The uniformed rating walked toward the real exit framed by the pillared facade of Rome’s Temple of Concord. Chekoumian’s Marie was a very lucky woman. Blavatsky hoped—and doubted—that she knew it
Chekoumian settled himself into a chair. He was too absorbed in his own affairs to notice that Blavatsky had gone without leave or ceremony. That wasn’t the sort of thing that mattered to him, anyway.
He touched the edge fold of the earliest letter with his chip-encoded signet ring. The envelope peeled back neatly, like tensed skin drawing the flesh open along a cut. If the seal was broken in any other fashion, the envelope would have melted with enough violence to ignite the paper within.
Chekoumian extracted the letter and began to read:
My Dearest Abraham,
Today Mother and I went shopping for Nita’s baby shower. You know Nita. Oh, don’t put yourselves out, she says, but if we didn’t you can be sure she’ll be telling everybody what cheapskates our side of the family is until she’s a gray old woman! Well, we . . .
* * *
The five passengers in the Starlight Bar, all of them male, watched the clear, curving wall as tugs on ground transporters crawled toward the Empress of Earth.
Wade wore his credit chip on a bracelet of untarnished metallic chain, an alloy from the heavy platinum triad. “I’ll take this round, then,” he said, and inserted the chip in the autobar’s pay slot.
Other men began punching selections into the pads on their chair arms. “Many thanks, ah, Wade,” Dewhurst said. “The next one’s—”
The autobar chirped in irritation. “I’m sorry, sir,” said the machine in an apologetic male voice,” I believe there’s a problem with this chip. If you’d try another one, please?”
Wade withdrew the chip with a look of amazement and outrage on his aristocratic features. “Oh, good lord,” he said. “I haven’t recharged this from my Terran account! Look, fellows, I’ll just pop down, to the Purser’s Office—”
“Pretty busy just now, don’t you think, Dickie?” Belgeddes warned with a lifted eyebrow.
“Never mind,” said Dewhurst. “I’ll pay for the round.”
“Much obliged, old fellow,” Wade muttered. “Very embarrassing.”
“Dickie’s always doing that sort of thing,” Belgeddes said indulgently.
“I dare say,” agreed Dewhurst as he summoned a whiskey and water. The autobar chuckled happily over Dewhurst’s credit chip.
Da Silva looked up into the auroral sky. “The first time I traveled,” he said, “I thought that—”he gestured toward the whispering light with a rum drink “—was what the stars would look like when we were . . .”
He paused and cleared his throat. “In sponge space, you know. But it was nothing like that.”
“Even though the bulkhead shows exactly what an optically clear panel would show,” Wade said, “in here we’re still completely cut off from the insertion bubble. If you’ve only seen sponge space from the insulated interior of a vessel, you haven’t a hint of what it’s like to be out in the cold, twisted radiance with nothing but a suit to protect you.”
Dewhurst snorted. “I suppose you’ve been a Cold Crewman, then, Wade?” he said.
“Oh, good lord no!” Wade chuckled. “But back long before you were born, I volunteered when Carlsbad decided to raise a sponge space commando during their unpleasantness with Jaffa Hill. Wasn’t my quarrel in the least, but I thought it might be interesting.”
He shook his head and looked deep into his drink. “It was that, all right,” he said. “Bloody interesting.”
“Dickie was the only member of the unit to survive,” Belgeddes explained to the others. “They found that practice isn’t the same as the real thing.”
“Practice was bad enough, though,” Wade murmured.
Reed stared at the crystalline mural over the autobar. The Empress of Earth’s ports of call were sculpted as icons. They ranged from Earth—bands of rose quartz and topaz to suggest the aurora borealis—to three onion-domed towers representing Tblisi. The bead of red light now on Earth would follow the Empress’s progress across the arc, while the blue indicator for the Brasil moved in the opposite direction until they merged briefly on the oil derricks of Hobilo.
“I don’t like this talk about wars,” Reed said morosely. “It’s going to cause trouble, I feel it. I just hope that we make Ain al-Mahdi. After that, well, I wish all you other fellows the best, but it’s not my problem once I’ve gotten where I’m going.”