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hand,” Perkev said.
    “No doubt,” I said, feeling a twinge of conscience.
    I thought of my father with concern.
    Rodrigo Park Kinago must have been a handsome man at one time. I resembled him somewhat: he was tall, his long face with handsome bones and light eyes in a warmly tinted skin that attracted surprised glances by those who had not noticed him at once upon entering a room he occupied. Clearly, something had happened in the past to affect his mind. He seemed uninjured on the surface, if more gray and drawn-looking than a man of his middle years might expect to in these days of rejuvenation treatments and general longevity. I loved him, but I hated to talk about him. “Poor, brave Rodrigo” was almost always how my relatives referred to him. Not just “Rodrigo,” but “Poor, brave Rodrigo,” and pretty much always with the sad smile that one saves for such occasions as a good friend who had shot off his own foot accidentally, who had been widowed, or who had suffered some other inescapable and overwhelming misfortune not of his own making. My curiosity on the subject overwhelmed me. The closest I’d ever come to hearing what had actually happened to my father fell from the lips of my great-uncle Perleas during one of his weekly drunks when my great-aunt Sforzina wasn’t around.
    “It was in the last war against the pirates, nephew,” Uncle Perleas had begun, sipping the fermented coca liqueur that he favored. He paused, thoughtfully. “No, Rodrigo really couldn’t have done anything else than exactly what he did. And certainly not after that.” I’d moved closer, agog. Uncle Perleas took an intake of breath, and was about to exhale details when, at that agonizing point, my aunt had come in and confiscated Uncle’s bottle and gave him a look that would have stopped the onset of winter, let alone an old man telling stories. I didn’t hear any more of the story that day, and when I tried to ask him about it at another suitably unguarded time, Perleas denied absolutely that he’d ever said anything. I certainly couldn’t ask my mother. She got very angry when I tried, with all of my eight-year-old tact, to inquire whether there wasn’t something odd about my paternal unit. I never tried again. My resultant grounding and deprivation of all privileges for a week was enough to deter my siblings from ever asking, either.
    My father didn’t provide me with any more clues. He pottered around in our rooms and the workshop assigned to him in the Craftworkers’ Courtyard, a vast expanse of cobbled paving dotted with small enclosures and chambers purpose-built for a variety of hand- and machine-oriented construction at one edge of the Imperial Compound, a vast city-within-the-capital-city of Taino. His specialty seemed to be coming up with alternatives for archaic substances or devices that had largely slipped out of usage altogether. I had never heard of “sealing wax” before he showed it to me. With most personal and official documents electronically transmitted these days, the utility of his fresh formulation seemed limited, but making it made him happy. I loved him, and in my small-child’s way, I wanted him to be happy. It worried me that I didn’t know why he was not like the fathers of my cousins or friends. Naturally, I wanted to be different than he was, so as not to be spoken of with pity.
    Father seemed content to remain within the ambit of those small spaces in the workshop, whereas I, my brother and sister couldn’t wait to slip the bounds of earth and go for illicit rides on borrowed suborbital skimmers or over the walls to parties thrown at exclusive clubs in town. No, Father had come to terms with his condition, and enjoyed a sunny if doddery disposition. I rarely considered his strangeness in latter days unless forced by conversational circumstance. As now.
    “He is very special,” I assured my new shipmates.
    “Was that your C.O. who came in with you?” asked Nesbitt, M., an ensign