But it was just air. It smelled good, but after weeks of the canned air inside the spaceship, any air would smell good. He inhaled it again, searching for some hint of his elusive memory in the fragrance. It was cold and bracing, with a hint of pollen and dust; but mostly it held the impersonal chemical stinks of any spaceport. Hot tar. concrete dust. The stinging ozone of liquid oxygen vaporizing from bleeder valves.
Might as well be back Earthside! Just another spaceport!
Well, what the hell! He told himself roughly to come off it.
The way you built it up in your mind, getting back to Darkover, you made it such a big deal that if the whole city came out to meet you with parades and fanfares, it would still fall flat!
He stepped back, out of the way of a group of Spaceforce men—tall in black leather, booted, blasters concealing their menace behind snug holsters—with stars blazing on their sleeves. The sun was just a fraction off the meridian—huge, red-orange, with little ragged fiery clouds hanging high in the thin sky. The saw-toothed mountains behind the spaceport cast their shadows over the Trade City, but the peaks lay bathed in the sullen light. Memory searched for landmarks along the peaks. Kerwin’s eyes fixed on the horizon, he stumbled over a cargo bale, and a good-natured voice said, “Star-gazing, Redhead?”
Kerwin brought himself back to the spaceport, with a wrench almost physical. “I’ve seen enough stars to last me awhile,” he said. “I was thinking that the air smells good.”
The man at his side grinned. “That’s one comfort. I spent one tour of duty on a world where the air was high-sulfur content. Perfectly healthy, or so the Medics said, but I went around feeling as if someone had thrown a whole case of rotten eggs at me.”
He joined Kerwin on the concrete platform. “What’s it like—being home again?”
“I don’t know yet,” said Kerwin, but he looked at the newcomer with something like affection. Johnny Ellers was small and stocky and going bald on top, a tough little man in the black leather of a professional spaceman. Two dozen stars blazed in a riot of color on his sleeve; a star for every world where he had seen service. Kerwin, only a two-star man so far, had found Ellers a fund of information about almost every planet and every subject under the sun—any sun.
“We’d better move along,” Ellers said. The process crew was already swarming over the ship, readying it for skylift again within a few hours. Favorable orbits waited for no man. The spaceport was already jammed with cargo trucks, workhands, buzzing machinery, fuel trucks, and instructions were being yelled in fifty languages and dialects. Kerwin looked around, getting his bearings. Beyond the spaceport gates lay the Trade City, the Terran Headquarters Building—and Darkover. He wanted to run toward it, but he checked himself, moving with Ellers into the line that was forming, to verify their identities and assignments. He gave up a fingerprint and signed a card verifying that he was who he said he was, received an identity certificate, and moved on.
“Where to?” asked Ellers, joining him again.
“I don’t know,” Kerwin said slowly. “I suppose I’d better report to the HQ for assignment.” He had no formal plans beyond this moment, and he wasn’t sure he wanted Ellers butting in and taking over. Much as he liked Ellers, he would have preferred to get reacquainted with Darkover on his own.
Ellers chuckled. “Report? Hell, you know better than that. You’re no greenie, still bug-eyed about his first offplanet assignment! Tomorrow morning is time enough for the red tape. For tonight—” He waved an expansive hand toward the spaceport gates. “Wine, women and song—not necessarily in that order.”
Kerwin hesitated, and Ellers urged, “Come on! I know the Trade City like the back of my hand. You’ve got to fit yourself out—and I know all the markets. If you do your shopping at the tourist traps, you can spend six months’ pay without half trying!”
That was true. The Big Ships were still too weight-conscious to permit transshipping of clothing and personal gear. It was cheaper to dispose of everything when you transferred, and buy a new outfit when you landed, than to take it along and pay the weight allowances. Every spaceport in the Terran Empire was surrounded with a ring of shops, good, and indifferent, all the way from luxury fashion centers to second-hand rag markets.
