Read Online Starbound by Joe Haldeman - Free Book Online

for the look,” Elza said.
    “Force of habit.” Once we were in the elevator, I pulled the ankle holster off.
    “A .289,” she said. “Not with legal rounds, I hope.”
    “Neuros.” I’d never fired one at a person, but they were impressive on a dummy. Smart round that finds an eye and blows a small shaped charge across the frontal lobes.
    “Jesus,” Dustin said. “You got them where?”
    I laughed, thumbing the door open. “Jesus had nothing to do with it.”
    “Boys and toys.” Elza went by me, flopped down on the couch, and slipped her shoes off. “So I get to take an extra seven kilos of clothes?”
    “Only sexy ones,” Dustin said.
    “I don’t have seven kilos of the kind you like. That’d be about a hundred outfits.”
    I sat in the easy chair and picked up the balalaika and plucked an arpeggio.
    “Say you’re not taking the banjo?” Dustin said, with hope in his voice.
    “No. I’ll be in my sixties when we get back. Take it up seriously then, as a retirement project.”
    Elza laughed. “You’ll retire about a year after you’re dead.”
    I had a sudden impulse to throw the instrument against the wall, just to do something unpredictable. Instead, I set it gently against the bookcase. “I don’t know. In a way, this is early retirement. Cleaned out my desk to embark on a new life of travel and adventure.”
    “Or stay in one room for thirteen years, trying not to go mad,” Dustin said.
    “There is that. I wonder whether they’ve packed enough straitjackets.”
    Elza got up and went to the refrigerator. “Wine?” She poured two glasses of white wine and a small glass of vermouth for herself. Bunched them together in two hands and brought them over to the coffee table. “I’m kind of torn,” she said. “Maybe go out to the Galápagos early, do some snorkeling.”
    Dustin held his glass up to her. “I’ll catch up with you. Say good-bye to London and Paris, maybe Kyoto. Come from the other direction.”
    “City boy.”
    “Don’t care much for the water. Fish fuck in it.”
    She arched an eyebrow. “People do, too.”
    “I’ll wait for zero gee.” He looked at me. “You’ve been there.”
    “It was all men. None of them appealed to me.”
    “I mean the Galápagos. Diving.”
    “Wasn’t recreational. Bomb threat to the Elevator.”
    “I remember. The note said something about Gehenna.”
    “Someone in Personnel must have sat down and entered Gehenna/ skindive/license to kill.”
    Elza sighed. “And I’m still on my learners’ permit.”
    “Well, you’ve got four days. I could get you a quick transfer to the Zone. You’d get more experience in four days than I’ve had in twenty years.”
    “I’ll think about it. Did you see many fish there?”
    “Not so many pretty ones. You want to go into the shallows, the reefs near the shore, unless you’re after big sharks.”
    “Maybe, maybe not.”
    “They’re protected. If one bites you and gets sick, there’s a huge fine.”
    “But you were there before,” Dustin said.
    “Twenty-five years ago, first wife. I could hardly get her out of the water, sharks and all.”
    “You think of her a lot,” she said.
    I tried to be accurate. “Her image comes to me often. I don’t sit and dwell on the memory of her.”
    “I know that. I guess that’s what I meant.” She shook her head. “Crazy time.”
    “We’re all dwelling on the past these days,” Dustin said. “Leaving everything behind.”
    There was so much I didn’t want to say. She gave me the Shakespeare book in the morning; at noon, she took one breath and died. Was it more or less horrible that it happened to so many at the same time?
    “You’re the philosopher,” I said. “I’m more an engineer, cause and effect.” Elza was watching me closely. I don’t think I’d ever raised this directly with her before. “We were crazy in love, like schoolkids, and although I know it was all blood chemistry boiling away, brain chemistry . . . still, we