"The ones right by the elevator banks are strictly for sluicers and suckers. If you're smart, you press on into the center."
Couples walked by arm in arm and openly kissed and fondled each other. Hark was bemused. Would he behave like that? A scantily clad woman with a butterfly tatooed on her forehead actually beckoned to him. He was about to break ranks and go and talk to her, but Dyrkin pulled him up short.
"Forget it, boy. Only a fool goes with the first one he sees."
Hark shrugged and kept on walking. Dyrkin was probably right. There was also so much to see. It was strange to be once again around human constructions. A side effect of living in a battle cluster was that one started to believe that everything in the universe had been made by the Therem and forgot that humans could also be creative in their own simple way. Each of the booths that they passed was unique. Some were gaudy, others makeshift, even dilapidated, but others were nothing less than works of art. There was a terrible irony, Hark thought, in that the women down here created while the men were off somewhere else destroying. Something had gone terribly wrong with the way human beings existed.
The bulk of the materials from which the booths were constructed had obviously been cannibalized from other parts of the base, but also evident were gems, fabrics, and decorative plastics that had no place in a Therem military installation. They had been manufactured in the women's colony or brought in from elsewhere. It all seemed to point to the fact that the women had organized a fairly complex internal economy and were permitted to conduct some measure of interplanetary trade.
Dyrkin, who seemed to be treating the liberty as if it were a full-blown mission, finally found a drinking booth that met his standards. It was a prime spot on the corn- dor, situated under a ventilation shaft. The upward shaft gave the place more headroom and brought a constant cool breeze, and the booth's dim, golden light produced an illusion of spaciousness that was a definite plus in the crowded environment. A huge flag with a stylized and exceedingly phallic serpent painted on it hung down from the inside of the shaft and fluttered gently. There was plenty of room for the men from the Anah 5. The only customers were three e-vac crew and a woman in a silver tunic that might have originally been cut from a radiation suit. A grade-two armorer was sitting at the same table as the woman, but he was so comprehensively drunk that she seemed to be preparing to dump him. A music unit was pumping muted electronic rhythms.
"This place'll do."
"It's kind of quiet, ain't it?"
"It won't stay that way for long, now that we're here."
"Why don't we go someplace with a bit more life? The big place back down the corridor-that looked okay. At least there were women in there."
"Trust the old master. There'll be plenty of women, and not just thumbprint whores, either."
There was a small sensor pad beside the entrance to the booth, and as they went inside, each man was supposed to press the ball of his right thumb into the pad's receptor. Every recstar establishment-eating house, knocking shop, dance hall-had one of these devices to the right of its door. Each strolling vendor and street-walking prostitute carried a smaller, portable version of the unit hung around her neck on a lanyard. The sensors were the basis of the women's economy. Each thumbprint registered somewhere in the infinite memory of the base's central intelligence. The number of thumbprints credited to a business or individual dictated the quantity of goods and services that could be drawn from the base. If either fell below a minimum quota of prints, that franchise would be revoked, and the vendor would find herself back scuffling in the general population. The advantage of the system, from the visiting men's point of view, was that it created a sense of competition that made for a far higher quality and greater variety of available amusements. It ensured that the recstar offered the fighting men the very best that it could. It also gave the Therem, if indeed they cared, the capacity to monitor the tastes and appetites of every single trooper who took liberty there. At first, Hark assumed that the thumbprint system was yet another example of Therem applied psychology. It was only later that he discovered that the women themselves had been instrumental in devising the system. The competition gave them a certain sense of worth and dignity and, at least in their own minds, made their situation something above a state of enforced prostitution. The distinction was largely illu-sionary, but in the Therem Alliance, even an illusion was better than nothing.
When the fourteen troopers had seated themselves, a tall, muscular blonde emerged from a room in back of the booth.
"I'm Vana, and I'm going to be your hostess for as long as you're here."
Fourteen troopers stared hungrily at Vana. "Will you look at that."
"Glad you like what you see." Vana's smile was strictly professional.
Dyrkin immediately got down to business. "So what you got to get loaded on around here?"
"You must be the maingun in this bunch."
"You got it."
"So you know what the deal is." "We got to like the place first." "Maybe you should try the special."
"Sure, specials all round."
Hark realized that there was some kind of liberty ritual getting started here. The special came in liter steins, piping hot, heavily spiced, and accompanied by beakers of ice water. Hark took a first experimental swallow, and his head swam. The drink had to contain other intoxicants in addition to the alcohol. Although powerful, the effect was much more subtle than the burn of the raw booze he'd tasted on the Anah 5. After three rounds of specials, Dyrkin made up his mind.
"Yo, Vana!"
"You want another round?"
"We want to make this place our home base for the duration."
Vana nodded. "Fourteen of you?"
"Fourteen."
'Ten thumbs per man per thousand minutes. We supply the food, and we invite over some of our friends. Deal?"
Dyrkin looked around at the others. Not all of them looked completely sold on the booth, but they all nodded. They had to concede that Dyrkin knew how to run a liberty.
"Deal."
The grade-two armorer, who had been facedown on the table for a while, sat up with a start. The woman in silver had already begun to exchange glances with Renchett.
"What the hell is going on in here?" the armorer demanded drunkenly.
He got unsteadily to his feet and squinted blearily at the troopers.
"Forsaken ground monkeys."
He had clearly taken leave of his reason.
"I ain't sharing a bar with no ground monkeys."
Renchett was on his feet and coming around the table.
"We got a problem here?"
He slapped the drunk hard on the chest with the flat of his hand. "Because-if you got a problem-" He punctuated his words with further slaps. His voice was flat and unemotional. "-then you-better-leave."