She nodded. “Last night.”
“Me, too. I come with. You Billy’s new memsahb.”
“Oh, Billy, you can’t help me on Boldly Go. They allow no men on the planet.”
“Maybe no help there. But maybe help…find ‘California.’ Is tramp freighter Reginão Luck pass through this week for Matriarchy. Big Board, him say so. They take him, the passengers, so Billy make book two berths.”
She looked toward the closed door. “I can’t…just walk out on him.”
“Why not?” Billy answered. “He would.”
Méarana put her harp in its case, strode quickly to her room, and fetched her bags. She returned to find Billy in the suite’s foyer with his own meager belongings. “I should buy you new clothes,” she told him. “The Kennel can’t object to that, can they?”
But the little man shook his head gravely. “Billy most objectionable man.”
They left quietly; but that night, on board the Reginão Luck, the harper sang no songs.
Traveling in the limited appointments of a tramp freighter throws one among a class of rough men and women, unaccustomed to the pampering of passengers. The harper’s presence meant an addition to their profit but they did not otherwise know what to do with her. There were no stewards.
Into the lack of service stepped Billy Chins. The Corner of Harpaloon had toughened him far more than his obsequiousness had made apparent. Out from under Donovan’s thumb, he came out of himself more. He could talk the talk that freighter crews understood, and a certain swagger began to inform his steps. He was still “mistress harp’s khansammy,” and while he never quite spoke with her as an equal, neither did he bow and scrape as he used to. He collected their meals in the freighter’s galley and served them to Méarana in her quarters, always ensuring that she had eaten before he did.
Throughout the brief transit to Boldly Go, Méarana could not shake the guilt for having abandoned the Fudir. Playing for the freighter crew lightened the melancholy and dark; but she could not quite find the joy, and she wondered if she had left a portion of her art behind her in the Hotel of the Summer Moon.
“It wasn’t right,” she told Billy the day they rendezvoused with the Freight Center in the high coopers of Boldly Go. “I spent years in the finding of him, and minutes in the leaving.”
But her servant only said, “Sometimes the search please better than the find.”
Bumboats did not drop down-system from the Freight Center, so Méarana and Billy had to wait two days for the regular shuttle run to Stranger Station, the passenger terminal. Arriving at the complex, they found the usual transient hotel, shopping arcades, and other facilities. Boldly Go was an important nexus on Electric Avenue, with connections to Sumday, Gatmander, and Alabaster as well as Siggy O’Hara; and over the next few days, while they waited for the bumboat to drop, several liners and smaller ships entered Boldly Roads for rest stop, maintenance, or terminal activities, and several more passed through “on the fly,” dropping and picking up passengers and freight and squirting and receiving comm traffic. Although not as large as Jehovah or Old ‘Saken, the interchange at Boldly Go was a prize worth plucking. There had been a war with Foreganger twenty years since and no more than five had passed since Yves Whitefield’s mercenaries had briefly seized the transit points. Without an Ourobouros station, the Cooperating Matriarchs of Boldly Go relied on their own Amazon Joint Navy—which had fended off both attempts.
Boldly Go was not a popular destination, and the bumboat carried mostly locals on leave from jobs on Stranger Station. These kept to themselves, chatting in high-pitched, excited voices. The outlanders were a mixed bag: two news agency crews, a dame from Angletar in a blue, head-to-toe borke, an Alabastrine businessman in a flowing green-yellow-red striped dashki, a High Taran in fringed cloak and kilt.
The pilot, a thickset woman with close-cropped hair, viewed her outland passengers with obvious disdain. Méarana’s long, red hair came under her disapproving eye, as did the head-to-toe borke. But the pilot reserved her greatest disdain for Billy Chins and other men onboard.
“Once we reach Charming Moon,” she said, “you bikes are off my boat! We got a nice holding facility there for males. Got urinals and everything. Whatever your business with down below, you can telepresent. And no complaining about the time lag. Be happy we don’t make you do it up here, where you’d have to wait five hours just to trade hellos.”
“Well,” said the woman in the borke, “so would your people on the ground. The inconvenience works both ways.” This earned her a scowl from the pilot.
The Alabastrine spoke up. “Boot I’m to meet with high ooficials of Bannerhook Indoostrials, oover the impoortation oof…”
“Sure you are, hooter. If you’re important enough, someone will come up to Charming. Maybe take your fee personally.” Some of the locals tittered at this sally, though Méarana did not understand the humor.
The express boat was equipped with Ramage-built Judson 253 alfven engines, rated for in-system use. So even though Stranger Station was almost thirty-two units up, the crawl was only eight days. By grabbing the strings of space and pulling herself along, the boat could “borrow” some of the local speed of space and maintain a constant acceleration of two standard gees down to Hera Orbit, where she would flip and decelerate at the same rate, “paying back” into the fabric of space. Within the vessel, counter-grids kept the apparent gravity to just over a single gee.
Once the boat was underway, the passengers unstrapped and moved about the cabin. A few headed toward the café, others remained seated and donned virtch hats so they could immerse in games or plays. In the café, the news crew from Sumday set up a game of five-handed rombaute at one of the tables. Méarana sat at a table with Billy, ignoring the scandalized glances from the Bolders. Mixing the sexes at table!
The woman in the borke joined them, introducing herself as Dame Teffna bint Howard. Méarana sent Billy to the service bar to buy three winterberry blues. Shortly, a woman from the other news crew—Great Rock News on Alabaster—joined them as well. She had a White Carthusian with a twist and a small deck salad of chaffered lettuce and wet walnuts. “Do you mind if I sit here?” she asked, without awaiting an answer. She belonged to that class of people, Méarana surmised, who never imagined unwelcome.
She introduced herself as Jwana Novski. Typical of Westland Alabastrines, she was tall and lean, with coal-black skin, long thin nose, and blond hair—but she spoke without the characteristic “hoot.” When asked, she explained that news faces on her world strove for a general Gaelactic accent. “We’re quite aware that people in the older sectors don’t take us seriously because of our accent.”
The Angletar dame asked what had brought two off-world news teams to Boldly Go, and Jwana said that they were to cover the trial of a celebrated wildman named Teodorq Nagarajan. Succumbing to the wanderlust that his kind often suffered, he had worked his way into the Periphery on a trade ship and had made a name for himself on a number of frontier worlds with his antics. He had, apparently on a dare, gone down to Boldly Go, where he had been caught. “He is what we call a ‘hunk,’” said Jwana, making a fist with her right hand.
“But how could a man get down from Stranger Station?” asked Méarana. “Aren’t we screened before embarkation?”
Jwana bobbed her head toward Dame Teffna, as if to say How do we know what’s under the wool? But Méarana thought customs inspectors were not so dim that they would not look underneath!