The Weaver's Tale

There isn’t a whole lot out by Tau Ceti. There’s Alpha of course, but that’s mostly just a pocked chunk of pyroclastic silica. It’s got some really fascinating cyanides but it probably wouldn’t do for the family reunion.

There’s just the star station floating around out there.

It’s called Tyan Xian at the moment––The Mountain of Heaven. No one seems to know how it wound up with a Chinese name and they sure don’t know where it came from. Humans didn’t build it though––not our kind anyway. The first survey team gave it a date of .75 million B.P. on the Terran calendar.

And maybe it is that old. From the trash floating around, it’s been a busy place. Apparently something or other lived there when it was discovered, but the ship’s logs were lost a few hundred years later on––at the Battle of Bam Bam’s Barn, over on Iffy.

That was during the Misunderstandings. A whole lot of things went missing with us humans about that time, but it’s a whole different story. Anyway, the place seems to have been a working trade station back then––same as now.

Then came the People. Actually, they called themselves the People of the Righteous Pathway of the One True God. That was Tadbury’s folks. The presumption being that they had the right god, and knew what the pathway was. Of course everyone else in the universe had to be wrong about it.

____________________________________

"Scrupulous Master Tadbury awaits docking instructions," came over the main farm ops deck speaker.

Several dock workers looked up from their work, more than a little amused. Ships came and went daily, but there were no such niceties as docking controllers or lock door marshals on Tyan Xian. The regulars knew what to do and set down where they were supposed to. And that was really just about everybody who ever showed up.

"Sean, toss me that tiara, will you. We’ve gotta straighten this turkey out, before he dings a perimeter screen, and wakes up the boss."

The comm link spun through the air slowly, and it did look a lot like a ruby-studded diadem. Its slow arc ended in the hands of a diminutive redheaded woman with a warm brown streak of cow manure across one cheek.

"Sure bad timing right now," said a powerfully built dark-skinned woman wearing even more manure.

"Yeah...still don’t see where all these air leaks are coming from," Mavis said to no one in particular. "Keep on it, Maya."

The bigger woman grimaced and sighed in irritation as Stanley Adebayo dropped down next to her holding his latest cyber creation.

Well over two meters, Stanley housed the childlike brain of an idiot savant in the obsidian-shaded body of an Olympian wrestler. Stanley spoke Machine. If it wasn’t powdered to rust, Stanley could make it go. He could also drive you nuts and it was well known that he had a real "thing" for Maya. Unfortunately, Maya was just starting her period and at the moment was on her very last nerve.

"We’re going to loose the bromeliads in here if we don’t get this locked down pretty quick," she snarled.

Stanley diplomatically ignored the crabby welcome, sliding the probes of his latest brainstorm down through the dewy warm cow patty.

At the feed trays, A few meters away, the patty dispensing XT-27 Nay Orley-Brahma whipped the serpentine spike of its tail across the purple hide in momentary irritation. The green-eyes monitored the human scenario with supreme disinterest as it busily munched the makings of a fresh batch.

"Mavis," Sean said as he set a second tiara on his head. "This guy’s coming in through the rancharia sector. What’s a ‘Scrupulous’ supposed to be, anyway?"

"Some kind of disease, I thought," Maya mumbled absently.

"No, that’s scrofula....I’m pretty sure," Stanley said. A scrupulous is some kind of big lizard or something. Probably, they bite too. He’s most likely got one a leash, and he’s its master."

"Uh hum." Mavis sounded a little doubtful as the tiara tucked its probe against the bone behind her right ear. She blinked as it yoked her in as a parasite to the Station Manager’s Sensory Net. So far none of these events had triggered its conscious attention yet. That could turn into a real nuisance.

A group of holo displays wobbled into place a meter in front of her face––a little skittish today. "What you get for skimping on the comm budget," she muttered to no one in particular.

One of the displays showed the cargo ship bearing down on the station––way too fast for a manual docking protocol, and far too close to the peach crop in Rancharia Zelda. Evidently they expected automatic dampers and tractors to fix everything for them. You get toys like that in the big corporate setups, but out here people were just trying to keep the air on.

