There was a matter of gear to pack, that only. He had lived all his life under those conditions. It would take about five minutes..
Regul stared at him as he walked the hall to his room, were still interested when he walked back with his dunnage slung over his shoulder carrying a burden, which neither regul nor mri would do: the regul not without a machine, and the mri never.
They flatly gaped, which in regul could be smiles, and, he thought, they were smiles of pleasure to realize that he was leaving.
The mri’s human, he had heard them call him, and mri was spoken as a curse.
“Good-bye, human,” one called at him. He ignored it, knowing it was not for friendliness that they wished him farewell.
There was a moment of sadness, walking the causeway outside. He paused to look toward the hills, with the premonition that it was for the last time.
A man could not wholly love Kesrith: only the dusei might do that. But hereafter there was only the chill, sterile environment of ships, where there was no tainted wind, no earth underfoot, and Arain was a near and therefore dangerous star.
He heaved his baggage again to his shoulder, walked the ringing mesh to the lowered ramp. They expected him. He signed aboard as personnel this time, a feeling unfamiliar only because there was not the imminent prospect of combat. Old anxieties seized on him. Ordinarily his first move would be for whatever rider vessel he had drawn, to begin checking it out, preparing for a drop into whatever Command had decreed for him.
“Compartment 245,” the duty officer told him, giving him his admitted-personnel tag: silly formality, he had always thought, where personnel were few enough to be known by sight to everyone on Flower. But they were headed for station, for a wider world, where two great warships, two probes, and an in-system rider mingled crews. He attached the tag, reckoning numbers. He was assigned near the mri. He was well satisfied with that, at least.
He went there, to ride through lift with them.
CHAPTER Five
THE STATION was a different world indeed regul-built, a maze of tbe spiraling tunnels favored by the sled-traveling regul. Everything was automated.
And strangest of all, there were no regul.
To walk among humans only, to hear their talk, to breathe the air breathed by humans, and never to be startled by the appearance of an alien face in all this vast space: it was like being cast across light years; and yet Kesrith’s rusty surface was only a shuttle flight away: the screens showed it, a red crescent.
The screens likewise showed the ships that clustered about the station Saber foremost, a kilometer-long structure that was mostly power, instrumentation, and weaponry and surprisingly scant of crew, only two hundred to tend that monster vessel. Shields made her strong enough to resist attack, but she would never land onworld. Flower and Fox had ridden in attached to Saber’s sides, as Santiago had ridden the warship Hannibal, like diminutive parasites on the flanks of the warships, although Flower and Fox were independently star-capable. Presently the probe ships were docked almost unnoticed in the black shadow of Saber. Flower had snugged into the curve to berth directly under the long ship, and from her ports and scanners there was very little visible but Saber and the station itself.
And the station, vast, complexly spiral, rolled its way about Kesrith, a curious dance that dizzied the mind to consider, as one walked the turning interior.
Most personnel made use of the sleds. The distances inside the station were considerable, the sleds novel and frighteningly rapid, whirling round the turns with reckless precision, avoiding collisions by careful routing at hairbreadth intervals.
Duncan walked, what of a walk was possible in the less than normal g of the station that was planned for regul comfort. The giddy feeling combined with the alien character of the corridors and the sight of Kesrith out of reach below, and fed his depression.
“That’s the one that came in off the desert,” he heard someone say behind his back. It finished any impulse he had toward mingling with these men, that even here he was a curiosity, more out of place than he was ever wont to be among regulars. He was conscious of the mask of tan that was the visible mark of the kel’en’s veil, worn in the burning light of Arain; he felt his face strangely naked in their sight, and felt their stares on him, a man who had lived with humanity’s enemy, and spoke for them.