ticketing machines.
'Ah ...' Cress settled back, looking up at the omnipresent video displays. Here they changed from scene to scene of the star port exterior: now the hazy, cloud-dressed surface of Kharemough; now the surface of the nearer moon, an abstract painting of industrial pollutants; now the glaring image of an interstellar freighter, a chain of coin discs strung out on the matte blackness like a necklace of drilled shell beads. He sat on Silky's far side, protecting Silky from strangers by the barrier of their bodies; Silky gaped at the sluggish patterns of passersby, oil on a water surface. 'That's what I like about Kharemough — they always try to keep your mind occupied.' A false note sounded in the easy words as the starships flashed onto the screen. Elsevier had said that Cress had once been a journeyman astrogator for a major shipping line. 'Too bad we can't see the Prime Minister's ships; but he's not due home for a couple more weeks. That's a sight to put your eyes out for sure, young mistress.'
Moon glanced down from the screens. 'Why do you always call me that? My name is Moon!'
'What?' Cress looked at her blankly, shrugged. 'I know it is, young mistress,' deliberate. 'But you're a sibyl; and I owe you my life. You deserve to be addressed with honor. Besides,' he smiled, 'if I let it get too casual, I might fall in love with you.'
She stared at him, taken by surprise, but his face refused to tell her whether he was making fun of her or not. She looked away again moodily, not knowing how to answer him; tried to watch the pictures on the screens.
Disembodied voices made announcements in Sandhi, and half a dozen other languages she didn't recognize at all. The ideo graphic symbols of written Sandhi were incomprehensible to her, but she was learning the spoken language from tapes that heightened recall while she listened. They opened her mind with music while they etched the words painlessly on her unconscious; and by now she could understand most of what she heard. But there were nuances within nuances to this language, just as there were to the relationships between the people who used it. A strict caste system controlled the people of this world, denning their roles in society from the day they were born. Offworlders were immune to its restrictions, as long as they remained aloof from them — she had been given a ticket, over Elsevier's pleading, for addressing a shopkeeper by his Sandhi classification, instead of as 'citizen.' More serious breaches of conduct within the system were punishable by stiff fines or even loss of an inherited rating. There were separate shops, restaurants, and theaters for the Technical, Nontechnical, and Unclassified ratings, and the highest and lowest could not even speak to each other without an intermediary. She had wondered indignantly, clutching her ticket, why they put up with it. Elsevier had only smiled and said, 'Inertia, my dear. Most people simply aren't unhappy enough with the known to trade it for the unknown. TJ could never understand that.'
Moon leaned forward on the quilt-surfaced couch as Elsevier rematerialized out of the crowd mass.
'They're already boarding. We'd better go.' Elsevier waved the ticket printouts toward the gateway at the far side of the waiting area, where passengers were funneling into the unknown. Cress stood up with Silky; Moon followed, resigned. 'Don't look so glum, young mistress; you won't feel a thing. It's all in the hands of the traffic controllers, a shuttle's not like a ship. More like a crate.'
'It's beautiful down there, Moon. Wait until you see KR's ornamental gardens.'
'Gardens aren't what I need, Elsie.' Her eyes went to the view of space again, like iron to a lodestone. 'I need to go home.'
Cress gave Elsevier an accusing, unreadable look; she turned away from it. 'Wait until you meet KR, Moon. You'll understand everything then.'
Chapter 20
They boarded the shuttle at the tail of the crowd. Moon caught a glimpse of its tubby, boxlike exterior through the airlock's port: It was a crate, just as Cress had said, with no propulsion of its own. It was drawn down to the planet and shunted back up again just like any other piece of freight, clutched in an invisible hand of repeller-or tractor — beams from one of the planetary distribution centers. A shipping window was a column of no-man's space thirty meters wide, licking out into the zone of heavy industry between Kharemough and its moons.
On board they were led to tiers of seats above a central floor screen that showed her a view of the planet's surface, misty with blue and khaki; she tried to concentrate on the solid immensity of it, and not to remember that it was unspeakably far below them. No one drifted weightless out of a seat even here on board the shuttle; the Kharemoughis claimed, with unsubtle pride, that getting rid of gravity was the hard part; they could produce it whenever they wanted to.
The exits sealed, the shuttle broke free from the station's grasp and began its drop into the tube of force. Moon sat oblivious to the muted conversations, mostly incomprehensible, around her-oblivious to everything but the vision of the planet's surface rising up to meet them in mid fall An amorphorous, cloud-swirled plate widened into ever clearer detail, while Elsevier's hushed voice pointed out the burnished blue seas, and the green-ochre of this world's islands, so huge that they shouldered aside the sea itself. The island centrally below grew until it was all she could see, dividing and redividing into murals of mountain, forest, farmland, all rolling inexorably into morning ... and then, before she quite realized it, a slender ring of twilit city laid out in ripples concentric around an immense, shining, treeless plain.
'... landing field,' Elsevier said.
At the final moment she had the feeling that another giant's invisible hand plucked them out of the air, before they impacted on the glowing grid lines of the field. It swept them aside, into one of the stolid warehouse buildings that peri metered the landing area, and at last set them down.
The crowd of passengers left the warm-colored interior of the passenger terminal. Moon felt her feet tingle as she walked at the pressure of an alien world ... or else they tingled with bad circulation. The artificial gravity of the space city was less than she was used to, and this was more; her feet came down like ballast no matter how carefully she moved.
It was barely dawn here on the planet surface, the air was still cool; Elsevier rubbed her arms inside her sleeves. Moon slipped on her own wine-red robe and belted it without protest. The Kharemoughis were a modest people, and Elsevier had warned her that the free ways of the Thieves' Market did not extend down to the ground. Sunrise opened like a flower in the east, the sky overhead would still be black and starless... Looking up, her breath caught hi her throat at the sight of the sky. Overhead the darkness was curtained with light, banner folds of green rose yellow gold icy blue; sighing bands of rainbow, rays of scintillating whiteness crowning an enchanted dreamland.
'Look at that, Silky.' Elsevier lapsed into Sandhi as her gaze followed Moon's up; the words were not praise. 'It's disgraceful.'
'You can say that again, citizen.' Three fellow shuttle passengers, dark, slender native Kharemoughis, stood beside them waiting for a taxi; one of them nodded his helmeted head in disgust. 'Pollution-you'd think there no tomorrow was. Ye gods, the sheer tonnage of cast-off junk floating up there. I don't know how they expect us our job to do.
It's not traffic control any more, it's a demolition derby.'
'SN—' The second of the three was a woman; she laughed lightly, tapped him not quite playfully on his uniformed shoulder. 'These citizens aren't from around here,' a significant lifting of the eyebrows. 'They don't need by our petty complaints to be bored, do they?'
'Yes, old man.' The third helmet bobbed. 'You really do need this vacation. You're like a bio purist sounding.'
The first man pushed his hands into his belt, looking annoyed.
'What's wrong with the sky?' Moon pulled her gaze down, reluctantly. 'It's full of light.' The way it should be. 'It's beautiful.'
The first man glanced at her with a frown starting, ended up smiling in spite of himself. He shook his head, more in sorrow than in anger. 'Ignorance is bliss, citizen. Be glad you're not a Kharemoughi.' A hovercraft slowed in
