In the Company of Others (12 page)

“In large groups, people are far worse, young Aaron. I'm sure you remember.”

He clung to what mattered, willing to grant Rosalind whatever fantasy held her. The older ones were often stuck in their own preferred view of things. “So you think this Smith doesn't know about my condition—that she's here because, for whatever reason, she thinks I can help her with the Quill.” A flood of something new coursed through Pardell's thoughts.
So that's what hope feels like
, he told himself, trying to keep it from his face. “Her job offer might be the real goods, after all.”

“Are you listening to anything I'm saying, young Aaron?” Rosalind demanded, her voice cold and even. “Nothing good comes from Earth. Nothing. Whether you believe in the Quill or entertain other possibilities, there hasn't been a ship dock with supplies that didn't have a price, or a transport arrive that didn't bring some new restriction or other trouble with it. What matters here is all bets are off. I don't know—and you can't know—what Smith wants. The only thing certain is that an Earther is desperate to find you . . . and that better warn you, young Aaron. That better keep you out of public view until her ship leaves dock and then some.”

A chill of excitement, not fear, raced down his spine even as he nodded obediently.
Anything
, Pardell told himself,
had to be an improvement over being sought as a freak.
He'd find a way to hide his true nature; it could be done. It had to be.

“Wipe that notion,” Rosalind Fournier told him bluntly, too used to reading his expressions. “Now.”

Pardell blinked at her. “What notion?”

She snatched his hand before he could move it out of her reach, clamping shut her servo fingers until he winced with pain and stared at her, quite astonished.
She was hurting him deliberately. Why?

“Do you think you are the only one so desperate for a future you'd try breathing vacuum if it looked promising?” Rosalind asked slowly and clearly, as if it was necessary for each word to sink into his mind separately, like hot rivets. Her fingers didn't relent their pressure; instead, they squeezed tighter. “This isn't some fantasy from one of your readers, young Aaron. Those people want something. You don't know what it is; you can't begin to guess the price.”

He'd had enough.
Of her. Of everything.
“Let go of my hand,” Pardell ordered, in a voice that burned passing up his throat. “Now.”

Rosalind looked down at their hands; hers opened and Pardell pulled his back to safety. The fingers throbbed. “You know you can't trust them,” she persisted. “At least tell me that.”

“I don't know anything—that's the problem, Rosalind. And I won't find out here, will I?” Pardell subsided, feeling a sudden despair as unsettling as the hope had been. “It's pointless arguing. I couldn't reach the
Seeker
and this Professor Smith even if I wanted to.”

Her look was the same one she used to give him when he protested his innocence as a child, caught with the evidence of a late night raid on the ration cupboard ringing his mouth. “It would be difficult,” she conceded almost cautiously.

“Impossible's more like it,” he nodded, then it struck him. “But you could go, Rosalind.”

“Me?” she arched a hairless eyebrow.

“Sure,” Pardell spoke faster, warming to his idea.
It could work!
“Station Admin has you registered with full stationer status. You've been in the stern docking ring a dozen times this year alone. More, I bet.”

Rosalind nodded reluctantly, as if suspecting being truthful might not be her wisest course. “I don't keep count. You know none of these semi-automated Earther ships have engineers on crew, so station calls me to help with emergency repairs on the odd stuff. Pay's respectable, if the company's not. Why should I go this time?”

Ah
, he was sure he spotted a glimmer of interest in her eyes. “You could check things out,” Pardell continued, trying not to sound too eager. “Maybe have a good look at this marvelous prototype starship while you're there. Do a little fact-finding. In the interests of learning more about the Earthers and their plans.”

The glimmer had grown to an almost sparkle, though Rosalind's expression remained doubtful. “This is extortion, young Aaron,” she accused. “You know I'd love to get a peek inside that ship.”

This time he reached for her hand. “Not extortion, Rosalind—helping me. Help me find out what I might be missing. I don't want that ship to leave and never know.”

“And if it is the obvious, after all?” she asked him.

Pardell could almost hear Raner's voice.
“You can trust Rosalind; she'll never avoid the painful places in the name of kindness.”

“If they are after a freak,” he told her evenly, “they can try another station.”

THERE had to be another way to hide the thing
, Gail grumbled to herself as she looked into the mirror and used a micro scalpel to make a small, precise incision in her scalp, just beneath the hairline and above her right eye. She'd numbed the area with ointment, but there was no way to numb her revulsion about slicing her own skin.

Gail pressed her finger behind the bloodless cut, her other hand at the ready. Got it. She surveyed the long, thin shard captured in a crease of her palm, less than pleased to have to rely on black-market tech. But the device had passed her tests on Earth.

She slipped the tiny object into an almost invisible slot in a disk that otherwise looked perfectly normal. When done, Gail slid the disk into a pocket. Before leaving the washroom, she took a second to run a bead of skin sealant along the incision, surveying the result critically before nodding to herself with satisfaction.

Gail's quarters were larger than standard, although standard on the
Seeker
would have been generous enough. There were fancier staterooms, but they were reserved for visiting dignitaries or sponsors—potential or present. Gail's meticulous habits in her office and lab were here, in precious privacy, tossed quite literally aside. The floor was buried under clothes and overflow paper. Her bed was blanketed in reports and note-covered scraps. Carpet showed in a serpentine path from the door to her bedside and to the washroom—Gail's concession to the needs of the cleaning stewards.

Gail found a reasonably clear space on her bed to sit cross-legged, viewer in hand. In case the FD's latest sweep had missed one of Reinsez's little spy-toys, she made a point of holding up a disk with an easily-read label as if considering it—something fact heavy she might be expected to review before sleeping. Dozens such hung in the storage bags suspended from her ceiling. Then, she palmed the one and inserted the other from her pocket, bending forward so even someone standing beside her couldn't see past her shoulder and hair to the screen.