"Scruples...or whatever, you need to cut back on those engines, you hear," she said. "You got to shed some velocity man...quick now."

"Youth, my approach velocity is entirely appropriate. I am Senior Chief Pilot of this ship and I do not intend to take all day debating way velocities with a station cadet. I have had considerable experience with stations much larger than this." The voice paused as though confused, and then went on in some indignation. "And where is the Master Con-Ops Officer."

"I’m it Scruffy," Mavis said. "Now, I need your attention here. This ain’t no regular Metro station you’re coming into. You’re not in-system here––got a couple of parsecs to go for just Mira. This is uncontrolled space, and...."

"That is Scrupulous, sir," the voice burbled indignantly. "And...." There was a momentary pause in his tantrum. "You...you are...a...female?"

The voice from the ship sounded somewhere between indignation and very real panic. The speaker was clearly horrified at his discovery.

Now it was Mavis’ turn to pause. The comment seemed to have no reference in the moment.

"Uh, look Captain Scruffles, you seem to be having some kind of existential psycho-conflict or something here, and I’m going to be about the last one you’d want for help with that kind of fracas.

Yeah, I am of the female persuasion, and I must say we are all just stunned here at your perspicacity, but we’re just a little pressed for time. Now here it is. If you don’t dump some velocity on that ship of yours before you hit the outer perimeter screens, the Station Master is going to go into a safety protocol and thump you in the nose with a presser field. That is gonna hurt. Got it now?"

"Station Master...? What is...?" And that was when the link dropped out.

"Anh...yeah well, there goes the Bernadette link," Sean said. "Whole quadrant’s blind now. So much for that comm budget supplemental."

There was nothing more from the approaching ship, but it did drop velocity. When the Station Master got around to noticing the newcomer there were no presser fields. Everyone on the docks relaxed.

Sean dropped his tool apron and draped it over a convenient wall hook. "I think I better go see what we got here," he said.

Sean had been elected Chairman of "B" Corridor some time ago. In fact Mavis could not remember when he hadn’t been the Chairman. He was too good at it, and good leaders are hard to come by. Even the Elders in Central Corridor listened when he spoke at Station’s Council.

"Mavis...?" Sean glanced over to see what she intended.

"Yeah, maybe I better. Station Master may need some help before these characters pop a seal somewhere hard to fix."

The Station Master ran Tyan Xian, at least the old station proper. The current human population amounted to being just guests.

Early residents thought they could change that and quickly found out different. It’s not just a component. The Station Master is the station and runs everything on, and a lot of things outside, the original installation. It is still presumed most likely to be a machine of some sort, but that can be difficult to keep in mind when it’s spouting Lewis Carroll, and singing arias from Puccini and Pau Ka Tikth.

It speaks Trade Meriq when it’s in the mood and seems to be curious about certain people and completely oblivious to most everyone else. That isn’t always such a peaceful distinction, as Mavis had found on a number of rather intimate occasions. She was one of those so favored by its attentions.

By the time they arrived at the Comm Center Mavis found that Scrupulous Master Tadbury had also aroused its curiosity.

"How dare you seize a ship under the hand of God’s Own Commander," Tadbury screamed at the air. The Station Master had generated a holo-form on the comm stage for the benefit of its human associates.

"I will have an answer of you," Tadbury blustered.

The figure on the stage was completely covered in a dark robe. The face was masked with an outrageous head veil, which was both elegant and oddly frightening. Presumably he could see out but was completely hidden from other people.

"Human, how is it that you experience such exigency in the absence of substantive jeopardy?" This was not an uncommon question for the Station Master. It seemed fascinated with human passions. Bedrooms were particularly vulnerable.

"You...you Flagitious conception of the Evil One!" Tadbury spluttered. "You creation of Fallen minds. You explain nothing to me."

"Tadbury," Mavis broke in. She didn’t want to risk the scrapple title. It just seemed to make him madder. "Your ship maneuvered unsafely in the rancharia sector—agronomic habitats. Nobody ever comes in from that direction. We all know that, but you don’t, cause you’re not from around here. There’s life tubes and tug traffic everywhere. They’re completely unprotected and there was just no way you weren’t going to bust into something coming in the way you were."

