Starfarers (68 page)

A few sullen men were slumped at tables, under the jerky obscenity of a live mural that must be a hundred years old. The tavern owned only half a dozen Standard-D girls, and they were raddled things who must have been bought third hand. One of them gave Kenri a mechanical smile, saw his face and dress and badge, and turned away with a sniff.

He made his way to the bar. There was a live tender who showed him a glazed stare. “Vodzan,” said Kenri. “Make it a double.”

“We don’t serve no tommies here,” said the bartender.

Kenri’s fingers whitened on the bar. He turned to go, but a hand touched his arm. “Just a minute, spaceman.” To the attendant: “One double vodzan.”

“I told you—”

“This is for me, Wilm. And I can give it to anyone I want. I can pour it on the floor if I so desire.” There was a thinness in the tone, and the bartender went quickly off to his bottles.

Kenri looked into a white, hairless face with a rakish cast to its skull structure. The lean gray-clad body was hunched over the bar, one hand idly rolling dice from a cup. There were no bones in the fingers, they were small delicate tentacles; and the eyes were colored like ruby.

“Thank you,” said Kenri. “May I pay—”

“No. It’s’on me.” The other accepted the glass and handed it over. “Here.”

“Your health, sir.” Kenri lifted the glass and drank. The liquor was pungent fire along his throat.

“Such as it is,” said the man indifferently. “No trouble to me. What I say here goes.” He was probably a petty criminal of some sort, perhaps a member of the now outlawed Assassins’ Guild. And the body type was not quite human. He must be a Special-X, created in the genetic labs for a particular job or for study or for amusement. Presumably he had been set free when his owner was done with him, and had made a place for himself in the slums.

“Been gone long?” he asked, looking at the dice.

“About twenty-three years,” said Kenri. “Sirius.”

“Things have changed,” said the X. “Anti-Kithism is growing strong again. Be careful you aren’t slugged or robbed, because if you are, it’ll do you no good to appeal to the city guards.”

“It’s nice of you to—”

“Nothing.” The slim fingers scooped up the dice and rattled the cup again. “I like somebody to feel superior to.”

“Oh.” Kenri set the glass down. For a moment, the smoky room blurred. “I see. Well—”

“No, don’t go off.” The ruby eyes lifted up to his, and he was surprised to see tears in them. “I’m sorry. You can’t blame me for being bitter. I wanted to sign on myself, once, and they wouldn’t have me.”

Kenri said nothing.

“I would, of course, give my left leg to the breastbone for a chance to go on just one voyage,” said the X dully. “Don’t you think an Earthling has his dreams now and then—we too? But I wouldn’t be much use. You have to grow up in space, damn near, to know enough to be of value on some planet Earth never heard of. And I suppose there’s my looks too. Even the underdogs can’t get together any more.”

“They never could, sir,” said Kenri.

“I suppose you’re right. You’ve seen more of both space and time than I ever will. So I stay here, belonging nowhere, and keep alive somehow; but I wonder if it’s worth the trouble. A man isn’t really alive till he has something bigger than himself and his own little happiness, for which he’d gladly die. Oh, well.” The X rolled out the dice. “Nine. I’m losing my touch.” Glancing up again: “I know a place where they don’t care who you are if you’ve got money.”

“Thank you, sir, but I have business elsewhere,” said Kenri awkwardly.

“I thought so. Well, go ahead, then. Don’t let me stop you.” The X looked away.

“Thank you for the drink, sir.”

“It was nothing. Come in whenever you want, I’m usually here. But don’t yarn to me about the planets out there. I don’t want to hear that.”

“Goodnight,” said Kenri.

As he walked out, the dice clattered across the bar again.

Dorthy had
wanted to do some surface traveling on Marduk, get to see the planet. She could have had her pick of the colony for escorts, but she chose to ask Kenri. One did not say no to a Star, so he dropped some promising negotiations for pelts with a native chief, hired a groundcar, and picked her up at the time she set.

They rode quietly for a while, until the settlement was lost behind the horizon. Here was stony desert, flamboyantly colored, naked crags and iron hills and low dusty thorn-trees sharp in the thin clear air. Overhead, the sky was a royal blue, with the shrunken disc of Sirius A and the brilliant spark of its companion spilling harsh light over the stillness.

