Starliner

by David Drake

  He cleared his throat and added, "Hope the rest of you are as lucky."

  "Going to look for a beach walker while you're here, Wade?" Dewhurst gibed.

  "Didn't look for the first one, friend," Wade said as he took a glass of whiskey from Reed.

  "I'll grant you're an expert on the difference between real and imagined, that's so," said Dewhurst.

  "Reed was right about them probably being extinct by now anyway," Belgeddes said. "You've got to remember that we're dinosaurs, Dickie and I."

  "There's dinosaurs on Hobilo," Reed said. "Near enough."

  Ain al-Mahdi's vast primary swung into view, filling much of the holographic sky with its multihued luster. The men paused, staring at the sudden beauty.

  "That's worth seeing," said Da Silva.

  On the wall above the autobar, the bead of red light representing the Empress of Earth backlighted the turquoise and tourmaline sea monster indicating Ain al-Mahdi; and the Brasil's blue glow settled over Calicheman, the agate head of a bull.

  * * *

  The building whose painted sign proclaimed it the Grand Hotel Universal faced the bubbling surf. It was constructed of cast concrete, three stories high, with full-length balconies for access to the rooms. The sunscreens with advertisements that shaded the balconies during the day had been rolled out of the way. Most of the shops on the ground floor had lighted signs of their own—WEXLER FINE TOBACCO PRODUCTS, THE SEAFRONT LOUNGE, and COURIER TORPEDOES TO ALL DESTINATIONS—ONE BLOCK DOWN.

  The Grand Hotel al-Mahdi was across the street which led away from the water. It was exactly the same as the Universal, except that its third story was of thermoplastic and had been added after the original construction. The primary was barely on the horizon and the city had no streetlights; for the moment, the external floods that lit the Empress of Earth a kilometer distant were enough to see by.

  Ran Colville sighed. Welcome to Tarek's Bay, heart and soul of Ain al-Mahdi.

  Bare-breasted women hung from the balconies, while in the street shills promised cut-rate delights for those willing to walk a block, two blocks . . . a lifetime if you chose the wrong street and hadn't had sense enough to keep in a group with your shipmates. Minibuses cruised the seafront, carrying sailors from the Empress and the freighters in port—

  And passengers from the starliner as well. Mixed busloads were sightseeing. Their guides would take them to some of the tamer clubs, where they would be charged three times the going rate for drinks and a moderately raw floor show. That was value for money, because they would have stories to tell back home about wicked Ain and how they saw it; and they would survive to get home, to get back to the Empress, at any rate.

  Other buses carried men only, or occasionally a load of hard-looking women. They too would get what they were asking for, and sometimes a great deal more. There was usually a missing passenger or two when a starliner lifted off from Ain, and the ship's medical facilities would be busy the following day.

  For all that, Ain al-Mahdi wasn't the asshole of the universe. Her primary was a panorama of slowly changing beauty, a great jewel in the sky.

  The human settlement of Tarek's Bay, however—that was the asshole of the universe.

  Ran walked slowly, feeling the shingle beach scuff against his boots. He didn't have a destination. He'd never landed on Ain al-Mahdi before, but he'd known a hundred Tarek's Bays over the years and he didn't belong in any of them.

  The New Port, originally a separate island but now joined to Tarekland by a causeway, was fenced and gated. The port and the neatly planned community within its boundaries were administered by a consortium of the major shipping companies. All but the rattiest tramp freighters landed there, because the amount of theft at Tarek's Bay was ten times the cost of docking fees in the New Port.

  Hotels within the port complex were clean, and passengers could vary their stopover with sightseeing trips. The New Port was obviously the choice of the sensible traveler—except that it had no more soul than Ain (whose surface was a thousand gravel islets in a gray sea) had sights.

  The transshipment trade made Ain al-Mahdi a center of commerce. She had begun as the collection point for miners in the vast sea of asteroids which shared the system with Ain's giant primary. Later, Ain's fortunate location through sponge space—"near" in terms of time and effort to many heavily populated worlds, Earth included—had expanded her transit trade across interstellar routes.

