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Bev had introduced me to shopping at the flea market. I still carried a mental image of her in black leather pants and matching jacket with what looked like an aluminum pullover under it. When I met her at the lock, she wore the leathers—she always wore the leathers—but that day she had a pale yellow blouse under it. With her military buzz cut hairstyle and four kilos of surgical steel piercings, the touch of yellow made her seem as feminine as I had ever seen her. Not that she could ever be mistaken for a man. There was never any doubt that she was female to the core, but this was nice too.

She was still an intimidating figure. She moved with a dangerous grace and fluidity that wasn’t just for show. She didn’t carry any weapons, but. I had seen her sparring with some of the other crew, so I was pretty sure she didn’t need any.

She smiled after I looked her over. “Are you almost done drooling?”

“No, but let’s go shopping. I got a lot of mass to fill!”

She laughed and we headed up to level nine and the flea market. “What are we looking for?”

“Wood, textiles, maybe even some stone. Umber is a water planet and I want either something land-based or reminiscent of land, I think. Whatever it is, it needs to be high quality.”

“Good point. No sense dragging crap from one system to another.”

I couldn’t believe how good it felt to be walking with her again—just being with her. I liked moving along in her bubble as people in our path slipped by to either side. Some stopped to look back at her. Of course, walking a step behind gave me an excellent view as well.

She looked over her shoulder and said, “If you don’t stop watching my butt and start looking for goods, this is going to be a waste of time.”

“Speak for yourself!” I teased, but I stepped up beside her. It pleased me when people looked back and forth between us and smiled.

I was not inspired by the flea market. We saw lots of kitschy handicrafts—stencil work on plain canvas, studs and stones in fabric goods, the usual collection of mediocre artwork. Niol was a manufacturing hub specializing in machine parts for the secondary spares market. There was not a lot of ancillary contribution to the flea market trade from the fabrication shops on planet. Bev and I must have browsed for over a stan, and I began to get discouraged.

“You’d think with the forests down below, we’d see some kind of wooden toys or something, wouldn’t you?” I asked.

“Not necessarily.”

A demon stepped in our path suddenly, and I saw a blur of black leather that stopped a centimeter from the nose of a mask. The woman wearing the mask froze and gave a little squeak. I didn’t blame her. I felt like squeaking myself.

“I’m so sorry,” Bev said, stepping back and dropping her hands to her sides. “Your mask startled me and it was just a reflex.”

The woman pulled off the mask and said, “Oh no, I’m sorry. I should know better than to startle people like that.”

She had a whole booth full of marvelous masks—everything from elegant dominoes, to faces of animals, as well as abstracts. Some were merely decorative and others were fully functional. I snapped digitals and flashed them to Pip while we talked to her. She was more than happy to discuss wholesale pricing so long as we were taking them out of the system. Beverly and I both bought several as samples and just to have. We confirmed that she would be around for a few days so we could come back later and arrange for a bulk purchase.

“I have bundles of them down in my storage cube,” she said. “I’d love to unload some of them. Everybody here’s seen them and, in this business, it always has to be something new.” She had a most delightful giggle and she used it to good effect.

Three booths later we came upon a silk carp. The vendor was a tall, slender woman. and she had the carps hung all around her booth. As we walked up to them, I laughed because Bev had no idea what they were.

“They’re like wind socks,” I said. “You hang them out to catch the wind and on a really windy day, they look like they’re swimming.”

“Not a lot of wind on a ship,” she pointed out. “Or orbital for that matter.”

“But there is on the ocean.”

The woman’s name was Estelle and she created the carp from remnants of cloth that she bought by the bundle. The stitching was lovely and the colors ranged from monochromatic reds and blues to explosions of orange, black, and gold. They ran in varying lengths from about a meter to three giant ones that were over four meters long. Each came with a sewn in harness in the mouth and had a short lead with a swivel clip for attaching it to the main flying line.

“We used to have one of these when I was a kid,” I told Bev.

“I never lived on a planet long enough to really get used to it,” she said. It was the first personal piece of information I could remember her sharing. We lived so much in the “right now” for the stanyer I had been aboard that neither the past nor our future had come into the discussion.

Again I took digitals for Pip but Estelle had no interest in any kind of bulk trade deal. Her entire stock was in the booth. Still she had a lot of them, even after Bev and I bought a few. I actually considered sticking one to the wall above my bunk just to dress up the space a bit, they were that nice. We found out that she, too, would be around for a couple of days but needed to leave the orbital and get back down to the surface soon.

We wandered about looking at things for a couple more stans but, of all the stuff we saw, the masks and carps were the only two that had the kind of unique quality that I looked for in trade goods.

As we left the sales floor, Bev surprised me by stepping close enough to take my arm and walk hip-to-hip. “I wish I could bottle your nose for trade goods, Ish. I’d love to can it or something. You sure can pick ’em.”

“Naw,” I said, too flustered from hot leather against my outer thigh to be very cogent. “I just look for things that are different.”

“So do I, but the difference is you find it,” she said. “I’d have walked right past these carp.”

“Well, I knew what they were and they’re perfect for sale on Umber. I wonder if I can get Sarah to bless them,” I added.

Bev laughed. “Only if you let her sell them. I swear that woman is a selling machine!”

I laughed with her and we walked in silence for a while.

“Are you okay now?” I asked her without looking down.

“Yeah,” she murmured. “I think so. It was hard there for a while.”

“Betrus was a very hard place to be,” I admitted. “You wanna tell me about it?”