“This is a beautiful world,” she said at last. Her tones came muffled through the tenuous air. “I like it better than Ishtar.”

“Most people don’t, Freelady,” he answered. “They call it dull and cold and dry.”

“They don’t know,” she said. Her fair head was turned from him, looking at the fantastic loom of a nearby scarp, gnawed rocks and straggling brush, tawny color streaked with the blue and red lightning of mineral veins.

“I envy you, Kenri Shaun,” she said at last. “I’ve seen a few pictures, read a few books—everything I could get hold of, but it isn’t enough. When I think of all you have seen that is strange and beautiful and wonderful, I envy you.”

He ventured a question: “Was that why you came to Sirius, Freelady?”

“In part. When my father died, we wanted some-one to check on the family’s Ishtarian holdings. Everyone assumed we’d just send an agent, but I insisted on going myself, and booked with the
Temeraire.
They all thought I was crazy. Why, I’d come back to new styles, new slang, new people … my friends would all be middle-aged, I’d be a walking anachronism … you know.” She sighed. “But it was worth it.”

He thought of his own life, the grinding sameness of the voyages, weeks slipping into months and years within a pulsing metal shell; approach, strangeness, the savage hostility of cruel planets—he had seen friends buried under landslides, spitting out their lungs when helmets cracked open in airlessness, rotting alive with some alien sickness; he had told them goodbye and watched them go off into a silence which never gave them back and had wondered how they came to die; and on Earth he was a ghost, not belonging, adrift above the great river of time, on Earth he felt somehow unreal. “I wonder, Freelady,” he said.

“Oh, I’ll adjust,” she laughed.

The car ground its way over high dunes and down tumbling ravines, it left a track in the dust which the slow wind erased behind them. That night they camped near the ruins of a forgotten city, a place which must once have been a faerie spectacle of loveliness. Kenri set up the two tents and started a meal on the glower while she watched. “Let me help,” she offered once.

“It isn’t fitting, Freelady,” he replied.
And you’d be too clumsy anyway, you’d only make a mess of it. His hands were deft on the primitive skillet.
The ruddy light of the glower beat against darkness, etching their faces red in windy shadows. Overhead, the stars were high and cold.

She looked at the sputtering meal. “I thought you…people never ate fish,” she murmured.

“Some of us do, some don’t, Freelady,” he said absently. Out here, it was hard to resent the gulf between them. “It was originally tabooed by custom in the Kith back when space and energy for growing food on shipboard were at a premium. Only a rich man could have afforded an aquarium, you see; and a tight-knit group of nomads has to ban conspicuous consumption to prevent ill feeling. Nowadays, when the economic reason has long disappeared, only the older people still observe the taboo.”

She smiled, accepting the plate he handed her. “It’s funny,” she said. “One just doesn’t think of your people as having a history. You’ve always been ground.”

“Oh, we do, Freelady. We’ve plenty of traditions, more so than the rest of mankind, perhaps.”

A hunting marcat screamed in the night. She shivered. “What’s that?”

“Local carnivore, Freelady. Don’t let it worry you.” He slapped his slug-thrower, obscurely pleased at a chance to show—what? Manliness? “No one with a weapon has to fear any larger animals. It’s other things that make the danger—occasionally a disease, more often cold or heat or poison gases or vacuum or whatever hell the universe can brew for us.” He grinned, a flash of teeth in the dark lean face. “Anyway, if it ate us it would die pretty quickly. We’re as poisonous to it as it is to us.”

“Different biochemistry and ecology,” she nodded. “A billion or more years of separate evolution. It would be strange, wouldn’t it, if more than a very few planets had developed life so close to Earth’s that we could eat it. I suppose that’s why there never was any real extrasolar colonization—just a few settlements for mining or trading or extracting organic chemicals.”

“That’s partly it, Freelady,” he said. “Matter of economics, too. It was much easier—in money terms, cheaper—for people to stay at home; no significant percentage of them could ever have been taken away in any event—human breeding would have raised the population faster than emigration could lower it.”

She gave him a steady look. When she spoke, her voice was soft. “You Kithmen are a brainy lot, aren’t you?”

