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  “Yeah, Brill has a heron. They’re from the same guy.”

  “You gave it to her?” she asked, but she had an expression that said she knew the answer already.

  “Yeah, funny story. We saw this booth but neither of us bought anything. Later we both snuck back to it alone and bought whelkies for each other. Over dinner, I reached to give her the heron just as she was handing me the one she’d gotten for me.”

  “You have one, too?”

  I reached into the pocket of my shipsuit and pulled out the dolphin, holding it up so the section overheads glinted off the polished wood. The way the light slipped across it almost made it look like it was swimming.

  “Oh, it’s lovely. Can I touch it?”

  “Sure.” I held my hand out.

  She reached out and stroked it a couple of times with just the tip of one finger along the back and dorsal in a gesture vaguely similar to the way Alvarez had.

  “It’s so smooth. The wood almost feels soft,” she said dreamily. “You know Brill carries hers with her, too?”

  “Does she? I knew she used to, but I didn’t know she still did.”

  I looked at the chrono and saw 17:44 click over to 17:45. “You ready to hand over the watch?”

  “Mr. Wang, all ops normal. No maintenance was scheduled or performed. You have the watch.”

  “Ms. Ardele, I relieve you. I have the watch.”

  She slipped her tablet into the holster and grabbed her coffee cup, still holding her whelkie in her other hand. As she slipped past me, she gave me a little peck on the cheek. “Thank you for the fox.”

  “You’re welcome. Sarah says they have to find their true owners. The fishermen along the south coast there think they’re magical in some way,” I said as I settled into the seat and scanned the readouts once quickly.

  “Maybe they are.” She regarded hers carefully once more.

  I shrugged. “Maybe,” I told her idly as I finished my scan through the various status readouts. “Or maybe we just believe in the magic. Maybe we just let the icon represent the ideal which gives us a physical manifestation of an intangible.”

  She laughed her bubbly laugh. “I don’t even know what you just said.”

  I had to replay the sound of my voice in my ears to remember, then I laughed, too. “Sorry, one of the themes that Mom was always talking about. How ideas are often represented by objects.”

  She held up her fox and let the light wash over it. “What do you think these are representations of?”

  “Dunno. Maybe we apply a personal meaning to each one. That the meanings you and I apply aren’t the same as Sarah applies to hers.”

  “You gave Sarah one?” she asked, surprised.

  “No, she got one from her village shaman. A raven. The differences in style are obvious, but the representation is spectacular in its own way.”

  “You gave one to Bev, though, didn’t you?” It was a statement more than question.

  “Yeah, just now.”

  “What’s hers?”

  “A wolf.”

  “Yes, that is fitting.”

  She headed back toward the hatch. “Well, I’m off. I wanna grab some dinner and a nap before I head out.”

  “Hot date?”

  “Well, I can hope.” She grinned wickedly. “I can hope.”

  “Good hunting! Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” I said, inadvertently repeating the little catch phrase my mom and I shared when one of us had gone out.

  She laughed and stopped with her hand on the hatch. “What wouldn’t you do?”

  The events of the previous day spooled out delightfully in my brain, and I laughed. “Apparently not much!”

  “Good for you,” she said. She started out again but stopped once more and asked, “What did you give Alvarez?”

  “A falcon.”

  She nodded. “Good choice.”

  With a final little wave, she slipped out of the hatch, and I settled down to review the logs and check the maintenance schedule.

  Chapter 24

  DUNSANY ROADS ORBITAL

  2352-APRIL-18

  At about 18:30, I slaved my tablet to the console and headed up to the mess deck. Pip waited for me with a big grin on his face. It did not seem possible that he would be so pleased just because of the digitals I sent him. I loaded up a plate with Cookie’s spicy beefalo and rice. There were some green beans, too, and I added a big pile of them. My body musta been telling me it needed the vitamins or something. I thought Pip was gonna turn himself inside out before I made it over to him.