Tadbury’s image on the stage turned to regard Mavis. She didn’t need to see the face to feel his animosity.

He sighed bitterly. "What a fallen place the Children have been forced to. A female is allowed to go unveiled in public, to pridefully assume spiritual relevance, presuming jurisdiction in the presence of men. And now you raise your voice to admonish even a Minister of the Way."

Tyan Xian was a very tight community and it was seldom that any single person got to such an extreme emotional position. The intensity of his passion, palpable even across a holo stage, left her feeling physically ill.

____________________________________

Time on Tyan Xian was metered on the clocks of a thousand different worlds. The ethnic Terrans still favored the months and years of their birth world, though very few had ever walked its surface. Life went on.

There were fewer than a thousand people on the station and while it could have comfortably held fifty times that many, resources were another matter. Much of the station’s food and atmospheric gasses were produced in the farm habitats well outside the structure itself. Much like a Terran Medieval castle most of the resources of the station extended far beyond the protection of the Station Master’s field defenses.

The Children showed themselves to be skilled farmers from the first and their ship was loaded with needed seeds and proto-annelids. They were enthusiastic traders and quickly picked up the technology of the station.

Mavis had not actually seen any of the Children in person since their arrival. Most of her work involved transferring foodstuffs and hardware back and forth within the living web of farm habitats around the central station.

She only picked up the Con-Ops tiara when trader ships came through, and that she could do from anywhere in the complex.

The crabapple harvest was in before she had time to take a restday again. But with a couple of ship days free she finally had some time to herself. With her personal finances more or less under control it was an opportunity to run out to the main community deck and indulge her favorite personal decadence––shopping!

The station was hardly a fashion pit and clothing had a tendency to be utilitarian. Mavis wore a violet silk jumper and hemp cord slippers most of the time. Today she topped it all off with her favorite tool-belt and a lime-green béret. Once in awhile someone got bored and did something weird with their hair or some face paint. So far they had always managed to live through it.

Several street preachers of various local sects were out on the docks proselytizing like usual. She even saw a speaker representing the Children. There were several other members of the group standing around and, judging from the stunned faces of their audience, the preacher was doing pretty well.

"Put away your sin-filled lives, stained with the salacious lubricity of procreation," he chanted. "Accept the perfect exsiccate discipline of the Crèche...The Deliverer. Free your bodies of the ancient sin of lusting flesh. Give up the original primal instincts and free your children from the stain of fecundity."

None of what he was saying made much sense to Mavis, but that wasn’t exactly unusual for a street preacher. She thought their robes were a bit severe and probably pretty hot. The headdresses were just plain scary.

As she approached, she noticed that the colors of the robes the Children wore were changing. They had been a deep light-eating black when she saw them on the Station Master’s holo stage. These were made of a very beautiful iridescent fabric she had never seen before, and they became even more filmy and sheer the closer she got.

Mavis didn’t think of herself as particularly easy to surprise but by ten meters she had come to a complete stop.

The preacher was absolutely magnificent but it was not his message that held the audience so rapt.

Adrianna and Kikki had managed to pry one of the sect’s females loose from her managing males––a brother, she supposed. They were all laughing about something or other when Mavis walked by their table.

"Oh, Mavis," Kikki tittered, "come on over and have a sit-down with us."

Kikki prided herself on being "one of the girls." It was not a position Mavis aspired to. She was a materials engineer and girl talk tended to make her crazy. But this time she was curious.

The gossamer clad female rose abruptly, crossed her arms over her face in a way that gave the impression she was covering her eyes. "Oh, please don’t see me," she said. "You are the devil worker the Scrupulous Master of the Way warned us to beware of."

Adrianna glanced up, cocking an eyebrow in Mavis’ direction. "Mavis...? Ah honey, this is just Mavis. I mean, she can be a real bitch when her period starts up, but she’s not all that bad when you get to know her."

