Arabella of Mars(57)
Arabella herself, unlike the rest of her mess, was not detailed to charcoal-making duty—as captain’s boy, she was tasked with caring for him through his recovery. Though she would have liked to visit the asteroid, with its endless net of twining branches playing host to twittering birds and birdlike things, she was not too sorry to be missing the work of sawing, stripping, and hauling vast quantities of wood, the piling up of damp sandy soil around a stack of logs, or the endless pedaling of the air-pump which kept the slow-burning logs in their caul of soil just barely alight. The work crews returned at the end of each shift weary, exhausted, and filthy.
She had to admit that she took a certain malicious pleasure in seeing Binion covered with soot and half-dead from fatigue. When he saw her smirk, he spat “bum-boy” at her, but seemed too exhausted to do any thing else.
Richardson continued as acting captain. But with the real captain now awake and improving, he seemed paradoxically less concerned about asserting his own authority, and his relations with the other officers grew much more cordial. It was as though the weight of the mantle of responsibility had caused him so much discomfort that he’d snapped at his subordinates.
*
Though conscious, the captain was still extremely weak, and even in a state of free descent he could not bear to remain on the quarterdeck for more than an hour or two. He spent most of each day in his cabin, slowly building up his strength and sleeping frequently. From time to time Arabella noticed him gripping his head with an expression indicating severe headache, but she never once heard him complain of it.
Arabella continued to tend to the captain’s needs, changing his bandages, bringing him soup from the galley, or doing any other thing he required. But, paradoxically, now that he was conscious their relations became more distant than they had been while she was caring for his unconscious body. For as long as he was awake, she must work to maintain the fiction of Arthur Ashby, captain’s boy. It was only while he slept that she could gaze upon his face and entertain fancies entirely inappropriate to her supposed sex and station.
And so they discussed the theory and practice of aerial navigation, the workings of Aadim and automata in general, and the sights he had seen during his travels. But though she gently inquired into his personal history, the captain proved as resistant as Arabella herself to discussing his family and his early life. All he would say was that he had joined the Honorable Mars Company at the age of eighteen, sailing on Swiftsure as navigator’s mate.
She wished that he would reveal more details about his inner life. Perhaps, she sometimes dared to hope, beneath his smooth professional veneer he might harbor some warm feeling toward herself. But though she must respect the captain’s desire to keep his life private—he certainly offered her the same courtesy—she realized that his reticence only made him more intriguing and mysterious, and seemed to draw her into wanting to know more.
The man was already intriguing enough, with his deep brown eyes, his musical accent, and his charming and very polite mannerisms. Some of the crew, she knew, considered him little more than a sort of performing ape, resenting his rise to the position of captain. But though she’d encountered this attitude toward foreigners as much on Mars as she had in England—her own mother harbored a particularly virulent strain of it—she herself had spent so much time among Martians that she held no predispositions against any thinking being, no matter their birthplace, color, or shape.
Indeed, so far was she from prejudiced against Captain Singh because of his race that sometimes, in idle moments, she found herself musing on what sort of life they might build together. He was in every way, she reflected, far superior to the foppish dandies to whom her mother had insisted on presenting her back in England.…
She shook herself and returned her attention to her duties. Such a gulf separated them—a gulf of status and breeding and, of course, hidden gender, as well as of color and creed—that such a notion could never be any thing more than a distracting fancy.
She needed to bend her thoughts toward Diana. All her efforts must be dedicated to getting the ship, captain, and crew back into peak operating condition, so as to resume the journey to Mars with all possible dispatch. Every day that passed put her further behind Simon.
Above all, she must not despair. Even if Simon arrived at Mars days or weeks before she did, it would take him some time to convince Michael to leave off the running of the plantation and go hunting with him. There was still time for her to warn her brother of the deadly danger their cousin posed. But that time was slipping away with every turn of Diana’s spring-wound glass.
*
Arabella was far from the only one who felt the pressure of passing time. Diana and all her sister ships of the Honorable Mars Company made their money by speed, by the swift conveyance of cargo from the place where it was produced to the place where it was needed. The officers and crew, too, must be fed and watered, and the ship’s stores were far from inexhaustible. Every man knew in his bones that Diana must finish her repair and resupply and be on her way as soon as ever she could, and the officers drove them hard.
So it was that the men, exhausted though they might be from their labors at charcoal-making, grew restive, muttering direly to each other about short rations and lost bonuses. The exhilaration that had followed the corsair’s defeat bled away, as day by weary day the men pedaled back and forth to Paeonia with load upon load of charcoal. They ate their diminished meals in sullen silence, and whispered complaints passed from hammock to hammock among the watch below.