The Memory Singer

By T. Jackson King

Jax Cochrane is a teen facing the unknown in the star system Nilong, the place where her parents and two other couples have decided to "retire" from scavenging among Alien ruins. She, her boyfriend Nagai, her ship sister Jioni and formal Hitori are four teens who have never seen a planet nor Aliens. They know only Ship life. But now, in Nilong, the four of them are discovering what life is like in a place ruled by the wolf-like Alish'Tak aliens. Their parents are the Memory Singers who combine singing ancient Earth songs with personal memories of Earth via the memorynet device, in the family's space cabaret that orbits the planet Storet.

But Jax has a history of rebellion against rules. Even though she knows nothing of planets or Aliens, she is determined to explore, to meet Aliens, to determine the course of her life herself. But can stubbornness save her when the Alish'Tak demand to own her? Can she survive on a planet, when all her life has been aboard ship? And can she build a connection with the young Alish'Tak male who helps her escape to the wilderness?

She may find the answers in space and down-planet, if she can just outwit the Aliens and environment long enough to grow up.

"A coming of age story reminiscent of Robert A. Heinlein or Alexei Panshin. Jax [the main character] is a fun character, and her world is compelling. The social patterns of Ship life are fascinating, and the Alish'Tak [the main alien species] are sufficiently alien to make for a fairly complex book. Very enjoyable."--Don Sakers, Analog Science Fiction

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gray Rabbit Publications / Fantastic Books
• Release date: Dec 18, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310638961

T. Jackson King

T. Jackson King (Tom) is a professional archaeologist and journalist. He writes hard science fiction, anthropological scifi, dark fantasy/horror and contemporary fantasy/magic realism--but that didn't begin until he was 38. Before then, college years spent in Paris and in Tokyo led Tom into antiwar activism, hanging out with some Japanese hippies and learning how often governments lie to their citizens. The latter lesson led him and a college buddy to publish the Shinjuku Sutra English language underground tabloid in Japan in 1967. That was followed by helping shut down the UT Knoxville campus in 1968 and a bus trip to Washington D.C. for the Second March on Washington where thousands demanded an end to the Vietnam War. Temporary sanity returned when Tom worked in a radiocarbon lab at UC Riverside and earned an MA degree in archaeology from UCLA. His interests in ancient history, ancient cultures and journalism got him several government agency jobs that paid the bills, led him to roam the raw landscape of the Western United States, and helped him raise three kids. A funny thing happened on the way to normality. By the time he was 38 and doing federal arky work in Colorado, Tom's first novel STAR TRADERS was a stage play in his head that wouldn't go away. So he wrote it down. It got rejected. His next novel was published as RETREAD SHOP (Warner Books, 1988). It was off to the writing races and Tom's many voyages of imaginative discovery have led to 23 published novels, a book of poetry, and a conviction that when humans reach the stars, we will find them crowded with space-going aliens. We will be the New Kids On The Block. This theme appears in much of Tom's short fiction and novel writing. Tom lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA. His other writings can be viewed at http://www.tjacksonking.com.

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Copyright

© 2014

Smashwords Edition.

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission except for brief quotations for review purposes only.

In-house editor: Ian Randal Strock

Fantastic Books

1380 East 17 Street, Suite 2233

Brooklyn, New York 11230

www.FantasticBooks.biz

ISBN 10: 1-61720-946-5

ISBN 13: 978-1-61720-946-8

First Edition

Dedication

To my sister, Ann, who has always had the bug to explore the world and the universe, even when kids and life jumped on her back to go along!

Acknowledgments

First thanks go to my two beta readers, Alicia Solomon and Mia McLeod, for their work on this and other novels. Also, the wonderful culture of Australia, its Outback, its songs and its tradition of going on Walkabouts inspired many elements of Jax’s adventures. Thank you, Aussies!

CHAPTER ONE

Jax was breaking the rules again.

She held the cold metal of the memorynet skull-cap in her hands, turning it wonderingly, her emotions as confused as the distant room lights reflected in its silvery web. She stood alone on a shadowed balcony high above the flashing colors and amazing shapes of several score Aliens. Alien lifeforms who relaxed below, on the crowded floor of her parents’ Memory Singer cabaret, listening to Jax’s mother sing her songs of exiled Earth.

