameleon’s cage stored just inside the top flap on the grating right before the grass line started. It was going to be so heavy to pick it up again. I stared at it with revulsion. What if I got just Chameleon and his cage and left the rest to be picked up later?
Omaara marched over and grabbed my bag. Her nose wrinkled even more at the bag’s smell. The camera swivelled and dutifully recorded her kindness. Of course it did.
“You owe me.”
“Thanks.” I didn’t mean it. I could’ve had someone else come get that for me later. My groan of pain as I forced my legs to try to walk smoothly came out a little louder than I’d intended. I wish my mom or dad would use the Station Council car to come get me.
Omaara granted me a genuine smirk. She never meant her smiles, but the smirks were real.
We walked far enough to get back out of recording distance.
“Xavier was going to come meet you.”
“Oh.” He would’ve carried the bag without making a big deal over it. The bag would’ve been enormous on him, but Xavier was strong.
“I convinced him you wouldn’t want him to see you like this.”
“Better him than you.” I turned and faced the long walk.
At least the scenery was nice.
Like I said, when you look at it from the outside, we live on the wall of a giant rotating cylinder. The rotation gives us the sensation of gravity in an outward direction. Center light runs through the middle of the cylinder, so during the day you can’t see the parts of the station that are straight overhead. It’s just too bright. But, at night, when center light is set to barely glow, you can see the whole station at once with all the windows twinkling like our very own handmade stars.
Chawla Station is gorgeous and it’s not small like some of the early Earth orbital stations. The station’s center light glows daylight spectrum at about double the lumens I’d had on Ladybug and I feasted my eyes on the brightness. To my left and right, the station curved upwards with bungalow homes, gardens, stores, and workshops scattered around the crazy-quilt of park land commons with a few private gardens here and there. The sparkling surfaces of the fish ponds surrounding the two big agricultural valleys we called “Gardens” recessed into the ground seeming to hang in the sky above me. Industrial work areas and storage were all either out-hull or in the levels beneath our feet, of course. The scenery wrapped around over my head until it disappeared into the center light’s brightness.
Center light on Chawla Station isn’t a narrow line like on some Kalpana-builds. Ours was built wide for zero-gee lab and factory stations to be inside it. Of course, now many of those spaces are senior apartments. Any experiments to be done in zero gee just get done outside the station instead of inside the station’s hub.
Zero gee is easier on old hips and knees but everyone I know of fights getting moved there, easier or not.
Our station’s spin is set to give us Earth-standard gravity even though some people had been arguing for years that 0.853 is actually optimal for human health. Not every station is going to be Daphnis. We also don’t have the perfectly straight grid of roads and paths that they do. Main East and Main West are as close as we get, but everything spiders off from that. And only Main East is completely straight all the way from Dockside to Powerside.
We’d left Dockside at the west exit, so Main East was directly overhead, hidden by the center light. That’s the longest straight-line road on Chawla, running from the docking side of the station all the way to Powerside. And it has a rail with a regular automated car system even kids can use. Main West has a built-in rail line too, but you need a private vehicle to use it. There are footpaths next to both. I had most of the length of Main West to walk to get to my house. Main East’s trolley could’ve taken me all the way to the other side of the station but I would’ve had to walk halfway around the curve to get home. So I reluctantly turned down Main West and just started to walk the long and winding way. At least I got to look up the curving hull and see the North Gardens as Main West turned that way. I watched the water of the fish ponds glisten as it flowed down over the lake’s inner falls to irrigate the rice terrace before moving slowly on to the sorghum, wheat and other crops laid out in multi-hued terraces below. I could just barely see the bottom level where it looked like some corn was getting pretty tall. A couple of people in one of Chawla’s boats floated about in the middle of the pond probably sampling the water or checking on the fish. The ecology of the station was so complicated it made my head spin. There were systems within systems and the fact that it all worked seemed as much a continuous daily gift as an act of human ingenuity. Give me a nice straightforward nuclear fusion reactor any day.
Once I’d gotten used to the tired slog of one foot after another and had started to deeply appreciate not having to carry my own bag, Omaara began her attack.
“Your little brother drives his pod better than you do and he’s a whole year younger.” Pause. “We all watched your final docking maneuver. Everyone was laughing at you.” She shot a look at me as if expecting to see me tear up. “Even Xavier did that snort giggle thing he does.”
Okay, that one hurt.