Adrianna shoved a chair out and motioned for Mavis to sit down. Kikki quietly took the veiled woman’s arm and got her to sit down again.

"There, now. Better." Adrianna took both of the woman’s hands and gently pulled them away from her face. "Now...there we go."

Mavis rolled her eyes, more or less discreetly. There seemed to be no escape from this little conclave.

She dropped into a chair saying, "Uh huh, look guys, maybe...." The implication being that Mavis thought it might be easier if she left. The woman was obviously upset at her presence.

"No no, come on girl. I’d like to know what you’re guilty of," Kikki said. "I was about to introduce you to our new arrival, Cinamin 7. Did I get that right?" she asked, looking over at the woman.

"Yes, that is very close," Cinamin murmured

"The "7" means the guy she’s married to has a few extra wives. She was just going to tell us how that works at bedtime. The guys around here would never hold up under that kind of pressure."

Kikki was never known for her diplomatic acumen, and Mavis could see from the roseate rash along her throat that Cinamin had not understood that was to be the subject of discussion. This woman was a stunning example of the cuts and tight curves every physical trainer dreams of.

And Cinamin 7 was blushing furiously from elegant cheekbones to slim athletic ankles––and everything there was in between.

"Uh, Kikki," Mavis said. "She just met us."

Cinamin jumped when Mavis spoke, and started to cross her arms again, then decided not to.

"Daughter!" An older man with white-silver hair was approaching Cinamin 7 from the crowd. He was dressed in much the same costume and obviously angry with her.

Cinamin turned abruptly towards him meekly, looking guilty about something or other. "Yes, father," she said.

She turned back quickly to the women and said, "I must be returning to the supervision of my husband, friends Kikki and Adrianna...." She looked for a moment as though considering whether or not it would be wise to include Mavis in that number. "...And friend Mavis," she decided in a stagy whisper.

She glanced around the table and then back to look Mavis bravely in the eye. "You have much different ways." She whispered. "The Speakers-of-the-Word say you are a good people in your hearts; you are simply flesh-bound and locked in your lubricity...awaiting redemption." She glanced quickly at her father who was glaring impatiently. "But..," she stammered. "You...just...you are all so happy with each other...!" She was actually crying as she raced off, vanishing into the crowd.

Adrianna was shaking her head as she turned back to Mavis and Kikki.

"What?" Mavis said, shrugging her shoulders.

"Well, my dear...." Kikki grinned raffishly at her.

"Oh, you don’t know about this?" Adrianna was looking over at Mavis as she asked.

"Know what, and why...are they all dressed that way?" Mavis asked.

"Yes. Well, if Mother Nature had been a little more tactful, she might have...well, and yes, they all are...as you say, ‘dressed’, like that."

"But..." Mavis said.

"Oh yeah, we know. The star they came from has this very weird spectrum. They don’t see like we do." Kikki’s voice was low and husky as she slowly cherished the long stem of her tall glass. "You should see the guys."

____________________________________

Cinamin 7 and Mavis became very close over the next several work cycles. Mavis didn’t ask, but she had the distinct impression that their relationship was not something Cinamin chose to discuss with her men.

The light of Tau Ceti streamed through the transparent bulkheads of the habitat making the long sheets of Weaver silk shimmer in the moving air, and this time it was Mavis who was blushing all the way to her toes.

Sleep disorders were common with the People, and Cinamin had just been telling her about a nightmare from her last Restime.

It seemed she had been chained naked, her elbows locked cruelly behind her back, forcing her breasts high, the hardening nipples pierced with icy cold golden rings joined by a leashing chain––also gold and just as icy. She was being chased through a deep cave by shadowy creatures with long slavering tongues––very long and dexterous slavering tongues. And of course the whole thing was in irrepressibly torrid color.

Mavis had been eleven the last time she had been troubled with a dream like that. Her mother had talked her through it all, and carefully supervised her first few loves.

Cinamin 7 didn’t have a mother to help her out. She had a spiritual adviser.

These dreams terrorized the girl, and her sister wives only told her that she needed to be more "prayerful." So Cinamin pumped Mavis for information whenever she could get together with her.

