They put him into Hospital Block this time. He was under
sedation for three days.
Two people were at his bedside when the doctor came to bring him
out. The thin, pale, blue-eyed woman with the nervous hands was
Amy. The little oriental with the presence of an iceberg was
benRabi’s friend Mouse.
Amy would sit for a minute, picking at her jumpsuit, shifting
this way and that. She would cross and uncross her legs, then would
rise and pace around for a minute before sitting again. She did not
speak to Mouse. Most of the time she deliberately tried to distance
Storm from herself and Moyshe. It was almost as if she saw Mouse as
a competitor for benRabi’s affection.
The men had shared missions under fire. Sometimes they did not
like one another much. Their backgrounds were day and night.
Centuries of prejudice had erected walls between them. Yet an
indestructible bond had been forged and hammered on the anvils of
shared peril. They had guarded one another’s backs and saved
one another’s lives too often to let go.
Mouse waited without moving, with the patience of a samurai.
He was a dedicated Archaicist. He had just encountered his own
ancient heritage and, in imagination, was trying the samurai role
for size. The code and conduct suited the warrior within him.
But it did nothing for the libertine. And Mouse was a classic of
that genre, at least with the opposite sex.
Masato Igarashi Storm did nothing by half measures.
The doctor coughed softly.
“Will he be all right?” Amy demanded.
“He’ll come out okay? I know what you told me,
but . . . ”
Mouse’s facial muscles moved slightly. His wan expression
spoke volumes about his disgust at her display.
The doctor was more patient. “Just an enforced rest, Miss.
That’s all it is. There’s nothing wrong that rest
can’t cure. I hear he did a hell of a job feeding realtime to
Weapons Control. He just pushed himself too far.”
A look flickered across Mouse’s stony face.
“What’re you thinking?” Amy
demanded.
“Just that he’s not usually a pusher.”
Amy was ready for a fight.
The doctor aborted it by giving benRabi an injection. He began
to come around.
Mouse seemed indifferent to Amy’s response. But not
oblivious. He was an astute observer. He just did not care what she
thought.
“Doc,” he said, “is there any special reason
for sticking with this kind of medical setup?”
The woman held benRabi’s wrist, taking his pulse.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s primitive. Almost Archaicist obsolete. They
had sonic sedation systems before I was born. Easier on the patient
and staff both.”
The doctor reddened. Mouse had been out of the hospital only a
few weeks himself. He had spent a month recuperating from a severe
wound received from a Sangaree agent who had tried to seize
control of Danion. He was not pleased with the quality of
medical care, and made no secret of it. But Mouse hated all doctors
and hospitals. He could find fault with the finest.
BenRabi had tracked the Sangaree woman down, and had shot
her . . .
Mouse had the nerve to stand toe-to-toe with the Devil and tell
him to put it where the sun doesn’t shine.
“We have to make do with what we can afford, Mr.
Storm.”
“So I’ve been told.” Mouse did not pursue it,
though he thought Seiners pleading poverty was on a par with Midas
begging alms on a street corner.
BenRabi opened his eyes.
“How you doing, Moyshe?” Storm asked, trampling
Amy’s more dramatic opener. His presence there, betraying his
concern, embarrassed him.
The fabric of centuries takes the stamp; they mark the children
indelibly. Their legacy remains as invisible and irresistible as
the secret coded in DNA. The young Mouse had learned that Old
Earthers were pariahs.
Mouse’s family had been in Service for three generations.
They were part of Confederation’s military aristocracy.
BenRabi’s forebears had been unemployed Social Insurees for
centuries.
Neither man considered himself prejudiced. But false truths sown
in the fallows of childhood, planted deep, continued to sprout
unrealistic real-world responses.
BenRabi had begun bridling his prejudice early. He had to
survive. There had been only two Old Earthers in his Academy
battalion.
He needed a minute to get his bearings. “What am I doing
here?” he demanded.
“You needed rest,” Amy told him. “Lots of it.
You overdid it this time.”
