Though Saren has been off-shift for an hour, he still feels the cloying humidity of the Pit on his skin. He works each day-shift in the convoluted bowels of probe ships and small haulers: upgrading hardware, recalibrating engines, and doing all that he can to remind himself that things are different here, that things can be better. Kethane is, after all, a different world and so there’s nothing to bind him to the Port Marseilles constellation of morals and mores. He walks along Kayler Street, approaching the intersection of Eighth: where pylons stand like up-thrust ribs, supporting twin maglev ribbons and boarding/departure platforms. The trains are quiet above. Always quiet. In the easterly distance, gantries, cranes, and repair-support scaffolds stand like abandoned, angular follies. The Pits, invisible from Kayler Street, swallow the feet of those structures in massive, tangled shadows. Shuttles boom and crackle into orbit, riding beams shot down from mother-ships in orbit—climbing the ladder as Pit crews would say. And a trio of haulers climbs now. He watches them for a moment, sidelong, aware—as any Pit-money might be—of ground crews scurried to shelter. It’s what you do, when a mother-ship fires a beam for her shuttles to climb: find shelter, in case there’s a skew in the firing program or some other accident that might reduce a man to cinder and smoke, or at least cook him in ways to make his mother cry. He is far from the Pits now: far from drive recalibrations and module upgrades. He is far from the targeted lasers, and the dark convolutions of exposed ship guts. He walks along Kayler Street (approaching the intersection of Eighth, where pylons stand like up-thrust ribs, supporting twin maglev ribbons) where the traffic way and pedestrian walks are crowded with hover-cars, pedicabs, and pedestrians and bordered by pawn shops and cheap eateries, VR bordellos and bars; where advertisements read the passage of pedestrians and announce the readiness of interactive women, cheap booze, or music tailored to whatever tastes your clothing may signify. He passes a novelty arcade—its faux-glass window alive with images of tempest-storm Betty Pages in black latex, linticular vinyl, and clear/shiny see-thru. In this part of the city, on this street (approaching the intersection of Eighth, where pylons stand like up-thrust ribs) the half-attainable women in vinyl and see-thru are taken as the common Pit-monkey’s desire, but for as long as he has walked this street (in search of one thing or another) he’s never known any of his compatriots to find need for stores like that. Kayler is not his street, though he finds reason to be here, when a certain ship falls into orbit… …when a certain crew takes planet-side liberty. He keeps his gaze downcast, watching for cracks or other irregularities in the iron-impregnated concrete. His work-boots are nearly silent. He walks carefully, not like a Pit-monkey at all. He walks like a spacer, measuring his steps, spreading his toes just so. Falling into an old mode of behavior, he keeps his ears tuned to the sound of trouble: footsteps behind him, or a particular silence that prickles the skin at the nape of his neck. Now, all he hears are street-sounds: rickshaw bells and the buzzing hum of hover-car traffic. He ignores those around him: vagrants in shadowed door-stoops, or hawkers whistling their illegal trade. He doesn’t know which whistles mean what, but he knows that drugs are involved—smeer and spliff: stuff to take you up, stuff to bring you down, stuff to move your mood in impossible directions—all on the street market for little more than twenty Currents a pop. His father’s voice—uninvited—sparks through memory. You be careful in a place like that…stick to yourself as much as you can. Remember where you come from, and even if your Ma and I can’t understand what it is that’s drivin’ your gut, you make sure—damn sure—to remember where you’re from, what you’re made for. It was all his father said one day, long ago. On another world. He hasn’t spoken to his family in more than three years. He is certain that they think him dead. * * * Kayler Street noise is drowned into silence as he steps into the babble of random talk and music tuned to the sustained key of tainted longing. The air stinks of tobacco smoke and desperate inebriation. Darling Darling is one of the few local bars with a controlled combustion license, and so smokers come here for shelter against the frowns and prohibitions that meet them in the city’s more upscale