someone else. And this time—this time, because his life depended on it…he aimed
for more than a free drink or a meal on some other combine’s credit. He needed a
crewman, someone, anyone with the right touch of minor larceny who could be
conned and cozened aboard and trusted not to talk in the wrong quarters. This
was flatly dangerous. Merchanter ships were family, all of the same Name, born
on a ship to die on that ship. Beached merchanters were beached only for a
single run, like the old man he had gotten from hospital; or if they were
beached permanently, it was because their own ships’ families had thrown them
out, or because they had voluntarily quit their families, unable to live with
them. Some of the latter were quarrelsome and some were criminal; he was one man
and he had to sleep sometimes… which was why he had to have help on the ship at
all. He scanned the comers of the bars he traveled on the long green-zone dock
of Viking, trying not to see the soldiers and the police who were more frequent
everywhere than usual, and looking constantly for someone else as hungry as he
was, knowing that they would be disguising their plight as he disguised it, and
knowing that if he picked the wrong one, with a shade too much larceny in mind,
that partner would simply cut his throat some watch in some lonely part of the
between, and take Lucy over for whatever purposes he had in mind.
It was the first day of this hunt on the docks, playing the part of honest
merchanter captain and nursing a handful of chits he had gotten on that faked
combine account, that he first saw Allison Reilly.
The story was there to be read: the shamrock and stars on her silver coveralls
sleeve, the patches of worlds visited, that compassed all known space, the lithe
tall body with its back to him at the bar and a flood of hair like a puff of
space-itself in the dim neon light.
In his alcohol-fumed eyes that sweep of hip and long, leaning limbs put him
poignantly in mind of sleepovers and that other scanted need of his existence—a
scam much harder than visa forging and far more dangerous. In fact, his life had
been womanless, except for one very drunk insystem merchanter one night on
Mariner when he was living high and secure, which was how Mariner knew his name
and laid in wait for him. And another insystemer before that, who he had hoped
would partner him for good: she had lost him Esperance when it went bad. He was
solitary, because the only women for merchanters were other merchanters, who
inevitably had relatives; and merchanters in general were a danger to his
existence far more serious than stations posed. Stations sat fixed about their
stars and rarely shared records on petty crime for the same reasons the big
combines rarely bothered with distant and minor accounts. But get on the bad
side of some merchanter family for any cause, and they would spread the word and
hunt him from star to star, spread warnings about him to every station and every
world humans touched, so that he would die; or so that some station would catch
him finally and bend his mind, which was the same to him. There were no more
women; he had sworn off such approaches.
But he dreamed, being twenty-seven and alone for almost all his days, in the
long, long night. And at that silver-coveralled vision in front of him, he
forgot the tatter-elbowed old man he had been trying to stalk, him with the
vacant spot in the patches on his sleeve, and forgot the short-hauler kid who
was another and safer prospect. He stared at that sleek back, and saw that fall
of hair like a night in which stars could burn—and saw at the same time that arm
resting on the bar, patched with the Reilly shamrock, which burned green in the
green neon glare from the over-the-bar lighting, advising him that among
merchanters this was one of the foremost rank, a princess, a Name and a patch