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up the snatch to this week and consign the old plan to The Harman s deepest
Hell.
 New singer. Known about her, I d a been back sooner. How long you had her?
 Three days now. Off the worldship. She was travel-ing standby-and-work-it,
got bumped. Heard it s Bug keeping you busy these days.
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Worm shrugged.  Likes my name, what it is.
 Make sense. So what you want?
 Bug was saying I need to get a Nameday present. I figure he s got the dump on
that, but I don t wanna step on toes if you know what I mean.
 Hunh. You been this way before.
 Been and done and learned the hard way about overplaying it. Bug says a
knife. I figure not fancy but nice. Who s got?
 Go see Old Henry. He has a shop in the Izar down by the Gate. Anything else?
 Yeah. The singer. She do more n sing?
Tank let out a roar of laughter, slapped his hand on the desk.  Gonna have to
lay down razor wire about that stage if this keeps on. He coughed into his
hand, gulped water from the jug on the shelf by his, head.  No, she don t do.
With the talent she s got she don t have to. Anything other than that?
 Nah, guess that s it.
Worm left The Tank and walked back to his official residence, new plans
whirling in his head.
10. A Day Late and a Synapse Short
1
Shadith strolled along Hutsartes Star Street, past doss houses and
taverns, beggars and street performers in a thousand shapes and colors with
varying degrees of skill in whatever it was they did. The street was wide (one
of the aspects of being on a newish colony world with plenty of room to
spread), the center strip given to loaders trundling lumpishly along,
heavy with cargo containers. The air was steamy, sweat beading on her
arms and never drying, just getting stickier. And it stank.
 She breathed in the sickly sweet aroma of rotting meat, rotting vegetation,
the sour effluvia of
inade-quate plumbing, over it all the iodine bite of the wind from the sea,
even though the water was several miles off and at least a mile lower in
elevation.
Amazing, she thought.
Live for a few months in ships and transfer stations and you forget how
saturated in bodily sensation a world can be. Hm, maybe a song in that. . . .
Playing with rhymes and images, threading automat-ically through a crowd of
hawkers, players, and crewfolk of the sort who milled about every Star Street
she d seen, she nearly crashed into a man who stepped from an alley in front
of her.
 Hey, watch where you going.
 Sorry. She started to circle round him, but his hand clamped on her wrist
and stopped her.  I
wouldn t do that, she said mildly as she turned to face him.
He dropped her arm as if it were hot.  I know you, he said.
 What?
 Shadow s your name, isn t it? I heard you sing. Nightfair. Bogmak. Maahhhh
nanna! How you do that?
She backed off a step. His words weren t slurred and he stood straight enough,
but the liquid gleam of his greenish eyes most likely came out of a bottle and
he carried the stink from the contents of that bottle in a fine mist around
him.  The singing was me, the rest was someone else. We broke up a while
back.
 Huhn. Too bad. Yah hai, come along and have a drink on me.
 Why not. Might as well use this one to start spreading her cover story.
 Where? I just got here and don t know places yet. You know my name. What s
yours?
 Meddlyr Trych. Cargo master on the Free Trader
Timik.
Just got here, you said?
 Off the worldship that left yesterday. I was riding standby and working my
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keep, singing this  n that.
They unstood me. Some Muck from the High City up there wanted space for his
bodyservant.
 Still singing, then?
 What I do.
He walked beside her without talking for several steps. She glanced at him
again, but she was sure she didn t know him, he was just one of the crowd at
the Nightfair and anyway that was over five years ago. He was an inch or two
taller than she was, a compact man, not lean but no excess fat on him. His
head was shaved and densely tattooed in patterns she recognized as luck signs,
blue lines on the bright amber of his skin, the framework filled in with
crimson, emerald, and gold. There were intricate fate knots between the middle
two knuckles of his fingers and no doubt more needle paintings were covered by
his shipsuit. His ears were pointed and flicked nervously as he walked and the
pu-pils of his eyes were almond shaped rather than round.
Meddlyr Trych. A Cousin, she thought.
Wonder what part of the
Diaspora produced his branch?
He pushed open a door and stood aside to let her precede him through it into [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]