In Ashes Born (A Seeker's Tale From The Golden Age Of The Solar Clipper Book 1) (11 page)

By the time the steward arrived with luncheon, I’d cleared the table and the couch of litter. The ‘Toss It’ trunk was full to overflowing, the ‘Can Live Without’ had its own share, and still stuff festooned the chairs in the living room. The pile on the table had grown, but I suspected it weighed less than the twenty kilos I’d imagined as a goal.

I accepted the hamper from the steward at the door and thumbed the receipt.

“I can set it up for you, if you like, Captain.”

I eyed his name tag. “Not necessary, Mr. Brewster, but I appreciate the offer.”

“Thank you, Captain. Just leave the hamper on your doorstep when you’re done. We’ll send somebody over to pick it up later this afternoon, if that’s satisfactory?”

“Excellent, Mr. Brewster. Thank you for your consideration.”

He nodded and scampered back up the path toward the O Club just as Pip came out of his cottage and crossed to meet me. “Lunch, I hope?”

“Soup and sandwiches. That all right?”

He nodded and followed me into the cottage. “You’ve had the maid in since I was here last.”

“Just a little light straightening and a round of toss out,” I said, placing the basket on the end of the table.

“Looks like mostly toss out.”

I took the pile of must-haves and moved them to the cleared couch to make room for lunch. Pip popped the lid on the hamper and burst out laughing.

“What?”

He looked over at me. “Just soup and sandwiches?”

“That’s what I ordered.”

He shook his head and unloaded the dishes. “Cookie thought we needed more than soup and sandwiches.” He slid a note across the table to me. It read:

‘If you’re going to take over the Western Annex, you two will need more than soup and sandwiches. Enjoy!’

I tried to see past Pip’s arm and the lid. “What’d he send over?”

“Oh, there’s soup. Chicken curry, if my nose isn’t mistaken. A pile of biscuits. At least one beefalo dish that I can’t place but smells yummy.” He peered into the bottom of the hamper. “And a whole granapple cobbler, if I’m any judge. And I am.”

We spread out the food, grabbed implements of mass ingestion, and began plotting.

Chapter Eleven
Port Newmar:
2374, June 6

Morning found me crossing campus in thick fog. A cold weather system had blown in on the overnight storm and the warm air over the land gave up its moisture in the form of fog and heavy dew. I knew the path by heart, or thought I did. I still jumped when the side of Hutchins Gym loomed at me with a shift in the wind.

Pip and I had been up late hashing out plans, and we’d consumed our weekly ration of Clipper Ship in the process. On top of the short night I’d had before, it was all I could do to drag my sorry carcass across campus.

I arrived soggy, groggy, and lost in the morass of what-if’s that
Sifu
Newmar had left me with the day before. The lights were on, gleaming behind the large windows, and I found her in the kitchen.

“Good morning, Ishmael,” she said. “Are you ready to begin?”

“I am,
Sifu
.”

“What do you need work on?”

“I’m still too weak for Snake Creeps Down. It leaves me struggling for Rooster Stands after it.”

She nodded. “That you recognize it says a lot. Very well. Let us work on Yang Short again today.”

She strode out onto the floor, pausing only to bow before stepping to the front of the room. The dimness of the fog outside reflected her form in the glass of the window as a backlit silhouette. Her black uniform cast a stark contrast to my informal workout clothes.

She stood for a moment and we took our breaths at the same time. As I let it out, the world shrank to my balance, my form. We danced together in perfect synchrony, my gray sweats a shadow behind her black reflection. At the end of the first set she stopped and eyed me me up and down.

“You’ve finished pruning?”

The slow, even beating of my heart marked the moments as I thought. “Not yet,
Sifu
, but I think I have made some progress.”

“Are you down to one trunk?”

“I believe I’m down to twenty kilos.”

Her eyebrows shot up at that. “And yet you think you have more to go?”

“Some baggage is harder to trim than others.”

