A Different Light (3 page)

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At last he got tired, not of looking but of staying still: a subtle warning ache was starting in his leg. He walked back to Sector One and went searching for the dining hall. The big room had many different kinds of food, and one thing it had was a huge pot of dark, aromatic, strong coffee. Jimson carried a cup to a table. He stretched his legs and let his bag slide to the floor. He sipped with half-closed eyes.

A rustle of cloth made him open his eyes. A woman was sitting across from him, watching him. Her eyes were outlined in purple as if she were wearing a mask, and there was a silver bracelet on her arm. "Hello," she said.

"Hello."

"I saw you at the Gate to Port today." It was not a question, but it hung in the air as a question would. Jimson found himself volunteering the information she had not asked for.

"I was looking."

"But your back was to Port."

"I'd finished looking at Port. I was looking at people." She nodded. After a moment, he explained. "I'm an artist. I like to look at faces especially."

"I'd like to see some of your work."

He reached for the bag and pulled out his sketchbook. There were sketches in it which he had made while waiting for the shuttleship on New Terrain. "They're not very good," he apologized. They weren't, but they weren't quite bad enough to throw away.

She looked through the sketchbook slowly and intently. Her hands against the creamy paper were striking: very brown, long, with crooked fingers, and the knuckles were very big and lumpy. At the picture he had done of the shuttleships she stopped, and brushed her hand across the page in sensuous response. "I like these," she said. She closed up the book and handed it back to him. "My name is Leiko Tamura," she said.

"Jimson. Jimson Alleca."

"Jimson Alleca," she repeated. "Thank you for showing me your work."

"It isn't finished stuff," he said. "Just bits and pieces—beginnings."

She was interested. "So you might end up not using any of it?"

"Right. Or only using some small part of it."

"You must use up a lot of paper that way," she said.

He had never considered it—the mountain of paper he used up. He visualized it suddenly, and it startled him. "Well, it isn't made of trees anymore," he said doggedly. And then laughed, and was pleased to find she was laughing with him. Her eyes were grey, and they laughed too.

"I wouldn't let it stop me," she said.

"No, I won't."

The shared laughter relaxed them both.

Leiko asked: "Do you like Epsilon Moon?"

"It's different," Jimson said, "I've never been here before. I keep wondering what it would be like to live here, or work here."
Now there's a nice oblique way of asking a question,
he thought.
Alleca, you're learning.

Leiko made a face. "Kind of stuffy," she said. "It's awfully small. I think it would get boring." She grinned. "I'm sure of it. I've only been here four days, and I'm already bored. Can't wait to be gone."

"I've been here since yesterday afternoon," he said.

"You haven't had much time to look around."

"I've seen Sector One. And you saw me at the Gate."

"Have you seen the starships?"

"How could I? I thought—they're outside the dome!"

"There's a place in Port where the dome transpares, and you can see out to the Flight Field. I bet, if you asked, you could get a temporary clearance to go through the Gate."

"You think so?" He turned it over in his mind. "Do the starships look like the shuttleships?" he asked, picturing in his head those needlenosed brightnesses standing in the sun at the shuttleport on New Terrain.

"No," she answered. "Not really." She looked away from him for a moment. Then she smiled. "Would you like company? If you would, I'll go with you."

"Would you?" It delighted him. "I would love company—but you must have things to do."

"No," she said, "not a damn thing, till my ship takes off again. I'm second pilot on a passenger run. We leave for Nexus tomorrow evening; and till then, I get to racket around here." She stood up. "I'll meet you at the tunnel tomorrow morning at nine. All right?"

"I'll be there."

Chapter 4

In the morning, after breakfast, Jimson went to an Information Booth and asked, "How can I get clearance into Port?"

The clerk asked, not sounding particularly interested, "Why do you want to go there?"

Jimson had learned long ago that bureaucratic questioners can only handle the simplest answers. "I'm an artist," he said, "and I want to draw pictures of it."

"Let me have your I-disc, please."

Jimson felt for his bracelet, remembered he was no longer wearing it, and hunted the disc from his bag. They both waited while the clerk played with his keyboard. Then he handed two discs back to Jimson, the I-disc, and a black one.

"The black disc is good only at the Port Gate," the clerk said. "When you come back through the Gate it'll be no good at all, and you can destruct it. It has a limit of one day, and if you try to use it on any other Gate, you'll get caged. That's all."

He walked to the tunnel. Leiko was waiting for him, in orange coveralls so bright that they blazed. Her eyes were decorated with glitter-dust on the lids. They joined the stream of people moving towards the Port Gate. Leiko walked arrogantly through it, daring it to deny her. Jimson fumbled nervously for the black disc. She laughed at him. He slid the disc over the scanner screen. The Gate bar lifted, and let him through.

"Can you ride the movalongs?" she asked him.

He settled his bag more securely. "I could once." What happens if you do it wrong? Oh, yes, you fall down. Hell with it. Grabbing for her hand, he made a reckless leap at the moving silver surface, and balanced on it.

"Hey—good!" Her fingers were strong around his.

"Now where do we go?" The movalong was fast enough to send a breeze flickering at them. Eight kilometers an hour? Twelve? More? Already they were among the buildings.

Leiko pointed ahead. "By the Flight Tower there's a junction, and we'll step to the other band. It goes that way, all the way out to the edge of the sky."

The edge of the sky! He had played with the thought all day yesterday, and now it had been returned to him.

A graceful spire stood out amid the block-like buildings ahead of them, reminding Jimson of the shuttleships. "That's the Flight Tower," said Leiko. "They co-ordinate the jumps from there. There'll be another movalong coming up on your right. It'll run parallel to this one, and you can just step over."

