I’d never seen the spaceport before, and I didn’t get much chance to see it now. But still a strange kind of excitement tightened inside me at the flashing glimpses I got of energized grids and silhouetted pylons, outbuildings, gantries … ships. I tried to shake off the choking mindcloud of everyone else’s despair and let myself feel the sight: these were ships that went to the stars, that weren’t tied to one place or even one world, that had the freedom to cross hundreds and thousands of light-years from sun to sun.… Ships like the gleaming disk with the Centauri Transport insignia on its side, that lay waiting up ahead to take me away from the prison of Oldcity and Quarro and Ardattee—to something a whole lot worse than any of them.
On board I was sedated and strapped into an acceleration sling so I couldn’t move. For hours I lay waiting, not knowing what would happen next. Then at last the ship came alive around me and began to lift. I didn’t know what to expect when it finally happened. Maybe I was lucky, because they didn’t bother to make our free ride easy or soft. I felt my body tense and fight and scream as the ship tore itself out of gravity’s fist, pushing upward and outward into clear vacuum with a will that was stronger than universal law.
I never even saw what it looked like to go up from Ardattee, leaving my life behind, or what my homeworld looked like from out in space. But by then it hardly mattered, to me or anyone else, because it was too late anyway, for all of us.
And then there was nothing to do but go on waiting.
* * *
I never knew where Tillit Sector was, or even what it stood for. The FTA hired out Contract Labor to fill the need for non-tech workers, and used them itself all over the Federation. There wasn’t even a planetside colony in the system where the ship came out of its final hyperlight jump: only an orbiting way station chained by gravity to a lifeless, lonely world. Not that that mattered, either. All that really mattered was what happened when I got there.
For days I waited in a gray stale room, with a bunch of others who lay staring at the ceiling, mainly, because there wasn’t anything else—hope, or even sorrow. One end of the room looked out on the scarred, angry face of the nameless world staring up at us from below. I sat on the floor in front of the port for hours, staring back. My mind was as bleak and empty as the view, and all I could think about was the red bond tag on my wrist; how there was no way to hide it, no hope for me either, now.
Until finally a guard came into the room and picked me out, glanced at my bond ring and said, “Okay, bondie, you’re it. Up.” He pointed with his thumb.
“N-now?” My voice shook.
He laughed. “What do you think?” He took me out into the hall.
There was another Crow waiting there; but this one looked like an official, and he said, “Your name is Cat?”
I nodded. They know about it here? I wondered if they went to this much trouble to make everyone suffer who’d ever slugged a recruiter.
“All right. We’ve got a special request on you, bondie.”
I touched the bond tag, feeling insects crawl across my mind; seeing something yellow and slimy drop out of a tree.…
He cleared his throat. “I understand you can drive a snow vehicle?”
“What?” I stared at him.
“We have a priority request for a snow vehicle driver, from one of our agents. Our records show that you’re qualified—?” (Somebody had paid him to ask me this. He expected me to answer yes.)
I didn’t disappoint him. “Been driving them all my life. Sure.” Sure that he could feel the lie seeping out around the edges of my thoughts, like water through a sieve. But why should he care?
“You’re already assigned, though.” He looked at the bond surprised or confused; that wasn’t in the plan. I held my breath. “I’ll put through a transfer.”
I started to breathe again. We were walking. Orders on me: Who had the contacts to bribe the FTA and fix its records … and knew about me? Siebeling—maybe he’d changed his mind? But Siebeling wouldn’t go to that kind of trouble; he wouldn’t need to. I tried to pick the official’s thoughts, but he didn’t know anything about why he’d been sent here to collect me—only that somebody up the line had made it worth his while.
And the one who was waiting for us was nobody I’d ever seen before. His name was Kielhosa, he was an agent for Federation Mining—which meant nothing to me. I looked him in the eye but there was no sign, no sort of recognition—and none lying secretly on the surface of his mind, either. He was as real as the tag on my wrist. I wondered if it could be some sort of crazy mistake after all. I wondered where the other bondie was whose name was Cat. And I hoped they didn’t send the poor slad to S1396 instead of me.
