He tried to remember the sky over Norden-and had again one of those sharp picture flashes of recollection.Ī silver bowl arching above a waving plain of grass, grass that was pale green, mauve, and silver all at once, changing as the wind rippled it. Troy Horan watched the pale gold in the morning sky deepen. Now, before dawn in Tikil, men from the Dipple leaned their bowed shoulders against the outer wall of the Casual Labor Center or squatted on their heels before the door that marked the meeting place between the haves and the have-nots. But later, when their home worlds were ruined or traded away across the conference tables, there was resentment, and on some planets there were organized moves to get rid of these rootless inhabitants. During the first fervor of patriotism the Dipple dwellers met with good will.
In this fashion, the Dipple had been set up on Korwar, far back from the fighting line. As a result, the citizens of several small nations suddenly found themselves homeless.Īt the outbreak of the war ten years earlier, there had been forced evacuations from such frontier worlds pioneers had been removed from their lands so that military outposts and masked solar batteries could be placed in their stead. But a fringe of frontier worlds had passed into the grasp of one or the other of the major powers-the Confederation or the Council. Several major and once richer planets had to be written off entirely, since worlds reduced to cinders on which no human being dared land were not attractive property. Afterwards, the two leading powers had shared out the spoils- spheres of influence. The War of the Two Sectors had been fought to a stalemate five years ago. He could try to exist without subcitizenship and a work permit, haunting the Casual Labor Center to compete with too many of his fellows for the very limited crumbs of employment he could somehow raise the stiff entrance fee and buy his way into the strictly illegal but flourishing and perilous Thieves’ Guild or he could sign on as contract labor and be shipped off world in deep freeze with no beforehand knowledge of his destination or work. A man from the Dipple had three choices for a cloudy future. To live there was a badge of inferiority.
To the south was the Dipple, a collection of utilitarian, stark, unattractive housing. To the east, fronting on the spaceport, was the part of Tikil in which lay the warehouses, shops, and establishments of the thousands of businesses necessary for the smooth running of a pleasure city, this exotic bloom where three-quarters of the elite of a galactic sector gathered to indulge their whims and play. To the north and west Tikil was an exotic bloom on a planet that had harbored wealth almost from the year of its first settlement. Tikil was really three cities loosely bound together, two properly recognized on the maps of Korwar’s northern continent, the third a sore-rather than a scar-of war, still unhealed.
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