Reflections flickered again, hinting at marvels forbidden. The woven net of the skull-cap should have burned her hands, so forbidden was what she now did. She should have returned the Alien device to its wall storage niche, but a bluish-metal cord reached from the skull-cap into the niche, where it connected to the central memorycrystal translator machine. That machine sat far below, on the stage floor of a darkened cabaret located on the outer rim of an Alien-run space station, a place so far from Human space that she and her clan-family were the first Humans these Aliens had ever met. She shivered.

Glinting lights. Fantastic shapes below.

Were the minds of Aliens as strange as their shapes? What harm was there to listening in on her mother’s Memory Song performance, even if she did pick up feedback from Alien minds? After all, she was eighteen. Fully mature. Smart enough. And the memorycrystal translator device was something she’d grown up with onboard ship. It was something she’d used to learn Human technologies and histories unknown to her parents, her aunts, and her uncles. Six adult Humans cannot teach four teenagers all there is to know of Humanity, of the Alien-run Forty-Seventh Florescence galactic civilization, or of the ways in which Alien minds differ from Human minds.

The memorynet tumbled in her fingers, like an antique slinky spring-toy her Mom had made for her during the years-long, sublight-speed approach to Nilong System. Below, her Mom’s silken soprano rose up, surrounding Jax with a song haunting and eloquent. Nicole Beaudry. Xenobiologist. Her mother. Her perfect mother. And in a half-circle around Nicole, there stood Jax’s father, aunts, and uncles, as they played their musical instruments, accompanying her mom as she stood on the stage below, flaxen-hair bright, her stance proud, singing the ancient Earth ballad My Lady Greensleeves. Somehow, her Mom blended into her song her own special memory of Earth. That memory was then carried to the memorynet devices attached to every chair, couch, and platform. And thence into the minds of their Alien customers.

They were wildly shaped beings from twenty-three different star systems, all Alien to each other, but all interested in Trade. These vastly different lifeforms listened, making no sound, hardly moving at all, as Nicole’s strong soprano filled the cavernous cabaret, echoing off the metal walls, resonating within Jax’s own heart. It gave her some of the strength she needed to face her own fear of so many strangenesses. To face her fear of new people in so many different shapes. To face the need within her. To face the realization that only she could chart her life’s path, only she could be true to herself, only she—

Jax lifted up the memorynet, steadied her breathing, and laid it atop her brown curls. She closed her eyes, seeking meditation trance state. So it would work better.…

It felt cold.

It felt like the itch you get when you don’t shampoo your hair for a week.

Then it felt.…

She was no longer Jax Cochrane—the rebellious daughter, an embarrassment to her parents, the one always pulling penalty time on starship maintenance, or the one caught sneaking off for loveplay with her boyfriend Nagai. The one who knew better than the adults what her life should be like.

Instead, she was—

Senior Pod Leader Myriam, listening with one of her three brain lobes to the unusual story sung by the pale-skinned biped whose mind felt too complex to be just a simple double-lobed brain.…

Jax gasped. Her heart beat harshly.

Mathematical equations that marched along a sere desert of wind-carved buttes, darkened skies, and echoing solitude, moving like something alive, something Alien, something whose multi-mind had long ago reduced all eternity to an elegant series of algorithmic equations whose beauty was so stark as to.…

Jax’s eyes turned up beneath closed eyelids. She did not breathe.

Frozen white vapors swirled about a starfish-form, many such forms, all spinning and moving and rebounding off each other as they sought reproduction, sought continuance, sought with slashing central beak to claw a way into the future for their genes, even as their minds shattered to the flow of waterfalling hormones, each among them convinced that only I am worthy of life.…

Like a statue, Jax stood. Somewhere. Out of time.

Four eyes. Four horns. Four minds. One body. An intelligence ancient, calculating, and evil. From inside the swirl of Alien music and memories, IT turned to her. Seeing her. Gazing upon her young mind with pitiless regard. And if she did not escape that gorgon-like mind-stare, she would go indescribably mad.…

Jax’s eyes fluttered. Her heart beat sped up. She gasped.

