The Reaches

'Go on,' Gregg said. He wiped the palm of his left hand on the breast of his tunic.

'So I've had to find ways to live,' I continued, 'and I've done so. Mostly women. And the problem with that is that when I found a woman I really cared about-there was no place the relationship could go except the way they've all gone, to bed and then nowhere. Because there's no me! Doesn't that make you want to laugh, Mister Gregg?'

'I'm not judging you, Moore,' Gregg said. He shifted Macquerie, not for his own comfort but for that of the snoring captain. Gregg's effortless strength would have been the most striking thing about him, were it not for his eyes.

'I'm twenty-seven,' I said. My bitterness surprised me. 'I want to put myself in a place where I have to play the man. I pretended it was the money that was pulling me, but that was a lie. A lie for myself.'

'Let's walk on,' Gregg said, suiting his action to his words. 'The air in this tube isn't the worst I've breathed, but that's not a reason to hang around out here either.'

I managed a half smile as I fell into step beside the bigger man. Now I massaged the bruises on my throat.

'You don't have to play the man when you're out beyond Pluto, Moore,' Gregg said reflectively. 'You can become a beast-or die. Plenty do. But if you're determined to come, I won't stop you.'

He looked over his shoulder at me. His expression could be called a smile. 'Besides, you might be useful.'

The Porcelain's airlock was directly ahead of us. I dropped back a step to let Gregg open the hatch.

I thought about the cold emptiness of Stephen Gregg's eyes. I had an idea now what Gregg meant when he spoke of what the Reaches cost.

VENUS ORBIT

Day 1

I'd never been weightless before. My stomach was already queasy from the shaking the Porcelain took from the 500 kph winds of the upper Venerian atmosphere. I hadn't eaten since early the night before, but I wasn't sure that would keep me from spewing yellow bile across the men working nonchalantly around me.

I clung to the tubular railing around the attitude-control console. The starship's three navigational consoles were in the extreme bow; the heavy plasma cannon was shipped in traveling position between the consoles and the attitude controls.

Guillermo was at the right-hand console. Ricimer, Hawtry, and the vessel's navigator, Salomon, stood behind the Molt, discussing the course.

'We need to blood the force, blood it,' Hawtry said. He was the only member of the group speaking loudly enough for me to hear.

Hawtry wore a rubidium-plated revolver and the silver brassard which identified him as an officer in the Governor's Squadron. He had at least enough naval experience to keep his place without clutching desperately at a support the way I did.

A sailor carrying a tool kit slid along the axis of the ship, dabbing effortlessly at stanchions for control. 'Careful, sir!' he warned in a bored voice before he batted my legs-which had drifted upward-out of his way.

Because the sailor balanced his motion by swinging the heavy tools, his course didn't change. My feet hit the shell locker and rebounded in a wild arc.

Stephen Gregg stood in the center of the three-faced attitude-control console. He reached out a long arm over Lightbody, reading placidly in one of the bays, caught my ankle, and tugged. I released my own grip and thumped to the deck beside Gregg.

Gregg's right boot was thrust under one of three 20-cm staples in the deck. I hooked my toes through both of the others. My hands hurt from the force with which I'd been holding on since liftoff.

'Want to go home now, Moore?' Gregg asked dryly.

'Would it matter if I did?' I said. The spacer who'd pushed past me was working on the Long Tom's traversing mechanism. A hydraulic fitting spit tiny iridescent drops which would shortly settle and spread over the Porcelain's inner bulkheads.

'Not in the least,' said Gregg. His voice was calm, but his head turned as he spoke and his gaze rippled across everything, everything in his field of view.

'Then I'm happy where I am,' I said. I glanced, then stared, at the controls around me. 'These are fully automated units,' I said in surprise. 'Is that normal?'

'It will be,' Gregg said, 'if Piet has his way-and if we start bringing back enough chips from the outworlds to make the price more attractive than paying sailors to do the work.'

'What we should be doing,' I said bitterly, 'is setting up large-scale microchip production ourselves.'

Gregg looked at me. 'Perhaps,' he said. 'But that's a long-term proposition. For now it's cheaper to use the stockpiles-and the operating factories, there are some-on the outworlds. And it's important that men return to the stars, too, Piet thinks.'

In a normal starship installation, there was a three-man console for each band of attitude jets-up to six bands in a particularly large vessel. The crewmen fired the jets on command to change the ship's heading and attitude, while the main thrusters, plasma motors, supplied power for propulsion.

On the Porcelain, a separate artificial intelligence controlled the jets. The AI's direction was both faster and more subtle than that of even the best-trained crew-but spacers are conservative men, those who survive, and they tend to confuse purpose-built attitude AIs with attitude control through the main navigational unit.

The latter could be rough because the equipment wasn't configured for the purpose. Even so, I believed machine control was better nine times out of ten than anything humans could manage.

'You do know something about electronics, then,' Gregg said, though he wasn't looking at me when he spoke.

'Do people often lie to you?' I snapped.

'Not often, no,' the bigger man agreed, unperturbed.

'Usually there's an officer to command each control bank,' Gregg continued mildly. 'Here, I'm just to keep the crew from being bothered by-gentlemen who feel a need to give orders. Lightbody, Jeude, Dole.'

The sailors looked up as Gregg called their names.

'Dole's our bosun,' Gregg said. 'These three have been with Piet since before I met him, when he had a little intrasystem trader. He put them on the controls because they can be trusted not to get in the way of the electronics.'

Jeude, a baby-faced man (and he certainly wasn't very old to begin with), wore a blue-and-white striped stocking cap. He doffed it in an ironic salute.

'Boys, meet Mister Jeremy Moore,' Gregg went on. 'I think you'll find him a resourceful gentleman.'

'A friend of yours, Mister Gregg?' Jeude asked.

Gregg snorted. Instead of answering the question, he said, 'Do you have any friends, Moore?'

'A few women, I suppose,' I said. 'Not like he means, no.'

My guts no longer roiled, but they'd knotted themselves tightly in my lower abdomen. I focused my eyes on the viewscreen above the navigational console. Half the field was bright with stars, two of which were circled with blue overlays. A three-quarter view of Venus, opalescent with the dense, bubbling atmosphere, filled the rest of the screen.

'That's a very high resolution unit,' I said aloud. 'I'm amazed at the clarity.'

'Piet doesn't skimp on the tools he needs,' Gregg said. 'It's a perfect view of the hell that wraps the world that bore us, that's certainly true.'

He paused, staring at the lustrous, lethal surface of gas. 'Does your family have records from the Collapse, Moore?' he asked.

'No,' I said, 'no. My grandfather sold the factory ninety years ago and moved to Ishtar City. If there were any