Downbelow Station (18 page)

“I suppose so.”

“Luck and luck,” Elene said, glanced aside at him and tightened her hand. “You can dice and win on dockside, but old Deep loads his. Carry a man like that for luck. Touch him for it. Here’s to survivors, Josh Talley.” Bitter irony? Or an effort at welcome? It was merchanters’ humor, impenetrable as another language. Talley seemed relaxed by it. Damon drew back his hand, and settled back. “Did they discuss the matter of a job, Josh?” “No.”

“You are discharged. If you can’t work, station will carry you for a while. But I did arrange something tentatively, that you can go to of mornings, work as long as you feel able, go back home by noon, maindays. Would that appeal to you?”

Talley said nothing, but the look on his face, half-lit in the image of the sun… it was nearest now, in the slow rotation… wanted it, hung on it. Damon leaned his arms on the table, embarrassed now to give the little that he had arranged.
 
“A disappointment, perhaps. You have higher qualifications. Small machine salvage, a job, at least… on your way to something else. And I’ve found a room for you, in the old merchanter’s central hospice, bath but no kitchen… things are incredibly tight. Your job credit is guaranteed by station law to cover basic food and lodging. Since you don’t have a kitchen, your card’s good in any restaurant up to a certain limit There are things you have to pay for above that… but there’s always a schedule in comp to list volunteer service jobs, that you can apply for to get extras. Eventually station will demand a full day’s work for board and room, but not till you’re certified able. Is that all right with you?”

“I’m free?”

“For all reasonable purposes, yes.” The drinks arrived. Damon picked up his frothy concoction of summer fruit and alcohol, watched with interest as Talley sampled one of the delicacies of Pell and reacted with pleasure. He sipped at his own.

“You’re no stationer,” Elene observed after some silence. Talley was gazing beyond them, to the walls, the slow ballet of stars. You don’t get much view on a ship, Elene had said once, trying to explain to him. Not what you’d think.
 
It’s the being there; the working of it; the feel of moving through what could surprise you at any moment. It’s being a dust speck in that scale and pushing your way through all that Empty on your own terms, that no world can do and nothing spinning around one. It’s doing that, and knowing all the time old goblin Deep is just the other side of the metal you’re leaning on. You stationers like your illusions. And world folk, blue-skyers, don’t even know what real is.

He felt a chill suddenly, felt apart, with Elene and a stranger across the table making a set of two. His wife and the god-image that was Talley. It was not jealousy. It was a sense of panic. He drank slowly. Watched Talley, who looked at the screens as no stationer did. Like a man remembering breathing.
 
Forget station, he had heard in Elene’s voice. You’ll never be content here. As if she and Talley spoke a language he did not, even using the same words. As if a merchanter who had lost her ship to Union could pity a Unioner who had lost his, beached, like her. Damon reached out beneath the table, sought Elene’s hand, closed it in his. “Maybe I can’t give you what you most want,” he said to Talley, resisting hurt, deliberately courteous. “Pell won’t hold you forever now, and if you can find some merchanter to take you on after your papers are entirely clear… that’s open too someday in the future. But take my advice, plan for a long stay here. Things aren’t settled and the merchanters are moving nowhere but to the mines and back.”

“The long-haulers are drinking themselves blind on dock-side,” Elene muttered.
 
“We’ll run out of liquor before we run out of bread on Pell. No, not for a while. Things will get better. God help us, we can’t contain what we’ve swallowed forever.”

“Elene.”

“Isn’t he on Pell, too?” she asked. “And aren’t we all? His living is tied up with it.”

“I would not,” Talley said, “harm Pell.” His hand moved on the table, a slight tic. It was one of the few implants, that aversion. Damon kept his mouth shut on the knowledge of the psych block; it was no less real for being deep-taught Talley was intelligent; possibly even he could figure eventually what had been done to him.

“I—” Talley made another random motion of his hand, “don’t know this place. I need help. Sometimes I’m not sure how I got into this. Do you know? Did I know?” Bizarre connection of data. Damon stared at him disquietedly, for a moment afraid that Talley was lapsing into some embarrassing sort of hysteria, not sure what he was going to do with him in this public place.
 
