In Melbourne again, he played on the street. He spent a lot of time in a coffee shop frequented by kids from the Cooper Astronautics Academy. A twenty-year-old girl he was living with suggested he sit in on some classes.
“Come on, get yourself some plugs. You’ll get them eventually somewhere, and you might as well get some education on how to use them for something other than a factory job. You like to travel. Might as well run the stars as operate a garbage unit.”
When he finally broke up with the girl, and left Australia, he had his certificate as a cyborg stud for any inter—and intra—system ship. He still had his gold earring, his little fingernail, his puzzle ring—and the syrynx.
Even with a certificate, it was hard to sign onto a star-run straight from Earth. For a couple of years he plugged into a small commercial line that ran the Shifting Triangle run: Earth to Mars, Mars to Ganymede, Ganymede to Earth. But by now his black eyes were a-glitter with stars. A few days after his eighteenth birthday (at least it was the day the girl and he had agreed would be his birthday back in Melbourne), the Mouse hitched out to the second moon of Neptune, from which the big commercial lines left for worlds all over Draco, for the Pleiades Federation, and even the Outer Colonies. The puzzle ring fit him now.
Draco, Triton, Hell3, 3172
The Mouse walked beside Hell3, his boot heel clicking, his bare foot silent (as in another city on another world, Leo had walked). This was his latest travel acquisition. Those who worked under free-fall in the ships that went between planets developed the agility of at least one set of toes, sometimes both, till it rivaled world-lubbers’ hands, and ever after kept that foot free. The commercial interstellar freighters had artificial gravity, which discouraged such development.
As he ambled beneath a plane tree, the leaves roared in the warm wind. Then his shoulder struck something. He staggered, was caught, was whirled around.
“You clumsy, rat-faced little—“
A hand clamped his shoulder and jammed him out to arm’s length. The Mouse looked up at the man blinking down.
Someone had tried to hack the face open. The scar zagged from the chin, neared the cusp of heavy lips, rose through the cheek muscles—the yellow eye was miraculously alive—and cut the left brow; where it disappeared into red, Negro hair, a blaze of silkier yellow flamed. The flesh pulled into the scar like beaten copper to a vein of bronze.
“Where do you think you’re going, boy?”
“Sorry—“
The man’s vest bore the gold disk of an officer.
“Guess I wasn’t looking—“
A lot of muscles in the forehead shifted. The back of the jaw got thicker. Sound started behind the face, spilled. It was laughter, full and contemptuous.
The Mouse smiled, hating it. “I guess I wasn’t looking where I was going.”
“I guess you weren’t.” The hand fell twice again on his shoulder. The captain shook his head and strode off.
Embarrassed and alert, the Mouse started walking again.
Then he stopped and looked back. The gold disk on the left shoulder of the captain’s vest had been bossed with the name Lorq Von Ray. The Mouse’s hand moved on the sack under his arm.
He flung back black hair that had fallen down his forehead, looked about, then climbed to the railing. He hooked boot and foot behind the lower rung, and took out the syrynx.
His vest was half laced, and he braced the instrument against the small, defined muscles of his chest. The Mouse’s face lowered; long lashes closed. His hand, ringed and bladed, fell toward the inductance surfaces.
The air was filled with shocked images—
Chapter Two
Draco, Triton, Hell3, 3172
Katin, long and brilliant, shambled toward Hell3, eyes on the ground, mind on moons aloft.
“You, boy!”
“Huh?”
The unshaven derelict leaned on the fence, clutching the rail with scaly hands.
“Where you from?” The derelict’s eyes were fogged.
“Luna,” Katin said.
“From a little white house on a tree-lined street, with a bicycle in the garage? I had a bicycle.”
“My house was green,” Katin said. “And under an air dome. I had a bicycle, though.”
The derelict swayed by the rail. “You don’t know, boy. You don’t know.”
One must listen to madmen, Katin thought. They are becoming increasingly rare. And remembered to make a note.
“So long ago … so long!” The old man lurched away.
Katin shook his head and started walking again.
He was gawky and absurdly tall; nearly six foot nine. He’d shot to that height at sixteen. Never really believing he was so big, ten years later he still tended to hunch his shoulders. His huge hands were shoved beneath the belt of his shorts. He strode with elbows flapping.
And his mind went back to moons.
Katin, born on the moon, loved moons. He had always lived on moons, save for the time he had convinced his parents, stenographers for the Draco court on Luna, to let him take his university education on Earth at that center of learning for the mysterious and inscrutable West, Harvard, still a haven for the rich, the eccentric, and the brilliant—the last two of which he was.
The changes that vary a planet’s surface, Himalayan heights to gentle, blistering Sahara dunes, he knew only by report. The freezing lichen forests of the Martian polar caps or the raging dust rivers at the red planet’s equator; or Mercurian night versus Mercurian day—these he had experienced only through psychorama travelogs.
These were not what Katin knew, what Katin loved.
Moons?
Moons are small. A moon’s beauty is in variations of sameness, From Harvard, Katin had returned to Luna, and from there gone to Phobos Station where he’d plugged in to a battery of recording units, low-capacity computers, and addressographs—a glorified file clerk. On time off, in tractor suit with polarized lenses, he explored Phobos, while Demos, a bright hunk of rock ten miles wide, swung by the unnervingly close horizon. He finally got up a party to land on Demos and explored the tiny moon as only a worldlet can be explored. Then he transferred to the moons of Jupiter. Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto turned beneath his brown eyes. The moons of Saturn, under the diffuse illumination of the rings, rotated before his solitary inspection as he wandered out from the land compounds where he was stationed. He explored the gray craters, the gray mountains, valleys, and canons through days and nights of blinding intensity. Moons are the same?
Had Katin been placed on any of them, and blindfold suddenly removed, petrological structure, crystalline formation, and general topography would have identified it for him immediately. Tall Katin was used to making subtle distinctions in both landscape and character. The passions that come through the diversity of a complete world, or a whole man, he knew—but did not like.
He dealt with this dislike two ways.
For the inner manifestations, he was writing a novel.
A jeweled recorder that his parents had given him when he won his scholarship hung from a chain at his waist. To date it contained some hundred thousand words of notes. He had not begun the first chapter.