Starfarers (24 page)

“Good evening, Kenri Shaun.”

He stopped, jerked from his reverie. Street light fell wan over the black hair and slim, decorously gowned form of the woman who had hailed him. “Good evening to you, Theye Barinn,” he said. “What a pleasure. I haven’t see you for—two personal years, I think.”

“Slightly less time for me.” It had been on Feng Huang, whence
Fleetwing
and
High Barbaree
went to different destinations before making for Sol. She smiled. “Too long, though. Where have you been hiding?”

“A party of us had to boat to Mars directly after our ship got in. Her mainframe navigator needed a new data processor. The Earth dealer told us he’d stopped carrying that type.”
We suspect he lied. He didn’t want to do business with tumies
. “We found one on Mars, brought it back, and installed it. Didn’t finish till today, and then, groundside, we had to go through two hours’ worth of admission procedures. Never did before.”

“I knew that. I asked your parents why you weren’t with them. But I—they supposed you’d be finished sooner. Didn’t you get”—she paused—“impatient?”

“Yes.” Feverishly. For Nivala, awaiting him. “The ship came first, however.”

“Of course. You were best qualified for the job.”

“My father’s handling my share of sales for me. I don’t like that much, anyway, and I’m not very good at it.”

“No, you’re born an explorer, Kenri.”

Chatter, monkey noises, keeping me from Nivala
. He couldn’t simply break off. Theye was a friend. Once he’d thought she might become more.

She continued quickly: “On the surface, things haven’t changed a lot since last I was here. The same Dominancy, the same buildings and technology and languages. More hectic, maybe. Not that I’ve ventured to see for myself. I take my impressions from the news and entertainment shows.”

“You’re probably well advised. I hear they’re clamping down on us.”

She flinched. The gladness fled her. “Yes. So far we’re
being denied permission to hold the Fair anywhere outdoors. And we have to wear a badge everywhere except the Town.”

Is that what that “special pass” business was about?
he wondered.
We didn’t want to make the spaceport official surlier by asking
. Nor did he now care to inquire, partly because of the tears he saw glint in her eyes.

Her mouth quivered. She reached a hand toward him. “Kenri, is it true? I’ve heard rumors, but I didn’t feel I … ought to ask your parents—”

“About what?” He wished immediately that he hadn’t snapped.

“You’ll resign? Quit the Kith? Become an Earthling?”

“We can discuss that later.” He couldn’t hold down the harshness. “I’m sorry, but I haven’t time this evening.”

She pulled her hand back.

“Good night, Theye,” he said more amicably.

“Good night,” she whispered.

He saluted again and strode off, fast, not looking back. Light and shadow slid over him. His footfalls rustled.

Nivala waited. He would see her tonight. Somehow, just then, he couldn’t feel quite happy about it.

She had
stood alone in a common room, looking at the stars in the viewscreen, and the illumination from overhead had been cool in her hair. Glimpsing her as he passed by, he entered quietly. What a wonder she was. A millennium ago, such tall, slender blondes had been rare on Earth. If the genetic adaptors of the Dominancy had done nothing else, they should be remembered with thanks for having recreated her kind.

Keen-sensed, she heard and turned about. The silver-blue eyes widened and her lips parted, half covered by a hand. He thought what a beautiful thing a woman’s hand was, set beside the knobbly, hairy paw of a man. “Oh,” she said. Her voice was like song. “You startled me, Kenri Shaun.”

“Apologies, Freelady.”

Since he had had no reason to come in—none that he could tell her—he felt breathtakingly relieved when she simply smiled. “No harm done. I’m too nervous.”

An opening for talk! “Is something the matter, Freelady? Anything I—anybody can help with?”

“No.” And, “Thank you,” she added. “Everyone is already very helpful.” They’d better be, with a passenger of her status. However, these first two daycycles of the voyage she’d been courteous, and he expected she’d continue that way. “It’s a sense of”—she hesitated, which wasn’t like a Star-Free—“isolation.”

“It’s unfortunate that we are an alien people to you, Freelady.”
Social inferiors. Or worse. Though you haven’t treated me so.

She smiled again. “No, the differences are interesting.” The smile died. “I shouldn’t admit this.” Her fingers brushed across his for a bare moment that he never forgot. “I should have grown used to it, outbound. And now I’m headed home. But the thought that … more than half a century will have passed … is coming home to
me.”