  “What’s got you all in a tizzy?” I asked. “Are you that excited about the batik? I brought some samples.”

  “No, those are good but you will not believe this.”

  “How do you know?” I asked with a chuckle. “You haven’t told me yet.”

  “Last night, I was in my rack reading. After cleanup, Sarah shows up and settles into her bunk with the shawl work.” I could tell it was going to be a long story so I ate slowly. “She’s getting darn good, but anyway she’s sitting there and crocheting her little fingers off. We talked about the booth and how well she did and so forth. She said she had a great time, but sold all her stuff and was looking forward to Betrus when she’d have more things to sell.”

  “Sounds like a new convert to the trading lifestyle.”

  “She’s still not quite in the same plane of existence with us, sometimes, but everybody is really good with her and many actually wait for her. She’s got more grit than me, I’ll tell ya that.”

  I just continued eating. He was having too much fun to hurry him and I knew he would tell me what had him so excited—eventually.

  “So, anyway, I asked her, if she was looking forward to selling her shawls or just selling. She giggled and said she had so much fun she wished she could just sell stuff. I asked her, ‘Doesn’t it bother you being in that crowd of people all day?’ She said no because when she was behind the table it was sorta like she was in the galley. Because people were coming to her, she felt in control.”

  I began to have second thoughts about whether he actually would get to the point of this story, but I did not have anything else to do, so I did not interrupt.

  “So, I knew we had that pile of stones in the locker. I also knew neither of us was going to get up there to sell ’em so I asked if she wanted to do it for us. I offered her booth commission on any she sold. I didn’t figure it would amount to much, and I was pretty sure you wouldn’t mind.” He stopped there and looked at me like it had been a question.

  I was a little slow in noticing the pause, but said, “No, not at all. I was wondering just this afternoon about how we were going to deal with them.”

  “What I meant is, do you mind that I offered her the commission? Ten percent?”

  I shook my head. “Of course not, how much did she wind up with? Fifty creds?”

  “Try four hundred.”

  I do not think I could have been more surprised if he had hit me with the omelet pan. I blinked slowly in confusion. “She made four hundred creds in commission? In one day?”

  He nodded with that big old grin plastered across his face. I knew he was telling me the truth but I could not quite process it. “But at ten percent she had to have sold,” and I lowered my voice to keep from screaming, “four thousand creds in a day? Less than a day, because I was up there with Brill around 15:00 and she wasn’t there then.”

  Pip’s eyes dance in glee. “Yup.”

  “Okay, you got my attention. Now back up and gimme the details.”

  “You know how we thought there were about two hundred fifty or three hundred of them left? It was more like four hundred. The smaller ones kept falling to the bottom. In the end she sold just over four hundred of them in about six stans.”

  “Gods, Pip, that’s about one a tic! For six stans?”

  He just grinned, his head bobbing frantically in agreement.

  The math fell into place then, too, and I practically yelled,
“She got ten creds each!”

  “Yeah, somehow. I have no idea how. I gave her the stones and leather stock last night and showed her how we were letting people buy the stones and then hack a piece of thong off the spool? Apparently she stayed up late and put a thong on every stone. She had some nice knot work to keep them together too. I saw them before she headed up to the flea with Rhon and the others. They looked good.”

  “But ten creds a piece? You were getting five at the most.”

  “When Rhon brought the pallet back, I asked her what was going on. Apparently our Miss Krugg is some kind of sales genius. She had bundled them into groups of fifty and stashed them in our cargo duffel. She would bring out a bundle and stand out near the edge of the booth and hawk them to the people walking by. She worked every angle, like the old get-em-while-they-last routine or calling them good luck stones. She hollered that they were fresh from the mines in Margary and just thirty creds each or four for a hundred. She even claimed they were blessed by a St. Cloud shaman. She had this whole bit going.”

  “Wait! She was hawking them for thirty creds each?”