establishments. Though not a smoker himself, he understands the need. The custom. The ritual. And now, bare steps into the cheap, wood-faced dive, he recognizes the onset of his own custom: the howling/silent marker of his own imprecise need. He recognizes Pit-monkeys like himself, hunched over drinks in stoop-shouldered gaggles around tables and along the main bar. He recognizes off-license interactives hunting marks in the Pit-monkey crowd. They’ve done all they could to mask the nature of their presence, but he recognizes each of those working girls by the predator’s desperation on their bland, vacant faces. Two have already claimed a pair of Pit guys for themselves. He cannot hear their cooing, sarcastic banter, but he is certain that they’ve gone beyond the prerequisite greetings. They’re at the crotch-tease bit of their time-honored game, and he knows that by night’s end, they’ll have worked a dozen men between them. There are spacers in the room: anonymous jonnies and janes in gray ship-overalls. They have little to do with the Pit crews and the interactives, though by night’s end—or the end of planet leave—they’ll have a few interactive stories to share amongst themselves, as they work whatever trade routes define their employment. He makes his way to the main bar. The barmaid eyes him blandly. She smiles. “Saren,” she says, and his name sounds like an accusation. “You’re right on time.” “How’ve you been?” he asks. He tries to smile, to look as if he hasn’t avoided this place for two years straight. “As if you care.” “I care, Magda. You know that.” “If you cared, I’d never see you again.” He shrugs. “Caring’s different things to different people, Mags.” “Yeah.” Her hair is darker now. Longer. Her features—always elfin—are pinched as if daily stresses have found some small weakness in the structure of her bones. She looks tired. “I’ve heard that cop-out before; I work in a bar, after all. So rather than just prolong this little verbal dance, why don’t I pretend that I believe anything that comes out of your mouth and just give you the first of your three free pints?” Rankled, Saren feels stiffness in his spine. “Why don’t I just pay?” he says. “It’s at least honest that way.” Magda shakes her head, already pulling a frothy, amber brew from the brass tap poised before her. “No need to ruin our little dance now. You do it so well.” There is a smile, deep in the timber of her voice, and it softens the iron Saren feels where his shoulders should be. He can think of nothing to say, and so he simply faces her, feeling too tall, too scruffy, too blond to challenge her opinion of him. She stands a glass mug before him, an errant tongue of beer-froth breaking down the side. Her expression softens and the smile that lights her face is wistful and unexpected. “It really is nice to see you,” she says. Softly. But something holds her in place and Saren thinks that she is stuck behind an impermeable, transparent membrane. Another reality. He’ll never breech it, he thinks, he’ll never touch her in that one way she’ll understand; and something in her gaze, in the way it doesn’t connect with him, tells him that she thinks exactly the same thing in exactly the same gut-wrenching way. He clasps his mug by its frosty handle and raises it in salute before taking his first sip. “He’s over there, by the way…so why don’t you just go on and do what you do.” “Mags—” “—Oh, go on now. You’re here for him just as he’s here for you. Don’t go ruining it by pretending otherwise.” “Mags—” “It’s okay, Saren. I’m okay with it. So just go. It’s the right thing.” * * * Saren finds his way to a table at the back of the bar. It is darker here; the light is muted in the colors of sepia and butter, beer-foam and ocher. The table is stained wood, carved with initials and cryptic numbers that might be dates of the registry numbers of survey ships, trade haulers, or vessels from the one military campaign that took crews from the backwater boondocks of Kethane and sent them to the skirmish lines at Bayler, Fargo, and Adler’s Rift. Darling Darling was the kind of bar that saw military grunts shipped out to the Lines, and now—more than two decades after the last shot fired—the ship numbers remain. Of the dozen ships warships that went out, eleven returned. It has been two years since he’s seen this table. —Two years since he’s seen the person sitting here in crisp Service grays: the friend…the stranger. Saren places his brew on the scuffed and carved table face. “I kept expecting to hear that you’ve finally