He had merely clichés for response. “Time dilation, Freelady. People you knew will have aged.”
Or died
. “But the Peace of the Dominancy still holds, I’m sure.”
All too sure.

“Yes, no doubt I can take up my life as it was. If I want to.” Her gaze went back to the blackness; stars and nebulae and cold galactic river. She shivered slightly under the thin blue chiton. “Time, space, strangeness. Perhaps it’s that—I fell to thinking—I’ll make the crossing in practically the same time as before, over the same distance, as far as the universe is concerned—except that it isn’t concerned, it doesn’t care, doesn’t know we ever existed—” She caught her breath. “And yet the return will take nine days longer than the going did.”

He took refuge in facts. “That’s because we’re rather heavily laden, Freelady, which
Eagle
wasn’t. Our gamma factor is down to about three hundred and fifty.”
Not that it ever gets much above four hundred. We merchantmen are not legendary
Envoy.
It isn’t necessary for us, it wouldn’t
pay; and maybe even we Kithfolk have lost the vision
. Kenri put the thought from him. It spooked too often through his head.

For a while they stood wordless. Ventilation hummed, as if the ship talked to herself. Nivala had once wondered aloud how a vessel felt, what it was like to be forever a wanderer through foreign skies. He hadn’t actually needed to explain, as he did, that the computers and robots lacked consciousness. She knew; this was a passing fancy. But it stayed with him, having been hers.

Nor did she now resent his pointing out an obvious technicality. She looked at him again. A breeze brought him a faint, wild trace of her perfume. “The time is more frightening than the space,” she said low. “Yes, a single light-year’s too huge for our imagining. But I can’t really grasp that you were born eight hundred years ago, Kenri Shaun, and you’ll be traveling between the stars when I’m dust.”

He could have seized the chance to pay a compliment. His tongue locked on him. He was a starfarer, a Kithman, belonging to nowhere and to no one except his ship, while she was Star-Free, unspecialized genius, at the top of the Dominancy’s genetic peerage. The best he could do was: “The life spans we experience will be similar, Freelady. One measure of time is as valid as another. Elementary relativity.”

She cast the mood from her. It could not have gone very deep. “Well, I never was good at physics,” she laughed. “We leave that to Star-A and Norm-A types.”

The remark slapped him in the face.
Yes, brain work and muscle work are the same. Work. Let the suboptimals sweat. Star-Frees shall concentrate on being aesthetic and ornamental.

She saw. He had not had much occasion to conceal his feelings. Abruptly, amazingly, she caught his right hand in both hers. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to—I didn’t mean what you think.”

“It’s nothing, Freelady,” he answered out of his bewilderment.

“Oh, it’s much.” Her eyes looked straight into his, enormous.
“I know how many people on Earth dislike yours, Kenri. You don’t fit in, you speak among each other of things unknown to us, you bring wares and data we want and drive hard bargains for them, you question what we take for granted—you’re living question marks and make us uncomfortable.” The pale cheeks had colored. She glanced down. Her lashes were long and sooty black. “But I know a superior type when I meet one. You could be a Star-Free, too, Kenri. If we didn’t bore you.”

“Never that, Freelady!”

They didn’t pursue the matter and he soon left her, with trumpets calling in him.
Three months,
he thought.
Three ship months to Sol.

A maple
stirred overhead as he turned at the Shaun gate, its leaves crackling in the wind. The street lighting didn’t do justice to their scarlet.
Early frost this year
, he guessed. The wind blew chill and damp, bearing autumnal odors, smoke from traditional hearthfires, cuttings and soil in gardens. He realized suddenly what had seldom come to mind, that he had never been here during a winter. He had never known the vast hush of snowfall.

Light poured warm and yellow from windows. The door scanned and recognized him. It opened. When he walked into the small, cluttered living room, he caught a lingering whiff of dinner and regretted arriving too late. He’d eaten at the spaceport, and not badly, but that was tech food. His mother cooked.

He saluted his parents according to custom and propriety. His father nodded with equal restraint. His mother cast dignity aside, hugged him, and said how thin he’d gotten. “Come, dear, I’ll fix you a sandwich. Welcome home.”