“And I know all the high spots, too. You haven’t lived till you’ve tried Darkovan
fifi
. You know, back in the mountains they tell some funny stories about that stuff, especially its effect on women. One time, I remember—”
Kerwin let Ellers lead, listening with half an ear to the little man’s story, which was already taking a familiar turn. To hear Ellers talk, he had had so many women, on so many worlds, that Kerwin sometimes wondered vaguely how he’d had time in between to get into space. The heroines of the stories ranged all the way from a Sirian bird-woman, with great blue wings and a cloak of down, to a princess of Arcturus IV surrounded by the handmaidens who are bound to her with links of living pseudoflesh till the day she dies.
The spaceport gates opened into a great square, surrounding a monument raised on high steps, and a little park with trees. Kerwin looked at the trees, their violet leaves trembling in the wind, and swallowed.
Once he had known the Trade City fairly well. It had grown some since then—and it had shrunk. The looming skyscraper of Terran HQ, once awesome, was now just a big building. The ring of shops around the square was deeper. He did not remember having seen, as a child, the loom of the massive, neon-fronted Sky Harbor Hotel. He sighed, trying to sort out the memories.
They crossed the square and turned into a street paved with hewn blocks of stone, so immense in size that it paralyzed his imagination to guess who or what had laid down those vast slabs. The street lay quiet and empty; Kerwin supposed that most of the Terran population had gone to see the starship touch down, and at this hour few Darkovans would be on the street. The real city still lay out of sight, out of hearing—out of reach. He sighed again, and followed Ellers toward the string of spaceport shops.
“We can get a decent outfit in here.”
It was a Darkovan shop, which meant that it spilled out halfway along the street and there was no clear distinction between outside and in, between the merchandise for sale and the owner’s belongings. But this much concession had been made to custom of the alien Terrans, that some of the goods for sale were on racks and tables. As Kerwin passed beneath the outer arch, his nostrils dilated in recognition of a breath of the familiar; a whiff of scented smoke, the incense that perfumes every Darkovan home from gutter to palace. They hadn’t used it, not officially, in the Spacemen’s Orphanage in the Trade City; but most of the nurses and matrons were Darkovan, and the resinous fumes had clung to their hair and clothing. Ellers wrinkled his nose and made an “Ugh!” sound, but Kerwin found himself smiling. It was the first touch of genuine recognition in a world gone strange.
The shopkeeper, a little withered man in a yellow shirt and breeches, turned and murmured an idle formula: “
S’dia Shaya.
” It meant
you lend me grace
, and without thinking about it, Kerwin muttered an equally meaningless polite formula; and Ellers stared.
“I didn’t know you spoke the lingo! You told me you left here when you were just a kid!”
“I only speak the City dialect.” The little man was turning to a colorful rack of cloaks, jerkins, silken vests and tunics, and Kerwin, exasperated with himself, said curtly in Terran Standard, “Nothing like that. Clothing for
Terranan
, fellow.”
He concentrated on picking out a few changes of clothing—underwear, nightgear, just what he could get along with for a few days until he found out what the job and climate would demand. There were heavy mountain-weight parkas, intended for the mountains in the climbing preserves of Rigel and Capella Nine, lined with synthetic fibers, guaranteed to safeguard body heat down to minus thirty Centigrade or well below, and he shrugged it aside, though Ellers, shivering, had already bought one and put it on; it wasn’t
that
cold even in the Hellers, and here in Thendara it felt like shirtsleeve weather to him. He warned Ellers in an undertone against buying shaving gear.
“Hell, Kerwin, going native? Going to grow a beard?”
“No, but you’ll get better ones in the Service canteens inside the HQ: Darkover is metal-poor, and what metals they have aren’t as good as ours, and cost a hell of a lot more.”
While the shopkeeper was making up the parcels, Ellers drifted to a table near the entry-way.
“What sort of outfit is this, Kerwin? I’ve never seen anyone on Darkover wearing anything quite like
this.
Is it native Darkovan costume?”
Kerwin flinched;
native Darkovan costume
was a concept, like
the Darkovan language
, which consisted only in the simplifications of Empire outsiders. There were nine Darkovan languages he knew about—although he could speak only one well, with a smattering of words from two others—and costume on Darkover varied enormously, from the silks and fine-spun colors of the lowlands to the coarse leathers and undyed furs of the far mountains. He joined his friend at the table, where a tangle of odd garments, all more or less worn, most of them the utilitarian coarse breeches and shirts of the city, were flung at random there; but Kerwin saw at once what had attracted Eller’s eye. It was a thing of beauty, green and dull yellows blended, richly embroidered in patterns that seemed familiar to him; he suspected he was more fatigued than he realized. He held it up and saw that it was a long, hooded cloak.
