Nebula Awards Showcase 2013 (32 page)

When she'd offered to show him the EVAC suits, which Lizzie had never done before, Themba held up his hand to stop her.

“My Dad says tourist stuff's all the same,” he'd said. “Ships are ships. What's important is the people who run it. What do
you
do for fun?”

So she'd taken him to the observation deck to point out her Daddy's body. She told him how he orbited by once every forty-seven days, and they always held up a candle for him.

Themba saluted Lizzie's father, real solemn and sad, like a soldier. He didn't tell her it was creepy; instead, he asked what Daddy had been like.

So Lizzie showed him Daddy's constellation. She traced the family shapes on the narrow, scratched porthole of the observation deck: Daddy's bear-constellation, Gemma's turbine-constellation, Momma's battleship. Themba started making up his own constellations until Lizzie explained that you only got to pick your own constellation when you turned thirteen.

He stopped. She'd liked that.

So Lizzie showed him how to make wishes off the microshields, where you said a question out loud three times and if a meteoroid got zapped before you could count to thirty, your wish would come true. And by the time Themba and Lizzie were done, Lizzie's last wish was that Themba would stay here forever.

Even though he was two years younger, he seemed older, because his Dad hauled him around the galaxy on diplomatic trips. He had lots of crazy stories. And though Lizzie wasn't too clear on how life actually
worked
on a planet, Themba never got tired of answering her questions.

Which was why Lizzie would show Themba how to make sauerkraut. Maybe Momma didn't want Themba to know; maybe it was a secret. But Themba was worth Momma's anger.

“Okay,” Lizzie said. She put Themba's cabbage head down on the cutting surface and reached for a knife. “You—”

One of Themba's escorts grabbed her wrist. Lizzie cried out, dropping the knife. She looked at the cafeteria—how could they have gotten through the kitchen door that fast?

“Fellas,
fellas
!” Themba shouted, waving them off. “Come on, it's a kitchen, there's knives, what's the problem?”

The escort kicked the knife over to the other, who examined it closely.

“You okay, Lizzie?” Themba rubbed her hand. His fingers were pleasantly warm.

“It's fine,” Lizzie said. And really, it was. If his escorts weren't so stupidly paranoid, they'd have let Gemma repair their ship in the mechbay instead of waiting for their own customized mechanics to arrive. And then Themba would have been gone in seven hours, not ninety-one.

“Come on,” Themba begged them. “Give me the knife.”

The escorts exchanged flat glances. Then they shoved her back into a corner, interposing themselves between Lizzie and Themba, then handed him the knife handle-first.

“I guess that's okay,” Themba shrugged. “What do I do with this?”

“Take the cabbage,” Lizzie said, craning her head to look out from underneath the escort's armpit. “Cut it in thirds . . .”

Lizzie had never taught anyone before, but even so she thought Themba was a little clumsy. He would have cut himself twice—but his escorts reached out, quick as a meteoroid, to grab the blade before it cut him.

“You're doing well,” Lizzie said. Themba smiled. Even with the escorts in between them, it felt—well, special. It was simple work, chopping and canning, but making sauerkraut was like the metal beams that framed the station, fundamental and strong; she'd never shared that part of herself before.

“This is fun,” Themba said. “Now I put in, what? Carrots?”

Themba dumped the last of the ingredients into a plastic tub, then proudly hoisted his special sauerkraut.

“What now?”

“Well,” she said. “It's gotta ferment.”

Themba bit his lip. “How long's that take?” And when Lizzie hesitated, knowing that it was longer than they had, Themba grabbed her arm.

“Promise me you'll keep it,” he said, looking absurdly serious. “Keep it here until I come back. Please?”

“I'll have to hide it,” Lizzie said. “Otherwise, Momma will sell it.”

“Show me where.”

They squeezed past the escorts and darted into the tiny airlock to the fermenting chambers, which were kept on a separate circulation vent. As it was, the damp, yogurty-vinegar sour smell almost made Themba topple over.

The chambers were small and cool, stacked with giant plastic tubs that bubbled over with foam-flecked sauerkraut. Lizzie hunted for the perfect space to store Themba's batch. His escorts bumped heads, fighting to peer through the tiny porthole.

