Today's Reading
I breathed in and out and tried to get a handle on my runaway exasperation. My nephew had authored so many of the ship's internal scripts over the centuries—no wonder certain commonalities of phrasing and expression crept in. Ferry babbling, the sense of tipsiness... This was easily the nephewest the shipmind had ever sounded. It boded not well.
Yes, said the ship, with what sounded suspiciously like a hiccup. I resisted the urge to speculate what a shipmind could even hiccup with. There is definitely a new dead body in one of the passenger cabins. Aft Port Deck Sixteen, Janet Dodds. No vitals at all. I remember now I felt them die, but it was just as the magnetic storm started! So I couldn't send Medical—and then things got rather scrambly, and now they're just there, a blank spot interrupting all my comfortable scans. The ship made a noise of profound unhappiness. It itches.
The magnetic storm—the only one I remembered—had happened two years ago. "Ferry, how many magnetic storms have there been since I got shelved?"
Thirteen.
I winced.
The science people say they're...something. About this corner of space. The quasars? So there may be many more of them.
The ship's mental voice was full of dread, and no wonder. Ruthie had once tried to explain—before I begged him to stop—how the first storm distorted the magnetics used in maintaining orientation and attitude. Redundancies kept the ship from abrupt physical changes in direction—say, turning the wrong way around and flinging us tiny humans up against the ceiling—but did not prevent the effects on the ship's sensors. Essentially, a magnetic storm turned Ferry
into the ship equivalent of a bachelor on a bender.
This one's supposed to last until half ten, Ruthie told me. But the storms never killed anyone! They haven't even damaged anyone in the Library! A slight cough with metallic echoes. Not since the first one, anyway.
I shied away from that particular reminder. It was barely three months ago, for me. I wondered how Celia had spent the years since then...
My hands—I might as well start thinking of them as mine, since nobody else was using them—itched to get around a pair of knitting needles. Better to count stitches and rows and cable crosses than to dwell on what I'd lost. Or rather, what I'd kept, and what Celia had lost.
Ferry had begun to sing soply—something maudlin about sailors and rum and home.
The later stages of intoxication: I suspected I'd get nothing useful from this point forward. I asked for the address of the corpse, then gave strict instructions to do the shipmind version of sleeping it off.
The lip rang with the silence, now that it was just me and my own thoughts. Down the long decks below no doors were open, no passengers prowled the artificial night. Battened down, Ferry had said, and I was briefly grateful to be the only person awake. It gave me an opportunity.
A detective's book erased, and a fresh corpse killed at almost the same moment. I was willing to bet the timing was more than mere coincidence.
And one lone person out and about, who thanks to Ferry's imposition I couldn't even question.
Had Miss Vowell seen something? Was she a witness or an instigator? I'd have to wait to ask her, because for now I needed her body. It would be two long days before I could get a new one of my own—better to strike while the iron was hot, and before the trail had gone cold. We could always restore Miss Vowell's mind later, after all.
I pressed the button for Deck Sixteen and felt my stomach lurch as the descent began.
...