Dimly, her mother sang of a long-ago vacation in the north of Ireland, weaving a spell of love, hope, and desire into the memory that entranced Jax, that spoke to her of what it meant to be an adult, to be grown-up, to accept the unfairness of life and the cruelty of fate, and yet to love so intensely that she.…

Lobes.

Horns.

Equations.

Spinning starfishes.

Jax!

Something wrenched the cold metal of the memorynet from her head. Dizziness swept over her. Cold sweat drenched her armpits. She whirled around, eyes blinking. Hitori!

Black-haired, pleasantly handsome, and full-blooded Japanese, seventeen-year-old Hitori Otera stared at Jax, his hands gripping tightly the crumpled memorynet skull-cap. His flat Asian face blanched with horror as he looked first at her, down to the skull-cap, away to the cabaret floor far below, then back to her, thin lips compressing now with righteous anger. Jax spoke first.

Hitori! Don’t you know better than to jerk someone out of memorynet trance?

Her shipboard nemesis turned formal, correct, and stiff—just like his dad. Jacquetta! he whispered, not wanting to disturb Nicole’s performance down below, beyond the railed balcony on which they both stood, as he too stayed close to the wall and mostly in the dark. It’s forbidden! Captain Ryoji forbade it himself. Alien minds are not the same as Human minds—you could have suffered mindwarp!

Weakness spread over Jax. She shivered, leaned against the balcony wall, and wrapped her arms around her jumpsuit-clothed body, wishing her teeth would stop chattering. Hitori Otera—don’t you try to tell me what to do! I’m a year older… and I’ve got my Dad’s Xenosapientology training. I can handle this. Another shiver. Another chatter of teeth. Grimacing, she clamped her teeth hard, face flushing as Hitori’s formal, Japanese face betrayed a thin, skeptical smile. If only her playmate of years past had grown up to be like Nagai. Or her ship-sister Jioni. Or like anyone except his father. Ryoji Otera. Captain of the Garbage Hunter starship Pride of Mumbai. Astrophysicist, Pilot-Navigator… and also the father of her beloved Nagai. Unlike Nagai, Hitori tried to be more Japanese, more reserved, more traditional than his father Ryoji. An impossible task. But one young Hitori still pursued. His black eyes narrowed.

You can’t! Concern showed in his dark eyes as he noticed her shivering, shaking, weak-kneed state. Jax! Come to Medlab. The mindLink may have harmed your heart’s autonomic functioning.

No! she said, loud enough to almost be heard below.

Yes, he hissed, stepping forward to grab her elbow. She wrenched loose, huddling back against the cold titanium-steel wall, teeth still chattering.

Go away, she muttered, eyes now seeing double images of short, stocky Hitori.

He stepped back a little, arms folded across his chest, chin down, lips thin again. Jax… this will have to be reported.

Amidst the nausea, amidst the cold, and at one with the warm sweat now beading her brow, came anger. Hitori! Haven’t you learned anything about loyalty from Aunt Shati? Or from Nagai? I can’t believe that I once liked you enough to pick you for my first kiss!

Hitori colored. Like he always did when any of the teens discussed sex or intimacy. Jacquetta, you’re a nice person, but you don’t know when to use good sense. Or follow orders. I’ve got to tell Captain Ryoji.

Shit! What to do now? Behind her, a slidedoor hissed shut in the balcony wall, telling her someone else shared their darkened overlook. Who?

Tell what to Captain Ryoji? asked a warm, contralto voice. A tall, mahogany-skinned young woman stepped into the half-light. Jioni!

Broad-faced, curvaceous, and half-Zulu/half-Hindu in parentage, her ship-sister’s face often held a serious, calm look. Except when in the presence of Hitori. Then she looked wistful and shy, mindful perhaps of her designated pairing with Hitori—a choice mandated by the parentage of the four teens, a very limited gene-pool, and the absence of any other Humans in Nilong system. Jioni’s dark brown eyes switched from Jax to Hitori, then quickly back to Jax. Standing tall and striking in her rose-colored sari robe, eighteen-year-old Jioni eyed Jax expectantly. Wiping sweat from her forehead, Jax explained what she had been doing.

