“And you think you can help us?” Sirius said, putting his hands on his hips.
“Yes,” Serendipity said, cocking her head. “First by asking . . . what are we going to do?”
«Eat lunch!» the Andiathar boy said, bearing a whole basket of satsumas.
—————
Sirius hadn’t known how hungry he was until satsuma juice was dribbling down his chin.
They made a little picnic next to the soulforge, sitting cross-legged around Serendipity’s glowing sphere, eating her strange orange fruit. Clearly not natural, it came apart into juicy and delicious slices, wrapped with a slightly bitter peel that Serendipity instructed them all to eat.
“Infused with elixirs,” she said. “But we’re going to need more sources of food.”
“Clothing is covered,” Leonid said. “At least for us—these softsuits are pretty tough.”
Leonid was staring at Serendipity, more openly than usual, but then Sirius realized he was staring at her bolero and wraps. They’d laundered themselves back into a fresh-pressed state, so new it looked like it was the first time she’d worn them. Sirius looked at Leonid, who nodded.
“I’m guessing,” Leonid said, “gear isn’t a problem for you either, Serendipity.”
“Toren has most of it, in my saddlebags,” she said, scowling. “But I’ll manage.”
“We have shelter,” Sirius said, wiping his mouth. “But we need to secure it.”
“Why?” Serendipity asked.
“Because Toren is going to come and take it,” Lenonid said. “Sooner than you think.”
Serendipity glared, then tossed her satsuma back into the basket.
“Dashpat,” she said. “What the hell is his damage?”
“He’s bitter. He was training to be an engineer, until Andromeda took the Engine Module and kicked all the boys out.” Leonid said. “This was about three years ago. I negotiated with her for the Halfway Boys, him and Sirius, to stay, but when his growth spurt hit—”
“She kicked him out,” Sirius said hotly. “Now Toren hates all the girls—”
“Halfway Boy,” Serendipity said slowly. “I don’t like the flavor of that word—”
“Oh, it’s got a nasty history,” Sirius said, voice filled with venom. “Back in the dawn of the Frontier, when passengers were worth less than the crew who could keep the ships flying, a halfway person meant someone who got half rations of food . . . or air.”
“That’s ancient history,” Leonid protested, avoiding Serendipity’s eyes. “We never did that. I forbade partial rationing. Even after the mutiny, everyone always got their minimums. It’s nothing to do with rations now. When the adult crew was on the ship, Halfway Boy just meant a boy of age who hadn’t yet passed the crew test.”
“But when Andromeda split the ship into boys and girls, it picked up a new meaning,” Sirius said, glaring at Leonid, who looked away, ashamed. “It came to mean someone who didn’t count as a ‘real’ boy—because they didn’t like girls.”
Serendipity’s lip curled, eyes staring off in the distance with increasing anger.
“And there were just the two of us, me and Toren,” Sirius said, staring into the basket. There were maybe a couple dozen satsumas in it. “Statistically only one out of twelve crewmen is homosexual. There were twenty-eight boys on Independence. Do the math.”
Serendipity gaped at Leonid. “They were gay, so you sent them to the girls? What?”
“To protect them,” Leonid said.
“Mostly from you,” Sirius said hotly. “The boys picked on us, but Leonid was a beast—”
“I am so sorry,” Leonid said. “I can only say that so many times—”
“You have no idea what it’s like to be one of the only gay kids on a ship this size.”
“Yes I do,” Leonid said. “Yes, I do. It’s a little higher than one in twelve, Sirius.”
Sirius stared at him. So everything he thought he’d seen in Leonid . . . was real.
“But . . . wait,” Sirius said, “you were . . . with Andromeda, with Serendipity—”
“Hey,” Serendipity said. “We—”
“Sirius,” Leonid said. “I’m bisexual. I could pass. It was easier that way.”
