Tripoint (31 page)

Saby looked at the table. The waiter brought the coffee. She sipped it, evidently satisfied. “So why did you come here?” she asked him, then.

“I heard about the gardens. It was a place I knew to go.”

“I didn’t plan to find you. I just happened here.—But if I called the ship, you know, if I told them you were coming back, I think it would make them rethink everything. I don’t think you’d end up in the brig again. I really don’t.”

“I get to be junior pilot, right?”

“I don’t think that.”

“It’s not a damned good offer.”

“What do you want?”

He didn’t know. He didn’t think any of it was true. He shook his head. Took a spoonful of cooling soup.

“Well,” Tink said out of nowhere. Torn looked up. “They’re looking for you, “ Tink said.

Last hope. A ball of fire and smoke.

“Did you tell her?”

“Tell her what?” Tink asked.

“That I’d be here.”

“I didn’t know you’d be here,” Tink said, sounding honestly puzzled.

It was too much. He shook his head. He had a lump in his throat that almost prevented the soup going down.

“Tink was going to the gardens,” Saby said. “He always does. I said I’d meet him here.”

“Not like a date or anything,” Tink said, sounding embarrassed. “She’s an officer.”

“Tink’s a nice date,” Saby said. “Knows everything there is about flowers.”

“I don’t,” Tink said.

He’d been caught by an accident. By the unlikeliest pair on
Corinthian
. Nothing dramatic. Tink and Saby liked flowers. What was his life or what were his plans against something so absolutely unintended?

“Call the ship,” he said. Tink clinched it. He didn’t want the cops. He didn’t want station law. “Tell them… hell, tell them you found me. Say it was clever work. Collect points if you can get ‘em.”

“You seen the gardens?” Saby asked.

He shook his head.

“You like to?” Saby asked.

Of course he would. He just didn’t think she was serious.

“You got to,” Tink said. And to Saby: “He’s got to.”

“You want to?” Saby asked.

“Yeah,” he said.

“You through?” Saby asked, and waved a hand. “Finish the salad. We’ve got time.”

“Good stuff here,” Tink said. “We’re taking on a load of fresh greens. Tomatoes. Potatoes. Ear corn.
Good
stuff…”

He’d only gotten potatoes and corn in frozens. He thought about the galley. About Jamal. Ahead of Austin Bowe, damned right, about Jamal, and Tink. A homier place than the accommodation his
father
assigned him. The pride Tink had in his work… he envied that. He wanted that. There were things about
Corinthian
not so bad.

If one had no choice.

“You want to go the tour, then?” he asked Saby. “I swear I won’t bolt. I promise. I don’t want you guys in trouble.”

“No problem,” Saby said. “I give everybody one chance.”

He shoved the bowl back. Half soup. Half salad. He hated to waste good food, especially around Tink. But he didn’t trust more Corinthians wouldn’t just happen in, on somebody’s phone call, and it had gotten important to him, finally, to see the place’ he’d seen beyond the doors, the path with the nodding giants he thought were trees. He’d heard about Pell all his life, some terrible things, some as strange as myth. He’d not seen a Downer yet. But he imagined he’d seen trees, in his view through the doors.

And if he’d only a little taste of Pell… he wanted to remember it as the storehouse of living treasures he’d heard about as a kid. He wanted the tour the kid would have wanted.

Didn’t want to admit that to his
Corinthian
watch, of course. He thought Tink was honest, completely. But he wasn’t sure Saby wasn’t just going along with anything he wanted until reinforcements arrived.

“I got a phone call to make first,” Saby said.

“Yeah,” he said. “I guess you do.”

He was surprised she was out in the open about it. It raised his estimation of Saby, and made him wonder if she had after all come here, like Tink, with Tink, just to see the trees.

He watched her walk away and outside the restaurant. He went to the check-out and paid the tab, in cash. He went out with Tink, toward the ticket counter, finally.

“Let me get the tickets,” he said to Tink. “It’s on my brother. He gave me funds.”

