“Hey, Sol-dier, what are you doing?”
He blinked himself back.
“Come sit with us?”
He crossed the room to the nearest bulky table and the remaining crew of the Dirty Old Man—428.
“How’s your hand?” Vlasa soothed it with a dark, ringed finger.
“It only hurts when I laugh.”
“You really are screwed up!” Ling-shan’s smile wrinkled. “Oh, Soldier, why look so glum?”
“I chipped my bar.”
“Ohhh… nothing but bad news tonight. Make him laugh, somebody, we can’t go on like this!”
“Tell him the joke you heard on Chrysalis—”
“—from the boy with a cat’s-eye in his navel? Oh. Well, it seems there was…”
His fingers moved reluctantly up the laces of his patchwork shirt and began to untangle the thumb-sized star trapped near his throat. He set it free; his hand tightened across the stubby spines, feeling only dull pressure. Pain registered from somewhere else.
“—‘Oh, they fired the pickle slicer too!’”
He looked up into laughter.
“It’s a tech-one joke, Soldier,” Ling-Shan said helpfully.
“Oh… I see.” He laughed, blindly.
“Soldier, we took pictures of our black hole!” Vlasa pulled at his arm. “From a respectable distance, but it was bizarre—”
“Holograms—” somebody interrupted.
“And you should see the effects!” Brigit said. “When you look into them you feel like your eyes are being—”
“Soldier, another round, please?”
“Excuse me.” He pushed back his chair. “Later?” Thinking, God, won’t this night ever end?
His hand closed the lock on the pitted tavern door at last; his woven sandal skidded as he stepped into the street. Two slim figures, one all in sea-blue, passed him and red hair flamed; he recognized Marena, intent and content arm in arm with a gaudy, laughing Tail. Their hands were in each other’s back pockets. They were going uphill; he turned down, treading carefully on the time- and fog-slicked cobbles. He limped slightly. Moist wraiths of sea fog twined the curving streets, turning the street lights into dark angels under fluorescing haloes. Bright droplets formed in his hair as he walked. His footsteps scratched to dim echoes; the laughter faded, leaving him alone with memory.
The presence of dawn took him by surprise, as a hand brushed his shoulder.
“Sojer, ‘tis you?”
Soldier looked up fiercely into a gray-bristled face.
“Y’all right? What’ree doin‘ down here at dawn, lad?”
He recognized old Makerrah the fisherman, finally. Lately it amused the old man to call him “lad.”
“Nothin‘… nothin’.” He pulled away from the brine-warped rail. The sun was rising beyond the mountains, the edge of fog caught the colors of fire and was burned away. It would be a hot day. “G’bye, ol‘ man.” He began to walk.
“Y’sure you’re all right?”
Alone again he sat with one foot hanging, feeling the suck and swell of water far below the pier. All right … ? When had he ever been all right? And tried to remember into the time before he had known her, and could find no answer.
There had never been an answer for him on his own world, on Glatte; never even a place for him. Glatte, with a four-point-five technology, and a neo-feudal society, where the competition for that technology was a cultural rationale for war. All his life he had seen his people butchered and butchering, blindly, trapped by senseless superstition. And hated it, but could not escape the bitter ties that led him to his destruction. Fragments of that former life were all that remained now, after two centuries, still clinging to the fact of his alienness. He remembered the taste of fresh-fallen snow… remembered the taste of blood. And the memory filled him of how it felt to be nineteen, and hating war, and blown to pieces…to find yourself suddenly half-prosthetic, with the pieces that were gone still hurting in your mind; and your stepfather’s voice, with something that was not pride, saying you were finally a real man… Soldier held his breath unaware. His name was Maris, consecrated to war; and when at last he understood why, he left Glatte forever.
He paid all he had to the notorious spacer women; was carried in stasis between the stars, like so much baggage. He wakened to Oro, tech one-point-five, no wars and almost no people. And found out that now to the rest of humanity he was no longer quite human. But he had stayed on Oro for ninety-six years, aging only five, alone. Ninety-six years; a jumble of whiteness climbing a hill, constant New Piraeus; a jumble of faces in dim blue lantern light, patterning a new life. A pattern endlessly repeated, his smile welcoming, welcoming with the patience of the damned, all the old/new faces that needed him but never wanted him, while he wanted and needed them all. And then she had come to Oro, and after ninety-six years the pattern was broken. Damned Tin Soldier fell in love, after too many years of knowing better, with a ballerina who danced between the stars.
He pressed his face abruptly against the rail, pain flickered. God, still need; thought it all turned to plastic, damn, damn… And shut out three times twenty-five more years of pattern, of everyone else’s nights and cold, solitary mornings trying to find her face. Ninety-one hundred days to carry the ache of returned life, until she would come again, and—
“See? That’s our ship. The third one in line.”
Soldier listened, unwillingly. A spacer in lavender stood with her Tail where the dock angled to the right, pointing out across the bay.
“Can’t we go see it?” Blue glass glittered in mesh across the boy’s back as he draped himself over the rail.
“Certainly not. Men aren’t allowed on ships; it’s against regulations. And anyway—I’d rather stay here.” She drew him into the corner; amethyst and opal wrapped her neck in light. They began to kiss, hands wandering.
Soldier got up slowly and left them, still entwined, to privacy. The sun was climbing toward noon; above him as he walked, the skyline of New Piraeus wavered in the hazed and heated air. His eyes moved up and back toward the forty-story skeleton of the Universal Bank under construction, dropped to the warehouses, the docks, his atrophying ancient lower city. Insistent through the cry of sea birds he could hear the hungry whining of heavy machinery, the belly of a changing world. And still I triumph over Death, and Chance, and thee, O Time—
“But I can’t stand it.” His hands tightened on wood. “I stood it for ninety-six years; on the shelf.” Dolefully the sea birds mocked him, creaking in the gray-green twilight, now, now— Wind probed the openings of his shirt like the cold fingers of sorrow. Was dead, for ninety-six years before she came.
For hours along the rail he had watched the ships in the bay; while he watched, a new ship had come slipping down, like the sun’s tear. Now they grew bright as the day ended, setting a bracelet on the black water. Stiffness made him lurch as he turned away, to artificial stars clustered on the wall of night.
Choking on the past, he climbed the worn streets, where the old patterns of a new night reached him only vaguely, and his eyes found nothing that he remembered anymore. Until he reached the time-eaten door, the thick, peeling mud-brick wall beneath the neon sign. His hand fondled the slippery lock, as it had for two hundred years. TIN SOLDIER… loved a ballerina. His hand slammed against the lock. No—this bar is closed tonight.
The door slid open at his touch; Soldier entered his quiet house. And stopped, hearing the hollow mutter of the empty night, and found himself alone for the rest of his life.