Indian ancestors on Daddy’s side of the family, and though I wear my black hair short, it will misbehave.
“Hi, Daddy,” I said as I came into our apartment. “Am I late?”
The living room was in a real mess. Books and papers were all in piles on the floor and the furniture was all shoved to one side. Our home ordinarily had a lived-in look, but this was far worse than usual.
Daddy was sitting in one of the chairs, sorting books. Daddy is Miles Havero. He is a small man just into middle age with a face that is hard to read, and a very sharp mind. He is mainly a mathematician, though he sits on the Ship’s Council and has for years. He and I had lived in this apartment since I left the dormitory when I was nine.
He gave me an inquiring look. “What happened to you?”
“I didn’t mean to be late,” I said.
“I didn’t mean that,” he said. “I’m talking about your clothes.”
I looked down. I had on a white shirt and yellow shorts. Across the front of both were streaks of dust and grime.
The Ship is a place where it is almost impossible to get dirty. The ground in the quad yards isn’t real dirt-and-grass, for one thing. It’s a cellulose product set in a milled fiber and plastic base—when a square gets worn they rip it out and put in a new one, just like in your living room floor. The only place there is dirt in any quantity is the Third Level, where there isn’t anything else but. A certain amount of dirt does get carried out of the Third Level and spread and tracked around the Ship. Eventually it gets sucked into the collecting chutes and blown down to Engineers on the First Level, where it is used to feed the Converters to produce heat, light, and power inside the Ship. But you can see that ordinarily there isn’t much opportunity to get filthy.
I once asked Daddy why they didn’t work out a system to keep the dirt at its only source—the Third Level—instead of going to the trouble of cleaning the Ship after it gets dirty. It wouldn’t be hard to do.
He said, “You know what the Ship was built for, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I said. Everybody knows that. It was built to carry Mudeaters out to settle the Colonies—I don’t call them that in Daddy’s presence, by the way; though it may seem surprising, he doesn’t like the word.
Daddy went on to explain. The Mudeaters—Colons, rather—were packed in at very close quarters. They weren’t clean people—try to convince a peasant to wash—and people packed in as close as they were are going to sweat and stink anyway. For that reason, mainly, the Ship was built with a very efficient cleaning and air-distribution system. The Ship is used now for a completely different purpose, so we no longer need that system.
Daddy said my suggestion wasn’t completely out of line.
“Why doesn’t the Council do something about it, then?” I asked.
“Figure it out yourself, Mia,” Daddy said. He was always after me to try to figure things out myself before I looked them up or asked him for the answers.
I did figure it out. Simply, it would be just too much trouble for too little result to scrap a complicated existing system that worked well at no present cost in favor of another system whose only virtue was its simplicity.
I brushed at my shirt and most of the dirt went its own way.
“I took a shortcut home,” I said.
Daddy just nodded absently and didn’t say anything. He’s impossible to figure. I was once taken aside and pumped to find out how Daddy was going to vote on a Council Question. They weren’t very nice people, so instead of telling them politely that I didn’t have the least idea, I lied. I can’t guess what Daddy is thinking—he has to tell me what’s on his mind.
He set down the book he had been looking at and said, “Mia, I have some good news for you. We’re going to move into a new place.”
I gave a whoop and threw my arms around his dear neck.
This was news I had wanted to hear. In spite of all the empty space in the Ship, we were crowded in our apartment. Somehow, after I left the dorm and moved in with Daddy we just had never gotten around to trading in his small apartment for a larger one. We were too