furnishings-suspended lamps with fringe hanging down, moving 'modern art' wall images that had ceased to be modern two decades ago-and thought, not for the first time, that he had come a long way down from his former exalted place in the world. For the truth was that, right now, even this looked good to him. 'You have not touched your soup,' said Enda.
Gabriel looked up at Enda with what was fast becoming the usual look: bemusement. ' 'Swill' would be more like it,' he said.
'That may be so,' she said, 'but we lost the right to treat it like swill when we paid for it. If you do not eat it, I must.'
'I wouldn't put that much strain on a new friendship,' Gabriel said as he picked up the spoon again. On the day that his trial ended, the day Enda had come for him the second time, she made no great demands on him. She merely walked him out into Duma, the brown-looking capital city of Phorcys, and there engaged a tiny two-room suite for the night. Calling the place a 'suite' had been nearly as much an act of hyperbole as calling the contents 'rooms.' There was just enough room to lie down in each of them, with a two meter line of shelf space above the pallet that nearly filled each 'room.' Sanitary facilities were down the hall in which the suites were stacked. These so-called facilities were exceptionally minimal, the lights being metered as rigorously as the water. At the time Gabriel noticed little of this. He had thrown himself down on the pallet with the unthinking gratitude for freedom of someone whose most recent sleeps have been in a jail cell, and there he lost the next twenty or so hours of his life, going blissfully and instantly unconscious.
His awakening under a ceiling only two feet from his nose was less than rapturous. There had been that magical moment when everything was dark and he was still befuddled with sleep. For a moment only, he actually believed that he was back in his cabin on Falada. It took only a second's worth of light (brought on when he reached out to feel for the edge of his bunk) to show him reality, and it was bitter. Not even Enda's gentle voice was able to do much for his mood on that first morning, or rather afternoon, of freedom.
It had been Enda's opinion that human physiology was briefly at fault-specifically, blood sugar-and she had brought him down a grimy, garbage-strewn street, under yet another dim, cloud-curdled sky to a banged-up wooden door set in an old blank stone wall. Inside was the Dive. The entry was itself uncomfortable enough. Even the gray day outside was bright compared to this place. It took a good few seconds for Gabriel to get his vision working. He must have looked like a gaping hick, standing there blinking into the darkness for some seconds. When his eyes were working again, he could see that everyone in the place-maybe eight people, scattered around the ill-lit booths and curtained-off tables- was staring at him. None of the looks were friendly, and to tell the truth, Gabriel would not have wanted any of them to be friendly, to judge from the general looks of the people. They were unkempt and ill- favored, and they sat hunched over their food or drinks like men and women who thought that, as a general rule, strangers should be shot or-better yet-knifed, since lanth cells and bullets cost money.
Enda paid them no mind at all but led Gabriel over to an unoccupied booth and made him sit down. It was hard. Gabriel wanted to grab a scrub brush and attend to the table, the benches on either side, and some square meters of the floor before actually coming in contact with them.
'Not now,' Enda hissed at him, good-humoredly enough, and Gabriel sat, though he kept shifting and twitching in the seat.
After a little while the food came, and Gabriel had to try to do something about it, though mostly he wished what he had done was to order just bread and kalwine, as Enda had. The soup was highly suspect to the scrupulous palate of a marine-a former marine, he kept telling himself, while still finding it somehow impossible to believe-and the atmosphere got worse, not better, as the other habitues of the Dive got used to his and Enda's presence there enough to begin ignoring it. The group over at one of the curtained corner tables in particular got noisily jocular-at Gabriel's expense, he thought, but their dialect was so thick that it was hard to tell for certain. Then they got obscene, and finally they began to sing, which to Gabriel's eventual astonishment turned out to be even worse than the obscenity. It wasn't that the song itself was rude. It was innocuous enough-but not one of the entities present had the faintest idea what key they were in.
