Dartagnan came toward her from the hub of the cabin; she sensed his movement more than heard it, and turned to meet him. “Don't come any closer. Please.” She brushed her night-black hair back from her face irritably. He stopped himself, wavering as he regained his balance; his open disappointment reached across the space between them.
“Mythili, I didn't know about this …”
“I know you didn't.” She cut him off. In his eyes lost images were rising; something between disgust and terror would not let her see them. “You don't need to fawn on me, Chaim. I'm not working for a corporation anymore. And neither are you, from the looks of it.”
“No.” His head stayed down; he stared at his own long-fingered brown hand clenched over a seat-back before the panel. “Sorry,” he said, still apologizing, compulsively, for something beyond words. “But maybe we've bottomed out, Mythili. Maybe we've changed our luck.” He lifted his head slowly. “This ship—look at it! It's all ours; it's giving us a chance to start over again, to prove we've got the guts to live by our own rules, this time. This is a dream come true—” His wide mouth stretched wider in a hopeful grin.
“Your dream, not mine!” She rebelled against the part of him that had included her without asking; against the part of herself that might have been glad. “I never wanted to be a prospector, I don't know a damn thing about it. I don't want to spend the rest of my life as a junker, living on the edge of starvation. And I don't want to spend it sharing this ship with you, Dartagnan!”
His whole body tautened visibly. “I see.” He sagged, as though the unseen tensions had let him go again abruptly, leaving him more formless than before. But the yielding softness had gone out of his eyes, and he looked at her without hope or apology. “So it's not your dream. Have you got anything to put in its place? No—or you wouldn't be here. You don't know a damn thing about prospecting; but I do. Only I can't pilot a ship this size well enough to get it into the places a prospector has to go. You can. Maybe we don't want each other,” he said with spiteful satisfaction, “but we sure as hell
Mythili bit the inside of her mouth until she felt sharp pain, until the first response died in her throat. “All right. I agree with everything you say. I'll work with you, because I have to. We'll share whatever we find fifty-fifty. But that's all—” words escaping again in spite of her.
“That's all I expected.” Chaim moved his mouth, imitating a smile sourly. “And I think there's one more thing we can agree on: Abdhiamal really screwed both of us.”
In the artificial brightening of a new day, Mythili left her tiny rented room and took an air taxi out across the kilometer-wide vacuole that held Mecca City. The towers of the city clustered on every side, their colored surfaces shimmering with faint movement as she looked outward and ahead. The sight did not touch her with wonder as it once had; today she scarcely saw them at all.
She had agreed to share a ship and a gamble with Chaim Dartagnan, and now she was about to back it up, taking all that was left of her life savings to buy the equipment and supplies they needed to make their trip. It was insane … but what other choice was there? She felt the tension that had shocked her awake after a night of depression-drugged sleep winding still tighter in her chest. She swallowed and sighed; but the tightness came back, and the taxi closed inexorably with her destination.
She made her way down the central core of the Abraxis commercial building, settling like a feather into gravity's soft well of suction. The skin of the building walls was golden, and she felt herself suffocating, sinking through honey. Workers and customers moved past her, propelling themselves like swimmers from the corridor's wall. She let them pass, letting her own slow sink-rate remain undisturbed.
The ship-outfitter's business, with its massive displays, occupied the two bottom-most levels of the building. Grimly she pushed aside the flaps of the upper-level entrance, found herself in a catacomb of stabilized boxes and closed mesh containers. She moved cautiously through the narrow aisles, where a handful of desultory strangers inspected navigation equipment she identified at a glance and prospector's gear she could not recognize at all. They stared as she passed, herself an unclassifiable oddity in this male domain.
She emerged finally into a large, less cluttered area; saw Chaim at last, gesturing over an equipment list, a pile of potential purchases growing at his feet. He glanced up, as though her tension radiated like cold, and broke off his conversation with the shopman. But his face stayed flatly expression less, unlike her own; the gift of his career as a professional liar. “This is my partner. She'll fill you in on anything else we need.”
She moved across the open space, joined the two men beside the counter where a small screen recorded the growing cost of their journey. The shopman regarded her with mixed emotions; she ignored him for the pile of supplies. She stared at the screen again, tallying the list in her mind, feeling a resentment rooted in something deeper than her ignorance of a prospector's needs: “Do we really need all that, Dartagnan?”
“We need more. But we can't afford it.” He glanced uncomfortably at the shopman.
“What about that spectroscope? The ship already has one.” She touched the one word on the screen that she really recognized, her fingers rigid.
“Not good enough. Sekka-Olefin already knew what he was looking for, and where to find it. We don't. We need all the help we can get.”
She shrugged, her mouth pulling down. “All right.”
“What about navigation equipment?”
“I checked the ship's system over again. It's in fine shape. There's nothing we can afford to add to it that would make a real difference.”
He looked relieved, the first genuine expression she had seen on his face. “Then I guess we can afford to eat, after all.”
“You want me to go ahead and fill the rest of your order, then?” The shopman addressed Chaim.
“Yeah.” Chaim passed him the list, glancing her way. “Go ahead.”
She looked away from him, becoming aware of the man in worn coveralls who waited, listening, at the edge of her sight. He moved forward at her glance, intruding on their circle of consciousness. Another prospector, she guessed, and not a very successful one; a heavyset man who looked old, older than he was, because a lifetime spent exposed to shipboard radiation aged the body badly. His dark brown, graying hair was clipped close along the sides of his bald head, and his broad, gnarly face was seamed with lines that could have been good-humored. As if to prove it, he smiled when she looked at him. She did not smile back. Undaunted, he cracked open their privacy and included himself in it.
Chaim turned at his approach, ungraceful with surprise.
The prospector squinted. “Aren't you … yeah, you must be! Gamal Dartagnan's kid? I'll be damned! Imagine runnin' into you, after all this time.”
Chaim stared, mildly disbelieving. “You knew my old ma—uh, my father?” he said, groping for a civil response.
“Yeah, I sure did. We were great friends, him and me. Almost partners.”
Mythili felt her face pinch at the falseness of the tone. Chaim's own face had become a vacant wall again; a defense, against what she wasn't sure. “What's your name?”
“Fitch. He must've mentioned me—”
“No.” Chaim's boot nudged the pile of supplies; containers stirred sluggishly and resettled. “How'd you know me? … We didn't look much alike.”
Fitch laughed, unaffected by the lack of positive response. “The hair. Anybody'd know that hair. And he talked about you all the time.”
Chaim's expression became slightly more expressionless.
“And you're kind of a celebrity, you know—all the media about old Sekka-Olefin's murder, and how you brought the killer in, with the help of the little lady, here.”
Mythili considered silently the fact that she stood half a head taller than Fitch, and wondered why she couldn't find the irony even slightly amusing; wondered whether she had lost her sense of humor permanently.
“And now word has it that you've got yourself Sekka-Olefin's ship. Word must be right, or you wouldn't be here outfitting. Following in the old man's footsteps, huh? Got a damn fine ship for it, from what I hear.… You know much about prospecting?”
“Only what I learned by doing it, with my old man.” A controlled sarcasm oiled the words.
