A Different Light Read Online Free PDF

she talked with her hands, her head turned away from him. He worked to catch the pose before she moved again. Her muscles moved like wire, tense and strong. Yet relaxed she was fluid as a fish, soft as a cat. She turned to smile at him. He smiled back.
    Chora stopped by the table and took away his glass, replacing it with a full one. "On the house," she said. Jimson turned to catch Rin's eye and nod his thanks. The bartender nodded back, his practised hands continuing their swift, rhythmic polishing. Rows of clean glasses glinted in front of him, like burnished bones. Once, in morbid humor, Jimson had offered to paint on each glass, free, the death sign, the skull-and-crossbones. Rin, smiling appreciation, had refused politely.
    "A picture, sure," he said. "But death's-heads on the glasses would be bad for business."
    Jimson savored the cold sting of the drink. There were seven of his pictures on the walls now, counting the nude of Leiko that someone had bought and not yet taken away. He had almost refused to let it go. She would almost never sit for him. "I can get you ten beautiful bodies just off the street. I'm skinny, my hair's a mop, my bones stick out too much, and my face is ugly." Someone had once told her she was ugly. He hated that unknown fool with methodical hatred, every time she refused to pose. But it didn't bother her if he drew her like this, in the bar.
    She was laughing now, head back, and her eyes glinted—they were grey, but not a simple grey, nor even a grey-green, but a silver grey, grey with silver highlights, like a line of silver ore on a rock face. He had been drawing her for four months now, and he still felt sometimes like a child drawing stick figures. Alleca, you're a fucking beginner.
    She came to stand in front of him. "How is it?"
    "Frustrating."
    "That last picture you sold paid the rent."
    "Fuck the rent."
    She laughed at him and walked away. The rent was little enough. But he wasn't making much, and Leiko was making nothing at all. He grinned, thinking of what his friends on New Terrain would say to see him now, sitting in a bar, trying to draw. It was getting noisier, more humid, and it was packed. A fight could start soon.
    There were fights in Rin's all the time. Once a week at least Chora had to dump some drunk with clenched fists out the door. Rin seemed not to mind the fights. He was strict about weapons though. People wearing knives, or carrying stun guns—pistols loaded with small light tranquilizing or sleep darts—were not welcome in the bar.
    The bar was dark—because Rin kept the lights down, except in spots—and glittery. There was glitter dust in the walls and in the floor wax, glitter obscuring the windows, glitter on clothes and on flesh. Some of the jewels in rings and chains and earrings were real. There was a beat in the air, rapid savage drumming, creating a kind of heat—in the room next door, Capt had the skinheads out, the small round drums whose taut covering is illegally-taken animal hide.
    Chora was bending over the tables, making rounds with her huge tray that she carried as if it weighed nothing, since for her it did weigh next to nothing. She was a Skellian, tall and big and muscular as a weightlifter, born to a gravity of two gees, and in the near Terran-standard gravity of Nexus she floated with an uncanny, incongruous grace.
    Miri Ikt sat near him. Miri claimed to be an Egyptian from Old Terra, and maybe she was. She was truly a navigator on the immense colonizing ship Sigurd, which made the long jump through the Hype out to the Magellenic Clouds, one way eighty-one standard years. Miri claimed to have made it twice. She looked no more than twenty-two. The Sigurd was in Port on Nexus now. At the bar huddled Denny and Kay, loaders at Port, part-time drunkards. Languorous in his corner, Chi lolled, green-clad, gold-wire haired, stoned to his glinting eyebrows on nightshade. Across from him sat Ysao, who was truly a giant, and maybe a telepath, and kept