The Navigator’s Gift
by David Barber
part 1
The sun wears the orbit of Pallas like a hat tipped at a jaunty angle.
It is a world that spends years alone, high above or below the ecliptic, estranged from the System’s financial ecology and visited only by the occasional gravity ship.
The GS Newton’s Friend was en route to Pallas when a hemorrhagic stroke felled its Navigator. In the aftermath, his young apprentice was shaken awake and summoned to the bridge.
Captain Swann and his diminutive sister were quarrelling in whispers but fell silent when Perry Fourteen Illes entered and stood by the empty Navigator’s chair.
Ada Swann had never taken to the girl, but then she did not like anyone much, perhaps only her nephew and, at their first meeting she’d warned Perry to keep her eyes off him. It was vexing to have to rely on her now.
Surely the Captain could be forgiven his queasy imaginings: the skull of this apprentice being lifted like the top of a soft-boiled egg so her Navigator’s Gift could be crammed inside. What manner of person would consent to that?
Captain Swann had first shipped out when he was the girl’s age, but Navigators spend a lifetime practising their arcane skills, and this was her maiden voyage.
He heaved a ragged sigh. “We need to get back to the Belt.”
“Pallas,” said Ada Swann.
“Vesta is well placed,” the Captain persisted, his gaze alighting on the livid scar around the girl’s head, then taking off again. “Though I suppose anywhere in the Belt would do.”
Ada Swann gave her brother a sharp look. The Swanns were spacers, descended from spacers, but she felt the blood had grown thin in the male line. He didn’t seem to grasp what a financial gamble they had taken with this voyage. How had he become so cautious?
“It must be Pallas. You know that.” Sometimes she wanted to shake him.
The Captain turned on his sister. He was a big man, and his beard gave him the look of an Earther villain in immersives.
“Would you risk leaving us adrift out here then? Towed in for salvage. Is that what you want?”
With the gravity drive off, the ship was coasting in the direction of Aldebaran, two million years away.
“I can take us to Pallas,” said Perry quietly. Unconsciously, she raised the hand to brush the cicatrix on her forehead. “I have my Gift, and the Navigator trained me in the use of it. He said I was ready to take the helm.”
Some of this was true and, with the Navigator’s death, the rest was moot.
During the long night watches, he’d left her to steer the ship as best she could. The Navigator had shown little interest in his new apprentice, her youth a nagging reminder of his own decline, though he felt disinclined to mention his shortcomings.
A brain insult was the common fate of Navigators, but Perry suspected his stroke was brought on by drugs the Navigator had taken to boost his waning powers. They had each kept all this from the Swanns.
“So that’s settled then,” announced Ada Swann.
The crew believed that Ada was the real master of Newton’s Friend.
* * *
The narrow Tween deck was reserved for ship specialists, and Perry had a cubby there.
Ruiz, the electronics chief, sat at the mess table, sipping the cortado he brewed from his private stock.
On Perry’s first day aboard, she had explored the ill-lit spaces around the hold and become lost. Off-duty crew kept to these lower decks, where they had their own hierarchy and casually brutal habits, and they spoke a baffling patois. Asking for directions, she was met with shrugs or blank stares.
Ruiz had rescued her without making it obvious. Bumping into her, he said he’d been reminded of the faulty light in her cubby and walked her back to tinker with it.
“So,” he said, his prosthetic eye gleaming. News of the Navigator’s demise was already common knowledge. “You leave us for Topside soon.”
Perry gulped the drink the cook claimed was coffee, thickened with sugar. Her Gift burned through calories.
“Acting Navigator now. You claim his cabin Topside. Eat at the Captain’s table.”
“I’d settle for having the light fixed in my cubby.”
Ruiz shrugged as before. Spares were for better days.
As she lay down in her cramped cubby with the failed light panel, the day watch had already begun: muffled voices, a distant thump of valves, the breath of circulating air. She hardly noticed the ship’s heartbeat any more. But adrenalin still coursed through her, and she could not sleep.
* * *
She must have been nine or ten. Shadowy figures sat at a long table. Moon, owner of the child farm, was the only one she knew.
“Perry Fourteen Illes,” he reads. He looks up, waiting for an answer.
Dazzled, Perry shades her eyes. Why have they stood her under a spotlight?
“Do you understand, child?”
She nods, though she does not understand. Memories of her childhood had all the hallmarks of a dream, the diminished sense of self, the mysterious logic of events beyond her control.
“We pay for her Gift,” Moon is explaining to the others at the table. “So she must be indentured to cover our outlay. But it is for her own good. In time, she will have a profession and be able to support herself.”