Her face relaxed and the smile that bloomed felt like the sun burning through the clouds. “That you recognize
that
,” she said, “says even more.” She turned back to the window and took the beginning stance—arms down, feet shoulder width apart, weight centered on her core. “Dance with me,” she said, and we began.

She led the dance in a form I didn’t recognize. The movements came smoothly, one after another but in no pattern I recognized. After the first few, I stopped trying to figure it out or anticipate the movement. I simply followed, focusing on my breathing and maintaining my balance. We swooped into Snake Creeps Down and flowed into Rooster Stands on One Leg, but moved to Grasp Sparrow’s Tail and then Wave Hands As Clouds. With each movement she flowed as water flows over stones, with no apparent pattern but as inevitable as gravity. We danced for nearly a stan without pause before she drew up to the closing, her arms rising and then falling to lie as she had begun—arms down, feet shoulder width apart, weight centered on her core.

We stood like that for several moments. The waves in my inner sea, washing the shore in a slow even rhythm. My breath, the wind across the waves.

She moved then, just slightly, turning her head to speak over her shoulder. “Thank you, Ishmael.”

“Thank you,
Sifu
.”

“Shall we have tea?” she asked.

“That would be very nice.”

“Then we shall.”

I joined her in the kitchen, taking my place behind the table as she heated the water and poured it over a measured portion of tea. She offered me a smile as she chose a cup I’d never seen before. As usual with her choices for me, it was a simple cup formed without a handle, a dimple pressed into the bottom as if it had been hand-molded from clay and pressed upwards with some artisan’s thumb. When she placed it on the table, it looked as if it belonged there. As if it had been formed there.

She drizzled a bit of the steaming tea into it and then into her own. She’d chosen another simple cup without handle and apparently without glaze. It was the first time I remembered her using one without a handle since I’d arrived.

She placed the teapot on the warming stone and took her cup in the tips of the fingers of both hands, lifting it as if in salute before taking a sip, her breath pulling air in with the steaming tea to cool it as she drank. It made a slurping sound that my mother might have found rude but which I recognized as part of the tradition.

I followed her lead and we sat there, unspeaking, for several heartbeats. My cup felt heavy in my hand, but balanced.

“Do you still think I have a message in my cups, Ishmael?” she asked, her voice so low that it barely rose above the sound of the morning breeze.

I looked at her collection, still missing one cup. I looked at the cups she’d chosen for each of us. I thought about what message she might have and what message I might see.

I smiled. “I think your messages are less about what you say with them than what they tell you about your students.”

Her face relaxed into a pleased smile. “Now, you begin to understand,” she said. “I’ll be away for the next week. I suspect you’ll be gone by the time I get back, but you may use the studio as long as you remain on-planet.”

I nodded my thanks. “If our plans work out, Mr. Carstairs and I will be leaving in a couple of days.”

“You’ll be traveling much lighter than when you arrived, Captain.”

“I will.”

“Good.” She tipped up her cup and drank down the tea. “When you’re ready, come back to see me and perhaps we can dance again.”

She rose and flowed away, all of her movements—from rinsing the cup to stacking it in the drainer to gliding out the door—as smooth as water. I felt like an ox next to a panther by comparison.

I sipped my tea, listening to the quiet. The light levels grew steadily as the system primary heated the atmosphere and the fog sublimated again. I heard the sounds of small birds chirping in the bushes behind the building. The tea she’d prepared had a strong tannin component that almost bit the tongue, but a sweet, almost fruity, aftertaste at the back of the tongue cleared it away. As the light level grew so did my awareness of time and place. I almost felt like I was waking from a dream, as if I’d come fully awake and realized I was still in my bed.

I shook my head and gulped the rest of my tea, took care of the empty cup, emptied the tea kettle and pot, disposed of the used leaves, and left everything draining. At least she wouldn’t come back to a pot full of mold. A glance at a small chrono tucked in beside the cooktop showed I had just time to get cleaned up before meeting Pip.

