cabin fever

The conditions on Roller leave something to be desired. That something would be living space. Caban offered to move the supplies out of the bunkroom, but where then would they go? So he strung up a hammock in the corner and found some spare blankets. This leaves me to wonder about the previous owner, or more likely string of owners. It’s a ship designed for one or two men who care more about cargo than their own standard of living. The food supplies, too, leave any manner of things to be desired, including taste, texture, temperature, freshness, and variation. I’ll buy something better once we dock again, rich in coconut money. The coconuts sold quickly on Barreston, a quick jump from Rookston, and only slightly less of a heap. Apparently Caban has reliable contacts on Barreston who sold us new cargo, we’ve got a hold full of fine grain alcohol to keep us company. The contacts also told him where he might start looking for Ice. Next stop: Miklund-3. After all their time together, they did not have a contingency plan. I wonder how they met up and began working together? Was it something like what happened with me? And why isn’t she the Captain and he the first mate?

Ah, how attached to this Log program I’m getting. But there is little else to do aboard Roller, it’s been cleaned as best we can and there is nowhere to go but into each other’s company. Its hard to know how long I’ve been aboard, or how long I’ve been Running. Its been years, but it is difficult to keep track. Cut me in half and count the rings. I hear they used to be able to do that with trees.

Assurance

I like to know what I am doing. If that is impossible, I can pretend. And while those you meet in this life are not always the most trustworthy of individuals, one likes to think that one’s companions are not complete idiots. I have worked with idiots. Some are simple and easily lead, they do what you tell them and you get your profit. The worst fools are stubborn fools, who refuse to listen and fail horribly. This life draws men and women who are stubborn, selfish, and often cruel.

And then there are those who are simply crazy.

I feared, for some time, that my newest partner might fight several of these descriptions. He did not, at first, strike me as particularly stupid or villainous, I had even hoped I’d found a rare commodity among Runners: a good man.
My third night aboard Roller I awoke with the sensation that something was wrong. Caban was not in his hammock, the ship was barely moving, and something smelled. I got up and checked the systems, then went to open the hatch to the cargo hold. The pungent odor enveloped me, and Caban appeared, looking slightly sheepish. (this old phrase implies that sheep often look ashamed, but a sad fact remains that I have yet to ever see a sheep, and cannot confirm the accuracy of the usage.)
“I was just about to bunk down,” he said, “when the censors said we were coming into a junkfield. And there was a whole load of cargo, just floating there!” I did not respond and he rubbed his head nervously. “So I thought, maybe I’d pull some aboard. Free cargo, free profit.”
“There is no such thing as free profit. What is that smell?”
“Well. It was frozen, before, but now that its thawing…” he settled suddenly, becoming professional. “Its manure.”
“I see.”
“I figure we can unload it at the next port. All profit.”
“Soonest is best. Are we off-schedule?”
“A bit.”
“People will be wanting their coconuts.”
I did not need to scold this man. His salesmanship faded, and he shrugged tiredly.
“Next time, I’ll check with you.”
He took it in stride. It is an easy stride, encompassing nearly everything. He accepts everything quickly and readily. Setbacks, gunfights, cramped quarters, our partnership.

Even now, after weeks aboard with him, I am not completely convinced that he is not, in fact, crazy. While I sometimes wonder how exactly he has lasted this long, it is clear he knows what he is doing. I rely on that, on what I see, its all the assurance I have.

