“You’ve seen a whelkie before?” Sarah asked, coming in from the entry to the quad.
“Yeah, in the flea market the other day.”
“Really?” she asked. Sarah kept her arms self-consciously in front of her as she moved past us and slipped up onto her bunk. After wrapping her blanket around her, she seemed more comfortable. I know I felt better because she was so bony it was difficult to see her that way.
“Yeah,” I told her. “Funny old geezer had a table full of them. What did you call them?”
“Whelkies. They’re carved from windrift and each one has a bit of whelk shell as the heart.” Sarah pulled hers down and held it up so we could see it. The rough, primitive carving had a shell with just the barest tinge of purple to it. “Some of the people on St. Cloud think of them as a kind of spirit guide.”
“A what?” Bev asked. She seemed really interested.
“A spirit guide. Depending on how superstitious you are, they’re anything from a curiosity like a horoscope, to a focal point for your spirit, or for some an actual guide.” Sitting there, holding her raven, and telling us about it she seemed almost relaxed. “Almost every little fishing village along the south coast has a shaman who carves these and hands them out to people. Usually if there’s sickness or tragedy in the house, the shaman will come and leave one of these behind.”
“That is a raven, right?” I asked her.
“Oh, yes,” she said, looking at me for the first time since she had hopped up on the bunk. “Are you sure you saw somebody selling them at the flea market?”
“Yup. There was this strange man in homespun clothes who had a weird way of talking. I thought it was just flea market patter.”
“Patter?” she asked.
Bev explained, “Yeah, sometimes a vendor will have a little act they do to make their goods more appealing or to draw people in. Sometimes they’ll tell jokes, or they’ll have a story about whatever it is they’re selling.”
“Ah,” said Sarah, “now I understand. Patter,” she repeated the word as if seating the term in her brain. She focused back on her whelkie. “This raven came to me about three weeks ago, now. It’s kinda rough, but I like it. The smoother and more finished it is, the more highly valued they are. Also, supposedly, the deeper the purple in the heart the more power it has. This one’s just got a little bit of purple, but he was powerful enough to lead me here,” she said with a smile which was a welcome sight to see, if only for its infrequency.
Pip asked me, “Doesn’t your dolphin have a really purple heart?”
“You have a whelkie?” Sarah asked, her eyes wide in amazement.
I reached into my pocket and pulled out the small packet. The string slipped off easily and the cloth fell away revealing the dolphin. The deep purple heart glinted in the overhead light.
“Wow!” Bev said, looking from Sarah’s raven to my dolphin and back. She started to reach for mine, but stopped and had an expression that seemed to be asking for permission.
I shrugged and offered it to her. She lifted it out of the little piece of cloth and held it up so the light gleamed off of its sleek sides.
As she was holding it up, Bev nudged me with her elbow and nodded toward Sarah. Our new shipmate was frozen, staring at the dolphin.
“Where did you get it?” she asked breathlessly, not taking her eyes off it.
“I told you. There was a guy selling these at the flea market.”
“You bought it?” she asked, and there was genuine surprise and possibly even shock in her voice. For the first time since meeting her she looked me directly in the eyes.
“Well, no,” I corrected. “Not this one. I did buy some—ten of them in fact, but this one was a gift.”
“It came to you,” she said.
“Came to me?” I asked. “What’s that mean?”
Sarah shook herself and took a deep shuddering breath. She held it, closed her eyes, and then slowly let it out. She spoke without opening her eyes. “The tradition says that the whelkies know where there is need and will come to those who need their help. Each is tuned to a particular individual and it will find its rightful owner.” She opened her eyes again and looked around self-consciously. “It sounds silly, I know, and I never believed in the old stories myself.”
Bev touched her arm gently. “Until your raven came to you?” she asked.
Sarah nodded. “My husband was—is—a fisherman. He’s looked up to in the village as a leader, but he’s really just a bully. He strong-armed my father and I became his wife.” She indicated the bruises on her face. “These are from him. About three weeks ago, he threw me against the wall so hard I cracked a rib.” She touched her right side. “The shaman came to treat my injuries.” She held up her left arm, and I could still see the residual bruising. “When he left, the raven was on my night stand.”
She took a few deep breaths and I thought she was done, but after a short while she continued, “That evening, just after sunset, I was sitting on the back stoop with the raven in my hands. I was frightened because I didn’t know what to think or what to believe. As I sat there, a spark of light glinted off the heart’s shell. It startled me until I realized it was just the reflection of the orbital glinting in the final rays of the setting sun—just a pinpoint of light in the darkening sky. I looked up just in time so see another point of light break off from it and drift away.”
She paused again before continuing, “A week ago, my husband went out fishing. His boat goes out for days, sometimes weeks at a time. As soon as he was gone, I made my way to the Union Hall at Port Starvey where Captain Giggone saved me.”