“Come on. I can take care of myself. I know
when . . . ”
“Crap!” the doctor snapped. “Every mindtech
thinks that. And then they turn up here, burned out. I change their
diapers and spoon feed them. What is it with you people, benRabi?
You all got egos two sizes too big for a small god.”
Moyshe was fuzzy. He tried to say something flip. His tongue
felt like it was wrapped in an old sock.
He saw tears in the doctor’s eyes. “Did you lose
someone at Stars’ End?”
“My sister. She came out of creche just before you
landsmen came aboard. She was only seventeen, benRabi.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, you’re not. You’re a mindtech. Anyway,
sorry doesn’t help. Not when I have to take care of her every
day. She was just like you, benRabi. She knew she could handle it.
She wouldn’t listen either. None of them would. Not even the
controllers, who should’ve known better. They put her back in
with only four hours’ rest.”
BenRabi kept his mouth shut. What could he say? He had been
introduced to Contact during the battle at Stars’ End. The
main Contact room had been a shambles. Dozens of mindtechs had
given everything to save Danion.
He never would have seen Contact, or even have discovered its
existence, had those linker casualties not been cruel. In those
days he had been a distrusted landsman, a convicted enemy spy who
was screened from all Seiner secrets. They had drafted him into
Contact only because he might give Danion a
millimeter’s better chance of surviving.
He had made his decision to cross over after Stars’ End,
virtually in the hatch of the ship designated to return the
landsmen contractees to Confederation.
He had waited too long. Half of his personal possessions had
departed with the ship. He had not recovered them. The service ship
crew had gotten into a row with Customs. The bureaucrats had
retaliated, seizing everything not bolted to the ship’s
frames.
BenRabi took Amy’s thin, cool hand. “How’ve
you been, darling? You look tired. How long has it been?” She
felt so cold . . . She was a spooky woman. Why
had he fallen in love with her?
He always fell for the strange ones, the neurotic and just plain
rotten ones. Alyce, in Academy . . . What a
loser she had turned out to be. And the Sangaree woman,
Marya, who had been a vampire in the midst of his last two
missions.
“I’m all right now that I know you’ll be okay.
Moyshe, please be more careful.”
She seemed unusually remote. BenRabi glanced at her, at Mouse,
and back again. More problems with Mouse? Her dislike for his
friend had taken a quantum leap recently.
Mouse did not talk much. The inevitable chess board had
accompanied him, but he did not offer to play. Amy’s presence
restrained him. Chess was one of his great passions, rivaling his
passion for seducing a parade of beautiful women.
“Hey, Mouse. Ever wonder what Max is doing these
days?” Referring to someone they had known before coming out
here was the only way he could think of to pull his friend into the
conversation.
“Probably getting richer and wondering why we don’t
come into her shop anymore. I don’t think Beckhart will
bother giving her our new address.”
“Yeah.” BenRabi laughed. “He should have heard
the news by now, don’t you think? Or pretty soon. He’ll
foam at the mouth.” For Amy’s benefit, he explained,
“Max was a friend of ours in Luna Command. She ran a stamp
store.”
“Best hobby shop in the moon,” Mouse said.
Amy did not respond. She simply could not comprehend what these
two got out of accumulating small bits of paper that were ages old
and required jeweler’s grade care.
And stamps were not the only thing. Between them they seemed to
collect everything. Coins. Stamps. All kinds of ancient
miscellania. Mouse had little wrought-iron trivets and other
old-time dohickeys all over his quarters. The one collection she
could appreciate was Moyshe’s butterflies. He had a frame of
exotics on his wall. They were incredibly beautiful.
The Seiner ships were ecologically sterile. Only their zoos
contained nonhuman life, and that the large, well-known
mammals.
Amy had no hobbies of her own. She read for relaxation. She had
acquired the habit from her mother.
Mouse even managed passably with a clarinet, an antique woodwind
seldom seen anymore. He claimed to have learned from his
father.
“What about Greta?” Mouse asked. “You think
the Department will take care of her?”
Amy jumped at the name. “You never did tell me about
Greta, Moyshe.”
