Flowers From the Dead, Part 1
"Jesus Christ, try and do a kid a favor and all you get is grief."
"You in or out, Ham?" Morg asked.
Ham muttered something under his breath. "Out."
He threw his five cards to the table in disgust. Made from thin strips of laminated metal, they stuck to the magnetic strip running along his side of the table.
"I see your fifty cents, Mr. Morgan," said Izzy, the youngest person at the table. He carefully added a pair of blue chips to the pile at the center of the table, where a large magnetic plate kept them from floating away.
"See it and raise another quarter," said Odrida, the ship's captain, as she casually tossed a blue and a green chip into the pot. "So how's the universe persecuting you this week, Ham?"
Mayberry Mitch's four crew surrounded the table in the small cabin that served as Mitch's galley, mess hall, and crew lounge. One wall was lined with food preparation equipment; a microwave, a null-G toaster oven, a null-G sink, a small refrigerator containing the ship's precious supply of perishable food items, and so on.
The remaining walls were crowded with cabinets storing the vessel's communal goods. One door was labeled "dishes," several contained foodstuffs, another had a first aid kit and fire extinguisher.
"It's my daughter, Yvette," Ham said while Morg threw a blue chip onto the pot. "Her kid Jocelyn writes asking me some 'career day' crap, so I take time out of my busy day and answer, like a good grandpa, right?"
"Oh, dear God," Odrida said, laughing.
"I'll see it," Izzy said, tossing in a blue chip just like the captain and first mate had done. The chip bounced off the magnetic plate and floated across the table to Morg, who plucked it out of the air.
"Too hard," he said to Izzy. "Weak magnetic field. And you want it to land flat." He demonstrated, adding Izzy's chip to the pile with a well-practiced flick of the wrist.
Izzy nodded. "I see, thank you."
The lounge was immaculately tidy. Spacers tended to be a fastidious lot, particularly those who served on ships like Mitch that for one reason or another had no artificial gravity installed. (In Mitch's case, the reasons were "age" and "budget.") Any items left lying around unsecured could be transformed from clutter into projectiles in a heartbeat.
The table and chairs, all made from lightweight plastic compounds, were secured to the floor for precisely that reason. The four people surrounding the table weren't so much sitting in the chairs as floating above them, using them to steady themselves when Newton's laws of physics suggested that perhaps they ought to float elsewhere.
"What?" Ham said, responding indignantly to his captain's muffled laughter. "I can't help-out my granddaughter?"
"Ham," Odrida said, "I'm trying to imagine you giving her career advice in a way that wouldn't piss-off your daughter. So, what did she object to? The gratuitous cursing? The belligerent tone? Or just the angry, embittered content?"
"Full house," Morg said, showing his cards. "Jacks over twos."
"Straight, five through nine," Izzy said. "So that means I lose, right?"
"Right."
"Piss," Odrida said, shaking her head. "Two pair, queens and sevens."
"Yvette kinda objected to all three," Ham grumbled while Morg collected the pot. "What, the kid's never heard 'shit' before? And that was some sound advice I gave her!"
Odrida laughed and covered her eyes with her hand. "I'd ask, but God help me, I'm afraid you'd answer."
"That was a good hand, Izzy," Morg said, integrating his new chips into the collection in front of him. "You should have played it more aggressively."
Izzy scowled. "But ... that would have resulted in me losing more money, Mr. Morgan, would it not?"
Morg shrugged. "You didn't know my hand was that strong. A straight will win a lot of pots."
"Bullshit, Morg!" Ham said, seemingly eager to talk about something other than his family. "Kid's right, you had the winning hand! Smart move was to fold, not keep raising!"
"In hindsight," Morg conceded. "But you have to act based on the intel you have at the time."
"What's your opinion, Captain?" Izzy asked.
"Morg does have a point," she said while Morg shuffled the cards, "but there's more to the game than just what's in your hand. Morg was really bidding it up. Good indication he thought his hand was pretty strong."
"Unless I was bluffing," Morg said.
"You don't bluff," Odrida said.
"No," Morg said, "I rarely bluff. Just makes it all the more effective when I do."
Ham barked out a laugh. "So if you just had two pair, how come you raised on him?"
"I dunno," Odrida said, shrugging. "Two pair doesn't suck. I wanted to see what happened next. I hate folding."
"If you ever get invited to a seat at a high-stakes table," Morg said as he dealt, "decline."
The captain stuck her tongue out at him.
Everybody tossed a white chip into the middle of the table and picked up their cards, Morg pausing to catch and replace Izzy's chip as it bounced.
"Speaking of high stakes," Ham said to Izzy, "What're you doing at this table, Izzy? I thought Jesus hated gambling." He looked at his hand. "Check."
"I've given that a great deal of thought, Mr. Scarpazzi," Izzy said. "The Bible is more ambiguous than you might think upon the subject of gambling. We are cautioned that money is the root of all evil, and thus a game played strictly to increase my own wealth would be suspect. Here, I believe this is primarily a way to socialize with my shipmates; the money is a secondary concern. I do not believe that participating in this game disobeys the teaching of Jesus in any way, else I would not participate."
