“You can really judge a pilot by watching him wrestle?” the officer inquired of Rydra.
She nodded. “In the ship, the pilot’s nervous system is connected directly with the controls. The whole hyperstasis transit consists of him literally wrestling the stasis shifts. You judge by his reflexes, his ability to control his artificial body. An experienced Transporter can tell exactly how he’ll work with hyperstasis currents.”
“I’d heard about it, of course. But this was the first time I’ve seen it. I mean in person. It was…exciting.”
“Yes,” Rydra said, “isn’t it?”
As they reached the ramp’s head, lights again pierced the globe. Ebony and Condor circled in the fighting sphere.
On the sidewalk Brass dropped back, loping on all fours, to Rydra’s side. “What about a Slug and a ’latoon?”
The platoon was a group of twelve who did all the mechanical jobs on the ship. Such simple work was done by the very young, so they usually needed a nursemaid: that was the Slug.
“I’d like to get a one-trip platoon if I can.”
“Why so green?”
“I want to train them my way. The older groups tend to be too set.”
“A one-tri’ grou’ can be a hell of a ’roblem to disci’line. And inefficient as ’iss, so I’ve heard. Never been with one myself.”
“As long as there’re no out-and-out nuts, I don’t care. Besides, if I want one now, I can be surer of getting one by morning if I put my order in at Navy.”
Brass nodded. “Your request in yet?”
“I wanted to check with my pilot first and see if you had any preferences.”
They were passing a street phone on the corner lamppost. Rydra ducked beneath the plastic hood. A minute later she was saying, “—a platoon for a run toward Specelli scheduled at dawn tomorrow. I know that it’s short notice, but I don’t need a particularly seasoned group. Even a one-trip will do.” She looked from under the hood and winked at them. “Fine. I’ll call later to get their psyche-indices for Customs approval. Yes, I have an Officer with me. Thank you.”
She came from under the hood. “Closest way to the Discorporate Sector is through there.”
The streets narrowed about them, twisting through one another, deserted. Then a stretch of concrete where metal turrets rose. Crossed and recrossed, wires webbed them. Pylons of bluish light dropped half shadows.
“Is this…?” the Customs Officer began. Then he was quiet. Walking out, they slowed their steps. Against the darkness red light shot between towers.
“What…?”
“Just a transfer. They go on all night,” Calli explained. Green lightning crackled to their left.
“Transfer?”
“It’s a quick exchange of energies resulting from the relocation of discorporate states,” the Navigator Two volunteered glibly.
“But I still don’t…”
They had moved between the pylons now, when a flickering coalesced. Silver latticed with red fire glimmered through industrial smog. Three figures formed: the women’s sequined skeletons glittered toward them, casting hollow eyes.
Kittens clawed the Customs Officer’s back, for strut work pylons gleamed behind the apparitional bellies.
“The faces,” he whispered. “As soon as you look away, you can’t remember what they look like. When you look at them, they look like people, but when you look away—” He caught his breath as another passed. “You can’t remember…!” He stared after them. “Dead?” He shook his head. “You know I’ve been approving psyche-indices on Transport workers corporate and discorporate for ten years. And I’ve never been close enough to speak to a discorporate soul. Oh, I’ve seen pictures and occasionally passed one of the less fantastic on the street. But this…”
“There’re some jobs—” Calli’s voice was as heavy with alcohol as his shoulders with muscle—“some jobs on a transport ship you just can’t give to a live human being.”
“I know, I know,” said the Customs Officer. “So you use dead ones.”
“That’s right.” Calli nodded. “Like the Eye, Ear, and Nose. A live human scanning all that goes on in those hyperstasis frequencies would—well, die first and go crazy second.”
“I do know the theory,” the Customs Officer stated sharply.