“It’s a riding-cape,” he said. “They wear them in the Kilghard Hills; and from the embroidery it probably belonged to a nobleman; could be his house colors, though I don’t know what it signifies, or how it came here. They’re warm and they’re comfortable, especially for riding, but even when I was a kid, this kind of cloak was going out of fashion down here in the city; stuff like that—” he pointed to the offworld synthetic parka Ellers was wearing—“was cheaper and just as warm. These cloaks are handmade, hand dyed, hand embroidered.” He took the cloak from Ellers. It was not a woven fabric, but a soft, supple leather, fine as woven wool, flexible as silk, and richly embroidered in metallic threads: The rich dyes were a riot of color spilling over his arm.
“It looks as if it had been made for a prince,” commented Ellers in an undertone. “Look at the fur! What kind of beast is
that
from?”
The shopkeeper burst out into a voluble sales pitch about the costliness of the fur, scenting customers; but Kerwin laughed and cut him off with a gesture.
“Rabbithorn,” he said. “They raise them like sheep. If it was wild
marl
-fur, this
would
be a cloak for a prince. As it is, I suppose it belonged to some poor gentleman attached to a nobleman’s household—one with a talented and industrious wife or daughter who could spend a year embroidering it for him.”
“But the embroideries, nobles, the patterns, fit for
Comyn
, the richness of the dyed leather ...”
“What it looks, is
warm
,” Kerwin said, settling the cloak over his shoulders. It felt very soft and rich. Ellers stepped back, regarding him with consternation.
“Good lord, are you going native already? You aren’t going to wear
that
thing around the Terran Zone, are you?”
Kerwin laughed heartily. “I should say not. I was thinking it might be something to wear around my room in the evenings. If bachelor quarters in HQ are anything like they were at my last assignment, they’re damn stingy with the heat, unless you want to pay a double assessment for energy use. And it gets fairly cold in the winter, too. Of course it’s nice and warm here now—”
Ellers shivered and said gloomily, “If this is
warm
, I hope I’m at the other end of the Galaxy when it gets
cold
! Man, your bones must be made of some kind of stuff I don’t understand. This is
freezing
! Oh, well, one man’s planet is another man’s hell,” he said, quoting a proverb of the Service. “But man, you aren’t going to spend a month’s pay on that damn thing are you?”
“Not if I can help it,” Kerwin replied out of the corner of his mouth, “but if you don’t shut up and let me bargain with him, I just might!”
In the end he paid more than he had expected, and told himself he was a fool as he counted it over. But he wanted the thing, for no reason he could explain; it was the first thing that had taken his fancy after his return to Darkover. He wanted it, and in the end he got it for a price he could afford, though not easily. He sensed, toward the end of the bargaining, that the shopkeeper was uneasy, for some reason, about haggling with him, and gave in much easier than Kerwin had expected. He knew, if Ellers didn’t, that he had really gotten the thing for somewhat less than its value. Considerably less, if the truth be told.
“That kind of money would have kept you happily drunk for half a year,” Ellers mourned as they came out on the street again.
Kerwin chuckled. “Cheer up. Fur isn’t a luxury on a planet like this, it’s a good investment. And I’ve still got enough in my pocket for the first round of drinks. Where can we get them?”
They got them in a wineshop on the outer edge of the sector; it was clear of tourists, although a few of the workhands from the spaceport were mingled with the Darkovans crowded around the bar or sprawled on the long couches along the walls. They were all giving their attention to the serious business of drinking, talking, or gambling with what looked like dominoes or small cut-crystal prisms.
A few of the Darkovans glanced up as the two Earthmen threaded their way through the crowd and sat down at a table. Ellers had cheered up by the time a plump, dark-haired girl came to take their order. He gave the girl a pinch on her round thigh, ordered wine in the spaceport jargon, and, hauling the Darkovan cloak across the table to feel the fur, launched into a long tale about how he had found a particular fur blanket particularly worthwhile on a cold planet of Lyra.