“Come with me when I leave, Lizzie,” Themba whispered. “They don't want you along, but I bet if I begged they'd bring you.”

Lizzie froze; it had never occurred to her that she could go anywhere else. She was going to grow up and die on Sauerkraut Station, just like five generations of Denahues before her.

“Where—where are you going?”

“I'm gonna be a
hostage
,” Themba said, and from the dreamy way he said it Lizzie just knew it was the best thing in the whole 'verse. “They'll give me the softest beds and the nicest food and all the games I want while Daddy talks to the Gineer. He says I'll be treated like a king while he's gone, but it could be years. It'll be lonely. With you, we could cook, we could play VR hockey . . .”

Lizzie fumbled for a marker and scrawled a big “T” on the top of Themba's tub.

“You like me that much?”

“Everyone's all stiff where I live,” Themba said. “Grab the wrong fork at dinner, they talk for months. But you, you're just . . . cool.”

Lizzie blushed as she shoved Themba's tub underneath a pile of well-aged kraut containers. No one had ever called her cool. But now all she could think of was Momma and Gemma, and how they'd just gotten Lizzie up to speed to take her slot on this three-man station. Momma should have hired someone new to take Daddy's place when he'd died five years back. Gemma had harangued Momma enough to get someone new, but Momma was firm: the family would get by without outsiders.

Fortunately, that was when Themba's escorts forced their way through the airlock, running a med-scanner over Themba's body.

For the rest of the day, Themba acted like he hadn't said anything, but Lizzie felt like she'd eaten a sugar bar. By the time she went to bed, she was vibrating with the secret.

Momma combed Lizzie's hair, as she always did before bedtime.

“What's gotten into you, Elizabeth?” Momma asked. “You're all snarls and tangles, and not just in your hair.”

Gemma had tried combing once, and even though Gemma was great with engines and cuddles, she was terrible with hair. But Momma was coolly methodical, softly tugging each snarl, and when she was done she left Lizzie with the cleanest, freest hair you could imagine. It was the most soothing feeling, being in Momma's hands.

But ever since Daddy had launched himself into orbit, Momma had gotten brittle. Daddy's death wasn't Momma's fault, Lizzie had understood that even when she was six—Daddy was just a cook, and should never have been out on the hull. But Momma had been dreadful ill thanks to a flu she'd caught from some inbound flight; Daddy had been dumb enough to try and do a woman's job repairing air leaks, and in his haste he'd forgotten to tether himself.

Back then, Momma had hugged; now, she gave orders. The only sign of the old, loving Momma was in that careful combing, and Lizzie was afraid that if she left—or even mentioned leaving—Momma might stop combing her hair.

“You lose someone dear to you, you start making distance,” Gemma had told her. “She still loves you, but she's terrible afraid of losing you. You gotta approach her just right, or she'll shut down on you like a crashed server.”

Lizzie tried to think of a nice way to put it, but nothing came to mind. So she blurted it out: “Themba wants me to be a hostage.”

Momma's brush stopped in mid-stroke. “Does he.”

Lizzie leaned back into her Momma, hoping to restart the brushing, but nothing came. So she turned around and said, “He says he wants the company.” That didn't seem like enough reason to leave the station, so she added: “He's my best friend, Momma.”

“I'm sure he is, Lizzie.” Momma was looking at the dented metal of the bedroom wall, like she often did these days.

“I'll need you here,” Momma concluded. Lizzie's heart sank—but the brush started moving through her hair again, comforting and careful. “I'll be ordering some hydroponic prefab farms tomorrow morning; you'll need to help install them. And it's time you learned how to pilot.”

That was an expected bonus; she'd been bugging Mom to let her learn to fly for years, but Momma said that girls under fourteen shouldn't fly unassisted near a dust belt. It was about as close as the new Momma came to an apology.

“That's real nice of you, Momma,” Lizzie said politely.

“Changes are coming,” Momma replied, and kissed her on the cheek. Lizzie nearly forgotten what that felt like.

