“Business, boot?”
“Business.”
The boy jerked a thumb over his shoulders, rapped twice on the door.
“Take it, boot.”
Naill pushed open the door. He felt like coughing; the smoke of a hebel stick was thick and cloying. There were four men sitting on cushions about a bros table playing star-and-comet, the click of their counters broken now and then by a grunt of dissatisfaction as some player failed to complete his star.
“What is it?” Stowar’s head lifted perhaps two inches. He glanced at Naill, acknowledging his presence with that demand. “Go on—say something—we’re all mates here.”
One of the players giggled; the other two made no sign they heard, their attention glued to the table.
“You have haluce—how much?” Naill came to the point at once.
“How much do you want?”
Naill had made his calculation on the way over. If Mara Disa could be relied upon, one pack . . . no, better two, to be safe.
“Two packs.”
“Two packs—two hundred credits,” Stowar returned. “Stuff’s uncut—I give full measure.”
Naill nodded. Stowar was honest in his fashion, and you paid for that honesty. Two hundred credits. Well, he hardly expected to have it for less. The stuff was smuggled, of course, brought in from off-world by some crewman who wanted to pick up extra funds and was willing to run the risk of port inspection.
“I’ll have it—in an hour.”
Stowar nodded. “You do that, and the stuff’s yours . . . My deal, Gram.”
Naill breathed deeply in the open, driving the stink from his lungs. There was no use going back to their own room, turning over their miserable collection of belongings to raise twenty credits—let alone two hundred. He had long ago sold everything worth while to bring in the specialist from the upper city. No, there was only one thing left worth two hundred credits—himself. He began to walk, his pace increasing as he went, as if he must do this swiftly, before his courage failed. He was trotting when he reached that other building set so conveniently and threateningly near the main gate of the Dipple—the Off-Planet Labor Recruiting Station.
There were still worlds, plenty of them, where cheap labor was human labor, not imported machines which required expert maintenance and for which parts had to be imported at ruinous shipping rates. And such places as the Dipple were forcing beds for that labor. A man or woman could sign up, receive “settlement pay,” be shipped out in frozen sleep, and then work for freedom—in five years, ten, twenty. On the surface that was a way of escape out of the rot of the Dipple. Only—frozen sleep was chancy: there were those who never awoke on those other worlds. And what awaited those who did was also chancy—arctic worlds, tropical worlds, worlds where men toiled under the lash of nature run wild. To sign was a gamble in which no one but the agency ever won.
Naill came to the selector, closed his eyes for a long moment, and then opened them. When he put his hand to that lever, pulled it down, he would take a step from which there would be no returning—ever.
An hour later he was once more at Stowar’s. The star-and-comet game had broken up; he found the smuggler alone. And he was glad that was so as he put down the credit slip.
“Two fifty,” Stowar read. From beneath the table he brought a small package. “Two here—and you get fifty credits back. Signed up for off-world?”
“Yes.” Naill scooped up the packet, the other credit slip.
“You coulda done different,” Stowar observed.
Naill shook his head.
“No? Maybe you’re right at that. There’re two kinds. All right, you got what you wanted—and it’s all prime.”
Naill’s pace was almost a run as he came back to the home barracks. He hurried up the stairs, down the corridor. Mara Disa looked up as he breathlessly entered.
“The medico was here again—Director sent him.”
“What did he say?”
“The same—two days—maybe three . . .”
Naill dropped down on the stool by the table. He had believed Mara earlier; this confirmation should not have made that much difference. Now he unrolled the package from Stowar—two small metal tubes. They were worth it—worth selling himself into slavery on an unknown world, worth everything that might come to him in the future . . . because of what they held for the dying woman who was his mother.
Haluce—the powder contained in one of those tubes—was given in a cup of hot water. Then Malani Renfro would not lie here in the Dipple; she would be reliving for a precious space of time the happiest day of her life. And if the thin thread that held her to this world had not broken by the time she roused from that sleep, there was the second draught to be sure. She had had to live in terror, defeat, and pain. She would die in happiness.
He looked up to meet Mara’s gaze. “I’ll give her this.” He touched the nearer tube. “If—if there is need—you’ll do the other?”
“You won’t be here?”
That was the worst—to go and not to know, not to be sure. He tried to answer and it came out of him in a choked cry. Then he mastered himself to say slowly, “I—I ship out tonight . . . They’ve given me two hours . . . You—you’ll swear to me that you’ll be with her . . . ? See”—he unrolled the slip for fifty credits—”this—take this and swear it!”
“Naill!” There was a spark of heat in her eyes. “All right, boy, I’ll swear it. Though we don’t have much to do with any of the old gods or spirits here, do we? I’ll swear—though you need not ask that. And I’ll take this, too—because of Wace. Wace, he’s got to get out of here . . . not by your road, either!” Her hands tightened convulsively on the credit slip. Naill could almost feel the fierce determination radiating from her. Wace Disa would be free of the Dipple if his mother could fight for him.
“Where did you sign for?” she asked as she went to heat the water container.
“Some world called Janus,” he answered. Not that it mattered—it would be a harsh frontier planet very far removed from the Dipple or Korwar, and he did not want to think of the future.
“Janus,” Mara repeated. “Never heard of that one. Listen, boy, you ain’t ate anything this morning. I got some patter-cakes, made ’em for Wace. He musta got labor today, he ain’t come back. Let me—”
“No—I’m shipping out, remember.” Naill managed a shadow smile. “Listen, Mara, you see to things—afterwards—won’t you?” He looked about the room. Nothing to be taken with him; you didn’t carry baggage in a freeze cabin. Again he paused to master his voice. “Anything here you can use—it’s yours. Not much left—except . . .” He went directly to the box where they had kept their papers, their few valuables.
His mother’s name bracelets and the girdle Duan had traded for on Sargol were long since gone. Naill sorted through the papers quickly. Those claim sheets they had never been able to use—might as well destroy them; their identity disks . . .
“These go to the Director—afterwards. But there’s this.” Naill balanced in his hand Duan Renfro’s master’s ring. “Sell it—and see . . . she has flowers . . . she loves flowers . . . trees . . . the growing things . . .”
“I’ll do it, boy.”
Somehow he was certain Mara would. The water was steaming now. Naill measured a portion into a cup, added the powder from the tube. Together they lifted Malani’s head, coaxed her to swallow.
Naill again nestled one of the wasted hands against his cheek, but his eyes were for the faint curve of smile on those blue lips. A tinge of happiness spread like a gossamer veil over the jutting of the cheekbones, the sharp angles of chin and jaw. No more moaning—just now and then a whisper of a word or a name. Some he knew, some were strange, out of a past he had not shared. Malani was a girl again, back on her home world of shallow seas beaded with rings and circles of islands, where tall trees rustled in the soft breeze that always came in late spring. Willingly she had traded that for life on a ship, following Duan Renfro out into the reaches of space, marrying a man who had called no world, but a ship, home.
“Be happy.” Naill put down her hand. He had given her all he had left to give, this last retracing—past care, sorrow, and the unforgivable present—into her treasured past.
“You there—you Naill Renfro?”
The man in the doorway wore the badged tunic of the Labor Agency, a stunner swung well to the fore at his belt. He was a typical hustler—one of the guards prepared to see the catch on board the waiting transport.