Mavis was a little cautious at first. Cinamin 7’s father, as it turned out, was their Speaker of the Way––old Scruffles, himself. He was an absolutely gorgeous man––Adrianna had staked out first dibs on him––but he was also your complete curmudgeon.

Mavis really liked Cinamin and didn’t want to get her in trouble with her family. So that left her seeming a little reserved on the subject of iced nipple rings and slavering tongues.

And then Cinamin told her about the crèche.

"No, the crèche has given us no children for almost five of your Standard years, Friend Mavis," she said.

"Crèche?" Green and orange eyes glowed at her curiously from the shadows.

The long bodies might have been taken for those of a Terran ferret, if ferrets came in green poly-ceram armor. The creatures had arrived with the People. Cinamin said they were called Weavers. They didn’t seem to be farm animals or even pets––more like companions. She didn’t know quite how they had come to live with the People, and no one else seemed to know either. They were prodigious spinners of the fibers the People used to make their astonishing clothing.

Whatever they ate was a mystery and they didn’t seem to breath air. Transport pilots were constantly startled to see them energetically running around in the vacuum of the outside decks. There were a lot of bright new faces out in the garden right now. The little creatures had been having a really good time in their new home.

"The crèche, of course. It is the reason our children are freed from Libidinous First Sin." She looked up anxiously at Mavis. "Oh, perhaps your families don’t discuss these things?" Cinamin 7 was watching Mavis discreetly. "Children...?" she ventured cautiously.

Mavis had been helping her pick up the nearly invisible mats of silk drifting across the rose bushes. She was folding a silky mat into one of the harvest baskets and completely missed her cue.

"Come now Friend Mavis, we women must know and discuss these things. The Crèche, which frees us from the Sins of Aphrodasia...the place where God gives us our babies."

She glanced up suddenly, puzzled, the drifting silks framing her beautiful features. She looked carefully at Mavis. "Oh Mavis, you do know where babies come from, don’t you?"

The pressure doors chimed, announcing that the lock was cycling a visitor through the egress protocol.

"Hey Mavis!" It was Sean, and he was breathing hard and looking unhappy. "Been looking all over for you. They got a problem with one of the rancharias out of "C" level."

"Yeah, and I bet I know which," she said. "Bernadette, again?" Sean was nodding as she jumped up.

"Been coming on for quite awhile," Mavis said. "That bulkhead’s never looked right to me."

She turned to Cinamin 7. "Got to make a run outside right now. That particular farm furnishes most of our O2."

She smiled. "So...?" Somehow both women understood a shift of her attention in Sean’s direction. Sean, of course, didn’t get it at all.

"...anyway, we can get back on this," Mavis grinned. "...later."

Sean looked puzzled as she shot through the lock he had just vacated. He knew something had gotten past him and it had nothing to do with plant habitats.

Four hours later Mavis was talking to him through the headset of a station utility low-pressure suit.

"...M...sive crazi...through...t...b...lkhead matrix," she said grimly through heavy interference. "I’ve cut th...ssure dow...to five kilos, but this...section I’m looking... now isn’t go...hold long...ven at that low."

Cinamin had come along with Sean to the habitat operations center. He was in the Ops Command chair trying to find a clear comm channel to Mavis suit. He wasn’t doing too well until Cinamin slid into the Comm Officer’s Chair. She glanced across the console briefly and then touched several keys.

"Sean...that you?" Mavis sounded tired.

Sean’s face was completely blank as he turned in the chair to look at Cinamin.

"My husband is Fourth Watch Comm Officer on the ship," she said. "He made sure all seven of us knew his job. Not all our men are so scrupulous as my father."

"Oh," he nodded. "Yeah." Then he turned back as Cinamin 7 opened a visual monitor showing Mavis’ position.

"Yeah, Mavis we’re here," he said carefully. "The plants aren’t going to take that for very long."

"Yeah Sean, I know," she said in quiet aggravation. "We’ve been over this a thousand times."

The expression on Cinamin’s face told Sean that she didn’t have a clue what the problem was.