She gave a small, nervous laugh. “So, was it the raven that led me here? Or just the coincidence of reflected light?” She shrugged one shoulder. “I don’t know. What I do know is I am here. What I feel is that I am safe for the first time in longer than I can remember. What does it mean that you have that beautiful dolphin?” Again she shrugged. “Perhaps, it’s just a lovely memento from somebody who cares for you. Maybe it’s a whelkie come to help you. Who’s to say?”
She heaved a great sigh. “There. That feels better.” Then she smiled.
The little trance-like state was broken. Bev stroked the side of the dolphin with the ball of her thumb as if remembering she still held it and then handed it carefully back to me.
Pip stared at Sarah like he had never seen her before. I knew the feeling. Bev was the first to find her voice and said, “Well, I know a couple of mess attendants who need to get some sleep, even if some environmental people don’t.” She stared pointedly at me.
“Oh, yeah.” I shook myself. “Right. As I was saying, I need to rack out myself. It’s been a long day.” Before I left, I turned to Sarah and said, “Thank you for telling us about the whelkies. I knew there was more to them than just simple bric-a-brac.”
“Well, now you know the story. What you believe in, is up to you.”
“True, and thanks for trusting us with your own story. You’re right about being safe here. Lois will take care of you.” I smiled at her and headed for my own bunk.
It had been a long day.
Chapter 11
ST. CLOUD SYSTEM
2352-FEBRUARY-23
I must have been tired because I slept straight through until the watch stander woke me at 05:30. Francis and I joined the other second shift crew and all of us managed to cycle through the san in just a few ticks. Nobody said much. I got the feeling it was more because we were all groggy rather than any deference to the sleeping crew.
On the way out of berthing, Francis headed down to relieve Brill while I ran up to get coffee for us. I could hear Cookie, Pip, and Sarah working in the galley and smelled cooking bacon. My stomach growled, but I settled for pouring two mugs and made a promise to come back for food soon.
By the time I got back down to Foggy Bottom, Francis was formally relieving a groggy looking Brill. She smiled when she saw me. “You holding up okay?” she asked.
“So far so
good,” I told her. “Guess what, I found out what those little statues are called and found out some pretty interesting folklore about them.”
“You’ll have to fill me in later. Right now I want some breakfast and a little nap before I have to be back here for the afternoon watch.”
She waved and headed out. Francis and I settled down to our coffee, and I made sure my tablet was slaved to the station.
“Just to refresh my memory,” I started, “sometime in the middle of the morning we’ll run the VSI again?”
“Yup, and that’s the highlight of the festivities. Unless something breaks.”
“What if that happens?”
“Depends on what it is. We might get wet. We might get dirty. We might die.” He shrugged. “It’s hard to say.”
“Hmm. I think I’d just as soon avoid that last one,” I said with a grin. “When was the last time something broke?”
“On the Lois? Never has happened as long as I’ve been aboard. I don’t see that changing any time soon so long as we pay attention to business and keep our crap in the tanks.”
“How about we review the overnight logs before heading up to breakfast? It’s a good idea to see if anything unusual happened on the previous watch,” he told me. “That way you’re less likely to be surprised.”
“Makes sense.”
“Brill is good, and she’d have mentioned anything out of the ordinary, so I doubt we’ll find much of note. Still, it’s a good habit to get into.”
As expected there was not anything unusual in the logs, so we went up to the mess deck for a quick breakfast. While we were there, the automated systems check fired off, and Francis had me acknowledge it on my tablet. “You’ll be standing watch on your own in a couple weeks, or less,” he told me with a grin.
After we returned to environmental, Francis startled me by saying, “Stay on the path. Write if you get work.”
“What?”
“Stay on the path. Write if you get work.”
“You’re gonna make me try to find my way alone?”
“Yep. Bip me if you get lost,” he said, leaning back in the watch stander’s chair and putting his feet up on the desk. “I can follow your progress from here. You’ll be okay.”
“But I thought you said we’d do this in the middle of the watch. It’s barely 07:30.”
“Traditionally, I said, traditionally. I also pointed out that we could do it any time.”
I could not think of any reason not to go, so I keyed up the overlay and headed out. It took me almost forty-five ticks and I missed one package during the trip, which I had to go back for, but I did not get lost. When I finally got back, Francis gave me a big grin and a thumbs up.
“That was amazing,” he said.
“What? Missing one?”
“Making it back at all.”
“What do you mean?”
He took a deep breath and said, “You’ve just passed the environmental initiation. It took me three tries before I could make it to the other end of the ship and back without having to call for help. It was a month of watches before I could make the run with only three missed stations.”
“You’re kidding!”
He shook his head. “Diane was able to do it on her second try, but Gregor never made the run without missing a station somewhere in the whole stanyer and a half he was aboard.”
“And you sent me out there alone after only one practice?”
“You made it, didn’t you?”
“Well, yeah.”
He shrugged. “I was watching you the whole way on the display. That one package, which is right behind the hatch in the spine, is easy to miss, but you backtracked to it in nothing flat. When you ran the after compartments without a miss, I was cheering and yelling in here. I’m surprised they didn’t hear me up in engineering berthing.” He wore a wide grin like a jack-o-lantern.
