Pell?” he asked. “Is that what’s got the military stirred up?”
“You hear a lot of things on the docks,” she said, cautious and frowning. “But
what’s that to you?”
“I’ll see you at Pell.”
“That’s crazy. You said you were due at Fargone.”
“I’ll see you at Pell.”
The frown deepened. She shifted in his arms, leaned on him, looking down into
his face. “We’re pulling out today. Just how fast is your Lucy? You think a
marginer’s going to run races with Dublin?”
“So you’ll be shifting mass. I’m empty. I’ll make it”
“Divert your ship? What’s your combine going to say? Tell me that”
“I’ll be there.”
She was quiet a moment, then ducked her head and laughed softly, not believing
him. “Got a few hours yet,” she reminded him.
They used them.
And when she left, toward noon, he walked her out to the dock-side near her own
ship, and watched her walk away, a trim silver-coveralled figure, the way he had
seen her first
He was sober now, and ought to have recovered, ought to shrug and call it
enough. He ought to take himself and his ideas back to realspace and find that
insystemer kid who might have ambitions of learning jumpships. He had knowledge
to sell, at least, to someone desperate enough to sign with him, although the
last and only promising novice he had signed had gotten strung out on the
during-jump trank and not come down again or known clearly what he was doing
when he had dosed himself too deeply and died of it
Try another kid, maybe, take another chance. He talked well; that was always his
best skill, that he could talk his way into and out of anything. He ought to
take up where he had left off last night, scouting the bars and promoting
himself the help he needed. He had cargo coming, the tag ends of station
commerce, if he only waited and if some larger ship failed to snatch it; and if
a certain old man kept his gossip to his own ship.
But he watched her walk away to a place he could not reach, and he had found
nothing in all his life but Lucy herself that had wound herself that deeply into
his gut
Lucy against Dublin Again. There was that talk of new runs opening at Pell, the
Hinder Stars being visited again, of trade with Sol, and while that rumor was
almost annual, there was something like substance to it this time. The military
was stirred up. Ships had gone that way. Dublin was going. Had a deal, she had
said, and then shut up about it. The idea seized him, shook at him. He loved two
things in his life that were not dead, and one of them was Lucy and the other
was the dream of Allison Reilly.
Lucy was real, he told himself, and he could lose her; while Allison Reilly was
too new to know, and far too many-sided. The situation with his accounts was not
yet hopeless; he had been tighter than this and still made the balance. He ought
to stick to what he had and not gamble it all.
And go where, then, and do what? He could not leave Dublin’s track without
thinking how lonely it was out there; and never dock at a station without hoping
that somehow, somewhen, Dublin would cross his path. A year from now, local… and
he might not be here. Might be—no knowing where. Or caught, before he was much
older, caught and mindwashed, so that he would see Dublin come in and not
remember or not feel, when they had stripped his Lucy down to parts and done
much the same with him.
He stood there more obvious in his stillness than he ever liked to be, out in
the middle of the dock, and then started for dockside offices with far more
haste than he ever liked to use in his movements, and browbeat the dockmaster’s
agent with more eloquence than he had mustered in an eloquent career, urging a
private message which had just been couriered in and the need to get moving at