“Prof. Azul said he was going to give you extra support and he was sure you’d pick up the knack eventually, but he didn’t sound like he actually believed it.”
Eh, not surprising.
“Your dad didn’t argue for you.”
Not surprised by that either. Dad doesn’t have arguments without first getting every last bit of information, and then he annihilates anyone who disagrees with him.
“My dad said nothing against you at all. He kept his mouth shut.”
Okay, that one was an odd thing to mention. So I had to ask, “Just like you did?”
“I said nothing.” Omaara’s eyes blazed. “You can check the tape from the docking. They record everything, you know. So everyone on Chawla can look at it for the next three days until they overwrite it.” She bit out the next sentence like she didn’t want to admit it. “I got your flight code-protected, so it’s hard for people to access and even harder to copy and share. Not that you’ll be appreciative.”
Huh. That was interesting.
“You aren’t a real Sadou. You should just tell them that they should stop expecting it of you. Everyone can quite clearly see that you aren’t the real thing.”
And back to being mean again. But she didn’t have anything to say to top that.
We walked down the footpath next to the thoroughfare which zig-zagged back and forth so you can’t see very far ahead. The buildings and trees obstructed our view. Whoever first designed Main West consulted with psychologists (who lived on Earth or some giant round thing) and they decided that people would like to pretend that they don’t live on a space station even when it’s perfectly obvious to everyone that we do. West wasn’t built straight; it slalomed back and forth in a sine wave with buildings in the way every so often. Main East Road was a straight shot with right angle intersections, which goes to show that just because you consult with experts and listen to them once, it doesn’t mean you have to keep doing what they said if it was a silly idea.
After you’ve lived in a place for a couple generations, the people who actually live there have different opinions than the original builders. And so there are parts of Main West that are straightened out into New Main West and other parts where the sine wave Old Main West continues. It’s a very Chawla mess of the sort that Daphnis people will never understand. Some of the people who owned structures along the route for the proposed perfectly straight New Main West refused to move.
We’d go straight for a bit and then we’d take a sideways curve and then we’d go straight again. You’d think a habitat designed from the very beginning to house people would be more logical than that, but people just aren’t that logical.
“My dad filed for permanent citizenship two weeks ago,” Omaara said.
“Uh huh,” I said.
“You better not screw it up,” she said. “Your dad or Mr. Petrie-Xi still has to sign off.”
I said nothing, because what do you say to that?
“I mean it, Calypso.”
“How could I screw it up?”
“If you find a way, I’ll make everybody hate you.”
“Look,” I objected. “I already told him and I already told you. There’s no reason for any of this to come back on him. I said it was my fault.”
Omaara glared at me. “My dad is no idiot.” She spun on her heel and stormed away.
Well, at least I got to walk by myself, except that she was carrying my bag.
I kept walking.
Feet ran up behind me not too long after. Omaara had realized that she was carrying my bag.
“I didn’t steal it,” she said.
“Just give it.” The sack hurt my shoulder. Omaara winced and her expression seemed to show genuine concern. I wondered if she’d’ve walked it all the way to my house if I’d just opened my mouth to ask, but I didn’t want to be grateful. I wanted to stay mad at her for a little while longer. Omaara pointed at me red-faced for a moment and then spun on her heel and stormed off again.
It really was a good stomping exit, but her shoulders were hunched over and she kept looking back at me. It’s hard to leave in dramatic pout when you stay in sight of each other for such a long time.
She was going to see me again tomorrow and the next day and every day after that.…Unless her dad lost his job before he could get permanent station citizenship; then she’d have to leave with him. I could travel, and I’d always get to come back. My family had that visit to Phoebe coming up and so, depending on how long our trip took and how many extra things came up to delay our return trip, I might have nine months maybe even a whole year before I saw Omaara again. And maybe they’d be gone to Daphnis by then. But I wasn’t counting on it. Her mom had been not calling for them to join her for long enough that something wasn’t right.
The growing sense of unease about that, and the disturbing sensation that I might’ve not only judged Omaara wrong but also that her family might be facing an impending disaster and that I maybe could help with it had me turning away from the fastest route to the Fluckey House and starting to head back towards Omaara’s retreating back.
“Caly, Calypso, welcome home!” A familiar cheerful voice called to me.
