brand of hand lotion.
Crossing the green line, she fished out her dog tags and pulled them off
one-handed as she reached the watch desk just the other side of the lock, smiled
wearily at her several cousins of varying degree who sat that cheerless duty,
and stuck the key-tag into the portable comp unit while Danny Reilly checked her
off. It was Jamie and little Meg behind her; she turned and nodded them a
courtesy, they seventeen and nineteen and herself a lofty twenty-five, that made
her ma’am to them, and them a merest nod from her. She took her packages on to
the checkin desk, stripped the packing materials off and put the merchandise in
the lidded bin a cousin offered her, with a grease-penciled ALLISON II on the
end amid the smears of previous notes. Nearly a thousand Dubliners returning
with purchases, with most of their quarters inaccessible during dock and only an
hour remaining before departure: it was impossible, otherwise, to handle that
much personal cargo; and it had to be weighed and reckoned against individual
mass allotment. There would be a scramble after first jump, while they were
lazing their way across the first nullpoint on their way to Pell, everyone going
to the cargomaster to collect their purchases. There was something psychological
about it, like birthday packages, that everyone liked to have something waiting
for that sort-out, be it only a bag of candy. And when a body went over-mass,
well, one could weigh it out again, too, and trade off, or consume the
consumables, or pay the mass charge with overtime and sell off one’s overmass at
the next port liberty, along dockside, or (at some stations with liberal
customs) in merchanters’ bazaars, themselves a heady excitement of barter and
docksiding stationers looking for exotica. A bin waited for packing materials;
she stripped it all down, closed the lid and watched her purchases go down the
chute to cargo, walked on, burdenless. When Dublin had collected all the packing
and the debris, down to the last moment before the cargo hatch was sealed, out
would pop a waste canister, everything from paper to reusable nylon, and station
recycling would seize it and carry it off to be sorted, sifted, and used again.
Dublin shifted nothing through jump but what was useful; station threw nothing
away that had to be freighted in, not even worn-out clothing.
“Are we still on schedule?” she asked the cousin nearest.
“Last I heard,” the woman said. The bell goes in about forty-five minutes.”
“Huh.” She threw an involuntary glance at the desk clock and walked on through,
burdenless, putting her dog tags to rights again, dodging past cousins with
last-minute business in cargo, mostly maintenance who were taking wastage to the
chute, and now and again someone with a personal bit of debris to jettison, a
nuisance that should have been run through comp before now, but there was always
someone trying to break through the line of incomers with something outgoing.
There was at least a reasonable quiet about the traffic toward the lift… a few
others her seniors, a few her junior, with some of the other unposteds… people
in a hurry in uncommonly narrow spaces, because the great cylinder that was
Dublin’s body still sat in docking lock, and no one in dockside boots could take
any corridors but the number ones. The rest remained dark, up the upcurve of the
intersecting halls, waiting the undock and the start of rotation which would
restore access to the whole circumference of the ship.
The pale green of outer corridors became Op Zone white, the dock smells which
wafted in from the lock gave way to bitingly crisp air, tiles and corridors and
lighting panels in pristine pallor that would show any smudge or
streak—notoriously clean, because Dubliners in their youth spent hour on aching
hour keeping the corridors that way. The lift, in the white zone, had a handful
of cousins waiting for it; Allison nodded to the others and waited too —a glance
and a hello to Deirdre, of her own year, another of her unit; got of a CATC man
on Esperance liberty, so it ran. Deirdre had that knit-browed absentia of a