Part 32 (2/2)

When I wasn't waiting on tables or drawing foaming flagons of ale for the s.p.a.cers and the wh.o.r.es, the merchants and the grifters, I sat by myself in a corner, posing for any ladies who might come in, a pad before me, a pen in my hand, looking dreamily out the window at the rockets and the shuttles that came and went with rattles of thunder and belches of flame.

That's where I was when she walked in.

Walked? She never walked in anywhere. She swaggered. She strutted. She strode. She burst into a room and claimed it and all who were in it for her own.

Her short hair was dyed crimson and stuck up in unruly spikes. A s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p was tattooed on one cheek, lightning flaring out from its engines, extending down her throat and on under her silver leather jacket. She stood in the doorway like a Colossus, though she wasn't more than a meter and an half tall, hands on her hips, blocking the rest of the gang with her from gaining entry until she had surveyed the bar and the bar had surveyed her.

”This one will do,” she decreed. ”Until the ale is gone, or the tables are in splinters.” The others crowded in after her, extras and supporting players in that particular act of the story of her life. She led them to the bar, laughing and shouting, jostling for a place next to her. She slapped down a wad of bills and said, ”Bartender, start pouring.”

My father, taller and broader than me, with a real moustache, called over to me, ”Peter, get your a.s.s over here and help.”

Her eyes followed his. If a cat could smile at the sight of some prey to toy with, it would smile as she did then.

I didn't know what to do as she stalked across the room. I looked around for some avenue of escape. I was used to luring an entirely different kind of fly into my web. What was coming for me now was a kind of fly that ate spiders for snacks then moved on up the food chain for something more filling.

”Oh, no,” she said. ”He's much too pretty to waste yanking on a spigot. Stay here, pretty boy, and tell me things and I'll fill your head with lies about the suns you think are only stars.” She pulled a chair close to mine and I breathed the air of other worlds, tasted danger and excitement I knew I would never know for myself.

I swallowed and prayed my voice wouldn't squeak as I asked, ”Where does the lightning strike?”

She paused an instant as she got my meaning, then laughed from somewhere deep and real inside of her. ”Ha! So you're more than merely pretty. It could be that later on tonight you'll find out where the lightning strikes.” She leered happily at me. ”I wouldn't even be surprised if it struck more than once.” She stuck out her hand, as if she'd suddenly made a decision about me. ”What's your name, boy? I'm Annie Jones.”

Of course I'd heard of her. When s.p.a.cers told their tall tales to each other, they often spoke of Annie Jones. But I never thought she was real. And she couldn't be, not really what the stories said she was, at least. Pirate, smuggler, mercenary. Murderer, thief. Defender, protector. Fighter of lost causes. A trail of broken-hearted men and women across the galaxy. A giant. A monster. Part machine. All machine. An alien.

She looked like a woman to me.

I took her hand. ”I'm Peter.”

We talked and the rest of the world went away.

”Once we found a colony planet that had been forgotten for centuries. They thought we were G.o.ds.” She laughed and pounded the table once thinking of the incongruity. ”But who can tell the difference between G.o.ds and devils? Not their leader. After a very little time alone with me, he made me an offering that took me almost six weeks to waste. And I know a lot of ways to waste money.”

”I remember a world,” she said, ”Where the sands were gold. Not just golden, but gold. And a handful of pebbles could buy you a palace on Earth because they weren't pebbles, they were rubies and emeralds and sapphires.” Then she grinned. ”When we left, we had to strip down to our skins, which they vacuumed. They searched us inside out. They counted our teeth and tapped our eyeb.a.l.l.s to be sure they were really ours. And I came away with enough of their precious pebbles to buy a new s.h.i.+p, with enough left over for a month on Hedys.” She barked a laugh at the memory. ”Remind me later to show you how I did it.”

I had no stories to tell. I had spent my days bound to the Earth, living a little life in a little bar on the outskirts of the rest of the galaxy. I had dreams, though, and I told her about them. And if they were silly dreams, as the dreams of the young often are, they still seemed both wonderful and possible to me. She didn't laugh, even though to her they must have been little things that, despite their size, would likely never come true for me. I even read her a poem.

”I loved a man,” she told me, later, her gaze far away. ”I loved him but I left him, with a promise that I'd come back. I did come back, in what to me was just a few short years, and he was an old man. Wrinkled and bald and shrunken. He'd waited for me. A whole long life he'd waited for me. When I saw him I turned away so he wouldn't see my disgust. I walked away from him. I left the Earth with no promises to anyone. And I will not make any promises ever again.” She looked at me, no laughter in her eyes. ”Do you understand me, pretty one?”

I did.

She summoned up her laughter again and said, ”Good. Then let's leave this place. With the crew that came in with me, your father should be keeping his eye on his till, not on his precious pup. Come on.” She stood up and pulled me by the hand. ”We have a lot of vices to cover before your education is complete. And when you tell people that you spent her leave with Annie Jones, they'll be able to see the truth of it in your eyes.”

