The locals, males and females both, wore loose blouses gathered at the openings, and drab-colored pantaloons with heavy sandals. One of the younger men carried two racks of candy trays, mostly emptied, on a yoke. He noticed Vesey—quite an attractive girl, now that Adele thought about it—and postured for her, arms akimbo.
Vesey deliberately turned her back on him and said, “I knew that Sexburga was a naval base, but I didn’t realize there was so much civilian trade. What do they produce here?”
The question—the words couldn’t be heard on the other side of the shrieking cable—was simply to remove the local man from her society. After a moment the fellow fluffed his full mustache and also turned away, though he was still puffed out like a rooster displaying.
Adele found it hard not to provide information even if it wasn’t really expected. “Very little, actually,” she said. “There’s some small-scale manufacturing, mostly to rebuild systems for the ships that land here. Local agriculture’s barely above subsistence level. But almost all the traffic into or out of the Sack touches on Sexburga so there’s quite a lot of transshipment as well as resupply, even though almost everything but the reaction mass has to be imported.”
The car shuddered to a halt. It was full, or nearly so, of spacers returning from liberty, and it looked to Adele as if there were as many planetary backgrounds represented as there were people.
That didn’t necessarily mean they were from different ships. A dark-skinned woman whose rough-out leathers were embroidered in eye patterns helped a male shipmate who was thin, blond, and wore only a silk shift and a beret. They were both drunk, but the woman could at least walk; her companion, hopping up and down, babbled in accented Universal that his feet had been cut off.
The peddlers got on, nodding in tired acknowledgment as Adele and the midshipmen boarded the car from the other side. The locals had finished their day, going from ship to ship to serve the spacers still on duty.
Adele noticed from the way the returning panniers and satchels swung, they weren’t always empty. Almost the first thing she’d learned when she began associating with spacers was that no matter how open a society might look from the outside, there was always something it considered contraband; and there were always smugglers ready to supply that contraband to whoever could afford it.
She smiled coldly. Since that seemed to be a universal trait, she supposed it was the way things were supposed to be. Adele had never been one to argue against observed reality.
Though that did leave the question of who or what had set up the system in the first place. Adele didn’t believe in a supreme being; but occasionally it seemed that things couldn’t possibly be so damnably absurd unless someone, Someone, was deliberately making them that way.
“My grandfather was on Sexburga with Admiral Perlot’s squadron in ’21,” Dorst said, craning his neck to peer up the cableway. “He said it was a really wild port, but of course it would be with twenty thousand spacers based here before the Strymon fleet surrendered. It won’t be like that now.”
It was hard to tell from the midshipman’s voice whether he was disappointed or relieved. Probably a little of both.
The top cable grew taut. Adele braced herself on one of the vertical poles that doubled as support for the canopy, and the car started upward with a jerk.
“I’m sure there’ll be plenty of ways to get into trouble in Spires,” Adele said dryly. “Whether they’ll be much different from the entertainments of the Strip outside Harbor Three is another matter.”
“What are the local animals like?” Vesey said; an apparent non sequitur until she added, “I saw a dog once in the New World Lounge.”
Dorst gasped and turned away, coughing or laughing. Vesey’s face lost all expression as she reviewed what she’d just blurted. She had a naturally dark complexion, so the blush took some moments to show on her cheeks.
“There’s no proven native life above the invertebrate level,” Adele said. She hid her smile, though perhaps Vesey would have felt better if she let it show. “With the flow of traffic through the port, I’m sure that the entertainment industry has as wide a range of options as the restauranteurs.”