Tripoint (30 page)

But it looked grimmer and grimmer.

Then he did spot a familiar backside. A shock of blond, spiked hair. A familiar swing to the walk.

“Capella!”

Said swinging walk never interrupted at all. He sprinted, overtook, grabbed an elbow. Gingerly.

“Not a sign,” Capella said darkly. “Not a perishing
sign
. And I’ve called in favors.”

Favors where Capella knew them might involve cages they didn’t want to rattle. Very dark places indeed.

“I’ve been out for two fucking
days
, Pella, I’ve been top to bottom of the station, I’ve been through records, I’ve been in the bars, I’ve been through computer services, I’ve put messages on the station system. I’ve looked in station employment and the spacer exchange. I’m out of places to look.”

“You look like hell.”

He rubbed an unshaven face with a hand that felt like ice. Tried to imagine what he was going to do or say if he didn’t find Tom Hawkins at all. Or if he couldn’t claim to be in command of the crew that did.

“When’d you eat last?” Capella asked.

He didn’t know. He shook his head. Remembered bar chips. A drink. God knew when. He hadn’t slept. Hadn’t showered. Hadn’t shaved. Hadn’t stopped walking in hours.

“Come on,” Capella said, and steered him for the frontages.

“We haven’t time. Pella, if we don’t find him…”

“Yeah, your ass is had. You just did us all such a favor. Come on.”

“Austin’s going to kill me.”

“Chrissy-sweet, I’m going to kill you, if captain-sir tosses us both off the ship, damned right I am. “ Capella didn’t give up his arm. She steered him into the dark of one of Pell’s ‘round the clock bars, into a vibrational wall of beat and light and music. He all but turned and walked out, confused by the input, except for Capella’s governing hand on his arm. Capella walked him up to the bar, tapped the counter in front of the barkeep with a black fingernail. The bracelet of stars glowed green. And the barkeep looked up with a stark, hard stare.

“Man wants something edible,” Capella said, “before he falls over. Can do?”

“Done,” the barman said, and shoved crackers at them. “Stew coming. What are you drinking?”

“Vodka and juice for him,” Capella said. “Rum for me. Scanlon’s.”

“You got it,” the barkeep said.

His knees made it to the table next the bar. He sat down. Good thing there was a chair under him.

Capella settled opposite. Folded her arms. Stared at him dead-on.

“We have got to find that son,” Capella said. “Think, dammit!

Where would he go? Is he religious? Has he got a kink? A vice? Has he got friends here?”

“No.—Hell, I don’t know. How would I know?”

“
Sprite
ever trade here?”

“No. I’m sure of that.”

“No business contacts. No companies with offices in places they do trade. Banks. Outfitters. Insurance companies. Religious organizations.”

“I don’t know! How could I know?”

“You could have asked him. You might have been curious. You might have wondered before you chucked him off to
Martin. “

“Don’t accuse me!”

The barman brought the drinks. Capella handed over her crew-card. “Put standard on it. I do math. Thanks.”

“He’s got two hundred,” Christian said.

“Two hundred what?” Capella asked.

“Two hundred in chits! I wasn’t going to turn him out broke! He’s got two hundred in hand. A fake passport. “ He got a breath. The air was cold, sullen cold, all the way to the center of his bones. He could admit, at least, the rest of his disgrace. “
Martin’s
got ten thousand.”

Capella hadn’t expected that. Clearly. She sat for a moment, then shook her head and gave a whispered whistle. “Shit-all. What’ve you got left here?”

“Five. Five to my
name
, Pella. I didn’t want to kill him!”

You never knew, with Capella, how anything played, or whether she thought you were sane or crazy. She sat staring for a moment and finally shook her head, looking away from him as if that much insanity was too much for her.

In her universe. In his. In Beatrice’s. In Austin’s. He didn’t know. He just never understood the rules. He never had. He got one set from implication and another set from Austin’s expectations, and Beatrice’s, and another still from Capella’s, and he just never understood the way to fit them together.

