She hit right on it, and the lump wouldn’t go away. He was scared of that little, little step she was asking, everything he’d tried to give away, too long, too desperately, until he’d learned strong people didn’t want it and weak ones drank you dry.
But he’d hurt Saby. Dammit, it wasn’t fair of her to be mad—he was mad, and hurt, that she was mad.
“I like you,” Saby said. “I want you to bunk with me. I didn’t think, I didn’t think I was, like, pressuring you…”
“You’re not.”
“Why Tink? Why do you trust him?”
“I don’t know,” he said, and that was the truth. “I don’t know.”
—viii—
FIGURE THEY’D BE FIRST IN or last in. But among the first, it turned out—a mortal relief, the phone call from Saby advising Corinthian they were leaving the Aldebaran. “Can you be there at customs?” Saby asked, tacit reminder there was a customs problem.
Easy fix, in fact. “Boy called,” Austin said to the agent at the kiosk out front of Corinthians ramp, and handed him the Union passport. “Lot activity of in and out the ship, he went out with the group—officer had the passports—”
The agent thumbed the passport. Ran the mag-strip for the visa, and it flashed Valid. “Checked through.”
“Yeah, he was supposed to get it from my son, something came up, he ran off on that problem… he’s twenty-three, scatter-brain, we’d been trying to find him to get it to him—this morning, he panics and phones our com, and now it’s a problem.”
“Yeah. Kids. I got two. Twelve and sixteen. Four-room apartment.”
“God.”
“Kid coming in?”
“On his way.”
“I’ll have it here, no problem. “ The agent put the passport under the desk. They talked about other things, the economy, both sides of the line, the entertainments on Pell, the free-port situation… for a ship’s captain at board-call, he was uncommonly leisured; for himself, with strangers, he was uncommonly conversational, but from where he stood, talking, he could see the whole dockside behind the customs line, a dim, utilitarian deckage, a neon-lit frontage of shops behind the two girders that were part of Pell’s main structure.
They talked about kids. He tried to imagine. About wives. He censored his arrangement with Beatrice. A couple of Downers waddled past, bound for somewhere. Transports lumbered along… Pell government was still talking about that transport rail system, the agent said, but the transport companies and the warehouses on Pell liked the status quo, on which they made money, and detested the rail, in which they endlessly debated all the share-plans the station could draft.
A couple of crew showed up, the early ones, Michaels and Travis, with slightly startled looks to see the captain standing waiting.
“Captain,” Michaels said. “Need a word. “ And Michaels diverted him aside from customs long enough to ask if he wanted anything. Michaels had basic good sense, in the essentials of discreet trouble-handling, and he would have left Michaels to take his watch down here, if it were slightly less explosive.
“I’ll handle it,” he told Michaels. “Just start the count. Develop a board glitch, we don’t display until we’re on last boarders.”
“Done,” Michaels said.
A group of eleven came in, techs, a couple of dockers… Corinthian’s monetary and liberty-time bonus for arrivals in the first hour of board-call got no few takers, but still, spacers were spacers, liberty-loves were hard to leave, and expect the real rush right down at the bottom of that first hour, and the last just right before the deadline, mostly the dockers, in that group, a few D&D’s that took some dealing with, but if Sabrina didn’t make it in the next quarter hour, she was going to find herself at the end of a long, long…
A closed taxi pulled up close, braked, and opened a door. No banker, no official got out, just, improbably—three Corinthian spacers, one Sabrina, in her usual fancy-business, Tink, in his bar-crawling gear, down to the bare arms and the tattoos and the earrings, and of course his threadbare duffle and the bagfuls of edibles. Last out, God, Tom Hawkins, sudden fashion queen, blue skintights, fancy black sweater, mod haircut, and a designer carry-bag, purple and orange—taste would out, evidently. Saby’d said he ‘needed a few things.’