Chapter Seven
I arrived at Sadou House more tired than I’d ever been in my entire life. I’d been practicing biting snark in my head. Since they hadn’t been at Dockside, they’d be home. I expected to walk in and see Dorian and Jules building something on the kitchen table. They’d look up, notice my exhaustion, and in the way of siblings, immediately attack.
I might be tired, but I wasn’t dumb.
If you’re this worn out, you’ve got to give your brain a head start on sibling conflict.
I trudged through the neat grove of mango trees around Sadou House and found the double front doors wide open.
“Just load that into the trunk,” my dad was saying. A couple of burly adults nodded their heads at me in passing and the wobbling of the boxes made my dad turn around inside and see me. “Caly! I was wondering when you’d get back here.”
He jogged over and wrapped me in an enormous hug.
“Ug. Pod reek!” He faked gagging but hugged me longer anyway.
When he at last let go, my frustration over the lousy flight was a distant memory.
Then he shifted straight to business.
“You can supervise these folks when they come back for the next load. I’ve got more things to straighten out at Station Control. But first”—he shook a finger at me—“get showered. Maybe two showers. And burn those coveralls. Burn the boots too.” He winked.
I loved these boots. And we didn’t have an incinerator. I certainly wasn’t throwing them in one of the station’s plasma arc recyclers. They were no where near that worn yet.
I walked into a house that looked like a hull breach had sucked everything in it not secured to something sturdy out into the vacuum. I’d only been gone a few days. How had they packed up this much?
Even the pictures had come off the walls.
I checked my room and everything was still there. But the room my two brothers shared was empty. The hair on the back of my neck rose in suspicion.
Their room wasn’t cleaned up and mostly packed to get on the ship like they were still going to be hanging out here for another a day or two. Theirs was empty, empty. The mattresses from their bunkbed had been stripped, anti-fungal and anti-mold preservation bagged, and leaned together against the wall. The bunkbed frame had been disassembled and partially packed into a crate.
No one was sleeping there tonight.
I grabbed my shower stuff from my room and trudged down the hall to the kids’ bathroom. Thankfully, we have that kind of tub and shower combo thing with the sliding frosted doors, because I think the shower curtain would’ve been gone if we’d had that more common kind of station bathroom.
I had to scrounge in my room for a towel. There weren’t any on the hooks, and the linen closet next to the bathroom was empty.
* * *
After cleaning up, I skinned into clean underthings, my favorite mechanic’s overalls, and, yes, my red carbide-toed boots. The footwear didn’t smell that bad. Besides, they were on my feet. My nose would be the closest to them, and if I could tolerate it, so could everyone else.
It was nice to not be in a spacesuit. Even the non-sealed-up form that we’d had to wear for safety while out in pods had gotten pretty annoying by the second and third day. And, of course, that smell.
Something about air close in, no matter how carefully they check all the details with the scrubbers and stuff, it turns foul after it’s been recycled a few hundred times.
I’d been daydreaming about what my first meal was going to be off the ship. Maybe tuna, barely seared. Maybe a simple curry with all the spices balanced perfectly.
One thing about shipboard food I always hated is how toned down all the spices are. The food requirements keep everything bland because they don’t want to cause false alarms for the exact same reason you’d think, so you don’t get any decent spices on your meals. Everything ends up tasting like oatmeal no matter what weird things they try to do with the texture to make up for it and give you variety.
When I checked, our kitchen pantry was pretty much empty except for, you guessed it, oatmeal.
I was able to put some honey on it, but that’s about as good as it got.
The built-in comm by the kitchen counter blinked dull green announcing unread messages. “Probably for Dad.” I tapped because I could forward them to his desk at Station Control if it was anything important.
All the messages I hadn’t gotten as upbeat videos on arrival poured out of the machine in basic textual form. Oh, I’d forgotten. Mom had been wanting us to do a tech fast and live with lower bandwidth usage to ease into how we’d be communicating with people off ship while we were travelling. That’s why none of the messages were waiting for me when I docked.
Caly-baby,
I had to stay on the Provie. Final underway checks. You remember how that goes from last time? Oh, maybe not, you were, what, three then? Anyway, I’ve asked Susu and Babu to help you pack up your stuff.
Sorry to hear your last flight wasn’t what you hoped for. Your zero-gee work is excellent, but those skills don’t transfer one-for-one to pod driving. There will be plenty of time to do sim work onboard, and I bet the cousins have some loaner pods at Phoebe you can practice with later.
But pack quick. We’ve got to get the house mothballed anyway.
Love,
Mom
Sis,
Went to RSC Dry Crust to claim my stateroom. You Chawla Sadous have silly ship naming conventions.
You come up with this quaint little name that only insiders understand and then you don’t even call it that. “The Provie” just sounds stupid.
