Priam's Lens

TWO A Diva among the Cockroaches

The joint’s name was, appropriately, La Cucaracha, although much of the lettering was faded or worn away and the electronic enhancements more resembled an electrician’s nightmare than anything coherent.

Most places this far down in the skids were shadows of places once great and legendary and respectable; this one had only the legends, and most of them were bad.

In a sense, the place was a reflection of what had once been the proud Confederacy, a federation of more than three hundred colonial worlds encompassing a multitude of races but dominated by those of Terra, also called Earth. It had been a marriage forged in blood and maintained by raw power, but it had held, and in its time it had been the lord of an entire galactic spiral arm.

Now The Confederacy was mostly a joke; worlds lay in ruins from rioting, panic, and raw fear, particularly among those too poor to book passage out in the way of the new invaders. The naval force that once could vaporize a planet or explode a star was reduced to an evacuation and surveillance service. What good was a military that could only blow up its own kind, that could neither inflict harm nor avoid being swatted like biting flies if they irritated?

There was still a government, of course, and a loose federation of worlds, but what good was it when you were retreating outward on a spiral arm? What happened when they ran out of worlds to evacuate to, as they pretty well already had? And who was going to put in the enormous resources and skill to create new habitable worlds when it was certain that eventually they, too, would be overrun?

Here lies The Confederacy; it wasn’t as great as we thought it was, but it was all we had…

The joint was in a once great city, now fallen into disrepair and overrun by its lowest common denominators, those who couldn’t leave and those who had already given up and lived for the moment. Only here, near the old spaceport, did any semblance of the old days exist, even if in memories.

The spaceport, now called Hacalu Naval District, was under severe martial law. The joint and the few other remnants of bygone days were inside the district, although that didn’t make it more desirable. Just because it was frequented by dispirited military people and the always anarchic spacers didn’t make it any more “normal,” only physically secure.

Inside it was always crowded with the flotsam and jetsam of The Confederacy. Most were Terrans, but there were often representatives of the dozen or more non-human races that had once, willingly or unwillingly, been members of the old order. If they could exist in a Terran friendly environment and consume the usual stuff, well, they weren’t turned away.

The Terrans didn’t discriminate, either. Not the spacers and the old-line Navy folks, anyway. Space took its toll on the professionals, always had. The twists and turns of time standing nearly still during journeys left them with no family or friends that didn’t also move the same way, and the various forces, the radiation and warping and twisting of space-time, changed them all into different, often unique life-forms of their own.

They were a tough, violent, mutant breed, and they were the only ones left holding any part of civilization together in what seemed to be the last days of independence and freedom any would ever know.

The place was filled with noise, and body odors less than pleasant, and the remnants of puke and vile concoctions. It was staffed by real people only because the machines could no longer be trusted; still, here you could buy most anything, any pleasure, any vice, anything at all.

Nobody seemed to notice her when she walked through the entrance and into the hall. Anybody who could stand the smell had already passed the first test. Still, in a place like this, every newcomer was viewed with some curiosity and even some suspicion, particularly when they knew that no ships had come in recently that they didn’t know and when the figure was unlike anyone familiar.

She was a small, slightly hunched over individual, wearing a black robe, perhaps a black dress, with a bit of tassel and lace about it. It stretched to the floor, giving little indication of what lay beneath, and it rendered the body somewhat shapeless, although it clearly was, or had started out as, Terran. She also wore a hat, one with a fancy shape and brim, from which fell a thin gauzelike film that made it impossible to see her face or tell any more about the features there. Clearly, though, she could see out of it. She moved slowly, with the aid of an ornate carved cane of what might have actually been real wood, in the kind of short shuffling steps that only the very ancient were forced into.

One huge, silver-haired man with a bushy gray beard and pointed, blackened teeth leaned over to the bartender and gestured slightly at the newcomer. “Is it me or what I’ve been havin’, or is that one there the oldest creature in the known galaxy?”

The bartender, a rough-looking man with nasty growths on his face and arms, shook his head. “Beats me. There’s some money in those clothes and that walking stick, but anybody with money wouldn’t walk like that.”

“Not unless it was an act,” the customer agreed, suspicious. He slid off the stool and casually approached the figure, who was still heading for the bar and might make it in another five minutes at the speed she was going.

She was either shriveled beyond belief or she was incredibly short; the silver-haired man literally towered over her.