“Christian,” Capella said, then, and took his hand in hers, on which the bracelet of stars glowed as independent objects. “We’ll look. All we can do. We’ll look, and I’ll call in a couple more favors. I don’t know what more we can do.”

“Austin’s going to kill me.”

“Yeah. I do wish you’d thought about that. But in realspace we play with real numbers, don’t we?”

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—i—

PEOPLE CAME AND WENT, tens and twenties the hour, and there wasn’t a place to sleep, except the public restroom, as long as nobody came in. He had the 200c… but he didn’t dare go outside the area or use up his cash. He didn’t know the station, didn’t know the rules, didn’t know the laws or what he could get into or where the record might be reporting. When you ran computers for a livelihood you thought of things like that sure as instinct, and Tom personally didn’t trust anything he had to sign for. You didn’t, if you wanted to avoid station computers, use anything but cash.

At least Christian’s money wasn’t counterfeit. At least
Corinthian
hadn’t reported him to the cops. And he’d gone for the one place on Pell he knew he might find a friend… straight to the botanical gardens Tink said was on his must-do list every time he got to Pell.

The gardens, moreover, were a twenty-four hour operation… tours ran every two hours, with the lights on high or on the actinic night cycle, even in the dark, by hand-held glow-lights. Hour into hour into shift-change and shift again, he watched the tour groups form up and go through the glass doors. He watched people go through the garden shop, and come away with small potted plants. He shopped, himself, without buying. He knew what ferns were. There were violets and geraniums aboard
Sprite
, people traded them about for a bit of green; and
Sprite’s
cook raised mushrooms and tomatoes and peppers in a special dedicated small cabin, so he understood plants and fungi and spices.

He had more than enough time to sneak a read of sample slide-sets and even paper picture books on the shop stands and to listen to the public information vids. He learned about oaks and elms, and woolwood; and how buds made flowers and how trees lifted water to their tops. It kept him from thinking about the police, and the ache in his feet.

But every time new people arrived through the outer doors, he dropped whatever he was doing and went furtively to look over the new group, dreading searchers from
Corinthian
and hoping anew for Tink, scared to death that during some five minutes he had his eye off that doorway he was going to miss Tink entirely.

So supper was a bag of chips from a vending machine and breakfast the next day was a sandwich roll from the garden shop cafeteria, because by then he was starved, and he’d held out as long as he could.

He skipped lunch. He figured he’d better budget his two hundred, as far as he could, against the hour the director’s office or the ticket-sellers or gardeners or somebody noticed him hanging around and began to suspect he was up to no good.

Meanwhile he tried to look ordinary. He didn’t spend more than an hour at a time in the shop. He walked from place to place, browsing the displays, the shop, the free vid show. He lingered over morning tea in the cafeteria, where he could watch the outside door through its glass walls, and drank enough sugared tea, while he could get it, that the restroom was no arbitrary choice afterward. He constantly changed his pattern in sitting or standing. He didn’t approach people. If they spoke to him he was willing to talk, only he had to say he was waiting for a group, and claim the truth, that he hadn’t had the tour, but, yes, he’d heard it was worth it. Once a ticketer did ask him could he help him, with the implied suggestion that he might move along, now, the anticipated crack of doom—but his mind jolted into inventive function, then, and he said he’d made a date and forgotten when and he didn’t want to admit it to the girl. So he meant to stand there until she showed. He was desperate. He was in love. The ticketer decided, evidently, that he was another kind of crazy, not a pickpocket or a psych case, and shot him tolerant looks when he’d look toward newcomers through the doors. He’d mime disappointment, then, and dejection and walk away, playing the part he’d assigned himself without much need for pretense.

That bought him off for a while, he figured. But he also took it for a warning, that if it went on too long the ticketer was going to ask him again, and maybe put somebody official onto him.

So he embroidered the story while he waited. He was desperately in love. He’d had a spat with the girl—her name was Mary. He couldn’t call her ship. She was the chief navigator’s daughter and her mother didn’t like him, and now he couldn’t find her. But he thought she might be sorry, too, about the fight. He thought she might show up here, to make up. He borrowed shamelessly from books he’d read and vids he’d seen. She had two brothers who didn’t like him either. He thought they’d told her something that wasn’t true, that started the fight… well, he
had
missed their date, but that was because he’d gotten a call-back to his ship and he couldn’t help it, and he’d tried to call her, but he thought her mother hadn’t passed on the message.

