“Good morning, my old buddy, my old chum!” Nicklin spoke cheerfully, following his policy of irritating Huertas with a show of effusive friendliness. “How are you this morning?”
“Okay,” Huertas muttered, attempting to slide past.
“I’m really glad to hear that,” Nicklin said. “Tell me, my old cobber, is Corey in the ship?”
“Hotel.”
“I’m indebted to you.” Nicklin gave Huertas a comradely punch on the shoulder and turned away in the direction of the Firstfooter Hotel. The Firstfooter, having depended almost entirely on spaceport traffic, had been in serious financial trouble since the Big Jump, and its management had been happy to give special concessions on the small amount of business Montane brought its way. It accommodated a few families of his pilgrims, mostly from outlying parts of the Pi region, who had come to Beachhead without waiting to be given a departure date.
Nicklin had seen them wandering around Garamond Park in a group, the children delighting in the unprecedented holiday, the parents instinctively banding together to fend off their sense of belonging nowhere. He saw them as pathetic figures who had renounced their stake in one world and would remain in a limbo of irrelevance until they reached another. He felt no concern for the adults, on the grounds that anybody who was so crazy as to give everything away because of a religious fad deserved little sympathy. You never should beggar yourself unless it’s for a really important and sensible reason—such as a snake-hipped woman telling you you’re a good lay. But it was taking the joke a bit far, even for the Great Prankster himself, when the lives of small children were so profoundly distorted.
Nicklin sometimes wondered if Montane was totally immune to experiencing doubt on that issue. Hurling them off into the void towards some putative speck of dirt brought quite a new meaning to the phrase “suffer the little children”. Their best hope for the future lay in the fact that the Tara had so little chance of ever setting out for New Eden—the Certification Wars, as Nicklin thought of them, were seeing to that.
Warned of the difficulties of getting operational clearance, Montane had carried out an astute move in making all his disciples into shareholders in a registered company. Legally they were now part-owners of the Tara, which meant that it had become a private rather than a public transport and therefore was subject to less rigorous controls. Such niceties seemed to be cutting little ice with the Space Transport Department inspectors, however.
Nicklin had seen Metagov officials arrive and depart in droves, most with the fixed prim expressions of bureaucrats who regarded the resurrected ship as a threat to their entire mode of existence. Their philosophy, as he had explained it to an uncomprehending Montane and Voorsanger, was that a bolt hole which had been drilled in situ by one worker was not as good as a bolt hole drilled by another worker in a properly licensed factory.
There were two ways out of the impasse, he had added. One was to resort to extensive bribery, at the highest and lowest levels; the other was to burn through the STD locks on the Tara’s slideway and drop the ship through the aperture in the dead of night. Montane had treated both suggestions as bad jokes, and apparently was waiting for a divine intervention to enable him to set sail with his band of pilgrim fathers and pilgrim mothers-to-be.
This is definitely the right time to go, Nicklin thought as he walked away from the ship. I’ve done all that I set out to do—with the notable exception of Danea—and I’m ready for what the Gaseous Vertebrate has to offer next.
He came out of the port authority land through a deserted cargo entrance and crossed Lindstrom Boulevard. The crystal pyramid of the Firstfooter was on his right, its sloping aspects mirroring the pale blue archways of the Orbitsville sky. He had just turned in the direction of the hotel when he saw a tall young woman walking towards him. She was wearing a lime sun-hat and matching shorts-and-halter outfit which complemented her blonde hair and tanned skin. The overall effect was of confident, graceful good looks, but what drew Nicklin’s attention was that she was smiling directly at him. There was also something about her which struck a mnemonic chord in his mind, and for a moment he wondered if she could be one of the many young prostitutes he had dallied with in the past two years.
“Jim!” she called out. “I was just coming to find you!”
He stared at her perfect, small-chinned face as she drew close and it was the look of recognition in her eyes which completed his own memories. “Zindee! Zindee White!”
She came to him with open arms and clung to him as they kissed. Even in the midst of his pleasurable surprise, he was aware of the pressure of her compact breasts and that she was kissing him full on the mouth, expertly and generously. This is good, he thought, as good as I’ve ever known it to be…
“Let me look at you,” he said as they ended the embrace. “Why, the last time I saw you you were a little girl!”
He had often heard adults use exactly the—same words when confronted by a young person who had been transformed in a few years, but he was quite unable to improve on the formula. Biological magic had been at work on Zindee, and he could only stand in awe of the outcome. She was still the child he had known, but that component of her was overwhelmed by the sheer physical presence of a beautiful woman.
“I can’t believe this,” he said. “What age are you now?”
“Seventeen.”
He shook his head. “I can’t believe this! Zindee White!”
“You never wrote to me” she said reproachfully.
“I know, and I’m sorry. I didn’t forget about you, but things have been happening.”
“I heard about them. In any case, I couldn’t have forgotten about you.” She gave him an oddly shy smile and fingered a small bronze disk which was on a chain at her throat. He had taken it to be a medallion, but on closer inspection saw that it was an ancient coin.
“What are you doing in this part of the world?” he said.
“Family visit to the big smoke.” She took her hand away from the coin for an instant looking saddened, and it occurred to him that either of her parents might have come to Beachhead to attend one of the large medical institutes.
“How are Cham and Nora these days?” he said.
“They’re fine. We checked in at the Firstfooter about an hour ago, and the information centre flashed me where to find you.” She looked beyond him towards the port area. “I was hoping to get there before you left.”
“In other words, you only want me for my spaceship.”
Zindee half-closed her eyes. “I wouldn’t say that—but I’ve never even seen one before.”
“Come on!”
They crossed the boulevard to the port authority gatehouse, where at Nicklin’s request a uniformed guard issued Zindee with a visitor’s pass in the form of a circular silver badge. As they walked arm-in-arm towards the ship, their sun-hats rubbing edges, Zindee explained that she was planning to take a general sciences course at the Denise Serra Memorial in East Beachhead, perhaps as a prelude to majoring in entomology. Her parents had come with her to combine a preliminary look at the college with a vacation.
“That’s great news,” Nicklin said. “If you’re going to be living in Beachhead for two or three years we’ll be able to see each other regularly.”
Zindee’s step faltered. “But… Aren’t you going away?”