Kielhosa had a jaw like a steel trap and hair as gray as an Oldcity morning. And he thought I looked like a street rat; he didn’t believe I could drive a snowtrack. He threw a couple of questions at me about how they worked; the Crow started to look uneasy. But I read the answers that lay waiting in his mind and gave them back to him perfectly. For once, I was glad to be a telepath. I tried to find out where I was going, then—but his mind was choked with schedules and delays, deadlines to meet, and the scum that he was stuck with picking over.
Finally he nodded and signaled to the guard. “I guess this one will have to do. Get him ready.”
The guard led me away. I wished I’d had time to find a clear answer; but in Oldcity they always said, “Asking questions is asking for trouble.” Wherever I was going, it couldn’t be any worse than S1396. So I kept my mouth shut and let it happen.
PART TWO
Crab
SIX
THERE WERE STARS everywhere. I’d been lost in the stars as long as I could remember, beautiful stars and night. I moved in the cold darkness—and cracked my fingers on something slick. The ceiling, about half a meter above my face. My eyes blurred, and when they cleared again, I could see that the stars were only a projection on the wall across the room. And I remembered that I was on a ship again, and where we were going. I felt in the dark for the restamped bond tag; and tried to smile but my face was numb.
They’d given me some kind of drug that had knocked me out back at the way station; getting me ready for a long trip this time, turning me into freight. I didn’t remember coming onto this ship and I didn’t figure I was supposed to be awake now; none of the others were, lying below me in tiers of bunks like bodies in a morgue. But I’d been awake before. I remembered watching the stars for hours, unchanging, while the ship sat in space and computed the next hyperlight jump. Somewhere back in another life, Dere Cortelyou had told me how the length of a jump depended on knowing the shape of space—and if you got the wrong solution, it was anyone’s guess where you’d come out on the other side. One time I saw us take the jump, saw the stars go blank and come back changed before you could hold your breath. I wondered if we’d made the right one; and then I remembered that any jump we made only meant that I was more light-years away from home and everything I knew.
I wondered how far we were going, and how long it had been. One of my arms was strapped down, and something was dripping into a vein. I never felt hungry, or even thirsty; I didn’t feel much of anything. I just lay in a bunk in a long dark room and looked at the stars—or their image on the ship’s hull: my mind was never clear enough to wonder why they were there. I could hear the crew sometimes, and once one of them came through to check up on us. As he passed my bunk, I let my free arm slip off and hit him in the face. He nearly leaped through the wall. But most of the time I lay alone in the quiet night counting stars, until I lost track of my fingers.
I was starting to count again, when all at once the stars blinked out and changed. And this time I was looking at a world; a new world. But I stared at the image on the wall for a long time before I understood what I was seeing. Inhabitable worlds were always in blues, like Earth on the Federation Seal. I’d seen Ardattee in pictures—soft-edged, smooth, blue and white—and the way-station world’s sterile reds and browns from orbit
. But this was different from either one, and somehow I knew it was all wrong. There was no blue at all. And it was … lumpy. Between swirls of pale cloud the mountains rose up too far, like the skin of a shriveled piece of fruit. We were far enough out to see the planet’s curve, but over the mountains I looked down into deep valleys of twisting golden green. The atmosphere shivered and glowed with light, and between the mountains the plains were silver, catching fire on the day side, as if the whole world was a piece of gem; until I wondered whether I was really seeing any of this. And I wondered what they needed me for.…
* * *
When it was over, they couldn’t wake me up. I didn’t remember a thing about the landing, or how I got to the bed I woke up in, in what turned out to be the tiny port hospital. It was an improvement over the ship’s floating morgue, but I wasn’t awake enough of the time to appreciate it. The hospital med techs claimed that my internal organs were peculiar, that the drug didn’t react predictably but that it would probably wear off in time.