Ham laughed. "Jesus, Izz! You agonize more over a stupid nickel-ante game of five-card than anybody I've ever met!"
"Ham checked, so it's your bet, Izzy," Morg said.
"Ah," Izzy said. "Uhm ... ten cents." He placed a red chip in the middle of the table. "You must not have met many Christians, Mr. Scarpazzi."
"Sure have," Ham said while Odrida raised the bet to a quarter. "Once crewed with a guy who was part of this weird Jesus cult that worshiped God by fucking. Every shore leave, he'd come back bragging about how many women he'd shared the Holy Word with!"
"There's a certain logic to it," Morg said as he tossed in a chip. "If you're gonna be yelling 'oh God, oh God' anyway, why not?"
Izzy had turned bright red. "I don't think that practice is consistent with Scripture."
Odrida smiled and patted Izzy on the shoulder while Ham added to the pot. "Lotta people believe a lotta things, Isambard," she said. "Doesn't mean you gotta agree with 'em."
"So how come you didn't join the Church of the Holy Orgasm?" Morg asked.
"They asked me not to join," Ham said. "Can you believe the fuckers? I was de-proselytized!"
"Impressive," Morg said. "You normally have to belong to a church before you can be excommunicated from it."
A chime sounded from the intercom. "Incoming message for Captain Chan," said the voice used by the ship's computer system. "Shall I take a message?"
"Negative," Odrida said, pushing herself away from the table. "Fold. Shit hand anyway. I'll take it in my quarters."
Could be work, she thought. Potential job trumps poker. Especially on this ship.
She pulled herself through the hatch leading to the central tube connecting all of Mitch's decks and pulled herself hand over hand towards the bow of the ship. She pressed her thumb against deck two's port hatch, which slid open immediately.
Decades ago, when Mitch had been a Coast Guard patrol bird, Deck 2-Port had been the officer's quarters. It had housed anywhere from two to four people, depending on how the ship was crewed. But now that the ship had made the decadent transition into civilian service, this entire cabin was devoted to the ship's captain.
Which meant it was still less than half the size of the bedroom Odrida had slept in when she was growing up. But what the hell; on a working spaceship, luxury is a relative thing.
The walls and cabinets were painted green, with brown highlights. Morg had once commented Odrida's quarters looked like a tree; since that had been what she was shooting for, she accepted it as a compliment.
The wall to her right had a multidisplay screen that was currently set to show an impressionist bowl of fruit. Odrida couldn't remember either the name of the piece or the painter, but she liked it; it was pretty. Above her bunk were a number of hand-drawn pieces of steadily-increasing skill; she definitely remembered the name of the artist responsible for these. They were all drawn by Quentin Garry, her friend and fellow disaster-survivor, currently enduring the trauma of Jr. High School. Her favorite was the oldest; entitled "ROCKET GIRL!" in bold red letters, it featured a blond, vaguely-feminine creature with rockets strapped to her back "ZOOOOOM!"-ing past planets. The rockets themselves bore black and yellow squiggles that looked suspiciously like the Coast Guard insignia.
Later pictures in the artist's oeuvre showed increasing familiarity with the subject matter; most subsequent works lacked sound effects because, in the artist's own words, "Outer space hates noise."
But all the pictures depicting people in space had them wearing spacesuits. Outer space had no air. This was a fact both the artist and the patron knew very intimately.
Odrida's bunk was recessed into the far wall. She held down the button next to it, causing it to fold into the wall, thus making way for her office. If she wanted, she could have pulled out a chair from under the bunk's hinge and produced a simple desk from the wall where the pillow had been, but since the ship was in freefall, it seemed fairly pointless.
She settled into a floating lotus position, steadying herself while she faced the wall where the head of the bunk had been. "Captain Chan ready to receive transmission," she said.
The screen on the wall in front of her flickered to life. The pinched face of an elderly, gray-haired woman appeared. Behind her was an expensive-looking sofa and a window looking out on a lawn.
Recognition tugged at Odrida's consciousness, but she just couldn't place the woman's face.
"Captain Odrida Chan here!" Odrida chirped. "What can I do for you?"
"Hello, Odrida," the woman said in tones that hinted at a suppressed desire to be call her something very rude instead. "Do you remember me?"
Odrida shook her head. "I feel like I ought to, but honestly, I don't. Sorry."
"That's all right. We've never met. However, you might have seen my picture."
Odrida pondered. Was this woman some kind of celebrity?
"You might have seen my picture," the woman said, "sitting next to the bed where you had sex with my husband."
Odrida's heart lurched, but she kept her face impassive. Shit! "Uhm ... yes. That would be it."
Philippa! That was her name! Philippa Rodriguez!
The wife of one Mitchell Rodriguez. The man with whom Odrida had enjoyed a brief, torrid affair while their world was dying.
The man Odrida had named her ship after.
"So," Odrida stammered, "how ya doing?"
