Hell's Heart

CHAPTER TWO

The Coffin Inn

It was late by local time when I spilled out onto the streets of Cthonius Linea, so I wandered the docklands looking for somewhere to stay. In some ways, I wasn't choosy. Cold, tired, and hungry, I would have taken a blanket in the exhaust port of an ore frigate if the price had been right. And even the blanket would have been optional.

The price, though, wouldn't. Prices never are.

That was part of the reason I passed by the Harpoon. Its intentionally suggestive sign—a supple youth picked out in pink-and-purple neon riding a long, lusty shaft into the night—didn't especially bother me. I've stayed in similar places before and sometimes the blaring music and the promise of getting railed hard for a small extra fee is exactly what I need. But the fact that every part of the sign was still lit, that the people inside seemed happy and free and well-sheltered, suggested that it'd be more than I could afford. Hell, the fact that it had a roof suggested it'd be more than I could afford.

I skipped the Swordfish for similar reasons; the atmosphere was less orgiastic and more refined, but I was still wearing my worn environment suit and had exactly one change of clothes with me. Refinement was not something I was able to offer.

The trick would be to move down. Not physically down, Europa is famously the smoothest body in the system, so there isn't really an up or down except where miners or fishers have cut into its ball-bearing surface. I needed to move socially down. To where the buildings were as old as the colony and the walls had been peeled back to the original titanium then repainted with whatever pigments a desperate local could forage or fabricate. To the kind of place where they don't tell you what organism your meat is coming from and you know you're better off not asking.

My feet worked on their own, taking me to the parts of the city that people with choices avoided. They didn't always work the way I wanted, mind you. Years in the Catechism of Prosperity meant they kept trying to guide me into churches, and on that day at least I wasn't in the mood for religion. Eventually, though, they brought me somewhere more promising.

It was called the Coffin Inn and I hoped that it might be exactly that—a place that would rent me a six-foot-by-two-foot shelf for the night, just stable enough to sleep lying down and just warm enough that I'd wake up with most of my fingers.

As it turned out, it wasn't that. It was something older and homier which, if I'd been in a better mood, I might almost have called "quaint." I made my way inside and found myself in a common room of the old kind, paneled in sheet metal and scattered with human flotsam. A screen on one wall flicked between pictures slightly too fast to make out any one individually. Between them, they made an impression that was almost hypnotic—an advertisement for a soda whose name I kept failing to read would flick into a digital portrait of a star-cutter in flight, then one of the old solar ships, then a fog-shrouded beast of unguessable proportions, then another advertisement, this time for a sleek H2-burning groundcar that no customer of the Coffin could possibly afford.

I once asked a man I half knew why they did that, why the trade-states tried to sell things to people who would never be able to buy them.

"Aspiration" had been his only answer. And although I hadn't liked to admit it, I'd known what he meant. The trade-states didn't sell products, not really. They sold dreams. They sold hope. And at such reasonable prices.

Tearing my eyes away from the ever-cycling screen, I button-holed the landlord.

"No room," he told me at once. "'Less you're inclined to share."

Inclined was a strong word. But I was out of options and he knew it. "Depends who with."

He looked at me in a scrutinizing way that I saw a lot and imagined more. "There's a lady has half a bed spare. Harpooner, mind."

That was actually forty times better than I'd expected. In my experience if you're inclined to share means something on the spectrum from "you can sleep in the pit with my guard-crabs" to "I will definitely be wanting to fuck you."

"You setting out into the storms?" the proprietor continued conversationally.

I nodded.

"Then you'll need to get used to close quarters. Not a lot of space on a hunter-barque."

I nodded again. All star-craft were cramped in one way or another. It was a kind of cosmic joke, I think, that trapped in a metal box was the freest I ever felt. As long as it was the right kind of metal box. The kind that went up instead of down and where if you died it'd be amidst the stars, not deep in a freezing pit or buried under water-ice.