away the layers. So, well, one sat down like a man and filled out the forms and
above all else tried not to look the nervousness he felt.
“You’ll have claims from WSC,” Dee advised him.
“Minor,” Allison said.
Again a stab of those dark, fathomless eyes. An elderly finger indicated the
appropriate line and he signed.
“There we go,” Allison said, approving it. He shook hands with the banker and
realized himself a respectable if mortgaged citizen. Allison shook hands with
Dee and Dee showed them to the outer office in person. They were someone. He
was. He felt himself hollow centered and scared with a different kind of fear
than the belly-gripping kind he lived in onstations: with a knowledgeable,
too-late kind of dread, of having done something he never should have done, a
long time back, when he had walked into a bar on Viking and tried to buy a
Dubliner a drink.
“You come,” Allison said as they walked out empty of their bundle of
applications, with a set of brand new credit cards and clear ship’s papers in
exchange. “Let’s get some of the outfitting done. I don’t know what you’re
carrying in ship’s stores. Blast, I’ll be glad to get that customs lock off and
have a look at her.”
“Got some frozen stuff. I outfitted pretty fair for a solo operation at Viking.”
“We’ve got five. What’s our dunnage allotment?”
“I really don’t think that’s a problem.”
“Accommodations?”
“Cabins 2.5 meters by 4. That’s locker and shower and bunk.”
“Sleep vertical, do you?”
“Lockers are under and over the bunk.”
“Private?”
“Private as you like.”
“Nice. Good as Dublin, if you like to know.”
He considered that and expanded a bit. “If you have extra— there’s always space
to put it. Storage is never that tight.”
“Beautiful.—Hey.” She flagged one of the ped-carriers that ran the docks, a
flatbed with poles, hopped on: Sandor followed, put his own card in the slot as
it whisked them along the station ring with delirious ease. He had never ridden
a carrier; never felt he could afford the luxury, when his legs could save the
expense. All his life he had walked on the docks of stations, and he watched the
lights and the shops blur past, still numb in the profusion of experience.
“Off!” someone would sing out, and the driver would stop the thing just long
enough for someone to step down. “Off!” Allison called, and they stepped off on
white dock, in the face of a large pressure-window and a fancy logo saying
WILSON, and in finer print, SUPPLIER. It was all white and silver and black
inside. He swore softly, and let Allison lead him into the place by the hand.
Displays everywhere. Clothing down one aisle, thermals and working clothes and
liners and some of them in fancy colors, flash the like of which was finding its
way onto docksides on the bodies of those who could afford it New stuff. All of
it. He looked at the price on a pair of boots and it was 150. He grabbed Allison
by the arm.
“They’re thieves in here. Look at that. Look, this isn’t my class. Lucy outfits
from warehouses. Or dockside.”
She wrinkled her nose. “I don’t know what you’re used to, but we’re not going to
eat seconds all the way and we’re not using cut-rate stuff. You don’t get class
treatment on dockside if you don’t have a little flash. And we’ll not be
dressing down, thank you; so deaden your nerves, Stevens, and buy yourself some
camouflage so you don’t stand out among your crew.”
He looked up the aisle at clothes he could not by any stretch of the imagination
see himself wearing, stuffed his hands in his pockets. The lining on the right
one was twice resewn. “You wear that silver stuff into Lucy’s crawlspaces, will
you? You fit yourselves out for work, Reilly.”
“There’s dockside and there’s work. Find something you like, hear me?”
He studied the aisle, nothing on racks, no searching this stuff for burn-holes
and bad seams. One asked, and they hunted it out of computerized inventory. “So
I get myself the likes of yours,” he muttered, thinking he would never carry it