Citizen of the Galaxy (13 page)

It was easier to learn to be a beggar.

He was swept up in his new problems and did not see Doctor Margaret Mader for days. He was hurrying down the trunk corridor of fourth deck -- he was always hurrying now -- when he ran into her.

He stopped. “Hello, Margaret.”

“Hello, Trader. I thought for a moment that you were no longer speaking to fraki.”

“Aw, Margaret!”

She smiled. “I was joking. Congratulations, Thorby. I'm happy for you -- it's the best solution under the circumstances.”

“Thanks. I guess so.”

She shifted to System English and said with motherly concern, “You seem doubtful, Thorby. Aren't things going well?”

“Oh, things are all right” He suddenly blurted the truth. “Margaret, I'm never going to understand these people!”

She said gently, “I've felt the same way at the beginning of every field study and this one has been the most puzzling. What is bothering you?”

“Uh . . . I don't know. I never know. Well, take Fritz -- he's my elder brother. He's helped me a lot -- then I miss something that he expects me to understand and he blasts my ears off. Once he hit me. I hit back and I thought he was going to explode.”

“Peck rights,” said Margaret.

“What?”

“Never mind. It isn't scientifically parallel; humans aren't chickens. What happened?”

“Well, just as quickly he went absolutely cold, told me he would forget it, wipe it out, because of my ignorance.”

“Noblesse oblige.”

“Huh?”

“Sorry. My mind is a junk yard. And did he?”

“Completely. He was sweet as sugar. I don't know why he got sore . . . and I don't know why he quit being sore when I hit him.” He spread his hands. “It's not natural.”

“No, it isn't. But few things are. Mmm . . . Thorby, I might be able to help. It's possible that I know how Fritz works better than he knows. Because I'm not one of the 'People.'“

“I don't understand.”

“I do, I think. It's my job to. Fritz was born into the People; most of what he knows -- and he is a very sophisticated young man -- is subconscious. He can't explain it because he doesn't know he knows it; he simply functions. But what I have learned these past two years I have learned consciously. Perhaps I can advise you when you are shy about asking one of them. You can speak freely with me; I have no status.”

“Gee, Margaret, would you?”

“Whenever you have time. I haven't forgotten that you promised to discuss Jubbul with me, either. But don't let me hold you; you seemed in a hurry.”

“I wasn't, not really.” He grinned sheepishly. “When I hurry I don't have to speak to as many people . . . and I usually don't know how.”

“Ah, yes. Thorby, I have photographs, names, family classification, ship's job, on everyone. Would it help?”

“Huh? I should say so! Fritz thinks it's enough just to point somebody out once and say who he is.”

“Then come to my room. It's all right; I have a dispensation to interview anyone there. The door opens into a public corridor; you don't cross purdah line.”

Arranged by case cards with photographs, the data Thorby had had trouble learning piecemeal he soaked up in half an hour -- thanks to Baslim's training and Doctor Mader's orderliness. In addition, she had prepared a family tree for the Sisu; it was the first he had seen; his relatives did not need diagrams, they simply knew.

She showed him his own place. “The plus mark means that while you are in the direct sept, you were not born there. Here are a couple more, transferred from collateral branches to sept . . . to put them into line of command I suspect. You people call yourselves a 'family' but the grouping is a phratry.”

“A what?”

“A related group without a common ancestor which practices exogamy -- that means marrying outside the group. “The exogamy taboo holds, modified by rule of moiety. You know how the two moieties work?”

“They take turns having the day's duty.”

“Yes, but do you know why the starboard watch has more bachelors and the port watch more single women?”

“Uh, I don't think so.”

“Females adopted from other ships are in port moiety; native bachelors are starboard. Every girl in your side must be exchanged . . . unless she can find a husband among a very few eligible men. You should have been adopted on this side, but that would have required a different foster father. See the names with a blue circle-and-cross? One of those girls is your future wife . . . unless you find a bride on another ship.”

Thorby felt dismayed at the thought. “Do I have to?”

“If you gain ship's rank to match your family rank, you'll have to carry a club to beat them off.”

It fretted him. Swamped with family, he felt more need for a third leg than he did for a wife.

“Most societies,” she went on, “practice both exogamy and endogamy -- a man must marry outside his family but inside his nation, race, religion, or some large group, and you Free Traders are no exception; you must cross to another moiety but you can't marry fraki. But your rules produce an unusual setup; each ship is a patrilocal matriarchy.”

“A what?”

“ 'Patrilocal' means that wives join their husbands' families; a matriarchy . . . well, who bosses this ship?”

“Why, the Captain.”

“He does?”

“Well, Father listens to Grandmother, but she is getting old and --”

“No 'buts.' The Chief Officer is boss. It surprised me; I thought it must be just this ship. But it extends all through the People. Men do the trading, conn the ship and mind its power plant -- but a woman always is boss. It makes sense within its framework; it makes your marriage customs tolerable.”

Thorby wished she would not keep referring to marriage.

“You haven't seen ships trade daughters. Girls leaving weep and wail and almost have to be dragged . . . but girls arriving have dried their eyes and are ready to smile and flirt, eyes open for husbands. If a girl catches the right man and pushes him, someday she can be sovereign of an Independent state. Until she leaves her native ship, she isn't anybody -- which is why her tears dry quickly. But if men were boss, girl-swapping would be slavery; as it is, it's a girl's big chance.”

Doctor Mader turned away from the chart. “Human customs that help people live together are almost never planned. But they are useful, or they don't survive. Thorby, you have been fretted about how to behave toward your relatives.”

“I certainly have!”

“What's the most important thing to a Trader?”

Thorby thought. “Why, the Family. Everything depends on who you are in the Family.”

“Not at all. His ship.”

