Dianthe scoffed. "That"s just change. You"ve all been hearing the same voices, seeing the same faces, since the last port. Anyone would sound good welcoming you to a station."
Now it was Lolanyo"s turn to scoff. "You"ve never heard "Gravel Gryta" at Beowulf." Lolanyo dropped his voice, put in a heavy rasp, and said, "You"re clear for approach on vector alpha three-nine." He sounded like an old woman who had spent too much time living hard and Dianthe couldn"t suppress a snort of laughter.
"So, why are you doing embroidery?"
Dianthe completed a couple more st.i.tches. "I bet it seems old-fashioned."
"I thought it was all done by machine," Lolanyo admitted.
"The commercial embroidery is. If you see it on a shirt or napkin, or whatever, you"re looking at something the robots have made. But this, I learned it from my aunt. She lives on Gedrosia and is really active in recreating ancient terrestrial art. She does needlepoint, calligraphy, and so on. I stayed with her one summer when I was growing up and she tried to get me interested in different crafts. Embroidery is the one that stuck with me. I can do it while sitting in the ComShed and it gives me something to do while waiting for your ships to come in."
Lolanyo found himself drifting as she spoke. For all her voice was beautiful when Dianthe gave instructions or even when she was telling him to get lost, when she spoke about something she cared about, and she clearly cared about embroidery, her voice took on an even more magical quality.
Lolanyo realized that she had finished talking. "I hike." Even as the words were coming out of his mouth, he realized he should probably have kept quiet.
As he said the words, the commie turned from her to look up at the numbers, as if they would magically begin counting down again. Dianthe put her embroidery down on her lap and looked up at him, seeing him for the first time.
"Being a com officer on an interstellar s.p.a.ceship seems a rather odd profession for someone who enjoys the outdoors." It just seemed so random and incongruous.
He glanced down at her. "I come from Greyfox." Seeing her blank look, he explained, "It is a small moon orbiting Redtail, which has been almost completely tamed. The parts of the moon that aren"t urbanized have been turned to tame farmland. When I was young, my father took me to Orbis, another moon orbiting Redtail. Orbis is untamed. Small mining towns built into mountain pa.s.ses. It seemed to be everything Greyfox wasn"t. Of course, now I know that Orbis has its own cities, but then, it was amazing and different."
Despite herself, Dianthe found herself listening to this young man. Lennie, or something like that. She looked over his uniform to see if he had a name tag and only found his last name, "Oum."
". . . only way I"d be able to hike in as many different places as I wanted to was to get off Greyfox. I left home and signed onto the first starship that would take me. I"ve been on the Pavo ever since.
"But when I get leave, not on a s.p.a.ce station like Oshun, but on a real world, I take off for the hills or the forest . . . anywhere wide-open nature can replace the claustrophobic nature of the Pavo."
He looked around at the tiny confines of the elevator car. Both of them burst out laughing.
"But those wide open s.p.a.ces are exhilarating. On Ontal, there"s this lake, kilometers from anything, high up in the mountains, one of the most secluded places I"ve ever been. The lake has a large mollusk population that gives it this deep purple hue. It"s like looking at a pool of ink. You"re standing there, the only person for kilometers enjoying this wonder. You have to see it to believe it.
"So you know how I got here," he said. "How did you make it from your aunt"s place on Gedrosia to the s.p.a.ce station?"
Dianthe looked at him. He had been listening to what she had said. In her experience that was a rarity. If she wasn"t giving instructions that people"s lives depended on from the ComShed, she might as well not speak. Although from what Lennie said, perhaps that wasn"t entirely true.
"As you might have noticed, I"m not the most outgoing per . . ."
With a loud clang, the lift started moving again. Dianthe quickly packed her embroidery away and stood up. When the door opened, she slipped out without another word, leaving the s.p.a.cer in the elevator. She could feel her face redden as she made her way to her apartment, not believing that she had opened herself up to him at all. Telling a stranger about her time with Aunt Lydia . . . it was just wrong, an invasion.
