Starliner(55)

Other buses carried men only, or occasionally a load of hard-looking women. They too would get what they were asking for, and sometimes a great deal more. There was usually a missing passenger or two when a starliner lifted off from Ain, and the ship's medical facilities would be busy the following day.

For all that, Ain al-Mahdi wasn't the asshole of the universe. Her primary was a panorama of slowly changing beauty, a great jewel in the sky.

The human settlement of Tarek's Bay, however—that was the asshole of the universe.

Ran walked slowly, feeling the shingle beach scuff against his boots. He didn't have a destination. He'd never landed on Ain al-Mahdi before, but he'd known a hundred Tarek's Bays over the years and he didn't belong in any of them.

The New Port, originally a separate island but now joined to Tarekland by a causeway, was fenced and gated. The port and the neatly planned community within its boundaries were administered by a consortium of the major shipping companies. All but the rattiest tramp freighters landed there, because the amount of theft at Tarek's Bay was ten times the cost of docking fees in the New Port.

Hotels within the port complex were clean, and passengers could vary their stopover with sightseeing trips. The New Port was obviously the choice of the sensible traveler—except that it had no more soul than Ain (whose surface was a thousand gravel islets in a gray sea) had sights.

The transshipment trade made Ain al-Mahdi a center of commerce. She had begun as the collection point for miners in the vast sea of asteroids which shared the system with Ain's giant primary. Later, Ain's fortunate location through sponge space—"near" in terms of time and effort to many heavily populated worlds, Earth included—had expanded her transit trade across interstellar routes.

The New Port was necessary to the smooth functioning of interstellar commerce; but so is a warehouse necessary, and men do not choose to live in warehouses. Perhaps that explained Tarek's Bay, though Ran didn't care for the implied comment on the nature of Man if it did.

He'd reached the west end of the Strip. Where the buildings stopped, so did all semblance of lighting. Ran had a pistol in his pocket, but he wasn't looking for trouble and there was nothing he'd meet farther out along the shingle except trouble.

If he wanted to, he could hire a car to fly him to an uninhabited islet. There he could toss gravel into the waves and watch the primary rise in perfect safety.

He could hire a woman to go with him. Again, perfectly safe, because escort services operating out of the New Port provided full medical histories of their employees. So far as Ran was concerned, that was as empty a proposition as trying to skip stones over live water.

He could cut out one of the Empress's passengers, no problem at all for Ran Colville. And then spend the rest of however long she was booked for trying to dodge somebody who might very well make a scene no matter what she said beforehand about understanding the ground rules. It wasn't that women lied, they just had no more control over some things than a man with a stiff prick did. An evening's fun wasn't worth a week or a lifetime of trouble. . . .

Ran sighed. He might as well get back. There was always work. That was the only important thing, anyway. He had the engineering officers' course loaded in his hypnogogue. It felt strange to learn the theory behind the fusion drives he'd fueled and trimmed as a Cold Crewman in another existence.

An aircar in ground effect mode pulled up beside Ran and touched down. "Going somewhere?" asked the driver.

Female, mid-twenties at a guess, but the car's yellow-green dash lighting didn't tell much. Her face was heart-shaped and strikingly beautiful.

"Going nowhere," Ran replied, squatting to put his head on a level with hers. "Headed back to my ship, to tell the truth."

The car was a two-seater. The small luggage space behind the seats held a makeup case and something flat rolled into a tube. If there was a bruiser wailing to knock Ran over the head, he wasn't hiding in the vehicle.

"I'd offer to show you Tarek's Bay," said the driver. The fans hissed at idle, occasionally driving a pebble to click against its neighbor. "But if you've walked this far, you've seen it all."

She smiled. "And besides," she said, "if I thought there was anything in the place you'd be interested in, I wouldn't be talking to you. It's the armpit of the universe."

Ran laughed out loud. "You know," he said, "that's almost exactly the phrase that crossed my mind. But you've been more gently brought up than I was."

The driver's smile became wistful. "Don't you believe it," she said. "I've lived on Ain al-Mahdi all my life.

"But Ain isn't all like—this!" she added sharply, gesturing back toward the Strip. Her fingers were long and shapely. "There's parts of it that are beautiful, only it takes time to find them. The people who live here don't care, and the transients don't have the time."