* * *
The building whose painted sign proclaimed it the Grand Hotel Universal faced the bubbling surf. It was constructed of cast concrete, three stories high, with full-length balconies for access to the rooms. The sunscreens with advertisements that shaded the balconies during the day had been rolled out of the way. Most of the shops on the ground floor had lighted signs of their own—WEXLER FINE TOBACCO PRODUCTS, THE SEAFRONT LOUNGE, and COURIER TORPEDOES TO ALL DESTINATIONS—ONE BLOCK DOWN.
The Grand Hotel al-Mahdi was across the street which led away from the water. It was exactly the same as the Universal, except that its third story was of thermoplastic and had been added after the original construction. The primary was barely on the horizon and the city had no streetlights; for the moment, the external floods that lit the Empress of Earth a kilometer distant were enough to see by.
Ran Colville sighed. Welcome to Tarek’s Bay, heart and soul of Ain al-Mahdi.
Bare-breasted women hung from the balconies, while in the street shills promised cut-rate delights for those willing to walk a block, two blocks . . . a lifetime if you chose the wrong street and hadn’t had sense enough to keep in a group with your shipmates. Minibuses cruised the seafront, carrying sailors from the Empress and the freighters in port—
And passengers from the starliner as well. Mixed busloads were sightseeing. Their guides would take them to some of the tamer clubs, where they would be charged three times the going rate for drinks and a moderately raw floor show. That was value for money, because they would have stories to tell back home about wicked Ain and how they saw it; and they would survive to get home, to get back to the Empress, at any rate.
Other buses carried men only, or occasionally a load of hard-looking women. They too would get what they were asking for, and sometimes a great deal more. There was usually a missing passenger or two when a starliner lifted off from Ain, and the ship’s medical facilities would be busy the following day.
For all that, Ain al-Mahdi wasn’t the asshole of the universe. Her primary was a panorama of slowly changing beauty, a great jewel in the sky.
The human settlement of Tarek’s Bay, however—that was the asshole of the universe.
Ran walked slowly, feeling the shingle beach scuff against his boots. He didn’t have a destination. He’d never landed on Ain al-Mahdi before, but he’d known a hundred Tarek’s Bays over the years and he didn’t belong in any of them.
The New Port, originally a separate island but now joined to Tarekland by a causeway, was fenced and gated. The port and the neatly planned community within its boundaries were administered by a consortium of the major shipping companies. All but the rattiest tramp freighters landed there, because the amount of theft at Tarek’s Bay was ten times the cost of docking fees in the New Port.
Hotels within the port complex were clean, and passengers could vary their stopover with sightseeing trips. The New Port was obviously the choice of the sensible traveler—except that it had no more soul than Ain (whose surface was a thousand gravel islets in a gray sea) had sights.
The transshipment trade made Ain al-Mahdi a center of commerce. She had begun as the collection point for miners in the vast sea of asteroids which shared the system with Ain’s giant primary. Later, Ain’s fortunate location through sponge space—”near” in terms of time and effort to many heavily populated worlds, Earth included—had expanded her transit trade across interstellar routes.
The New Port was necessary to the smooth functioning of interstellar commerce; but so is a warehouse necessary, and men do not choose to live in warehouses. Perhaps that explained Tarek’s Bay, though Ran didn’t care for the implied comment on the nature of Man if it did.
He’d reached the west end of the Strip. Where the buildings stopped, so did all semblance of lighting. Ran had a pistol in his pocket, but he wasn’t looking for trouble and there was nothing he’d meet farther out along the shingle except trouble.