the start of a beautiful business venture

Caban asked me to come with him and check out his new ship. I knew exactly what he was asking. How easily I could have said no, and stayed to rot in my room in Rookston. But the town…I had drifted into one of the many midden heaps of the galaxy, and now I would drift out again. So I took my knapsack, left a coin for rent, and went with him to the shipyard. I find once again that all I own fits in that old knapsack and my old skull.
Roller is a junker. A tiny ship, but heavy. Well-made, for the time, but a heap nonetheless. There were two levels, the lower with a fair-sized cargo space and engine room. The engine looked well enough, he told me it would fly. The upper deck was nothing but a hallway, an escape hatch at one end, a tiny water closet, and a bunk room barely big enough for the food and water supplies crammed inside its musty interior. The bridge, as he called it, was dominated by the controls and viewscreen at one end, and between that and the far wall were two chairs and counter bolted to the floor, as well as two lamps. In the corner was a low bed. The whole room was perhaps fifteen paces long.
The cargo hold was full of coconuts. I found this completely inexplicable, he merely shrugged with the eternal confidence of a young Runner. Who knew there was such a market for coconuts?
I showed him without being asked that I could operate the controls no trouble. He asked which systems I could use and I knew that he was sizing me up for a job. I’d take it. I’d known the man for an hour, but I had a good feeling about him. I still do.

coincidence

The first time I laid eyes on my new Captain, he was crashing his way out of a bar in Rookston, emptying his guns behind him through the broken window and shouting various guttural Anglo-Saxon curses. He landed with a practiced roll and was on his feet and barreling toward me within a matter of seconds. Forseeing crossfire, I quickly upended the café table I had been sitting at and got down behind it. Others around me chose to run, but the running man found my shelter most welcome, and hopped behind it. He peered above the rim and fired a few more shots, then turned to look at me while reloading. And so I found myself, for the first time, bunkered down shoulder-to-shoulder with Holmes Caban.
He grinned crookedly and introduced himself over the ricocheting of bullets. I gave him my name and he replied “Pleasure, I’m sure.”
His words jolted me, I felt a sudden thrill and almost instinctual wave of compassion for this stranger. The commotion in the street did not sound promising, and the squeal of police sirens (the same on every planet, seemingly) shocked me into action.
“Look” I said, “I have a place to go to ground. Cover me and then follow.”
He did not question me, and after a brief moment of thought --weighing his options, clearly a true space criminal--nodded. He spun and began to fire again, and I dodged out of cover and ran to the alleyway alongside the café. In a moment I heard pounding footsteps behind me, and after assuring myself that it was him I continued on my way. Twisting and turning on a strange route through the slums of Rookston, I made sure we’d lost the lawmen before coming to the room I had rented from a rundown Inn. A rather hopeless prospect in that heap of a town. Drifting, again. Space debris.
He settled into the room as if he owned the place, not asking the questions I was asking myself: why was I helping him? Why did I risk so much for a stranger, a criminal?
“Is it safe here?” he asked instead.
“Safe as anywhere. You in a lot of trouble?”
“Nah. None followed.”
“And those you were shooting at?”
“They had their business done.”
It was an old saying…not old, perhaps, but common. It placed him as a carrier, probably a small-time cargo transporter. Possibly a Runner. Someone I would know, because somewhere along the way they had become my people. If I had taken a different ship that day so long ago, a science vessel or a circus crew…but I chose pirates.
“No harm, then, giving aide to a fellow Runner” I replied. He sized me up for the third time since our meeting.
“Do I know you?”
“No.” There were few in the universe who had heard of me, though I’d been Running for more than a decade. This is another of those points of pride. Perhaps I have too many. His name sounded vaguely familiar, though I’d been out of the network for a while, stuck here in backwater Rookston.
“What do you do, then? Besides live in heaps, help strangers, and get into gunfights without breaking holster?”
I enjoyed the question. “By trade, I’m a navigator.”
His eyebrow raised, just one of them. “That so? I happen to know a bit of that myself, trade being my business. I’m Commodore Holmes Caban.”
“Commodore?” This man claimed some sort of fleet? Unlikely, but boasting is part of the Runner trade. I waited for him to explain, but he did not, and became one of five men I’ve ever met who did not immediately underestimate my intelligence.
“I recently purchased another ship here.”
“In this junkspot? Why?”
He shrugged. “Necessity.” He then spun for me the most marvelously foolish story, one I must later record for the sake of explaining the Runner lifestyle. It involved a deal, a trade, a load of valuable cargo, several double crosses, failed communication, and ended with a dramatic chase and his first mate leaving him behind. He wasn’t sure he’d ever see his ship or crew again. “Or the money from the cargo” he concluded bitterly. But his first mate, a woman named Ice, was supposedly loyal, it was just a matter of finding her again.
“When you’re lost, aren’t you supposed to stay put?” I asked. He looked at me carefully, then said “If I listened to that, Scout, I’d never have gone to space at all.”

education

I decided long ago that I wanted to know everything.

