Our ship was fueled for another seven years, but our flight ended at Socorro for the most prosaic reason possible: we had run out of food. Exchange rates and docking fees ate most of what little money we had, and that left us on Socorro with enough cash for two weeks' food or one good party.
Guess which we chose?
For five months we'd been running from Shawn, or at any rate the cloaked, dagger-bearing assassins we imagined him sending after us. I'd had nothing but Tonio's company and freeze-dried food to eat, and the only wine we'd drunk had been stuff that Tonio brewed in plastic bags out of kitchen waste. We hadn't realized how foul the air on the Olympe had grown until we stepped out of the docking tube and smelled the pure recycled air of Socorro Topside, the station floating in geosynchronous orbit at the end of its tether.
The delights of Topside glittered ahead of us, all lights and music, the sizzle of grilled meats and the clink of glasses. How could we resist?
Besides, freaky Probability was fizzing in our veins. Our metabolisms were pumped by a shift in the electromagnetic fine structure constant. Oxygen was captured and transported and burned and united with carbon and exhaled with greater efficiency. We didn't have to breathe as often as in our home Probability, and still our bodies ran a continuous fever from the boost in our metabolic rate.
Another few more steps into Probability and the multiverse would start fucking with the strong and weak nuclear forces, causing our bodies to fly apart or the calcium in our bones to turn radioactive. But here, we remained more or less ourselves even as certain chemical reactions became much easier.
Which was why Socorro and its Topside had been built on this strange outpost of the multiverse, to create alloys that weren't possible in our home probabilities, and to refine pure chemicals in industrial-sized quantities at a fraction of the energy it would have taken elsewhere.
Probability specialists in the employ of the Pryor corporate gene line had labored hard to locate this particular Probability, with its unique physical properties—some theorists would argue, in fact, that they'd created it, like magicians bringing an entire universe into being with their spell. Once the Pryors had found the place, they'd explored it for years while putting together the right industrial base to properly exploit it. When they finally came, they came in strength, a whole industrial colony jigsawing itself into the Socorro system practically overnight.
Once they started shipping product out, they had to declare to the authorities where it came from, and this particular Probability was no longer secret. Others could come and exploit it, but the Pryors already had their facilities in place, and the profits pouring out.
Nobody lived in Socorro permanently. There was something about this reality that was conducive to forming tumors. You came in on a three-year contract and then shipped out, with cancer-preventing chemicals saturating your tissues.
"Oh yiss," Tonio said as we walked down Topside's main avenue. "Scrutinize the fine ladies yonder, my compeer. I desire nothing so much as to bond with them chemically, oh yiss."
The local fashion for women was weirdly modest and demure, covering the whole body and with a hood for the head, and the outfit looked inflated—as if they were wearing full-body life preservers, designed to keep them floating even if Topside fell out of orbit and dropped into the ocean.
But even these outfits couldn't entirely disguise the female form, or the female walk. My blood seemed to fizz at the sight, and perhaps, in this quirky Probability, it did.
Music floated out of a place called the Flesh Pit, all suggestive dark windows and colorful electric ads for cheap drinks. "Let us sample the pleasures of this charming bistro," Tonio suggested.
"How about some food first?" I said, but Tonio was already halfway through the door.
The Flesh Pit had alcohol and other conventional stimulants, and also others that were designed for our current reality, taking advantage of the local biochemistry to deliver a packaged high aimed at our pumped metabolisms. The charge was delivered from a pressure cylinder into a cheap plastic face mask. The masks weren't hygienic, but after a few huffs we didn't much care.
While getting refills at the bar we met a short, brown-skinned man named Frank. He was drinking alcohol, and joined us at our table. After two drinks he was groping my thigh, but he didn't take it amiss when I moved his hand away.
The Flesh Pit was a disappointment. The music was bottom-grade puti-puti and the women weren't very attractive even after they took off their balloon-suits. After we bought Frank another drink he agreed to be our guide to Topside's delights, such as they were.
