Tripoint (33 page)

Then
he whirled around and ran leftward up the dockside, on what he was sure was blue-and-grey’s trail. Red flashes were still floating across his watering vision, it was still grey around the edges, and balance consequently wasn’t a hundred percent, but he was dead on course, with blue-and-grey and one other some distance ahead of him.

He didn’t see Capella. He kept going, double-fast, figuring on giving Mr. Sumbitch another quarrel to take his mind off her, figuring on his
Corinthian
backup to be coming, and hoping some
Corinthian
would have the basic sense to drag the sod he’d left behind him into the bar. Cops might ignore bar-business until it spilled onto the docks, but bodies in doorways were a guarantee of notice.

Just, if Capella had come out, too, and run into a trap…

“You!” he yelled, at blue-and-grey, with a stitch coming in his side and his head going around—he was too dizzy to chase the guys at a dead run. But run was what they did, then, damn the luck, just took out, both of them.

He ran, his head pounding like hell, vision fuzzing and tearing. He knocked shoulders with somebody in a better mood than he was—caught-step, recovered, chased the two until he knew he didn’t know where they’d gone—then leaned against a friendly support girder near a pharmacy frontage, sweating and aching for breath.

Pocket-com was beeping, when things got quiet. He fumbled after it and thumbed it on. “Christian. Yeah. Lost the guy. Got a fix?”

“What in hell’s going on?”

God.
Corinth-com
had rousted Austin out. Wasn’t what he wanted.

“Dunno, sir, I was walking out of
Jaco’s
—” He gasped for air. “—and some damnfool hit me over the head.”

“Thieves?”

“I—” It was better than any lie he could think of. He didn’t know what Capella was into. He didn’t spill Capella’s confidences—and he thought in the best functioning of his battered brain that an urgent request to cover her rear was at least in the neighborhood of a confidence. “Yes, sir, maybe. I dropped a guy in
Jaco’s
doorway. They find him?”

There was a delay while, one presumed,
Corinthian
asked on another channel.

“Travis says negative. Phone if you’ve got detail. “

Get off the com, Austin meant. Travis was mainday Engineering, and he’d been that for years, no green fool.

“Yessir. Working on it.—Sir. Have you seen my brother?”

A pause. “
Negative. “

As if Austin wouldn’t lie.

Damn!

Austin clicked out on him. And where Capella was…

“Chrissy!”

His heart did a flip. He turned around. Capella was there in the ambient noise of the docks, ghostlike, not a warning.

“Shit!” He got a breath. “Guy clipped me on the head. I was scared they’d got you…”

“You get him?”

“Got away. Who
were
those guys?”

“Them, I don’t know. Not a ship-patch in the lot, but they’re no station-slime.”

“Blue-and-grey. You knew him.”

“Yeah, I knew him.”

He didn’t like the tone or the faraway look Capella sent in that direction. Capella didn’t talk about times past. Or the Fleet. That was the deal. “Pella. Need-to-know, here. Just—is it personal? Or what?”

Capella could have a real bar-crawler look, type you’d pick up for a fast one and maybe cheap, till she went all business and gave you that down-the-gun-barrel stare. “I want to know what ship he’s on. I want to know who just came into port.

“Capella. “ He had his business track, too, when he had to. And he knew what he had a right to ask. “The one question. Personal? Or not?”

Capella didn’t answer for a moment. Then: “You remember those doors I said I rattled looking for elder brother?”

“Yeah?”

“Bad stuff. Real bad stuff. This is not a friend and it has a ship, apparently, I can’t think how else it got here. I’d sincerely like to lie in port until this leaves. It has to leave. Eventually.”

They’d seen port-scum. They’d dealt with it.
Corinthian
had had encroachers on their territory, in port, and in space. He’d never seen Capella spooked into sobriety by any opposition. She just got crazier.

She wasn’t now. Cold sober. Not laughing.

“Pella. We’ve got that Hawkins ship…”

“Screw the Hawkinses. This is Mazianni, you understand me.”

Capella didn’t use that word. Not about herself. Capella said Fleet.
The
Fleet, as if there wasn’t any other. As if they still served something besides survival.