"This is a closed ecology out here," he told her. "Our air and water are processed through the green plants, and most of them are in that habitat where the bulkhead is failing. Smells pretty bad, but that’s our optimum production environment.

"Well anyway, the water lilies are holding up well," Mavis noted.

"Great, at least we won’t die thirsty." Sean added in bleakly.

"That’ll be nice. We can suffocate in comfort." Mavis chuckled bleakly. "I’ve been looking through everything we’ve got for matrix patching, but it’s all old. I can’t get any of it to hold pressure more than a couple of centiseconds."

"Yeah, air processors are already starting to wilt on the outside tiers. We’ve got a while...ship-day...might go a little longer. Then we’ll be on the bottled stuff...as long as that goes."

Sean was silent for a moment, looking for an alternative. It wasn’t there. They both knew it wasn’t.

He crossed his arms as he turned to Cinamin 7. He sat silently in the Command Chair looking at her. "I’m afraid you folks just stopped at the wrong farm."

____________________________________

Mavis scanned the wall in front of her. To the unaided eye it was just a flat gray surface. Occasionally the colors shifted shades where patching had occurred. This particular section had quite a bit of that. The scanners she carried in her helmet showed a different scene. The entire area was crazed with hairline fractures.

That happened, of course, with the cheap materials they were forced to use. There was always going to be some fracturing, always a little leakage. This crazing wasn’t minor though. It was going to bust a hole, and they didn’t have the materials to fix something this size.

She looked down quickly at a commotion around her boots. She had only a second to catch sight of a pair of big green alien eyes. And then the entire universe stood up and smacked her in the brain.

Mavis floated in blackness filled with hazy disks and haloed spikes of colored brilliance. She was slowly getting used to the idea that she was not dead.

Tyan Xian actually has something of an atmosphere. Incoming ships see it glowing against the station lights. Thousands of years of cycling air locks and impeller particles have allowed a lot of trash gases to accumulate. They used to call that sort of thing smog on the planets.

She had just made her own little contribution to interstellar warming. A thick hoarfrost covered her suit and she still drifted inside a frothy ice fog of atmospheric gases. She wasn’t sure how long she had been unconscious.

Obviously the bulkhead had blown out and she had gone with it.

She was outside the station and headed slowly but inevitably towards Mira.

Burning up in a star was hardly a worry. She would be a desiccated husk millions of years before she even touched the heliosphere.

The umbilicus, which had connected her to Station air, had been neatly severed and curled a few meters in front of her chest. Something glossy covered the tube’s end. She couldn’t tell what it was, but, apparently, it was the reason there was still air in her suit.

She brushed the snow from her visual plate cameras to see how bad it was, and got the jolt of her life. A small armored face wiggled its nose at her. It had been knocking its paws at the hard plate. Apparently it was trying to get her attention and had been for some time. She could hear it now that she was paying attention.

What you were supposed to do in this case was scramble the rescue sleds with the fancy Smythe-Kline mini-drivers. It was all in the Imperial Space Forces Rescue Ops manual. She had run across it one Restday in the library––in the childrens’ reader along with all the other fairy tales.

They just picked up their victims, and slid them into the waiting life-cradle.

What a really good idea! Unfortunately, none of this stuff existed within ten light years.

The other thing was that her sensors were showing the station fixed, and not receding from her position. That was still bad, just not as bad as it could be. She was well over two hundred meters out and in a leaky utility pressure suit, not equipped for Wayfare-EVA––not for EVA at all. There probably weren’t more than a couple of Wayfare equipped suits on the entire station––the engines are just too expensive.

Something had stopped her exit.

She reached an arm out and the little guy relaxed some and crawled down to perch on her boot.

Then she felt it. There was something holding her boot on a line with the bulkhead she had just left. She couldn’t see it, but when she pulled her knee up towards her chest the suit’s range finder lopped off almost half a meter’s distance to the bulkhead. It also turned her around, to face the darkness.

She reached her right arm down and circled it under her boot.

The little guy jumped at her arm, and she pulled it back just as her glove grazed the line––luckily, only barely. A piece of her suit floated free. It was just part of one of the glove tools, but the metal had been sliced clean through.