“That was in another life.”
They were lovers, but they did not know one another well.
BenRabi did not like stirring up the snake pit of people’s
pasts. There was too much chance of finding something nasty. It was
there in every life.
But he answered Amy’s question. “I told you before.
She’s a kid I met the last time I was on Old Earth. The last
time I visited by mother. She wanted out. Her friends
wouldn’t let her go. I arranged it for her. And ended up
sponsoring her.”
“Sort of like being a foster parent,” Mouse
explained.
“Guess she’d be eighteen now. I haven’t
thought about her in ages. You shouldn’t have mentioned her,
Mouse. Now you’ve got me worried.”
“Hey, don’t. Max will look out for her.”
“Maybe. But that’s not right, putting it on somebody
else. Is there any way I could send her a letter now and then, Amy?
Just to let her know I’m all right and thinking about her?
I’d let you or Jarl write it if you wanted. You could even
run it through the crypto computer to make sure it’s
innocent.”
“This’s just a kid?” Amy demanded.
“Yeah. She reminded me a lot of me when I came off Old
Earth. Awful lost. I thought I could help out by sponsoring her.
And then I kind of ran out when the Bureau sent us out here. I told
her we’d be back in a couple of months. It’s been
almost fourteen.”
“I’ll ask Jarl. He lets a little mail go out. Some of us
have relatives outside. But it’s slow.”
“That doesn’t matter. Amy, you’re a jewel. I
love you.”
“Well, if you’re going to get mushy,” Mouse
said, standing. “I’ve got to run. A citizenship class.
It’s from hunger, Moyshe. Me and Emily Hopkins and this
fascist bastard of a teacher . . . Maybe
I’ll hurt the arm again. Get back in here so I can miss a few
too. Behave. Do what the doctor lady says. Or I’ll wring your
neck.” He made his exit before Moyshe could embarrass him
with many thanks-for-comings.
“You’re awful quiet today, honey,” benRabi
said after a while. Perhaps if the doctor had not been
there . . .
“I’m just tired. We’re still doing double
shifts and barely keeping our heads above water. We’re going
to be in the Yards a long time. Assuming Danion
doesn’t fall apart before we get there. Assuming the sharks
don’t knock us apart.”
“You’ve mentioned these Yards about fifty times and
wouldn’t tell me about them. Do you trust me enough
now?”
“They’re what the name sounds like. Where we build
and fix our ships. Moyshe, you’re not going anywhere for a
while. Tell me about you.”
“What?”
“I met you the very first day. Way back on Carson’s,
when you signed your contract. We lived together for months before
I even found out you’ve got a daughter. I don’t know
anything about you.”
“Greta isn’t my daughter, honey. I just helped a kid
who needed somebody . . . ”
“It’s almost the same thing, isn’t
it?”
“Legally, I guess. On paper. They’d have trouble
making it stand up in court.”
“Tell me. Everything.”
There was little else to do but talk. He talked.
The doctor, lurking in the background watching suspiciously, had
made it clear that he would be stuck here for a while.
“All right. Let me know when it gets boring.”
He had been born in North America on Old Earth, to Clarence
Hardaway and Myra McClennon. He had hardly known his father. His
mother, for reasons he still did not understand, had elected to
raise him at home instead of burying him in the State Creche. Only
a few Social Insurees raised their children.
His early years had been typical for home-raised S.I. children.
Little supervision, little love, little education. He had been
running with a kid gang before he was eight.
He had been trine when he had seen his first offworlders.
Spikes, they had called them. These had been Navy men in crisp
dress blacks diligently pursuing the arcane business of
offworlders.
Those uniforms had captured his imagination. They had become an
obsession. He had started keying information out of his
mother’s home data retrieval terminal. He had not had the
education to decipher most of it. He had started teaching himself,
building from the ground up toward the things he so desperately
wanted to know.
At ten he had quit the gang so he would have more time to study.
Halfway through his eleventh year the revelation had come. He
had to get into space. He had approached a Navy recruiter
clandestinely. The man had arranged for him to sneak through the
Academy exams.
