"No golden took part in the war," Ratlit said.
"They never do." I watched his thin fingers get all tangled together.
After two divorces, my mother ran off with a salesman and left me and four siblings with an alcoholic aunt for a year. Yeah, they still have divorces, monogamous marriages and stuff like that where I was born. Like I say, it's pretty primitive. I left home at fifteen, made it through vocational school on my own, and learned enough about what makes things fly to end up — after that disastrous marriage I told you about earlier — with my own repair hangar on the Star-pit.
Compared with Ratlit I had a stable childhood.
That's right, he lost the last parent he remembered when he was six. At seven he was convicted of his first felony — after escaping from Creton VII. But part of his treatment at hospital cum reform school cum prison was to have the details lifted from his memory. "Did something to my head back there. That's why I never could learn to read, I think." For the next couple of years he ran away from one foster group after the other. When he was eleven, some guy took him home from Play Planet where he'd been existing under the boardwalk on discarded hot dogs, souvlaki, and felafel. "Fat, smoked perfumed cigarettes; name was Vivian?" Turned out to be the publisher. Ratlit stayed for three months during which time he dictated a novel to Vivian. "Protecting my honour," Rablit explained. "I had to do something to keep him busy."
The book sold a few hundred thousand copies as a precocious curiosity among many. But Ratlit had split. The next years he was involved as a shill in some illegality I never understood. He didn't either. "But I bet I made a million, Vyme! I earned at least a million." It's possible. At thirteen he still couldn't read nor write, but his travels had gained him fair fluency in three languages. A couple of weeks ago he'd wandered off a stellar tram dirty and broke, here at the Star-pit. And I'd gotten him a job as grease monkey over at Poloscki's.
He leaned his elbows on his knees, his chin in his hands. "Vyme, it's a shame."
"What's a shame, kid-boy?"
"To be washed up at my age. A has-been! To have to grapple with the fact that this — " he spat at a star — "is it."
He was talking about golden again.
"You still have a chance," I shrugged. "Most of the time it doesn't come out till puberty."
He cocked his head up at me. "I've been pubescent since I was nine, buster."
"Excuse me."
"I feel cramped in, Vyme. There's all that night out there to grow up in, to explore."
"There was a time," I mused, "when the whole species was confined to the surface, give or take a few feet up or down, of a single planet. You've got a whole galaxy to run around in. You've seen a lot of it, yeah. But not all."
"But there are billions of galaxies out there. I want to see them. In all the stars around here there hasn't been one life form discovered that's based on anything but silicon or carbon. I overheard two golden in a bar once, talking: there's something in some galaxy out there that's as big as a star, neither alive nor dead, and sings. I want to hear it, Vyme!"
"Ratlit, you can't fight reality."
"Oh, go to sleep, grandpa!" He closed his eyes and bent his head back until the cords of his neck quivered. "What is it that makes a golden? A combination of physiological and psychological ... what?"
"It's primarily some sort of hormonal imbalance as well as an environmentally conditioned thalamic/personality response."
"Yeah. Yeah." His head came down. "And that X-chromosome heredity nonsense they just connected up with it a few years back. But all I know is they can take the stasis shift from galaxy to galaxy, where you and I, Vyme, if we get more than twenty thousand light-years off the rim, we're dead."
"Insane at twenty thousand," I corrected. "Dead at twenty-five."
"Same difference." He opened his eyes. They were large, green and mostly pupil. "You know, I stole a golden belt? Rolled it off a staggering slob about a week ago who came out of a bar and collapsed on the corner. I went across the Pit to Calle-J where nobody knows me and wore it around for a few hours, just to see if I felt different."
"You did?" Ratlit had lengths of gut that astounded me about once a day.
"I didn't. But people walking around me did. Wearing that two-inch band of yellow metal around my waist, nobody in the worlds could tell I wasn't a golden, just walking by on the street, without talking to me a while, or making hormone tests. And wearing that belt, I learned just how much I hated golden. Because I could suddenly see, in almost everybody who came by, how much they hated me while I had that metal belt on. I threw it over the Edge." Suddenly he grinned. "But maybe I'll steal another one."
"You really hate them, Ratlit?"
He narrowed his eyes at me and looked superior.
"Sure, I talk about them," I told him. "Sometimes they're a pain to work for. But it's not their fault we can't take the reality shift."
"I'm just a child," he said evenly, "incapable of such fine reasoning. I hate them." He looked back at the night. "How can you stand to be trapped by anything, Vyme?"
Three memories crowded into my head when he said that.
First: I was standing at the railing of the East River — runs past this New York I was telling you about — at midnight, looking at the illuminated dragon of the Manhattan Bridge that spanned the water, then at the industrial fires flickering in bright, smoky Brooklyn, and then at the template of mercury street lamps behind me bleaching out the playground and most of Houston Street; then, at the reflections in the water, here like crinkled foil, there like glistening rubber; at last, looked up at the midnight sky itself. It wasn't black but dead pink, without a star. This glittering world made the sky a roof that pressed down on me so I almost screamed ... That time the next night I was twenty-seven light-years away from Sol on my first star-run.
Second: I was visiting my mother after my first few years out. I was looking in the closet for something when this contraption of plastic straps and buckles fell on my head. "What's this, ma?" And she smiled with a look of idiot nostalgia and crooned, "Why that's your little harness, Vymey. Your first father and I would take you on picnics up at Bear Mountain and put you in that and tie you to a tree with about ten feet of cord so you wouldn't get — " I didn't hear the rest because of the horror that suddenly flooded me, thinking of myself tied up in that thing. Okay, I was twenty and had just joined that beautiful procreation-group a year back on Sigma and was the proud father of three and expecting two more. The hundred and sixty-three of us had the whole beach and nine miles of jungle and half a mountain to ourselves; maybe I was seeing Antoni caught up in that thing, trying to catch a bird or a beetle or a wave — with only ten feet of cord. I hadn't worn clothes for anything but work in a twelvemonth, and I was chomping to get away from that incredible place I had grown up in called an apartment and back to wives, husbands, kids and civilisation. Anyway, it was pretty terrible.
The third? After I had left the proke-group — fled them, I suppose, guilty and embarrassed over something I couldn't name, still having nightmares once a month that woke me screaming about what was going to happen to the kids, even though I knew one point of group marriage was to prevent the loss of one, two, or three parents being traumatic — still wondering if I wasn't making the same mistakes my parents made, hoping my brood wouldn't turn out like me, or worse like the kids you sometimes read about in the paper (like Ratlit, though I hadn't met him yet), horribly suspicious that no matter how different I tried to be from my sires, it was just the same thing all over again ... Anyway, I was on the ship bringing me to the Star-pit for the first time. I'd gotten talking to a golden who, as golden go, was a pretty regular gal. We'd been discussing inter-and intragalactic drives. She was impressed I knew so much. I was impressed that she could use them and know so little. She was digging in a very girl-way the six-foot-four, two-hundred-and-ten-pound drive mechanic with mildly grimy fingernails that was me. I was digging in a very boy-way the slim, amber-eyed young lady who had seen it all. From the view deck we watched the immense artificial disk of the Star-pit approach, when she turned to me and said, in a voice that didn't sound cruel at all, "This is as far as you go, isn't it?" And I was frightened all over again, because I knew that on about nine different levels she was right.