“She’s still Family,” Tanith said. She was sixteen, and there was something in her face that made Pendt think she knew a secret that would never even occur to her younger sister or any of the boys. “A Harland is always worth something, even if we have to wait for her for a bit.”
“The captain has made it clear we’re not to bother with her one way or the other,” Jerrus said. He was the most practical of the lot, the most like his mother, except he couldn’t feel the stars. “So, we won’t, unless we get new orders.”
“And you’d better set an example for her sibs,” Tanith said. “Not to mention Karderee. They need to understand how fragile our balance is, and what Pendt’s flaws might cost us.”
That shut everyone up for a while. The Harlands were not afraid of space, but they were respectful towards it, and not a one of them, Pendt included, was going to tempt fate.
As she cleared plates from the table without being acknowledged by any of her relatives, it occurred to Pendt that she had one thing they didn’t have: She had seen the stars.
She didn’t see them again for a very long time.
3.
JUST BEFORE SHE TURNED eight, Pendt asked if she could work in hydroponics. She told her mother that she knew as much about plants as she did about protein—which was to say, not much—and that she thought she could help the plants grow better.
“How do you know that?” Lodia asked, and Pendt found herself the sole recipient of her mother’s attention quite suddenly. It was not a reassuring feeling.
“I just”—Pendt groped for words to explain the feeling—“I just do?”
It was difficult to elucidate. It was similar to the feeling that Pendt had as she measured out calories onto her siblings’ plates, but wilder and less predictable. She felt it most strongly when she had just eaten, and sometimes it knocked the wind out of her if she chased it for too long.
Lodia was quiet for a moment, and then she put her hands under Pendt’s chin and forced her to make eye contact.
“You will always feel that call,” Lodia said. Her voice was pure Officer, but there was a fear in her eyes that Pendt didn’t understand. “I feel a call to the stars and your brothers feel the call of electricity, but you must never answer it, do you understand me?”
“But I can make the plants grow better,” Pendt protested. “I know I can. I can be better for the Harland.”
“The Harland has all the plants it needs,” Lodia said. “The machines in hydroponics are sufficient to our needs, and they do not require calories like you would if you did their work.”
Tears sprang to Pendt’s eyes. She hadn’t learned to control the impulse to cry yet, even though she was always determined to stop herself. She ground them off her cheeks with the palms of her hand and faced her mother.
“I want to be better for the Harland, sir,” she said. “I’m sorry my idea is a bad one.”
“It’s all right, Pendt,” Lodia said. “If you knew everything about ship operations at eight, it would be a miracle. It takes a long time to understand the balance of space. Your aunt works hard to maintain it, making sure we have exactly what we need and nothing more. That’s how we survive.”
Her mother opened the door to their quarters and ushered Pendt out into the hallway. It was past time for both of their shifts to start. Lodia was nearly due on the bridge to relieve the captain for the afternoon’s inspection, and Pendt was, as always, to report to the galley.
“Will you leave me at the next colony?” Pendt asked just before her mother stepped into the lift. Her cousins had started whispering things about her being left behind. It was marginally better than when they suggested Arkady might just airlock her and get it over with.
“No, little cat,” her mother said. The use of the name was not a comfort, less a bargain and more a threat. “When you’re eighteen and can sign a contract on Brannick Station, you’ll be worth so much to us.”
That vague promise or something like it was all Pendt ever got. She didn’t know why she would suddenly be worth more when she was eighteen, except that she would be able to enter into contracts. Her oldest cousins could do that if they wanted, though they didn’t need one to work on the Harland. Dr. Morunt was under contract, but Pendt’s mother never talked like she was planning to give her daughter medical training. The cook had no gene-sense to speak of, relying on Morunt’s calculations to determine who ate how much. It must have something to do with food, though. Everything always came back to food.
Pendt continued to wonder about it while she worked in the galley preparing lunch. She was best at measuring out portions, so the job was usually given to her. This required much less heavy lifting, but she could still make mistakes by being imprecise or by dropping things, so her rate of punishment had not decreased.
Pendt fetched the containers from the galley stowage and arranged the trays being assembled for everyone’s meal. Each tray had a coloured chip on it, indicating who the meal was for, and Pendt’s job was to make sure the calories on the plate matched Dr. Morunt’s recommendations. The food was divided up by type: protein, vegetable, starch. Each package was made of fibres that would be recycled into wires and such. When it was emptied and cleaned, Pendt put it into the compressor. All told, it was tedious work. But it didn’t result in getting burns from the stove and there was no point in complaining, so Pendt did it.
Sometimes, Pendt’s life felt like an eternity of peeling back lids and scooping out the nutritious matter inside. The rational part of her knew that it had only been a few years and that she had too many more to get through to be thinking so defeatedly, but occasional irrationality was her only escape, and so when her job was particularly boring, she let herself drift while she was doing it.
The spatula scraped against the bottom of the container Pendt was holding, and she added it to her stack of empties. There were enough to put through the recycler—a machine that extracted the last bits of edible calories from the packaging and sent them to hydroponics for use as fertilizer—so Pendt added that to her rhythm. As they started to emerge from the recycler, Pendt placed the sanitized containers into the compressor, the last time she had to worry about them. Her attention split between the trays, the recycler, and the compressor, Pendt did not anticipate the danger she was in until it was too late.
She reached a fraction of a centimetre too far into the compressor or maybe she withdrew her hand a fraction of a second too late. She never knew. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that her index finger got caught in the gears that controlled the speed of the machine.
Time seemed to slow down, and she was aware that what was about to happen was going to hurt. A lot.
Her finger was crushed between two pieces of metal and she screamed. She pulled her hand back, but the nail caught on a jagged edge, and tore all the way off. She turned away from the trays, determined to bleed only on the floor, and cradled her hand against her chest. Her jumpsuit turned red and the cook and the other galley workers were screaming at her, but she couldn’t understand them. All she knew was pain.