  The New Port was necessary to the smooth functioning of interstellar commerce; but so is a warehouse necessary, and men do not choose to live in warehouses. Perhaps that explained Tarek's Bay, though Ran didn't care for the implied comment on the nature of Man if it did.

  He'd reached the west end of the Strip. Where the buildings stopped, so did all semblance of lighting. Ran had a pistol in his pocket, but he wasn't looking for trouble and there was nothing he'd meet farther out along the shingle except trouble.

  If he wanted to, he could hire a car to fly him to an uninhabited islet. There he could toss gravel into the waves and watch the primary rise in perfect safety.

  He could hire a woman to go with him. Again, perfectly safe, because escort services operating out of the New Port provided full medical histories of their employees. So far as Ran was concerned, that was as empty a proposition as trying to skip stones over live water.

  He could cut out one of the Empress's passengers, no problem at all for Ran Colville. And then spend the rest of however long she was booked for trying to dodge somebody who might very well make a scene no matter what she said beforehand about understanding the ground rules. It wasn't that women lied, they just had no more control over some things than a man with a stiff prick did. An evening's fun wasn't worth a week or a lifetime of trouble. . . .

  Ran sighed. He might as well get back. There was always work. That was the only important thing, anyway. He had the engineering officers' course loaded in his hypnogogue. It felt strange to learn the theory behind the fusion drives he'd fueled and trimmed as a Cold Crewman in another existence.

  An aircar in ground effect mode pulled up beside Ran and touched down. "Going somewhere?" asked the driver.

  Female, mid-twenties at a guess, but the car's yellow-green dash lighting didn't tell much. Her face was heart-shaped and strikingly beautiful.

  "Going nowhere," Ran replied, squatting to put his head on a level with hers. "Headed back to my ship, to tell the truth."

  The car was a two-seater. The small luggage space behind the seats held a makeup case and something flat rolled into a tube. If there was a bruiser wailing to knock Ran over the head, he wasn't hiding in the vehicle.

  "I'd offer to show you Tarek's Bay," said the driver. The fans hissed at idle, occasionally driving a pebble to click against its neighbor. "But if you've walked this far, you've seen it all."

  She smiled. "And besides," she said, "if I thought there was anything in the place you'd be interested in, I wouldn't be talking to you. It's the armpit of the universe."

  Ran laughed out loud. "You know," he said, "that's almost exactly the phrase that crossed my mind. But you've been more gently brought up than I was."

  The driver's smile became wistful. "Don't you believe it," she said. "I've lived on Ain al-Mahdi all my life.

  "But Ain isn't all like—this!" she added sharply, gesturing back toward the Strip. Her fingers were long and shapely. "There's parts of it that are beautiful, only it takes time to find them. The people who live here don't care, and the transients don't have the time."

  "I've got fourteen hours," Ran said deliberately.

  She touched a control. The passenger door swung open. "Hop in," she said, "and I'll show you the moon-fish spawning in a lagoon."

  Then she said, "And there's an air mattress in the back."

  * * *

  Tug motors hammered as they helped a tramp freighter down into the New Port. The blue glare was reflected from the office building opposite and through the glazed front of the Port Complex Towers.


  Miss Oanh turned her face toward the empty lobby and watched her shadow lengthen across the tile floor. Disks behind the clear tube of the drop shaft paused, indicating that someone had gotten on at a higher level, then began to fall smoothly again. When she called up to his room, Franz had said he would be only a moment.

  The starship dropped below the rooflines of the outer buildings in the complex. The cutting light vanished and the noise dulled to a rumble. Oanh looked out the front window again. If she stared at the drop shaft, Franz wouldn't be the one to appear in it . . . .

  The hotel was fully automated. The only living things besides Oanh in the lobby were the local life forms swimming in an aquarium. Fish on Ain al-Mahdi tended to metallic colors and vertical rather than horizontal compression, but Oanh's only interest in the creatures was as possible food—

  And food was the farthest thing from her mind, now.

