A Closed and Common Orbit (Wayfarers #2)(48)

‘Why?’

‘Because they think they’re doing the right thing. It’s complicated. Can we save that question for later?’

Jane brushed the mushroom pile together real tight, then picked her knife back up. ‘Is it on your question list?’

‘I just added it.’

‘Okay.’

‘Anyway, the people here don’t want to change. The city people, anyway. Those brothers should’ve known better, but they were doing what they believed in.’ She shook her head. ‘They were kind people, but very foolish.’

‘What’s foolish?’

‘A foolish person would reach into a machine without turning off the power.’

Jane frowned. ‘That’s stupid.’

Owl laughed. ‘Yes, it is. Anyway, they were only with me a short time. They purchased the shuttle less than a standard before, but I mostly sat in the bay of their carrier ship. The carrier took them to the Han’foral tunnel, which is the closest one to here. Took about thirty-seven days to get from that tunnel to where we are now.’

Jane chopped the mushrooms smaller, smaller, smaller. The littler they were, the easier on her stomach. ‘When was that?’

‘About five years ago.’

Jane stopped chopping. She looked at the face in the wall. ‘You’ve been here for five years? In the scrap?’

‘Yes.’

Jane tried to think about how long ago five years was. She was ten now, so she was five when Owl had got to the planet. Jane couldn’t remember being five very well. And in five more years, she’d be fifteen! Five years was a lot. ‘Were you sad?’ she asked.

‘Yes. Yes, I was very sad.’ Owl smiled, but it was a weird kind of smile, like it was hard to do. ‘But we’re together now, and I’m not sad any more.’

Jane stared at the mushroom bits, all purple and white and chewy. ‘I’m still sad.’

‘I know, sweetheart. And that’s okay.’

They had talked a lot about sad a few days before, after Jane had thrown a box of stuff at the wall for reasons she couldn’t explain. She’d yelled at Owl a lot, and said she wanted to go back to the factory, which she didn’t really at all, so she didn’t know why she’d said it. Then she’d cried again, which she was real tired of doing. She’d done a lot of bad behaviour that day, but Owl hadn’t been angry. Instead, she’d told Jane to come sit next to the wall screen by her bed, close as she could to Owl’s face, and Owl made some music until Jane stopped crying. Owl said it was okay to be sad about 64, and about the bad things that had happened at the factory. She said that was a kind of sad that would never go away, but it would get easier. It hadn’t gotten easier yet. Jane wished it would hurry up.

She scooped up the mushroom bits into her hands and walked over to the stove. A stove was a hot thing you made food on. Owl could give it power now, ever since Jane had started cleaning off the outside of the ship – the hull. Now more of the coating on the hull could make power out of sunlight. Once Jane finished that task, Owl wouldn’t have to choose which things worked and which things didn’t. She could make a lot more things work now than she had at first. She could make the ship very warm and turn on all the lights inside, and the stove and the stasie worked. The shower worked now, too, because Jane had filled up the water tanks. That had taken six days of dragging the water wagon back and forth, back and forth. It had been stupid and bad, and there had been dogs a couple times (the weapon was such a good thing). But there was clean water now, and she didn’t itch any more, and the bathroom wasn’t gross. That all was good. But between that and the two days she’d spent cleaning scrap off of the ship, her arms and legs were real real tired. She wasn’t bleeding or broken or anything, but she hurt.

She put a pan on the stove, dropped the mushrooms into it, and turned the stove on real low. She had to be careful doing that. Mushrooms weren’t very good to eat without being cooked, but if she cooked them too hot, they’d stick to the pan and they wouldn’t be any good at all. She’d made that mistake the first time, and wasted a whole bunch of them. With as much work as it took to bring mushrooms home and get them ready, she didn’t want to waste any ever again.

Jane had a thought she hadn’t before. ‘Did you have a crew before the . . . the two men?’

Owl had said she wasn’t sad any more, but she was now. Her face said so. ‘Yes. The shuttle was owned by a couple on Mars. They used the ship for vacations. Outer Sol system, mostly. The occasional tunnel hop. I was with them for ten years.’

The mushrooms started to make hissing sounds. Jane tried to keep an eye on them, but she was worried about Owl. She’d never heard her sound so wrong. ‘Did they get arrested, too?’

‘Oh, no. No, they sold the ship. They had two children, Mariko and Max. I watched them grow up in here. But after they became adults, the vacations stopped, and I guess . . . I guess their parents didn’t need a shuttle any more.’

Jane frowned, watching the mushrooms wiggle against the pan. ‘Did you want to stay with them?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did they know that?’

‘I don’t know. If they did, it wouldn’t have mattered. That’s not how the galaxy works.’

‘Why?’

‘Because AIs aren’t people, Jane. You can’t forget that about me. I’m not like you.’