“Are you sure you’re in the right place, ma’am?” he asked, trying to be polite. He reflected, though, how even the small suggestion of money might mean she wouldn’t get ten steps when she left the place.

“Cockroaches of a hundred varieties on the floor, roaches on the sign—I think there can not be two of these places,” she responded in a high, tough, ancient voice suited to what had to lie beneath the clothes. “I need to find someone. He’s a frequenter of this place, and we had an appointment to meet here today this very hour.” She started creeping on toward the bar, and he followed.

“Yeah? Who? Maybe I know him.”

“You probably do, but that doesn’t mean much. He is called, I believe, simply the Dutchman. Is he about?”

“The Dutchman! I—yeah, I know him. Sort of. But he’s not here, and the Hollander’s not in port. I’m afraid somebody just tricked you into coming into a real dangerous place, ma’am.”

“I have been in worse. I know that is hard for you to believe, but you are not a woman and you weren’t out here in the old days. Do you even remember the old days, sonny?”

“Yes, ma’am. Most of us do. Remember, a lot of us were born centuries ago. We age slow, and with the docs in these ports, we can keep ourselves in fairly good condition even when age does get to us. I’ve lived seventy years, but I was born over three hundred years ago, on Cagista.”

She cackled, amused, as she finally made it to the bar itself and accepted her self-appointed reception committee’s aid in easing into one of the overworn full stools with back and one arm still intact. She let out a sigh of contentment when she settled in, as if great pain had suddenly been lifted from her.

“Sonny, you want to compare old age with me? I was born nine hundred and seventy-one years ago next month.”

His jaw dropped, and he wasn’t at all sure he believed her. “Ma’am? That’s before space flight! That’s back in ancient history! Why, that would mean you’d have been born on Earth!”

“Well, they’d gone to the Moon, but not much more,” she acknowledged. “Me, I was born in a small town in the west of England called Glastonbury. Nobody’s heard of it these days; like England, like Earth itself, it’s passed into dim legend. It was a legend then. Joseph of Arimathea brought the Holy Grail to Glastonbury. King Arthur built Camelot there and found the Grail and used it to fight evil.” She paused. “None of this means anything to you, though, does it?”

“I’m afraid not, ma’am. Earth was destroyed before my time. I never even knew anybody who’d even been there before you, let alone somebody actually born there. I told Atair, the bartender, there, that I thought you looked the oldest person I ever did see. Maybe I’m right?”

Sharing birth years was an old sport among spacers, although not between them and the groundhogs. Space travel did all sorts of things to you when you did it all the time, some positive, some negative, but in addition to the biological effects there was always the problem of time. Like anything else, time, too, was warped and distorted by going to and fro over impossible distances using artificially created wormholes and natural phenomena to attain speeds and distances otherwise impossible. When nothing else could give, time gave as well. Spacers were literally a breed apart, not just because of the physical toll but because they were forced to sever all links to family, home, and clan. Time was linear only to them, relative to all others. How many years had she physically lived to pass through that nine hundred plus? How many had he to reach even his temporal distance from his birth?

She seemed amused by his impudence at suggesting her age. “Perhaps. Too old, certainly. Old enough to hear parents speak of world war and be schooled in the greatness of the British Empire even if they had dissolved it before I got there. Old enough to see Communism fall and a hundred isms after that. Old enough to see Earth finally bring on its own doom, and old enough to not have been there at the time. And old enough, now, not only to have seen The Confederacy at its start and height, but at its death. Let me tell you, young man, if you live long enough to reflect back on those kinds of events in a stinkhole like this, you’ve lived far too long and it’s pretty damned depressing!”

“Well, I can see that,” he admitted. “Even in my lifetime. But whoever lured you here wasn’t your friend, I can tell you. You’d get mugged before you got to the street level now that you’ve shown up here. I’ll have them call for a Navy police escort.”

“That’s all right. I know where I am and what I am doing,” she assured him. “You are Navy, I take it?”

“Yes, ma’am. I’m a chief warrant officer on the Hucaniarea—that’s a frigate in drydock above. Been here a month and a half getting repairs and refitting. Probably be stuck here another month or more. Name’s Gene Harker. Just `sir’ or `Mister Harker’ to most folks. Not much for a spacer to do when he’s drydocked, I’m afraid. The kind of stuff that can be had in here makes the time pass a little quicker. Wouldn’t take most of it in here, though. You give any of these hard-asses a hair and they steal the whole beard.”