I didn’t turn around immediately. I was trying to decide if I should say something. But Omaara looked at the person behind me and her face scrunched up intense disgust. How could she react like that to such a good person? Because she’s nasty, I reminded myself. Remembering all the mean things Omaara’d been saying earlier in the walk, I watched to make sure Omaara really was going. She turned off the road and ran through the mango orchard that surrounded the house the Rockworths had rented for Xavier.
Good luck with that. Xavier was going to be on my side no matter how close to true her ugly comments got.
I turned back around towards the vision on the rail line in the center of Main West.
“I’d want to make sure she wasn’t going to stab you too.” Ms. Ahini de Zuri-Grumft leaned against her beauty of a car and smiled at me as if I were her most favorite little sister in the whole wide world.
“Um, Ms. Zeegee, no kids stab each other on this station.”
“Could have fooled me,” she replied, running a hand over her vehicle as if to buff off a spot on the finish that I couldn’t see. The pink and white of her on-or-off-track car matched the paint scheme of the elaborate doll house my cousins had on Phoebe better than it did anything a station administration deputy usually wanted to drive, but Ms. Zeegee was fun like that. She’d tried to get us kids to call her Ahini like the adults did, but my Susu had heard my older brother do that just once, and I’d been smart enough to learn from the mistake. If you are a Sadou kid, adults got called by their last names, always. If the adult is difficult and really wants a nickname, they could have a nickname made out of their last name. Ms. Ahini de Zuri-Grumft had picked Zeegee which got turned into Ms. Zeegee.
And Ms. Zeegee was watching the mango orchard now. Omaara should be passing through the other side of it soon. Ms. Zeegee’s long eyelashes flicked just a bit when the door to Xavier’s house opened and his guardian, Ms. Dreya, allowed Omaara in. Ms. Zeegee reminded me of an Egyptian supermodel. Her elaborate eyeliner was a permanent makeup tattoo, and I suspected the rest of her exceptionally beautiful face had some surgical help too. She was in her second contract job on station and had gone home to Caelus between stints. Xavier and I had looked up her badge photo from her first job on station (which had been when we were just toddlers) to see how much she’d changed. Ms. Zeegee had gotten more gorgeous, not older. Her cheeks are harder now, and in the first photo her smile looked more forced than in her second one where it looks like whoever took the photo just made a joke.
She had big coiling black ringlet hair, perfectly lined deep brown eyes, and lips that she claims are an unfortunate mauve shade, but actually suit her face very, very well.
Those lips are the only weird thing in Ms. Zeegee’s two employee photos where the second photo isn’t an improvement in the earlier one photo. She had a different lip tint in the first photo that was redder and even more attractive on her. I don’t think the tint faded. I think she changed it. She still looks good, but she also looks like she’s trying to be my mom’s sister.
Anyway, Ms. Zeegee nodded her head at the four-seat on the track right next to me and said the sweetest thing I’d heard in a while: “Can I drop you off somewhere, Caly?”
My enthusiastic response was muffled by her friendly hug. Ms. Zeegee lifted my bag into the cargo trunk of the four-seater and let me have the chameleon cage on my lap. With a knowing grin, she worked the gears and took the vehicle off the track. The beeping alert announced that the vehicle was now operating on stored power.
“So where to?” She gave me a sidelong look. “Visiting a boy before you go home? You know Xavier would rather see you than her.”
“Um, no,” I didn’t know how to explain that Xavier was all but engaged to a very pretty Li girl who also had genetic dwarfism, but who he hadn’t met yet. So I didn’t bother. “The Fluckey’s place, please.”
“The child vet?” Disbelief, anger, and finally a forced expression of goodwill worked over her face.
I just pointed at the chameleon now laying in a grayish sleepy lump on the bottom of the cage. “Post flight canary check.”
“Oh. Oooh. Of course. You know, Caelus just trusts the machinery.” Her lips twitched into an unwilling frown. “Though that might’ve been because the birds kept dying and it panics the lower workers.” She caught my concerned expression and forced a laugh. “The avian buyer got scammed and bought us a flock of quite elderly canaries. Some people have never been off a planet surface and just don’t understand the importance of a job well done. Anyway, let’s get you to the kid playing vet.”
I guess from her perspective Mr. Fluckey is sort of a kid, but he did his full citizenship spacewalk a full year ago, before the rules changed, when they still let you just grab any old ice bit from the closest chuck of the Rings or even from our shepherd moon, Pan. Mr. Fluckey is a fully trained veterinarian, and I think he’s better at it than my little brother because he keeps track of things and remembers to follow up. People used to call Mr. Fluckey a prodigy until my little brother got interested in animals too.
