Captain Future xx - The Death of Captain Future (October 1995) Read Online Free PDF Page B

category. After we were revived from biostasis, I had learned many little things about her, but not very many big things. It wasn't as if she was consciously hiding her past; it was simply that the subject had never really come up, during the few times that we had been alone together without Captain Future's presence looming over us. Indeed, she might have completed the voyage as a near-stranger, had I not made an offhand comment.
    “I bet the selfish son-of-a-bitch has never thought of anyone else in his life,” I said.
    I had just returned from the galley, where I had fetched two fresh squeezebulbs of coffee for us. I was still fuming from the argument I had lost, and since McKinnon wasn't in earshot I gave Jeri an earful.
    She passively sipped her coffee as I pissed and moaned about my misfortunes, listening patiently as I paced back and forth in my stikshoes, ranting about the commanding officer's dubious mental balance, his unflattering physiognomy, his questionable taste in literature, his body odor and anything else that came to mind, and when I paused for breath she finally put in her quarter-credit.
    “He saved my life,” she said.
    That caught me literally off-balance. My shoes came unstuck from the carpet, and I had to grab hold of a ceiling handrail.
    “Say what?” I asked.
    Not looking up at me, Jeri Lee absently played with the squeezebulb in her left hand, her right foot holding open the pages of her personal logbook. “You said that he's never thought of any anyone else in his life,” she replied. “Whatever else you might say about him, you're wrong there, because he saved my life.”
    I shifted hands so I could sip my coffee. “Anything you want to talk about?”
    She shrugged. “Nothing that probably hasn't occurred to you already. I mean, you've probably wondered why a google is serving as first officer aboard this ship, haven't you?” When my mouth gaped open, she smiled a little. “Don't look so surprised. We're not telepathic, rumors to the contrary ... it's just that I've heard the same thing over the last several years we've been together.”
    Jeri gazed pensively through the forward windows. Although we were out of the Kirkwood gap, no asteroids could be seen. The belt is much less dense than many people think, so all we saw was limitless starscape, with Mars a distant ruddy orb off to the port side.
    “You know how Superiors mate, don't you?” she asked at last, still not looking at me.
    I felt my face grow warm. Actually, I didn't know, although I had frequently fantasized about Jeri helping me find out. Then I realized that she was speaking literally. “Prearranged marriages, rights?”
    She nodded. “All very carefully planned, in order to avoid inbreeding while expanding the gene pool as far as possible. It allows for some selection, of course ... no one tells us exactly whom we should marry, just as long as it's outside of our own clans and it's not to Primaries.”
    She paused to finish her coffee, then she crumpled the squeezebulb and batted it aside with her right foot. It floated in midair, finding its own miniature orbit within the compartment. “Well, sometimes it doesn't work out that way. When I was twenty, I fell in love with a boy at Descartes Station ... a Primary, as luck would have it. At least I thought I was in love...”
    She grimaced, brushing her long braid away from her delicate shoulders. “In hindsight, I guess we were just good in bed. In the long run it didn't matter, because as soon as he discovered that he had knocked me up, he got the union to ship him off to Mars. They were only too glad to do so, in order to avoid...”
    “A messy situation. I see.” I took a deep breath. “Leaving you stuck with his child.”
    She shook her head. “No. No child. I tried to keep it, but the miscarriage ... anyway, the less said about that, the better.”
    “I'm sorry.” What else could I have said? She should have known better, since there has never been a