So now our dear, wonderful, all grown-up Hitori is going to tell on me!

Oh? Jioni moved close to the balcony wall, out-of-sight of the crowded cabaret floor, and out of the view of her mother Shati Mtani—who even now made her graceful way among the tables and platforms, taking refreshment orders—as Nicole paused, switched to a new song, and then resumed her performance. Jioni sucked air through her teeth, face thoughtful, eyes lidded. Jax, why can’t you be logical?

Logical! Fury rose up suddenly. Just as quickly she banished it, recalling like a cold shower the empathy and understanding that Aunt Shati had taught them all as they were raised by the three partner-couples of the Pride. She swallowed hard. "Logical! What’s logical in a galaxy overrun with Aliens who have million-year-old civilizations? What’s logical in following the orders of distant Earth, when they’re a century beyond the memory-time of our parents? And what’s logical in a universe where we had to give up the Pride!"

Ohhh, Jax, murmured Jioni, sympathy warring with hard-learned rules.

Tears stung Jax’s eyes. Frozen emotion shook her. She drew a breath of pain. The Pride was gone now, bartered away for food, supplies, and a multi-environment habitat globe attached to a ring of similar globes, all of which circled Touch Point space station’s Core Globe. The adults called their habitat globe—in which lay the cabaret—The Enclave; the Alien Traders who ran Touch Point called it The Home of the Memory Singers. Jax didn’t know what to call it—she still ached for the reassuring, enclosed spaces of the Pride, the only home she, Jioni, Hitori, and Nagai had ever known. The Pride was all the world Jax had ever known. A world of few people, colorful rooms and corridors, neat hideaway spots, little strangeness, and social patterns that fit Jax like an old shoe, or the grip-smoothed quarterstaff she used during her martial arts lessons. Now, in a way, they were all orphaned. Even Jioni.

Her ship-sister hung her head, black corn-row braids swinging freely in the artificial gravity of the Enclave. Then she looked up, equidistant between silent, watchful Hitori and hurting Jax. Uncertain. Then resolve came. She turned on Hitori. Hitori—why must you tell on Jax? I’ll take her to Medlab for a checkout. Shati will understand. Why can’t you?

Hitori’s formal look wavered slightly, his demeanor under the brown-eyed gaze of Jioni not quite the armor-suit he pretended. He clasped arms behind his back, and rocked on his heels. Nervous. Jax could tell. As could Jioni. Who grinned a bit. Their ship-cousin shook his head jerkily. Can’t. It’s the Rules. Ship Rules keep us alive. You know that. That’s the first thing we learned. Even before we could walk. He blinked, growing distant from love struck Jioni. You don’t assume that air is behind the corridor slidedoor—you check! By the Procedures. By the Rules. Or you’re dead. As Jax could have been from listening in on the feedback from those Alien minds!

But I’m not! Jax said, eyes still hazed, coldness only now leaving her chest, the shivers dying away as her body’s adrenaline response was displaced by new hormones, new neurotransmitter chemicals that told her—at a deep level—she was no longer in immediate life danger. I’ll be fine. No big deal. I promise not to listen in again.

Hitori smirked skeptically. Even Jioni turned to Jax, her ship-sister’s own skepticism clear to see. Jax had a reputation. And it had nothing to do with her love-life. They both knew her too well. Like Nagai. Like Nicole, and her dad Jonathan. Like Aunt Shati and Uncle Rama. Like Uncle Ryoji and Aunt Kosui. In the nineteen years of shared life as the Pride slowed from ninety percent of lightspeed down to entry speed for Nilong System, or Mu Pegasi, as the star charts listed it, the six adults and four teens of her clan-family had come to know each other very intimately. No one slept in Suspense on the way into Nilong, as the adults had done when traveling from star to star. Instead, they had worked on creating the children and family life that all the adults had yearned for.

Jax shrank back against the cold steel wall. She worked hard to make herself small, to avoid notice from Uncle Rama standing Watcher duty at the cabaret’s entrance, or from tall, lanky Aunt Shati as Jioni’s mom moved to join her husband. Below, the gathered Aliens again listened to Nicole sing a new Memory Song. Jioni reached out, touching Jax’s bare forearm.