  “Don’t look at me. She asked me what to sell them for and I just told her, ‘Whatever you can get.’ Rhon was killing herself laughing.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “She came in early and got some dinner, but she said she needed to get back to her shawls, so I suspect you’ll find her on her bunk. At the rate they’re going through yarn, I bet they’ll run out before we hit transition.”

  “If you see Sean or Tabitha, you might tell them there’s a lot of really nice cotton yarn up in the flea. I bet they could shift to lacework and the mass on some of that cotton would be really low for the length.”

  “Good idea. I’ll tell ’em.”

  I sat there for a tick in stunned disbelief. “So, how much did we make?”

  “We got two hundred fifty for the yarn we sold to the co-ed crochet team and three thousand six hundred twenty-five for the stones, after commission.”

  I laughed. “That was money well spent! We’d have been lucky to make two kilocreds and it would have taken us three days!”

  “That’s what I thought, too!”

  “So, we’re clear on mass?”

  “Yup.”

  “We’ve got a balance on our partnership of over five kilocreds again?”

  “Yup,” he said again.”Something close to it.”

  “You know this is insane, right?”

  “Like you being dragged out of Jump! by Alicia Alvarez isn’t?” He laughed some more.

  “She didn’t drag me. I went willingly. But to remain on subject…trading…that is. You’re going to go talk to the batik guy? Chuck?”

  “Yeah, I didn’t get a good sense of what that was on the digital, but what I saw was interesting.”

  “I bought some samples. Brill liked it, too.”

  “Okay, sounds good. You wanna go with me? I’ll wait until you wake up. I’ll want to go in the afternoon.”

  ”Better deals in the afternoon!” We chanted together and laughed.

  It suddenly dawned on me that this was the first time Pip and I were not on opposite port-side watches since I had been aboard. In the past we never could leave the ship at the same time. Obviously it occurred to Pip first. “That could be interesting. I’ll see if Bev wants to go. She’s on night watch tonight, too.”

  He went back to start evening cleanup while I finished the last of my spiced beefalo and rice. I had eaten most of it without noticing. Pip’s news was just so startling. I checked the tablet, just to make sure I had not missed any alarms from environmental, but I had only been gone about a quarter stan. It seemed much longer.

  A small icon flashed in the corner of the screen, letting me know I had a message—not a standard intra-ship notification but an incoming one from the StationNet. I looked at for perhaps a full tick before I opened it. It read:

  It’s beautiful. Damn, you’re good.

  —AA.

  It was another tick or two before I could close the message and take care of my dishes.

  One thing bothered me about Sarah’s little performance. I stopped at my locker for a tick and pulled the two stones I had gotten from the pile and stuck them in my pocket before I headed over to deck berthing. Pip was right and I found her crocheting on her bunk. “Hi, Sarah,” I said from outside the quad.

  She looked up and smiled. “Hey, there! Everybody on the ship is talking about you! I didn’t know you were a celebrity.”

  I chuckled. “Well, I didn’t used to be. Things just got out of hand.” I stepped into the quad and leaned against Pip’s bunk. “I wanted to thank you for selling those stones today.”

  She grinned. “Oh, you’re welcome. I had so much fun. People were so nice and I even had some patter that seemed to help. Patter? That’s the correct phrase?”

  “Yes, that’s right. You learn fast.”

  “Thanks!” Sarah beamed and seemed much younger than when we first met at the shuttle docks. Not physically. She still carried her age, but it looked almost painted on. I wondered how old she really was, but I was more than a little afraid to ask.

  “Can I ask you something about your patter, Sarah?” I asked gently.

  “Sure.”

  “Rhon told Pip that you were saying the stones were blessed by a St. Cloud shaman.”

  “Yes.” She looked down at her hands. “I did. I fibbed a little bit about how rare they were, but Rhon seemed think that was okay.”

  “I see. You didn’t think telling the people that the stones were blessed was a fib?”

