Trouble in the Stars Read online

  The captain raises a skeptical eyebrow. “It just happened to stow away on my ship at the same time that you did?”

  “You did leave your outer hatch open,” I point out. Then I try raising one of my eyebrows the way she just did, but I can’t do it, they both go up. It must take practice.

  The captain grips the fork as if she might stab me with it, and then stands and tosses it onto the table with a clatter. She makes a circuit of the mess-room, pausing to kick at a pile of dirty clothes that’s been left on the floor, and comes back to the table, where she flings herself into her chair again.

  I start on my fourth bowl of food.

  “What are you?” the captain asks.

  I freeze with a spoonful of grains halfway to my mouth. “I’m a young human male,” I tell her. “I am Trouble.”

  Her eyes narrow.

  Over by the wall, Reetha straightens. She points a claw in my direction. “Criminal,” she says in her deep voice. “StarLeague.”

  The captain goes very still. “Reetha,” she says softly, without taking her eyes from me, “you think he’s the escaped prisoner who was being hunted on the station?”

  Reetha grunts, and I guess it means yes.

  The captain leans closer, and her voice has gone cold and low. “Are you?” she asks. “Is the StarLeague after you?”

  “I don’t even know what the StarLeague is,” I tell her.

  Her eyes widen. “The StarLeague is the galactic government. Their military enforces the laws, bringing prosperity and peace to all beings.”

  Reetha snorts.

  The captain gives half a shrug. “Depending on what you mean by peace.” Then she fixes her glare on me again. “So. Are you an escaped prisoner? Is the StarLeague hunting you?”

  “No,” I insist. “I’m not. It’s not.”

  “Then who are you?” she asks. “Where do you come from?”

  “I’m nobody,” I tell her. “And I don’t come from anywhere.”

  That part of it is the absolute truth.

  But the captain doesn’t believe me.

  7

  Technically, the captain tells me, galactic law allows ship captains to toss stowaways out an airlock, no questions asked. Especially suspicious stowaways who may in fact be devious intergalactic escapees from class-four military prison facilities.

  But she doesn’t have Reetha space me, even though I can’t answer her questions.

  Instead she puts me to work.

  “It’s three weeks until we reach our next stop, at Janx Station,” she says.

  I’m not sure how long a week is, but in case it’s a human thing that I should know, I don’t ask.

  “We’ll dump you at Janx. And,” she adds, getting to her feet, “if the StarLeague picks you up there, Trouble, it’s your problem. Not mine.”

  Reetha pulls something circular and shiny from her pocket and gives it to the captain.

  “In the meantime,” the captain says, “you can make yourself useful. Hold out your hand.”

  Reetha has gone to stand behind me. A heavy claw rests on my shoulder, keeping me in my chair.

  As ordered, I hold out my right-side hand. See? Completely harmless.

  Without touching me, the captain leans forward and snaps a shiny metal cuff around my wrist. With a satisfied nod, she steps away. “As long as you’re wearing that, you won’t be able to leave the mess-room. You going to give us any trouble, Trouble?”

  The cuff feels cold and heavy around my wrist. “No,” I say meekly.

  “Put him to work,” she orders Reetha, and spins on her heel. But before she leaves the mess-room, she pauses in the doorway and studies me.

  And I study her. She’s not happy about something. The situation is bothering her more than it should, I think. Humans, it turns out, are way more interesting and strange than I expected they’d be.

  A burp escapes from my full stomach, and my eyes go wide. First time that has happened.

  The captain shakes her head and walks out.

  Reetha doesn’t give me detailed instructions. She just waves a claw at the mess-room and says one word. “Clean.” Then she leaves.

  * * *

  The first thing I do, of course, is discover what happens when I try to go out of the mess-room.

  I step into the doorway, and the cuff on my right wrist gives a warning buzz, and as I start to take another step, there’s a crackle, and a crashing shock goes through me, and I find myself on my back on the floor in the middle of the mess-room, blinking up at the ceiling. The echoes of the shock shiver through me, little lightnings of fizzing pain that leak slowly out of my fingers and toes.

