Requiem for a Ruler of Worlds (10 page)

There were manual controls as well, and these responded to the silent commands. It was as if ghosts were manipulating the touchpads and switches; monitors and indicators flashed in all colors, ignored.

There was ceaseless, disembodied activity.

A surveillance monitor swung to focus on him. A synthesized voice asked politely, "Is there any problem?"

"No, I … no. Thank you." He retreated, flustered, from the haunted cockpit and its corpselike residents.

"Spooky, isn't it?" Alacrity said when Floyt returned to his seat. "I don't much care for headboarders either." He thought it better not to tell the Terran any of the gruesome tales about what happened if a headboarder became mentally unhinged.

"Here." Alacrity handed Floyt an elastic, pouchlike affair with a fastening strap.

"What's this?"

"Put your valuables in it—money and travel documents. Then put it on, between your calf and knee, pouch facing inward, under your pants." He smiled at Floyt's surprise. "Keep your eyes open and stick close, citizen. This is a
starport
we're headed for. If you don't know what that means, you will in about three hours."

Studying Luna's cold, pockmarked face on their approach, Floyt saw that the final Srillan raid had left Earth's moon almost completely untouched.

"Anyway, almost everything's underground," Alacrity observed. "The surface is either empty or looks like a garbage dump."

Mindframe
settled into a subsurface hangar, and a huge slab-door rolled closed overhead, while a debarkation tube stretched out to leech onto the shuttle's airlock.

The two had their minimal baggage in hand, and Alacrity insisted on presenting the anticontamination suit to the shuttle crewchief, since they had no further use for it. He didn't mention that he'd sold the suit.

The cash was already in his upper left arm pocket.

The Terran followed the breakabout through the tube, shuffle-hopping in the fractional gravity, taking to it quite handily, delighting himself until he realized that he wasn't supposed to be enjoying any part of his assignment. Alacrity paused by the airlock at the tube's end, signaling for Floyt to hang back while the other passengers queued up at the customs chutes.

The Earther was content enough with waiting, testing his newfound skill with little bounces and skips.

Carrying small cargo boxes and personal baggage,
Mindframe's
crew moved past them, graceful and free in its native gravity. The head-boarded pilot and her copilot greeted Floyt courteously, as if they'd met him while awake.

The crew presented themselves to the customs agents; the other passengers had been passed through quickly. Now Alacrity moved to get into line, with Floyt close behind. The customs agent who checked out Floyt's documentation examined him a little curiously; Earthservice functionaries weren't known to travel offworld for any reason. But the man marked Floyt's ID packet and, after a cursory look through it, his bag as well.

Alacrity was still standing before an agent in the next chute, Floyt saw. After the agent had finished with the breakabout's documents and warbag, he lifted a large wooden case from behind the counter.

Alacrity opened the case's fingerprint lock. Floyt went over to see what was going on. The breakabout drew out a coiled band of red-brown leather.

It was a heavy, machine-stitched gunbelt with shoulder strap and holstered pistol. Alacrity opened the holster strap and drew the weapon, with a bit of effort, the metal clinging to the leather. He drew the ponderous handgun and set it down carefully on the counter.

"Officer's weapon?" one of the customs inspectors asked.

"Captain's Sidearm," Alacrity corrected, pointing to a gleaming insignia on the holster. The harness was a variation on the ancient Sam Browne belt. The breakabout slung it over one shoulder.

One inspector entered the gun's serial number into a data-search terminal. Others examined his documents, both paper and info-wafer, suspiciously. "It was my father's," Alacrity added.

It was a weapon that would make an impression on anyone, weighty and matte-black, wide-muzzled and ominous. It had a curved basket-guard to protect the user's hand from energy backlash.

More interesting, to Floyt, was the sturdy rib running from muzzle to handguard base. It was a deflector, like the ones on primitive Terran firearms, for warding off edged or blunt weapons. This one was notched and dented in several places. The Captain's Sidearm had contoured grips of yellowed ivory mounted with worn crests of some sort. The crests resembled a florid Maltese cross superinscribed on a celestial arc.

Alacrity went to one end of the counter with the inspector-in-charge. They had the hardwood box and the Captain's Sidearm, and the breakabout was speaking earnestly to the Lunie. The other customs agents conspicuously ignored the conversation.