He took us up a flight of stairs to a place that didn't seem to actually have a name. The very second I stepped into the front room a woman attached herself to me, spreading herself across my front like a cephalopod embracing its prey. My eyes were still adjusting to the dim light and I hadn't seen her until she'd engulfed me.
My eyes adapted and I looked around. We were in what appeared to be a small dance hall: there was a bar at one end and a live band at the other, and benches along the sides where women smoked and waited for partners. There were a few couples shuffling around on the dance floor, each man in the octopus clutch of his consort.
"Buy me a drink, space man?" my partner said. Her name was Étoile and she wore a gardenia above one ear. I looked longingly at the prettier girls sitting on the benches and then sighed and headed for the bar. On my way I noticed that Tonio had snagged the most beautiful woman in the place, a tall, tawny-haired lioness with a wicked smile.
I bought Étoile an overpriced cocktail and myself a whiff of some exotic gas. We took a turn on the dance floor, then went to the bedroom. Then back to the bar, then to the bedroom. Frank was sent out for food and came back with items on skewers. Then the bar, then the bedroom. I had to pay for clean sheets each time. Étoile was very efficient about collecting. Occasionally I would run into Tonio and his girl in the corridor.
By morning the bar was closed and locked, the dance floor was empty, I was hungry and broke and melancholy, and Tonio's girl had gone insane. She was crying and clutching Tonio's leg and begging him to stay.
"If you leave I'll never see you again!" she said. "If you leave I'll kill myself!" Then she took a bottle from the bar and smashed it on a table and tried to cut her wrist with a piece of glass.
I grabbed her and knocked the broken glass out of her hand, and then I pinned her against the wall while she screamed and sobbed, with tears running down her beautiful face, and Étoile tried to find the management or the bartender or someone to get Tonio's girl a dose of something to calm her down.
I gave Tonio an annoyed look.
He had driven his woman crazy in only one night.
"That's a new record," I told him.
Étoile returned with an irritated and sleepy-eyed manager, who unlocked the bar and got an inhaler. He plastered the mask over the weeping woman's face and cracked the valve and held the mask over her mouth and nose till she relaxed and drifted off to sleep. Then Tonio and I carried her to her room and laid her on the bed.
"She ever done this before?" I asked the manager.
He slapped at the wisp of hair atop his bald head as if it had bitten him. "No," he said.
"You'll have to watch her," I said.
He shrugged his little mustache. "I'm going back to bed," he said.
I looked at Étoile. "Not me," she said. "Unless you pay."
"It is necessary at this juncture," said Tonio, "for me to confess the infortunate condition of our finances."
Infortunate. Tonio was always making up words that he thought were real.
"Then get your asses out of here," said the manager. Étoile glared at me as if it weren't her fault I had no money left.
We dragged ourselves back to the Olympe. The ship smelled a lot better with air being cycled in from the station. I wondered if I'd ever be able to pay for the air I was breathing.
"I hope Fanny will recover, yiss," Tonio said as he headed for his ra
ck.
"What did you do to her?" I said.
"We did things, yiss. It was Fanny did all the talking."
I looked again at Tonio and tried to figure out yet again why so many women loved him. He wasn't any better-looking than I was, and he was too skinny and he had dirt under his nails. His hands were too big for the rest of him. He had blue eyes, which probably didn't hurt.
Maybe the attraction was the broken nose, the big knot in the center of his face that made it all a little off-center. Maybe that's all it took.
"Listen, Gaucho," he said. He had his sincere face on. "I am aware that this contingency is entirely my fault."
"It's too late to worry about that," I said.
"Yiss, well." He reached down and took the ring off his finger, the one with the big emerald that Adora had given him, and he held it out to me. "This is the only valuable thing I own," he said. "I desire that you take it."
"I don't want your ring," I said.
