A Different Light (4 page)

"There are always stories," Leiko said.
"
I've
never met them. There must be, though—there are a million systems and planets we haven't been to yet. But that's something for the X-teams to worry about, not me. That's their job." Jimson marvelled at the ease with which she dismissed his visions. A million systems and planets! And he couldn't ask her questions!

"I remember you said you're a pilot," he hinted.

"I can handle any ship in the Hype, except the colony ships that go to the Clouds, like the
Sigurd,
or the
Cordelia.
And the shuttleships, too, of course. But I prefer the smaller passenger or cargo runs."

Jimson suddenly understood an effect of the custom which prohibited personal questions. You could never demand intimacy—you could only volunteer it. To know another person you had to make yourself vulnerable to her. He wanted to give Leiko something—but she had already seen his sketches. What else did he have to offer?

He reached for his bag. "Do most Hypers know a lot of other Hypers?" he asked.

"It depends. Why?"

He felt in his pack. "I was wondering if you know this person." He handed her the visicube.

After a long look she handed it back to him, shaking her head. "No."

"My oldest friend," Jimson said. "I haven't seen him for fourteen years. This came to me about four months ago. No message. It's odd, how little he's changed. But I don't know where he is, or what he's doing. I hoped I might be able to find him."

"You meet up with people in the strangest places," Leiko commented. "He might turn up on any world, who knows? Especially if you don't look. The luck has a habit of running things that way."

"Well, I can only go to one world at a time," Jimson said. "And I don't really know where I'm going first. Any suggestions?"

"What do you like?" She was interested. "Icarus is a beautiful place. Or—do you like mountains?—there's Ley. I like Ley."

"I'm not very much on landscapes," he said. "I like to draw people."

She nodded. "People are best."

* * *

In his room, he took out a fresh sketchbook, a handful of pens which he arranged in his habitual order—broadest line to thinnest line—and a glass of cold water, set way to the left, where his right hand would not knock it over when reaching for the pens. He drew: the Flight Tower, the movalongs, the starships, Leiko's face. He stopped only for sips of water, and to stretch his cramped and ink-stained hands. This was not
doodling,
but careful work that might one day lead to a finished piece, or a roomful of pieces. Sternly he suppressed the excitement that was threatening to drive the pen too fast. It was like making love. Go slow, he told himself. Go slow, don't rush it.

At last he could no longer make the pen move. Stumbling to the bed, he fell across it, elated, exhausted. He was almost instantly asleep.

Just before waking, he dreamed about Russ, and woke with that face vivid in his mind, and memories he'd pushed out crowding back. He flicked the light on and went padding across the room to where the visicube stood on the desk. Just that one message, if you could even call it that, in fourteen years—just the cube, no communigram, nothing. Damn it, Russell, why can't I shake loose from you? He rubbed his eyes, feeling grimy and sticky, though not so tired. The clock face told him that he'd slept the afternoon away. It was already evening.

He looked around at the bare white walls. Already they seemed familiar. His books were in a pile on the floor. His pens were all over the desktop. The
Polish Rider
—he plucked the print down from the wall and laid it flat between two pages of a sketchbook.
Where are we going now, you and I?

No answer.

Shall we go to Dakar?
But he had the feeling that the Rider knew all about Dakar. Hell, it was just another artists' colony, he thought. After a month, it would be just like living in Las Flores. More boredom. He didn't want to die on Dakar.

Death riding slowly through His

countryside—

Noted;

Undelayed.

 
It came from a poem he had tried to write about the picture. He still liked that line.

The knock at the door made him start. When he opened it, he saw Leiko. She looked different. He figured out why when she came into the light. Her eyes were bare—no glitter, no color, no mask.

"Oh. Hello," he said.

"Sleeping?"

"I just woke up."

"You have that look."

He rubbed his hands through his sleep-tousled hair self-consciously, and then laughed, and she smiled. "I came to say goodbye," she said. "I'm going tonight. I wanted to see you."

"Thanks." He hunted for the right words. "You showed me things I would never have found by myself. I'm very grateful."

"It was fun. I liked being with you."

"I like being with you, too." There was a ridiculous, awkward silence.

Leiko said: "You mentioned earlier that you hadn't decided where to go."

"I haven't."

"There are a lot of worlds to see," she said, "but I thought you might like to try Nexus. Nexus Compcenter, where the starships are. I'm going there. Maybe I'll take a few months off before I look for another ship. It's an interesting place. Lots of faces." She glanced at him. "I thought you might want to look for your lover there."

"Oh."

"Sometimes it's hard to decide." She walked over to him, laid her hands on his shoulders, and kissed him. Her lips were soft and dry. "That's for goodbye." Her hair brushed his chin. It was fine, a silky brown flyaway net, framing her face. She had a small dust of freckles on either side of her nose. She stepped back. "I hope it's good for you, wherever you go," she said.

At the door she turned back. "On Nexus I spend a lot of time in the Port City, at a bar called Rin's. If you should decide to stop by, I might be there." Then she went through the doorway with one long gliding step, as if she were riding the movalongs.

Chapter 5

That summer—the summer of ivy—

We made slow love in a little room,

And watched the green stems grow up the wall

Into our window.

He was drawing Leiko again. There were other things to see in the crowded bar, but she was hunched in a new position, one hip perched on a table's edge, one shoulder up, muscles flexing under her thin shirt as she talked with her hands, her head turned away from him. He worked to catch the pose before she moved again. Her muscles moved like wire, tense and strong. Yet relaxed she was fluid as a fish, soft as a cat. She turned to smile at him. He smiled back.

