It wasn’t all that busy, though. Oh, there were a few dozen men and women, mostly business types, sitting around talking in low tones to each other, and a few young people in military uniforms over in one corner accompanied by a man and a woman who were clearly both from the escort services and doing their usual fine acting to their paying clients. She recognized the guy—Yuri, his name was—from old times, but she gave no acknowledgment nor would he to her if he saw and recognized her. It was part of the code.
You knew you were in a first-class establishment, though, because there were real people doing drink service. Usually it was all automated: you gave your order into a hidden speaker, it arrived on a robot tray after being mixed by some barely concealed bartending machine, and that was that. Nobody needed to wait tables, or be waited upon. It was all ego, all part of making you feel like you really were better than other people. Not like the escorts. Cybersex could be far more intense than real sex and very, very authentic, but it turned out that you paid a real price physically for doing a lot of it, and it got cold after a while, too, because you knew it was fake and you knew just how it would wind up. Until people became machines they needed other people.
She had always wondered about those who did merge with machines. It was a one-way trip; you could be switched to other mechanical devices but you’d never be human again. Like the woman who was the captain of the Stanley, for example: a brain and spinal cord in a charged fluid bath whose thoughts controlled every aspect of that big ship and whose thought processes and calculating abilities were augmented by a gigantic high speed quasi-organic super computer. What would make somebody do that? You really didn’t live much longer, overall, unless you were employed by people willing to put in constant maintenance. Even then, even if you got to live a few extra centuries, what did it matter? You might feel superhuman and all powerful, but you were really just a part in a big hulking ship that went where others told it to go, and you could never touch or feel other human beings, never really come down here, even to a dump like this, and enjoy life.
But you sure were anonymous if you wanted to be. After all that experience, An Li realized that she never knew the captain’s name, nor anything about her past except that she’d been a woman. She’d been nothing but a disembodied voice, the captain. She was up there now, unable to move out of orbit until somebody with the correct codes allowed her to do so, and then only to where those signals told her to go.
One thing was sure—you had to be crazy or desperate to become like that. Little more than a slave to some corporation, forever locked in a cold vacuum of space, looking down on what you could never again share.
She could never do that. She thought death far preferable to that kind of life, but because others thought differently she and the rest of humanity could still travel on working ships requiring no crew and no skilled bridge. It wasn’t the only way to travel through space, but it was the most cost-effective, the most efficient way to do it.
“What would you like, ma’am?”
She was startled out of her reverie by the question. She looked up and saw a young, dark, curly-headed man in a kind of uniform wearing a barely visible headset and microphone.
“Oh, give me a half carafe of the house chablis,” she responded.
“Yes, ma’am. Coming right up.”
She wasn’t used to being waited on, and she couldn’t see the appeal of it. Hell, with the all-automated system she’d have ordered when she wanted to and had a quick response. Now she’d been interrupted, would have to wait until this boy got the wine from probably the same kind of machine they had in the lower-class places, have him bring it when he had the time and noticed it was up, and then she’d have to pay him or even tip him. It seemed not only archaic but so… unnecessary.
She decided to keep to something mild and controllable. Any of the fun drugs would just siphon precious cash while impairing her, and hard booze was murder on somebody her size. Wine was low-alcohol, and she could sip it.
She looked around, and settled for some reason, perhaps past experience or just plain instinct, on one guy who was sitting at the end of the bar near the route to the rest rooms. She wasn’t sure why her senses were attracted to him; certainly he looked less like he belonged here than she did. Maybe that was the reason—he just looked like a fish out of water. Rumpled clothes that looked like they’d been slept in, but of an expensive designer-type cut and look. Gray and black peppered hair that went in all directions at once and looked not only uncombed but perhaps uncombable, and a full but very nicely trimmed beard and mustache of the same middle-aged mix that fit his face quite well but which also marked him as an anachronism. Nobody who traveled between worlds had beards these days. Too much trouble. And the fact that the thick facial hair got a lot of attention when the rest of him did not told her that the look he had was the look he deliberately cultivated.
And he smoked! She wasn’t sure what he smoked, but the pipe was clearly visible when he reached inside his coat for something. People who smoked were just about flaunting their wealth and position, particularly these days.
What was a guy like that doing on a world like this drinking beer alone in an overpriced bar?
She decided to see if she could find out.
The method wasn’t subtle nor innovative, but it usually worked if a guy liked women. Sitting as he was on the stool just in front of the rest rooms, it was fairly simple to go by him fairly ostentatiously to get a feel if he noticed you, and, whether he did or not, when you came out (assuming he was still there) you were simply stuffing something, maybe a small makeup kit or anything that would make a real clatter on the floor, and you just dropped things near the guy. Most people were polite enough to notice and even help, and it broke the ice.
This guy was no exception. In fact, she felt his eyes on the back of her neck as she went in, and, after five minutes or so, when she emerged and dropped the small makeup kit so that it opened and scattered small stuff all over the floor, he was fairly quick to slide off the stool and begin to help her retrieve things.
She gave him the patented smile and thanked him for helping. It didn’t take a minute to recover and put away the dropped materials. “Thanks,” she said. “I do that a lot, I’m afraid, after I’ve been offworld for a while and then get back on. Different gravity or something, I guess.”
His eyes, an odd blue-gray unusual in any company, widened a bit and his bushy eyebrows rose. “You’ve been in space as more than a passenger, I take it?” It was a throaty baritone, one that wouldn’t carry all that far but had a kind of friendly, relaxed texture to it. The accent was definite but unplaceable; he was from someplace she’d never been.
She nodded. “Just got back from saving the universe and getting canned for my trouble. We weren’t getting paid to save the universe, we were getting paid to salvage a dead world.”
He was definitely interested, possibly hooked. “You were with that group that ran into that thing that ate a whole colony? I heard about that.”
“Everybody has. All it’s done is make me and most of my crew unemployable around here. I shoulda brought back some of the damned worm and let it eat my creditors. Trouble is, the worm would then know what they knew and it would still come after me for the money.” She looked around. “Pardon, but I’m standing and my drink’s over there. Care to join me, Mister…?”