Sirius closed his eyes. “Dammit,” he said. “All that time you were picking on us—”
“Hiding in plain sight kept me out of trouble. Toren’s doing the same dance now,” Leonid said. “Butching up so the other boys will pretend to ignore what they know. Do you blame him? Once you get that . . . that pack going, you can’t stop it—”
“Because you’re doing everything wrong,” Serendipity said. “Segregation is a recipe for prejudice. Your brains naturally build up snap judgments about other groups. You root them out by getting close, intimate, extended experience with people who are noticeably different—”
“I didn’t split the ship,” Leonid said. “It was Andromeda and Artemyst—”
“If you were Captain,” Serendipity said, “it was your responsibility to rejoin it.”
“Yes, it’s all my fault, I know that,” Leonid said. “We split, and we were both so angry, and she closed off the Module, but I thought I had to be the bigger, ah, man, and let things cool off. Truth is, I was just cutting her slack that I shouldn’t have—”
“It was mutiny,” Sirius said. “Toren wanted to storm the Module right away.”
“And he was probably right,” Serendipity said.
“And he knows it,” Leonid said. “But now, three years later, with the ship wrecked, he’s not going to be satisfied with I told you so. Believe me—he was my right hand man. At first I did it to protect him, but now . . . he’s the biggest, and strongest, and has the blaster under his belt—”
“And thinks he should lead,” Serendipity said.
“And he thinks he should punish the girls for their sins,” Sirius said. “Andromeda split the boys and the girls. Leonid was planning to turn the tables and lock the girls out of the Engine Module. But Toren hates them. Who knows what he’ll do to them—”
“We can’t let this go on,” Serendipity said quietly. “We can’t survive here on satsumas. Your ship’s done. Monsters rule the skies. We have to get the hell out of here. And not just us. All of us—we can’t let Toren find some cave to live in and drag all the girls into a living hell.”
“I don’t see how the three of us can stop it,” Leonid said. “We can’t beat Toren—”
“What are you talking about?” Serendipity said. “Why do we need to ‘beat’ him?”
“We can’t take on the whole crew, and we can’t get them to follow us. Using weapons on each other is forbidden, so we have a sparring tradition—” and here Serendipity hissed “—and you saw what happened when Sirius tried. Me, I haven’t beat him since he turned sixteen.”
“Me neither,” Sirius said, “and I was trained by bounty hunters. He’s just too tough.”
“What we’ve got to do is hide out, hole up, and wait for it to blow over,” Leonid said, staring at a satsuma. “If we can find something Toren wants, like shelter or food supplies, maybe we can negotiate with him, get him to agree to ease up a bit on the girls—”
“What?” Serendipity said. “No! We can’t let him set up a patriarchal system! Once they get started they last forever. The last time gender equality collapsed in human culture, it took eleven thousand years before women got decent rights again—”
“You’re worried about the girls’s rights?” Sirius said.
“I’m worried about the system Toren wants to set up,” Serendipity said. “Egalitarianism is like diamond. It’s the strongest natural structure—but it can burn away to vapor, or crumble to black dust, and when it’s gone, it stays gone. Tolerance is only metastable.”
“What?” Leonid asked.
“We all love living in a system that’s tolerant, but it only has a perceived stability,” Serendipity said. “You have to maintain tolerance, watch it, nurture it . . . or it crumbles.”
“Egalitarianism? Nurturing tolerance? You’re worried about social issues in another camp? You’re crazy,” Leonid said. “We can’t worry about what Toren’s doing out there. We have to worry about him coming here—”
“He’s right,” Sirius said, glancing between them, worried. Leonid got it. Serendipity clearly didn’t. She could think, she could plan, she even clearly had some spacer training—but she didn’t have any real experience. “Serendipity, we’ve got to focus on survival—”
Serendipity stood up.
“Twelve thousand, two hundred and forty-three,” Serendipity said. “That’s how many human colonies I surveyed before I came here. I know how they succeed—and how they fail. And they fail when someone puts survival above what’s right—and it sticks. Forever.”
“So tell us,” Leonid said, glancing at Sirius, “what do you think is right?”