The next afternoon, Themba's special-ordered mechanics docked at the station in a big mil-spec ship that bristled with gun ports. Lizzie had hoped that maybe it would take the techs weeks to fix Themba's ship, but Gemma had already told her it was a simple repair; they just wouldn't let Gemma touch it without a Level IV Gineer security clearance.

Sure enough, six hours after the mechanics arrived, Themba came to say his goodbyes. She squeezed him tight, trying to store the memory away for future nights.

“So you gonna come?” he whispered.

“I can't. My family needs me.”

He nodded. “I thought so,” he said. “But it's good, I guess. I'm helping my Daddy forge friendships, you're helping your Momma stay in business. Our parents need us. That's good, isn't it?”

Lizzie tried to say yes, but she burst out in tears instead, and then Themba buried his face in her neck. “Come back when you're done?”

Themba put his hand on the bright breast of his kaftan and promised that he would. And then Lizzie watched her best friend of four whole days, eighteen hours, and twenty-three minutes leave.

She hoped she'd see him again, but she doubted it. Things had a way of disappearing in space.

 

* * *

 

The guests at Sauerkraut Station told Lizzie stories of a world without maintenance. It seemed incomprehensible to Lizzie. How could a garden just spring up when you weren't looking?

When she was younger, she'd asked the customers about these worlds, expecting that if she asked enough people then one would eventually relent and admit that yeah, it was all a lie, just like the Vacuum Vipers that Dad had told her nestled inside incautious little girls' spacesuits, waiting to bite anyone who didn't check their EVA suits carefully.

But no; somber businessmen and travelling artists alike assured her that yes, water dripped freely down from the air, and helper faerie-bees flew seeds into every crevice. Gemma had even taken Lizzie down to the rec room, where customers paid money to kick their feet up on one of eight overstuffed footrests and pull a rented screenmask down over their heads, to show Lizzie the videos she'd taken of her planetside adventures. It had taken some convincing before Lizzie had believed that it wasn't a special effects trick.

What would it be like to live in a world that could get by without you? Lizzie's world was held together by checklists of chores and maintenance. Lizzie's world
needed
her.

For the first time, though, her needful world didn't feel like enough.

In every room, she found something she'd forgotten to tell Themba. Her daily tasklist became a litany of things she should have said to Themba, a constant ache of wondering what he would have thought.

When she straightened the cramped sliding-cabinet beds of the twelve guest chambers, she would have told Themba of all the crazy things people left behind—ansibles, encrypted veindrives, even a needler-rifle once. When she re-tightened the U-bends of the shower stalls, which provided luke-warm dribbles of water to customers for a nominal fee, she thought about how Themba would have wanted to see the central heating system, would have squirmed into the central axis to look at the boiler. And her worst chore of all would have been a joy with Themba there; normally, Lizzie hated pushing all the spare part bins away from the walls of Gemma's repair bay so she could scan the walls for metal fatigue.

But with Themba, she would have tugged up the heavy metal plate in the floor to expose the hidden compartment full of emergency supplies. Then she would have whispered about the hidden
hidden
compartment below that they never dared open, lest they disturb the dust at the bottom.

Then, afterwards, she and Themba and Gemma would have all clambered into the punctured ship that was crammed edgewise into the beams of the dockbay's ceiling—that contentious collection of parts that Momma called a junker, and that Gemma insisted was a classic waiting to be restored. And Gemma would have hugged them both as she told Themba the story of Great-Gemma and the Pirates.

But that was stupid. Themba's father had brought him to hundreds of planets. Why would he be impressed by a secret compartment? Sauerkraut was a novelty to Themba the first time—but when his hands stung from chopping a hundred heads of cabbage, would he still smile? When his shoulders ached from serving defrosted sausages and Insta-Ryz buns to six-hour guests, would he still want to stay?

Of course he wouldn't. He had chefs now.

And when Momma's voice boomed down from the conning tower to alert her that a new collection of guests was on its way, Lizzie took her place by the station's airlock with new vision. Momma always told her that the guests were weary from nearly a month in the transit-ships—they wanted a happy smile, a home-cooked meal, a touch on the shoulder. Lizzie had seen them as just another chore.