Jax. Ship-sister. You look terrible. You really should go to Medlab.

Jax jumped, nerves still jangling from the mindLink, then looked up, seeing Hitori’s unguarded face as he watched Jioni move forward and put an arm around Jax. Hitori looked confused, uncertain—and yet, yearning. For what? So far, Jax hadn’t seen much sign he intended to pursue Jioni, to become her love partner as she was with Nagai. He noticed her looking and turned away, but not before his eyes betrayed a misty sheen. She decided it was kinder to ignore it, but she wondered why Hitori had never noticed Jioni’s yearning for something more intimate than what he was willing to commit to. So far. Or had he?

Oh, all right. Medlab it is. Leaning on Jioni’s arm, Jax limped through the balcony slidedoor, with Hitori’s steady footfall just behind them. The sound of her mother’s high soprano shut off suddenly as the slidedoor closed. They were now in a yellow-lit hallway of the Enclave, heading toward the Residential Quarters. And Medlab. She shrugged off Jioni’s help, standing on her own. Then she walked. Dizzily. I can walk on my own.

Jioni sighed. You can’t do everything on your own, ship-sister.

Oh yeah?

Hitori stepped closer, looking ever so formal in his white and black-checkered jumpsuit. Jax. The Rules say—

Screw the Rules! she yelled, bounding off the hallway wall. Jioni grabbed her hand. She stopped walking, needing the firm support of a steel wall at her back. She eyed Hitori. Know-it-all Hitori. What have the Rules ever gotten us Humans? Other than a fifth-rate, minority status in a galaxy run by Aliens?

Jioni showed alarm. Jax—get a grip on yourself! You’re not usually this wild.

She laughed, hollowly, weakly. Maybe I should be. Maybe I ought to do more. Maybe we ought to do more wild things. Like explore Touch Point. On our own!

Thunder-darkness filled Hitori’s high forehead as he stood opposite Jax, hands at his side, ignoring Jioni’s bemused look. Later, Jax, he said sternly. Father says we have to establish ourselves before we wander anywhere. And anyway, we have to stay in the Enclave until the Alish’Tak lift the restrictions on our Refuge application.

Spit on them! Jax hissed, furious at all Rules. "We’re Humans! We paid our way into this system with the Pride! Why do we have to listen to a bunch of long-eared werewolves?"

Hitori stepped closer to Jax, so close she could smell the soap on his skin. Because it’s their star system, Jax. We’re guests here, just like all the other Aliens on Touch Point. And the Alish’Tak have the ground-systems and Predator ships to back up their demands. He sniffed. It’s called reality, ship-cousin.

Well… maybe we can make our own reality, she sniffed.

Jax turned her back on him, resuming her walk to Medlab, but not letting go of Jioni’s hand. Once again, she felt irritated by Hitori’s know-it-all attitude. Why not go explore Touch Point? Why not meet, talk to, and be friends with these multitudinous Aliens who were so different from her own people? Why not go downplanet to Storet, the Alish’Tak home world? She was already an adult—they all were. Why did their parents treat her, Jioni, Nagai, and Hitori like junior citizens, in need of tending like their food-animals? Frustration welled up in her heart, even though she loved them all. Even snotty Hitori. Even… even distant, reserved, but fair Captain Ryoji.

As she stumbled along to Medlab, the empty hallway—so Alien compared to the color-filled corridors of the Pride—brought it all back to her. The last two months at Touch Point. The realization of just how little power ten Humans possessed.

By now, everyone knew their only genuine Trade currency lay in the memories and songs of Earth—and the ability to weave the two together into a unique performance. A performance that seemed to attract the jaded Aliens of Nilong System, and so earned the Enclave badly needed barter credits for its long-term survival. The Pride had not been much. Not to these Aliens. A small Orphaned ship with limited resources, lacking a planet-base for colonial laborers, the robot ships to gather hydrogen isotopes for deut-li fuel, and without the tooled factories to manufacture the complicated devices of Florescence technology—such a ship had to look to its own small resources for survival. The Pride could have wandered from system to system, scraping together an existence among the Aliens until the ship exhausted its small wealth in scavenged technology. Instead, the adults had chosen Nilong, and now looked to a less tangible possession for barter—and found it in the Memory Songs of a Home-world left far behind in both time and distance.