'Now my newfound friends My money spends Almost as fast as winkin', But when I make
To clear the slate, The landlord says, 'Keep drinkin'! '
Oh, Lord above,
Send down a dove
With beak as sharp as razors
To cut the throats
Of them there blokes
What sells bad beer to spacers-'
It was a universal sentiment, or at least one that Gabriel had heard before on other planets, in other company, and sung in recognizable keys. The poignancy of the contrast between then and now made his eyes sting. He worked to master himself, intent that whatever else he might do with this soup, he would not cry in it.
Gabriel glanced up at the fraal sitting across from him, calmly crumbling her bread into her plate, and wondered for about the thousandth time what to make of her. She had come from nowhere, given him clothes and guidance, and most bizarrely of all, hope. Even a grain of that was welcome at the moment. Enda was unquestionably a godsend. But questions were a matter very much on Gabriel's mind at the moment, and he was unable to simply let any recent occurrence, no matter which god was involved, go uninvestigated. He had been too trusting about letting other matters of late go that way. As a result, his life was changed out of all recognition. He was determined not to let it happen again. Enda was at least more somberly dressed than she had been on that first meeting, now in a dark coverall that favored the prison clothes Gabriel had been so glad to get rid of after the 'suite.' But there was no hiding the blue radiance of those eyes, and it was surely an illusion brought on by her natural paleness that made her seem to glow slightly in the darkness of the Dive. Gabriel was perfectly aware of the glances being thrown at Enda from some of those booths. Here and there a curtain would twitch back, eyes would gaze briefly out into the darkness, then the curtain would fall again. Enda went on with her eating, delicate and abstracted, and paid the watchers no mind-or at least, she seemed not to. She had already often given Gabriel the impression that she was watching everything but making an art of seeming not to.
Of course there was always a slight sense of mystery about any fraal, even though they were the alien species that humans had known the longest. Partly this had to do with their innate sense of privacy. They had long since lost their homeworld and many of the talents and treasures associated with it, but they did not generally trumpet the fact or bewail their fate. They got on with life as they found it, which included humans and other species, and they handled it in the ways that best suited them.
Gabriel knew that by and large there were two kinds of fraal, Wanderers and Builders. The former came of stock that, after leaving the fraal homeworld long ago, preferred to hold to the traveling lifestyle, moving from system to system in their city ships and avoiding too much contact (or, humans whispered, 'contamination') with other species. The Builders, even before they came across human beings, were more committed to establishing colonies on planets. After their first official contacts with humans in the 22nd century, Builder-sourced fraal began to intermingle and intersettle freely with human beings. Gabriel often wondered whether any other of the known sentient species could have pulled off this coup so successfully, and often enough he doubted it. The fraal, however, had possessed an advantage. Earlier contact with their kind, in the centuries before human space travel, had made its mark on numerous human societies in terms of myths and images that had come to haunt the 'racial psyche' of mankind. The recurring tales of slight, pale, slender people, human but not quite human, longer-lived than human beings and somehow involved with them-for good or ill-had been there for a long time, changing over centuries but never quite going away. When the fraal finally revealed themselves and their ancient settlements on Mars, the response was not the widespread xenophobia that might have been expected, but a kind of bemused fascination, as if the human race was saying to itself, Oh, it's only them. There were those, more paranoid than others, who had seen some kind of elaborate plot behind this, who were sure that the fraal had planted the stories or made those earlier clandestine visits to Earth as part of some obscure master plan having to do with domination or invasion. Later history made nonsense of this, of course, but there were still some who found the fraal, especially the Wanderers, too oblique for their liking.
Gabriel had no problem with fraal. There had been many communities of them on Bluefall and later on his other home. There had been some on Falada as well, though not as part of her marine complement: a few Star Force officers, one of them (Gabriel thought) a pilot who did shuttle work. The thought came before he could stop it. Not one of those I killed, thank everything. He winced, though. Suddenly there were whole great parts of his mind