Chora stopped by the table and took away his glass, replacing it with a full one. "On the house," she said. Jimson turned to catch Rin's eye and nod his thanks. The bartender nodded back, his practised hands continuing their swift, rhythmic polishing. Rows of clean glasses glinted in front of him, like burnished bones. Once, in morbid humor, Jimson had offered to paint on each glass, free, the death sign, the skull-and-crossbones. Rin, smiling appreciation, had refused politely.

"A picture, sure," he said. "But death's-heads on the glasses would be bad for business."

Jimson savored the cold sting of the drink. There were seven of his pictures on the walls now, counting the nude of Leiko that someone had bought and not yet taken away. He had almost refused to let it go. She would almost never sit for him. "I can get you ten beautiful bodies just off the street. I'm skinny, my hair's a mop, my bones stick out too much, and my face is ugly." Someone had once told her she was ugly. He hated that unknown fool with methodical hatred, every time she refused to pose. But it didn't bother her if he drew her like this, in the bar.

She was laughing now, head back, and her eyes glinted—they were grey, but not a simple grey, nor even a grey-green, but a silver grey, grey with silver highlights, like a line of silver ore on a rock face. He had been drawing her for four months now, and he still felt sometimes like a child drawing stick figures.
Alleca, you're a fucking beginner.

She came to stand in front of him. "How is it?"

"Frustrating."

"That last picture you sold paid the rent."

"Fuck the rent."

She laughed at him and walked away. The rent was little enough. But he wasn't making much, and Leiko was making nothing at all. He grinned, thinking of what his friends on New Terrain would say to see him now, sitting in a bar, trying to draw. It was getting noisier, more humid, and it was packed. A fight could start soon.

There were fights in Rin's all the time. Once a week at least Chora had to dump some drunk with clenched fists out the door. Rin seemed not to mind the fights. He was strict about weapons though. People wearing knives, or carrying stun guns—pistols loaded with small light tranquilizing or sleep darts—were not welcome in the bar.

The bar was dark—because Rin kept the lights down, except in spots—and glittery. There was glitter dust in the walls and in the floor wax, glitter obscuring the windows, glitter on clothes and on flesh. Some of the jewels in rings and chains and earrings were real. There was a beat in the air, rapid savage drumming, creating a kind of heat—in the room next door, Capt had the skinheads out, the small round drums whose taut covering is illegally-taken animal hide.

Chora was bending over the tables, making rounds with her huge tray that she carried as if it weighed nothing, since for her it did weigh next to nothing. She was a Skellian, tall and big and muscular as a weightlifter, born to a gravity of two gees, and in the near Terran-standard gravity of Nexus she floated with an uncanny, incongruous grace.

Miri Ikt sat near him. Miri claimed to be an Egyptian from Old Terra, and maybe she was. She was truly a navigator on the immense colonizing ship
Sigurd,
which made the long jump through the Hype out to the Magellenic Clouds, one way eighty-one standard years. Miri claimed to have made it twice. She looked no more than twenty-two. The
Sigurd
was in Port on Nexus now. At the bar huddled Denny and Kay, loaders at Port, part-time drunkards. Languorous in his corner, Chi lolled, green-clad, gold-wire haired, stoned to his glinting eyebrows on nightshade. Across from him sat Ysao, who was truly a giant, and maybe a telepath, and kept everybody just a little afraid. It was said, here and there, that Ysao had once—in another lifetime, maybe?—worked in the almost legendary X-teams, the Exploration Teams that made the first landing on any world. It was also said—though Jimson had no way of verifying it, because no one would choose to break custom and
ask
him—that Ysao disappeared for part of every year and went to Psi Center, where he helped train a yearly crop (Jimson imagined them as tall, blond, and very thin, like grain) of X-team telepaths. And there was Leiko. And Jimson, in the corner that was his because he always sat in it. And fifty-odd other people.

Jimson attended to his drawing. In the back of his mind sat the words of the communigram, which had arrived in the mail a day ago.

Jimson Alleca: You could at least have told someone where you were going. It took me long enough to find you. Hope you are still there. Are you WORKING? You better be, to pay for this 'gram. Get some work together. I guarantee a show and a buyer. I scattered the news around, discreetly, that you might have some NEW things happening. Keep in touch. Samson.

"Samson?" Leiko had asked.

"Now I wonder how in hell he managed to find me?"

"Who is he?'

"My agent. He sells my pictures and sets up my shows. He is one smart man." Smart to find me, damn him, Jimson had thought.

"You've been working pretty hard," Leiko had said. She'd nodded at the sketches that lay scattered on the desk, the floor, the chairs. "Lots of portraits."

The noise of the bar skirled round him as he counted over pictures in his mind.
I'll send the portraits, and the nudes. I'd like to do one more—if she'll sit for me.

She strode towards him now, glitter-dust in her hair. She set her cheek against his. "I want to go home," she whispered.

* * *

Home was a shabby, four-room house, in one of the old sections of Port City. When it had been built, it was fashionable to live in the center of a garden, and the little plot of land around the house was now a sloping, tangly jungle. The ivy crawled up the walls of the house and into the bedroom window. The summer night was sweating hot. They pushed the bed beneath the window and lay under the portal of cool air, watching the glowing light of the city hanging above them, reflecting off the walls and ceiling, as the sweat dried on their bodies. After a while Leiko sat up and pulled the sheet over them both. Then she lay down; head on his chest, one leg thrown over his hip, arm across his stomach. Their heartbeats seemed to merge, separate, merge again.

"Lady?"

"Hey?"