He never would have made it had there been no special standards
and quotas for Old Earthers. He would have gotten skunked had he
been in direct competition with carefully prepared Outworlders,
many of whom had grown up in the military life. Half the officers
in Service were the children of officers. Service was a complete
sub-culture, and one that was becoming increasingly less connected
with and controlled by the over-culture. He had had motivation.
At twelve he had run away from home, fleeing to Luna Command and
Academy. In six years he had climbed from dead last to the 95th
percentile in class standing. At graduation he had taken his Line
option and been assigned to the Fleet. He had served aboard the
destroyers Aquataine and Hesse, and the attack
cruiser Tamerlane, before requesting Intelligence
training.
Following a year of schooling the Bureau had assigned him as
Naval Attaché to the Embassy on Feldspar. He had had a half dozen
similar assignments on as many worlds before his work attracted the
attention of Admiral Beckhart, whose department handled dangerous
operations, and tricks on the grey side of legal.
He had taken part in several tight missions, and had
reencountered his former classmate, Mouse. They had shared several
assignments, the last being to join the Starfishers to ferret out
information that could be used to force the Seiners to enter the
Confederation fold.
Some of it Amy had heard before. Some she had not. She was not
satisfied. Her first comment was, “You didn’t say
anything about women.”
“What do you mean? What’s that got to do with
anything?”
“Everything, as far as I’m concerned. I want to know
who your lovers were and how come you broke up. What they were
like . . . ”
“You’ll shit in your hand and carry it to China
first, Lady.”
He was still a little dopey. He did not realize that he had said
it aloud till he began to wonder why she had shut up so
suddenly.
After one stunned gasp Amy blew out of the room like a tornado
looking for a town to wreck.
The lady doctor came out of the background, took his blood
pressure. “She’s pushy, isn’t she?”
“I don’t know what’s got into her. She
wasn’t like that before.”
“You’ve had an interesting life.”
“Not really. I don’t think I’d do it the same
if I had it to do again.”
“Well, you could, couldn’t you?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Rejuvenation. I thought it was available to everybody
landside.”
“Oh. Yes. More or less. Some of the brass have been around
since Noah landed the Ark. But Fate has a way of catching up with
people who try to slide around it.”
“Wish we had it out here.”
“You don’t look that old.”
“I was thinking about my father. He’s getting on
now.”
“I see. How soon can I leave?”
“Any time, really. But I wish you’d wait a couple
hours. You’ll be weak and dizzy.”
“Mouse was right about sonic sedation.”
“I know. But I don’t write the medical budget. Good
luck, Mr. benRabi. Try not to see me again.”
“I hate hospitals, Doctor.”
He did. His only stays had been at Bureau insistence, to modify
him mentally or physically.
He did a few minor exercises before catching a public tram
home.
Amy was waiting. “Oh, Moyshe. That was stupid of me. You
were right. Those things aren’t any of my
business.”
She had been crying. Her eyes were red.
“It’s all right. I understand.” But he did
not. His cultural background had not prepared him for personal
nosiness. In Confederation people lived now. They did not
consider the past.
“It’s just that I
feel . . . Well, everything’s so chancey
the way it is between us.”
Here she comes, he thought. Hints about getting married.
Marriage was important to the Seiners. In Confederation it was
more an amusing relic, an entertainment or daydream for the young
and the romantic. He could not reconcile his attitudes with Seiner
seriousness. Not yet.
The Starfishers had won his loyalty, but they could not make him
a different man. They could not make him reflect themselves merely
by adopting him.
Was Mouse having the same trouble? he wondered. Probably not.
Mouse was a chameleon. He could adapt anywhere, vanish into any
crowd.
“I have to go to work,” Amy told him. Weariness
seemed to be dragging her down.
“You’d better get some rest yourself,
honey.”
After she left he took out his stamp collection and turned the
well-thumbed album pages. Mouse had opened a Pandora’s box by
mentioning Max and Greta. After a while he pushed the album aside
and tried to compose a letter to the girl.
He could not think of much to say.
