those doctors did to my body! I don’t even have blood any more.”
“Yeah, that can’t be fun.”
“Thing is, you’re leaving, right? You’re not from around here. I want to go with you. I already hated this place when I was alive. Can you imagine how messed up it’s going to be for me now I’m dead?”
I thought about it for a moment. “You know, I think the folks at the Bureau would be willing give you a place to stay, Rufi…Roof.” I nodded. “Just hang around for a little while, then Bayless can drive both of us. I’ve got a private Bureau plane waiting in Sonoma.” I smiled. “It’s not like you’ve got a lot of stuff to pack.”
“No,” he said seriously. “But there is one thing I gotta do first. Can you come along?”
“Where?”
“I need to say goodbye to my dad.”
You haven’t heard a houseful of drunken rummies scream until you’ve heard how these guys sounded when Roof showed up at his dad’s house in mid-party — bloodless, scalpless, and very obviously dead. The few who could keep their legs (and bladders, and sphincters) under control long enough to run outside all ran into me, which probably didn’t help their state of mind, either. Albie told me later that about half of of Bobby Gentle’s friends ran straight into to town after this life-changing experience and threw themselves on the mercy of Jesus, care of the nearby Monk’s Point Presbyterian Church.
“I told him he ought to get his act together,” Roof said as he rejoined me. I could see his dad lying slumped in the doorway of the house where he’d fainted, a beer still clutched in his fist. “I don’t think he’ll listen, though.”
“Don’t underestimate your powers of persuasion,” I said as I led him up (*) the driveway. I could hear some of the guests still shrieking inside. “You may have a future on the religious circuit, kid.”
I took him back to Albie’s place, and found him some duct tape so he could stick the top of his head back on until we could fix him properly back at the Bureau.
“Wow,” said Ted. He looked a little pale himself. “I mean…Jeez. That’s pretty… So what happened to the kid?
“He stayed with us for a couple of years. Worked a few missions for BPRD, but his heart wasn’t in it.” I smiled as I thought of Roof. He had been a slacker before the word existed — he had just happened to be a dead one. The last thing he wanted to do was spend his afterlife working an office job. “Last I heard, he was in Yakutata, Alaska, surfing year-round. He likes it ‘cause it’s real cold there, and nobody ever asks why he always wears a wetsuit.”
“And the Thursday Men?” asked Liz.
“Haven’t heard from them — or their woeful buddies. But I can’t help but worrying about it sometimes.”
“Why’s that?” Liz smiled at me. She thinks I think too much. She’s probably right.
“Well, if those two dimensions just happened to run smack into ours, what about the others? What about the rest of the days of the week? Why haven’t we heard anything yet from the Monday Men or the Tuesday Men?” I re- lit my cigar. “They’re probably here already, and we don’t even know yet. In fact, you could be one of them, Ted. It would explain your singing voice.” I slapped my hand on the table. “Now, who’s playing cards?”
The Tenth Muse
When I first got to know Balcescu, I didn’t like him much. A snob, that’s what I thought he was, and way too stuck on himself. I was right, too. One of the things that drove me crazy is that he talked like George Sanders, all upper-crust, but I didn’t believe for a moment he actually knew who George Sanders was. Old Earth movies wouldn’t have been highbrow enough for him.
He also loved the sound of his own voice, whether the person he was talking to had time to listen or not.
“There you are, Mr. Jatt,” he said one day, stopping me as I was crossing the observation deck. “I’ve been looking for you. I have a question.”
I sighed, but not so he could tell. “What can I do for you, Mr. Balcescu?” Like I didn’t have anything better to do coming up on twelve hours ‘til Rainwater Hub than answer questions from seat-meat. Sorry, that’s what we call passengers sometimes. Bad habit. But I hate it when people think they’re on some kind of a pleasure cruise, and that just because I’m four feet tall and my voice hasn’t broken yet I’m the best choice to find them a comfy pillow or have a long chat about the business they’re going to be doing planetside. What a lot of civilians don’t get is that this is the Confederation Starship Lakshmi, and when you’re on my ship, it’s serious business. A cabin boy is part of the crew like anyone else and I’ve got real work to do. Ask Captain Watanabe if you think I’m lying.
Anyway, this Balcescu was a strange sort of fellow — young and old at the same time, if you know what I mean. He had all his hair and he wasn’t too wrinkled but his face was thin and the rest of him wasn’t much huskier. He couldn’t have been much older than my cabin-mate Ping, which would make him late thirties, maybe forty at the most but he dressed like an old man, or like someone out of an old movie — you know, those ancient films from Earth where they wear coats with patches on the elbows and loose pants and those things around their necks. Ties, right. That’s how he dressed — but no tie, of course. He wasn’t crazy, he just thought he was better than everyone else. Wanted you to know that even though he was some kind of language scientist, he was artistic. It wasn’t just his clothes — you could also tell by the things he said, the kind of the music he listened to. I’d heard it coming out of his cabin a couple of times — screeches like cats falling in love, crashes like someone banging on a ukulele with a crescent wrench. Intellectual stuff, in other words.
“I can’t help but noticing that much ado is being made of this particular stop, Mr. Jatt,” he said when he stopped me on deck. “But I went through four Visser rings on the way out to Brightman’s Star and nobody made much of that. Why such a fuss over this one, this…what do they call it?”
“People call Rainwater Hub ‘the Waterhole’,” I told him. “You can call it a fuss, but it’s dead serious business, Mr. Balcescu.”
“Why don’t you call me Stefan, my young friend — that would be easier. And I could call you Rolly — I’ve heard some of the others call you that.”
“Couldn’t do it, sir. Regs don’t allow it.”
“All right. How about something else, then? You could call me something amusing, like ‘Mr. B’…”
I almost made a horrified face, but Chief Purser always says letting someone know you’re upset is just as rude as telling them out loud. “If you don’t mind, I’ll just keep calling you Mr. Balcescu, sir. It’s easier for me.”
“All right, then, Mr. Jatt. So why is Rainwater Hub such a serious business?”
I did my best to explain. To be honest, I don’t understand all the politics and history myself — that’s not our job. Like we rocket-jocks always say, we just fly ‘em. But here’s what I know.
When Balcescu said he went all the way out to Brightman’s Star and there was no fuss about wormhole transfers, he was right, but that’s because he’d left from the Libra system and his whole trip had been through Confederation space. All those Visser rings he went through were “CO amp;O” as we say — Confederation Owned and Operated. But when he hopped on the Lak’ to join us on our run from the Brightman system to Col Hydrae, well, that trip requires one jump through non-Confederation space — the one we were about to make.
Not only that, but for some reason not even Doc Swainsea can explain so I can understand, the Visser ring here at Rainwater is hinky, or rather the wormhole itself is. Sometimes it takes a little while until the conditions are right, so the ships sort of line up and wait — all kinds of ships, the most you’ll ever see in one place, Confederation, X-Malkin, Blessed Union, ordinary Rim traders, terraform scouts out of Covenant, you name it. They call it the Waterhole because most of the time everybody just…shares. Even enemies. Nobody wants to shut down the hub when it means you could wind up with an entire fleet stranded on this side of the galaxy. So there’s a truce. It’s a shaky one, sometimes. Captain Watanabe told us once in the early days the Confederation tried to arrest a Covenant jumbo at another hub, Persakis out near Zeta Ophiuchus — the Convenant had been breaking an embargo on the Malkinates. Persakis was shut down for most of a year and it took twenty more for everyone to recover from that, so now everybody agrees there’s no hostilities inside a hub safety zone — like predators and prey sharing a waterhole on the savannah. Once you get there, it’s sanctuary. It’s… Casablanca.