  So that’s . . . what happens when I . . . try to leave the mess-room. Now I know. Won’t try it again.

  I lie there, staring up. There’s probably an on-ship word for ceiling, but I don’t know what it is. I consider the situation I’m in.

  With the amount of food that I have ingested, I have plenty of energy. I could easily shift out of this cuff if I wanted to.

  Eventually I will have to, if the captain means it about dumping me at the next station.

  I think she does mean it.

  They have given me food and warm clothes, and they don’t currently plan to toss me out an airlock, and I’m not a dangerous intergalactic criminal prisoner. But I am not safe here.

  Or anywhere, but especially not here.

  8

  Shakily, I get to my feet. There’s nothing I can do about my situation for three weeks, however long that is. So I’d better obey the captain’s orders and get to work.

  I start with the galley—the kitchen. It’s a narrow space between two counters, so narrow that a large person like Reetha must have to squeeze to fit in here. Above the counters is a row of orange-colored cabinets, all containing food packets that should be organized according to what different species eat instead of all jumbled together. Below the counters are metal machines for storing other foods and, I discover, for cooking them. I find a bin stuffed with protein bars and take one to munch as I explore the rest of the mess-room.

  Just off the galley is a head—a bathroom, remember?—and a tiny closet containing cleaning supplies.

  I’m not at all surprised to find that the cleaning supplies are unopened and unused, because the entire mess-room is filthy dirty. The floor is sticky, everything in the galley is almost gummy with grease and spilled food. Scattered around are bits and scraps of wire and plastic and all kinds of junk, and dirty cups, dirty clothes, rat droppings, and tools that probably belong in the engine room. The bathroom is self-cleaning, but clearly nobody’s bothered to actually push the button to clean it, and let me tell you, reptilians make a mess when they’re eliminating their bodily wastes.

  I’m on my hands and knees scrubbing at a smear of gunk on the galley floor when a member of the crew ducks through the doorway and into the mess-room. Peering around the edge of the galley, I see that it’s the tall, thin, blue-skinned humanoid.

  When I pop up from behind the counter to say hello, he startles, flailing his arms, stumbling back until he lands on the couch, where he sits, staring at me.

  “Sorry,” I say, stripping off the safety goggles I was wearing. “I’m Trouble.”

  “You certainly are,” he says in a wavery voice. “I should have expected . . . The captain said . . . Well.” He spreads his long six-jointed fingers over his chest, as if to calm himself. Then he climbs to his feet. He’s almost twice my height, so tall that the top of his blue-furred head nearly touches the ceiling. His joints bend both forward and back, so he moves in a kind of bobbing way as he lowers himself into a nest-like chair at the table, folding his legs and looking at me expectantly. “Lunch?” he asks.

  I don’t know what lunch is.

  He gives a graceful wave of one of his bony hands. “The midday . . . You know . . . F
ood?”

  Oh, he wants me to serve his meal. Lunch. An excellent word to know.

  I inspect the food packets in the galley cupboard. “Is stew all right?” I ask.

  “I think . . . well, perhaps?” he answers.

  I clean out a bowl, figure out how to prepare the stew, and when it’s ready, I bring it to him.

  Then I make a bowl of stew for myself—lunch!—and join him at the table, where he tells me that his name is Ambaratryachnxeftryambanartix, Amby for short. Amby tells me that he is not he but they because their species can choose any one of five genders, and they say that they like to change sometimes. They are the ship’s navigator. I ask them what that involves, and they tell me how wonderful it is being a navigator, although it sounds to me like it’s mostly staring at numbers and doing complicated calculations. Then I ask them about the rest of the crew. Amby says that Reetha handles security and communications, which seems strange since she barely talks, Shkkka keeps the ship’s engines running, and the last crew member, Telly, manages the cargo.