They put him into Hospital Block this time. He was under
sedation for three days.
Two people were at his bedside when the doctor came to bring him
out. The thin, pale, blue-eyed woman with the nervous hands was
Amy. The little oriental with the presence of an iceberg was
benRabi’s friend Mouse.
Amy would sit for a minute, picking at her jumpsuit, shifting
this way and that. She would cross and uncross her legs, then would
rise and pace around for a minute before sitting again. She did not
speak to Mouse. Most of the time she deliberately tried to distance
Storm from herself and Moyshe. It was almost as if she saw Mouse as
a competitor for benRabi’s affection.
The men had shared missions under fire. Sometimes they did not
like one another much. Their backgrounds were day and night.
Centuries of prejudice had erected walls between them. Yet an
indestructible bond had been forged and hammered on the anvils of
shared peril. They had guarded one another’s backs and saved
one another’s lives too often to let go.
Mouse waited without moving, with the patience of a samurai.
He was a dedicated Archaicist. He had just encountered his own
ancient heritage and, in imagination, was trying the samurai role
for size. The code and conduct suited the warrior within him.
But it did nothing for the libertine. And Mouse was a classic of
that genre, at least with the opposite sex.
Masato Igarashi Storm did nothing by half measures.
The doctor coughed softly.
“Will he be all right?” Amy demanded.
“He’ll come out okay? I know what you told me,
but . . . ”
Mouse’s facial muscles moved slightly. His wan expression
spoke volumes about his disgust at her display.
The doctor was more patient. “Just an enforced rest, Miss.
That’s all it is. There’s nothing wrong that rest
can’t cure. I hear he did a hell of a job feeding realtime to
Weapons Control. He just pushed himself too far.”
A look flickered across Mouse’s stony face.
“What’re you thinking?” Amy
demanded.
“Just that he’s not usually a pusher.”
Amy was ready for a fight.
The doctor aborted it by giving benRabi an injection. He began
to come around.
Mouse seemed indifferent to Amy’s response. But not
oblivious. He was an astute observer. He just did not care what she
thought.
“Doc,” he said, “is there any special reason
for sticking with this kind of medical setup?”
The woman held benRabi’s wrist, taking his pulse.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s primitive. Almost Archaicist obsolete. They
had sonic sedation systems before I was born. Easier on the patient
and staff both.”
The doctor reddened. Mouse had been out of the hospital only a
few weeks himself. He had spent a month recuperating from a severe
wound received from a Sangaree agent who had tried to seize
control of Danion. He was not pleased with the quality of
medical care, and made no secret of it. But Mouse hated all doctors
and hospitals. He could find fault with the finest.
BenRabi had tracked the Sangaree woman down, and had shot
her . . .
Mouse had the nerve to stand toe-to-toe with the Devil and tell
him to put it where the sun doesn’t shine.
“We have to make do with what we can afford, Mr.
Storm.”
“So I’ve been told.” Mouse did not pursue it,
though he thought Seiners pleading poverty was on a par with Midas
begging alms on a street corner.
BenRabi opened his eyes.
“How you doing, Moyshe?” Storm asked, trampling
Amy’s more dramatic opener. His presence there, betraying his
concern, embarrassed him.
The fabric of centuries takes the stamp; they mark the children
indelibly. Their legacy remains as invisible and irresistible as
the secret coded in DNA. The young Mouse had learned that Old
Earthers were pariahs.
Mouse’s family had been in Service for three generations.
They were part of Confederation’s military aristocracy.
BenRabi’s forebears had been unemployed Social Insurees for
centuries.
Neither man considered himself prejudiced. But false truths sown
in the fallows of childhood, planted deep, continued to sprout
unrealistic real-world responses.
BenRabi had begun bridling his prejudice early. He had to
survive. There had been only two Old Earthers in his Academy
battalion.
He needed a minute to get his bearings. “What am I doing
here?” he demanded.
“You needed rest,” Amy told him. “Lots of it.
You overdid it this time.”