“I have the records,” he answered Talley’s question, “That’s all the knowledge I have of it.”

“Am I your enemy?”

“I don’t think so.”

“I remember Cyteen.”

“You’re making connections I’m not following, Josh.”

Lips trembled. “I don’t follow them either.”

“You said you needed help. In what, Josh?”

“Here. The station. You won’t stop coming by—”

“You mean visiting you. You won’t be in the hospital anymore.” Suddenly the sense of it dawned on him, that Talley knew that. “You mean do I set you up with a job and cut you loose on your own? No. I’ll call you next week, depend on it.” “I was going to suggest,” Elene said smoothly, “that you give Josh comp clearance to get a call through to the apartment. Troubles don’t keep office hours and one or the other of us would be able to untangle situations. We are, legally, your sponsors. If you can’t get hold of Damon, call my office.” Talley accepted that with a nod of his head. The shifting screens kept their dizzying course. They did not say much for a long time, listened to the music and nursed that round of drinks into a second.

“It would be nice,” Elene said finally, “if you’d come to dinner at the end of the week… chance my cooking. Have a game of cards. You play cards, surely.” Talley’s eyes shifted subtly in his direction, as if to ask approval. “It’s a long-standing card night,” Damon said. “Once a month my brother and his wife would cross shifts with ours. They were on alterday… transferred to Downbelow since the crisis. Josh does play,” he said to Elene.

“Good.”

“Not superstitious,” Talley said.

“We won’t bet,” Elene said.

“I’ll come.”

“Fine,” she said; and a moment later Josh’s eyes half-lidded. He was fighting it, came around in an instant. All the tension was out of him.
 
“Josh,” Damon said, “you think you can walk out of here?”

“I’m not sure,” he said, distressed.

Damon rose, and Elene did; very carefully Talley pushed back from the table and navigated between them… not the two drinks, Damon thought, which had been mild, but the screens and exhaustion. Talley steadied once in the corridor and seemed to catch his breath in the light and stability out there. A trio of Downers stared at them round-eyed above the masks.

They both walked him to the lift and rode with him back to the facility in red, returned him through the glass doors and into the custody of the security desk.
 
They were into alterday now and the guard on duty was one of the Mullers.
 
“See he gets settled all right,” Damon said. Beyond the desk, Talley paused, looked back at them with curious intensity, until the guard came back and drew him down the corridor.

Damon put his arm about Elene and they started their own walk home. “It was a good thought to ask him,” he said.

“He’s awkward,” Elene said, “but who wouldn’t be?” She followed him through the doors into the corridor, walked hand in hand with him down the hall. “The war has nasty casualties,” she said. “If any Quens could have come through Mariner… it would be that, just the other side of the mirror, wouldn’t it?—for one of my own. So, God help us, help him. He could as well be one of ours.” She had drunk rather more than he… grew morose whenever she did so. He thought of the baby; but it was not the moment to say anything hard with her. He gave her hand a squeeze, ruffled her hair, and they headed home.

« ^ »

Cyteen Station: security area; 9/8/52

Marsh had not yet arrived, not baggage or man. Ayres settled in with the others, chose his room of the four which opened by sliding partitions onto a central area, the whole thing an affair of movable panels, white, on silver tracks. The furniture was on tracks, spare, efficient, not comfortable. It was the fourth such change of lodging they had suffered in the last ten days, lodging not far removed from the last, not visibly different from the last, no less guarded by the young mannequins, ubiquitous, and armed, in the corridors… the same for the months they had been at this place before the shifting about started.
 
They did not, in effect, know where they were, whether on some station near the first or orbiting Cyteen itself. Questions obtained only evasions. Security, they said of the moves, and: Patience. Ayres maintained calm before his companion delegates, the same as he did before the various dignitaries and agencies, both military and civilian—if that had any distinction in Union—which questioned them, interrogations and discussions both singly and in a group. He had stated the reasons and the conditions of their appeal for peace until the inflections of his voice became automatic, until he had memorized the responses of his companions to the same questions; until the performance became just that, performance, an end in itself, something which they might do endlessly, to the limit of the patience of their hosts/interrogators. Had they been negotiating on Earth, they would have long since given up, declared disgust, applied other tactics; that was not an option here. They were vulnerable; they did as they could. His companions had borne themselves well in this distressing circumstance… save Marsh. Marsh grew nervous, restless, tense.
 