I wanted all of the knowledge I could attain, anything that would fit into my skull. But I could not resign myself to the bland facts presented on Comweb or Govweb, the universal “information” networks. There are a thousand careers I might have chosen and excelled at, a thousand more I could have resurrected from the dead. Historian, environmentalist, poet, archaeologist…these no longer exist. But I must work within this world. So I learned how to fly ships.
My grandparents raised me with their old-fashioned notions of books, of words set down with a purpose. How ironic that as science helps our elderly to live longer and healthier, the rest of society values their knowledge that much less. It is easy to become soulless, and do not blame me for my misanthropy. I have lived long in space.
I was sixteen when my grandparents died, one after another in quick succession. Suddenly the universe reared up in front of me and confronted me with the truth: it is empty. The void of space swallows everything we do, everything we make. Mortals have few defenses against this darkness.
My own parents had been consumed into this blind world, no better than drones. I do not know what spark was in me that made me look beyond. There is a universe of things to learn, and I would find a way to experience them.
My grandparents gone, school a painful joke, the prospect of a dingy Gov job, an utterly unfulfilling life…I could not afford an offworld ticket, but I headed down to the Spacedocks anyway. Once there I found a likely-looking ship and a comfortable looking crate, broke the law and made myself a stowaway. It was, at that point, the most impulsive decision of my life.

welcome to the world

I cannot claim to be an old-timer. I was born into this world already accustomed to space, technology and the loss of old ways. My parents were born the year the first colony gained independence, their childhoods were marked by the conflicts between Earth governments and those newly-made in space. By the time they reached adulthood, a new generation claimed citizenship on new planets. By my birth, there were more cities off-world than on our humble homeworld. There are children born now who have no homeworld, no port of call, born and raised aboard ships. Mankind has a gift for exponential growth.
My grandparents were true old-timers, born before two millennia of the Common Era concluded and this glorious Space Age began. They remember a time before space ports, the Comweb, planetary traders; a time when books were published and forests existed on uncontrolled pieces of land. I never knew this world, and mourn only that there are so few records of it. In the days of the Space Age, all eyes look forward. Information is computerized, the rest falls by the wayside.
My own education has been largely self-created. This archaic vocabulary that I cling to is, I admit it, a point of perverse pride. Words have been lost, whole languages melded into slang and the drawls of interstellar cargo-carriers. School is the institutionalized version of a survival guide. We were taught to operate communication systems, add columns of numbers, sign our names, tap blinking buttons…perfectly molded into the factory drones, soldiers, and terraformers needed by the galactic economy. There was no mention of anything else. I did too well in school, I took it too seriously and learned too much. Which is why, at a young age, I realized that I could learn much more beyond the confines of the classroom.

Logging in...

I just got this Log program. Why I never thought of it before I don’t really know, I suppose I was never this bored before. But after all this time absorbing as much as I could, it occurred to me that it might benefit the universe some by recording a bit of what I know. Become a historian.
The problem is that it is highly doubtful that anyone will care in the least what I have to say. If anyone cared about our human past, they wouldn’t have been so eager to leave it behind. Space debris! What has become of culture, of literature and a millennia of history? Space debris. Burnt up in a propulsion engine, left in a trail of litter.
I do not know what purpose this log will serve but to aid my own flagging memory. I imagine a stranger reading it from some database somewhere, learning from this precious and scholarly record of the Dark Ages. More likely these words will be read by someone I do not yet know, someone who has the task of going through my bunk after I’ve died. Perhaps a scavenger, looting the knapsack beside a bullet-ridden body. Morbidity aside, I would prefer the first alternative.