Calli suddenly hooked the Officer’s neck with his hand and pulled him close to his own pocked face. “You don’t know anything, Customs.” The tone was of their first exchange in the café. “Aw, you hide in your Customs cage, cage hid in the safe gravity of Earth, Earth held firm by the sun, sun fixed headlong toward Vega, all in the predicted tide of this spiral arm—” He gestured across night where the Milky Way would run over a less bright city. “And you never break free!” Suddenly he pushed the little spectacled red head away. “Ehhh! You have nothing to say to me!”
The bereaved navigator caught a guy cable slanting from support to concrete. It twanged. The low note set something loose in the Officer’s throat which reached his mouth with the metal taste of outrage.
He would have spat it, but Rydra’s copper eyes were now as close to his face as the hostile, pitted visage had been.
She said: “He was part,” the words lean, calm, her eyes intent on not losing his, “of a triple, a close, precarious, emotional, and sexual relation with two other people. And one of them has just died.”
The edge of her tone hued away the bulk of the Officer’s anger; but a sliver escaped him: “Perverts!”
Ron put his head to the side, his musculature showing clear the double of hurt and bewilderment. “There’re some jobs,” he echoed Calli’s syntax, “some jobs on a transport ship you just can’t give to two people alone. The jobs are too complicated.”
“I know.’ ” Then he thought, I’ve hurt the boy, too. Calli leaned on a girder. Something else was working in the Officer’s mouth.
“You have something to say,” Rydra said.
Surprise that she knew prized his lips. He looked from Calli to Ron, back. “I’m sorry for you.”
Calli’s brows raised, then returned, his expression settling. “I’m sorry for you too.”
Brass reared. “There’s a transfer conclave about a quarter of a mile down in the medium energy states. That would attract the sort of Eye, Ear, and Nose you want for Specelli.” He grinned at the Officer through his fangs. “That’s one of your illegal sections. The hallucination count goes way u’, and some cor’orate egos can’t handle it. But most sane ’eo’le don’t have any ’roblem.”
“If it’s illegal, I’d just as soon wait here,” the Customs Officer said. “You can just come back and pick me up. I’ll approve their indices then.”
Rydra nodded. Calli threw one arm around the waist of the ten-foot pilot, the other around Ron’s shoulder. “Come on, Captain, if you want to get your crew by morning.”
“If we don’t find what we want in an hour, we’ll be back anyway,” she said.
The Customs Officer watched them move away between the slim towers.
4
—RECALL FROM BROKEN BANKS and color of earth breaking into clear pool water her eyes; the figure blinking her eyes and speaking.
He said: “An Officer, ma’am. A Customs Officer.”
Surprise at her witty return, at first hurt, then amusement following. He answered: “About ten years. How long have you been discorporate?”
And she moved closer to him, her hair holding the recalled odor of. And the sharp transparent features reminding him of. More words from her, now, making him laugh.
“Yes, this is all very new to me. Doesn’t the whole vagueness with which everything seems to happen get you, too?”
Again her answer, both coaxing and witty.
“Well, yes,” he smiled. “For you I guess it wouldn’t be.”
Her ease infected him; and either she reached playfully to take his hand or he amazed himself by taking hers, and the apparition was real beneath his fingers with skin as smooth as.
“You
’re so forward. I mean I’m not used to young women just coming up and…behaving like this.”
Her charming logic again explained it away, making him feel her near, nearer, nearing, and her banter made music, a phrase from.
“Well, yes, you’re discorporate, so it doesn’t matter. But—”
And her interruption was a word or a kiss or a frown or a smile, sending not humor through him now, but luminous amazement, fear, excitement; and the feel of her shape against his completely new. He fought to retain it, pattern of pressure and pressure, fading as the pressure itself faded. She was going away. She was laughing like, as though, as if. He stood, losing her laughter, replaced by whirled bewilderment in the tides of his consciousness fading—
5
WHEN THEY RETURNED, BRASS called, “Good news! We got who we wanted.”
“Crew’s coming along,” commented Calli.
Rydra handed him the three index cards. “They’ll report to the ship discorporate two hours before—what’s wrong?”
