Meg and Sal were on 6; he had found that out on their way in. He’d left a message for them on the ‘board, and he planned on company tonight. That and a drink and a long, long bath. Maybe with Meg, if she answered her messages.
If she wasn’t otherwise engaged.
The car stopped. He got out, on legs that felt tired even under 8’s low g, muscles weary of fighting the stimsuit’s elastic and now with gto complicate matters. Ben got out too, and said, “Meet you at the ‘Bow.”
Ben didn’t even slow down. He just punched the button to go on down as far as the core lift went, to 3.
Bird shook his head and headed off down 8-deck—damned if he was even going to call up his mail before he hit the bar at the Starbow. Mail would consist of a bank statement and a few notes from friends as to when they’d gone out and when they’d be back. His brother in Colorado wrote twice a year, postal rates out here being a week’s groceries and Sam not being rich. It wasn’t quite time for the biannual letter and outside of that there wasn’t mail to get excited about. So screw that. He just wanted a chance to get the weight off, get a drink, see a couple of familiar female faces if fate was kind, and never mind Ben’s wet dreams. Ships didn’t come without debts, probably multiple owners, not mentioning the bank, and the company would find some technicality to chew up any proceeds they could possibly make from the ship, til it was hardly worth the price of a good rock, plus expenses. Ben was going to work himself into a heart attack someday, if ulcers didn’t get him first.
The meds said, and the Institute taught you, some null- geffects got worse every time you went out: your bones resorbed, your kidneys picked up the calcium and made stones, and the body learned the response—snapped to it faster with practice, as it were, and Ben believed it. Science devised ways to trick gravity-evolved human systems, and you took your hormones, you spent your sleeptime in the spinner and you wore the damn stimsuit like a religion. Most of all you hoped you had good genes. They told gruesome tales of this old miner whose bones had all crumbled, and there was a guy down tending bar in helldeck who had so many plastic and metal parts he was always triggering the cops’ weapon scans. He didn’t intend to end up like that, nossir, he intended eventually to be sitting in a nice leasing office collecting 15-and-20 on twoships, free and clear of debt, and letting other poor sods get their parts replaced. He had no objection to Morrie Bird sitting in that office as vice president in charge of leases, for that matter: Bird had the people sense that could make it work, and Bird couldn’t last at mining forever: they’d already replaced both hips.
So Bird went off to the easy adjustment of 8-deck in blind trust that Mama would do the right thing and assay their take in the sling and record all the data they’d shot to the offices during their approach—while the one of them who’d worked for Mama for two years and knew the way Mama worked took the immediate trip down to 3-deck, and the frontage of the debtors’ barracks he’d once lived in. Oddity was endemic hereabouts—you could look down the strip now and spot a guy dressed head to foot in purple, but he wasn’t necessarily crazy—at least you could lay money he didn’t claim the company’d done this or that or ask you the time every five minutes.
God, he hated remembering this place. But he still kept an ultra-cheap locker there, with a change of clothes—
Because you had to dress if you were going to go call in debts, nothing rad or rab, just classic. Good sweater, good pants, casual coat. Real shoes. You had to look like solid credit to get what he was after. And his legs were in good enough shape, all things considered: he’d foreseen this, and taken his pills and worked out all the way back—burning off the desire to strangle Dekker, Bird had probably thought, regarding those unusually long sessions on the cycle and the bounce-pads.
But he could walk, at least. He could peel out of the coveralls and the stimsuit, shower in the public gym, dress himself in stationer style and go down past helldeck to 1, where he weighed Earth-normal, walking like an old man, it might be, but he’d taken a painkiller while they were coming in, and it was just a matter of taking it easy—going where Mama knew damned well a spacer directly back from a run wasn’t comfortable going—which was why so many tricky little company rules said you had to sign the forms in person, on the day you docked, at the core office if you wanted Mama to take her time—or in the main offices if you wanted Expedition. The inner decks being notoriously short of lawyers, a lot of spacers never even realized Expedition was possible.
You could put in a company-backed claim on salvage, for instance: go to the general office, file to have the company run procedures and wait it out; but that threw it into ASTEX administrative procedures, which ground exceedingly slow, and put it in the hands of ASTEX Legal Affairs, which usually found some t uncrossed or i undotted. Up there you could file a claim for expenses, but you only got that after Mama had adjudicated the property claims, unless you knew to file hardship along with it; and you could file for salvage, but you had to know the right words and be sure the clerk you got used them: half the low-level help at the core couldn’t spell, let alone help you with legalese.
Best of all, you could pay a call on an old classmate from the Institute, break the queue andget the precise by-the-book words on the application.
8-deck was transient and gray and lonely: you might see a handful of miners in from their runs, not to mention the beam-crews and the construction jocks and whoever else worked long stints in null; you saw the occasional Shepherds and ‘driver crews, transiting to their own fancy facilities, and a noisy lot of refinery tenders and warehouse and factory workers and dock monkeys on rest-break (there were a lot of refinery operations on 8)—and sometimes, these days, some of the military in on leave—but you didn’t get anything like the flashy shops or the service you had down on helldeck. Here you kind of bounced along between floating and walking, being careful how fast you got going, being careful of walls and such—your brittle bones and your diminished muscles and your head all needed to renew acquaintances with up and down—slowly, if you were smart.
The public part of 8 was all automats, even the sleeperies—no enterprising station freeshop types behind the counters, even for the minim shifts that Health & Rehab would let a stationer work on 8. It was robot territory, just stick your card in a slot and you got a sleepery room or a sandwich or the swill that passed here for bourbon whiskey: but that was all right for a start, everything was cheaper than helldeck and your whole sense of taste was off, anyway, for the first bit you got used to refinery air.
You found no luxury here that didn’t come out of an automatic dispenser, unless you were working for the company—in which case you saw a whole other class of accommodations, the adverts said: they said a whole lot better came out of the vending machines behind those doors—but Bird had never seen it. ‘Driver crew and Shepherds didn’t need the waystops that miners did—if they were up here they were slumming, on a 1-hour down from some business in the mast; but generally they went straight to helldeck, where big ship officers and tech crew had cushy little clubs and free booze, and Access with all sorts of perks on the company computers.
Adverts said you could get at least a sniff of those perks, even as a miner—if you let the company own your ship and provide your basics; but that meant the company could also decide when you were too old or you didn’t fit some profile, and then you were out, goodbye and good luck, while some green fool got your ship. God help you, too, if Mama decided you weren’t prime crew on that ship, and some company-assigned prime crew got shunted out to work tender-duty for three years at a ‘driver site—which effectively dumped all the relief crews back at the Refinery onto the no-perks basics, to do time-share in a plastics factory. Work for the company and you could fill in your time swabbing tanks in the chemicals division til you got too old, and then they set you down on retirement-perks and let you sweep floors in some company plant to earn your extras.