“I haven’t time,” he replied. Helplessly: “I’d like to, but, well, I have to go out again.”

“Theye Barinn was asking about you,” she said, elaborately
casual. “The
High Barbaree
came in two months ago.”

“Yes, I know. And we happened to meet on my way here.”

“How nice. Are you going to call on her tins evening?”

“Some other time.”

“Her ship will leave before ours, do you know? You won’t see her for years. Unless …” The voice trailed off.
Unless you marry her. She’s your sort, Kenri. She’d do well aboard
Fleetwing.
She’d give you fine children.

“Some other time,” he repeated, sorry for the brusqueness; but Nivala expected him. “Dad, what’s this about badges?”

Wolden Shaun grimaced. “A new tax on us,” he said. “No, worse than a tax. We have to wear them everywhere outside the Town, and pay through the nose for them. May every official of the Dominancy end in a leaky spacesuit with a plugged sanitor.”

“My group got passes at the spaceport, but we were told they were just for transit to here. Can I borrow yours tonight? I have to go into the city.”

Wolden gazed for a while at his only son before he turned around. “It’s in my study,” he said. “Come along.”

The room was crammed with his mementos. That sword had been given him by an armorer on Marduk, a four-armed creature who became his friend. That picture was a view from a moon of Osiris, frozen gases like amber in the glow of the mighty planet. Those horns were from a hunting trip on Rama, in the days of his youth. That graceful, enigmatic statuette had been a god on Dagon. Wolden’s close-cropped gray head bent over his desk as he fumbled among papers. He preferred them to a keyboard for composing the autobiography that officers were supposed to bequeath to their ships’ databases.

“Do you really mean to go through with this resignation?” he asked.

Kenri’s face heated. “Yes. I hate to hurt you and Mother, but—Yes.”

Wolden found what he was searching for. He let it lie. Face and tone kept the calm suitable to his rank. “I’ve seen others do it, mainly on colony planets but a couple of times on Earth. As far as I could learn afterward, mostly they prospered. But I suspect none of them were ever very happy.”

“I wonder,” said Kenri.

“In view of the conditions we’ve found here, the captain and mates are seriously considering a change of plans. Next voyage not to Aurora, but a long excursion. Long, including into regions new to us. We may not be back for a thousand years. There’ll be no more Dominancy. Your name will be forgotten.”

Kenri spoke around a thickness in his throat. “Sir, we don’t know what things will be like then. Isn’t it better to take what good there is while we can?”

“Do you truly hope to join the highborn? What’s great about them? I’ve seen fifteen hundred years of history, and this is one of the bad times. It will get worse.”

Kenri didn’t respond.

“That girl could as well be of a different species, son,” Wolden said. “She’s a Star-Free. You’re a dirty little tumy.”

Kenri could not meet his gaze. “Spacefarers have gone terrestrial before. They’ve founded lasting families.”

“That was then.”

“I’m not afraid. Sir, may I have the badge?”

Wolden sighed. “We won’t leave for at least six months—longer, if we do decide on a far-space run and need to make extra preparations. I can hope meanwhile you’ll change your mind.”

“I might,” said Kenri.
And now I’m lying to you, Dad, Dad, who sang me old songs when I was little and guided my first extravehicular excursion and stood by me so proudly on my thirteenth birthday when I took the Oath.

“Here.” Wolden gave him the intertwined loops of black cords. He pulled a wallet from a drawer. “And here are five hundred decards of your money. Your account’s at fifty thousand and will go higher, but don’t let this get
stolen.” Bitterness spat: “Why give an Earthling anything for nothing?” He clamped composure back down on himself.

“Thank you; sir.” Kenri touched the badge to his left breast. Molecules clung. It wasn’t heavy but it felt like a stone. He sheered off from that.
Fifty thousand decards! What to buy? Stuff we can trade—

No. He was staying here. He’d need advice about Earthside investments. Money was an antidote to prejudice, wasn’t it?

“I’ll be back—well, maybe not till tomorrow,” he said. “Thanks again. Good night.”

“Good night, son.”

Kenri returned to the living room, paused to give his mother a hug, and went out into the darkness of Earth.

At first
neither had been impressed. Captain Seralpin had told Kenri: “We’ll have a passenger, going back to Sol. She’s on Morgana. Take a boat and fetch her.”