“I would think that they are all spacers or employees of the Navy and these support establishments,” she resounded. “I shouldn’t think that any would stoop to the level of mugger. Smuggler, certainly, or even hired killer, but not a mere mugger of a little old lady. What the devil could I have that any of them would find useful?”

“Some of ’em were just born bad, and some are on all sorts of drugs and hackplays and just don’t have the same sense of real life that they would if they weren’t so fucked—sorry, ma’am—fouled up.”

She gave the soft cackling laugh once again. “Sir, don’t spare any language on my part! I’ve forgotten more foul language in countless tongues than you can possibly know! But every character here who is truly `fucked up’ makes himself as vulnerable as anybody is to them. No, I suspect that few allow themselves to get that off reality, even in this place. Enough to take away the stink, perhaps, but you come here for those things and you buy and take them away with you. If you stay, you stay for business or for the company.”

“Guy was killed here not four hours ago,” the bartender commented, having edged over closer to them. “Two old captains got into some kind of fight over something that happened twenty, thirty years ago. They got to screaming, and before we could stop them they shot each other. One was vaporized, the other lost a leg and a hand. Don’t think they aren’t dangerous, ma’am.”

“I didn’t say they weren’t dangerous,” she responded softly. “I simply meant that I am no babe in the woods, and that they are not the only ones in here who might be dangerous.”

It was said so simply, so softly, so matter-of-factly in that little old lady voice of hers that both men felt an odd chill when they heard it. You just never know about anybody, not really. While it was hard to take anybody who appeared and sounded like she did as any kind of a threat, who knew what she might have under those baggy clothes?

“You say the Dutchman’s ship is not in port?” she asked, changing the subject. “The message we received was that he would have gotten in this morning.”

“Pardon, but if you’re talking Die Fliegende Hollander, van Staaten’s ship, then you’re talking more legend than reality,” the bartender told her. “Like its namesake, nobody has ever reported the ship making port. It’s a ghost ship from a long-overrun world. I’ve heard every kind of talk and legend about him from those who come in here, but nobody’s ever really seen it, let alone connected with it. It’s not real.”

The officer looked thoughtful for a moment, then sighed. “Oh, he’s real enough, I’m afraid, but he still wouldn’t be coming in here.”

Both the bartender and the old woman stared at him. “You know of him, then?” she asked.

“Oh, yes. He’s number one on the most wanted list, if you want to know. He never makes port. He attacks likely prey, small freighters and the like, stealing what fuel and spares he needs, sometimes taking the whole ship and cannibalizing it. He’s got all he needs on that ship. You spot him, he either makes tracks at maximum speed or he attacks and destroys, depending on who and what you are. That’s why they say that spotting the Hollander is signing your death warrant. He’s totally insane, but he’s damned good at what he does. But he doesn’t talk, not to anybody, except to occasionally give an automated warning to prey to abandon ship now or be destroyed. If he has it cold, he’ll sometimes do that much. We’ve chased him from one end of the Arm to the other at one time or another. We think he actually lurks inside the Occupied Zone, somehow keeping just beyond the interest of the Zuni Demons, as we call ’em in the Navy.”

“Fascinating,” she responded. “So if he were to show up here, somehow, you would be forced to arrest him or something?”

Harker smiled. “Something like that. I’m not a cop, but I’ve come close enough to him once on the ship to take it kind of personally that he’s still at large. You know how much brass he’s got? His identification signature shows up on screens and instruments as an ancient sailing ship with all sails up!”

He sensed her smiling, although he couldn’t see it, and he could hear her amusement at this. “Ah, yes, the Flying Dutchman. I used to sing it, you know, when I was young.”

“Ma’am?”

“Die Fliegende Hollander. It is Dutch for The Flying Dutchman. A captain who, consumed by jealousy, murdered his wife in a rage thinking she had betrayed him while he’d been gone on his voyages, only to discover that she had indeed been true and that only his own inner demons were the evil. Cursed by her family, condemned to sail his ship forever, making landfall only once each century for just a week or so, condemned otherwise to sail alone forever, a symbol of death and a curse even to behold, until and unless a woman of her own free will sacrifices her life to free him. It’s an ancient legend, and a classical one. You’ve not heard of it, either?”