I scampered back to the cottage and spent a few ticks throwing more clothing into the ‘Toss It’ bin and contemplating the remaining uniforms. On the one hand, all I needed for shipboard work was a workable collection of shipsuits. Even dress uniforms would stay hung in closets for the most part. I cast a slightly jaundiced eye at the civvies, but I still hadn’t found a decent tailor. Until I did, those would have to do.

The chrono ticked over to 1050. I expected Pip at 1100 so I scampered for the shower. Shipboard living was good practice for the “hurry up shower.” I was out, dressed, and mostly dry before Pip knocked on the door at 1105.

“Second thoughts?” he asked when I slipped the latch to let him in.

“About the partnership?” I shook my head.

He blinked a couple of times. “About what?”

“I don’t need all these uniforms, do I?” I pointed at the collection of undress and utility khakis still strewn over the furniture in the living room.

He coughed out a single laugh. “If that’s your biggest problem, we’re golden.”

“Where’d you get your bag?” I asked.

“My bag?”

“The one you flew down with.”

“Oh, standard luggage module. Chandlery, where else?”

I shrugged. “I don’t get out much.”

“Probably find something similar at the academy store. Maybe even one with the academy logo on it. Rah! Rah!” He waved his fists as if he held pom poms, with a mischievous grin on his face and his eyebrows halfway to his hairline.

“Where are we on the checklist?”

“I talked to Roland. Ship’ll be ready to make ship noises by tomorrow. He figures if we leave within a couple of days, we’ll be there in plenty of time.”

“How much is plenty of time?”

“A week before the auction.”

I gave a low whistle. “The
Son
has some legs in there, huh?”

“That’s what we specialize in. Long legs. High value. Low mass.”

“No wonder you made money flying in from Dunsany.”

“Son, we make money on every flight.”

“What are you flying back to Breakall?”

He shrugged. “Dunno yet. I’ll grab something on the way out the door.”

“I’m impressed.”

“Don’t be. It’s all tricks of the trade. I put the word out with one of the brokers upstairs when I arrived. We’ll have several to choose from by the time we file an outbound flight plan.”

“You’ll pay a broker?”

“Fees are cheap money with the kind of cargo we carry.”

“All right, then. Ship? Check. Lawyer?”

“We’re having lunch with Alys at the O Club at 1200. She’ll know.”

“Hear back from your father?”

He frowned at that. “No, but I only messaged him yesterday. If he’s out in the back of Dunsany Roads somewhere, it may take a bit to catch up to him.”

“We still need to iron out the contingency clauses.”

“Like dissolution, death of a partner, and all that?”

“Yeah. How do we break deadlocks on votes.”

“We also need at least one more member of the board,” Pip said.

I pondered that for a couple of ticks. “I’d really like to open that up to the engineering officer, but I don’t expect we’ll hire one until we already have the ship. And we need to be incorporated before that happens.”

“I’m not too keen on having more members of the crew as board members. What if we need to fire one?”

I remembered Gramps Bailey and nodded. “Good point.”

“Any flashes of insight for the name?” he asked.

“Nothing I want to put on letterhead. I’ve spent most of the time since we broke last night either asleep or trying to make sense of Margaret Newmar.”

“Is she being enigmatic again?”

“You have no idea.”

“Well, let it percolate. I haven’t anything more original than Carstairs and Wang, Inc.”

“C&W?”

“Yeah. Probably. Why?”

“I’ve heard worse, but there has to be better,” I said.

“Agreed.”

“Shall we mosey on over to the O Club and grab a Clipper Ship before lunch?”

“Don’t you still have some in your fridge?” I asked.

“Of course, but I’m hoping to save that for the trip over to Breakall.”

“I’ll buy you a case, if you want,” I said.

“A case won’t cut it. How much mass in a pallet of the stuff?”

I laughed. “Don’t ask me. You’re the cargo master.”