"It"s time to move on."
The s.p.a.ceman grinned hugely, lines of amus.e.m.e.nt crinkling out around his watery brown eyes. "Need a lift?"
The Minstrel nodded.
The s.p.a.ceman"s face softened, the lines of squinting into the reaches of an eternal night broke and he extended his hand: "My name"s Quantry; top dog on the Spirit of Lucy Marlowe. If you don"t mind working your way singing for the pa.s.sengers, we"d be pleased to have you on board."
The tall man smiled, a quick radiance across the shadows of his face. "That isn"t work."
"Then done!" exclaimed the s.p.a.ceman. "C"mon, I"ll fix you a bunk in steerage."
They walked between the wiper gangs and the pitmen. They threaded their way between the glare of fluorotorches and the sputtering blast of robot welding instruments. The man named Quantry indicated the opening in the smooth side of the ship and the Minstrel clambered inside.
Quantry fixed the berth just behind the reactor feederbins, walling off a compartment with an electric blanket draped over a loading track rail. The Minstrel lay on his bunk -a repair bench-with a pillow under his head. He lay thinking.
The moments fled silently and his mind, deep in thought, hardly realized the ports were being dogged home, the radioactive additives being sluiced through their tubes to the converter-cells, the lift tubes being extruded. His mind did not leave its thoughts as the tubes warmed, turning the pit to green gla.s.s beneath the ship"s bulk. Tubes that would carry the ship to an alt.i.tude where the Driver would be wakened from his sleep-or her sleep, as was more often the case with that particular breed of psioid-to snap the ship into invers.p.a.ce.
As the ship came unstuck from solid ground and hurled itself outward on its whistling sparks, the Minstrel lay back, letting the rea.s.suring hand of acceleration press him into deeper reverie. Thoughts spun: of the past, of the further past, and of all the pasts he had known.
Then the converter-cells cut off, the ship shuddered, and he knew they were invers.p.a.ced. The Minstrel sat up, his eyes far away. His thoughts were deep inside the cloudcover of a world billions of light-years away, hundreds of years lost to him. A world he would never see again.There was a time for running, and a time for resting, but even in the running there could be resting. He smiled to himself so faintly it was not a smile.
Down in the reactor rooms, they heard his song. They heard the build of it, matching, sustaining, ringing in harmony with the invers.p.a.ce drive. They grinned at each other with a softness their faces did not seem equipped to wear.
"It"s gonna be a good trip," said one to another, smiling. In the officer"s country, Quantry looked up at the tight-slammed shields blocking off the patchwork insanity of not-s.p.a.ce, and he smiled. It was going to be a good trip.
In the saloons, the pa.s.sengers listened to the odd strains of lonely music coming up from below, and even they were forced to admit, though they had no way of explaining how they knew, that this was indeed going to be a good trip.
And in steerage, his fingers wandering across the keyboard of the battered theremin, no one noticed that the man they called the Minstrel had lit his cigarette without a match.