They were right. There comes a time when you can’t even sleep any more, and when I woke up for good, Kielhosa was still waiting. I opened my eyes, and the first thing I saw was his face: I remembered then why I’d wanted to sleep forever. I’d come to the end of my journey and my choices, and now I was stuck with the consequences.
I was the only one of Kielhosa’s new recruits who hadn’t made it to the mines right after we landed; it didn’t make him real happy. But when he led me out of the starport at last, I got enough of a shock to make me forget all my problems. The port town was cheap duraplast on one muddy street, but the world around it was … beautiful. The mountains rose up on every side in wild fingers with the town lying in their palm, like something out of Nebula Pioneers on the threedy. But this was real; I was real, standing with the planet pressing against my feet, breathing in the fresh, sweet air. I felt weak and clumsy, it was cold, the light here was dim and strange. But none of that mattered. I turned around and around and started to laugh because I couldn’t believe it. The sound startled me; I hadn’t laughed for a long time.
“What’s so funny?”
“It’s beautiful!”
“Hunh. This poisonous hole? That is funny. You didn’t come here for the scenery, bondie. You’re a working boy, remember? It was an inconvenience, letting you sleep it off in that hospital. You’d better be worth it.” He started on again. I followed him, hardly listening. “Watch your step, you’re moving in one and a half gravities. It makes you awkward until you get used to it.”
“Uh, why do you need somebody to drive a snowtrack here?” Maybe it was only for the winter; it was cold here, but I didn’t see any snow. It was crazy to hope my luck had changed, but …
“You’ll see.”
I didn’t say anything more.
We walked out past the edge of town. A whitish, sandy track ran through a field of rust-colored grass spotted with yellow flowers—and craters, spitting steam, and pale blots of mud. The biggest of them wasn’t more than a meter across, and some of them were only dried mud pits; but up ahead the track swerved around a fresh break in the earth, where white mud crusted the dying grass. The scent of flowers and the stink of sulphur mixed in the sharp wind.
On the far side of the field was a blue stone building. Out beyond it the land dropped off like the end of the world. The view as we reached it made me ache. All of it real: green hills folding into long, green-golden valleys, bright water spilling over slate-blue rocks all the way down to … I shut my eyes and looked again. “What the hell—” The hills ended, and beyond them the land lay flat clear to the horizon. Endlessly flat and silver, and the sun’s reflected light burned your eyes, like sunlight on metal. “Is that—?”
“Snow,” Kielhosa said, behind me.
Disappointment caught in my chest. I swore under my breath. Kielhosa frowned and rubbed his head; I’d projected it without meaning to. I shut my mind tight, looking back at the mountains again. They were still green. “But … how?” Even I knew that what I saw just didn’t make sense.
“Steam heat, in a manner of speaking—lot of volcanic activity in those mountains.” He pointed past me, and following his hand I saw plumes of smoke hanging in the sky over a couple of the highest peaks. “Cinder is a piece of star, it was the companion to that sun up there until it blew itself up. The fragment’s still hot enough to melt rock at its core. Where the heat leaks up to the surface it keeps the ground warm, makes hot springs and geysers, that sort of thing. That stream down there would scald you. Water freezes solid out past the foothills, though. Temperature never gets up to freezing.”
I ignored everything he’d said past: “‘A piece of star’ … you mean, Cinder? Is this the Crab Nebula?”
“Where did you think you were, kid? What do you think all that garbage is up in the sky?”
I glanced up, into a sky the color of sapphires. Shining across it like cobweb was the end of the star that was Cinder. The sun made me squint, but I couldn’t see its circle, just a starpoint of light that flickered, cold and pale, like a strobe. It was only six miles wide—that was why everything seemed dim—and they called it a pulsar. I heard Cortelyou’s voice in my mind: Forty-five hundred light-years from home.
So I’d made it to the Crab Colonies, after all. I looked down again, at the bond tag on my wrist, and down the green-gold valley at the snow.
“Nice view,” Kielhosa said. He was laughing at me.