And it was of course Marsh the Unionists singled out for particular attention.
 
When they were in single session, Marsh was gone from their midst longest; in the four times they had been shifted lately, Marsh was the last to move in. Bela and Dias had not commented on this; they did not discuss or speculate on anything. Ayres did not remark on it, settling in one of the several chairs in the living area of their suite and picking up from the inevitable vid set the latest propaganda the Unionists provided for their entertainment: either closed-circuit, or if it were station vid, it indicated mentalities incredibly tolerant of boredom—histories years old, accounts cataloging the alleged atrocities committed by the Company and the Company Fleet.
 
He had seen it all before. They had requested access to the transcripts of their own interviews with the local authorities, but these were denied them. Their own facilities for making such records, even writing materials, had been stolen from their luggage, and their protests were deferred and ignored. These folk had an utter lack of respect for diplomatic conventions… typical, Ayres thought, of the situation, of authority upheld by rifle-bearing juveniles with mad eyes and ready recitations of regulations. They most frightened him, the young, the mad-eyed, the too-same young ones. Fanatic, because they knew only what was poured into their heads. Put in on tape, likely, beyond reason. Don’t talk with them, he had warned his companions. Do whatever they ask and make your arguments only to their superiors.

He had long since lost the thread of the broadcast. He cast a look up and about, where Dias sat with her eyes fixed on the screen, where Bela played a game of logic with makeshift pieces. Surreptitiously Ayres looked at his watch, which he had tried to synch with the hours of the Unionists, which were not Earth’s hours, nor Pell’s, nor the standard kept by the Company. An hour late now. An hour since they had arrived here.

He bit at his lips, doggedly turned his mind to the material on the screen, which was no more than anesthetic, and not even effective at that: the slanders, they had gotten used to. If this was supposed to annoy them, it did not.
 
There was, eventually, a touch at the door. It opened. Ted Marsh slipped in, carrying his two bags; there was a glimpse of two young guards in the corridor, armed. The door closed.

Marsh walked through with his eyes downcast, but all the bedroom doors were slid closed. “Which?” he asked, compelled to stop and ask of them.
 
“Other side, other way,” Ayres said. Marsh slung back across the room and set his bags down at that door. His brown hair fell in disorder, thin strands about his ears; his collar was rumpled. He would not look at them. All his movements were small and nervous.

“Where have you been?” Ayres asked sharply, before he could escape.
 
Marsh darted a look back. “Foulup in my assignment here. Their computer had me listed somewhere else.”

The others had looked up, listened. Marsh stared at him and sweated.
 
Challenge the lie? Show distress? The rooms were all monitored; they were sure of it. He could call Marsh a liar, and make clear that the game was reaching another level. They could… his instincts shrank from it… take the man into the bathroom and drown the truth out of him as efficiently as Union could question him. Marsh’s nerves could hardly stand up to them if they did so. The gain was questionable on all fronts.

Perhaps… pity urged at him… Marsh was keeping his ordered silence. Perhaps Marsh wanted to confide in them and obeyed his orders for silence instead, suffering in loyalty. He doubted it. Of course the Unionists had settled on him… not a weak man, but the weakest of their four. Marsh glanced aside, carried his bags into his room, slid the door shut Ayres refused even to exchange glances with the others. The monitoring was probably visual as well, and continuous. He faced the screen and watched the vid.

Time was what they wanted, time gained by this means or gained by negotiations.
 
The stress was thus far bearable. They daily argued with Union, a changing parade of officials. Union agreed to their proposals in principle, professed interest, talked and discussed, sent them to this and that committee, quibbled on points of protocol. On protocol, when materials were stolen from their luggage! It was all stalling, on both sides, and he wished he knew why, on theirs.