moved on,” Jonas Cayne says, rising from his seat and closing the space between Saren and himself. He folds Saren into a warm and prolonged embrace. He smells of expensive cologne: something offworld, something common in another neck of the interstellar woods. What began as an embrace ends as a deep and hungry kiss. With slow reluctance, they break apart. Jonas moves back to his seat and settles down. Saren claims the seat opposite him, sits, and considers the friend/stranger before him. “You’re scruffy,” Jonas says with quiet approval. Saren blushes. “Still working the Pits?” Here, Jonas touches the rim of his mug, clasps the glass and raises it to his lips. He takes a generous swallow. “I’ve been promoted. Money’s better.” “Still living in the Barracks?” “Yeah. It’s cheaper that way.” Kethane is a foreign world to both of them, but where Saren is pale and shy in the manner of a backwater hick from the face of Port Marseilles, Jonas wears the pecan-husk complexion of an Aurigan and wiry black hair like a tight-knit cap. He has cultivated a goatee in the two years spent out there…up there. It is common for Survey men to keep their faces bare, and Saren wonders at this small change in Jonas. “Welcome back,” Saren says, nipping at his own drink. “I’m glad to be back,” Jonas says. “How long?” “Short. Three days and two nights.” “And then?” A cloud of inscrutable emotion veils Jonas’ lean features; his gaze falls to the tabletop and lingers in contemplation of something carved there. “Yeah,” he says, glancing up. “And then.” He steals another sip of his beer. “I was on shift when your ship locked orbit. I didn’t see your shuttle though.” “You looked for it?” “I always look.” Jonas’ expression maintains its haunting inscrutability. Saren falls into silence. “Your home-world sweetheart didn’t look too pleased to see me,” Jonas says, after a long moment. He bobs his head in the direction of the bar. A smirk warms Saren’s features. “She wasn’t too pleased to see me either.” “It’s like that eh?” “It’s always been like that.” The old story of the lovelorn country girl and the moody, scruffy homophile: both are light years from home, but there is no real connection between them, no blossoming of home-world/back-country love. There were whole operas based on that single human dynamic. Most of them bear indefinite endings. Jonas takes another sip of beer. “So,” Saren says. “We have three days and two nights. And then what?” Jonas shrugs. “I’m off to Auriga. Orbital-3 for some quality face-to-face with family members I haven’t seen in more than a decade. After that—” Silence. The inscrutable expression returns, snapped into place like a crystalline mask. “Back to the interstellar outback, then?” “Yeah.” “Back to the aliens.” Saren is unsure if the words are a question or a comment. They leave the taste of ambiguity on his tongue. Jonas nods. “The Hetha’aa,” he says. * * * The bar is crowded when they leave. The mood has shifted. The music is harder, industrial, and tinged with an undercurrent of anger and angst. Kayler Street has shifted as well. There is a glow to the east: the Pits. The gantries and towers that stand as black, skeletal shapes by day are bathed in harsh and utilitarian light. Saren feels the Pits as if they are a part of himself. By his own instinctive reckoning, it is well into Odd Shift, and he doesn’t envy the repair crews and the inspectors their work. Odd Shift invariably marks the arrival of one scamp cruiser or another: some barely-licensed radiation hazard in for only the most rudimentary of repairs. Odd Shift is Patch Shift: where dubious ships and half-pirate crews make planet-fall for reasons best left for Port Authority to worry with. Odd Shift will end at the flare of sunrise, and bars like Darling Darling will see another movement of clientele, their needs mapped in the presence of harder bottled spirits and more brazen interactives. A small cruiser descends, like some indolent, idiot mass. He recognizes the type—that bulbous, beetle-shell hull in the rat-belly colors of metal and worn ablative shielding. It is a short range vessel, one of the small interplanetaries making the endless loop from Kethanus-Oort, to Prescott, to Shar, inward-and-in to Kethane Proper, where it trades cargo, takes on fuel and cheap-pay passengers, before hitting the reverse of its circuit, from Kethane Proper to Shar, to Prescott, outward-and-out to Kethanus-Oort, where it all begins again. “The noise,” Jonas says. “That’s always the first thing I notice.” There is a