Tink didn’t seem to understand that. Tink seemed to suspect something mysterious and maybe not savory, but he agreed. Tink looked utterly reputable this mainday evening, which was Tink’s crack of dawn morning—wearing
Corinthian-green
coveralls that hid the tattoos except on his hands. His short-clipped forelock was brushed with a semblance of a part. He had one discreet braid at the nape. Most men looking like that were looking for a spacer-femme who was also looking. Not Tink. And he understood that. At twenty-three, he began to see things more important than the endless search after encounters and meaning in some-one. Some-thing began to be the goal. Some-thing: some credit for one’s self, some achievement of one’s ambitions, some accommodation with the illusions of one’s misspent childhood.

Saby came back from her phone call, all cheerful, her dark hair a-bounce, mirth tugging at the corners of her mouth. “The captain says about time you reported in. I told him you were waiting to take the tour. He said take it, behave ourselves, and we’re clear.”

“He said that?” He didn’t believe it. But Saby didn’t look to be lying. She was too pleased with herself.

“Come on. Let’s get tickets.”

“Got ‘em,” Tink said.

“Christian’s compliments,” he couldn’t resist saying. “His money.”

Saby outright grinned. And pulled him and Tink, an elbow apiece, toward the staging area.

—ii—

IT WAS ROSES TINK FAVORED. But trees and the concept of trees loomed in his mind and forever would, palms and oaks and elms and banyans and ironhearts, ebony and
gegypa
and
sarinat
. They whispered in the fan-driven winds, they shed a living feeling into the air, they dominated the space overhead and rained bits and pieces of their substance onto the paths.

“If a leaf’s fallen,” the guide told them, “you can keep it. Fruits and flowers and other edibles are harvested daily for sale in the garden market.”

Leaves were at a premium. Tourists pounced on them. But one drifted into his reach, virtually into his hand, gold and green.

“You can dry it,” Tink said. “I got two. And a frozen-dried rose.”

“The hardwoods come from Earth,” the tour guide said, and went on to explain the difference between tropics and colder climates, and how solar radiation falling on tilted planets made seasons—the latter with reference to visual aids from a tour station. First time the proposition had ever made sense to him.

Then came the flowers, in the evolution of things, the wild-flowers and finally the ones humans had had a hand in making… like Tink’s roses, hundreds and hundreds of colors. Individual perfumes, different as the colors. The reality of the sugar flowers. The absolute, sense-overwhelming profusion of petals.

It smelled… unidentifiable. There was something the scent and the assault of color did that the human body needed. There was something the whole garden did that the human body couldn’t ignore. He forgot for a minute or two that he was going back onto
Corinthian
, and that if things had gone differently he might have had a hope of his own ship.

But that might come around again.

There might be a chance. There might be…

Fool’s thought, he told himself, and felt Saby’s hand on his arm, and listened to Saby talk about the roses, and the jonquils and iris and the tulips and hyacinths. Figure that the cornfields and the potatoes were much more important, yielding up their secrets to the labs as well as supplying stations and spacers direct…

Interesting statistics about the value they were to humankind. About human civilizations riding botanical adaptations to ascendancy.

But less inspiring than the sensory level… and he was glad that the tour wended its final course back to the whispering of the tall trees, back to that sweet-breathing shadow. His legs ached from walking. Felt as if they’d made the entire circuit of the station.

Maybe they had. But he took the invitation the guide offered, to linger a moment on the path. He didn’t want to go out, where, he’d been thinking the last half hour, a whole contingent of
Corinthian
crew must be waiting for him.

Maybe Christian, too. Probably Christian—madder than hell.

But a ship was a place. A station wasn’t, in his book. He’d had his taste of dodging the station authorities just trying to evade questions from the botanical gardens staff. He didn’t want to do it dockside and in and out of hiring offices, trying to stay out of station-debt, which, if he got into that infamous System… no.

Which meant a return to
Corinthian
was rescue, in a way, and he was willing to go. But he didn’t want to lose the souvenir leaf—the garden was a place he wanted to remember and wasn’t sure he’d see again. So, fearing a little over-enthusiasm on the part of the arresting party he was sure was waiting, he asked Saby to keep the leaf safe for him. “Sure,” she said, and slipped it into her sleeve-pocket.

So the tour was done, and he walked out with Tink and Saby.

Didn’t find the reception party—and he was so sure it existed he stopped and stood in the doorway, looking for it.