“I thought I was going to lose you,” she said without looking at me.

“Lose me?” I asked. Sometimes I could be so stupid.

“Yeah. Lose you. You may remember that you were about
that close
,”—she held up her thumb and forefinger about a millimeter apart—“to being put on the beach?”

“Well, yeah, but—”

“I know,” she said almost bitterly. “It was stupid but I couldn’t help myself.” She acted like she might want to say more, but she didn’t.

“What’ll you do if I go to the academy?” I asked out of thin air.

She stopped and jerked me around by the arm. “What? You’re going to the academy?”

I was a little afraid she was going to hit me—and not the playful slug in the arm but full on in the face. “I don’t know. But I’m thinking about it at the end of my contract next year.”

She looked into my face. “If you apply, you better tell me that very day! I don’t want any surprises like that.”

I thought she was being a little demanding. “Why? What’ll you do?” I asked in challenge.

She grinned a naughty grin and said, “Book a hotel room. You’re not getting away without a proper send off.” She took my arm again and hugged it even a little closer than might have been, strictly speaking, proper. I found I did not mind at all.

Remembering my conversation over breakfast I asked, “Did you know Salina Matteo is Jennifer Agotto’s mother?”

“Yeah, why do you ask?”

“I had my view of the universe shifted radically at breakfast this morning.”

“Damn, that musta been some omelet. Was it the mushrooms?” she asked with a devilish glint in her eye.

“No, I found out that almost everybody on the ship is from a spacer family of some kind.”

“Oh? You didn’t know?”

“I didn’t think there were such things as spacer families. All I have to go on is the
Lois
for personal experience.”

We walked in silence for a few more meters. “But you knew Pip came from a trader family,” she said.

“True, but it was an abstract idea until I met his aunt and uncle and saw their ship.”

“That musta been something to see.” She laughed. “You on an indie.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just that I’d have liked to see your face when you walked into the living room.”

It was my turn to stop and turn her to face me. “Do they all have living rooms?”

“No.” She laughed. “Some of them are more like the
Lois
, but if you changed your mind about your picture of trader families, you musta felt like you were stepping into a dreamscape. Off the dock and into the living room, right?”

“How’d you know?”

“Most common small ship configuration. If you’re docked, you don’t wanna have to go far to answer the front door bell should anybody come to call. Did you see the bridge?” she asked.

“No, didn’t get past the living room.”

“It’s usually outfitted like a kind of den. It’s where the family spends most of its time underway. Of course, the smaller ships have less time underway too.” She looked up at me, then and asked, “So is that why you’re thinking of going to the academy? Gonna start your own spacer family?”

The way she said it made me chuckle. “I didn’t even know what that meant until last night. The captain and Mr. von Ickles have been trying to convince me to go for the last three months.”

“Really? How’d the captain get involved?”

“I’m not sure. We were talking about the possibility of my having to leave the
Lois
, and she asked if I’d considered going to the academy and it just kinda went from there.”

“So? You’re thinking about it or not?”

“I told the captain that I wanted to stay with the
Lois
and at least work my contract out. It’ll be up this time next August and if I still like being in space and I think I’d like to continue, I’ll consider going.”

“What’s the hang-up? You not sure you want to continue being a spacer?”

“No. Actually, at this point I can’t imagine being anything else, but I’ve got about sixty thousand good reasons why I can’t go.”

“Sixty thousand? Gah!” she said. “I had no idea it was that expensive.”

“Tuition alone is forty, but I need room and board too.”

She nodded and hugged my arm again. I felt no need to talk a lot more after that. She held on until we got on the lift.

“So, you come from a spacer family, too?” I asked.

“Yup. Grew up in a merchie co-op. I left to get some seasoning and haven’t gone back yet. Someday, maybe,”

I just sighed and shook my head.

“What?”

“It’s just—I never realized how closed the community is. You almost have to be born into it.”

“Or luck into it like you and Sarah. Yeah. But it’s not that much different from any specialized trade. Doctors tend to breed doctors. Teachers tend to breed teachers. You probably would have been a professor if you’d had a chance.”

I appreciated that she didn’t say, “If your mother hadn’t died.”

The lift opened and we went across the docks heading for the ship. “Thanks for going with me, Bev. I really needed to touch base with you.”

“Any time, boy toy,” she teased. She was absolutely serious as she keyed the lock open and said, “And I needed to touch base too, thanks, Ish.”

On watch, I couldn’t concentrate on the logs. I really needed to extract the data for the systems that had restarted normally and add a new layer to my graphic but my whole image of the lonely spacer, tragically bereft of hearth and home, had been ripped from me in just one day.

Salina asked, “Are you okay, Ish?”

I turned my chair so I could face her where she sat at the console. “It’s just been such a weird day—meeting Pip’s aunt and uncle last night and seeing how they lived shipboard, finding out that you were married and have your daughter with you here, discovering that I’m much more of an outsider than I ever thought, it’s a bit much to process.” I sighed. “I guess I’m having trouble adjusting to the idea that spacers have real lives like anybody else. I had this whole notion of ‘spacer bar, love em and leave em, and don’t screw with the crew’ so ingrained in my head that, now, I’m feeling like I don’t really understand anything.”

“Well, that’s a start. You can’t possibly understand what it means to somebody like Pip to be a spacer when his father, mother, grandparents, and their parents all have been spacers. But you also need to figure out a way to realize that you not knowing is okay.”

I had to process that for a few ticks. “I think that helped actually.”