Baya sat on the bed and watched him pack. She was from one of the
worlds of Mintaka, and as humanoid as they came, not very tall but very
well shaped, and colored one beautiful shade of old bronze from the
crown of her head to the soles of her feet, except for her mouth, which
was a vivid red.
"It seems funny," she said, "to think of you not being here tomorrow."
"Will you die of missing me?"
"Probably, for a day or two. I was comfortable. I hate upheavals."
Durham reached across her for his small stack of underwear. She was
wearing the yellow silk thing that made her skin glow by contrast. He
saw that it was dubiously clean about the neck, and when he paused
to kiss her he noticed the tiny lines around her mouth and eyes, the
indefinable look of wear and hardness that was more destructive to
beauty than the mere passing of years. Yesterday they had been two
of a kind, part of the vast backwash left behind by other people's
successes. Today he was far above her. And he was glad.
"The least you could do," she said, "would be to make this a really big
evening. But I suppose you couldn't run to that."
"I've got money." Burke had given him some, but that was for expenses
and he would neither mention it nor touch it. "Artie brought a pretty
good price, so did the furniture." There was nothing left in the
apartment but the bed, and even that was sold. He had bought back a few
of his better belongings, and he still had a wad of credits. He felt
good. He felt joyous and expansive. He felt like a man again.
He poured two drinks and handed one to Baya.
"All right," he said, "here's to a big last evening. The biggest."
They had cocktails in a bar called The Moonraker because it was the
highest point in that hemisphere of the city. It was the hour between
sunset and moonrise, when the towers stood sharply defined against a
sky of incredible dark blueness, with the brighter stars pricked out
in it, and the dim canyons at the feet of the towers were lost in the
new night, spectral, soft and lovely. And the night deepened, and the
lights came on.
They wandered for a while among the high flung walkways that spanned
the upper levels of the towers so that people need not spend half their
lives in elevators. They skirted the vast green concourse from which
the halls of government rose up white and unadorned and splendid.
They only skirted one corner of it, because this galactic Capitol
Hill ran for miles, dominating the whole official complex, and one
enormous building of it was fitted up so that the non-humanoid Members
of Universal Parliament could "attend" the sessions in comfort, never
leaving their especially pressurized and congenially poisonous suites.
Between humanoid and non-humanoid there were many scientific gradations
of form. But for governmental purposes it boiled down simply to
oxygen-breather or non-oxygen-breather.
"Human or not," said Durham, standing on an upper span, with the good
liquor burning bright inside him, "human or not, they're only men like
me. What they've done, I can do."
"This is dull," said Baya.
"Dull," said Durham. He shook his head in wonderment, staring at her.
She was beautiful. Tonight she wore white, and her hair curled softly
on her neck, and her mouth was languorous, and her eyes--her eyes were
hard. They were always hard, always making a liar out of that pliant,
generous mouth. "Dull," he said. "No wonder you never got anywhere."
She flared up at that, and said a few things about him. He knew they
were no longer true, so he could afford to be amused by them. He smiled
and said,
"Let's not quarrel, Baya. This is good-bye, remember. Come on, we'll
have a drink at the Miran."
They floated down on the bright spider web levels of the walkways,
drifting east, stopping at the Miran and then going on to another
drinking place, and then to another. The walks were thronged with other
people, people from hundreds of stars, thousands of worlds. People
of an infinite variety of sizes, shapes and colors, dressed in every
imaginable and unimaginable fashion. Ambassadors, MP's, wives and
mistresses, couriers, calculator jockeys, topologists and graph men,
office girls, hair-dressers, janitors, pimps, you-name-it. Durham saw
them through a golden haze, and loved them, because they were the city
and he was a part of them again.
He was out of the backwash of not-being. Hawtree had had to give in,
and this footling errand to some dust speck nobody ever heard of was
simply a necessary device to save his own face. All right, Hawtree,
fine. We will go along with the gag. And you may inform the haughty
Miss Hawtree, who can, believe us, be also the naughty Miss Hawtree,
that we don't know if we want her back or not. We'll see.
"--take me with you," Baya was saying.