  Most First Class passengers took ground accommodations during the Empress's layovers. Minister Lin did not. He expected Oanh to remain in the suite with him and his staff. They spent the time digesting the information sent to meet them by courier torpedo: data from Nevasa, Tellichery, and very possibly from agents on Grantholm itself. His daughter was simply to wait, safe and silent until the Empress of Earth was star-borne again.

  Oanh didn't have credit in her own name . . . but Franz had booked a room here at the Towers. While they were aboard the starliner, there was a constraint that affected both of them though they had never mentioned it.

  The safety door of the drop shaft rotated open. Oanh turned, her smile as bright as her dress of gold-shot natural silk, and faced the four big men who stepped off the platform.

  She recognized them as passengers from Grantholm traveling aboard the Empress of Earth. They'd stared whenever they noticed her in the starliner's public rooms. Though the Grantholmers never said anything, they were the last people Oanh would have chosen to meet off the ship.

  "Well, what have we here?" the leader of the group said in delight.

  The men seemed to have been in a serious accident since Oanh last saw them. Two of them walked stiffly, one had a patch over his right eye, and half the leader's beard had been shaved away so that a ten-centimeter slash up his cheek could be covered with SpraySeal.

  The Grantholmers looked even more like a gang of pirates than they had aboard the Empress of Earth. Oanh turned very quickly and walked out of the hotel. The filter field across the open doorway tugged momentarily at her hair and clothing.

  The air outside was five degrees warmer than that in the lobby—closer to what Oanh personally preferred. Night-flying insects, whose ancestors were unintended immigrants aboard earlier starships, buzzed about her face. The filter kept them out of the hotel as it sorted air molecules by energy level, directing slow molecules inward while shunting the fester ones outside.

  Bioliers on high curved standards flooded the street with their soft gleam, about forty percent of normal daylight illumination. They were balanced toward the green in a way that Oanh found unpleasant. A minibus and a large cargo hauler moaned past.

  At the side of the Towers building was a barred rank of rental vehicles, two- to eight-place in size. Oanh stepped toward them before she remembered that her credit chip was valid only on Nevasa.

  She turned. The four Grantholmers were already on top of her. They must have moved like cats, for all their bulk and injuries. "Looking for a ride, girlie?" one of them said. "We'll give you a ride."

  "Rent one of those vans, Golschbauer," the leader ordered curtly. "The closed one."

  Oanh tried to dart between two of the men. The leader caught her easily and gripped her from behind at the base of her skull. His thumb and forefinger clamped like ice-tongs. Oanh tried to scream, but she couldn't make any of her muscles obey. Her vision slipped through screens of orange and blue. The edges of things blurred.

  "Now, Golschbauer!" the leader snarled from a great distance. "Don't do anything to offend the spy cameras."

  Holding Oanh with an ease that mimicked gentleness, he smiled and nodded in the direction of the recording unit on the nearest biolier. An artificial intelligence patrolled the streets of the New Port, fed by cameras mounted to view all of the community's open spaces.

  Any event which departed from the accepted matrix—a fight, a vehicular accident, a drunk returned from Tarek's Bay waving a liquor bottle—brought a human emergency services team. The teams had medical support and enough firepower to splatter a determined problem over a city block.

  The New Port was run not by democrats but by an oligarchy of shipping corporations. Municipal services were carried out with brutal efficiency.

  Vehicles passed in the street. No one looked toward Oanh and her captors with even the vaguest interest

  "What's going on here?" someone demanded in a voice like gunshots. "You there—von Pohlitz! Let that woman go unless you plan to spend the rest of your life on a penal asteroid as soon as you next touch Grantholm soil!"

  Oanh didn't recognize the voice. Her captor turned to face the question, carrying her with him.

  She saw Franz, his face thinned into a hatchet by white fury.

  The bar containing the rental vehicles dropped. A large van pulled from the rank.

  "And just who are you to interfere with me and my girlfriend, little fellow?" the Grantholm leader asked in a harsh, contemptuous voice. He gripped Oanh even more firmly. Her knees buckled, but she remained standing like a skeleton clamped in a display stand.