Alacrity reached to the pocket on his upper left arm, and lunar metal-foil currency changed hands.

The inspector-in-charge nodded, and an underling entered serial numbers into the data unit. Alacrity had a temporary carrier's permit. The customs agents disappeared behind their superior, eyeing the cash in his hand. Alacrity tucked the hardwood box into his war bag, gathered up bag and gunbelt, and sauntered back to Floyt.

He stopped to don the gunbelt, adjusting the old-fashioned buckles and settling the strap that fit over his left shoulder. "As soon as we can, Floyt, we'll pick up one for you, something easy to fire, that you can hide under your—"

"I will not carry a weapon."

"Listen, this is a starport. And Epiphany might not be safe either."

"I
won't
!"
Earthservice psychprop had been emphatic about that from infancy. Alacrity saw that there was no appealing the decision for the time being. He skip-shuffled for the exit. Floyt trailed him with a growing surety of movement.

They threaded their way along a winding tunnel marked in Terranglish and Tradeslang. It was well lighted and comfortably warm. The air smelled of hydroponic and aeroponic growth. They emerged into a place designated "Billingsgate Circus," named centuries before by some homesick cockney. It was an enormous rotunda, some two hundred meters across, set beneath Luna's surface and roofed by a transparent dome.

Due to glaring signs and holos on the circus, it was difficult to see anything through the dome. The place was a costume-jewelry box of shops, brothels, stalls, saloons, hotels, places of worship, clinics, shady-looking places claiming to be schools, casinos, and dance halls.

Banks of machines vended everything from on-the-spot blood tests to disguises, and raucous autohucksters, like robotized barrow boys, were everywhere.

Lunies of every age and sort abounded. Their dress ranged from nudity with polychromatic skin film to latter-day Byzantine neo-Nipponese to the mode known as "sex gladiator." Floyt in his understated Earther slacks and the matching tunic that concealed his Inheritor's belt, and Alacrity in his shipsuit, attracted no notice.

Local residents had a suggestive, even provocative way of moving in their light gravity—by Terran standards, at any rate. They sucked and chewed on pacifiers impregnated with their favorite drugs, or paused to sniff from inhalers. They masticated hybridized betel nuts and coca leaves, popped spansules, or licked chemically enhanced sweet-sticks.

Floyt gaped at a major corridor called Petticoat Lane, the main spaceport red-light district. Its blazing, graphic advertisements offered things illegal even to mention on Terra. Near the two was an extravagant-looking cabaret called, simply, Sorbition. Among its flashing messages was one assuring the public, lower lifeforms served—what'll you have? Alacrity gazed at it wistfully, but knew they couldn't stop just then.

Nor would there be time for Floyt to pick up another language or two at the local Pan Stellar Communications Institute franchise. Pan Stellar taught everything from Terranglish as a second language to the finger-palaver of Smack Dab and the neo-Silbo whistled in Tivoli's endless caverns. The techniques included mnemonic treatments, info implants, subliminal tutelary programs, and heuristic regimens.

It wouldn't take long, but it would have taken longer than they had. Still, Terranglish was fairly common where the two were bound, and many other languages were based on it and used loanwords from the Terran tongue.

A few non-Lunarians were also around, O'Neillers and other Solarians. Alacrity also spotted a number who were outsystem, and the nonhumans in the crowd were obvious. Floyt had often heard the term "bright-eyed and bushy-tailed," but never before encountered an intelligent being who lived up to the expression. His lip curled as a thing like a walking mushroom covered with feathers bobbed past. "I keep waiting to turn into a pillar of salt," he declared.

"Oh, this is just the action part of town," Alacrity said lightly. "Lunaport's got its monuments and parks and city hall." He watched a svelte young woman with a green-dyed topknot, wearing an extremely wide-mesh body stocking of the same color, sashay into an endorphin den. "Things are always a little looser around a spaceport."

Floyt checked the cheap proteus supplied him by Earthservice. His accessor, of course, was of no use away from Terra's data and computer-service networks and satellite links. "I suppose it's best we were getting to our lodgment. It's a place called the High Movers' Stop." Weir's executors had included provisions for quarters during the wait for transit. "Which way would that be, Alacrity?"