Their parents had once been a highly trained, three-couple Garbage Hunter crew, sent out by Earth to poke into the technological detritus of dead Alien civilizations. The ancient devices and systems were whimsically called Garbage by the many Alien races of the Forty-Seventh Florescence galactic culture. It was a term promptly adopted by Earth as she, too, joined the scavenging with her own ships. As they hunted, the Garbage Hunters sent back the newfound data to Earth by tachyon radio, enriching Earth’s technology with each new discovery, but remaining physically exiled by the inexorable limits of sublightspeed star travel. The suspended animation capsules of Suspense made such travel possible. And offered an eventual return to a centuries-later Earth when each ship’s resources were finally depleted. Not all chose to return.

After hunting through the garbage of a fourth world, the crew of the Pride of Mumbai had tired of their dangerous work and defied Earth’s orders to continue the Hunt. They chose instead a different destiny of family, and a home among the many Alien species of Touch Point Trading Station in Nilong System, a yellow giant star 106 light years down-arm from Earth. Earth had sputtered angrily, had threatened, had cajoled, had finally pleaded, then had relented, having no practical alternative. And so the Pride had come to Nilong. Only to be traded away. Their home gone. Replaced by this. The sterile yellow hallway closed in on her.

Only the feel of boots thudding against the hard steel of the hallway told Jax that she lived. Lived in the Human sense. Lived like Humans were meant to live—free, unhindered, unconfined.…

Here we are. Jioni squeezed her hand as they came up to the blinking blue caduceus of Medlab, looking at Jax as they all stopped. Her ship-sister’s dark brown face measured Jax, eyes scanning her from booted feet to sweat-stranded curls. Finally, she grinned, lips quirking. You look a mess. Mom was right—you Australians are born dirt-grubbers!

Jax grinned weakly, ignoring Hitori’s offer of support. And you Zulus are too proud to know when an Alien is insulting you. Jioni’s soft face fell, eyes distant as Jax reminded her ship-sister of their lost planetary home. Jax felt like clunking her head against the Medlab wall—sometimes she felt far more stupid, and far younger than her own eighteen years. Her mouth flapped as she searched for a way to take the sting away. Uh, uh, Jioni, I wish I had your looks.

Jioni smiled easily. Behind her, Hitori watched them both, but his main attention was on Jioni as the tall, young woman palmed the Medlab’s admit patch. The slidedoor moved aside, allowing entry into the unoccupied facilities. Jioni pulled Jax in, with Hitori staying back at the open slidedoor. Her ship-sister let go, and grabbed something tube-like from a wall cabinet. She turned, grabbed Jax’s arm, smiled, and then poked the hyposprayer against Jax’s bare skin.

This won’t hurt a bit.

The hell it won’t! Jax groused.

Warmth washed over her. Dimly, she saw Hitori step forward to help Jioni move Jax to the examining table. Through failing sight, she noticed how self-assured Jioni looked as she activated the routine Body Scan devices. Just like Nagai looked. Nagai was their future doctor-in-training. Jioni was only cross-trained. Like Jax. Like Hitori. Still, her ship-sister’s usual shyness had vanished as she moved to her task. Moved to helping Jax. Moved in a blur of dark-skinned limbs as nearby, Hitori watched it all, dark eyes alert, his flat face now stiff with resolve. With the intent to tell.

She fell away into the darkness of the sedative, mind swirling with worries, with thoughts of Nagai, with fears of future retribution—and with stairstep mental lists of homework assignments from Tenth Level Tutorial. Silly her. Homework was now the least of her problems.…

CHAPTER TWO

Later, recovered from the mindLink effects and hungering for the sound of music, of Human music, Jax had left the Medlab alone, refusing further help from Jioni or Hitori. She’d grabbed her acoustic guitar from her own room, then headed for the armorglass windowed room at the top of their habitat globe, the only place where you could directly see the full expanse of interstellar space, the stars, and the spinning shapes of Touch Point Station. But with guitar in hand, she’d noticed one string was broken. She turned back to the Residential Quarters, heading for her parents’ three-room suite. It was while searching for an F-note wire in their quarters that Jax had stumbled across something in their clothes closet. Something she hadn’t expected.