He took my hand and pressed the ring into it. "If necessity bides, you can sell it," he said. "I don't cognizate how much it's worth, but it's a lot, yiss. It will pay for docking fees and enough food to peregrinate to some other Probability where you might be able to make a success."
I looked at him. "Are you saying goodbye, Tonio?"
He shrugged. "Compeer, I have no plans. But who knows what the future may necessitate?"
He ambled away to his rack. I looked at the ring on my palm—all the intricate little designs on it, the dolphins of the Feeneys and the storks of the Storch line all woven together in little knots.
I went into my stateroom where I closed the door. I put the ring on my desk and looked at it for a while, and then I went to bed.
When I woke in the morning, the ring was still there, shining like all the unpaid debts in all the multiverse.
I met Tonio when I was working with my wife Karen on a mining concession owned by her family, an asteroid known only by an identification number. We were supervising the robots that did the actual mining, following the vein of gold and sending it streaming out into the void to be caught by the processor that hovered overhead. Gold was a common metal and prices were low. The robots were old and kept breaking down.
Tonio turned up in a draft of new workers, and we became friends. He had his charm, and his strange Andevin accent, and the vocabulary he'd got in prison, where he had nothing to read for months but a dictionary. He said the prison term was the result of a misunderstanding about whether or not he could borrow someone else's blazemobile.
Tonio and I became friends. After Karen and Tonio became friends, I equipped myself with a heavy pry bar and went looking for him. When he opened the door to his little room and saw me standing there, he just looked at me and then shrugged.
"Do whatsoever thou must, compeer," he said, backing away from the door. "For I deserve it in all truth."
I stepped in and hefted the pry bar and realized that I couldn't hit him. I lowered the bar and then Tonio and I talked for about six hours, after which I realized that my marriage hadn't been working in a long time, and that I wanted out and that Tonio could have Karen for all I cared.
After the divorce, when everything had played itself out and there was no point in staying on the claim of a family to which I was no longer tied, I left the scene along with Tonio.
Of the various options, it was the course that promised the most fun.
The Olympe isn't a freighter, it's a small private vessel—a yacht in fact, though I'm far from any kind of yachtsman. The boat can carry cargo, but only a modest amount. In practice, if I wanted to carry cargo there were three alternatives. Passengers. Compact but valuable cargo, which often means contraband. And information, despatches so private that the sender doesn't want to broadcast them even in cipher. Usually the despatches are carried by a courier.
Once we docked on Socorro I advertised Olympe—I even offered references—but didn't get any takers, not right away. Fortunately docking on Socorro was cheap—this wasn't a tourist spot, but an industrial colony with too much docking capacity—and the air was nearly free. So Tonio got a job Upside, selling roasted chestnuts from a little wheeled grill—and with his blue eyes and broken nose working for him, he soon sold more chestnuts than anyone in the history of the whole pushcart business.
I took my aurora onto the station and went looking for work as a musician. I did some busking till I got a job with a band whose aurorista was on vacation in another Probability, and my little salary and Tonio's got us through the first month even though the puti-puti music bored me stiff. Then I auditioned for a band that had a series of regular gigs in upscale bars, and they took me on. I got a full split and a share of tips instead of a tiny salary, and things eased a bit. Even the music was better. We played popular songs while the tables were full of the dinner crowd, but afterward we played what we liked, and when I got a good grind going, I could make the room sizzle the way my blood sizzled in this little corner of the multiverse.
During our flight I'd had nothing to do but practice, and I'd got pretty good.
A couple of months went by. I didn't see Tonio much—he'd got a girlfriend named Mackey and was spending his free time with her. But he sent a piece of his pay into my account every month, to help pay for Olympe.
I didn't have to sell the ring. I put it in the captain's safe and tried not to think about it.
The docking fees got paid, and our air and water bill. I had Olympe cleaned and the crudded-up old air filters replaced. I polished the wood and the ornate metalwork in my stateroom till it glistened, and put up some of Aram's old things, in case I wanted to impress a potential passenger with the luxury we could offer. I started stocking the larder against the day it was time to leave.
