A Passage of Stars, Page 4

  “So you help the booters.”

  “Never so noble,” he said with a slight grimace. “Bootleggers go up in the nonoptimum times. It’s more expensive for them, but they can’t be traced by Station or by Elly Port tracers, and for the same reason, we’re in no danger of being caught looking the other way, since at those times we’re their only monitor. But there’s never an authorized lift from Apron Port. Only unofficial ones. Even the booters go through us.”

  “Do your parents know?”

  He grinned again, that engaging blend of indolence and sensuality. “Mom and Grandmam Caenna set the whole system up. Dad doesn’t know—he’d feel duty-bound to turn them in.”

  Lily looked at him intently for some moments. He basked in the force of her appraisal. “I never took you for a revolutionary,” she said finally.

  He tightened his embrace to pull her closer. “Do you love me for it?” he asked softly.

  “No.” She pushed away from him. “I won’t lie to you. There isn’t a man I’ve met here who—I don’t know—I just feel like they’re all so—”

  “So predictable,” he said glumly. “I know. You’ve said it often enough. Even that hot-tempered asteroid miner you left me for last year?”

  She winced. “Don’t throw it in my face. You’re worth ten of him.”

  “You didn’t think so then.”

  She shrugged, embarrassed. “He had his—good qualities. But even a short temper becomes predictable after a while.”

  The admission brought a faint smile to his lips. “At least I’m not alone. The only man I’ve never heard you condemn with that quality is Master Heredes.”

  “Of course not. But Master Heredes isn’t—”

  He gave a short, ironic laugh. “Master Heredes isn’t the kind of person who propositions, or gets propositioned. Even if one was tempted.”

  “Are people tempted?” Lily asked, abruptly curious. “I guess after all these years as his student, it had never occurred to me. I’m not sure why.”

  “Perhaps his unpredictability isn’t unpredictable enough for your tastes.”

  “Oh, Finch! Maybe he’s just too important to me as my sensei. Hoy. And I do like you better for it, for what you’re doing. I mean that.” He sighed and let her stand up. “I’m going to regret this,” he said, turning to the console. “Go shower yourself and your clothes. I’ll see if the booter who’s going up in half a rev will take you. But only to Station, mind.” He caught her movement toward him in his peripheral vision. “Don’t say it,” he said hastily, “because you won’t mean it.” She stopped. “Just go clean up.”

  Almost half a rev later she and Finch stood, Bach at her feet, by the ramp that led on to the in-system shuttle run by a pair of elderly and extremely well-dressed brothers. Finch handed over her duffel bag, which he had insisted on carrying, and stood somewhat awkwardly in front of her. The wind tugged at their clothes and hair, incessant and strong.

  “These two are safe,” he said finally. “They’ll get you to Station, no problems—you won’t be idented or anything. You shouldn’t have any problem finding that Captain Cha.”

  There was a pause.

  Lily smiled slightly. “I suppose you mean the problem will be cutting Master Heredes loose. You’re sure you don’t want to come?”

  “Frankly, Lily, I doubt if I would be any use. And Swann said she’d only cover for me for as long as it took me to get you here and back.” He shrugged, smiling with a trace of self-mockery.

  “Don’t underestimate yourself,” said Lily softly. “It’s your worst fault.”

  One of the brothers stuck his head out of the hatch and called for her.

  She put out a hand to grasp Finch’s shoulder, pulled him toward her. He put his arms around her and they embraced, then kissed.

  “Is it really my worst fault?” he said into her ear.

  “Oh, yes.” Lily thrust him gently away from her and picked up her duffel bag. Bach rose, rocked to one side by a gust of wind, and righted to his correct axis. “You do more things well than you think you do.”

  He smiled, a bit wanly. She stepped onto the ramp. “When will you be back?” he asked quickly.

