Saby came back from her phone call, all cheerful, her dark hair a-bounce, mirth tugging at the corners of her mouth. “The captain says about time you reported in. I told him you were waiting to take the tour. He said take it, behave ourselves, and we’re clear.”
“He said that?” He didn’t believe it. But Saby didn’t look to be lying. She was too pleased with herself.
“Come on. Let’s get tickets.”
“Got ‘em,” Tink said.
“Christian’s compliments,” he couldn’t resist saying. “His money.”
Saby outright grinned. And pulled him and Tink, an elbow apiece, toward the staging area.
—ii—
IT WAS ROSES TINK FAVORED. But trees and the concept of trees loomed in his mind and forever would, palms and oaks and elms and banyans and ironhearts, ebony and gegypa and sarinat. They whispered in the fan-driven winds, they shed a living feeling into the air, they dominated the space overhead and rained bits and pieces of their substance onto the paths.
“If a leaf’s fallen,” the guide told them, “you can keep it. Fruits and flowers and other edibles are harvested daily for sale in the garden market.”
Leaves were at a premium. Tourists pounced on them. But one drifted into his reach, virtually into his hand, gold and green.
“You can dry it,” Tink said. “I got two. And a frozen-dried rose.”
“The hardwoods come from Earth,” the tour guide said, and went on to explain the difference between tropics and colder climates, and how solar radiation falling on tilted planets made seasons—the latter with reference to visual aids from a tour station. First time the proposition had ever made sense to him.
Then came the flowers, in the evolution of things, the wild-flowers and finally the ones humans had had a hand in making… like Tink’s roses, hundreds and hundreds of colors. Individual perfumes, different as the colors. The reality of the sugar flowers. The absolute, sense-overwhelming profusion of petals.
It smelled… unidentifiable. There was something the scent and the assault of color did that the human body needed. There was something the whole garden did that the human body couldn’t ignore. He forgot for a minute or two that he was going back onto Corinthian, and that if things had gone differently he might have had a hope of his own ship.
But that might come around again.
There might be a chance. There might be…
Fool’s thought, he told himself, and felt Saby’s hand on his arm, and listened to Saby talk about the roses, and the jonquils and iris and the tulips and hyacinths. Figure that the cornfields and the potatoes were much more important, yielding up their secrets to the labs as well as supplying stations and spacers direct…
Interesting statistics about the value they were to humankind. About human civilizations riding botanical adaptations to ascendancy.
But less inspiring than the sensory level… and he was glad that the tour wended its final course back to the whispering of the tall trees, back to that sweet-breathing shadow. His legs ached from walking. Felt as if they’d made the entire circuit of the station.
Maybe they had. But he took the invitation the guide offered, to linger a moment on the path. He didn’t want to go out, where, he’d been thinking the last half hour, a whole contingent of Corinthian crew must be waiting for him.
Maybe Christian, too. Probably Christian—madder than hell.
But a ship was a place. A station wasn’t, in his book. He’d had his taste of dodging the station authorities just trying to evade questions from the botanical gardens staff. He didn’t want to do it dockside and in and out of hiring offices, trying to stay out of station-debt, which, if he got into that infamous System… no.
Which meant a return to Corinthian was rescue, in a way, and he was willing to go. But he didn’t want to lose the souvenir leaf—the garden was a place he wanted to remember and wasn’t sure he’d see again. So, fearing a little over-enthusiasm on the part of the arresting party he was sure was waiting, he asked Saby to keep the leaf safe for him. “Sure,” she said, and slipped it into her sleeve-pocket.