I began to relax. Perhaps Shawn's vengeance was not quite so hot on our tail. I even spent some dinars on my own pleasures.
Not knowing whether or not it was a good idea, I went back to the place where Frank had taken us that first night. I wanted to find out if Tonio's tawny-haired woman was all right. But I didn't see her, and I had barely started chatting with a couple of the employees when the manager recognized me and threw me out.
Which was an answer, I guess.
There were other places to have fun, though, that didn't come with bad memories. My band played in a lot of them. I met any number of women in them, and we had a good time with the sizzling in the blood and nobody went crazy.
So it went until a friend of Frank's made an offer to hire Olympe. Eldridge was a short man with fast, darting hands and genes left over from some long-ago fashion for albinism. His pale hair was shaggy, and his eyes looked at you with irises the color of blood.
Eldridge offered a very generous sum to ship a small cargo out to one of the system's outer moons, a place called Vantage, where a lot of mining and processing habitats were perched on vast seams of ore. The trip would take five days out and five back, and I was free to take any other cargo on the return trip. Half our fee would be paid in advance, half on delivery. The one condition Eldridge made was that the seals on the packages should not be broken.
I'd been scraping a living aboard Olympe long enough to know what that stipulation meant, and I knew what I meant to do about it, too.
The band hired a temporary aurora player, and Tonio quit his chestnut-selling job even though his boss offered him a bonus. We had no sooner cleared Upside than the two of us went into the cargo space and broke every seal on every container, digging like maniacs through cushions of spray foam to find exactly what was supposed to be there, bottles of rare brandy or expensive lubricating oil for robots or canister filters for miners' vac suits. We searched until the air was filled with a blizzard of foam and I began to wonder if we'd misjudged Eldridge entirely.
But in what was literally the final container, we found what we were looking for, about forty kilos of blue salt, exactly the stimulant to keep miners working those extra hours to earn that end-of-the-year bonus, to keep them all awake and alert a
nd safe until the salt turned them into sweating, shivering skeletons, every synapse turned to pork cracklings while heavy metals collected in their livers and their zombie bodies ran on chemical fumes.
Well well, I thought. I looked at Tonio. He looked at me.
Vantage would have been a couple months away except that Olympe could shift to a Probability where we could make better time, a place where the stars hung in the sky like hard little pearls on a background of green baize. We made a couple course changes outside our regular flight plan, then docked at Vantage and waited for the police to come and tear our ship apart.
Which they did. It was all part of Eldridge's plan. The griffs would find the blue salt in our cargo hold, and we'd be arrested. The salt would find its way from police lockers to Eldridge's dealers on Vantage, who would sell it and give the griffs a piece. In the meantime the griffs would collect our fee from Eldridge in fines, and the money would be returned to Eldridge. I'd be coerced into signing over Olympe in exchange for a reduced sentence, and Olympe would be sold, with the profits split between Eldridge and the griffs.
It's the sort of trap that tourists in the Probabilities walk into all the time. But Tonio and I aren't tourists.
The griffs came in with chemical sniffers and found nothing, which meant they had to break into the cargo containers, and of course found that they'd been broken into already. "A freelance captain's got to protect himself," I told the griff lieutenant. "If I find contraband, it gets spaced."
I wouldn't admit to actually having found the salt. I didn't know the local laws well enough to know whether that admission would implicate me or not, so I refused to admit anything.
The lieutenant in charge of the search just kept getting more and more angry. I was worried that she or one of her cronies would plant some contraband on the ship, so I made a point of telling her that I'd turned on all the ship's cameras, one in every room and cargo space, and was livecasting the whole search back to a lawyer's office on Upside. If she tried to plant anything, it would be caught on camera.
The Green Leopard Plague and Other Stories Page 32