“Come on. I can take care of myself. I know
when . . . ”
“Crap!” the doctor snapped. “Every mindtech
thinks that. And then they turn up here, burned out. I change their
diapers and spoon feed them. What is it with you people, benRabi?
You all got egos two sizes too big for a small god.”
Moyshe was fuzzy. He tried to say something flip. His tongue
felt like it was wrapped in an old sock.
He saw tears in the doctor’s eyes. “Did you lose
someone at Stars’ End?”
“My sister. She came out of creche just before you
landsmen came aboard. She was only seventeen, benRabi.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, you’re not. You’re a mindtech. Anyway,
sorry doesn’t help. Not when I have to take care of her every
day. She was just like you, benRabi. She knew she could handle it.
She wouldn’t listen either. None of them would. Not even the
controllers, who should’ve known better. They put her back in
with only four hours’ rest.”
BenRabi kept his mouth shut. What could he say? He had been
introduced to Contact during the battle at Stars’ End. The
main Contact room had been a shambles. Dozens of mindtechs had
given everything to save Danion.
He never would have seen Contact, or even have discovered its
existence, had those linker casualties not been cruel. In those
days he had been a distrusted landsman, a convicted enemy spy who
was screened from all Seiner secrets. They had drafted him into
Contact only because he might give Danion a
millimeter’s better chance of surviving.
He had made his decision to cross over after Stars’ End,
virtually in the hatch of the ship designated to return the
landsmen contractees to Confederation.
He had waited too long. Half of his personal possessions had
departed with the ship. He had not recovered them. The service ship
crew had gotten into a row with Customs. The bureaucrats had
retaliated, seizing everything not bolted to the ship’s
frames.
BenRabi took Amy’s thin, cool hand. “How’ve
you been, darling? You look tired. How long has it been?” She
felt so cold . . . She was a spooky woman. Why
had he fallen in love with her?
He always fell for the strange ones, the neurotic and just plain
rotten ones. Alyce, in Academy . . . What a
loser she had turned out to be. And the Sangaree woman,
Marya, who had been a vampire in the midst of his last two
missions.
“I’m all right now that I know you’ll be okay.
Moyshe, please be more careful.”
She seemed unusually remote. BenRabi glanced at her, at Mouse,
and back again. More problems with Mouse? Her dislike for his
friend had taken a quantum leap recently.
Mouse did not talk much. The inevitable chess board had
accompanied him, but he did not offer to play. Amy’s presence
restrained him. Chess was one of his great passions, rivaling his
passion for seducing a parade of beautiful women.
“Hey, Mouse. Ever wonder what Max is doing these
days?” Referring to someone they had known before coming out
here was the only way he could think of to pull his friend into the
conversation.
“Probably getting richer and wondering why we don’t
come into her shop anymore. I don’t think Beckhart will
bother giving her our new address.”
“Yeah.” BenRabi laughed. “He should have heard
the news by now, don’t you think? Or pretty soon. He’ll
foam at the mouth.” For Amy’s benefit, he explained,
“Max was a friend of ours in Luna Command. She ran a stamp
store.”
“Best hobby shop in the moon,” Mouse said.
Amy did not respond. She simply could not comprehend what these
two got out of accumulating small bits of paper that were ages old
and required jeweler’s grade care.
And stamps were not the only thing. Between them they seemed to
collect everything. Coins. Stamps. All kinds of ancient
miscellania. Mouse had little wrought-iron trivets and other
old-time dohickeys all over his quarters. The one collection she
could appreciate was Moyshe’s butterflies. He had a frame of
exotics on his wall. They were incredibly beautiful.
The Seiner ships were ecologically sterile. Only their zoos
contained nonhuman life, and that the large, well-known
mammals.
Amy had no hobbies of her own. She read for relaxation. She had
acquired the habit from her mother.
Mouse even managed passably with a clarinet, an antique woodwind
seldom seen anymore. He claimed to have learned from his
father.
“What about Greta?” Mouse asked. “You think
the Department will take care of her?”
Amy jumped at the name. “You never did tell me about
Greta, Moyshe.”