“She’s a pretty one,” the ticketer at the door said—to him, he realized then, and then, in the racing of his bewildered wits, remembered the lie he’d told, about waiting for a girlfriend.

“Yeah,” he said, and only wanted to get out of there before some other remark started trouble, but Saby laughed, took the cue and hooked her arm into his, steering him away and on, toward the doors.

“Tink,” she said, “it’s all right. You don’t know where we are. Right? We’ll make board call. Captain’s orders.”

Tink didn’t look certain about that.
He
wasn’t certain about this ‘don’t know where we are’ and ‘captain’s orders’… not that Saby was likely to use physical force. But Saby clearly had the upper hand in the information division, and
he
could be in deep trouble, for all he knew, headed for one more ship like
Christophe Martin
.

Tink said, looking straight at him. “Tom,—if she says it’s so, it’s so. If she says do, you do it. All right? Is that all right?”

Tink meant it. Tink meant it a hundred percent, like a nervous mama turning her kid over to a stranger she almost trusted, and he had it clear who was in what role in Tink’s book: if he did anything Saby could complain of, Tink was going to find him, he had no question.

“Yeah,” he said, and meant it. “No problems. I
want
to go back to the ship. I’m willing to go. “ It finally occurred to him to say that, and he thought at least Tink would believe him.

“Come on,” Saby said, tugging on the arm still linked with hers, and he had the momentary, panicked thought that if anything happened to Saby, if any remote, unpredictable accident happened to Saby Perrault, he was a dead man, not alone in Tink’s book, but with the rest of
Corinthian
, the same law that, had brought
Sprite’s
crew to Marie’s defense, however belated, the same that defended every merchanter on dockside and made, stations skittish of any challenge to ship-law, if two ships decided to settle a problem, or if, however rarely, a spacer disappeared off a dockside. Saby could call down all of
Corinthian
, hire-ons the same as born-crew, he got that clear and clean from Tink.

And he was, on those grounds, as much a prisoner in Saby’s light, cheerful grip as he would have been in the hands of the delegation he’d expected.

He didn’t see where Tink went. Maybe to the shops, maybe to another lift. But Saby coded Blue 9/20 on the lift pad where they stopped. The car took a moment or two arriving.

“That was nice,” Saby said, hugging his arm tight. “It’s always different, the gardens. I try to go at least once. I don’t want to be on a planet. I really don’t like the thought of infalling. The gardens are really just close enough for me. They do weather sometimes. I think that’s just on the morning tour. They say you can plan on getting wet.”

“I’m not going to run away,” he said. “You can let go.”

She didn’t let go. She kept it physical—meaning knock her down if he wanted to run. And you could die for that, if Tink got hold of you. “I’ll take you back to the ship,” she said, “if you really want.”

“What’s my choice?”

“The
Aldebaran
. I talked to Austin. He’s just really pissed at Christian. He said it’s my call. The
Aldebaran’s
a really nice place. Good food. Class One. You tell me you won’t do anything stupid and you can stay there and we can have first-class food and soak up the latest vids. No sex in the offer, understand, just a place to be for a few days.”

He was relieved at the no-sex part. Wasn’t a mach’ thing to be relieved at. Or maybe it was. Human dignity. If you reckoned that. He didn’t like being shoved, ordered, ultimatumed, or kidnapped. He’d grown very touchy about kidnapped.

“Why?” he asked.

But the car came, and they got in, with two other riders aboard. Saby smiled. He smiled. Acted easy. The other passengers did, clearly romantically inclined, hand in hand. Everybody smiled at everybody. Saby hung on to his arm and his nerves were strung tight as wire, the whole short distance out to Blue 9/20, where they got off and the other spacers stayed.

“What’s the deal?” he asked, then, in the brief privacy they had as they walked.

“The offer?”

“The sleepover. The fancy food. You.”

“I told you. I don’t come with the room.”

“Yeah, that’s fine. I don’t, either. But why?”

“Because you’re not a fool. Because Christian’s got it coming, and Austin’s pissed. That’s enough.”

“I don’t see it.”

“Do you dance?”

“Do I dance?”

“I know this restaurant. They’ve got a view, this huge real view of the stars from the dance floor. I can teach you.”