Ratlit said: "I know what you're thinking." A couple of times when he'd felt like being quiet and I'd felt like talking I may have told him more than I should. "Well, cube that for me, dad. That's how trapped I feel!"
I laughed, and Ratlit looked very young again. "Come on," I said. "Let's take a walk."
"Yeah." He stood. The wind fingered at our hair. "I want to go see Alegra."
"I'll walk you as far as Calle-G," I told him. "Then I'm going to go to bed."
"I wonder what Alegra thinks about this business? I always find Alegra a very good person to talk to," he said sagely. "Not to put you down, but her experiences are a little more up to date than yours. You have to admit she has a modern point of view. Plus the fact that she's older." Than him, anyway. She was fifteen.
"I don't think being 'trapped' ever really bothers her," I said. "Which may be a place to take a lesson from."
By Ratlit's standards Alegra had a few things over me. In my youth kids took to dope in their teens, twenties. Alegra was born with a three-hundred-milligram-a-day habit on a bizarre narcotic that combined the psychedelic qualities of the most powerful hallucinogens with the addictiveness of the strongest depressants. I can sympathise. Alegra's mother was addicted, and the tolerance was passed with the blood plasma through the placental wall. Ordinarily a couple of complete transfusions at birth would have gotten the new-born child straight. But Alegra was also a highly projective telepath. She projected the horrors of birth, the glories of her infantile hallucinated world on befuddled doctors; she was given her drug. Without too much difficulty she managed to be given her drug every day since.
Once I asked Alegra when she'd first heard of golden, and she came back with this horror story. A lot were coming back from Tiber-44 cluster with psychic shock — the mental condition of golden is pretty delicate, and sometimes very minor conflicts nearly ruin them. Anyway, the government that was sponsoring the importation of micro-micro surgical equipment from some tiny planet in that galaxy, to protect its interests, hired Alegra, age eight, as a psychiatric therapist. "I'd concretise their fantasies and make them work 'em through. In just a couple of hours I'd have 'em back to their old, mean, stupid selves again. Some of them were pretty nice when they came to me." But there was a lot of work for her; projective telepaths are rare. So they started withholding her drug to force her to work harder, then rewarding her with increased dosage. "Up till then," she told me, "I might have kicked it. But when I came away, they had me on double what I used to take. They pushed me past the point where withdrawal would be fatal. But I could have kicked it, up till then, Vyme." That's right. Age eight.
Oh yeah. The drug was imported by golden from Cancer-9, and most of it goes through the Star-pit. Alegra came here because illegal imports are easier to come by, and you can get it for just about nothing — if you want it. Golden don't use it.
The wind lessened as Ratlit and I started back. Ratlit began to whistle. In Calle-K the first night lamp had broken so that the level street was a tunnel of black.
"Ratlit?" I asked. "Where do you think you'll be, oh, in say five years?"
"Quiet," he said. I'm trying to get to the end of the street without bumping into the walls, tripping on something, or some other catastrophe. If we get through the next five minutes all right, I'll worry about the next five years." He began whistling again.
"Trip? Bump the walls?"
"I'm listening for echoes." Again he commenced the little jets of music.
I put my hands in my overall pouch and went on quietly while Ratlit did the bat bit. Then there was a catastrophe. Though I didn't realise it at the time.
Into the circle of light from the remaining lamp at the other end of the street walked a golden.
His hands went up to his face, and he was laughing. The sound skittered in the street. His belt was low on his belly the way the really down and broke g ...
I just thought of a better way to describe him; the resemblance struck me immediately. He looked like Sandy, my mechanic, who is short, twenty-four years old, muscled like an ape, and wears his worn-out work clothes even when he's off duty. ("I just want this job for a while, boss. I'm not starring out here at the Star-pit. As soon as I save up a little, I'm gonna make it back in toward galactic centre. It's funny out here, like dead." He gazes up through the opening in the hangar roof where there are no clouds and no stars either. "Yeah. I'm just gonna be here for a little while."
("Fine with me, kid-boy."
(That was three months back, like I say. He's still with me. He works hard too, which puts him a cut above a lot of characters out here. There's something about Sandy ... ) On the other hand Sandy's face is also hacked up with acne. His hair is always nap short over his wide head, but in these aspects, the golden was exactly Sandy's opposite, come to think of it. There was still something about him ...
The golden staggered, went down on his knees still laughing, then collapsed. By the time we reached him, he was silent. With the toe of his boot Ratlit nudged the hand from the belt buckle.
It flopped, palm up, on the pavement. The little fingernail was three quarters of an inch long, the way a lot of the golden wear it. (Like his face, the tips of Sandy's fingers are, all masticated wrecks. Still, something ... ) "Now isn't that something." Ratlit shook his head. "What do you want to do with him, Vyme?"
"Nothing," I said. "Let him sleep it off."
"Leave him so somebody can come along and steal his belt?" Ratlit grinned. "I'm not that nasty."
"Weren't you just telling me how much you hated golden?"
"I'd be nasty to whoever stole the belt and wore it. Nobody but a golden should be hated that much."
"Ratlit, let's go."
But he had already kneeled down and was shaking his shoulder. "Let's get him to Alegra's and find out what's the matter with him."
"He's just drunk."
"Nope," Ratlit said. "Cause he don't smell funny."
"Look. Get back." I hoisted the golden up and laid him across my neck, fireman's carry. "Start moving," I told Ratlit. "I think you're crazy."
Ratlit grinned. "Thanks. Maybe he'll be grateful and lay some lepta on me for taking him in off the street."
"You don't know golden," I said. "But if he does, split it with me."
"Sure."
Two blocks later we reached Alegra's place. But like I say, Sandy, though well built, is little, so I didn't have much trouble. Halfway up the tilting stairs Ratlit said, "She's in a good mood."
"I guess she is." The weight across my shoulders was becoming pleasant.
I can't describe Alegra's place. I can describe a lot of places like it; and I can describe it before she moved in because I knew a derelict named Drunk-roach who slept on that floor before she did. You know what never-wear plastics look like when they wear out? What non-rust metals look like when they rust through? It was a shabby crack-walled cubicle with dirt in the corners and scars on the window pane when Drunk-roach had his pile of blankets in the corner. But since the hallucinating protective telepath took it over, who knows what it had become.