“No word yet?” the ticketer would ask him.

And once, “Son, you ever think of sleep?”

He looked woebegone and shook his head. It didn’t take acting. He was so tired. He was so hungry. He watched the tour groups gathering and going in, he watched the young lovers and the parents with kids and the spacers on holiday and the old couples who came to do the evening tour. He saw the amazing green and felt the moist coolness from the gardens when the doors would open, cool air that wafted in with strange, and wonderful scents. You could do a little of it by computer. You could walk in a place like that. You could even get cues for the smells and hear the steps you made, on tape. But the brochure—he’d read every one, now, in his waiting, from the selection they had in the rack—said that it was unique, every time, that it changed with seasons, that it could put you in touch with the rhythms of Earth’s moon and seas.

He stood outside the vast clear doors, and turned back again when they shut, and went back to his waiting, figuring maybe Tink had business to do first, and wouldn’t come here until maybe tomorrow.

He didn’t know. He was hungry and he was desperate. He thought (thinking back into his made-up alibi) that he might pretend to be some total chance-met stranger calling in after Tink, and maybe get a call through
Corinthian’s
boards and out to him through the com system, but maybe they’d suspect, maybe they had a voice-type on him and they’d figure he might try to contact Tink and they’d come up here and haul him away with no chance of making a deal.

Hunger, on the other hand, he still had the funds to do something about. He splurged a whole 5c on a soup and salad, I which was astonishingly cheap on Pell, especially here, where green salad was a specialty of the restaurant.

It looked good when they set it in front of him. He didn’t get it often enough. The soup smelled wonderful.

He’d only just had a spoonful of the soup when he saw, the other side of the glass, coming in the doors, a dark-haired woman in
Corinthian
coveralls.

He let the spoon down. He ducked his head. His elbow hit the knife and knocked it off the table. On instinct he dived after it, as a place of invisibility.

He straightened up and didn’t see her. Presumably she’d gone to the gathering area, just past the corner. He turned around to get up.

Stared straight at
Corinthian
coveralls. At dark hair. At a face he knew.

“Ma’am,” he said, compounding the earliest mistake he’d made with Saby.

“Mind if I join you?”

He was rattled. He stumbled out of his chair, on his way to outright running, and ended up making a sit-down-please gesture. He fell back into his seat, thinking she was surely stalling. She’d probably phoned
Corinthian
.

“Have you called them?” he asked.

Saby didn’t look like a fool. He could be desperate enough to do anything, she couldn’t know. He saw calculations go through her eyes, then come up negative, she wouldn’t panic, she knew he might be dangerous.

“Not yet,” she said. It had to be the truth. It left him room to run. “I hear you didn’t like Christian’s arrangements.”

“I don’t trust him,” he said. “Less, now.”

“The captain wasn’t in on it.”

“I never thought so,” he said.

“Christian’s in deep trouble,” Saby said. “Have your soup.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Listen. The captain wants you to come back. The passport’s a fake. There’s just all kinds of trouble. There’s some real nice people who could get hurt.”

The waiter came over, offered a menu.

“Just coffee,” Saby said. “Black.”

The waiter left. Tom stirred his tea with no purpose, thinking desperately what kind of bargain he could make, and thinking how it was a ploy, of course it was. But a captain had a ship at risk because of him, a ship, his trade, his license, all sorts of things.

Which meant once Saby made that phone call, all hell was going to break loose, and they’d take him back, they’d
take
him back, come hell or station authorities. Couldn’t blame anyone for that. Any spacer would.

“He’d really like it if you’d come back,” Saby said.

“Yeah,” he said. “I guess he would.”

“I don’t think he’d have you on scrub anymore.”

“I like scrub fine. It’s good company.”

“We don’t want trouble.”

“I know you don’t. I don’t. Just give me my passport and you won’t hear a thing from me.”