  Lily paused. “I don’t know.” She felt the medallion lying smooth against her skin under her shirt. The wind whipped her black hair up across one cheek, shifted to strike directly into her face, bringing tears to her eyes. “I don’t know,” she repeated, gazing out at the high rock walls that sheltered Apron Port, at the distant huddle of buildings that marked the town, the scatter of ships lying still and windswept in their berths, and at Finch, his hair and clothes seeming alive in the air. “Maybe I’ll never be back,” she said, too softly for him to hear, and she took an abrupt step toward him and hugged him fiercely. He held her, let her go as soon as she relaxed her hold, and she went quickly up the ramp, Bach beside her.

  Inside, she turned to watch the ramp retract into the ship, the slow rising of the hatch. Beyond, Finch stood alone, a solitary figure buffeted by the wild air on the field, the distant howl of the wind generators and the shriek of the wind around rocks and buildings accompanying his wave. The hatch shut with a solid click and she stood sealed in the silence of the shuttle.

  One of the brothers appeared. “This way, luv,” He led her and Bach to launch chairs behind the pilot seat. “We’re lucky to still be running, sure enough,” he went on. “The current laws are killing decent commerce, just so Central can run its own monopoly. Do you realize that three small independents I know personally have been forced to booting—ourselves included—not ’cause we like this line of work. But it’s better’n the five others who lost their ships and had to turn to Station-hopping, or go to ground, or—worst—to Government Assistance just as if they were no better’n tattoos, all because the greedy elites pretend to govern in the name of all of us”—he strapped himself in and his more taciturn brother began lift-off proceedings—“so indeed we’re happy to do the Caennas a favor, them having done so much for us independents, all things considered.” He ceased talking because his attention was needed for the launch.

  A surge of power, and they were up. Breaking past the walls of the gorge, the storm hit them like the blow of a trained fighter. They were thrown and wrenched until Lily thought she would lose the quick meal Finch had insisted she eat. But the voluble brother made a few jokes, dispelling her fear, and they passed the cloud layer and arrived in the calm of the high atmosphere.

  “Nice ’bot,” observed the taciturn brother, glancing back at Bach, whose lights had all gone off during the turmoil. A single orange light winked on. Lily agreed mildly.

  “‘So appear the blessed children, prisoners, and guardians of the Void,’” said the voluble brother. The screens that covered the shuttle’s windshield rolled back.

  Lily gasped.

  Stars. A million. A myriad. Astonishing. The sky, which was never anything but clouds on Unruli, was black, strewn with an infinity of brilliant points of light.

  “This must be your first time up,” said the voluble one.

  “Ten years ago I came up to Station,” said Lily softly, still transfixed. “I was fifteen. I ran away from home.”

  “Didn’t get far,” remarked the taciturn one.

  “I got as far as Remote,” she said. “But I never forgot this.”

  Bach began to sing, softly,

  Wie wunderbarlich ist doch diese Strafe!—

  “How miraculous indeed is this punishment!”

  Static on the radio, and a disembodied voice cut in with numbers.

  “Ah, there’s Station on,” said the voluble brother. “We’ll be there faster’n you can say your periodic table.”

  “Hoy,” Lily said in a breath, staring at the stars.

  4 Station

  THE RADIO TRAFFIC, LILY soon discovered, had nothing to do with them, except as a guide to avoid Security as they approached Station.

  Of the three small moons that orbited Unruli, one had been found to be large enough
and stable enough to house the interlacing spread of Station. Here cargoes came up from Unruli or, routed through Tagalong, from the asteroid belt on in-system ships and were transferred to the highroad merchanters or the unmanned lowroad freighters for the haul between systems. Here news and information, personal communications, and government edicts were, for Security reasons or for astonishingly high prices, loaded into the occasional military cruiser and sent through windows at vectors only highly trained personnel on the best ships could risk, so the news could arrive at the next systems before the fastest merchanter would dare to. Here lived folk who by biology or prejudice could not exist on the world below. Here, on the fringes, the old areas long since left to decay, the poor and the unemployed and the desperate eked out a life separated from vacuum by the thinnest of patched walls. Here, beyond the reach of Security mostly because Security could not be bothered by an organism that would, if driven to ground, only spring up somewhere else, the booters landed, using their wits rather than the Portmaster’s controllers.