“Everyone is ultimately equal,” she said. “If not in ability, in rights. Each creature has life. Each creature makes choices. And each creature should stand or fall on their choices, not on things they can’t change. No creature should stand above another!”
Sirius clapped. “Very stirring,” he said, feeling a wry smile creep onto his face: listening to this crazy pampered half-horse girl talk about ideals actually left him feeling a bit inspired. But just a bit—and they had serious work to do. “But we’re talking about survival—”
“We are not on a lifeboat,” Serendipity said. “We’re standing at the foot of a Beacon of the Intergalactic Alliance, the largest civilization in the history of the universe. We’re at the doorstep of its homeworld, Dresan, just fourteen thousand light years away—”
“Fourteen thousand light years—”
“Is a day trip,” Serendipity said. “We are not isolated. We might be just off the spacelanes—but we are off the spacelanes. That has a consequence. Space is really big. No one will stumble onto us unintentionally. This place went ten thousand years between visits. For all practical purposes, whatever gets started here will keep happening forever.”
“Forever,” Leonid said, staring at Norylan. “You’re really not exaggerating.”
“No,” Serendipity said. “But if we want to stop it, all we have to do is call for help.”
“How?” Sirius said. “Wait for your circuits to heal, then you . . . just think ‘SOS?’”
“No,” Serendipity said. “We’re atop the Plume, a huge column of gas. We need the eight-centimeter transmitter in my survival kit. It will reach hundreds of light years, enough to get some kind of aid, but it’s got to be unpacked and the transmitter physically set up—”
“Let me guess,” Sirius said. “You need it, so it’s in your saddlebags—”
“In the camp,” Leonid said. “We’d have to go through Toren.”
“Exactly,” Serendipity said. “That’s our choice. Confront Toren, get to a transmitter, and call for rescue—or sit on our hands, and let Toren decide the future of every human on this world for the next ten thousand years. Sell the girls into slavery and scare the ‘Halfways’ into hiding.”
“All the while pretending he’s not a Halfway Boy himself,” Sirius said.
“Oh, that’s never happened in history,” Serendipity said.
Sirius scowled. “Still, he’s tough. Can we use the Beacon instead?”
“No,” she said. “It’s an older design—it could take months to discharge the power it accumulated in the surge, and what if there are aftershocks? It could kill me unless we dig up an induction fuse. No. I need my transmitter from my survival kit and its booster.”
“Pity we can’t use the link in Independence,” Sirius said.
“The drive burned out,” Leonid said. “How do we know the link wasn’t fried too?”
“We shut it down before we dropped from hyperspace,” Sirius said. “Standard procedure. Power will flow through a link if it’s active, whether it’s tensor shock or gliderfield collapse. Shut the link down, and it’s just a hunk of matter that the shockwave passes by—what?”
“Treasures in the attic,” Serendipity said, with a happy grin. “I’ve been on a ship like Independence before—Deliverance, when I was six. Some function my grandmother dragged me to. Even then, I dreamed of becoming a historian, and it’s a famous colony ship. Naturally I wandered off to the historical exhibits . . . and touched all the display consoles.”
“Naturally,” Sirius said sarcastically. “How does that help us?”
“I’m laced through and through with nanomachines, and they’re always learning,” Serendipity said. “When I put my hand on those consoles . . . I downloaded the history of Deliverance, and all its original schematics. I think, with some work, I’m compatible.”
“Even if a lot of the circuits are fried,” Leonid said, “I bet the workshops are not.”
“Of course we should use Independence,” Sirius said, sitting straight up. “It’s got an enormous emission blade. It decouples naturally from the glidercore when we pop to normal space. Attach a hyperlink, and we could call for help through nine meters of hyperspace—”
“Best idea yet,” Leonid said. “Still . . . we’ll have to get past Toren.”
“Better than going head to head in camp,” Serendipity said. “Still . . . I can take him.”
“What?” Sirius said. “Are you serious?”