He knew it was true, but he made the expected disclaimer.

“No, no,” she said. “I’ve read up on your history a little. Correct me if I’m wrong, but since the earliest times of space travel the qualifications have been pretty rigid. A spaceman just had to be of high intelligence, with quick reactions and stable personality both. And he couldn’t be too large, physically; but he had to be tough. And a dark complexion must be of some small help, now and then, in strong sunlight or radiation. … Yes, that was how it was. How it still is. When women began going to space too, the trade naturally tended to run in families. Those spacemen who didn’t fit into the life, dropped out; and the recruits from Sol were pretty similar in mind and body to the people they joined. So eventually you got the Kith—almost a separate race of man; and it evolved its own ways of living. Until at last you had a monopoly on space traffic.”

“No, Freelady,” he said. “We’ve never had that. Anyone who wants to build a spaceship and man it himself can do so. But it’s an enormous capital investment; and after the initial glamour had worn off, the average Solarian just wasn’t interested in a hard and lonely life. So today, all spacemen are Kithmen, but it was never planned that way.”

“That’s what I meant,” she said. Earnestly. “And your being different naturally brought suspicion and discrimination. … No, don’t interrupt, I want to say this through. … Any conspicuous minority which offers competition to the majority is going to be disliked. Sol has to have the fissionables you bring from the stars, we’ve used up our own; and the unearthly chemicals you bring are often of great value, and the trade in luxuries like furs and jewels is brisk. So you are essential to society, but you still don’t really belong in it. You are too proud, in your own way, to ape your oppressors. Being human, you naturally charge all the traffic will bear, which gives you the reputation of being gougers; being able to think better and faster than the average Solarian, you can usually best him in a deal, and he hates you for it. Then there’s the tradition handed down from Mechanoclastic times, when technology was considered evil and only you maintained a high level of it. And in the puritan stage of the Martian conquest, your custorn of wife trading—oh, I know you do it just to relieve the endless monotony of the voyages, I know you have more family life than we do—Well, all those times are gone, but they’ve left their legacy. I wonder why you bother with Earth at all. Why you don’t all just wander into space and let us stew in our own juice.”

“Earth is our planet too, Freelady,” he said, very quietly. After a moment: “The fact that we are essential gives us some protection. We get by. Please don’t feel sorry for us.”

“A stiff-necked people,” she said. “You don’t even want pity.”

“Who does, Freelady?” he asked.

On the edge
of the slum, in a zone bulking with the tall warehouses and offices of the merchant families, Kenri took an elevator up to the public skyway going toward the address he wanted. There was no one else in sight at that point; he found a seat and lowered himself into it and let the strip hum him toward city center.

The skyway climbed fast, until he was above all but the highest towers. Leaning an arm on the rail, he looked down into a night that was alive with radiance. The streets and walls glowed, strings of colored lamps flashed and flashed against a velvet dark, fountains leaped white and gold and scarlet, a flame display danced like molten rainbows at the feet of a triumphal statue. Star architecture was a thing of frozen motion, soaring columns and tiers and pinnacles to challenge the burning sky; high in that airy jungle, the spaceman could hardly make out the river of vehicles and humanity below him.

As he neared the middle of town, the skyway gathered more passengers. Standards in bright fantastic livery, Norms in their tunics and kilts, an occasional visitor from Mars or Venus or Jupiter with resplendent uniform and greedy smoldering eyes—yes, and here came a party of Frees, their thin garments, a swirling iridescence about the erect slender forms, a hard glitter of jewels, the men’s beards and the women’s hair elaborately curled. Fashions had changed in the past two decades. Kenri felt acutely aware of his own shabbiness, and huddled closer to the edge of the strip.

Two young couples passed his seat. He caught a woman’s voice: “Oh, look, a tommy!”

“He’s got a nerve,” mumbled one of the men. “I’ve half a mind to—”

“No, Scanish.” Another feminine voice, gentler than the first. “He has the right.”

“He shouldn’t have. I know these tommies. Give ’em a finger and they’ll take your whole arm.” The four were settling into the seat behind Kenri’s. “My uncle is in Transsolar Trading. He’ll tell you.”