  The elderly brothers landed swiftly and, despite the pronounced jar at impact, efficiently. Lily offered to help offload their cargo; they refused. They did, however, request Bach’s assistance in clearing up a small matter—not illegal, they assured her—on Station’s mainline computer, and in return detailed for her a variety of shortcuts that would make her trip through Station quicker and more unobtrusive. She left alone to find the Portmaster’s office.

  As she waited in the port lock, it occurred to her that if the Sar hadn’t sent her to Heredes’s Academy after that attempt at running away, she might have been back here long ago. She smiled ruefully. The lock coughed and jerked open onto a scene quite unlike that brief glimpse of Station she remembered from ten years ago. But, of course, she had come nowhere near this area then.

  Each elongated finger of Station consisted of a public corridor allowing access to shops, offices, housing, docking facilities, and warehouses. Lily remembered the constant hum of machines and a quiet background of humans and pygmies and the occasional sta moving with purpose and order from dock to shop to office.

  Now, stepping over the bulkhead into the corridor, Lily smelled first: the odor of rotting food kept for too long in a closed area. Heard the pandemonium of life occasionally broken by the shrilling of a machine or the hiccuping jolts of an ill-repaired motor.

  Directly across from her, plastine two-by-fours boarded up the entrance to a shop; faded letters peeled off from the wall. Nearby, a lean-to of scrap metal jutted out into the corridor. Children, their faces colored in wild patterns with tattoos, gawked at her. A woman sat in a stain of wetness, singing in a loud, tuneless voice. Blue-and-orange checks patterned her hands and arms. A disfiguring burn that covered her left eye and cheek and ear marred the broader pattern on her face. Two men and a woman, dressed in identical cheap synthetics, spat on the woman as they passed her and paused to eye Lily with curiosity. Tattooed children cowered as the three walked on down the corridor. A tattooed shopkeeper, arms and legs a riot of purple swirls, bobbed up and down in a frenzy of bowing as the trio halted by him. One of the men spoke; something changed hands; they went on.

  “Hoy.” Lily turned to go in the same direction. “They could have warned me.” She stepped carefully over a pile of filthy rags, shifted to avoid the weaving path of a man whose face was mottled with blue dots and a suppurating rash, and made her way down the corridor. Litter lay strewn across the street. Children picked through it. Under a ripped and dirty awning, scrawny adolescents, dressed in clothing that revealed the elaboration of tattooed decoration on their bodies, beckoned to Lily as she passed.

  The lock into the next section was closed. She shifted from one foot to the other. Two dark alleys, shortcuts, branched off on either side of the seal. The lock blinked green; she stepped in and waited in the five-meter-square dead zone as it shut, repressurized—a moment of lightness as the gravity field switched placement—and opened into the next section.

  Like the other, this section curved away, alleys, shabby storefronts, and docking entrances breaking the dull sheen of wall. The untattooed trio she had seen before stood ahead at the curve, surrounding a tattooed woman who seemed to be pleading with them. As Lily approached she saw the woman give a handful of beads to one of the men. Again they paused to glance at Lily before they went on. The tattooed woman, weeping, ran into her shop.

  Lily came to the lock. A tattooed man in poor but neat clothing bowed to her from his storefront. Behind him, a clean child swept under the awning, careful with the orderly display of homewares. Lily smiled at the man, and he smiled back, bobbing again, as the lock opened and she stepped in with two other people.

  Immediately she saw a difference. The storefronts onto the next corridor were lit and in good repair, and each establishment name was suffixed by the official section number, F1. And at least half these people were not tattooed. For the first time, she saw the occasional black-and-gray uniform of Security personnel.

  In section F2, a few of the businesses had signs: “No tattoos allowed.” “Ridani not spoken here.” Machines droned in the background. One front advertised a school, another a medical clinic.