“I think I have, yes,” the officer admitted. “One of those nautical ghost stories Navy types love, even the ones who sail in space. I wasn’t puzzled by the invoking of the legend but rather by your comment that you’d `sung’ it.”

“Impossible to believe now, but once I was quite beautiful,” she told him. “And I had not only the looks but the voice of an angel. A soprano with a three-octave range. Grand opera, Mister Harker. Oh, it was glorious when it was done! An entire play that was sung, with full scenery and props and all the rest, with a full symphony orchestra, voices and instruments in perfect harmony, all musical instruments. These days the only instruments anybody knows how to play are the small portable consoles that can synthesize anything and anybody. You have to come to a place like this just to hear anybody sing anything any more, and that mostly bawdy songs and nasty little ditties off-key. Once, though, it was all done with people, the best people playing the best instruments, even if their instrument was their voice. Now you’d have to dig into some ancient archive, I suppose, to find a good VR holographic performance, but so few people do that nobody knows or cares or understands anymore. It’s too bad, really. It wasn’t just art, it was a total experience of a kind nobody gets these days.”

“And you sung this grand whatchamacallit? That’s kind of impressive,” the security officer commented. “I assume you were the woman who eventually sacrificed herself?’

“Of course. Great opera usually ended in tragedy, but even that was compensated for. Why, a great soprano or great tenor with the right work might take twenty minutes to die!”

“Talk about singing your heart out,” the bartender muttered.

Harker noted that even the roaches weren’t having a very good time with her. While he’d just go through a decontamination chamber on the way back to get rid of creepy crawling hitchhikers, they didn’t have a prayer with her. Every once in a while there would be a tiny snap and, if you looked hard enough at the right place on her all-encompassing dress, you’d see a tiny wisp of smoke or even a brief bright pinpoint of light. A personal force field, he thought. It was something you had, in combat gear, but he’d never seen one on a civilian of any stripe. She definitely had money, that was for sure, and connections, too, and those type of people could buy whatever they fancied or needed. Maybe she wasn’t kidding. The surprises she was revealing, bit by bit, indicated that any muggers might have an ugly surprise if they tried anything on her.

Harker cleared his throat. “Uh, ma’am? Why would you have an appointment with somebody like the Dutchman?” he asked her. “And what would he want with you, if I might make the comment. I mean—”

“I know just what you mean, young man!” she came back sharply. “What he wants with me, I suspect, is money, perhaps goods he can’t buy or hijack but requires for his own purposes. I don’t know the price. I do know that he claims to have something that is worth almost any price if it is anything close to genuine and not a gimmick to work some scheme on my family. He doesn’t want anything to do with me, I don’t think. In fact, I’m not certain he knows I exist, or at least that I’m still alive and mobile, such as I am. I haven’t gotten out much in the past century or so. It is why I had to be the one to meet him. I have no fear of death and I am not particularly worried about capture. I’m frail enough that almost anything coercive he can try would almost certainly kill me, and I’m tough enough not to be bothered by that. Many of the younger members of the family might well be taken in more by this, and be more vulnerable in other ways. Understand?”

Oddly, he thought he did understand her. All except what would bring her out here in the first place on the word of a murdering scoundrel.

“What does he claim to have, ma’am?”

He could almost sense a wary smile under that veil. “Some of it is best kept—private—for the moment. However, let us just say that he claims to have a method of getting into and out of occupied worlds, and that is of great interest to my family.”

Both the Navy man and the bartender laughed at that. “Sure, and to everybody else, too, if it could be done, but it can’t,” the latter said at last. “If it had ever been done, I’d know it. They all come in here, soon or later. All of ’em. Been a bunch of ’em claimed they could do it, but they left and they never came back. Ain’t nobody among these liars and braggarts claim they done it. None of ’em! ’Cause it can’t be done! People and machines and shit—pardon, ma’am—they get squooshed there, and while you might get down to the surface, you’ll never get back, and God knows what kind of hell you’re in once you’re stuck there. Nope, he’s givin’ you a line, lady. Now I know he’s pullin’ a con on you.”

“If he’d shown up at all,” the officer noted, looking over the half-deserted bar that nobody had entered or exited since the old lady entered. “Might be nothin’ to do with the Dutchman, really, ma’am. Ever think of that? Anybody in your family or businesses who might want to get you out of the way for a while?”

