“I hope the boat will not be too uncomfortable for you, Freelady,” he mumbled, and hated himself for the obsequiousness of it. He should have said, you useless brainless bitch, my people keep Earth alive and you ought to be kneeling to me in thanks. But he bowed again instead, and helped her up the ladder into the cramped cabin.
“I’ll make out,” she laughed. She was too young, he guessed, to have taken on the snotty manners of her class. The fog of Ishtar lay in cool drops in her hair, like small jewels. The blue eyes were not unfriendly as they rested on his sharp dark face.
He computed an orbit back to Marduk. “It’ll take us four-plus days, Freelady,” he said. “I hope you aren’t in too much of a hurry.”
“Oh, no,” she said. “I just wanted to see that planet too, before leaving.” He thought of what it must be costing her, and felt a vague sense of outrage that anyone should throw good money around on mere tourism; but he only nodded.
They were in space before long. He emerged from his curtained bunk after a few hours’ sleep to find her already up, leafing through Murinn. “I don’t understand a word of it,” she said. “Does he ever use one syllable where six will do?”
“He cared a great deal for precision, Freelady,” said Kenri as he started breakfast. Impulsively, he added: “I would have liked to know him.”
Her eyes wandered around the boat’s library, shelf on shelf of microbooks and full-sized volumes. “You people do a lot of reading, don’t you?” she asked.
“Not too much else to do on a long voyage, Freelady,” he said. “There are handicrafts, of course, and the preparation of goods for sale—things like that—but there’s still plenty of time for reading.”
“I’m surprised you have such big crews,” she said, “Surely you don’t need that many people to man a ship.”
“No, Freelady,” he replied. “A ship between the stars just about runs herself. But when we reach a planet, a lot of hands are needed.”
“There’s company too, I suppose,” she ventured, “Wives and children and friends.”
“Yes, Freelady.” His voice grew cold. What business of hers was it?
“I like your Town,” she said. “I used to go there often. It’s so—quaint? Like a bit of the past, kept alive all these centuries.”
Sure, he wanted to say, sure, your sort come around to stare. You come around drunk, and peer into our homes, and when an old man goes by you remark what a funny little geezer he is, without even lowering your voices, and when you bargain with a shopkeeper and he tries to get a fair price it only proves to you that all tommies think of nothing but money. Oh, yes, we’re very glad to have you visit us. “Yes, Freelady.”
She looked hurt, and said little for many hours. After a while she went back into the space he had screened off for her, and he heard her playing a violin. It was a very old melody, older than man’s starward wish, unbelievably old, and still it was young and tender and trustful, still it was everything which was good and dear in man. He couldn’t quite track down the music, what was it—? After a while, she stopped. He felt a desire to impress her. The Kith had their own tunes. He got out his guitar and strummed a few chords and let his mind wander.
Presently he began to sing.
“When Jerry Clawson was a baby
On his mother’s knee in old Kentuck,
He said: ‘I’m gonna ride those deep-space rockets
Till the bones in my body turn to dust.’—”
He sensed her come quietly out and stand behind him, but pretended not to be aware of her. His voice lilted between the thrumming walls, and he looked out toward cold stars and the ruddy crescent of Marduk.
“—Jerry’s voice came o’er the speaker:
‘Cut your cable and go free.
On full thrust, she’s blown more shielding.
Radiation’s got to me.
‘Take the boats in safety Earthward.
Tell the Fireball Line for me
I was born to ride through deep space,
Now in deep space forevermore I’ll be.’”
He ended it with a crash of strings and looked around and got up to bow.
“No … sit down,” she said. “This isn’t Earth. What was that song?”
“Jerry Clawson, Freelady,” he replied. “It’s ancient—in fact, I was singing a translation from the original English. It goes clear back to the early days of interplanetary travel.”
Star-Frees were supposed to be intellectuals as well as esthetes. He waited for her to say that somebody ought to collect Kith folk ballads in a book.
“I like it,” she said. “I like it very much.”
He looked away. “Thank you, Freelady,” he said. “May I make bold to ask what you were playing earlier?”
“Oh … that’s even older,” she said. “A theme from the Kreutzer Sonata. I’m awfully fond of it.” She smiled slowly. “I think I would have liked to know Beethoven.”
They met each other’s eyes, then, and did not look away or speak for what seemed like a long time.
The Town ended as sharply as if cut off by a knife. It had been like that for 3000 years, a sanctuary from time: sometimes it stood alone on open windy moors, with no other work of man in sight except a few broken walls; sometimes it was altogether swallowed by a roaring monster of a city; sometimes, as now, it lay on the fringe of a great commune; but always it was the Town, changeless and inviolate.
No—not so. There had been days when war swept through it, pockmarking walls and sundering roofs and filling its streets with corpses; there had been murderous mobs looking for a tommy to lynch; there had been haughty swaggering officers come to enforce some new proclamation. They could return. Through all the endless turmoil of history, they would. Kenri shivered in the wandering autumn breeze and started off along the nearest avenue.
The neighborhood was a slum at the moment, gaunt crumbling tenements, cheerless lanes, aimlessly drifting crowds. They wore doublets and kilts of sleazy gray, and they stank. Most of them were Norms, nominally free—which meant free to starve when there wasn’t work to be had. The majority were Norm-Ds, low-class manual laborers with dull heavy faces, but here and there the more alert countenance of a Norm-C or B showed briefly in the glare of a lamp, above the weaving, sliding shadows. When a Standard pushed through, gay in the livery of the state or his private owner, something flickered in those eyes. A growing knowledge, a feeling that something was wrong when slaves were better off than freemen—Kenri had seen that look before, and knew what it could become: the blind face of destruction. And elsewhere were the men of Mars and Venus and the Jovian moons, yes, the Radiant of Jupiter had ambitions and Earth was still the richest planet … No, he thought, the Star Empire wouldn’t last much longer.
But it ought to last his and Dorthy’s lifetime, and they could make some provision for their children. That was enough.
An elbow jarred into his ribs. “Outta the way, tommy!”
He clenched his fists, thinking of what he had done beyond the sky, what he could do here on Earth—Silently, he stepped off the walk. A woman, leaning fat and blowsy from an upstairs window, jeered at him and spat. He dodged the fleck of spittle, but he could not dodge the laughter that followed him.
They hate, he thought. They still don’t dare resent their masters, so they take it out on us. Be patient. It cannot endure another two centuries.
It still shook in him, though. He grew aware of the tautness in his nerves and belly, and his neck ached with the strain of keeping his face humbly lowered. Though Dorthy was waiting for him in a garden of roses, he needed a drink. He saw the winking neon bottle and turned in that door.
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 h
is 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.”
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