The breakabout answered, "Forget it; we're not going there. Too many people know we're supposed to."

"The Earthservice gave me definite instructions. It's settled."

"Hell's entropy! Will you forget Earthservice, Ho? We're on our own now, can't you get that through your turban?"

Several passersby noted the dispute without stopping. It wasn't much out of the ordinary in Billingsgate Circus. Besides, Alacrity had one thumb hooked in a gunbelt carrying a rather large pistol.

"See here," Floyt objected. "I'm tired and foul-smelling. I have no intention of wandering Lunaport until boarding time."

"Ho, how'd you like to check into the Stop and find another admirer waiting for you with a styrette, hm? Tired of living, are you, or just curious about the afterlife? We'd probably
both
end up getting terminal vitamin shots!"

Floyt half smiled despite himself. "Well, even at one-sixth gee, we're going to get pretty tired standing around here, aren't we?"

"I asked a few questions when I came through O'Neill V on my way to Terra. We've got a perfect place to moor down for a while."

"You have friends here?"

"Sort of. There's a Forager lashup out near Hubble City. That's for us."

Floyt yielded. They wove through the throngs, kangarooing and skid-stepping. Alacrity found a map sphere, then led Floyt off toward a tubeway.

When they'd boarded and found places on the insubstantial-looking seats, the Earther inquired, "Who are these Foragers?"

The capsule accelerated as Alacrity replied, "You'd call them, uh, Gypsies. Or beachcombers.

Salvage and recycling experts. Nomads."

"Criminals?" Floyt couldn't stop himself from asking.

Alacrity's look hardened. "No. And neither am I. Listen, I know what they told you about me, but I'm a murderer about the same way you're a noble, fearless hero of the Terran weal, all right?"

Without turning a hair, Floyt answered, "Credit me with a little intelligence; Skinner and his team worked on me, too."

They both acknowledged a bit of common ground, Floyt with a half smile and Alacrity with a nod.

Floyt went on, "So these Foragers roam the entire moon?"

"They go just about anywhere other humans go—any star system and in between."

Alacrity looked to the viewscreen at the front of the capsule. It showed the lunar surface beneath which they were passing and the ruins of the first boxtown. In its time, This End Up City, or "Upsie," as it came to be called, had been the largest ever to accumulate. But Upsie had been abandoned centuries before, ramshackled and used up during the first hundred years or so of human expansion.

Shipping containers of every shape and size, fabricated for cargo of all descriptions, had been jury-rigged as living quarters. Additional structures had been slapped together from whatever materials were available. This End Up City, like most boxtowns, had been a high-risk place to live.

Boxtowns were found all across human space still; Alacrity had lived in them and knew their subculture well. He watched until the place was no longer within range of the capsule's pickups, then turned back to the Earther.

"I've met Foragers before. These should be willing to take us in. We'll see."

The specter of the moon's first and smallest mass driver grew rapidly in the monitor, little more than skeletal remains, stripped and—rare for Luna—vandalized.

Clustered around the catapult head, though, were newer structures that struck Floyt as disharmonic and looking a bit unfinished, even though their design was strange to him and struck him as hodgepodge.

"This is our stop," Alacrity announced. They gathered their things as the capsule slowed and stopped, then stepped out onto a broad platform. The capsule whispered away on its rail-field.

The place had plainly been a busy depot at one time; now it looked forlorn. A few crates and containers were stacked here and there, along with old machinery, pieces of equipment, and scavenged parts. But most of the huge depot was empty, with just enough debris and general refuse to give it an air of decay.

Several men and women, young and fiercely suspicious, stood nonchalant guard. To Floyt they resembled some off-world update of Dickens's street urchins. They carried hammergun rifles, plasma lances, and scatterbeams. Half of them were crouched near machinery or other cover. The Terran concluded that they'd been forewarned of the capsule's approach—not surprising, he supposed, in such a pronouncedly technical society.

Carefully ranging to either side to give themselves clear fields of fire, the Foragers studied the new arrivals. They hadn't missed the weapon on Alacrity's hip. The breakabout lowered his warbag, and the Earther followed suit dubiously.