She seemed taken aback for the first time since entering the place. “Goodness! I never even thought of something like that! Young man, you must have an interesting background. Still, while I can’t see what good it would do anyone, it certainly provides a logical alternative to all this, doesn’t it? Perhaps I should check a bit and see if anything odd might be happening back home, though. It certainly seems clear that I have gone astray by coming here.”

“I wouldn’t trust this fellow one bit, ma’am, particularly because it’s obvious that your family has wealth and that’s all that motivates him. He’s a killer.”

“These days, aren’t we all?” she muttered, not quite loud enough to be fully heard.

“Ma’am?”

“Nothing. Nothing. Well, young man, if you will watch my back, as it were, I might as well leave. I assume you will be watching in any event, just in case this mystery man puts in some sort of clandestine appearance. I feel quite safe. It was a pleasure talking with you.”

He made pleasantries in response, not bothering to deny what she had said since it was so obviously the truth. Still, the idea that the Dutchman, the real Dutchman, would expose himself anywhere near a full military base and conventional spaceport was almost laughable.

As she shambled across the floor, vaporizing vermin as she went, he could see eyes following her from the darkened booths and private alcoves. These were a smart lot, though; they wouldn’t put their necks in a noose by so obviously following her out. Even so, he almost wished one would. While the Dutchman might not show up, somebody claiming to be him sure could. Who would know? The Dutchman was only a name and a colorful hologram on the radar screens. The name registered as several people from the distant past, but which, if any, of them it might have been was unknown. Those who had seen him and lived had seen only a darkened bubble on an environmental suit.

There was even a theory that the Dutchman didn’t exist at all, that it was just a cover name for a whole range of pirates and scoundrels who had imitated a trademark modus operandi and used it as an extra mask of concealment. Certainly there was some evidence for this; the same Dutchman who had been a cruel killer at one instance had been a polite and even noble thief at another. The only way to know for sure would be to blow him to hell and then see if “the Dutchman” showed up again.

He put his hand to his jaw and pressed in a certain spot. “Duty,” came a distant, thin voice in his ear, and only in his ear.

“Old woman leaving the Cuca, full dress and veil, slow as molasses,” he whispered in a voice so low it probably couldn’t be understood a meter or two away. “Put surveillance monitors on her the moment she comes out the front door and follow her progress. Prepare to move in if anyone approaches her. She thinks she’s here to meet the Dutchman.”

“The Dutchman! Ha! Okay, will do. Is she out yet?”

“Just about. You should see her on the street about… now.”

“Yeah, got her,” responded the duty officer. “Let me do a scan.” There was a pause, then, “Wow! She’s got a fortune in electronics inside that rag!”

“Well, she’s got a personal force field.”

“She’s got a lot more than that. The readings here are very strong. She’s got some kind of weaponry, some robotic augmentation, and she’s radiating shit like a deep space probe. Infrared, UV, sonics—you name it. I wish I had a ship that well equipped!

The Navy intelligence man turned to the bartender. “I’ll get somebody else to cover in here. I think I should take a little walk myself.”

“Yeah? You really think she’s gonna meet the Dutchman?”

“I dunno, but she’s too smart and too well equipped to walk in here blindly and then leave so meekly.”

He made the exit a lot faster than she had, but she was still gone from immediate view. “Where away?” he asked the duty officer.

“Two blocks to your left, then down one. She walked a lot faster once she turned the corner. Now she seems stopped, like she’s waiting for a pickup.”

“Get me an unmarked tail car,” the Navy man ordered. “Have it ready in case we need to give some chase here. If she gets picked up by anybody except a limo or a service taxi I think I want to see who and what are really under that veil and dress.”

“You always did lust after older women, didn’t you? I’ve got one on the way. Looks like we won’t make it for a complete intercept, but I can keep her on the trace long enough. She’s got her ride. Looks like an ordinary cab but she didn’t flag it or call it, at least not on any public frequency we know.”

“Got it! Stay on her!” He rounded the corner to see her suddenly and spryly entering the cab and the door sliding hut. It was off like a shot, not even waiting for her to belt in, which was another clue that this wasn’t just an ordinary fare.

Almost immediately the tail car pulled up to him, door already open. He jumped in and was thrown back against the seat much as the old lady, if indeed that was what she was, must have been. The cab was out of sight, but the tail car was accelerating rapidly, making it tough for him to turn and press the controls that strapped him in for the ride.

