TriPoint, a Union Alliance novel by Caroline J. Cherryh

“I don’t know! How could I know?”

“You could have asked him. You might have been curious. You might have wondered before you chucked him off to Martin. “

“Don’t accuse me!”

The barman brought the drinks. Capella handed over her crew-card. “Put standard on it. I do math. Thanks.”

“He’s got two hundred,” Christian said.

“Two hundred what?” Capella asked.

“Two hundred in chits! I wasn’t going to turn him out broke! He’s got two hundred in hand. A fake passport. “ He got a breath. The air was cold, sullen cold, all the way to the center of his bones. He could admit, at least, the rest of his disgrace. “Martin’s got ten thousand.”

Capella hadn’t expected that. Clearly. She sat for a moment, then shook her head and gave a whispered whistle. “Shit-all. What’ve you got left here?”

“Five. Five to my name, Pella. I didn’t want to kill him!”

You never knew, with Capella, how anything played, or whether she thought you were sane or crazy. She sat staring for a moment and finally shook her head, looking away from him as if that much insanity was too much for her.

In her universe. In his. In Beatrice’s. In Austin’s. He didn’t know. He just never understood the rules. He never had. He got one set from implication and another set from Austin’s expectations, and Beatrice’s, and another still from Capella’s, and he just never understood the way to fit them together.

“Christian,” Capella said, then, and took his hand in hers, on which the bracelet of stars glowed as independent objects. “We’ll look. All we can do. We’ll look, and I’ll call in a couple more favors. I don’t know what more we can do.”

“Austin’s going to kill me.”

“Yeah. I do wish you’d thought about that. But in realspace we play with real numbers, don’t we?”

* * *

Chapter Nine

Contents – Prev/Next

—i—

PEOPLE CAME AND WENT, tens and twenties the hour, and there wasn’t a place to sleep, except the public restroom, as long as nobody came in. He had the 200c… but he didn’t dare go outside the area or use up his cash. He didn’t know the station, didn’t know the rules, didn’t know the laws or what he could get into or where the record might be reporting. When you ran computers for a livelihood you thought of things like that sure as instinct, and Tom personally didn’t trust anything he had to sign for. You didn’t, if you wanted to avoid station computers, use anything but cash.

At least Christian’s money wasn’t counterfeit. At least Corinthian hadn’t reported him to the cops. And he’d gone for the one place on Pell he knew he might find a friend… straight to the botanical gardens Tink said was on his must-do list every time he got to Pell.

The gardens, moreover, were a twenty-four hour operation… tours ran every two hours, with the lights on high or on the actinic night cycle, even in the dark, by hand-held glow-lights. Hour into hour into shift-change and shift again, he watched the tour groups form up and go through the glass doors. He watched people go through the garden shop, and come away with small potted plants. He shopped, himself, without buying. He knew what ferns were. There were violets and geraniums aboard Sprite, people traded them about for a bit of green; and Sprite’s cook raised mushrooms and tomatoes and peppers in a special dedicated small cabin, so he understood plants and fungi and spices.

He had more than enough time to sneak a read of sample slide-sets and even paper picture books on the shop stands and to listen to the public information vids. He learned about oaks and elms, and woolwood; and how buds made flowers and how trees lifted water to their tops. It kept him from thinking about the police, and the ache in his feet.

But every time new people arrived through the outer doors, he dropped whatever he was doing and went furtively to look over the new group, dreading searchers from Corinthian and hoping anew for Tink, scared to death that during some five minutes he had his eye off that doorway he was going to miss Tink entirely.

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