Thinwolf was, in a pragmatic sense, no longer an employee of SeedCorp, and thus beyond their retribution. So, out of curiosity, he broke the seals on his cargo compartment.
The cargo, consigned to one of Jaworld's wealthy planters, consisted of an emperor's ransom in toys. Thinwolf found a beautiful carousel equipped with several dozen saddled menagerie beasts, each sculpted of semiprecious stone and caparisoned with silver and gold. He found a magnificent bullet car, armored in black steel, enameled with rich designs in red and blue, upholstered in ermine. He found an antique bed, its tall carnelian headboard carved with naked, sloe-eyed goddesses. He found a hundred other useless treasures.
But there was a lovely little surface boat, outfitted for a long cruise, tied down on a launching pallet. In its salon was a med unit as good as the one on the SeedCorp platform.
Last and best, there was the conservator hulk, built for the rich planter. The dark Nilotic features were astonishingly similar to Thinwolf's own pale ones. It was blank, ready to imprint, and offered him survival. The thought that his flesh would die still saddened him, but he told himself: Be sensible. You're not a redskin anymore. What matter that your connection to the Earth dissolves. The Earth is far away, and forgotten.
He called the factor. "I'm going down to your groundside station, with your permission. I’ve an urge to feel the pull of a planet one last time."
The factor was puzzled, but made no objection. "No recreational facilities, though, and I have only one man down there now, Coedi Kimpt. He's an odd one, a little rough around the edges, but he gets along well with the scavengers."
"I'll be polite," Thinwolf promised.
A day later his ship lay cooling in the lagoon at the center of the artificial island SeedCorp used for a groundside base. Summeilodge shared the lagoon with a small SeedCorp shuttle. On the north side of the island, a warehouse complex raised blocky shapes against the sky, and a transverse crane arced over one end of the lagoon.
An autodinghy came out and carried Thinwolf back to the dock. Coedi Kimpt waited for him there, a small man with a sleek blond head and long, muscular arms.
Kimpt helped him from the dinghy, with surprisingly gentle hands. "Well, so you're John Thinwolf. I'm Coedi." The little man smiled a sweet, open smile, and his tiny eyes glistened. "They tell me I'm the scum at the bottom of SeedCorp's barrel; how high do you float, John?"
Thinwolf laughed. "Not so high as I used to, Coedi. In fact, I think I'll be leaking out the drain pretty soon."
Coedi took him to the visitors' hostel, made him comfortable in a small room with a view of the open ocean.
When the sea was dark, Thinwolf walked the path to the trading post, which showed narrow, yellow-glowing windows to the night. He pushed into the store. Shelves crowded with crates rose up to the ceiling. Coedi sat under a single glowbulb, smoking a pipe. "Come in, John," he said. "Drink? Smoke? Skinpopper?" He held out a tray full of poppers. "Upstairs tries to keep me happy, so none of them have to come down here. I've passed up six rotations so far this year — they love me in the sky."
Thinwolf raised his hands. "Thank you, but I can't. The quackbox won't let me do anything that's even a little bit fun; says it'll kill me quick."
"O.K. But it's a lousy way to spend your last days. Sit down." Coedi indicated a high-backed chair. "So. What brings you to our little resort?"
Thinwolf lowered himself into the chair. The pain had diminished to a tolerable level under the palliatives, but he was still weary. "Tired of shipboard, Coedi. I haven't been dirtside in years. Might be my last chance."
Coedi leaned forward. "Might?"
Thinwolf studied the trader. Backwaters like Passage were settling basins for SeedCorp's worst and best. He felt, with illogical conviction, that Coedi was the latter. "Redskin instinct," he muttered.
"What?"
"Sorry, thinking aloud. What would you say if I asked for the use of your crane?"
Coedi laughed. "Gonna pop your goody box, eh? Gonna have a good time anyway! The crane ... you'll have to tie me up before you use it. Let's see, I got a good piece of rope here somewhere." He half-rose, as if to go off among the dark shelves.
"Wait, not right now.... But thank you."
"Why not right now? You got time to burn, right." But Coedi sat down, smiling his innocent smile.
"Maybe I do..." He told Coedi about the hulk, about the boat.
The trader's face filled with delight. "Going fishing? Gonna wait till it hurts too much before you twitch the switch?"
"Might fish. Might just cruise around and see the sights."
"The sights. What would those be?" Coedi seemed amused.
"Oh. Well, the Forbidden Cities, I guess. Is there anything else?"
"No. But I tell you, there's not a lot to look at in most of them. The dead ones were cleaned out long ago, and the live ones will kill you. And John, you got to stay away from the dying ones. Sometimes they blow themselves up, at the last, or burn. Though mainly they're dangerous because those are the ones that the bonepickers tie up to, and the pickers are a hard bunch. There's some would be happy to cut your throat and steal your boat." Coedi spoke earnestly.
"Will it be hard to avoid them?"
Coedi rubbed his chin. "No, guess not. You shouldn't have much trouble getting away from any pickers you come across. They generally run displacement hulls — slow, but they can move a lot of cargo with a lot less energy. That squirtboat you're about to steal, it oughta walk away from anything that's out there. You'll be O.K., long as you don't get drunk with them."
Thinwolf laughed. "No fear. Well, tell me more about the Cities?"
Coedi's eyes gleamed. He settled back with his pipe and talked.
The Cities were already ancient when the first humans had arrived on Passage. Several scientific expeditions had disappeared into various of the living Cities before the danger became common knowledge. Of the three or four thousand Cities that drifted the world-ocean, perhaps a hundred were dead, already looted down to bare metal when humans had first found them. Perhaps six hundred were in various stages of decay, their defenses erratic enough to give marauding humans a fair chance of survival. The remainder were fully functional but, presumably, empty. Some of the living Cities had permitted explorers to enter and leave, as long as they attempted to take no souvenirs, and those explorers had found no inhabitants.
"My guess is they're not mean, the Cities. Just unreliable," Coedi said. "You be careful about trusting 'em, John. Some of the worst will invite you in for tea, sweet as you could want, but if you go in, no one'll ever see you again. No malice, maybe, but gone is gone. If you go, be careful."
"And all of them alien?"
"So the experts say. Makes sense, since they're all old as hell, and SeedCorp didn't get here till seven hundred years ago. But now you mention it, there's a bonepicker legend about a human City. Or anyway, a City with a human face."
Interesting, thought Thinwolf. "Oh? Tell me."
"Not much to tell. The pickers don't talk about it much; they're all hoping to be the one to find it. But it's supposed to keep to the high northern latitudes, just below the iceberg line. Cold, smoky water up there, strange seabeasts, incredible auroras — good setting for a legend, I guess. Anyhow, some of the old pickers will tell you about the time they saw it, sailing through the night fogs. How there's a Seagate of gold, fifty meters high, carved with a thousand faces. Human faces. The Gate of Faces. This City's supposed to sail fast; none of those who saw it could stay close. They all tried to mark it, of course, but they could never find it again. Some think it swims under the sea most of the time."