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sensible advice he would have given another Adelbom; but then Frenco cringed, and Giles remembered he was speaking to an arbite. He softened his voice. "If we can get her alive to planetfall, she'll be all right in the long run." Page 75 ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html "Yes, sir," said Frenco. He made an effort to put some life back into his words and some animation into his posture. "That's right," said Giles. "Why don't you leave her to herself now? You can see she'd rather be left alone-and you could use some rest Come up to the front section and take my cot for a while." Frenco looked at him gratefully. "Thank you. Honor, sir," he said. "But you're sure-you think I can't help her at all by being here even if she acts like she doesn't want me?" "I'm sure," said Giles. "Everyone else on board here will be keeping an eye on her for you." Frenco nodded. "Yes," he said. "Thank you. Thank you all. ... I guess I will go and lie down up front, just a bit." He went out. Giles turned his attention to Mara. "Have you been eating?" he asked. "You look like you're losing weight." She gave him a wraith of a smile. "We're all losing weight," she said. "I don't see how we can last another eighty days to reach Belben, if we and the vine keep going downhill like this." "Yes . . ." Giles felt the sudden ache in his jaws that signaled he was clamping his teeth together again too fiercely. The gesture was becoming a habit with him, lately. 101 "What is it?" Mara was looking at him. "Something - . ." He looked at Di, but Di was beyond lis- tening-lost in the dark night of her own misery and the sound of her own weeping, added to the music sounds from the recorder in the middle section, that would keep anyone else from overhearing. "You know I said the plan behind my bomb was to turn the spaceship aside to 20B-40?" "I remember," she said. "There was a critical period," he said, "a maximum number of ship-days during which such a change of direction would be practical. The period of days began the day the bomb went off. I've been counting the days since. We've got no less than six days. After that it'll be too late to change course. We might as well continue on to Belben." Page 76 ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html Her eyes were big. Or perhaps it was just the new thinness of her face that made them seem so. "How close is this 20B-40?" "Now?" he said. "About thirty days away." "But we could hold on another thirty days!" Mara said. 'T don't understand-" "The Captain's refused to change course from the one set for Belben/' he said. "There's no use my trying to explain to you why. I don't really understand it myself. Just take my word for it that it has to do with honor in the way the aliens see it." "But what's wrong with him? Certainly just honor-" "It's not a 'him,'" Giles said. "That's something I've been keeping to myself from the first so as not to scare the arbites-" He broke off with a short, harsh laugh. "Do you know, I'm begin- ning to forget to think of you as an arbite? We're all getting down to a basic common label of 'human animal' on board this boat.... No, the Captain's a female. Not only that, she's pregnant. The Engineer was the male parent, just before he died; and it must have been their . . . mating that Di stumbled in on, back at that time she can't remember." Mara drew a deep breath. "Oh..."she said. 102 "The fact that the Captain is pregnant ties in somehow with the matter of Albenareth honor, in taking the lifeship to its original destination, even though all of us-and she, too-are going to die before we reach it." "But if she dies, what about the-the child?" "It won't die- It lives on her body, in some way." Giles waved the matter aside. Somehow, as with the matter of the bomb, he felt immeasurably better just from having been able to tell someone else about the Captain, her pregnancy, and 20B-40. "At any rate, what it all adds up to is that I've got to find some way of convinc- ing the Captain she has to change course to 20B-40 inside of the next six ship-days." Mara shook her head. "I still don't understand," she said. "Why can't we just take over and make the course change ourselves? I know these aliens are awfully strong, but there's eight of us and only one of her." He smiled at her a little sadly. "Do you have any idea what changing course means?" he asked. Page 77 ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html "No," she said, "to be honest, I don't. It's a matter of using the controls up front a certain way, isn't it? But didn't you have to [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |
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