Stations of the Tide Read Online Free PDF

never suspected existed.”
    “Oh, I suspected something all right. I just never felt called on to do anything in particular about them.”
    “Well, you come to the jubilee in Rose Hall tomorrow night, and you can eat your heart out.”
    “Oh, is that what you want me to eat out?” He grinned wryly, then danced back as the beam slipped a few inches in its harness. “Watch that side there! A little remark like that don’t deserve to get my toes crushed.”
    “Don’t you worry. It’s not your toes I’m thinking of crushing.”
    “Excuse me,” the bureaucrat called up. “Is there any chance. I can rent your truck? Are you the owner?”
    The redheaded woman looked down at him. “Yeah, I’m the owner,” she said. “You don’t want to rent this thing, though. See, I’m running it from a battery rated for a rig twice this size, so I gotta step down the voltage, okay? Only the transformer’s going. I can get maybe a half hour out of it before it overheats and starts to melt the insulation. I been kind of nursing it along. Now Anatole’s got a spare transformer, but he thinks he oughta be able to charge an arm and a leg for it. I been holding off. I figure it gets a little closer to jubilee, he’ll take what he can get.”
    “Aniobe, I keep telling you,” the shopkeeper said. “I could buy that sucker off him for half what—”
    She tossed her head. “Oh, shut up, Pouffe. Don’t you go spoiling my fun!”
    The bureaucrat cleared his throat. “I don’t want to go far. Just down the river a way and back again.” A barnacle fly stung his arm, and he swatted it.
    “Naw, the wheel bearings are starting to seize up too. Onliest place to get lubricant nowadays is Gireaux’s, and old Gireaux has got a bad case of the touchy-feelies. Always trying to get a little kiss or something. If I wanted to get a tub of grease out of him on short notice, I’d probably have to get down on my knees and give him a sleeve job!”
    The men grinned like hounds. Pouffe, however, shook his head and sighed. “I’m going to miss all this,” he said heavily. The bureaucrat noticed for the first time the deep-interface jacks on his wrists, gray with corrosion; he’d served time on Caliban in his day. The man must have an interesting history behind him. “All your friends say they’ll keep in touch after they move to the Piedmont, but it’s just not going to happen. Who are they kidding?”
    “Oh, come off it,” Aniobe scoffed. “Any man as rich as you will have friends wherever he goes. It’s not as if you needed to have a personality or nothing.”
    The last timber loaded, Aniobe shut down the truck and shipped the winch. The laborers waited to be dismissed. One, a roosterish young man with a comb of stiff black hair wandered onto the porch, and casually leaned over a tray of brightly bundled feathers—fetishes, perhaps, or fishing lures. Chu watched him carefully.
    He was straightening from the tray when Chu stepped forward and seized his arm.
    “I saw that!” Chu spun the man around and slammed him up against the doorpost. He stared at her, face blank with shock. “What have you got in that shirt?”
    “I—nothing! W-what are—” he stammered. Aniobe stood up straight, putting hands on hips. The other laborers, the bureaucrat, the shopkeeper, all froze motionless and silent, watching the confrontation.
    “Take it off!” Chu barked. “Now!”
    Stunned and fearful, he obeyed. He held the shirt forward in one hand to show there was nothing hidden there.
    Chu ignored it. She looked slowly up and down the young man’s torso. It was lean and muscular, with a long silvery scar curving across his abdomen, and a dark cluster of curly hair on his chest. She smiled.
    “Nice,” she said.
    The laborers, their boss, and the shopkeeper roared with laughter. Chu’s victim reddened, lowered his head angrily, bunched his fists, and did nothing.
    *   *   *
     
    “You notice the way that redhead was teasing those