Starliner(4)

The compartment was designed to hold thirty people in comfort. Besides the Grantholm party, there were only five others, huddled, like Franz, at the further end, though the monorail was packed on this run.

A family of six—father, mother, and children, none of whom was older than ten standard years—shuffled into the compartment from the next car down. The adults hesitated for a moment, blinking as if fearful that the apparent emptiness was a trick.

A Grantholm man noticed the newcomers. "Hey!" he shouted. "This compartment isn't for slant-eyes!"

"Yeah," cried one of the women. "Ride out there!" She pointed to the white expanse beyond the car's full-length side windows. Violent winds lifted dry snow from the ground and whipped it into ghastly patterns. "There's plenty of room for your sort."

The newcomers were in origin Tamils, from low on the Indian subcontinent. Their eyelids had no sign of an epicanthal fold—

And more particularly, they were as unlikely to be citizens of Nevasa as were those folk in the front of the compartment

"Pardon?" said the man. His smile was broad and as humorless as that of a man dying in convulsions. "I am Parvashtisinga Sadek and—"

"Go back where you came from, slant-eye!"

"Hey, you can leave the wife. I might have a use for her!"

"Save the oldest girl, too!"

Very deliberately, Franz Streseman got up from his seat He stood in the aisle, facing the Grantholm party with his legs spread and his hands crossed behind his back in a formal at-ease posture. He said nothing, but he met the eyes of any who looked his way.

He heard the Tamils slip into seats behind him. The children began to chatter, but their parents shushed them. When Franz was sure that the last of them was settled, he walked forward two places and sat down again himself.

"Hey, we're coming into the station," noted one of the Grantholm women who was looking out a side window to avoid having to note Franz Streseman's presence. As she spoke, the car shuddered with the thump, thump, of airlocks. The monorail had passed into the vast protected doughnut of Port Northern, encircling the open area where the starships landed. In the sudden stillness of the atmosphere, Franz felt the faint whine of drive pods braking the train.

Shapes and bright light fluttered past the compartment's windows. The images slowed to become platforms—empty to the right, packed with passengers for the return trip on the left of the train—as the monorail decelerated to a crawl. Thrust pulled Franz forward against his grip on the handrail. The Sadek children squealed again, and the infant began to cry.

The car shifted with a loud clack as the superconducting magnets shut down and the monorail touched its support rail for the first time. The right-hand wall slid up and recessed into the car's roof. Warm, dry air bathed the passengers. The monorail's quiver had been too slight to notice during the high-speed run, but Franz noticed the absence now that they had come to a halt

Baggage consoles were spaced a meter apart along the back wall of the platform, with a uniformed attendant waiting near each trio of machines. Franz didn't run, but he was young and alone. He made it to a console a half-step ahead of one of the Grantholm couples. The woman muttered to her husband as other members of their party spread across the consoles to either side.

Franz placed the ID chip he wore as a signet on his left little finger in the slot of the routing machine. The holographic display fluoresced in a random pattern, then reformed with the images of eight sealed, cubic-meter crates and four ordinary suitcases. The crates sat beneath a red mask; the suitcases were outlined in blue.

Franz nodded and pressed the pad of his thumb to the cursor pulsing on the immaterial screen. An attendant, a woman with a dark complexion and indeterminate features, stepped over to him and slipped her own chip into the paired slot of the console.

She smiled professionally. "So, Mr. Streseman," she said. "You identify this luggage as yours and request that it be loaded aboard the Empress of Earth?"

"That is correct," Franz said in the formal response to authority which had been ingrained in him since birth.

"Eight pieces of hold baggage, four pieces to accompany you in your cabin. Would you like to make any changes now? You won't be able to do so once the vessel is under way."

"No," Franz said. "That is correct. I am returning to Grantholm for military service. I will not have need of the items in my hold baggage until, until I resume my education."

The luggage itself was in the lower compartment of one of the cars of the monorail. Robot systems would transfer it to the starliner, but there were practical as well as legal reasons for requiring passengers to identify their own property immediately before boarding.