Dianthe"s apartment was typical of all the residential cubes on Oshun. It was essentially an efficiency. The furniture-a bed, table, a couple of chairs-all folded out of the walls with a small kitchenette in one corner of the room. The community bathrooms were down the hall. As she entered the apartment the lights came on and a chair and side-table sprouted from the wall. She walked over to the kitchen nook and tossed a dinner package into the oven. When the oven buzzed, she carefully took the steaming bowl out and sat in the chair to eat.
The apartment was Spartan. It was difficult to decorate the walls when any given wall could transform from a flat surface into a bed, a chair, a closet, whatever was needed at a moment"s notice. However, the apartment had never struck Dianthe as antiseptic until now. Five minutes before she had come in, anyone viewing the room would have had no idea that anyone lived here, let alone Dianthe.
After getting off the lift, Lolanyo made his way back to the Pavo. Dianthe was the most unsociable person he had ever met. It wasn"t just that she liked solitude or that she was a misanthrope, it was that she simply didn"t have any understanding of how to relate to anyone outside a narrow professional relationship.
No, that was wrong. Lolanyo realized he had very limited experience with Dianthe. A s.e.xy voice at the end of a com link, a person who wanted to be left alone, and a stranger in a broken lift. For all he knew, she was sitting gabbing happily away with her friends, perhaps even her husband. No, he couldn"t picture her having a bunch of friends.
His berth on the Pavo was small, little more than a bed that folded up into the bulkhead and a closet. Every flat surface bore his mark. Tri-vids he had taken on hikes across nearly a score of worlds adorned the inside of the room, which was no larger than the lift car he had been stuck in with Dianthe.
Lolanyo knew that any thoughts he had of becoming involved with Dianthe were crazy. He had thanked her for doing her job, or at least tried to. She wasn"t interested in someone who would be on the station for a day or two every several months. h.e.l.l, she probably wasn"t interested in someone who lived on the station full time.
It didn"t matter. In two days" time, the Pavo would leave Oshun and Lolanyo wouldn"t be back to the s.p.a.ce station for at least six months, by which time his encounter with Dianthe would just be a distant memory. Of course, it had been even longer than that since his last visit to Oshun and he had arrived with images of what the owner of the voice must have been. With the reality of meeting her, though, he would focus on the negatives. Oshun would just be another stop of his tour of duty.
A s.p.a.ce station, even one which serves as a transfer point for multiple species, only has a limited amount of room. Even just moving between the ComShed, the Mess Hall, and her apartment, there was a good chance Dianthe would b.u.mp into the Pavo"s commie again before he shipped out.
Every day, despite her best efforts, she came into contact with scores of other people. Most of them were anonymous pa.s.sersby, perhaps with the occasional necessary comments. The Pavo"s commie should have been no more than one of those pa.s.sersby. He was actually anonymous since she had no idea what his name was, although she had decided that Lennie wasn"t right. It bothered her that she thought she would recognize him if she pa.s.sed him in the corridors. It bothered her that she was even thinking about him enough to know that it would bother her.
Most of the time they spent in the elevator, he had droned, but there was one point when his emotions and excitement made her look at him differently. He was talking about a purple lake he had seen somewhere in his hiking and his voice just filled up the tiny room with his sheer joy at being in such a vast s.p.a.ce.
On her way to work, she stopped on the main concourse with its variety of stores, ranging from the canteen used by the station staff to the shlocky gift shops frequented by the transients. She had been surprised to discover that she didn"t have anything for lunch and figured picking something up before work would be easier, faster, and cheaper than hitting the mess hall.
As she was charging her lunch, she saw someone who looked familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. Living on Oshun was strange. There were the people who looked familiar because they were strangers who lived on the s.p.a.ce station and who she saw with some frequency, even if she didn"t know what they did or who they were. Then there were the complete strangers, clearly pa.s.sing through on their way from one place to another. Finally, there were the people who looked like people she knew, but weren"t. She pegged this person in the last category.
As she exited the canteen, he spoke to her."Dianthe?"
She realized it was the commie from the Pavo. "Look, it"s a small s.p.a.ce station. Running into you like this is not the universe"s way of saying that we were meant to be together. There is no fate involved here. Just somebody picking up lunch and running late for work and somebody else poking around for a souvenir to take on his voyage."