—Dorian
I snorted. He knew full well why it was named what it was named. My eyes tracked up to the framed but very faded cross-stitching of Proverbs 17:1 that Grandma Susu had made as a wedding gift for my parents.
Technically, she’d given it to them wrapped as a barely started thing when they were married. A whole lot of years later, when I was six and a half and two brothers were finally getting formally adopted was when she finished it and made a huge production out of framing it and putting it on our wall.
But anyone who knows Susu wasn’t surprised by that.
Of course, she’d started it by hand when my parents first got engaged. And it was awful. I’ve seen photos. Eventually, she’d built and coded a robot to unpick all the mistakes and redo it, so it was actually legible: “Better a dry crust with peace and quiet than a house full of feasting, with strife.”
We didn’t usually have quiet, but we also didn’t have that much strife.
The next message loaded.
Sis,
Hey, I told Dorian that Babu and Susu are looking after his menagerie. I dropped off all of them, but most of the cats have made their way back to our house on their own. Hopefully they are smart enough to stay outside during the mothballing and will eventually go back to the Grands when they get hungry. The mini goat, the three parrots, and the turtle are more compliant and harder to lose. Wishing for the best. Make sure to drop off the chameleon too. If it got squished in your pod troubles, don’t tell Dorian yet. He’s stressed enough about getting on a ship again.
Yours,
Jules
Grandpa Babu buzzed while I was reading.
I took the call.
“Caly, you lived!”
I love that wrinkled old man, but he was definitely leaning towards the crazy side. If Grandma Susu hadn’t been around to keep track of him, he might have needed to move to the low-gee senior apartments in the center light. Nursing students stayed there in shifts to check with people around the clock for whatever random medical emergencies seem to pop up all the time when people get older.
I could see Susu behind him. She had her remote-view goggles on, and her hands were dancing around—the familiar motion that meant she was operating something outside the skin of the station. Probably building something or taking something apart. Like she usually was.
“Oh, Babu, are you sure you’re supposed to be using the comm?”
He made a raspberry noise. “That wasn’t gonna stop me.”
He had a point.
Once you get to a certain age, apparently you can do whatever you want pretty much. Kind of the opposite of being a kid, if you ask me.
Now he made a move that made me think he was trying to look over my shoulder in the screen.
“Hey, um,” he said, “your little brother home?”
Nope. He sure wasn’t. But Grandpa Babu looked at me expectantly.
“Dorian!” I yelled.
There was no answer. “Nope. Clearly not.”
Babu laughed at me.
“I’m sure that’s not how you’re supposed to ask him to come to the comm.”
“It worked, didn’t it?”
Babu nodded. “Well, when you see him tell him tell him to give me a call?”
I cocked my head at grandpa. “Everything okay?”
“Oh. No.” He hung his head. “No, kid, they brought over all the pets. You know for, for Susu and me to start keeping an eye on them because you guys are all going off to Phoebe…but you know that new hamster you got?”
You, general you. Not you, meaning me, specifically.
“Yeah?” I could never remember what Dorian named his pets because he kept changing their names, and so the rest of us just tend to call them by the animal name.
“Well, his cage wasn’t all the way secure and…” He shook his head again. “I found its tail and one of its feet.”
“What? Where?”
“I mean, I know we were a little bit late putting out the cat food but—”
“Oh, no.”
When he didn’t continue, I asked the obvious follow-up.
“What about the rest of the little pets?”
He shrugged. “There’s been a massacre. I brought the three little white mice he’s got over to the vet like you know you’re supposed to, but that Papi Fluckey euthanized them.”
I opened my mouth to ask, but Babu kept talking.
“‘Why?’ I said to him.” Babu gestured animatedly. “Then ’e said, ‘Station’s got a rule against, you know, rodent class animals.’”
“We aren’t supposed to have the mice at all.” I had to agree.
“That rule’s not for pets,” Babu insisted.
I couldn’t help but shrug. It was a grown-up’s rule, and I was pretty sure it did forbid them as pets too. “Maybe rodents aren’t supposed to be pets?”
“Papi murdered Dorian’s pets. Wasn’t right,” Babu insisted.
I’d been bitten by so-called pet rats before, and the cats often killed them. A mouse isn’t a great pet option in a house full of cats. Dorian had been devastated that time when Susu’s cat Brasco had murdered a different set of pet rodents.
We really weren’t supposed to have them, but Dorian really, really loves animals. And my dad likes to see all his kids be happy.
People come in on the transports and don’t pay attention to what they’re supposed to bring sometimes. That’s how Dad sometimes had surprise animals available to make my little brother’s day.
Chameleon chose that moment to swing into view and poke his long nose very close to the camera.
“And what’s that? New little buddy, huh?”
“Babu, are we going keep Brasco from eating this one?”
“Eh, he can hide. It’ll be all right, right?” Babu clicked off the screen.
Obviously, Chameleon was not going to be all right.