Danil D. Appleby reached to take the cards. “I…she…” and couldn’t say anything else.
“Who?” Rydra asked. The concern on her face was driving away even his remaining memories, and he resented it, memories of, of.
Calli laughed. “A succubus! While we were gone, he got hustled by a succubus!”
“Yeah!” from Brass. “Look at him!” Ron laughed, too.
“It was a woman…I think. I can remember what I said—”
“How much did she take you for?” Brass asked.
“Take me?”
Ron said, “I don’t think he knows.”
Calli grinned at the Navigator-Three and then at the Officer. “Take a look in your billfold.”
“Huh?”
“Take a look.”
Incredulously he reached in his pocket. The metallic envelope flipped apart in his hands. “Ten…twenty…But I had fifty in here when I left the café!”
Calli slapped his thighs laughing. He loped over and encircled the Customs Officer’s shoulder. “You’ll end up a Transport man after that happens a couple of more times.”
“But she…I…” The emptiness of his thefted recollections was real as any love loss. The rifled wallet seemed trivial. Tears banked his eyes. “But she was—” Confusion snarled the sentence’s end.
“What was she, friend?” Calli asked.
“She…was.” That was the sad entirety.
“Since discor’oration, you can take it with you,” said Brass. “They try for it with some ’retty shady methods, too. I’d be embarrassed to tell you how many times that’s ha’’ened to me.”
“She left you enough to get home with,” Rydra said. “I’ll reimburse you.”
“No, I…”
“Come on, Captain. He paid for it, and he got his money’s worth, aye, Customs?”
Choking on the embarrassment, he nodded.
“Then…check these ratings,” Rydra said. “We still have a Slug to pick up, and a Navigator-One.”
At a public phone, Rydra called back to Navy. Yes, a platoon had turned up. A Slug had been recommended along with them. “Fine,” Rydra said, and handed the phone to the officer. He took the psyche-indices from the clerk and incorporated them for final integration with the Eye, Ear, and Nose cards that Rydra had given him. The Slug looked particularly favorable. “Seems to be a talented coordinator,” he ventured.
“Can’t have too good a Slug. Es’ecially with a new ’latoon.” Brass shook his mane. “He’s got to keep those kids in line.”
“This one should do it. Highest compatibility index I’ve seen in a long while.”
“What’s the hostility on him?” asked Calli. “Compatibility, hell! Can he give your butt a good kick when you need it?”
The Officer shrugged. “He weighs two hundred and seventy pounds and he’s only five nine. Have you met a fat person yet who wasn’t mean as a rat underneath it all?”
“There you go!” Calli laughed.
“Where do we go to fix the wound?” Brass asked Rydra.
She raised her brows questioningly.
“To get a first navigator,” he explained.
“To the Morgue.”
Ron frowned. Calli looked puzzled. The flashing bugs collared his neck, then spilled his chest, scattering. “You know our first navigator’s got to be a girl who will—”
“She will be,” Rydra said.
They left the Discorporate Sector and took the monorail through the tortuous remains of Transport Town, then along the edge of the space-field. Blackness beyond the windows was flung across with blue signal lights. Ships rose on white flares, blued through distance, and became bloody stars in the rusted sky.
They joked for the first twenty minutes over the humming runners. The fluorescent ceiling dropped greenish light on their faces, in their laps. One by one, the Customs Officer watched them go silent while the side-to-side inertia became a headlong drive. He had not spoken at all, still trying to regain her face, her words, her shape. But it stayed away, frustrating as the imperative comment that leaves your mind as speech begins, and the mouth is left empty, a lost referent to love.
When they stepped onto the open platform at Thule Station, warm wind flushed from the east. The clouds had shattered under an ivory moon. Gravel and granite silvered the broken edges. Behind was the city’s red mist. Before, on broken night, rose the black Morgue.
They went down the steps and walked quietly through the stone park. The garden of water and rock was eerie and empty. Nothing grew here.