“No,” he said. “Pella. Tell me the truth. I swear—it doesn’t go past me.”

Long silence. Then: “Worth your life. Mine. Yours. The ship. Yeah, I know we’ve got Hawkins troubles. But screw ‘em. Blow ‘em. Ships have got lost before now in the deep dark. But we can’t
go
out with this guy on our tail, and he will be, he
can feel
us in the dark.”

“We can’t not!”

“If Patrick’s in port, this isn’t the time I’d have sent shock-waves through the informational ambient here, you know what I mean? You seriously understand?”

“Patrick-who?”

“Patrick’s enough. Used to be
Europe. “

“Mazian himself?”

“Yeah.”

“He’s alive.”

“Oh, yeah. Stuff I can’t say, Christian-person.”

“
Christian
, dammit. I have a name.”

“Yeah. So did I. But names are little things. Winner. Loser. Right. Wrong. This side, that side. All that shit. On old Earth—they used to be superstitious about names. Like if you could call somebody the right one, you could catch their soul. And you don’t
want
to engage on that level, you truly
don’t
, Chrissy-love. You don’t want that karma with me.”

“Don’t play me for a fool, dammit, I don’t know your words.”

“I like you. Like you too much.”

“Is that why you’re sleeping with my brother?”

“Chrissy… Christian. Is that a matter? Is that sincerely a matter? We are talking about survival. We are talking about something…”

Capella didn’t finish.

“Yeah?” he said,
not
dismissing the matter of older-brother and Capella and what he thought had been going on.

“Christian. Not all of us trade with you. Some have their own notions. I need to talk with the captain.”

“Yeah,” he said.

It was all
he
knew to do.

—iv—

SABY WAS RIGHT. THE RESTAURANT view was spectacular, a real viewport (fortified, the sign at the door assured the patrons: even the Battle of Pell hadn’t compromised it) that reached from polished black floor to mirror-finish ceiling, a revolving view of the stars and the planet that spacers themselves rarely saw so directly. To either side, making silhouettes of the tables, dwarfing human dancers, the walls were high-rez screens, with magnified, filtered views, that spun and whirled in a camera-construct, a montage of images that a spacer’s body reacted to in expectation of accel and vector shifts that didn’t, of course, happen.

Meaning a spacer could get motion-sickness walking across the floor, if he was a cabin-dwelling merchanter whose well-loaded ship didn’t regularly do the maneuvers those shots described, but whose stomach knew when a
g
-shift ought to happen. Tom kept his eyes on the level surface where the floor was real as the waiter captain led them to their table. A stationers’ revenge on spacers, that tape was, that produced those images… or the stationers that produced it had no remotest idea they’d made an amusement ride for a spacer’s force-trained body.

Dance, did the woman want? Damned show-off spacer-femme. He was going to fall on his ass before he reached the table. Tripped over his own feet, but the chair saved him.

Grace under pressure.

They sat. They had cocktails. The food was good, if scant by his reckoning, small vegetable things he hadn’t seen on the tour, and a good sauteed fish with, they advertised, genuine herbs (not difficult) and genuine citrus sauce, an expensive and tongue-puzzling treat. But not an extravagance at Pell. He’d
seen
oranges growing. He’d got himself a leaf—well, Saby had it, but he’d caught it in mid-flight. He’d seen fish swimming in a man-made brook, almost enough to put him off eating this one. But not quite. It was good. The lights came and went and whirled about the polished floor.

And against the light, shadows came, once, that he took for children, until a handful of spacer-diners near them stopped, and stared.

He looked, too, and saw the glint of breathing-masks with a little increase of heart rate. Downers, a handful of them, and the sight richocheted off the study he’d done as a boy—off all the sense of the strange and unfathomable that a boy could romanticize. Alien intelligence, if eccentric and even childlike to human estimation.

“Look,” he whispered to Saby, not to be rude, because they were quite near.

“Local sun’s sacred to them,” Saby said. “They can come here. It’s the law.”

“Law, hell. They’re people. It’s their world. “ He’d thought he almost liked Saby tonight. Not with that attitude.

“Yeah,” Saby said. “But good there’s a law. Damned shame we have to make a law. What I hear… we had to explain crime to them.”

“They have deviants.”