A woman at the table leans into the light, her face touched by concern. Perry has always thought this is what a mother looks like.
“For your own good, yes,” the woman nods. “You have chosen well.”
“You think I chose this!” Perry shouts, and wakes herself up.
* * *
Conscious of the Swanns behind her, Perry settled into the Navigator’s chair. There were no controls; she merely plugged the cable into her skull. The Swanns, the bridge, and the ship faded away. It was her Gift, interfacing with the drive and taking over her visual cortex to show her the humps and hollows of spacetime.
At first, Newton’s Friend wallowed in gravitational doldrums, and they made little headway.
“The apprentice is doing her best,” she heard Ada Swann tell her brother.
Next watch, the perpetual motion of the worlds stirred spacetime to their advantage. The drive gained traction from gravitational gradients and, with difficulty, Perry steered the ship towards Pallas. It was progress measured in days until Pallas swelled in the screens, rocky, grey, and not quite round.
Perry listened as Captain Swann spoke with an unhelpful voice on Pallas Dock. “Berths for registered vessels only,” the woman insisted.
Pallas was a Closed world, but Ada Swann had gambled their cargo would be snapped up, repaying tenfold the money she’d borrowed.
She motioned her brother to get on with the story they’d concocted.
“Surely you wouldn’t refuse a ship in an emergency?” declared Captain Swann.
“An emergency?”
“Our life support is failing. It’s you or nothing.”
The Captain caught Perry’s eye and touched a finger to his lips.
After a while, the woman came back on air. “Berth Seven.”
Captain Swann smoothed down his beard and sent for his nephew.
In older times, an AI would have docked Newton’s Friend, expertly using the gravity drive alone, but now Egan Swann had to bump them into the berth with finicky bursts from add-on thrusters. He turned and saw Perry watching him. Of course she was. He grinned and winked.
Both childless, the Swanns were grooming their nephew to captain the ship when they retired.
On the first day of her apprenticeship, Perry had stood on the bridge beside the Navigator, in awe of Captain Swann and scolded by his sister. Egan had a smile for her though, under his gene-tweaked golden eyes. She’d never seen anyone like him.
On a worldlet in the Trojan Federation, after too many drinks, he’d confided he had no intention of wasting his life playing delivery boy in that old tub.
“Pointless to compete with torch ships hauling cargo,” he’d said. As soon as his uncle and aunt retired, he had other plans.
He lowered his voice. “Folk raced yachts on old Earth long after wind-powered craft had their day. Gravity ship racing could be like that, the new thing, like lightsails and the Inner Worlds Cup.”
Before Perry could think of an answer to this nonsense, he tapped the back of her hand. “And I’d need a good Navigator.”
Next day it seemed he’d forgotten; like she forgot her disfigurement when he grinned at her.
* * *
All the other berths on Pallas Dock were empty, and Berth Seven was the farthest away.
No one came to meet them, so Captain Swann and his sister were forced to walk the length of dockside to find someone in charge. They insisted Egan come with them to learn how deals were made. He chanced on Perry loitering in the Tween deck mess, aimless now her navigating was done.
“What’s she doing here?” Ada Swann demanded.
“Our new Navigator should get to see the world she brought us to.” Egan took Perry by the arm and they fell in behind his uncle and aunt. “Besides,” he murmured to her, “it means I don’t have to listen to them.”
“Look at this place,” the Captain complained. He glanced down at his sister. “There’s no money here.”
Ada returned a canny smile. “Those in charge always have money.”
On every other world, the Dockmaster was an important person, though not here, it seemed. The visitors squeezed into his tiny office overlooking dockside, and he bowed and shook hands with each of them in turn, his flustered gaze finally settling on Perry.
Seated behind the Dockmaster was a small, watchful man they assumed was his assistant, until he stood and announced himself. He represented the Ruling Committee.
Crew were allowed on Dock, he announced, though Pallas itself was off-limits. Visitors must wear the ID passes provided. These were required by law.
He held up his own ID. They’d need one to be served in bars or make purchases.
When Ada Swann was sure he’d finished, she cleared her throat. “Of course. And here is our manifest. We have some luxury items and the latest medicals. In case you’re interested.”
The ID passes were trackers, which the crew either disabled or left on the automated carts trundling up and down dockside, all to the bafflement of Dock Security, who found this civil disobedience incomprehensible.
Bar Number One served only two kinds of drink, but this part of Dock was spun up, so at least they stayed in the glass. Egan sat with Ruiz at the bar, sipping the one called beer. Because of her Gift, Perry avoided alcohol, so she arranged to meet Egan later and went exploring.
Copyright © 2024 by David Barber
