which was credit wherever it liked, that walked wide and did as it pleased.
Nothing like Lucy had a prayer against Dublin Again, that great and modern
wonder which meant clean corridors and clean coveralls and credit piled in
station accounts from Cyteen to Pell. They were Dubliners with her, cousins or
brothers, big, dark-haired men of varying ages. He saw them in a fog beyond her,
talking to her; and her arm lifted the glass and her hair swung with the spark
of the changing neon like red stars… she was turning on her elbow to set the
glass down, a second swirl of starry night.
Ah, he pleaded to God fuzzily, not wanting to see her face, because perhaps she
was not beautiful at all, and he could look away in time and make that beautiful
back and cloud of hair into his own drink-fogged dream to keep him company on
the long watches—as long as she had no face. But he was too paralyzed to move,
and in that same long motion she turned all the way around, shook back the
living night from her face that was all blue now in the changing neon lights.
He was caught then, because he forgot to laugh and forgot everything else he was
doing in that bar, stared with his mouth open and his eyes showing what they
showed when he was not laughing —he knew so, because she suddenly looked
nettled. She stood straight from the bar, which movement drew his eyes to the A.
REILLY stitched over the blue-lit silver of a breast, while she was looking him
over and sizing him up for the threadbare brown coveralls he wore and the
undistinguished (and lying) E. STEVENS his pocket bore, and the gaudy nymph with
Lucy ribboned on his sleeve… the nymph was a standard item in shops which sold
such things. It decorated any number of ships and sleeves, naked and girdled
with stars and badly embroidered with the ribbon blank, to be stitched in with
any ship’s name. Insystem haulers used such things. Miners did. He did, because
it was what he could afford.
She stared a good long moment, and turned then and searched her pocket… her
crewmates had gone elsewhere, and she paused to glance at one who was himself
making slow stalk of a woman of another crew off in the dim corner. She tossed a
chit down on the water-circled counter and walked for the door alone, while
Sandor stood there watching that retreating back and that cloud of space-itself
enter the forever day of the open dock outside.
He called the bartender urgently and paid… no tip, at which the man scowled, but
he was used to that. He hurried, trying not to seem in haste, thinking of the
woman’s cousins and not wanting to have them on his tail. His heart was pounding
and his skin had that hot-cold flush that was part raw lust and part stark
panic, because what he was doing was dangerous, with the docks as tense as they
were, with police watching where they were never invited by merchanters.
He had dreamed something in the lonely years, which was—he could no longer
remember whether the dream -was different from what he had seen standing alive
in front of him, because all those solitary fancies were murdered, done to cold
pale death in that collision, because he had seen the one bright vision of his
life. He was going to hurt forever—the more so if he could not find out in
brighter light that her face had some redeeming flaws, if he could not have her
herself murder the image and his hopes at once and give him back his common
sense. You’ll not have tried, kept hammering in his brain. You’ll never know.
Another, dimmer self kept telling him that he was drunk, and yet another self
cursed him that he was going to lose everything he had. But the self that was in
control only advised him that he was lost out here in the glare of dock lights,
that she had gotten away into another bar or a shop somewhere close.
He looked about him, at the long upcurve of the dock which was curtained by