“Not criminals.”

He was discussing criminality with a
Corinthian
crewwoman. “No kidnappers?”

“No reason, I guess. “ Saby refused the bait. “But I wouldn’t be a Downer. I’d rather have our faults… since we can’t figure theirs. Seems safer.”

The waiter came. Saby ordered a drink. He did. The band had started. He saw the Downer-shadows bobbing to the music, knees bending ever so slightly, to tunes light, classic, rather than current. Couples were walking onto the floor.

Going to fall on my ass, he thought.

They had the cocktails. His was lime and vodka, hers was import Scotch. The music was slow and soft, and the Downers had filed away to the edges of the dark. They lived in the arteries and veins of Pell Station, where their oxy-ratio was law. They maintained, they worked, they asked no pay but the sight of the Sun of Downbelow, Pell’s Star. They worked a season or two and then went down again to the world, in the springtime of their main continents, when, the brochures said, Pell had to take to human resources, and make do without its small and industrious helpers. No Downer would work in springtime. Mating consumed them. Females left their burrows and took to walking, simply walking, wherever their fancy took them; and males followed them, far, as far as their resolve and their interest could drive them, until the last gave up, lost interest, resigned the Downer lass to his last rival, who had still to find a place, and dig a nest, and satisfy the far-walking adventuress of his craft and his passion and his worth. What need of nations or boundaries, or such territorial notions? The object of their desires went where she pleased.

Not likely they’d form a government. Not likely they’d fight a war.

Not likely they’d have achieved their dearest dream, to see their Sun, except as human guests.

But they traded their agriculture for human goods, they maintained complex machinery they had no innate impulse to invent themselves. Ask what they might become, or understand, or do, in centuries to come.

“Penny for your thoughts.”

“Huh?”

“They say that, this side of the Line. Penny for your thoughts. What are you thinking?”

“About the Downers. About getting into things you don’t understand. About fools that go wandering in warehouses. Why haven’t they hauled me back to the ship?”

Saby lifted a bare and shapely shoulder. Pretty. A distraction to clear thinking. You could get to looking in her eyes and missing the thoughts entirely.

Saby didn’t answer his question. Never had. They’d sat in the room for most of three days, shopped via the vid system, used the
Aldebaran’s
restaurant, the
Aldebaran’s
gym, the
Aldebaran’s
hair salon, swum in the pool, baked in the sauna… had no personal conversation, just a Race you to the other side, and a, What’s your favorite color? kind of dealing with each other, shallow, safe. Saby liked green, loved to dance, preferred coffee to tea, liked the skintight craze and bought him some for evening as well as day. Saby could take an hour in the bath and run a chain of figures in her head instantly. Those things he’d learned about Saby. But talk about the ship, Christian, the captain, even Tink,—no. Dead cutoff.

“What could I have seen in that warehouse?”

“I don’t know. What were you looking for?”

“You could be a lawyer. Was it something 1 could have seen or just a chance to get at my mother’s son?”

“That’s then. Now’s now. “ She sipped her whiskey. “They’ve a marvelous dessert. Orange creme cake.”

He wasn’t even tempted. “You,” he said. “No thanks.”

“Board-call’s tomorrow. Are you going to go?”

“Have I got a choice?”

“Oh, you could raise a fuss right now. Yell for the cops, all sorts of things.”

“I could end up stuck here. Legaled to death. I’d as soon be dead.”

“So you’ll go back without a fuss?”

“Sure. “ His turn to shrug. They’d been through it before. He didn’t know why she’d started down this track. “No passport. No choice. “ He dreamed of answering that board-call, showing up and having
Corinthian
hand him to the cops, claim they never knew him. He didn’t understand Saby. They’d spent a lot of money. Saby had spent it… on her account, Saby said. Or he’d spent Christian’s cash.

But he could get to that customs gate only to discover it was
his
account she was accessing and the ship wasn’t paying. In that case, he
had
that station-debt, and he had to pay it, if the ship wouldn’t. No passport, no ID, no ship willing to pay for him. That was the scenario he’d slowly put together—Saby swearing to customs that he’d lied to her, they were his charges, not hers, with a whole ship to back her story and damn him to a spacer’s hell.