So we left, and we did things. Things I never imagined. We went places. Places I hadn't known existed. We saw people. People I would have run from without her. There were no seconds, nor minutes, nor hours, nor days. The time we were together existed all at once, forever. I blinked and she was gone.

The next time she went away, I was a man. Not young. Not yet old. I had been married, once, or twice, or three times. Depending on how you define it, depending on who you ask.

I told myself it had nothing to do with spending a night (or two? Or three?) with Annie Jones.

But the way I made my living did.

I still sat at that same table in the corner. But I no longer even pretended to write poetry. And I no longer posed to lure girls and women. Now I sat in shadows and waited for people who wanted to sell something that had arrived on Earth and somehow bypa.s.sed customs. Or people who wanted to buy something they would rather their wife, or husband, or their boss, or priest, or their local policeman not know about. Or maybe they wanted to get away from Earth, far away, and fast, and, of course, furtively. My time with Annie made me known to people who knew things, in places where the sun winked and found somewhere else to s.h.i.+ne. Useful people.

It was just convenience that made me sit at the same table. It just happened. I wasn't waiting for Annie to come back. She wasn't coming back. And if she did, she'd probably look for someone like I used to be. Or maybe not. Maybe someone, or something, else would catch her eye. But not me. I'd had my turn. And I would be d.a.m.ned before I wasted my life waiting for her like that other guy. No promises. I still remembered, I still understood.

There were two men across the table from me. Nervous men with big brimmed hats, who would not look at me but looked at the door often.

”All right,” I said. ”Pa.s.sage for five of you at the price agreed.” An envelope snuck across the table to me. I counted and nodded. ”Berth 17, at one o'clock. Will With the One Eye will meet you. Remember, five and only five. If there are six, none of you will board. And only ten kilos of luggage each. More and your luggage will stay here, even if you don't.”

Their heads bobbed. Their eyes searched the room for spies and eavesdroppers and they got up to slip away, when the door seemed to erupt inward and a bald woman in a black jumpsuit of some s.h.i.+mmering, simmering stuff burst in and crowed. Literally crowed, her head thrown back to show the lightning slas.h.i.+ng down her throat.

She saw me and cried, ”Peter!” and headed for me like a G.o.ddess toward an offering left inside her temple. My customers knocked over their chairs and each other in their haste to be gone.

She ignored them and looked me over. ”You'll do. You're not the impudent little vintage you were last time. Something stronger now. Fuller bodied, certainly. What? No hug for the prodigal returned?”

I was suddenly aware that my heart was beating, that I was breathing the same air she breathed. ”I didn't wait for you.”

She grinned. ”Yet, here I am. Unannounced, unbidden, and uncharacteristically unkissed.” She pretended to look around the bar. ”Is there a jealous wife lurking about with a knife? Or an innocent child too young to see what a lascivious s.p.a.cer might do to her father?”

My own smile broke free, opening the way for other feelings to wash over me. ”No, no wife, not at present. And no child, innocent or otherwise to be shocked by you. Just me, and if I didn't wait for you, I'm still glad you're here.” I got up and grabbed her, picking her up and squeezing her as if I didn't know I was going to have to let her go again. She gave me a kiss and I swear I felt her tongue tickle me down at the bottom of my stomach.

She hadn't changed much. Less hair. Was she smaller? Maybe I had grown. Maybe the memory of her was bigger than the reality. But why should she have changed? From her point of view, she'd only been gone a couple of years or so. For me it had been a good-sized part of my life. Spent not waiting for her.

We left the bar, and once again time was an ocean in which we swam, too vast to know if we were moving toward or further away from sh.o.r.e, or just staying in one place.

We went places and did things. This time there were as many doors that I could open as ones to which she was the key. Annie of the Stars and Peter of the Port. If we weren't king and queen of our respective realms, we were at least the duke and d.u.c.h.ess.

We fought a handful of sailors. We watched the sylphs of Cygnus dance, or mate, or communicate, or all or none of those things, then we tried to imitate them, which caused a tavern full of pirates to be appalled. We tasted the pleasures of a hundred worlds.

”Why did you come back?” I asked her as we lay in bed.

”Chance?” She shrugged. ”A job. Someone needed something from there to here and I brought it.”

”Why did you come back to me?” I waited for her to answer.

Eventually she said, ”It's what I do. There's a Peter on a lot of worlds. I come back to see what you've become. It's like visiting a series of portraits. I see you captured as a young man. Then I visit a moment when you are as you are now. If there is a next time, you'll be an old man. Three ticks of the clock. Beginning, middle, end. Then gone. It's like traveling through time.”

”So I'm some sort of marker, away for you to mark your pa.s.sage through the years?”

She looked at me. ”I made you no promises. You said you understood. I never asked you to wait for my return.”

”I did not wait for you,” I told her.

I did not wait for her, I told myself.

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