At the door slabbed metal without external light blotted the darkness. “How do you get in?” the Officer asked, as they climbed the shallow steps.
Rydra lifted the Captain’s pendant from her neck and placed it against a small disk. Something hummed, and light divided the entrance as the doors slid back. Rydra stepped through; the rest followed.
Calli stared at the metallic vaults overhead. “You know there’s enough transport meat deep-frozen in this place to service a hundred stars and all their planets.”
“And Customs people too,” said the Officer.
“Does anybody ever bother to call back a Customs who decided to take a rest?” Ron asked with candid ingenuousness.
“Don’t know what for,” said Calli.
“It’s been known to happen,” responded the Officer dryly. “Occasionally.”
“More rarely than with Transport,” Rydra said. “As of yet, the Customs work involved in getting ships from star to star is a science. The Transport work maneuvering through hyperstasis levels is an art. In a hundred years they may both be sciences. Fine. But today a person who learns the rules of art well is a little rarer than the person who learns the rules of science. Also, there’s a tradition involved. Transport people are used to dying and getting called back, working with dead men or live. This is still a little hard for Customs to take. Over here to the Suicides.”
They left the main lobby for the labeled corridor that sloped up through the storage chambers. It emptied them onto a platform in an indirectly lighted room, racked up its hundred-foot height with glass cases, catwalked and laddered like a spider’s den. In the coffins, dark shapes were rigid beneath frost-shot glass.
“What I don’t understand about this whole business,” the Officer whispered, “is the calling back. Can anybody who dies be made corporate again? You’re right, Captain Wong, in Customs it’s almost impolite to talk about things like…this.”
“Any suicide who discorporates through regular Morgue channels can be called back. But a violent death where the Morgue just retrieves the body afterward, or the run-of-the-mill senile ending that most of us hit at a hundred and fifty or so, then you’re dead forever; although there, if you pass through regular channels, your brain pattern is recorded and your thinking ability can be tapped if anyone wants it, though your consciousness is gone wherever consciousness goes.”
Beside them, a twelve-foot filing crystal glowed like pink quartz. ??
?Ron,” said Rydra. “No, Ron and Calli too.”
The Navigators stepped up, puzzled.
“You know some first navigator who suicided recently that you think we might—”
Rydra shook her head. She passed her hand before the filing crystal. In the concaved screen at the base, words flashed. She stilled her fingers. “Navigator Two…” She turned her hand. “Navigator One…” She paused and ran her hand in a different direction. “…male, male, male, female. Now, you talk to me, Calli, Ron.”
“Huh? About what?”
“About yourselves, about what you want.”
Rydra’s eyes moved back and forth between the screen and the man and boy beside her.
“Well, huh…?” Calli scratched his head.
“Pretty,” said Ron. “I want her to be pretty.” He leaned forward, an intense light in his blue eyes.
“Oh, yes,” said Calli, “but she can’t be a sweet, plump Irish girl with black hair and agate eyes and freckles that come out after four days of sun. She can’t have the slightest lisp that makes you tingle even when she reels off her calculations quicker and more accurate than a computer voice, yet still lisping, or makes you tingle when she holds your head in her lap and tells you about how much she needs to feel—”
“Calli!” from Ron.
And the big man stopped with his fist against his stomach, breathing hard.
Rydra watched, her hand drifting through centimeters over the crystal’s face. The names on the screen flashed back and forth.
“But pretty,” Ron repeated. “And likes sports, to wrestle, I think, when we’re planetside. Cathy wasn’t very athletic. I always thought it would have been better, for me, if she was, see. I can talk better to people I can wrestle with. Serious though, I mean about working. And quick like Cathy could think. Only…”
Rydra’s hand drifted down, then made a jerk motion to the left.
“Only,” said Calli, his hand falling from his belly, his breath more easy, “she’s got to be a whole person, a new person, not somebody who is half what we remember about somebody else.”