Nonetheless, he made up his mind to be as inconspicuous as possible until he reached Coby and, once there, to lose himself under a completely false identity. Being inconspicuous would mean, of course, that he should restrict his contacts with other people aboard, as much as possible; but that was a small hardship. At this moment he felt no great desire to make the acquaintances of his fellow passengers, or those who staffed the ship.
It was a prudent decision, but in making it he had not considered how much such solitary behavior would leave him to his own thoughts and feelings during the days that followed. At times he would find himself unexpectedly immersed in grief, an unbearable grief that would mutate gradually into an icy, compelling rage, that in its own strange way seemed familiar, although he could not recall having felt anything like it before. It made him shiver, thinking of Bleys and the Others, and all their kind. A desire to destroy them and everything connected with them would seize him so powerfully that he could think of nothing else.
As ye have done to me and mine. …
The words seemed to arise out of some ancient part of him like a stained and weathered carving on the stone of his soul. He would follow the advice of the ghosts of Malachi, Obadiah, and Walter to hide until he was strong enough to fight back against those who had done this; and then he would destroy them as they had destroyed all those he had ever loved. Just as Ajela had reminded him that Tam Olyn had once set out to destroy the entire Friendly culture. Tam had changed and turned back from what he had started to accomplish, but Hal would never do so.
Walter's teaching had warned against letting destructive emotions grow and take charge of him; and he had been trained in ways to control them. But he found now that in the worst moments of his grief, the rage was the only thing that could push it from him - and at such times the grief seemed too great to be borne.
Still, in all, the trip to New Earth was not that long in actual subjective, shipboard time. Most of the passengers on board were bound beyond that world, to Freiland, which was now the richer and more commercially active of the two worlds under the star of Sirius. But the ships stopped at New Earth first, because New Earth was the major transshipment point for that solar system; and, like Hal, all those who were going on to other destinations would be making their change to other vessels there, rather than at Freiland.
Hal had hoped to find at least one other person aboard who was going to Coby, or who had known that planet first hand, so that he could ask what the life there was actually like for miners. But none of the other transshipping passengers were bound in his direction - he had asked the purser to check the ship's list to make sure. In the end, when he took the jitney down to New Earth City for the three days he must wait for his vessel to Coby, he was as much alone and knew as little as he had when he had come on board.
But New Earth City itself caught his attention, even driving the memory of the events on the terrace and the Encyclopedia temporarily into the background of his thoughts. It was a space-base city, which meant it had its primary commercial activity in off-world shipping. The sky was busy with passenger and cargo jitneys going to and from parking orbit; the streets were equally full of a multitude of shipping agents. He had no trouble finding passage under a different name on a ship headed for Coby, after he had cancelled his original reservations.
The city, itself, lay in the uplands of the north temperate zone of that world, in mid-continent, at the confluence of the two large rivers that together with their tributaries provided a watershed for nearly one-third of the continent's land mass. Hal remembered from his geography studies that the city was supposed to be very cold in winter. But now it was mid-summer, the air dusty and windy with the odor unique to vegetation of that latitude on the planet. He sat in sidewalk restaurants, drinking the local fruit and vegetable juices and watching the people who passed.
In spite of his training, the romantic part of him had always clung to the thought that there would be markedly noticeable differences to be seen in the people on the younger inhabited planets. But New Earth was an unspecialized world and the majority of the people on it looked as much like full-spectrum humans as those of Earth. They looked the same; essentially, they talked the same; and, with slight variations in cut and style, they wore the same sort of clothes. Only occasionally did he see an individual who dressed and acted as if he or she clearly belonged to one of the true Splinter Cultures - Friendly, Exotic, or Dorsai - and these stood out sharply from those about them.
Nonetheless, it was a strange and foreign place, New Earth City - the sunlight, the smells, the activity, all had differences about them that caught at his imagination and compelled it. He could see no signs of the decay Tam Olyn had spoken of, the approach of an Armageddon, an end to present civilization, or even to the human race itself. Dismissing the puzzle at last from his mind, he turned to a more immediate question. He tried telling those he met that he was a University-level student from Earth on a thesis-trip, testing his ability to pass for someone in his late teens or early twenties, and was gratified when no one questioned this.
Part of him, he had found out long since, was a chameleon; an imaginative actor who could be seduced by an infinite number of roles. He had three days, local time, to pass before his new transport to Coby would be leaving orbit; and, even in three days, he came close to being strongly tempted to stay where he was for a month or two, learning to fit in with what he saw around him and experiencing New Earth living from within its society.
But the thought that Bleys might already have set - no matter how idly - a search in progress for him, plus the pull of that same amorphous, oceanic purpose in him which had set him unthinkingly to packing as the time approached to board the jitney to the New Earth-bound ship; these sent him up to the ship to Coby in time; and a few hours later, he was once more between the stars, heading toward the first phase shift that would bring him eventually to work in the mines of that airless world.
The ship he travelled on now was not a passenger liner, like the one on which he had left Earth orbit, but a cargo vessel that carried a small complement of passengers in accommodations comparable to those of the ship's officers. The only other passengers were three commercial representatives who spent all their time gambling with gravityless shotballs in the lounge. The officers and crew were indifferent to conversation with the passengers. They had their own professional clubbishness, and except at meals he never saw them; and so, at the end of five days, they came to Coby.
- Not just to an orbit around Coby, however. At the mining world, it developed, spaceships did not park in orbit and wait for jitneys from the surface. They not only went down like military craft, directly to the surface, they went one step further. They descended below the world's surface. Everything built on Coby had been built underground, and as the ship Hal was on gingerly nudged its way close to the Moon-like landscape of the planet, that landscape developed a crack before them from which light shone upward. Barely hovering, it seemed, on its maneuvering powerways, the ship slid into an opening, as the jitney from Earth had slipped into the opening of the port of the Final Encyclopedia.
The moment they were inside, the opening closed again behind them. With pressure barriers, there had been minimal loss of air; but for a world that needed to make all its air and water out of crustal chemicals, even small losses would be important, Hal thought. But then he forgot problems having to do with the crustal extraction of chemicals; for the place into which they had come was another matter entirely than the entry port of the Encyclopedia.
This was like nothing so much as a full-sized surface military or commercial spaceport, hollowed out of the solid stuff of the world, with a spacepad of remarkable dimensions, its edges thick with fitting yards. In the viewing screen of his room, with which Hal was watching their landing, spaceships could be seen lying in the cradles of those yards and being fitted with the metal parts and fabrications that Coby could supply more cheaply than any of the other worlds.