were up here they were slumming, on a 1-hour down from some business in the mast; but generally they went straight to helldeck, where big ship officers and tech crew had cushy little clubs and free booze, and Access with all sorts of perks on the company computers.
Adverts said you could get at least a sniff of those perks, even as a miner—if you let the company own your ship and provide your basics; but that meant the company could also decide when you were too old or you didn’t fit some profile, and then you were out, goodbye and good luck, while some green fool got your ship. God help you, too, if Mama decided you weren’t prime crew on that ship, and some company-assigned prime crew got shunted out to work tender-duty for three years at a ‘driver site—which effectively dumped all the relief crews back at the Refinery onto the no-perks basics, to do time-share in a plastics factory. Work for the company and you could fill in your time swabbing tanks in the chemicals division til you got too old, and then they set you down on retirement-perks and let you sweep floors in some company plant to earn your extras.
Hell, no. Not this old miner.
But a lot of years he had been coming back to 8, and he’d seen changes—or maybe he had felt livelier once upon a time. 8 these days echoed to footsteps, not to music and voices. The bright posters had all gone years ago, the month the company had gone over to paperless records-keeping. The company favored gray paint or institution green, except for pipes that came wrapped with hazard yellow and black.
You used to get the unofficial bills here too, the pasteups that would appear overnight—saying things like TOWNEY LIES and FREE PRATT & MARKS—Mama hadn’t liked those in the best days, nossir, the bills that said things like EQUAL ACCESS and the take-one flyers that used to give you the news the company wouldn’t. They’d all gone. No paper.
You still found the old barred circle, you still found PEACE and FREE EMIGRATION scratched in restroom plastic, right alongside the stuff you could figure Neanderthals must’ve carved in Stone Age bathrooms—you found MINIM and RABRAD and SCREW THE CORP, along with other helpful suggestions in the toilets… far more frequent here than down on helldeck, he guessed because sanding down the panels in light
g
made a bitch of a lot of dust, and spray paint was as bad. Or maybe it was because Security didn’t come up here much and the ordinary maintenance crews were contributing to it too. So the crud and the slogans stayed in the bathrooms, not even covered by paint, while 8-deck got nastier and dirtier and showed its age like some miners he knew.
He was in a sour mood—maybe the cops, maybe Ben’s stupid chance-taking with the datacard, maybe just that he was tired of the shit and tired of feeding a company that was trying to blow itself to hell; and right now specifically because the cops had their Personals, which meant he was stuck in the stimsuit and his day-old coveralls until the cops turned his kit loose: damned if he was going to buy new knee and ankle wraps at vending machine prices.
But he did buy a bottle of aspirin, a cheap men’s personals pack, and a far too expensive bottle of cologne: the hips were gone, the ankles were going, the hair was gray and thinning, but the essentials still worked and he did have hopes. He walked into the bar in the front of the ambitiously named Starbow Hotel and, with his card in the slot at the desk, punched Double and Guests Permitted.
In the midst of which transaction somebody grabbed him from behind and swung him around, clean off his feet.
“Hey!” he yelled, as the turn brought him face to face with dusky-skinned Sal Aboujib, who grabbed him the same as the one behind—
That
had
to be Meg Kady.
He hugged Sal back in this bouncing unstable minim-
g
dance. He said, “Damn, you’re both fools!”
But he’d hoped with all his heart they’d got his message.
“Old
Adverts said you could get at least a sniff of those perks, even as a miner—if you let the company own your ship and provide your basics; but that meant the company could also decide when you were too old or you didn’t fit some profile, and then you were out, goodbye and good luck, while some green fool got your ship. God help you, too, if Mama decided you weren’t prime crew on that ship, and some company-assigned prime crew got shunted out to work tender-duty for three years at a ‘driver site—which effectively dumped all the relief crews back at the Refinery onto the no-perks basics, to do time-share in a plastics factory. Work for the company and you could fill in your time swabbing tanks in the chemicals division til you got too old, and then they set you down on retirement-perks and let you sweep floors in some company plant to earn your extras.
Hell, no. Not this old miner.
But a lot of years he had been coming back to 8, and he’d seen changes—or maybe he had felt livelier once upon a time. 8 these days echoed to footsteps, not to music and voices. The bright posters had all gone years ago, the month the company had gone over to paperless records-keeping. The company favored gray paint or institution green, except for pipes that came wrapped with hazard yellow and black.
You used to get the unofficial bills here too, the pasteups that would appear overnight—saying things like TOWNEY LIES and FREE PRATT & MARKS—Mama hadn’t liked those in the best days, nossir, the bills that said things like EQUAL ACCESS and the take-one flyers that used to give you the news the company wouldn’t. They’d all gone. No paper.
You still found the old barred circle, you still found PEACE and FREE EMIGRATION scratched in restroom plastic, right alongside the stuff you could figure Neanderthals must’ve carved in Stone Age bathrooms—you found MINIM and RABRAD and SCREW THE CORP, along with other helpful suggestions in the toilets… far more frequent here than down on helldeck, he guessed because sanding down the panels in light
g
made a bitch of a lot of dust, and spray paint was as bad. Or maybe it was because Security didn’t come up here much and the ordinary maintenance crews were contributing to it too. So the crud and the slogans stayed in the bathrooms, not even covered by paint, while 8-deck got nastier and dirtier and showed its age like some miners he knew.
He was in a sour mood—maybe the cops, maybe Ben’s stupid chance-taking with the datacard, maybe just that he was tired of the shit and tired of feeding a company that was trying to blow itself to hell; and right now specifically because the cops had their Personals, which meant he was stuck in the stimsuit and his day-old coveralls until the cops turned his kit loose: damned if he was going to buy new knee and ankle wraps at vending machine prices.
But he did buy a bottle of aspirin, a cheap men’s personals pack, and a far too expensive bottle of cologne: the hips were gone, the ankles were going, the hair was gray and thinning, but the essentials still worked and he did have hopes. He walked into the bar in the front of the ambitiously named Starbow Hotel and, with his card in the slot at the desk, punched Double and Guests Permitted.
In the midst of which transaction somebody grabbed him from behind and swung him around, clean off his feet.
“Hey!” he yelled, as the turn brought him face to face with dusky-skinned Sal Aboujib, who grabbed him the same as the one behind—
That
had
to be Meg Kady.
He hugged Sal back in this bouncing unstable minim-
g
dance. He said, “Damn, you’re both fools!”
But he’d hoped with all his heart they’d got his message.
“Old
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