“Okay, driver!” he said needlessly. “Follow that cab!” There wasn’t any driver, and they were already in hot pursuit, but he’d always wanted to say that.

The artificial intelligence that drove and flew and guided all surface and near-surface transport on the planet, including within the Naval District, could pretty much track and, if necessary, even control or halt anything that moved. They were zipping along just a few meters above street level: high enough not to run over any pedestrians, low enough to be almost like a true surface vehicle. The screen in front of him in the dash showed their location and the location of the cab they were following. It wasn’t that far ahead now; he could make it out even in the gray gloom that passed for a nice day in this hole.

“They’re heading for the docks,” he told the duty officer. “What’s parked that looks likely?”

“Not much that’s civilian, if that’s a help. Aluacar Electric company shuttle, commuter shuttle to Kanlun Spaceport, Melcouri Interstellar surface shuttle, that’s about it.”

“What about this Melcouri?”

“Family owned company, one of the rare private ones. Not very big now, once huge. They sold off a lot decades ago after the fall of Helena. It was almost a company planet and they may not have lost all their business, but they lost the family and the will. They still haul freight, but mostly on single contracts.”

“How long has the ship been in?”

“The—let’s see—Odysseus, of all things. Wonder what that means? In on—yeah, just came in late yesterday. No commercial traffic logged in or out.”

“That’s the one. They’re Greek, or at least they’re lovers of Greek, my friend,” the Navy cop told the duty officer. “All out of ancient stories nobody reads or remembers anymore except maybe university professors.”

“That right? You know it, though.”

He sighed. “Yeah, I know it. I know a lot of apparently useless crap, but sometimes it rises up and justifies its existence in my mind. Everybody else lets a glorified data-base do their thinking for them.”

“Huh? I—Hold it! You’re on the nose, buddy! Melcouri it is. They’ve already turned on the power in the shuttle, too, and there’s a request for preliminary clearance. You want me to hold them?”

“Yeah, do it. I just want to make sure this is all above board.” He was beginning to doubt his instincts now, in spite of the spryness and effective getaway of the old lady. She said she was going back to check on things, and that’s what she was doing. Why did he still feel that there was something wrong with the setup?

At least it explained the interest. If they had left much of their family and friends on Helena, and this Dutchman claimed to be able to get in and out, then no price would be too much for them just to see who or what might have survived down there. The trouble was, it had been tried by just about everybody. You could get in all right, but never out. It didn’t seem to be the Dutchman’s style, but it was clearly a con game to get a gigantic payment. Hell, if he didn’t bump them off on the way, he could easily send down whoever of the Melcouri family was to go in. Why not? They’d never get back up.

Still, the Dutchman was the kind of guy who would more likely attack and ransack the whole ship up there, not somebody who’d expose himself long enough to pull a scam like this, no matter how good it sounded. “Is she inside?”

“Yeah, just entered. I’m stalling them on clearances and they know it.”

The chief sighed. “Has anyone filed a departure plan for the docked vessel above?” he asked.

“Just checked. No, not a peep. They haven’t even filed a preliminary flight plan for approval, so they’re not in any hurry to leave. Why? You want to go up and check them out? Want me to keep the shuttle here until you can board? You can always use the routine inspection ploy.”

Harker considered it. “No, let them go,” he instructed the duty officer. “There’s more going on here than we know yet, and I’m not sure who’s playing what game. I can always go on up if they file to leave. Until then—well, have the dock workers find something that might take a few days to repair and keep it handy.” He wished he had a list of who was aboard up there, but since they hadn’t come down to the planet, they were still technically in transit and there was no need to provide the list. He had a sudden thought. One of them sure had to have gone through Immigration. “What was the name on the old lady we just chased?”

“Anna Marie Sotoropolis. Blood and prints match. It’s her, for what it’s worth.”

Another Greek name. At least it was consistent. Nine hundred years…

Of course, she hadn’t actually lived nine hundred years, at least subjectively. Still, physically she almost certainly was well over a hundred and fifty, which was plenty years enough. He wondered what kind of memories she had; what kind of life and loves and ancient lifestyle were in those experiences. Days when the mother world was still habitable, when human beings sang opera for the masses…

Sure as hell was a lot more romantic than the Cucaracha and this hole, that was for sure.

“I want round-the-clock monitoring of the ship with notification if anybody enters or leaves, even by the dock or in an e-suit,” he instructed. “And if that shuttle comes back, I want to know immediately, no matter who, what, or where I might be. Understand?”