"I wasn"t going to say anything about fate. I was just going to say "h.e.l.lo." Aside from the Pavo"s crew, you"re the only person I know on Oshun. I get that you need to be left alone. I just thought I"d say "hi"."
He turned and walked off.
Dianthe watched him leave and noted that he never turned back to see if she was looking. She felt a vague sense of unease that he didn"t look back at her.
She made it to the ComShed moments before her shift was supposed to begin. Erich glanced up at her as she came in, nodded a silent greeting, and turned back to the book he was reading. He had learned long ago that Dianthe preferred to do their shift changes in silence and had given up trying to talk to her. The ComShed allowed a lot of leisure time between ship arrivals. As Erich logged out, Dianthe checked his duty log to see if there was anything she needed to know before starting. It looked like it had been a quiet shift.
She heard the door close as Erich left. She took out her embroidery; she would have a good hour before the first scheduled arrival. Today would be a nice slow day, the sort that could be handled easily by computer.
After she guided the Jenkins away from the station, she found herself performing a search for information about Ontal and the fabulous lake the Pavo"s commie had described. Panoramic pictures of the lake popped up on her screen, the deep purple water set against green and orange plants under a brilliant blue sky seemed more like something from an insane artist"s palette than a photograph. Cycling through the pictures, Dianthe noted how few people she saw at the lake. She also noticed that one of the pictures was taken by Lolanyo Oum and the name seemed familiar.
She checked the name against The Pride of Pavo"s manifest and discovered that it belonged to the communications officer who had been tracking her down. On a whim, she ran a search on his name.
In addition to serving on the Pavo, he was a travel writer, describing his hikes on several different sites. His photographs were gorgeous, near professional quality, and demonstrated an excellent eye for composition. Looking through them she realized that no matter what they depicted . . . canyons, lakes, mountains, forests . . . they all lacked any humans. Not only humans, any aliens. The only living things caught in any of the pictures were vegetation.
A klaxon called her attention to the imminent arrival of a ship and she saved the information she had found on Lolanyo Oum and turned her attention to bringing the ship through safely.
Lolanyo spent his spare time exploring the maintenance corridors of Oshun. They were warm and cramped, filled with multi-colored pipes. Usually, he had to crawl on all fours to make his way through and he had to be careful to avoid six-way intersections where the floor dropped away. It wasn"t a hike, but it was an exploration of new places. And it kept him away from the Pavo.
Lolanyo loved the Pavo and in fact, as the ship"s full name suggested, took great pride in being on board the freighter. However, he found the need to get away from its familiar s.p.a.ce whenever he could. When he left Oshun, he knew that he would be on the Pavo for at least three weeks, seeing the same people, seeing the same hallways. Lolanyo just felt the need to get away from there whenever he could. See something different. It was why he had signed on in the first place. And the maintenance shafts of Oshun were the closest thing to exploring within 100,000 kilometers. It would have to make do until next planet fall.
As Lolanyo scuttled and crawled his way through the ducts, he sketched out a map and occasionally took pictures, more as a record than to share. A trip like this didn"t warrant writing an article, but he still wanted a full record of it for his own use. Who knew when knowing the inner workings of Oshun Station would come in handy.
Despite his vague map, he didn"t have any idea where he was in relation to the public parts of the station. He could be behind apartments, the shipping corridor, only feet from where the Pavo was docked. He found himself wondering where he was compared to Dianthe.
If he was honest with himself, he would admit that when he had first approached her, a part of him was looking for a fling. Her terse response should have put an end to any pursuit, and in a way, it did. She had made it clear that she wanted nothing to do with him, although she did it in a way he could hardly take personally. She wasn"t rejecting Lolanyo Oum, she was rejecting the whole human race. At the same time, he found that he did want to get to know her, learn why she was so, not lonely, because he didn"t think she thought of herself as lonely, but solitudinous. It was almost as if she was another place to explore, something new to see.
He let himself out through the nearest access hatch. He was in an unfamiliar part of the station and looked around for a map so he could figure out how to get back to the Pavo. Checking his watch, he realized that his leave only had an hour remaining. He found the map and was a little chagrinned to learn he was near the ComShed.
Great, he thought. Now to get out of here before Dianthe sees me and becomes convinced I"m stalking her.