  “What sorts of cargo do you carry?” I ask, taking a bite of stew.

  “Ah . . .” Amby blinks. “On this ship it’s best not to ask that kind of . . . you know . . . that sort of question,” they say primly.

  “That’s all right,” I tell them. “I’m very good at not asking questions.”

  Amby’s response to that is to stare at me, blinking.

  Then Amby leaves, and I clean for a short while, and more of the crew comes in. This time it’s Reetha, along with Telly, the humanoid with the tusks. “Lunch,” he barks at me, so I prepare some stew for them, and also for me, and we sit together at the table. I already know that Reetha isn’t a conversational person, so I try talking to Telly, but he ignores me, slurps up his stew, leaving all the parts of it that are meat, and goes out. Reetha follows him.

  I clean up after them and wait for the next lunch-eater.

  This time it’s one of the Shkkka. I offer to make her a meal, but she pushes past me, grabs some food packets from the galley, and takes them with her, back to the engineering section of the ship. I make a bowl of stew anyway, and take bites of it while I’m scrubbing grime off the countertop.

  Just after that, another member of the crew comes in. It’s the captain.

  “Lunch?” I ask happily.

  “What are you serving?” she asks, sounding a little grim.

  “There’s stew,” I tell her. “And also stew. I haven’t figured out how to make anything else.”

  She shrugs, so I make a bowl of stew for each of us and join her at the table, setting down a pile of protein bars at my place.

  “I tried to go out of the mess-room,” I tell her.

  “Hah,” she says, and takes a bite of her lunch. “How did that go?”

  “Could have been worse,” I say.

  She snorts and reaches across the table to take one of the protein bars at my place. Without me even thinking about it, my hand shoots out, lightning fast, to stop her, the metal cuff banging against the table. Then I freeze, and she freezes, staring at me.

  “Hmmm,” she says, and slowly moves her hand away.

  We both eat for a while, in silence.

  I realize something. “Do you have a name? Besides Captain?”

  She grunts and gets up from the table. Going to the galley, she tosses her dirty stew bowl into the sink and rummages in a cupboard. “Want some kaff?” she asks.

  “What’s kaff?” I ask.

  She pauses. “Huh. Stimulant beverage, served hot. Nasty stuff.”

  “Yes, please,” I say.

  A moment later she brings two steaming mugs to the table, setting one in front of me.

  “My given name is Astra,” she tells me as she sits down again. “It means ‘star.’”

  “Star,” I repeat, and taste the kaff. My mouth puckers up. It is nasty.

  She slouches into her chair, wrapping her hands around her mug. “For most beings, the important part of this galaxy is its stars. Bright points in the darkness. Light, warmth, color, planets, other beings. Not me.” She takes a sip of her kaff. “I like the space in between the stars.”

  “I don’t,” I say.

  “Why not?” Captain Astra asks.

  “It’s lonely,” I answer.

  “It is,” she agrees. She gazes at me over the rim of her mug. After a long moment she says, “It’s odd, Trouble, that you’ve never heard of kaff. Humans drink it all over the galaxy.”

  All I can think of to say is, “Oh.”

  Tilting her mug, she finishes off her kaff, making a face at its bitterness. She gets to her feet, then leans on the table, staring down at me. “At the station, that StarLeague officer, General Smag, ordered all of the ship captains to attend a meeting, and told us about the escaped prisoner they were hunting. An extremely dangerous being, he said, and—”

  “I’m not the prisoner they were after,” I interrupt. “And also, I am not dangerous.”

  “And,” the captain goes on, relentless, “devious.”

  “I’m not devious,” I tell her.

  She nods. “You don’t seem to be. But maybe you’re so devious that you seem like you’re not devious.”

  “What?” How does that even make sense?

  “Reetha has been a member of my crew for a long time,” she tells me. “She doesn’t trust you, Trouble, which means I don’t either.” She leans closer, and for just a second I see in her eyes that space between the stars. Cold, empty, uncaring. It makes me shiver. “Reetha has never been wrong about something like this.” She straightens. “Never.”