It had worked.
While image quality varied from remarkable to adequate, depending on the lighting and her proximity to taller others, Gail held in her hands a visual record of her trip through the station, including the time wasted in meetings and meals. She sped past the latter, then slowed the playback to a crawl beginning with her first look inside Mr. Leland's dim, smelly bar, easily marked by the change in brightness as she'd removed her veil to assist the vid.

How could so many fit inside?
Gail asked herself again. The washroom of the campus faculty club offered more floor space. She remembered the smooth feel of the bar in the club's main lounge, all sculpted wood, designed to give every patron a choice between total privacy or the subtle hint of others nearby. The maximum that spacious room had ever held was probably half of those crowded into Sammie's.
Nothing like this—overwhelming physicality.
Gail shuddered.

Those on Thromberg Station didn't seem to mind. Despite the fact that several of Sammie's customers were definitely the worse for the local brew, they'd all seemed healthy and happy enough, given most were at the extreme lower end of the normal range for body mass. Forester had boasted about the success of their ration distribution system. Gail supposed the line between preventing starvation and providing adequate nutrition had blurred for all of them years ago.

There was no audio, but Gail didn't require it, confident of her ability to recall anything said that mattered. It was her eyes she didn't trust, knowing the tricks they played on memory: the way the brain stored images that were like averages of what was really there; the way fleeting glimpses were lost before you could notice what you'd seen; even the way one eye was maddeningly blind to what the other saw at any moment in time.

She adjusted a control. Too close a view of Sammie's mismatched teeth panned outward to the crowd behind. Gail halted the image.

That man.
Huge, long-armed, the face of a god, and a standing shock of red hair that must cause trouble in a 'suit helmet. He'd be striking in any group on Earth; here his massive frame was so out of place she remembered him vividly. What she hadn't remembered seeing was this.

He wasn't looking at her.

She'd had the rapt attention of everyone from the moment she'd lifted the curtain. The proof was in this recording. Yet, as Gail advanced the playback second by second, she saw this one man had glanced away from her and back toward the bar.

It was a quick, furtive glance. Gail would never have caught it without the vid.
So
, she asked herself,
what or who were you looking at, my giant friend?

Half an hour later, Gail removed the disk, surreptitiously sliding in the one she'd pretended to watch into the viewer before tossing it aside. She dropped back on her piles of reports and blankets, legs still crossed, feeling the stretch burn pleasantly along her lower spine and outer thighs.

She'd found him. The direction of the big man's glance had helped, but once she'd known where to look, it had been easy. His clothing betrayed him. The figure ever-so-briefly glimpsed from behind one of the aproned bartenders didn't belong there, despite being dressed like every other customer in shabby stationer gray.

Gail had stared at his face—what the image revealed of it—so long that now, when she closed her eyes, she could still see it.
Intense,
she judged it. A little scared, but too curious to stay hidden, like a young fox she'd encountered during a camping trip. Not handsome by Earth standards—there was something not right about the cheekbones, close under the skin, an unusual angle to his oddly large eyes, or maybe the chin was too firm for the rest of the jaw.
Not an ugly face
, Gail decided,
but different. If he were smiling
, her tired mind went further than she planned,
it might be quite a nice face.

Which was irrelevant
, Gail told herself firmly, pushing out her legs to clear some sleeping space. She was willing to bet she'd now seen Aaron Luis Pardell in the flesh and equally sure traditional methods weren't going to find him in person.

A good thing
, she yawned,
Pardell had such an easy-to-find friend.

 

While Gail had no intention of sharing her vid or its method of concealment with anyone else, the description she supplied was more than enough for Forester. “In Sammie's?” he interrupted before she was half done. “That's got to be Malley—Hugh Malley. Second-generation stationer. Works in metal recycling. We don't have many his size here.”

“I can believe that,” Grant said almost fervently. Gail wasn't surprised Grant remembered Malley. She was willing to bet Grant and his people had automatically calculated how much more force it would require to subdue a man of Malley's size—or how much of the tranquilizer they'd all carried concealed in their sleeves would be necessary to put him down hard, should he be a threat.

They'd agreed to appear weaponless
, she reminded herself, the entire debate ringing completely clear in memory, but not to being that way.

“So now you want Malley instead of Pardell?” Forester looked as though he wanted to comment, then met her eyes. For some reason, he changed his mind, saying simply: “Good. Malley I can find for you. He doesn't use his room share much, but he's got a hideyhole in the same section as the recycling plant. Most of the workers sleep close.”

“Why?” Gail asked curiously.

“It's close,” the stationer repeated. His tone seemed to expect her to share some inside joke. When she didn't respond, Forester continued almost impatiently: “The incoming loads wake them up. They move fast enough, they get to sort the scrap first—usually nothing, but enough tech and hardware slip by the inspectors to make it worthwhile having quick eyes and quicker fingers on both shifts.”'

“You allow people to steal from the scrap metal?”

Gail answered Grant's question when Forester looked offended. “It's to the station's benefit to be sure nothing's wasted,” she said calmly. “I imagine there are similarly independent operations throughout Thromberg, aren't there?” She didn't wait for an answer. “How soon can you contact Malley?”

“Man's gone to bed,” Forester said after a glance at his wristchrono.

“It's the middle of the afternoon,” Grant protested mildly, as aware as Gail that the station kept Sol Standard time, as did every ship.

“Even-cycle, yes,” Forester agreed. “Judging by when we found him in Sammie's, Malley runs odd-cycle. Now's his dead of night.”

“Then wake him,” Gail said. “We don't have the time to waste, Administrator.”