Mavis pulled her hand back and then looked very carefully over at her diminutive rescuer.

The little guy had welded a line to her boot and attached the other end to the bulkhead––apparently the silky stuff they spun themselves. And it had done all of that during her explosive exit. Then it jumped aboard and spun out line long enough to decelerate. She couldn’t even guess at the tensile strength of a thread that could take that kind of stress.

It was about as heroic as it was completely unbelievable. She wasn’t entirely sure how she knew all of this, but still, she didn’t see any other explanation.

The only problem was, whatever the stuff was, it was so close to being a monomolecular filament that it cut through everything that touched it.

The little guy was busy again at her boot. She couldn’t see him, her or whatever, all that well, but suddenly she noticed that she could now see the line where it attached to her boot. Every once in awhile her body twisted around and the line caught a bit of starlight. On each pass the thread got just a bit thicker and brighter.

Finally, the little tank marched itself up along her suit and she was looking at a pair of giant green eyes.

It probably was not telepathy. People had been trying to get that to work for centuries and it was still just Restday kidvid stuff. But whatever it was, she just knew that things were up to her now. The little guy was out of tricks for the moment.

"Mavis, you all right." That was Adrianna coming over her helmet comm.

"Yeah. Adrianna!" she answered over the comm headset. "Yeah, don’t think I’m hurt anywhere...CO2’s rising...pretty fast. I’m gonna gray out pretty quick." She was reversed to the station bulkhead now.

"Good. Well, not that maybe...anyway, you’re still kicking. Yeah, I see you out there. You’re turned away from us right now."

"Adrianna, there’s a line attached to my boot. I don’t know much more about it, but it seems...."

"What?" There was a long pause, and then Adrianna said, "yeah? You're not receding!" There was a longer silence, and Adrianna said, apparently more to herself than Mavis. "What’s going on...what?"

Then she came back on, talking to Mavis. "There’s a line...just a thread...attached over by the exit blow...stuck right on the bulkhead...next to the blowout," Adrianna said. "There must be twenty or thirty of those little creatures climbing around here. This thing...just runs into the bulkhead...can’t even see a ripple at the join. Never seen this kind of stuff before. This little thread...can’t hardly see it."

"That’s what cut my suit then," Mavis said.

"Cut? Oh yeah, something like that. Yeah, that would be.... You touched the stuff?" Adrianna asked.

Mavis felt her right leg move sideways. "Yeah...my buddy here stopped me, or my hand would be coasting out to Mira Cetus now. Just nicked the tool rack on my glove."

The stars began to move as her body picked up a complex oscillation. She’d never had a problem with micro-g illness before but she was a little shocky right now and breakfast was fast rebelling,

She closed her eyes and the vertigo stopped. She hated that––not being able to see, but then there are very few ordeals in space more obnoxious than trying to breath through your own vomit.

Mercifully, breakfast stayed where it was.

"Hang on, Hon," Adrianna said. "Sean’s over at Melody Rancharia. Stanley's getting boiler pressure up on one of those sleds he cannibalized."

"You...kidding," she whispered. "The Stanley Steamers? What...he using for...seals?"

"Don’t know, hon, but it’s gotta be tighter than the crap in your suit."

In spite of herself Mavis had to chuckle. Stanley Adebayo and his steam powered Wayfare tugs were a standing joke on Tyan Xian. He’d gotten the idea from an old Terran silent movie in the library. The ideas dated back to steam vehicles of 19th Century Earth––the Chinese and Atlanteans, maybe had them before then.

The thing was, they fueled on anything that boiled water. They also didn’t need logic doodads from halfway across the Universe.

Mavis didn’t know when the black giant carefully lifted her body into the stations only medi-doc cradle. It was a stubborn little machine and patiently sifted through the threads of her dying consciousness, coaxing and cajoling until it had its way. But somewhere she knew Sean, when he gently kissed her eyes.

Technically Mavis was dead––cyanotic, blue, and hadn’t drawn a breath in several hours. Technically all of that was so. It just wasn’t true.