He quickly made his way away from the ComShed to the main corridor, successfully avoiding Dianthe. The main concourse was crowded and he blended in with the traffic. When he turned down the corridor to find the Pavo "s berth, he was shocked to find Dianthe leaning against the wall.
"Lieutenant Oum, I was hoping to find you." She spoke in a stilted manner, as if the words had been rehea.r.s.ed instead of the inconsequential small talk that everyone used every day.
Lolanyo stammered something that he knew wasn"t coherent.
"I looked at some of your pictures. They are really pretty amazing. I"d . . . I"d like to ask you about them."
Lolanyo glanced at his watch. "Now really isn"t a good time. I"m on duty in ten minutes. If you give me your code, I can let you know when I"ll have time and we can meet. Here. In the bar. Wherever works for you."
Dianthe didn"t think Lolanyo knew how difficult it was for her to come down to the berthing area to find him. It went against everything she knew. He hadn"t rejected her, but she wasn"t sure she would be able to come back down if he did send her a note. She knew how Erich and the rest of the staff viewed her. She couldn"t help knowing. At every one of her performance reviews her boss commented on her anti-social behavior. There was nothing she could do about it and was sure that the only reason she kept her job was because she was good at it. If she ever gave them a reason to fire her, she would be gone in a second.
She knew she was probably wrong, but looking at Lolanyo"s pictures made her believe she had found a kindred spirit. Someone else who liked solitude. Someone else who understood what it meant to be alone, but not lonely. She felt like there was a connection and it seemed . . . strange. She couldn"t remember the last time she actually wanted to talk to someone.
And it was still hard to make the effort. She didn"t have the practice. She knew that people could chat casually with each other, but it wasn"t a skill she had. Her entire way down from the ComShed she had rehea.r.s.ed what she wanted to say in the hopes it would come out smoothly and, perhaps, even spontaneously. She had the feeling she failed and now just wanted to hide in her apartment and never come out.
In her apartment, she pushed a b.u.t.ton and a chair and table emerged from the wall. She dropped into the chair and pulled out her embroidery. After three st.i.tches, she realized she wasn"t concentrating on what she was doing and had to pull the st.i.tches out. She wandered around the apartment aimlessly, turning the vid on before realizing she had watched three shows and couldn"t remember anything about any of them.
Instead, she found that she had been having fleeting thoughts about Lolanyo. Nothing particularly concrete, but looking over the couple of hours she"d been in her apartment, they were the only things she could actually remember. She was absurdly proud of herself that she remembered his name. And she had called up one of his pictures on her tablet and had it displayed on the wall. A waterfall cascading through a dense jungle of strange plants. As with all of Lolanyo"s photos, there were no people, no aliens, no animals in the picture. It was the solitude of the picture that spoke to her. That made her feel like she had a connection to Lolanyo. Like he might understand her.
And it made her feel uncomfortable.
Her compad chirruped at her. She looked down to find a message from Lolanyo.
Have you ever been on a starship?
Since she was on a s.p.a.ce station, it seemed an odd question, but in fact, she had never been on an actual starship. All of the ships she had been on had merely been interplanetary. Dianthe suddenly found herself with a desire to be on a real starship.
She sent back a short message. Only moments later, she had a reply.
Come on down to the Pavo.
When she reached the Pavo"s berth, she found Lolanyo standing exactly where she had been waiting for him before his shift had started. Despite herself, all the awkwardness had returned.
There was something different about Dianthe as she came around the corner and nearly walked into Lolanyo. He saw an eagerness about her that he hadn"t seen in any of their previous encounters. It was as if something had happened to cause her to drop whatever shields she had put up between herself and the whole human race. Or at least the part of it that Lolanyo represented.
"I can"t give you a very long tour, but you"ll be able to see the main parts of the ship."
She didn"t say anything, but followed as he led her on The Pride of Pavo.
Lolanyo took her through as much of the ship as he could, showing her the freight hold, mess, sleeping quarters, and bridge. Dianthe took it all in with her customary silence. When he had finished showing off the Pavo, they sat in the mess.
"I had expected something like Oshun. I hadn"t realized how cramped it is on one of these ships."
