My fist came down so hard that the keyboard jumped. It wasn’t fair, damn it! I must have been able to read, must have been able to understand those squiggles, or the Mishimuto Corporation would never have recruited me. Hell, I’d been an officer, for god’s sake, and surely they knew how to read.

But the chunk of metal that had taken my memories had taken my capacity to read as well, leaving me unable to do anything more complicated than killing people.

The rage died away and tears of self-pity trickled down my cheeks. I thought of the others, the ones Bey had mentioned, and wondered if they felt as I did. Was that why one of them had committed suicide? Why the other had been confined to a mental institution? And what about the skull plates? Were they a coincidence? Similar injuries treated in a similar way? Or something more?

The questions crowded around me and made my head hurt. I pushed them away and turned my attention to the problem at hand. I didn’t understand the characters, so I’d get some help from someone who did. There were a variety of techniques available, and one of them would work. True, this situation called for a more complicated scam than usual, but there was no reason to believe I couldn’t come up with one.

I withdrew the disk, glanced at the time, and stood up. The cabin was small compared with those assigned to the regular crew, but comfortable nonetheless. I had a bunk with overhead entertainment console, a locker ten times larger than my wardrobe, and a desk-computer combo. The only trace of the previous occupant was the half-empty bottle of hooch stashed under the mattress and a black sock in one of the drawers.

I stepped into the corridor and knocked on Sasha’s door. There was plenty of time, since her shift didn’t start for another hour so. Her voice was muffled by the steel hatch. “Yes?”

“It’s Max.”

“Are you alone?”

I looked around. Lester was nowhere in sight. The corridor was empty. “Yup.”

The hatch slid open. The bandage had been replaced with a black eyepatch that gave Sasha a piratical air. And that, plus the bra and panties, was reminiscent of the more exotic strip shows I’d seen. It was nice to be trusted yet somewhat disturbing at the same time. I felt like Uncle Max, eccentric, but essentially harmless. Sasha had no idea that she’d offended my delicate male ego and motioned me inside. I slipped into scam mode.

“Hi, how’s it going?”

“Lester’s a pain in the ass, but otherwise fine. How ‘bout you?”

“Oh, nothing much,” I said casually. “The captain’s on my case…but what else is new?”

Sasha nodded understandingly. “Yeah, I know what you mean. I’m so tired of working on Kreshenko’s inventories I could puke. I’ll bet the guy dreams about decimal points. What’s your job like, anyway?”

I shrugged. “That’s the problem. I haven’t started yet…and the captain’s pissed. Not to mention Killer.”

Sasha stepped into her pants and pulled them up around her waist. I tried to ignore the fact that she had nice legs and failed. She looked surprised. “You haven’t started? Why not?”

I produced the disk. Light glinted from its surface. “1001100101111000011110. This stuff is complicated. I wouldn’t want to screw up.”

Sasha nodded understandingly, as if my tendency to screw up was an ongoing problem, which it definitely was. “You want some drill? No problem. Let’s take a look.”

I felt the thrill of victory as she slipped the disk into her console and hit the appropriate key. “Where shall we start?”

“From the top,” I answered quickly. “And read it aloud. I learn better that way.”

Sasha nodded and started to read. “The Nutralife 4000 food maintenance and production system is intended for use on Class IV ships carrying no more than twenty crew and passengers. It is essential that this system be provided with sufficient oxygen, water, and nutrients. Failure to provide these materials in sufficient quantities will reduce the system’s capabilities to provide dependents with a balanced diet and nullify the Nutralife 4000’s warranty.”

Then she paused, frowned for a moment, and pointed at the screen. “What’s that word?”

I shook my head slowly. “Beats the heck out of me.”

Sasha raised an eyebrow. “Really? You don’t know the word ‘and’?”

Blood rushed to my face. I tried a bluff. “Of course I know it…”

She held up her hand and looked as concerned as a person with a black eyepatch can. “Admit it, Max…you don’t know how to read. It goes with the brain damage.”

The way she said it was sort of sad, as if accepting the truth of something she’d suspected all along, and managed to ignore. “People think you’re stupid when you can’t read.”

I felt her fingers on my hand and looked up into her face. It was the nice Sasha, the same one who had kissed my cheek, and was occasionally sympathetic. “You’re far from stupid, Max. Disadvantaged, yes, and strange at times, but far from stupid.”

The compliment was rather heavily qualified but I decided to accept it anyway. Doing so made me feel warm, loved, and damned near human.

Sasha looked at her watch. “I have about forty-five minutes. Let’s get to work.”

She read, and I listened, and the information began to accumulate. Other sessions followed, and two cycles later, on the eve of the very shift when Killer had promised to eject me from the main lock, I was ready to go. Or semi-ready, since there were vast tracts of highly technical information that had gone in one ear and out the other.

But Sasha had instructed me to take heart from the fact that no less than three of the ship’s androids were assigned to the farm and would handle the real as well as the intellectual heavy lifting. No, my role was to supervise and provide something the instruction disk called “psycho-reinforcement,” but sounded a lot like petting. So, armed with my newfound knowledge and the very best of intentions, I headed for the farm. It was located about two-thirds of the way down the length of the ship’s hull and consisted of two sections.

The first was reminiscent of the way a revolver works. Nine cylinders rotated around a central axis, but rather than bullets, each chamber contained a thirty-foot-long hydroponics tank. Rather than using soil, which was heavy and therefore expensive, the tanks contained trays full of water mixed with nutrients. Each tank was shielded against radiation, received sunlight via external solar collectors, and had its own internal irrigation system.

Rotating as they did around a central axis, the tanks paused in each of the nine possible positions for two hours at a time. Retractable decking slid into place and allowed my robotic assistants to open the chamber and take care of the more mundane chores like seeding, trimming, and harvesting. And what a harvest it was!

I arrived on the maintenance deck just in time to see the androids remove the last of some basketball-sized tomatoes. One of the robots, a rather functional-looking unit with four legs and three arms, spotted me and minced over. Multi-colored paint drippings covered him from sensors to foot pads. They were the residue of a maintenance assignment, and the source of the nickname: Picasso. Like most higher-order androids, Picasso had the ability to supplement his original programming through on-the-job experience, and his speech reflected that fact. “Hey, dude…what’s happening?”

“I’ve been assigned to run the farm.”

“All right! ‘Bout time the captain sent a bio bod down here. The veggies are fine but the aniforms are antsy as hell. We shoot the breeze with ’em, and shovel their shit, but it ain’t the same. Come on…I’ll take you into section two.”

I followed the robot past the still-open module. Though smaller than Picasso, and built more like spiders, the other androids stood waist-high and were equipped with all sorts of highly specialized sensors, cutters, and grabbers. Picasso handled the introductions. “The one with the stickers all over his torso is known as Decal, and the other one prefers the official designator of Agrobot Model XII.”