Doomstar

When he knew that it must be dark outside he went very quietly up the ladder to the bridgeroom and took from the arms locker a skinning knife that Flay had given him as a gift. Then he went into the cubicle he had shared indistinguishably with Boker and cleaned himself of the grease and stains of the afternoon's unfinished labor.

He put on fresh clothing, hiding the knife in his tunic. Under Hurth's bunk in the adjoining cubicle he found a battered round cap with a second officer's badge on it and a limp peak that would partly shadow his face. He also took what money he could find, including small coins. He still had his money belt, but it did him no good for casual spending.

He went down the ladder again, this time to the lower depths where Glevan kept his tools. Here he got a pair of heavy wire cutters. Then he returned to the companionway where he had left Chai on watch.

The ship's lights were out, except for those in the center well. The companionway was dark, showing the open hatch as a lighter area. Chai blew softly through her nose, and touched him.

He crouched close to her. He could see nothing. The outside floods had not been turned on and the wide space of the pad was dark except for the glimmer of a cloudy sky. The glare of the administration area was too far off to matter. But he trusted Chai.

'Man?'

'Under ship. Not move.'

They had left a guard, then, or more properly a spy. He wanted to tell Chai to kill, but he only said, 'Hit him.'

She went down the ladder like a puff of smoke and there was no noise at all until somebody pulled in his breath in a startled half cry that was broken off by a heavy slap. A second later she called. He went down the ladder. In the black shadow under Grellah's tripod gear there was a lighter blob. He did not stop to examine it. With Chai running beside him he went off between the lines of ships.

He went all the way on foot, avoiding the transport strips with their too-many passengers. Fortunately Grellah's pad was in one of the outermost rows. Even so it was a long way, and he expected every moment to hear a warning hooter sound for liftoff, and he prayed that they would not be caught on the pad.

They were not. Ships landed and took off, but they were in other quadrants. The tall wire fence appeared at length before him, topped with intricate barbs to prevent climbing.

Kettrick cut the heavy mesh quickly and let Chai and himself through. An interrupted impulse would show up on a board at Administration, warning that the fence had been cut, and where, and the guards would be sent at once. But they would be looking for thieves breaking in to pilfer from the docked ships, not for someone going the other way. At least he hoped so. Somebody would probably put two and two together when the spy came to and yelled. In the meantime, he had better make what speed he could.

He took time to bend the ends of the cut strands back in the right direction with the plier teeth of the cutters. Then he ran like the devil across the periphery road and the cleared space beyond, into a belt of trees that followed the moss-grown ditch of a disused canal.

He headed for the city. Behind him he heard a carrier come along the fence line looking for the break. There was no pursuit.

Achern was an old city. Much of it was built of the pink stone, which was extremely hard and enduring, and parts of it were quite incredibly old. It had not changed too greatly with the impact of new technologies and the influx of new races and ideas. The Achernans had greedily assimilated what they wanted and rejected the rest, including any resident alien population. They disliked humans intensely and saw to it that there was no little coagulation of permanent intruders that might develop into a political force.

Humanity flowed off its ships into the Market, the taverns and shops and business houses and the other houses along the Canal of the Blue Lanterns, leaving money in Achernan pockets all the way, and then it flowed back into its ships and departed. Diplomatic and other unavoidable human personnel such as the I–C and corporation staffs were rotated on a three-year basis.

There had of course been some new building, chiefly around the starport and chiefly of an industrial nature. In the main, the Achernans found their ancient city adequate just as it was, and if the humans did not they were welcome to go elsewhere.

It was a beautiful city, one of the loveliest in the Cluster. The truly massive, piled, pinnacled buildings of pink stone were made to look as delicate as clouds, afloat above the mirroring canals, their hard outlines all softened with carving as though the wind had fretted them. The Achernans loved carving. Even the boats on the canals were carved, and the graceful spans of the bridges. Lamps like silver moons hung in the warm night, and the flowering vine that gave the city its peculiar spicy smell clambered everywhere with branching sprays of white.

Yet Kettrick felt, as always, a tightening of the skin across his back and a deep distaste in which all his senses joined. The design of the buildings was subtly unhuman, the motifs of the carvings not at all subtly unpleasant to the human eye. The boats glided too quietly on the oily water, the sound of voices was too soft, the footsteps too undulant. The pretty flowers shed poison on the air, the sweetness of the opium poppy. And all the piled-up windows and the deep-arched doorways and the curtained boats held glib black glossy eyes that watched and blinked with ophidian disdain.

Underneath it all, and perhaps most potent of all, was the faint dry body odor that set his ape hackles on end and made Chai grunt and blow.

He was by no means alone on the streets. The evening was young. There were many places of entertainment. Crowds of outworlders moved freely through the maze of streets and waterways; merchants, traders, officers and crews from the ships, employees of many firms and diplomatic establishments. Nobody looked twice at Kettrick. Chai got an occasional startled glance, but the Tchell were not unknown here; merchants often used them for guards and Kettrick had seen them more than once around the Market. He walked as quickly as he dared without seeming to hurry, keeping as much as he could to the darker or less crowded ways.

The Spaceman's Hall was in one part of a very ancient building. Dim shapes of pink stone writhed up the massive doorway on either side and met overhead with a flourishing of time-worn wings. Inside was a great blank room, shorn of every fitting that might have told of its former uses. There were cheap wooden benches in it now, where spacemen could wait for a berth or make contact with friends or sleep off a drunk.

A big board hung on one wall, with a few Wants scrawled on it. Beside it, in untidy bunches, the postings of current shipping dangled from pegs. In one corner a man from a world way over on the western fringe of the Cluster sat in the midst of a complex of pigeonholes, message boards, files, and a teletype machine. Silky white hair covered his head, the tops of his shoulders, his chest and back. He looked like a melancholy white rabbit, except for his eyes, which were a pale yellow and more like a coyote's.

Kettrick left Chai to sit by the door and went to where the postings hung, moving with a sort of dreary slouch as though he did not greatly care whether he found what he was looking for or not. He began to flip through them, as idly as he could with his nervous hands. He wondered if the Spaceman's Hall were being watched, if the yellow- eyed man were a spy, if one of the crewmen snoring on the benches were working for the Doomstar.

The teletype began to clatter, chewing out another listing from the spaceport. Kettrick's eye ran down the lists of ships, searching. The machine fell silent. He heard the yellow-eyed man get up and start toward him.

Kettrick turned the page. He continued to turn pages while the man inserted the new paper into one of the bunches. He could not find any listing for Starbird. That meant she had left, and he would have to go to the back files for time and destination.

He said, 'Uh…'

The yellow-eyed man looked at him, smiling. 'Help you, mister?'

'Looking for a friend of mine,' said Kettrick.

'Know when he landed?'

Kettrick shook his head. 'I'm not even sure he has.'

'What's the name of the ship?'

As in a dream, Kettrick heard himself saying, 'Starbird'

It caused not a ripple. 'Oh, yes,' the man said. 'I remember her, she's the one had to dump her cargo and go into repair dock.' He went back and shuffled through his files. 'Here.' Kettrick stared at the typed sheet, not really seeing it. 'She'll be tied up a couple of weeks, at least. But I guess they did all right in the Market, so it's not a calamity. You'll probably find your friend at one of the hostels. You can leave a message on the board, if you want to, in case he comes in.'