At the junction she took a long graceful forward and to the side step, a dancer's glide. He copied her. Soon the two ribbons turned away from each other. They were alone. He looked back. Port glimmered behind him, the movalong seemed a stream of water running through sand. Ahead of them was nothing; just a thin covering of sand over rock, and a horizon of shimmery grey-blue. Port was the mirage of an oasis seen through spinning dust.

Leiko waved a hand at the desert-like place. "I like this," she said. "I was born on a desert world."

Then the movalong brought them to a platform, and there was a hole in the sky.

Bright light beamed across flatness. He saw shapes like huge stones: round, oval, spire-like, square, like toys made out of pipe-cleaners and clay. Not stones. Not toys. Starships.

Leiko was speaking. "The round ones are passenger ships, and the polygons are cargo ships. The ones that look like shuttleships are robot probes, unpiloted."

It was impossible to tell how big they were. The light hit them strangely, creating sharp, solid shadows that fooled the eye, and beyond the ships a curtain of stars descended, drawing his gaze. The ships seemed like artifacts made by aliens. He put a hand out and touched the cold transparent surface of the sky.

"There's a bubble out there," Leiko said.

"A what?"

"A bubble." She put her head close to his; her breath was warm on his cheek. "There." Her hand traced a line along the window.

Suddenly he saw it—or rather, saw something between the starships and his eyes. It was indistinct, but it reflected light, and he tracked it by flashes as it traveled among the ships. There was nothing moving anywhere else. Then he couldn't see it anymore. He watched. Nothing happened. He was bending to get his sketchbook from his bag when Leiko caught his arm. One of the ships was changing color, like a stone heating, from purple to blue to green to orange to yellow to scarlet to dull red. Then it was gone. Leiko made a little sound in her throat, not really a sigh.

"What was that?" Jimson asked.

"A ship jumping into the Hype. Visible light emissions are a byproduct of the Drive."

Jimson sat back on his heels and opened his sketchbook. He closed his mind to Port, to the wasteland of sand and dust ahead of him, to the silver sky, and focused it on the changing ship. Dina had named the process "doodling." It was pattern-making, like a child drawing pictures in the dirt, more internal than external. Humming, he worked pen across paper. At last he became conscious of Leiko beside him, and of his cramped legs. He looked at the pages he had filled. They were covered with sharp jagged lines, and the spaces into which those lines leaped. He stuffed the book into his pack and stretched, grunting. "How long have we been here?"

"An hour or so," Leiko said. "Are you finished?"

"I think so. Thank you for staying with me."

"I liked watching you," she said. "It was—different. Was it like you thought it would be?"

"No."

"Maybe you'll draw a picture of it," she said.

"I might."

Going back towards the miniature city in the distance, Jimson remembered Leiko's gesture and her words:
I was born on a desert world.
He was curious about her—where she had lived, what she had done. But custom forbade him to ask. He scowled at the movalong. She glanced at him shrewdly. "I'm hungry," she said. "Are you?"

He thought about it, and decided he was. "Yes."

"We can eat in the Flight Tower, if you'd like."

"We can?"

"Sure. There's nothing secret in the dining hall."

The inside of the Tower looked very much like Sector One; long corridors with a lot of closed doors. The dining hall was huge: four or five food counters and an acre of tables and chairs. He sniffed the strange smells. "Don't worry," Leiko said. "There'll be plenty of stuff you can eat."

She chose something that looked like bird, covered with an orange gluey sauce. "What is that?" asked Jimson.

She said something in a language he didn't know. "It's good; it tastes a little like fish."

"I'll try some," Jimson said. He liked fish. "How do I eat it?"

"With your hands," Leiko said. "Soak up the sauce with the bread." She indicated the flat pancake-looking things on the edge of the plate. Jimson picked one up. It felt like a piece of light wood, but when he dunked it in the sauce it turned orange and bulged, sopping up liquid like a sponge. He took a bite.

"S'good." Imitating Leiko, he grabbed the end of what looked to be a bone. The meat was orange-red, firm, and delicious. He watched Leiko, and, as she did, he alternated bites of meat with bread soaked in sauce. He was surprised when there was no more. "Really good."

"Now if you go to Verde, or any Verdian colony planet, you know you can eat the food."

Jimson asked, a bit diffidently, "There are a lot of Verdians here, aren't there?" It was impossible not to notice the clusters of green-skinned people in their green robes, all tall, all golden-haired.

Leiko said, "Not a lot. Most of the ones on this Station come from Dionis, I think. That's closer. But wherever you go through the Hype, you'll see Verdians working near the starships."

"Why?"

"They're terrific spatial mathematicians," Leiko said. "It has to do with the way they experience space. We sense it second-hand, with sight and hearing and balance and so on. There is a sense in us that could directly perceive it, but our other senses block it, jam it, otherwise we just go crazy. But the Verdians always experience it directly. They can handle it. And they don't need that jamming mechanism. The drawback comes when they encounter the Hype. They can't handle the dual perceptions. So they can only go into Hype under heavy sedation. But their advantage is that there's no problem in topology that they can't solve. If you need to go from here to here, through the Hype of course, there are a lot of incongruencies. Well, a navigator trying to map a course could take a month to write a program to tell the computer all the new things it needs to know. Just as if you asked me to draw your picture—I couldn't do it. I don't see that way. But you could draw mine in—what? Ten minutes? And a Verdian could write that program in two hours. Wherever they have starships, they have Verdians around to solve the problems."

"Are there any other beings out there, besides the Verdians and us?" Jimson asked.