Suddenly he grabbed the sides of the table.
“Where is Dan going to go!”
The Mouse’s glass tumbled, smashed on the stone.
“You tell me!”
He shook the table again.
The bartender was coming over.
Dan stood, overturning his chair, and rubbed his knuckles on his eyes. He took two staggering steps through the sunburst that rayed the floor. Two more. The last left long maroon prints.
The black-haired woman caught her breath. The blond man closed the cards.
One mechanic started forward, but the other touched his arm.
Dan’s fists struck the swinging doors. He was gone.
The Mouse looked around. Glass on stone again, but softer. The bartender had plugged the sweeper into his wrist and the machine hissed over dirt and bloody fragments. “You want another drink?”
“No,” the Mouse’s voice whispered from his ruined larynx. “No, I was finished. Who was that?”
“Used to be a cyborg stud on the Roc. He’s been making trouble around here for a week. Lots of places throw him out as soon as he comes in the door. How come you been having such a hard time getting signed on?”
“I’ve never been on a star-run before,” came the Mouse’s rough whisper. “I just got my certificate two years back. Since then I’ve been plugged in with a small freight company working around inside the Solar System on the triangle run.”
“I could give you all kinds of advice.” The bartender unplugged the sweeper from the socket on his wrist. “But I’ll restrain myself. Ashton Clark go with you.” He grinned and went back behind the bar.
The Mouse felt uncomfortable. He hooked a dark thumb beneath the leather strap over his shoulder and started for the door.
“Eh, Mouse, come on. Play something for us—“
The door closed behind him.
Draco, Earth, Istanbul, 3164
The shrunken sun lay jagged gold on the mountains. Neptune, huge in the sky, dropped mottled light on the plain. The star-ships hulked in the repair pits half a mile away.
The Mouse started down the strip of bars, cheap hotels, and eating places. Unemployed and despondent, he had bummed in most of them, playing for board, sleeping in the corner of somebody’s room when he was pulled in to entertain at an all-night party. That wasn’t what his certificate said he should be doing. That wasn’t what he wanted.
He turned down the boardwalk that edged Hell3.
To make the satellite’s surface habitable, Draco Commission had planted Illyrion furnaces to melt the moon’s core. With surface temperature at mild autumn, atmosphere generated spontaneously from the rocks. An artificial ionosphere kept it in. The other manifestations of the newly molten core were Hells 1 to 55, volcanic cracks that had opened in the crust of the moon. Hell3 was almost a hundred yards wide, twice as deep (a flaming worm broiled on its bottom), and seven miles long. The canon flickered and fumed under pale night.
As the Mouse walked by the abyss, hot air caressed his cheek. He was thinking about blind Dan. He was thinking about the night beyond Pluto, beyond the edge of the stars called Draco. And was afraid. He fingered the leather sack against his side.
When the Mouse was ten years old, he stole that sack. It held what he was to love most.
Terrified, he fled from the music stalls beneath white vaults, down between the stinking booths of suede. He clutched the sack to his belly, jumped over a carton of meerschaum pipes that had broken open, spilling across the dusty stone, passed under another arch, and for twenty meters darted through the crowds roaming the Golden Alley where velvet display windows were alive with light and gold. He sidestepped a boy treading the heels of his shoes and swinging a three-handled tray of tea glasses and coffee cups. As the Mouse dodged, the tray went up and over; tea and coffee shook, but nothing spilled. The Mouse fled on.
Another turn took him past a mountain of embroidered slippers.
Mud splattered the next time his canvas shoes hit the broken flooring. He stopped, panting, looked up.
No vaults. Light rain drifted between the buildings. He held the sack tighter, smeared his damp face with the back of his hand, and started up the curving street.
The Burnt Tower of Constantine, rotten, ribbed, and black, jutted from the parking lot as he reached the main street, people hurried about him, splashing in the thin slip covering the stones. The leather had grown sweaty on his skin.
Good weather? He would have romped down the back-street shortcut but this: he kept to the main way, taking some protection from the monorail. He pushed his way among the businessmen, the students, the porters.
A sledge rumbled on the cobbles. The Mouse took a chance and swung up on the yellow running board. The driver grinned—gold-flecked crescent in a brown face—and let him stay.
Ten minutes later, heart still hammering, the Mouse swung off and ducked through the courtyard of New Mosque. In the drizzle a few men washed their feet in the stone troughs at the wall. Two women came from the flapping door at the entrance, retrieved their shoes, and started down the gleaming steps, hastening in the rain.
Once, the Mouse had asked Leo just when New Mosque was built. The fisherman from the Pleiades Federation—who always walked with one foot bare—had scratched his thick, blond hair as they gazed at the smoky walls rising to the domes and spiking minarets. “About a thousand years ago, was. But that only a guess is.”
The Mouse was looking for Leo now.
He ran out the courtyard and dodged between the trucks, cars, dolmushes, and trollies crowding the entrance of the bridge. On the crosswalk, under a street-lamp, he turned through an iron gate and hurried down the steps. Small boats clacked together in the sludge. Beyond the dinghies, the mustard water of the Golden Horn heaved about the pilings and the hydrofoil docks. Beyond the Horn’s mouth, across the Bosphorus, the clouds had torn.
Beams slanted through and struck the wake of a ferry plowing toward another continent. The Mouse paused on the steps to stare over the glittering strait as more and more light fell through.
Windows in foggy Asia flashed on sand-colored walls. It was the beginning of the effect that had caused the Greeks, two thousand years before, to call the Asian side of the city Chrysopolis—Gold City. Today it was Uskudar.
“Hey, Mouse! Leo hailed him from the red, doffing deck. Leo had built an awning over his boat, set up wooden tables, and placed barrels around for chairs. Black oil boiled in a vat, heated by an ancient generator caked with grease. Beside it, on a yellow slicker, was a heap of fish. The gills had been hooked around the lower jaws so that each fish had a crimson flower at its head. “Hey, Mouse, what you got?”
In better weather fishermen, dock workers, and porters lunched here. The Mouse climbed over the rail as Leo threw in two fish. The oil erupted yellow foam.
“I got what … what you were talking about. I got it … I mean I think it’s the thing you told me about.” The words rushed, breathy, hesitant, breathy again.
Leo, whose name, hair, and chunky body had been given him by German grandparents (and whose speech pattern had been lent by his childhood on a fishing coast of a world whose nights held ten times as many stars as Earth’s), looked confused. Confusion became wonder as the Mouse held out the leather sack.
Leo took it with freckled hands. “You sure, are? Where you—“
Two workmen stepped on the boat. Leo saw alarm cross the Mouse’s face and switched from Turkish to Greek. “Where did you this find?” The sentence pattern stayed the same in all languages.