“So, how did the out-hull go?” Ms. Zeegee aimed her vehicle at the grassy breaks between the trees, bushes and houses to come at Fluckey’s from the back. It was best not to let him see you coming, after all.
Thinking about my pod driving experience, I groaned. I was going to have to explain myself to everyone over and over again.
“That fun, huh?” Ms. Zeegee let out a comforting sort of harrumph and launched into her own story of an early space training simulation where she’d made a mess of things, finishing up with an insistent affirmation that she’d been much older than me then and she was sure that I’d done so much better than that.
I had to admit that I’d needed a tow back home and that I hadn’t even gotten to go through the proper hand off of pod control to station control and I proved it by starting to rattle off the memorized process. To my embarrassment, I got stuck partway through and couldn’t remember if it was “take on comms cabling” first or “take on electrical lines.”
I needn’t have sweated it. Ms. Zeegee jumped straight into a rant about how foolish Mr. Ulbadine had been to deny me that educational opportunity and how it was his fault, really, that my out-hull jaunt hadn’t been a blinding success.
That didn’t quite seem right, and I tried to offer some defenses for him. Ms. Zeegee lauded me for my kindness and chastised me, just a little bit, for not putting credit where credit was due: on myself.
By the time we reached the old Fluckey place, I was feeling a lot better about everything that had happened.
I waved goodbye to Ms. Zeegee and approached the house.
* * *
Old Papi Fluckey’s veterinary clinic and animal feed store crouched with as much malevolence as a two-story building could manage directly in front of New Main West. I’d always loved the place. The entire structure was made of gray-black one-way glass panels held together by lunar steel girders. One of the glass squares next to the flat roofline had been reversed to show a nest of boxes shoved against the interior wall. Pretty much every kid on the station had made a copy of this house with their toddler building kits, and once we got old enough to wield electric screwdrivers, it was natural to want to go play with the adult-sized version of the toy. Since the rivets for all the glass were on the outside, it was considered too toddlerish to flip the glass panels on the ground floor, but upper story panels were fair game. And you had to manage it without breaking the tiles, of course. Anyway, I love this place so much, and my tile up there was still flipped. I made a mental note to flip it back before we left for Phoebe.
Another great thing about Fluckey’s is that the family has been curmudgeonly from the very beginning. This place was one of the ones forcing New Main West to shift back into Old Main West.
The road took a sharp right-angle turn, circled warily around the funny building, and made another ninety-degree turn to straighten out again in the direction of the power station on the far side of Chawla Station. Midway around the curve of Old Main West, a paved flower-lined walkway ran up to the grand entrance. The flowers were planted and tended to by the Chawla’s Ladies Floral Guild, very much against Mr. Fluckey’s wishes, but since good taste and Fluckeys have been at war for some time, it was unsurprising that the fight was continuing with flowering annuals at twenty paces.
If you squint, the Fluckey building looks like a tower, in a cubical, squat sort of way. Its two stories make it the tallest building on the station. The edges of the flat roof do also have balconies that extended several feet outwards overhanging the sides of the building. Animals get boarded up there, and the overhang has grated flooring, which means anyone a little slow for the final steps across the front porch risks getting dog or cat pee in their hair. Sadou Station out on Phoebe has three people with veterinary training. They have posted office hours. They have office staff and assistants. They help each other out and refer business back and forth. And all of them moved there after training under Papi Fluckey and then not wanting to have to deal with him ever again after surviving that experience. Papi Fluckey is mostly not the one working and Roro Fluckey does the animal care instead, which is for the best, because Roro is super smart. But Roro hasn’t changed a single thing about House Fluckey. If anything, the pets up there are even more likely to spray unwary vet customers.
I was already stinky, but animal urine would still be another step worse. Pausing to listen, I didn’t hear any telltale scrabbling of paws up above.
I stepped quickly through the worst part of the danger zone and pounded my fist on the part of the glass next to the door hinges. Papi Fluckey had liked to believe people didn’t know which panels were the door and which weren’t, so if he was the one working, he might be intentionally slow to answer the door out of annoyance that I’d knocked on the actual door. I might’ve woken up something four-footed and small-bladdered above. I skipped back out from under the overhang and waited for someone to open the door.
And waited.