  The van swung around tightly in the street and pulled up where it blocked the nearest camera's view of Franz. One of the Grantholmers stepped close to trap the smaller man against the vehicle.

  "Who am I?" Franz snarled. "I'm the nephew of the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, you dogturds, I'm the grandson of the man who commanded the Grantholm Legion on Lusignan. I'm Franz Streseman, that's who I am!"

  The Grantholm leader grunted as though he'd been gutshot. He released Oanh and stepped back. She started to fall. Franz caught her around the waist and shoulders and nestled her body against his. Her skin was flushed and she felt as though she was being dragged through a bed of nettles.

  "Sir, we meant no—"one of the Grantholmers began.

  "Get into that car and get out of New Port!" Franz snarled in the voice of a man Oanh hadn't met until this moment. "Don't come back until the Empress is ready to lift!"

  There was a bustle of motion, big men scuttling into the van as though whips instead of words cracked against them.

  "And if I see any of you faces during the rest of the voyage, it will be the worse for you when we reach Grantholm. I, Franz Streseman, promise it!"

  The springs of the rental vehicle yelped as the last man leaped aboard. The engine wasn't powerful enough to chirp the tires as the driver stamped on the throttle, but the van continued to accelerate for as long as it remained in sight.

  Oanh's vision was returning to normal. Her skin felt clammy. Franz kissed her.

  "Darling," he murmured. "My love? Are you all right?"

  "Franz, let's go inside," she said. Her voice was hoarse.

  "Please!" he begged. He stepped back, holding her by both shoulders. "Please—now that you know. Is it . . . ?"

  "I don't want to talk about it now," Oanh said. "Let's go up to the room."

  She threw herself into his arms again and kissed him fiercely. She couldn't see for her tears. She knew that by her statement, she had answered Franz's question and all the questions behind it; all the questions he had been afraid to raise and she was afraid to look at, even now.

  "I don't want to talk about it ever!" she shouted in a despairing voice as she clung to her lover.

  * * *

  The primary was at zenith, filling half the sky. The water in the lagoon boiled with moonfish, ten-centimeter disks of succulent flesh. They formed streamers of blue and silver and magenta, rotating and coalescing as they shifted. By now they covered most of the enclosed water, mimicking the primar
y's opalescent atmosphere with their own varihued skins.

  She stretched over the air mattress, supporting herself on toes and fingertips with her pubic wedge the highest point of a perfect arch. Ran looked down at her. The primary mottled her pale skin with bands of color more intricate than the finest tattooing.

  "Do you like it?" she asked softly. Her eyes were dosed.

  Ran knelt beside her on the mattress again. "It's beautiful," he said.

  "I told you my planet was beautiful," she said. "Not just the moonfish, but the moonfish now. Of course, everything becomes beautiful in breeding season."

  She held her position like a painted ivory bow. It was uncanny. He began to fondle her. Her vaginal muscles accepted his finger greedily, but the rest of her body remained frozen.

  "Humans have the power here," she said. "That's not wrong—it's like the storms on the face of the primary. Nature can't be wrong. But they're the wrong kind of humans, don't you think?"

  "Yes," said Ran. He continued to hold her, but his member had lost its renewing stiffness. There were

  stories about what you found on the beaches of Ain. . . .

  "I think so, yes."

  She lifted her right hand from the mattress and combed her fingers through his hair while she balanced on only three points. "What would you do about it if it were your decision, starman?" she asked. Her eyes opened. They reflected the rich light of the planet above.

  "I might try to kill them," Ran said, his finger stroking in and out His clothes lay in a neat pile on the other side of the mattress. The pistol was with them.

  "That's not a solution," she said, smiling up at him. "Humans have the power. Power to sterilize the planet if they became angry and frightened enough. And the problem isn't humans, it's the kind of humans. Much better to replace them. Over time."

  Ran Colville was as still as ice, except for his right hand.

  "Silly!" she said. "Not like that, not anything bad."

  She seated herself and drew Ran's lips to hers with the same lithe motion. Leaning back from the kiss, she said, "I'm human, darling. You know that."