I spat.
We went back to the stone house. It was covered on the outside with the slate-blue rock I’d seen pushing out of the hillside; someone’s strange idea of decoration, I supposed. I couldn’t see why they were showing off a pile of stones. The inside of the building was wooden; it looked even stranger, with the computer port set into the board walls. We put on thermal clothes from a locker, and then went on through to an outside loading area. “What’s that?”
Kielhosa walked over to the transparent room-size bubble hanging from a steel wire. “A cable car. It’s the cheapest thing here for moving ore up the hill.” He nodded at me. “Get in.”
I came up beside him and caught hold of the waiting entrance. The whole bubble moved under my hand, as fragile as a crystal glass. I jerked my hand away and looked back. “Oh, no. I ain’t getting into that—” Kielhosa’s face said I’d better not give him any more trouble. I caught the doorway again and stepped inside. My feet didn’t go through the floor, but the bubble rocked like a hammock and threw me forward; I staggered and fell onto a platform at one end. Kielhosa stepped in just like it was home, and we barely shifted. He sat down on a seat at the other end, balancing our weight. There was a clear square with lights on it; he pushed a button and the lights went green, from red.
The bubble bounced once, and then swung out away from the building … into the air. The ground dropped out from under us; I could see it far down below our feet. We were suspended up there between spidery towers in nothing, not even a mod; just a bubble, drifting down.…
“Where’s your faith in modern plastics, bondie?” Kielhosa said.
I stuck my hands into my pockets and tried not to weigh anything.
It was almost a relief to stand in the trampled slush at the bottom of the hill. Someone was waiting with a snow vehicle, though; and out beyond him the snow was waiting for us all.
The other man said, “Get what you came for?”
“I got him, Joraleman.” Kielhosa nodded. He treated Joraleman like an equal, not like a bondie. I wondered who he was. “Supplies loaded?”
“Right. Check the list if you want.” Joraleman looked over at me. “The new driver taking us back? I’ve had it up to here with double duty.”
I shook my head but Kielhosa said, “That’s what he’s here for. You’re lucky I got you a replacement so fast. Not many ’track drivers end up in the labor pens.”
I looked for a way to change the subject. “Uh, why don’t you use some kind of mod for moving your stuff? Wouldn’t it be faster—”
> “The air currents are too erratic, and the gravity’s too high. It would take a magician with psi to keep anything flying out there.” Joraleman shrugged. He was a big man, tall and heavyset, still young. He had a beard, and his hair was nearly as blond as mine; but his skin was pale and freckled. I couldn’t see his eyes behind his opaqued goggles, but when he smiled it wasn’t like he thought I was the joke. “We tried it.”
“Oh,” I said, knowing I couldn’t fly a mod either, even with psi. Right then I didn’t feel like anybody’s magician. “Well, I…”
“Let’s go.” Kielhosa nodded.
“I still feel a little sick. You mind if I don’t drive?”
“You’ve had a week already,” he said. “A person might get the idea you were stalling for time.”
I started toward the snowtrack. It looked like an orange egg lying on its side on balloons. That didn’t help much. It was a lot bigger than I’d thought by the time I reached it. I climbed up into the cab and looked at the instrument panel. Kielhosa sat behind us. I tried to pick their minds for something to help me; but my own tension got in the way and I couldn’t pull out a clear thought to save my life. There was a touchboard with symbols on it, but I couldn’t tell what most of them stood for. I made a half guess on one and got the power started. It made me feel braver and I touched another. It didn’t work. The snowtrack gave a godawful screech and leaped about a meter. Kielhosa pushed me out of the seat and got it stopped. Then he kicked me out into the snow and called me some things I’d never been called before, and a lot more things I had been called.
When he ran out of ideas, he told me to get up, and Joraleman asked me if I’d ever driven a snow vehicle before. There wasn’t any reason to lie now, so I didn’t. Kielhosa looked at me funny and I knew he’d finally figured things out. By now it wouldn’t take any brains.