  In the next lock, a good dozen people passed through with Lily to the main sections. Five brightly dressed pygmies, their two-fingered, two-clawed hands waving frantically in the air as they talked, hurried into a well-lit alley that would lead, Lily knew, to one of the low-gravity sections where they lived. Two women sat conversing at a street-side cafe, a thin tattooed girl standing behind them holding their packages. A cargo robot motored carefully down the corridor. With her neat tunic and trousers and clear skin, Lily rated scarcely a passing glance. The one tattooed girl who walked alone up the street, not carrying anything, was stared at. Even the pygmies, barely a meter tall, with their half-human, half-birdlike features, were considered commonplace.

  In the next section at least four corridors thrust out from a main square. A small computer gazebo in the center displayed, after several transactions, a map of Station. Lily cast a quick eye over the berth arrangements, laid out numerically by sections; the zones she had first come through were labeled as “abandoned” and not referenced for docking at all. A distinctive sign marked Portmaster’s office.

  Section A3, like all sections that housed government sections, had a high incidence of the black-and-gray Security uniforms. Portmaster’s office adjoined the central square and by itself took up an area as wide as a street. All manner of folk stood in line at the Permits counter. Others sat, patient but noisy, on plastine benches. Along one wall, the arrival and departure and assignment lists scrolled past on huge screens. Lily unclipped her com-screen from her belt and found an open plug-in on the wall. Next to her a long-limbed sta, dressed in expensive silks whose color complemented the rust sheen of her scalelike skin, cursed in a fluid undertone as unwanted information came up on her screen. Her clipped and tied mane shook with suppressed emotion.

  Lily queried for the berth and departure time of the ship that had left with Heredes. The screen went blank while memory was searched. For all she knew, they had gone on to Tagalong, skipping Station entirely. She would never be able to pick up their trail. But numbers rolled up on the screen, and there it was. The right ident, listed on the Apron Port log, with—and she smiled—a complaint of unauthorized launch duly logged against them by Caenna Harbormaster (H. F. Caenna, controller on duty). Perhaps the complaint had forced them to land at Station to receive clearance directly for a jump window out of system. Whatever the reason, they were there, berthed at M2-11, no departure time listed. And at Station, where ships in the official sections were manacled into place as a safety measure—so regulations stated—it was impossible to leave without authorization.

  Lily logged off. Beside her, the sta still punched numbers in, her double-thumbed, four-fingered hand fluent on the keys, and received unacceptable replies.

  The M2 berths lay in a stretch of corridor that housed docks and warehouses. The
double doors of one warehouse stood open, revealing a hive of silent activity within, pygmies sorting with almost telepathic cooperation through a cargo. At berth 5 two copper-skinned sta towered above a woman dressed in the tunic and belt of a mercenary. They acknowledged Lily as she passed and returned to their light-hearted conversation. The rest of the odd-numbered berths were vacant; green “free” lights advertised space. Two people passed Lily. A cleaning unit backed out of a berth several doors farther along. But at berth 11, Lily saw just the orange “occupied” light, the smooth blankness of the closed lock doors, and the com-panel empty of message or request.

  Had she really thought it would be so easy? That she had only to present herself at their door and they would hand Heredes over to her, recognizing her superior claims? Or that, finding an open, unguarded lock, she could walk onto the ship and free him? She realized now that she had never considered what she would do if she found the ship.

  The orange light glowed a steady negative at her. She smiled. She would just have to storm them—sometimes speed and surprise was the only tactic when the enemy had the better defensive position. If she was lucky, some of them might be stuck in line at the Portmaster’s office. But they wouldn’t be there forever. She needed Bach. She had to act now.

  She took the shortcuts back, narrow alleyways that snaked between the outstretched arms of Station. She had to backtrack to the K5 section before she found the first shortcut; damp and smelling of mold, it led her in a low, dark arc to section B7. A handful of makeshift seals branched off it into unimaginable dwellings, so close to vacuum that each movement must seem an invitation to disaster.

  Another alley led from B6 to G2, a short run from there from G4 to F4. In F4, three alleys branched out into dimness. She took the central one, found herself touching moist walls that gave beneath her hands. The floor was rough and broken. Here, where the corridors widened or where some hastily patched break had left space off the main path, people huddled, whispering, trading, watching. In the low light, Lily saw the telltale dapplings of tattoos.