An alcove in the back of the closet had been decorated with small baby toys, a few lost baby teeth, a swatch of her curly brown hair, some of her earliest colored ink drawings that showed a stick-figure family of herself, Dad, and Mom, and over a dozen flat photos of herself at all ages, as she had grown up aboard the Pride. Her first colored glass necklace hung from a rung. Her first musical instrument—a loud, metal kazoo—lay worn and dented in a small niche, like an object of honor. And in the center of the alcove, resting on a flat table that she’d earlier seen used as her mom’s makeup stand, sparkled a color holo-cube of herself. From a few months ago, just before leaving the Pride behind. In it, a tall, lanky, short-haired young woman strode through the Research Library of the Pride, narrow face set in a determined manner, green eyes flashing, body curves looking far more feminine than she now felt.

Jax reached into the cool, dim darkness of the closet alcove, fingers just touching the holo-cube. She left it in place, undisturbed.

Funny, she thought. This is almost like a… an altar, or something.

Did her parents really worship her?

Shivering, her breath catching in her chest, warm wetness filled her eyes. Gasping suddenly, she stepped back, still in the closet and able to see the alcove that was normally hidden by robes, jumpsuits, clothes boxes, and music folios stacked in an untidy pile.

She knew, intellectually, that the planet landings had been hard on her parents, aunts, and uncles. She knew they’d all wanted children, some sooner than others. And she knew, from the expedition log, just how deadly xenoarchaeological ruins on long-dead planets could be. The adults had gone combat-suited and laden down with enough weaponry to decimate a small city. But she’d never guessed at the depth of their need. Never suspected the… the critical centrality of herself and her fellow teens to the emotional lives of their parents. The adults just were. Like tanked air, the recycling vats, the now transplanted Farm with its rice paddies and carp ponds, like power from the reactor, like… like the gravfields one could turn on or off at the touch of a panel. Without thought. Without worry. Without considering the millennia of scientific research, trial-and-error bench work, lost careers, hopeless dead-ends pursued, and the glory of finding a new part of the mystery that was the universe. Science was just a tool to Jax. But people…

To her parents, Jax, Jioni, Hitori, and Nagai were something far, far more.

We must be like air to them, she marveled. The breath of life.…

She grabbed the F-note string from the supplies shelf, then turned and hurriedly left their rooms, entering the Residential Quarters hallway like a prisoner escaping from some place long-hidden, remembering the experience but needing, badly, the release. Just as their room door slid shut behind her, up walked Hitori, moving on the balls of his sandaled feet. His head framed by straight black hair carefully trimmed, keeping only a samurai-like topknot as his sole affectation, Hitori inspected her, the closed door, and the empty hallway. Silently. Speculation flared across his face.

Jax, I was looking for you.

Oh? Was he pursuing her, still upset about her clandestine memorynet mindLink? She moved away, heading down the hallway to the new Research Library and its cluster of personal study rooms. Why?

Our joint research project on remote teleoperators. Remember? He essayed a tentative smile as he strode along beside her. I pilot it, you write the software, and we both scrounge whatever spare hardware we can? The habitat globe can use an external Eye for maintenance—or for Security duty.

She nodded, lengthening her strides beyond the reach of Hitori’s shorter legs, feeling contrary. Of course I remember. So?

His mouth worked silently, then spoke with something of a squeak. So it’s time for the assembly. Then the test-out phase. Ready?

Wishing she could instead be nestling in Nagai’s strong arms, whispering secrets to him, asking him what he, the oldest, thought about their parents and the role of themselves to the adults, Jax nodded reluctantly.

"Ready. But don’t quote Flight Rules to me! I’ll scream if you pull any more of that sanctimonious stuff on me. I’m not nihongin."

Hitori’s pale face stiffened, eyes growing distant. Anyway you want it. Too bad you can’t appreciate how tradition binds us all together, rather than just see it as more rules.

Pulling ahead of Hitori, Jax shrugged