O’Carroll pried the Terran’s fingers loose. “I didn’t like the way Tirasi was picking a fight with Slugger.”
“You didn’t like it?” The Fudir shook his head. “You didn’t like it? Did anyone ask that you should? The only one who had to like it was O’Toole, and in case you didn’t notice, he did! He and Tirasi have gone round on round since the cows came home. It’s a ritual with them. Malone takes bets, and everyone clucks in disapproval. So you keep your nose out of their business.”
Little Hugh shook his head. “No, there was a meanness to it. You’re making it out less than what it was.”
The Fudir shoved him on the chest. “This from a man ready to throw an entire world back into civil war because he lost his job in a hostile takeover.”
Little Hugh seized the Fudir’s wrist. “Careful, old man, or I’ll break you in two.”
But the Fudir only relaxed and said mildly, “We shouldn’t quarrel with each other.” The words were meek enough, but they sounded oddly like Do you really think you could?
Now there was a new and sudden thought! Little Hugh released the Terran. “You’re not as old as you look,” he said in wonder.
The Fudir grunted and turned to the door. “Don’t get in any fights with Tirasi. January may have sensed something. Try to be a bit more invisible. That was your specialty wasn’t it? Didn’t they call you the Ghost?”
“I know disguises.”
But Hugh’s response was ambiguous and the two parted company, and each considered what the other had revealed.
Electric Avenue lay along the geodesics, and so was straight as a rule. It was the rule that was warped and twisted. In the groove, everything was always dead ahead. O’Toole checked the ship’s centering at intervals, but the only exciting moment came a week and a half out, when Cerenkov turbulence signaled the bow wave of a vessel sliding down the road in the opposite direction.
Since a ship on the Avenue was, in a certain sense, nowhere in the universe, no two ships could ever occupy the same place. There was thus no danger of superluminal collisions, only a slight buffeting by ships passing in the light. Now and then, O’Toole corrected for the slight deviations these caused. “But this time,” he swore, “it musta been a fookin’ fleet.” The wake had slewed the ship to the side of the channel, close to the subluminal mud.
Nothing he couldn’t handle, however. O’Toole dismissed the turbulence off handedly, although Little Hugh found him afterward in the wardroom with a strong drink in his hand and a disinclination to conversation. Even January appeared almost concerned, his perpetual smile flattened nearly to horizontal, and something long and extremely angry had been entered in the ship’s log.
“They ain’t supposed to enter the Avenue so close together,” Maggie B. explained when Ringbao had asked her. “Creates a passel of problems for the oncoming traffic.” But when he pressed her on how close things had gotten, she only smiled and told him not to worry. That worried him.
“Why?” the Fudir asked when O’Carroll brought the matter up. “‘A miss is as good as a mile.’ Always a lot of traffic on the Grand Trunk and sometimes it just bunches up. No point worrying over it. January will file a squawk with STC New Eireann.”
But when they exited the slipstream and yanked themselves into Newtonian space, they found STC New Eireann off-line, and the magbeam cushions failed to catch them.
Hogan swore mighty oaths and shifted the alfvens into reverse, braking the ship by snatching at the strings of space as they fell inbound from the exit ramp. The whine rose to a teeth-rattling pitch that filled the ship and put everyone on edge. Despite the refit at Gladiola, waste heat made the power room nearly unbearable and Hogan and Malone could take only an hour inside before emerging, sweat-soaked, to pant in the corridor outside and worry whether the containment field would take the strain.
“How bad is it?” Ringbao asked Maggie B. as she headed for the control deck to relieve January.
“Not now, Ringbao,” she answered him.
New Angeles had braked without magbeams before, but this time they hadn’t been expecting it and hadn’t been prepared for it and could ye get out o’ th’ fookin’ way, Ringbao!
It was hours before the tension eased, a little; and days before anyone relaxed. By then, Kalim had harvested enough off the radio to understand what had happened to the world they were approaching. A fleet of rievers had overwhelmed Jumdar’s planetary police, pillaged New Down Town, and looted everything they could break open.
“Aye, that’s bad cases, that,” January said, but his mind was on the difficulties of shedding velocity without the magbeam cushions. Lacking the ephemeris from New Eireann STC, Maggie B. and Bill Tirasi and Kalim extrapolated from the ship’s previous visit to identify the markers on which to take their bearings. They cursed the rievers for their troubles. Several days passed in this manner, during which time a few magbeam platforms did come back online. But the world toward which they fell was too busy binding up its wounds to worry much over an inbound tramp. Passing below the orbit of the Dagda, New Angeles secured her first long-distance visuals and they could see orbital factories tumbling like children’s toys broken and flung aside.
O’Toole fretted, for he had been “bread-and-buttered” in the Vale, and though he had gone and flown, the places in his memory did not lie quiet. “There was a girl there,” he said to Ringbao over a brooding bowl of uiscebaugh. “In Fermoy, it was, and I fancied her some; and I wud av married her but that she didn’t ’prove me dhrinkin’ av the creature. Ah, ’tis the wimmin an’ not the alfvens what drive a man to space. An’ now Kalim sez Fermoy’s been…” He did not finish the thought, but took a drink while Little Hugh O’Carroll fought to stay within the shell of Ringbao della Costa. He laid a hand on the pilot’s forearm.
“Maybe girlfriend okay,” he forced his persona to say, his words wrung out of any hint of how deeply he himself felt about the world he had once helped manage.
O’Toole shook his head. “That was years ago…She’s long forgotten me. I thought I’d long forgotten her.”
An Craic
The harper frowns in dissatisfaction. “And what is the point of that tale? That to journey hopefully is better than to arrive? I hadn’t thought you capable of such banality.”
It is difficult to know when the scarred man smiles. His lips hang down the curve of his chin like an old sock thrown across a chair-back. “Why do you think anyone has arrived, or that they have journeyed with any hope?” He laughs. “But let them have their moment.”
The harper says nothing, but her mouth hardens. “Your humor is too cruel,” she says at last. “I think it has poisoned the story.” She stands to go, but the scarred man’s words, projected somehow by the geometry of the alcove, seem to whisper by her very ear.
“Where can you go to get the story, poisoned or not? Those who were in it are scattered, gone, or dead. It’s our version you’ll hear, or none at all.”
She picks up her harp case and slings it across her back. “Don’t be so sure, old man. I did not come here unschooled. Your lips are not the only ones that tell this tale.”
The scarred man lifts a clawed hand, as if begging. “Don’t go,” he says. It might have been a plea had it been said with more feeling; but there is little of feeling left in him and so it sounds more like a command. “Stay a while longer, for our loneliness.”