I did not know what to make of it. “It seemed pretty logical as I was doing it. All the packages are marked on the schematic. I just followed the map.”
“Exactly! But do you know how long it takes most people to figure that out? Oh, Ish, you’re gonna be great!”
I felt pleased that I did well, but still harbored doubts about my ability and the responsibilities that I had signed up for. Sure, the easy routine things are a snap but all the talk about something going wrong and everyone dying cast a sobering pall.
The rest of the morning passed uneventfully. Francis had me sit at the watch stander station and showed me how to check for routine maintenance tasks that might be scheduled during a shift. There were none for the morning watch, but we would have one in our evening shift. Then he took Brill’s chair and left me to handle all the routine system checks and keep an eye on the graphs. Over time, I noticed that they did fluctuate ever so slightly up or down, but they never moved far and always cycled back.
Around 10:00 Francis took me on what he called “a walk about” and we did an informal inspection tour of the section. The area was not that large in total, but the paths twisted back on themselves and took strange turnings behind and between massive chunks of equipment. He pointed out things to look for along the way like valves, which might be developing leaks, or the smaller filters that needed periodic replacement. He pointed out the one that we had seen in our earlier examination of routine maintenance tasks.
Brill came to relieve us at 11:45 and Frances regaled her with the story of my solo perambulation of the ship. She gave me a big smile and a high five. I still did not see what the big deal was, but I tried to be suitably excited for them. Personally, though, I was eagerly awaiting lunch and a nap. We had to be back on duty at 18:00.
Francis and I became a good team and he did not make me do all the VSI’s by myself. He claimed it was because he needed the exercise, but personally, I think he was just grateful for the company. After a few days, I had made a good start on the spec three study materials, but there was a lot of stuff to cover. I was not overly comfortable with some of the math and science, which there was quite a bit of. At the end of my first week, Brill moved me to third-section to stand watch with Diane.
To be totally honest, I did not understand why I did not just stay on with Francis. We got along well and he certainly knew his stuff. Once I started working with Diane, though, I recognized that Brill was exposing me to different styles of watch standing. Francis had been—not loose, exactly—but he was laid back and willing to go with the flow. Diane, on the other hand, was a checklist maker. On every shift the first thing she did was make a list of everything that needed doing and then she scheduled everything. At this time, do the VSI. At that time, do the department walk through. Any scheduled maintenance goes here. She was very good at it and, somehow, it suited her.
Having me around worked out well for her, too. Diane was the Scrubber Queen, and one of her challenges had been finding enough people to do the sludge tanks and replace the algae matrices in the scrubbers. Being on duty with her, meant she did not have to cajole anyone into coming in on their off-time to help. We had one midwatch where she and I spent the night up to our armpits in slime. We did the VSI early that evening and she picked a shift where there was no other routine maintenance. I am not saying that Francis would not have been able to find a two-stan window to do the scrubber, but with Diane, I always knew exactly what we would be doing, and when.
Even with all the planning, we still had a lot of time on our hands to just sit and stare at the monitors. After all, it was watch standing duty. I had known Diane for a while by then. She had gone with me back on Margary to visit a mushroom farm, and I had helped her out with a few tasks even before I actually joined the department. I am not sure which factor contributed the most, or perhaps it was both, but we slipped quickly into a level of synchronization that I had not really developed with Francis during my week with him. It was not that Francis and I did not get along. He was a good guy, and I liked his dry wit very much. But working with Diane, the watches did not seem quite so long. I tried
to convince myself that it was because of her checklists and not because she was smart, witty, and cute.
One odd thing about Diane was that she would never talk about her past. She was not that much older than me, but she had been working as a spacer for almost five stanyers. I knew she had been on at least one other ship before the Lois, but she would not talk about it. “A girl needs to have a bit of mystery,” she would tell me with a sultry smile when I asked a question that was too personal. Then she would mug it up, batting her eyelashes like something out of an old movie, before changing the subject.
Two weeks out of St. Cloud, I adjusted my schedule once more and joined Brill. Our first watch together was an afternoon shift and I felt like I had not seen her in weeks. We passed each other back and forth during watch change, of course, but it was good to spend time with her again.
Brill’s style of watch standing was something between Francis’s and Diane’s. She would start the shift by enumerating the tasks we needed to accomplish but did not actually write them down or set a schedule for doing them. That first afternoon, all we had on our plates was the VSI and the automated integrity checks. Diane and I had done scrubber maintenance the day before and we were good for another week on sludge duty. That left Brill and I plenty of time for a good gabfest. I think she did not want to intimidate me with a bunch of questions about how I liked environmental, so she broke the ice with some small talk.
“So, you never did tell me…what did you learn about the sculptures?” she asked after we had settled in.
While I filled her in on the story that Sarah had told, she pulled her whelkie out of her pocket to get a good look at it.
When she saw me do the same, I think she was a bit surprised. “You carry yours, too?” she asked.
“Yeah, I would feel kinda naked without it. I always have it in my pocket, and I catch myself playing with it from time to time when I’m studying or walking around on VSI.”
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