"You can see why I need to go for hikes when I make planet fall. After being in such tight quarters, I need to get away from the Pavo and her crew. You"ll notice how empty the ship is. Everyone is like that. As soon as we hit a planet or a station, we scatter, only coming back to the ship when we have duty. And tomorrow, we"ll all come back and spend the next several weeks on top of each other until we get to our next port of call."
"It sounds horrible," Dianthe said.
Lolanyo shook his head. "For you, I think it would be. But not for me. Sure, I would like to have more room. Some privacy. But the Pavo gets me from place to place. It lets me see new worlds I"d otherwise never get to see."
Dianthe looked around the small room. The mess was smaller than her apartment and seemed designed to allow up to twenty-five people to eat at the same time. She shuddered at how crowded it must get.
"How many people crew to Pavo?"
"Our full complement is about 140. About a third are sleeping at any given time, but that still leaves 95 people active at any point."
"How can you stand it?"
"I"m not you. I enjoy the company of other people. I like the hustle and bustle. I also like being able to be alone. Between our voyages and the time I get to spend on leave, I can handle it just fine. But if I were living a solitary existence . . . it would drive me as crazy as if I never had any time alone with just my thoughts."
"But you capture being alone so well in your photos," Dianthe blurted.
Lolanyo considered that for a moment, thought about some of his photos. "Just a side effect of hiking alone. I"m just trying to take pictures of what I see. The undisturbed beauty each planet has to offer."
He looked at her.
"I hope you didn"t get the wrong idea about me."
Dianthe shook her head. "I guess I was just projecting my own needs on to you. I think I should go now." She rose from her seat.
"I"m sorry. I didn"t mean to mislead you."
"It wasn"t anything you did. I saw those pictures and saw what I wanted to be there."
Lolanyo escorted her to the hatch.
"I know I insinuated myself into your life. I"m glad I did. It was good to get to know the person behind the voice I"ve always heard when I come to Oshun."
"Good-bye."
Lolanyo watched her disappear down the corridor and felt as if she were taking a part of him with her.
She was humiliated and could feel Lolanyo watching her race down the corridor. She wended her way through the crowd, not to her apartment, but to the crew"s mess, which was half empty. She grabbed a dyinant onyx and sat at her favorite table near the back, sipping the golden-black liquid slowly and wondering how she had allowed herself to become so vulnerable to a total stranger in such a short period of time.
He would be leaving the next day and she wouldn"t be seeing him again. Her life would be able to return to normal. And yet the thought didn"t bring her as much comfort as she would have expected it to. She finished off her drink and thought about ordering a second. Instead, she got up and made her way to her apartment.
Her apartment was quiet and empty, the way it always was, but for the first time, she was aware of the silence. The distant hum of Oshun"s environmental machinery seemed like a constant, and annoying, drone. Dianthe turned the vid on and allowed the blather of the talking heads drown out the silence, something she could never remember having done before. It left her feeling disconcerted, almost as if she were someone else.
Eventually she made dinner and went to sleep.
In the morning, she awoke, aware that she had slept fitfully and with vivid dreams of walking in strange, unnatural landscapes with Lolanyo. She got ready for work and walked through the crowds to the ComShed.
She said "Good morning" to Erich, who looked back at her with a stunned silence, and began to scroll through the day"s schedule. It was much busier than the day before, with several ships leaving Oshun and several more arriving, either coming to Oshun or making planet fall. Either way, Dianthe, would be responsible for guiding them in from their jump points.
As she prepared to take over the Com, she could hear Erich mumbling instructions into his mike while his fingers tapped their own instructions over the keyboard, sending data to a ship either coming to or leaving Oshun. She glanced at the day"s schedule and realized The Pride of Pavo would be on it. A sadness filled her.
After a few moments, Erich indicated that the ship had cleared Oshun. He signed out and left the ComShed, leaving Dianthe alone to face the day.
Communication Sub-Officer Lolanyo Oum sat on the bridge, again in his sea of calm as The Pride of Pavo prepared to leave Oshun. He pa.s.sed along instructions from Oshun Navcom, a man"s voice, not Dianthe"s, to the Commander and relayed questions and status from the Commander back to Oshun.