  She shrugged a little shrug and focused on her crochet work. “Maybe a little.”

  “Only a little?”

  She worked the yarn for almost a whole tick before speaking, “Did you know that shaman is often a hereditary position?”

  “I’ve heard that it is in some cultures, yes. But how do they do it on the south coast?”

  “The post is almost always passed from father to son. The son inherits the gift from the father, you see. Sometimes you find a shaman when somebody’s been sick…really sick. When they recover, they discover they’ve received the shaman’s gift. But most often it’s inherited.” Her fingers never stopped moving and her eyes never looked up.

  “I see, and did the shaman in your village have a son?”

  She shook her head. “No, my mother died having me,” she said it so softly that I could barely hear her.

  “And you blessed the stones.”

  “Yes. I blessed the stones.”

  I pulled the two from my pocket and held them up by the thongs. “Would you bless mine?”

  “Why do you want me to bless them?” she asked, looking up for the first time. “You’re not a follower.” There was something akin to anger in her eyes.

  I shrugged. “A lot of people thought it was worth it today. Who am I to argue?”

  “But I’m not really a shaman,” she spat. “I’m not a boy.”

  “Maybe so,” I agreed. “But you’re not on the south coast any more, either. You’re on a ship that carries the spirit of a great woman. The captain of this ship is a great woman. Maybe the ship needs a great woman to be her shaman.” I shook the thongs, making the stones rattle together.

  “You don’t believe that,” she said flatly. “You’re making fun of me.”

  “I’m not making fun of you. I’m in no place to be ridicule anybody. And to be a shaman, maybe, you only need somebody to believe in you.” I held the stones higher and offered them to her again. “It doesn’t matter to me what you believe in. The important thing is that I believe in you.”

  She swallowed hard and looked at the stones like they might burn her if she took them.

  Neither of us moved for a long time. Finally, she reached out and took the stones from me. She looked at me once more, then she closed her eyes and I could see her lips moving ever so slightly as if reciting to herself. She kissed each stone and handed them back to me.
r />   “Thank you, Sarah.”

  “Thank you, Ishmael,” she replied and with a little smile and a deep breath she went back to her crochet work.

  I stepped out of the quad and almost bumped into Pip who had been standing just out of sight. “Clean up done already?”

  “Yeah, you know what port-side mess is like.” He had the look on his face that told me he had been there for a while.

  “Well, I need to get back to environmental,” I told him. “Wanna walk as far as the gym?”

  He followed me out of the berthing area and then grabbed my arm. “What in the name of Venus’s hairy palms was that all about?”

  “What?”

  “That mumbo jumbo with the stones.”

  “She’s come a long way, but she’s still healing.”

  “No kidding!” he said. “So why are you encouraging her.”

  “What? Why am I encouraging her to heal?”

  “No! Why are you encouraging her in her delusion?”

  “What delusion?”

  “All this shaman stuff. First the whelkies, now the stones.”

  “Well, the whelkies are real. I have one in my pocket. And she did bless the stones.”

  “But none of that is any more magical than I am.”

  “What makes you think you’re not magical?”

  That stopped him for a few heartbeats.

  “Are you going soft in the head on me, Ish?” he asked with genuine concern.

  “Well, maybe. But I remember the story you told me about when you came aboard.”

  “Yeah. So what? They traded me for Murdock.”

  “And once you came aboard, things began to turn around for you.”

  “That’s true, but I don’t see what that has to do with Sarah being a shaman and all this magic crap.”

  “Why do you think things started changing when you got here?”

  “I don’t know. I got a better attitude maybe. People were nicer here.”

  “Or maybe they just believed in you,” I told him quietly. I noticed I still had the stones in my hand and I thrust the white one into his. “Here, lucky stone, blessed by a St. Cloud shaman. Wear it in good health.”

  I left him standing there gaping at me as turned and headed back to environmental. As I walked, I tied the green one around my neck and let it slide down inside my shipsuit. You never know.