“I’m not saying we go in there swinging fists,” Serendipity said. “But he thinks that might makes right, correct? If he catches us, I’ll challenge him. The rest of the boys weren’t comfortable following him. I could see that. If they know someone could defend them—”
Sirius stood up.
“And that someone is you?” Sirius said, gauging her. She seemed a bit rattled by the attention. “I trained Tori to fight, back when boys like Leonid were bullying him all round the innards of the ship once the adults died. No one’s beaten him since he hit puberty—”
“I’m sure you trained him well,” Serendipity said, “but it’s nothing like what I’ve—”
“Oh, come on!” Sirius said. “You saw him! He’s a monster! You watched three people take him on and fail. And you? You think you could fight him? You couldn’t even beat me.”
He punched her arm, hard.
“Stop it, this is pointless. I’m not fighting you,” Serendipity said.
Sirius laughed and hit her again, harder this time.
Again she said, “Stop it!” Hurt and confusion spread over her face. She raised her hands feebly, fingers loose and forearms angled as if to defend herself, and Leonid got up and tried to intervene, pushing the two of them apart.
“You think Tori will stop just because you say ‘stop it’?” Sirius said, ducking Leonid and punching her again, harder and harder, fists glancing off her protesting hands and striking her arms and shoulders. “You think he’ll cut you a break just because you’re a girl—”
He swung for her chin—and her hoof popped out and nailed his groin.
Lights flashed behind Sirius’s eyes. He doubled over. He had a sudden vision of a huge knobbly knee coming straight for his face—and then everything went black, just for a moment. When he came to, his cheek was pressed to the deck by a booted hoof on his skull.
“I said, stop it,” Serendipity said quietly. Sirius heard Leonid groan, and opened his eyes to see Leonid down on one knee, also doubled over, his arm twisted up crazy behind him by her deceptively gentle hand. “Both of you. And if Toren doesn’t stop when I ask . . . he’ll be sorry.”
It took five minutes of talking for the two of them to calm Serendipity down enough for her to let them go. Sirius cradled his head gingerly as he s
tood up. Leonid had briefly struggled, and Sirius had felt a pop: he was sure Serendipity’s boot had broken the bones of his skull.
“Don’t worry,” Serendipity said, peering at Sirius with a pair of round spectacles. Behind their dark purple mirrored lenses, light flickered, casting patterns on her face. “It’s just a linear fracture. It should heal nicely on its own.”
“I was just trying to stop it,” Leonid said, feeling his arm. “You didn’t have to—”
“Those who in quarrels interpose,” she said, “must often wipe a bloody nose.”
“So you can fight,” Sirius said, feeling the side of his head. “You’re an expert.”
“No, no,” Serendipity said. “I just know the basics. I hate fighting.”
“Like, what basics?” Sirius said. “What are you good at?”
“Well, midrange for selfdef, of course,” Serendipity said, as if her words were the most obvious things in the world, “plus traditional grappling and striking. Beyond hand to hand, I’ve only got proficiency in knife and staff. Never took zeegee and my sniping is terrible—”
“You learned all that?” Sirius said. “Before or after going into the space marines?”
“My grandmother invented her own martial art,” she said. “A lot was expected of me.”
“This is what I was trying to tell you before we ever hit this dogforsaken rock,” Leonid said, glaring at Sirius. “You really don’t know how tough the Dresanians are. They have every advantage. They’re all immortal. They have centuries to get like this.”
“It shouldn’t take centuries, but it is why we can spend up to thirty years in school: to learn how to recreate our culture,” Serendipity said. “Dresanian citizens are civilization seeds. I know how to throw a punch or set a bone, cook a meal or land a spacecraft—”
“And you’re just nineteen,” Sirius said. “What will you be like at a hundred?”
“Oh, Lord,” Serendipity said. “That’s what I’m going to have to do, isn’t it?”
“What?” Sirius said.
“I ran away to free myself from my grandmother,” Serendipity said, looking at her fists. “But if we want to survive . . . I’m going to have to become her.”
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