Downbelow Station (66 page)

“All the same,” he said. “We want you close.”

“Don’t ask me my course,” she said. “That’s my business. I’ve places. I’ve sat still long enough.”

“We’re going to try a run to Viking,” Neihart said, “and see what kind of reception we’ll get… in about another month.”

“Might be interesting,” Mallory conceded.

“Luck to us all,” Damon said.
 
ii Pell: Blue dock; 1/30/53; 0130 hrs. md.; 1330 hrs. a.
 
The hour was well into alterday, the docks nearly deserted in this non-commercial zone. Josh moved quickly, with the nervousness he always had outside someone’s protective escort on Pell, with the vulnerable feeling that the few strollers on the dockside might know him. Hisa saw him, stared solemn-eyed. The Pell dock crew by berth four surely recognized him, and the troops on guard there did: rifles angled toward him.

“Need to talk to Mallory,” he said. The officer was a man he knew: Di Janz. Janz gave an order and one of the troopers slung his rifle into carry and motioned him ahead up the access ramp, walked behind him through the tube and into the lock, past the quick traffic of troops this way and that in the noisy corridor and suiting room. They took the lift up, into the main central corridor, where crew hastened about last-minute business. Familiar noises. Familiar smells. All of it.

She was on the bridge. He started to go in and the guard inside stopped him, but Mallory looked his way from her place near the command post and curiously signaled both guards permission.

“Damon send you?” she asked when he stood before her.

He shook his head.

She frowned, set her hand consciously or unconsciously on the gun at her side.

“So what brings you?”

“Thought you might need a comp tech. Someone who knows Unionside—inside and out” She laughed outright. “Or a shot when I’m not looking?” “I didn’t go with Union,” he said. “They’d have redone the tapes… given me a new past. Sent me out… maybe to Sol Station. I don’t know. But to stay on Pell, right now—I can’t do that. The stationers—know me. And I can’t live on a station. Not comfortably.”

“Nothing another mindwipe can’t cure.”

“I want to remember. I’ve got something. The only real thing. All that I value.”

“So you go off and leave it?”

“For a while,” he said.

“You talked to Damon about this?”

“Before coming down here. He knows. Elene does.” She leaned back against the counter, looked him up and down thoughtfully, arms folded. “Why Norway?”

He shrugged. “No station calls, are there? Except here.”

“No.” She smiled thinly. “Just here. Sometimes.”

“Ship she go,” Lily murmured, staring at the screens, and smoothed the Dreamer’s hair. The ship pulled away from the Upabove, rolled, with a move quite unlike most ships which came and went, and shot away.

“Norway,” the Dreamer named her.

“Someday,” said the Storyteller, who had come back full of tales from the big hall, “someday we go. Konstantins give we ships. We go, carry we Sun in we eyes, not ’fraid the dark, not we. We see many, many thing. Bennett, he give we come here. Konstantin, they give we walk far, far, far. Me spring come again. I want walk far, make me nest there… I find me star and go.” The Dreamer laughed, warm laughter.

And stared out at the wide dark, where Sun walked, and smiled.

the end