“It’s in the console and done,” the duty officer assured him.

“Good. Then log me out for now. I need a shower bad.”

Three days passed and nothing more was heard from the ancient diva or the ship, which simply sat up there as if parked for the duration. Gene Harker was even taking some good-natured ribbing from the local police and Naval security people over his suspicions, with tales of a romantic tryst with a nine-hundred-year-old woman finishing in a virtual dead heat with the suspicion that she was actually there picking up secret agent cockroaches.

On the fourth afternoon, though, at about the same time as the old lady had walked into that smelly bar, and with a lot more traffic passing through, another unlikely pilgrim entered the bar and asked the same crazy question.

“Yes, Father?” Max the bartender called to him. “Anything you particularly would like? The synthesizer here is still in pretty good shape in spite of the condition of this joint.”

“Just a little bourbon and water will do it, my lad,” the priest answered cheerfully.

At least, unlike the old lady, he was very much in the open; a ruddy-faced man with a big hawk nose and close-set deep brown eyes, physically probably pushing fifty, in a standard black clerical suit and reversed collar. Only his gold ring on his left finger gave anything else away; it was very expensive for a priest’s ring, and the Maltese cross in gold against a precious polished black opal background was that of the Knights of Malta, an incredibly secretive and not exclusively religious group that was invariably composed of the best and the brightest of each generation. This guy was no dummy, and he was no itinerant missionary on his way to a new post, either. Indeed, the mere fact that he was not at least an archbishop at his age showed that he was probably even more important than he seemed. A Maltese Knight with no high position running great institutions was somebody who was maybe running things that nobody knew about.

Max turned and tapped a code into the small console just beneath the bar. This started the synthesizer working, and within seconds a whiskey glass formed and molded itself into solidity within the cavity in back of the bar; then a soft brown liquid and a clear one poured into the glass. As soon as it was done, Max grabbed it and put it on the bar in front of the priest. “Watch the roaches, Father,” he warned. “They drink almost anything in the joint these days.”

“They’re all God’s creatures, my boy,” he responded and sipped the drink, obviously finding it to his liking.

“You know, there are nicer bars just outside the gates here,” Max told him. “Restaurants, too, some with real fresh food, not synthetics.”

“I’ll take that under advisement,” the priest replied, now drinking rather than sipping. The glass was soon empty.

“Another?”

“Just one more, exactly like that last one,” the priest responded. As Max tapped in the code, the priest continued, “You know, I’m used to everybody telling me what company I should keep and what places I’d like. It’s a misunderstanding of my whole profession, you see, although, God knows, enough hypocrites and scoundrels have browbeaten people into playing holier-than-thou for generations. Christ not only drank wine, He supplied it to others, and He spent a good deal of His time with sinners and publicans and spoke mostly about the horrid sins of religious hypocrisy. Saint Paul was betrayed by religious types but saved by a prostitute. You could almost read the Bible and find more prostitutes and thieves and the like going to heaven and more and more white-robed prayer-mongers going to hell and decide that things were all upside down.” He drank down the second drink in two quick gulps, getting a wondrously rapturous smile on his face from doing so, then reached into his jacket and pulled out a fat cigar. He clipped off the end, then lit it with a lighter that looked more like a portable blowtorch.

“You know,” said the priest, “I really like living in this time, for all its failings. There was a time when these things would just cause all sorts of horrible problems if you smoked them regularly. Now we can cure anything they can give you. It’s always been thus. Either people have been trying to rid us of all the simple pleasures because they’re bad for us, or the simple pleasures have been trying to get rid of us.”

The bartender chuckled. “You staying long or just passing through?” he asked.

“Passing through. Truth to tell, I’m in your rather, er, colorful joint for a purpose. I’m looking for someone who is said to be here.”

“I know most of the regulars. What’s the name?”

“I don’t know, really. He calls himself the Dutchman, I believe, after some impossibly ancient legend from old Earth.”

In the Bachelor Officer’s Quarters three kilometers northwest of the bar, an alarm sounded, loud enough to wake anybody but the dead.

Gene Harker stirred himself and punched the comm link. “Yeah?”

“Got a shot from Max at the Cuch,” a voice told him. “Somebody else just asked for the Dutchman.”

“I knew it!” Harker almost shouted, suddenly very wide awake.