quiet note of abstraction in his voice, as if he speaks from the depths of some other place. It’s always like this at first, during the first few hours, as Jonas acclimates himself to local gravity, local sounds, and the heady smack of local brew. “Humans are noisy people,” Saren says. Jonas smiles. “I said that the last time I was here.” “Those exact words.” Two years ago. Silence as they pick their way through the night-time crowds. There is a scent in the air: food-scent and the continual waft of expensive cologne. The city’s rich have emerged from their warrens; they scamper through the night, rubbing shoulders with Service crews and Pit-monkeys, looking for whatever it is that the rich seek; it invariably involves a particular degree of slumming it, of talking to an interactive and getting a bead on where her (or his) life went into its subtle-though-definite skew. That is the draw of Kayler Street (approaching the intersection of Eighth, where pylons stand like up-thrust ribs, supporting twin maglev ribbons, and the passage of near-silent trains.) Saren holds no illusions about this place or its draw. Jonas, he knows, comes here for the same reasons as any tourist: to rub shoulders with glamorous scum and wrap his mind around the subtle warps and skews that mark human life in this neck of the interstellar outback. “Kayler Street,” Magda said, once, “is where everybody comes to try and figure things out.” Saren has wondered what the draw might be for her. She knows more of the street than he does, more than Jonas. She knows the people who have deep and prolonged needs for places like Darling Darling. She knows the Pit-monkeys and the spacers, the indigent and the angry. “Everything is so close,” Jonas says. There is amazement in his voice: there is dread. “Space feels wrong here.” Saren knows as much about the Hetha’aa as anyone else—not as much as Jonas. Not nearly as much. “But they have cities.” “Not like this. They’re quieter. More open.” Jonas considers the easterly distance: the Pits and the attached port. A look of troubled abstraction veils his narrow, pecan-husk features. “I think that city is the wrong word. What they have are large towns, enormous villages. But they’re not like this.” “You miss it there,” Saren says. Quietly. “Yeah. I do. I’ve had to leave every two years, for re-acclimation, for debriefing and psych review, but it’s home, you know? I’m familiar with it. I know people there, even though they look more like primate-shaped fish, they’re people. I know the barbers who’ll polish your scales; they have absolutely no idea what to do with hair; I know the tree-cutters, the basket weavers, librarians, I know their clerks and musicians and wall sweepers and that fat guy with the blunt snout who runs a bookstore near my host-home. He always has an opinion about something…especially the weather. They’re quiet. So quiet! You should meet them, Saren; I think you need to, if you’re ever going to understand anything I say about them. Even more, if you’re ever going to understand anything about me.” Saren flinches as if slapped. He has heard all of this before. Come away! You have an engineer’s rating. You have experience; we can use you on board the Melville. I’ve got the captain’s ear, she’ll accept your application. And as always, Saren’s response is silence: a wordless, inarticulate denial. “So loud here,” Jonas says. “So cramped.” Saren knows the pattern of stresses that Jonas must feel. Their meeting at Darling Darling is the most Jonas might handle in his short time here. It is spacer’s shock. Saren has seen it before: worse cases, and always among those from the Deep Survey ships. “We can go somewhere quiet.” “I’ve reserved a room. We should go there.” Saren nods. “Of course.” “There’s food, if you’re hungry,” Jonas says. “I need the silence.” He gestures at the city. “There’s too much.” Saren slides an arm around Jonas’ shoulder and pulls him close. It is all he can think to do, but he’s uncertain if the gesture is for Jonas, or for himself. Jonas, inhales deeply, closes his eyes and leans in close to Saren. For a moment, their forward motion is halted and they simply stand in the flow of pedestrians, cradled in a half-embrace. And then, with sudden and decisive fervor, Jonas smiles and takes Saren’s hand in both of his. “Come on,” he says. “We’ll eat. And afterward, I have something to show you.” End of Part One As always, thank you for reading and commenting, and hopefully you’ve enjoyed this opening glimpse into this wacky little world.