Tal remembered looking down dumbly at the two armed men he’d just sent unconscious into die snowdrifts behind the bar. They were gangsters, pure and simple, but the police were also out searching, and Tal saw no point in differentiating between groups that were trying to end his life. Shouts and questions coming from the bar suggested that more such people would soon be on their way. Well, didn’t they say that Apheans all died young? So his quest was unfulfilled—it probably would have failed anyway, even if he’d had five hundred years—
And then a voice had said, “Excuse me! Do you need a hand?”
He looked up into the wildly blowing snowflakes. A figure was lying atop the high concrete wall that surrounded the back yard. “What?”
“I said, do you need a hand?”
It was a human male, perhaps twenty, dark-haired and underdressed for the weather. A number of things went swiftly through Tal’s head, but what he said was, “Yes.”
“How many are coming after you?” asked the madman on the wall. “Can we take them?”
“It would be best not to try.”
“Oh.” The voice sounded disappointed. “Well, never mind; here, let me help you up, and we’ll softly and silently vanish away.”
It sounded like a quote, the way he said it. Tal was about to die in the backyard of a sleazy port bar, and this lunatic was quoting some other human lunatic.
“You don’t understand,” said Tal. “The only way out is the port, and the police will have been told to detain me.”
“Oh, tarradiddle to that,” said the young man, confirming Tal’s estimate of his sanity. “Come on up; we’ve got a certain amount of diplomatic immunity, and maybe I can pass you for one of my aides. They’re tramping about here in the snow looking for me now; it’ll be hours before they all get back.” His grin showed through the slanting snow. “You’ll be on board by then.”
“On board what?”
Sounds from the bar increased.
“Do you care?” asked the young man swiftly.
Tal took his hand.
And that is how, thought Tal two years later, you entered an entire culture of lunatics. At least they were traveling lunatics, and he could continue his search at each stop.
He finished inserting his gray lenses and examined the results—a totally forgettable human male. Excellent.
He rose, put on the dress helmet of his rank, and took the twenty-minute walk to Transport. That deck was, as ever, a haven for Outsider techs on contract; the walls were full of them, programming the shorties and capsules that were operating between the Diamond, the Opal, and Baret Station. He ignored the admin assistants and approached the dayshift duty officer.
“Officer Diamond,” he said. ‘There should be a station pass waiting for me.”
The duty officer, a middle-aged man in Transport yellows, stared at him openly. Diamond was a ship’s name, not a proper form of identification. Tal could see the question in his eyes: Was this Adrian’s tame demon?
Finally the officer said, ‘They use tattoos here.”
“That’s not unusual,” said Tal.
“Not as such, sir. You got a double-shift pass, sir; the station charges fifty units for it, and it’ll fade in sixteen hours. That’s when your air rights terminate, so don’t be tardy getting back.”
“What’s the Baret Station penalty for letting a pass lapse?”
“They space you, I think. A charming bunch, from what I hear. Step over here, if you would, sir; you’ll have to take off your helmet. They do the forehead here; easier to spot. By station law, your hair has to be short enough not to hide it.”
Tal removed his helmet and handed it to the man. “See that it’s returned to my quarters.”
“Yes, sir. Please close your eyes, sir.”
Tal closed his eyes and felt the tattoo gun touch his forehead.
“All done, sir. You can wait on the line over there.”
Tal looked eloquently around at the enormous space of Transport, bays filled with ships. “Why do I need to wait?”
“No pilots available, sir. We’ve only got shorties online now, and they need a human to pilot.”
“They need something to pilot. Is that one in Bay Orange available?”
“It’s okayed for service, sir, but we don’t have a man—”
“I’ll take it. Plug me into Departure.”
Tal turned on one heel and left, not being one to waste his time on social pleasantry. His orders had been sufficiently clear.
Five minutes later he was sitting inside the shortie, waiting for the departure program to fling him away from the City. Recalling the way the duty officer had stared at him, he considered again that it might have been better, on the day he agreed to stay on the Diamond, to have made up some plausible Empire surname. But Adrian had saved his life, and for some reason Tal had not wanted to lie to him at that moment.
Then his pod burst from the line of shortships with a welcome kick of speed; good-bye, for the time being, to the museum of eccentricity that was life in the Three Cities. Back to the real world, the mainstream of human culture that he hunted in, and was hunted. A line from history came to him, the sentence of some ancient queen: “Keep her close confined.” They keep you close confined in the universe at large, thought Tal, as he pictured the long, dusty road ahead of him. He used to think that fatalism was no more part of his nature than optimism; but his compass was beginning to swing around to the acknowledgment that his human genes would have their say. He no longer approached his quest with any expectation of success—he no longer approached it with any expectations at all. He approached it like some charwoman on her way into the quarters of a messy nobleman with bucket and broom, looking forward to quitting time.
His station pass was good for sixteen hours. It was frustrating, then, to spend the first four of them