“That was in another life.”
They were lovers, but they did not know one another well.
BenRabi did not like stirring up the snake pit of people’s
pasts. There was too much chance of finding something nasty. It was
there in every life.
But he answered Amy’s question. “I told you before.
She’s a kid I met the last time I was on Old Earth. The last
time I visited by mother. She wanted out. Her friends
wouldn’t let her go. I arranged it for her. And ended up
sponsoring her.”
“Sort of like being a foster parent,” Mouse
explained.
“Guess she’d be eighteen now. I haven’t
thought about her in ages. You shouldn’t have mentioned her,
Mouse. Now you’ve got me worried.”
“Hey, don’t. Max will look out for her.”
“Maybe. But that’s not right, putting it on somebody
else. Is there any way I could send her a letter now and then, Amy?
Just to let her know I’m all right and thinking about her?
I’d let you or Jarl write it if you wanted. You could even
run it through the crypto computer to make sure it’s
innocent.”
“This’s just a kid?” Amy demanded.
“Yeah. She reminded me a lot of me when I came off Old
Earth. Awful lost. I thought I could help out by sponsoring her.
And then I kind of ran out when the Bureau sent us out here. I told
her we’d be back in a couple of months. It’s been
almost fourteen.”
“I’ll ask Jarl. He lets a little mail go out. Some of us
have relatives outside. But it’s slow.”
“That doesn’t matter. Amy, you’re a jewel. I
love you.”
“Well, if you’re going to get mushy,” Mouse
said, standing. “I’ve got to run. A citizenship class.
It’s from hunger, Moyshe. Me and Emily Hopkins and this
fascist bastard of a teacher . . . Maybe
I’ll hurt the arm again. Get back in here so I can miss a few
too. Behave. Do what the doctor lady says. Or I’ll wring your
neck.” He made his exit before Moyshe could embarrass him
with many thanks-for-comings.
“You’re awful quiet today, honey,” benRabi
said after a while. Perhaps if the doctor had not been
there . . .
“I’m just tired. We’re still doing double
shifts and barely keeping our heads above water. We’re going
to be in the Yards a long time. Assuming Danion
doesn’t fall apart before we get there. Assuming the sharks
don’t knock us apart.”
“You’ve mentioned these Yards about fifty times and
wouldn’t tell me about them. Do you trust me enough
now?”
“They’re what the name sounds like. Where we build
and fix our ships. Moyshe, you’re not going anywhere for a
while. Tell me about you.”
“What?”
“I met you the very first day. Way back on Carson’s,
when you signed your contract. We lived together for months before
I even found out you’ve got a daughter. I don’t know
anything about you.”
“Greta isn’t my daughter, honey. I just helped a kid
who needed somebody . . . ”
“It’s almost the same thing, isn’t
it?”
“Legally, I guess. On paper. They’d have trouble
making it stand up in court.”
“Tell me. Everything.”
There was little else to do but talk. He talked.
The doctor, lurking in the background watching suspiciously, had
made it clear that he would be stuck here for a while.
“All right. Let me know when it gets boring.”
He had been born in North America on Old Earth, to Clarence
Hardaway and Myra McClennon. He had hardly known his father. His
mother, for reasons he still did not understand, had elected to
raise him at home instead of burying him in the State Creche. Only
a few Social Insurees raised their children.
His early years had been typical for home-raised S.I. children.
Little supervision, little love, little education. He had been
running with a kid gang before he was eight.
He had been trine when he had seen his first offworlders.
Spikes, they had called them. These had been Navy men in crisp
dress blacks diligently pursuing the arcane business of
offworlders.
Those uniforms had captured his imagination. They had become an
obsession. He had started keying information out of his
mother’s home data retrieval terminal. He had not had the
education to decipher most of it. He had started teaching himself,
building from the ground up toward the things he so desperately
wanted to know.
At ten he had quit the gang so he would have more time to study.
Halfway through his eleventh year the revelation had come. He
had to get into space. He had approached a Navy recruiter
clandestinely. The man had arranged for him to sneak through the
Academy exams.
