*
Back within the station, Hesperus felt the need to collect his wits and to assess the situation. Skirting the trading floor he located a bar called The Long Spoon, where he purchased and drank two doses of Old Dreadful without haggling or even sitting down. Although this rendered him temporarily incapable of speech he was still able to indicate his desire to the barkeeper for a third. This he carried with careful concentration to a shadowed corner table, where with equal focus he sat and stared into the smoky depths of his glass.
He rolled the interview with Arae around in his head. A dangerously unbalanced individual, to be sure! It was true, then, that the very rich possessed no gratitude. After all, without Hesperus’s involvement in her life, without his financial outlay on her behalf, where would she be now? Even once her bonded sentence had expired, there would have been few opportunities for her. She would have ended up drudging in some factory, or scratching in the mud on some plantation, no doubt. Perhaps, in selling her to Sunderling, Hesperus had exposed her to some unpleasantness – but now here she was, Queen of Stranglehold! Surely such good fortune cancelled out whatever inconvenience she might have experienced, leaving her deeply in his debt … the ledger-books of the universe were ill-balanced, so much was certain.
Another sip burned its way down Hesperus’s throat. He shuddered, remembering the steely touch of Arae’s fingers there. Inside that suit she could punch a hole through a hull plate. If they should meet on more equal terms, though, then … he frowned, and with one finger trailed a drop of Old Dreadful across the scarred tabletop, watching the greasy surface flinch under the dark spirit’s path. Then what? he asked himself. Such an encounter was hardly likely, and in any case, he was no assassin. In a few short years Arae had slain Sunderling, dominated Stranglehold, grown staggeringly rich and powerful, and now wielded influence across an entire star system. What had he achieved? His crew were mutinous, his ship was falling apart, and time and again his fortunes slipped from his grasp like smoke and dreams. He slumped low in his chair, his twixtear cap misshapen and awry.
There was a stir from across the room and the muttered conversations of the bar’s few patrons died away. An insectoid musician, a member of the Didiran cantor caste, was stepping up onto a small dais. Its instrument, a chitaronne, was crafted from the translucent husk of its own chrysalis, lacquered and stretched into shape and strung with the musician’s own extruded silk. The Didiran settled onto a low four-pronged crouching stool, strummed the chitaronne, and began to play.
Hesperus recognised the melody: an old song, often sung in dives and dens where spacefarers gathered. Hesperus had sung it himself many times. The dozen oval membranes which studded the insect’s thorax pulsed and trembled, and the song rolled out as if from a choir.
Call my name out on the common band!
Shout it for the stars to hear
Tell them that I, with heart and hand
Fought the universe and showed no fear.
I battered down the witchspace doors
And through them, heedless, came and went
To touch a million different shores
and shake the very firmament.
I voyaged through the blazing black
And from the vacuum drew my breath
I knew no borders, held no track
I laughed at life and danced with death.
My days have run out with the sands
But as I sink down into night
Call my name out on the common band
To be remembered at the speed of light.
To be a spacer was to ply a dangerous trade. Few left any memorial of their passing; fewer still left any mortal remains. It was traditional, then, among them, to mark a colleague’s death with a wake, where their name would be yelled out across the general communications frequency: radio-waves scribbled onto spacetime as proof that, once, they had lived. Spacers often bellowed these verses in a raucous drunken chorus, as affirmation of the singers’ continued survival as much as anything else. The Didiran, though, had not given the song its customary defiant volume or hectic pace; instead it wove a clear cold harmony around the words, and made their trite sentiments seem rich and sombre through the deep thrumming of the chitaronne’s drone-strings.
Hesperus felt his fur bristle; a seismic shiver ran up his spine. Life, he thought, was but a fleeting spark of brightness amid black infinities of nonexistence: precious, yes, but blink and you’d miss it. So what if he had not yet scaled the heights of his ambition? It was the struggle that mattered; life had to be lived. He stood, and saluted the musician with his glass of Old Dreadful, then downed the dose with a flick of his wrist and a jerk of his neck. He grimaced once, tugged his twixtear cap straight again on his head, flicked the brim, and marched out of the bar.