“Well, when you say 'ship' you mean 'family.' “

“Just backwards. If a Trader becomes dissatisfied, where can he go? Space won't have him without a ship around him; nor can he imagine living on a planet among fraki, the idea is disgusting. His ship is his life, the air he breathes comes from his ship; somehow he must learn to live in it. But the pressure of personalities is almost unbearable and there is no way to get away from each other. Pressure could build up until somebody gets killed . . . or until the ship itself is destroyed. But humans devise ways to adjust to any conditions. You people lubricate with rituals, formalism, set patterns of speech, obligatory actions and responses. When things grow difficult you hide behind a pattern. That's why Fritz didn't stay angry.”

“Huh?”

“He couldn't. You had done something wrong . . . but the fact itself showed that you were ignorant. Fritz had momentarily forgotten, then he remembered and his anger disappeared. The People do not permit themselves to be angry with a child; instead they set him back on the proper path . . . until he follows your complex customs as automatically as Fritz does.”

“Uh, I think I see.” Thorby sighed. “But it isn't easy.”

“Because you weren't born to it. But you'll learn and it will be no more effort than breathing -- and as useful. Customs tell a man who he is, where he belongs, what he must do. Better illogical customs than none; men cannot live together without them. From an anthropologist's view, 'justice' is a search for workable customs.”

“My father -- my other father, I mean; Baslim the Cripple -- used to say the way to find justice is to deal fairly with other people and not worry about how they deal with you.”

“Doesn't that fit what I said?”

“Uh, I guess so.”

“I think Baslim the Cripple would regard the People as just.” She patted his shoulder. “Never mind, Thorby. Do your best and one day you'll marry one of those nice girls. You'll be happy.”

The prophecy did not cheer Thorby.

By the time Sisu approached Losian Thorby had a battle station worthy of a man. His first assignment had been to assist in the central dressing station, an unnecessary job. But his background in mathematics got him promoted.

He had been attending the ship's school. Baslim had given him a broad education, but this fact did not stand out to his instructors, since most of what they regarded as necessary -- the Finnish language as they spoke it, the history of the People and of Sisu, trading customs, business practices, and export and import laws of many planets, hydroponics and ship's economy, ship safety and damage control -- were subjects that Baslim had not even touched; he had emphasized languages, science, mathematics, galactography and history. The new subjects Thorby gobbled with a speed possible only to one renshawed by Baslim's strenuous methods. The Traders needed applied mathematics -- bookkeeping and accounting, astrogation, nucleonics for a hydrogen-fusion-powered n-ship. Thorby splashed through the first, the second was hardly more difficult, but as for the third, the ship's schoolmaster was astounded that this ex-fraki had already studied multi-dimensional geometries.

So he reported to the Captain that they had a mathematical genius aboard.

This was not true. But it got Thorby reassigned to the starboard fire-control computer.

The greatest hazard to trading ships is in the first and last legs of each jump, when a ship is below speed-of-light. It is theoretically possible to detect and intercept a ship going many times speed-of-light, when it is irrational to the four-dimensional space of the senses; in practice it is about as easy as hitting a particular raindrop with a bow and arrow during a storm at midnight. But it is feasible to hunt down a ship moving below speed-of-light if the attacker is fast and the victim is a big lumbering freighter.

The Sisu had acceleration of one hundred standard gravities and used it all to cut down the hazard time. But a ship which speeds up by a kilometer per second each second will take three and one half standard days to reach speed-of-light.

Half a week is a long, nervous time to wait. Doubling acceleration would have cut danger time by half and made the Sisu as agile as a raider -- but it would have meant a hydrogen-fission chamber eight times as big with parallel increase in radiation shielding, auxiliary equipment, and paramagnetic capsule to contain the hydrogen reaction; the added mass would eliminate cargo capacity. Traders are working people; even if there were no parasites preying on them they could not afford to burn their profits in the inexorable workings of an exponential law of multi-dimensional physics. So the Sisu had the best legs she could afford-but not long enough to outrun a ship unburdened by cargo.

Nor could Sisu maneuver easily. She had to go precisely in the right direction when she entered the trackless night of n-space, else when she came out she would be too far from market; such a mistake could turn the ledger from black to red. Still more hampering, her skipper had to be prepared to cut power entirely, or risk having his in-ship artificial gravity field destroyed -- and thereby make strawberry jam of the Family as soft bodies were suddenly exposed to one hundred gravities.

This is why a captain gets stomach ulcers; it isn't dickering for cargoes, figuring discounts and commissions, and trying to guess what goods will show the best return. It's not long jumps through the black -- that is when he can relax and dandle babies. It is starting and ending a jump that kills him off, the long aching hours when he may have to make a split-second decision involving the lives -- or freedom -- of his family.

If raiders wished to destroy merchant ships, Sisu and her sisters would not stand a chance. But the raider wants loot and slaves; it gains nothing simply to blast a ship.

Merchantmen are limited by no qualms; an attacking ship's destruction is the ideal outcome. Atomic target-seekers are dreadfully expensive, and using them up is rough on profit-and-loss -- but there is no holding back if the computer says the target can be reached -- whereas a raider will use destruction weapons only to save himself. His tactic is to blind the trader, burn out her instruments so that he can get close enough to paralyze everyone aboard -- or, failing that, kill without destroying ship and cargo.

The trader runs if she can, fights if she must. But when she fights, she fights to kill.

Whenever Sisu was below speed-of-light, she listened with artificial senses to every disturbance in multi-space, the whisper of n-space communication or the “white” roar of a ship boosting at many gravities. Data poured into the ship's astrogational analog of space and the questions were: Where is this other ship? What is its course? speed? acceleration? Can it catch us before we reach n-space?