doorway. It irked him that he would be forced to stay in an underground room. Back on earth he lived high in a skyscraper, and he had waited a long time—and paid several bribes—to get an apartment looking over the city and the flat stark plains beyond. Having paid the bribes still troubled him.
The lobby was deserted and empty. Not even an AS waited to serve him.
STARFARERS 8 3
'Hello!'
No one replied. Griffith went behind the desk, intending to go into the back and rout out whoever or whatever was supposed to be in attendance.
A sheet of paper rustled beneath his shoe. He picked it up:
a sign, blown to the floor by a breeze. It carried a notice in several languages, beginning with French. He glanced farther down and found the English version.
'We regret that we are not here to aid you. Our government has called us home for consultations.'
Griffith snorted at the idea of hotel keepers* being called home for consultations. His briefing had neglected to mention that France held the guesthouse concession and that all its personnel would be gone by the time he arrived.
'Please choose a chamber from our diagram and consider our house yours during your stay. We have no locks so no code is required. Please put soiled linen into the laundry chute. Fresh linen may be retrieved from the armoire in the hallway.''
The lack of locks irked him even more than the idea of staying underground. Not that he was stupid enough to bring anything sensitive with him, but if anyone found out who he was they would not know that, and they might search his belongings. Besides, some people would snoop even without suspicions to go on.
Griffith was a very private person.
He glanced at the diagram. Two rooms out often had been spoken for. He left signing in till after he had seen what the guesthouse had to offer.
He strode along the ramp leading to a second-story hallway. The interior wall was blank. Doors to the guest apartments opened from the exterior wall. Each end of the hallway led out onto a balcony and exit ramp.
The guesthouse was more pleasant than he expected, and, though it was indeed underground, each room flowed into its own small terrace just beneath the crest of the hill. All the rooms were similar, with one wall of windows. The hillside sloped to a stream and a small grove of trees. The furnishings were Spartan: a futon, a small desk, woven mats on the floor. His shoes crunched on the floor coverings.
To give himself the most privacy, he chose the room next
84 vonda N. Mcintyre
to the most distant exit. He dumped his things, apparently at
random, on the futon, then left to lake a long exploratory walk.
FIoris Brown waited in the transport until someone came along to help her. The excitement of the trip had begun to catch up with her, and she felt tired. She dreaded the return to gravity. Weightlessness was a blessing, easing the aches of lift-off as well as the aches of age that she had suffered for twenty years.
As she waited, she looked out the dorsal port.
The bow of the transport obscured her view of the inhabited cylinder, but the wild cylinder spun slowly in the distance. Even farther away, the furled sail lay waiting for its test deployment. It looked like a huge, tautly twisted silver cable.
A young man dove into the transport, sailed through the aisle, and stopped himself just above her. She smiled at him. Everyone on the transport had been so clean-cut. This was the first person she had seen who dressed in a manner she found familiar and comfortable. He was a big man, with dark skin and hair so black it had blue highlights. He wore ragged blue jeans and a black leather vest; he was clean-shaven but his hair was long, tied back in a ponytail, fanning out behind his head. Despite his youth, sun-squint lines radiated from the comers of his eyes.
'I'm your liaison. Infinity Mendez.'
'Hello.' She extended her hand. 'My name is FIoris Brown.'
He took her hand and held it rather than shaking it. His hand completely surrounded her skinny, wrinkled fingers. She felt embarrassed by the gnaried blue veins.
'We don't shake hands much in zero-g, Ms. Brown,' he said. 'One more force to counteract.'
'Please call me FIoris.'
He unfastened her seat belts with deft and impatient movements, then turned his back to her. The fringe on his leather vest dangled raggedly.
'Grab your stuff and grab hold,' he said.
The fastenings stuck. She fumbled at the net.
He made a peculiar motion of his hands and shoulders that STARFARERS 8 5
caused him to rotate toward her. Without comment, he unfastened the net, stuck it under his arm, and presented her with his fringe again. She wound her hands in the cut leather. It felt warm and slippery. He gathered his strength, like an animal about to leap.
She was afraid he would wrench out her arms, but he pushed off carefully and glided with surprising smoothness
between the seats of the transport, drawing her after him.
They were the last people to leave the passenger compartment. Even the waiting room had cleared out.
'How are you on hills?' Infinity asked.
'Slow,' she said.
'Okay.' He took her to an elevator. 'Hold on, and keep your feet near the floor.''
He pointed to one surface, which FIoris would not necessarily have chosen as the floor except for the orientation of the grasps and the painted outlines of footprints.
'This'll feel weird. Something to do with the spin. You need a physicist to explain it, but you get used to it. Down,' he said to the elevator. It complied.
At first she thought he must have told her the wrong surface to keep her feet near, for she felt a force drawing her toward the surface of the elevator at her back. Gradually, as the elevator slid toward the floor of the cylinder, the force slid, too, pulling from a more and more horizontal orientation till it fell and acted like gravity, staying steady and 'down.'
The elevator stopped.
'Most folks don't come this way,' Infinity said. He set off toward the bright end of the tunnel.
FIoris stepped out of the elevator. She stumbled. Strange how she could have gotten so used to weightlessness in two days. She steadied herself and followed Infinity Mendez, trying to keep up.
Returning to gravity was not as hard as she had feared. Starfarer's seven-tenths g made walking easier than back on earth.
She stepped cautiously out into the cylinder, into fresh cool air. She looked around, then up. For a moment she shrank back, as if the whole incredible construction might collapse upon her. Pictures failed to reproduce the feeling of observing one's world from the inside, from above. FIoris felt as
8 6 vonda N. Mdntyre
she imagined a fifteenth-century explorer might have, had he crossed the equator and discovered the people on the other side really did walk upside down on the far side of the world. She stepped gingerly out of the tunnel, crossed the semicircle of rock foam at its base, and stood on the new grass.
She glanced at her liaison.
'Why are you looking at me like that?'
'Not many old people on board Starfarer,' he said. 'Not as old as you, anyway. 1 hardly know anybody who's old.'
She tried not to be offended. She wondered how many
other people on board Starfarer had grown up in space, in a
society that was missing the entire eldest generation.
'Don't you have grandparents back on earth?'
'Somewhere. 1 don't know. Come on.' Carrying her things, he strode off across a bright green lawn that lay between rougher fields. His unshod feet barely marked the grass. She followed, wondering if she, too, should take