  And then she turns and stalks out of the mess-room.

  9

  Humans, I’ve learned, like to divide up time into manageable bits. Seconds, hours, days, weeks. I like this idea a lot because it means they eat on a regular schedule too.

  We eat, I mean.

  Clearly I am not very good at being a human.

  I’m so bad at being a human that the captain thinks I’m sneakily pretending to be something I’m not, which is technically true but not really true, because I am still me no matter what shape I’m in.

  What I need to do, so that I don’t get spaced in the next three weeks, is to become better at being a human.

  * * *

  The next morning, after the crew and I have eaten breakfast—another new word that I highly approve of—they leave me alone in the mess-room. They’re all muttering to each other as they go out, worried that their long-range sensors have detected a blip, whatever that is. While they deal with their blip problem, I take the first step in becoming a better human, which is to figure out my own human body.

  Flopping down onto the couch, I take off one of my foot-coverings to examine my toes. They’re strange. Stubby not-fingers with no apparent purpose. I wiggle them, and then stand to see what it feels like to walk without using them. Ah, I see. Toes help with balance, with walking on two legs.

  Next, ears. Ears are even more strange. Fleshy, whorled protuberances, made for capturing sounds and directing them to the hearing mechanism inside my head. Humanoids put decorations on them too. Telly has a row of gold rings in each of his pointed ears.

  Telly, I also discovered, loves leafy growing things. At the breakfast table, he held up his hand and said, “I have a green thumb.”

  Just so you know, his thumb was not any kind of green color.

  He went on to tell me that he is a vegetarian, which means he only eats things that are plants. No meat. Weird.

  Still, I said to him, “I’m sorry that I made you stew with meat in it for lunch. Next time I’ll make you something more vegetably.”

  “Good,” he grunted. Then his ears twitched, and he pointed with his fork at the garden on the counter in the galley. “I like salad,” he told me.

  “. . . salad,” I repeated
, not understanding.

  And then he got to his feet and we went over to the garden and he showed me how the vegetables grow, how you put a tiny magical rock called a seed into this stuff called dirt and it turns into a leafy green plant with roots that suck nutrients out of the dirt.

  Seeds, he told me, are the most valuable thing in the entire galaxy, and I didn’t have any trouble believing it.

  “Try one,” Telly said, and pulled up a plant and held it out to me. “This is lettuce.”

  I popped it into my mouth and chewed. My teeth crunched on the dirt. It tasted . . . interesting.

  “You’re not supposed to eat the roots,” Telly told me, and he made a huffing noise that sounded like laughing.

  While we talked, I noticed that one of the gold rings in Telly’s pointed ears had a tiny bell on it that tinkled softly every time he moved his head.

  Anyway. Ears.

  I go to the center of the mess-room and stand still, to practice listening. There’s a faint hum coming from the galley, and a deeper thrum that must be the pulse engines, but otherwise the ship makes hardly any noise at all, even though it’s hurtling through space.

  I flop down onto the couch again, and pull on my foot-covering.

  Another weird thing is the fact that male humans have their reproductive organs on the outside. Who thought that was a good idea?

  But the strangest are my human eyes. Most beings’ tender parts are well protected, but human eyeballs are the most sensitive, delicate sensory organs, covered only by eyelids and lashes. And they’re wet!

  I lie on the couch for a while and practice raising one eyebrow, like the captain does.

  Then I get up and circle the mess-room once, twice, three times.

  I am noticing that I don’t like having nothing to do.

  I could shift into the shape of a small creature and explore the ship . . .

  No. Better not.

  Then I remember another thing that humans do. They smile. It means they bare their teeth and turn their lips up. I haven’t quite figured out what the smile means to another human. I think it might be a welcoming gesture, but it doesn’t make sense to me. When other species bare their teeth, it’s meant to be a threat. Still, I practice smiling, too.