He never would have made it had there been no special standards
and quotas for Old Earthers. He would have gotten skunked had he
been in direct competition with carefully prepared Outworlders,
many of whom had grown up in the military life. Half the officers
in Service were the children of officers. Service was a complete
sub-culture, and one that was becoming increasingly less connected
with and controlled by the over-culture. He had had motivation.
At twelve he had run away from home, fleeing to Luna Command and
Academy. In six years he had climbed from dead last to the 95th
percentile in class standing. At graduation he had taken his Line
option and been assigned to the Fleet. He had served aboard the
destroyers Aquataine and Hesse, and the attack
cruiser Tamerlane, before requesting Intelligence
training.
Following a year of schooling the Bureau had assigned him as
Naval Attaché to the Embassy on Feldspar. He had had a half dozen
similar assignments on as many worlds before his work attracted the
attention of Admiral Beckhart, whose department handled dangerous
operations, and tricks on the grey side of legal.
He had taken part in several tight missions, and had
reencountered his former classmate, Mouse. They had shared several
assignments, the last being to join the Starfishers to ferret out
information that could be used to force the Seiners to enter the
Confederation fold.
Some of it Amy had heard before. Some she had not. She was not
satisfied. Her first comment was, “You didn’t say
anything about women.”
“What do you mean? What’s that got to do with
anything?”
“Everything, as far as I’m concerned. I want to know
who your lovers were and how come you broke up. What they were
like . . . ”
“You’ll shit in your hand and carry it to China
first, Lady.”
He was still a little dopey. He did not realize that he had said
it aloud till he began to wonder why she had shut up so
suddenly.
After one stunned gasp Amy blew out of the room like a tornado
looking for a town to wreck.
The lady doctor came out of the background, took his blood
pressure. “She’s pushy, isn’t she?”
“I don’t know what’s got into her. She
wasn’t like that before.”
“You’ve had an interesting life.”
“Not really. I don’t think I’d do it the same
if I had it to do again.”
“Well, you could, couldn’t you?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Rejuvenation. I thought it was available to everybody
landside.”
“Oh. Yes. More or less. Some of the brass have been around
since Noah landed the Ark. But Fate has a way of catching up with
people who try to slide around it.”
“Wish we had it out here.”
“You don’t look that old.”
“I was thinking about my father. He’s getting on
now.”
“I see. How soon can I leave?”
“Any time, really. But I wish you’d wait a couple
hours. You’ll be weak and dizzy.”
“Mouse was right about sonic sedation.”
“I know. But I don’t write the medical budget. Good
luck, Mr. benRabi. Try not to see me again.”
“I hate hospitals, Doctor.”
He did. His only stays had been at Bureau insistence, to modify
him mentally or physically.
He did a few minor exercises before catching a public tram
home.
Amy was waiting. “Oh, Moyshe. That was stupid of me. You
were right. Those things aren’t any of my
business.”
She had been crying. Her eyes were red.
“It’s all right. I understand.” But he did
not. His cultural background had not prepared him for personal
nosiness. In Confederation people lived now. They did not
consider the past.
“It’s just that I
feel . . . Well, everything’s so chancey
the way it is between us.”
Here she comes, he thought. Hints about getting married.
Marriage was important to the Seiners. In Confederation it was
more an amusing relic, an entertainment or daydream for the young
and the romantic. He could not reconcile his attitudes with Seiner
seriousness. Not yet.
The Starfishers had won his loyalty, but they could not make him
a different man. They could not make him reflect themselves merely
by adopting him.
Was Mouse having the same trouble? he wondered. Probably not.
Mouse was a chameleon. He could adapt anywhere, vanish into any
crowd.
“I have to go to work,” Amy told him. Weariness
seemed to be dragging her down.
“You’d better get some rest yourself,
honey.”
After she left he took out his stamp collection and turned the
well-thumbed album pages. Mouse had opened a Pandora’s box by
mentioning Max and Greta. After a while he pushed the album aside
and tried to compose a letter to the girl.
He could not think of much to say.