Three drinks later Ragan excused himself, saying he had a commission at the HQ and had to report on it before he could get paid.  When he had gone, Kerwin scowled impatiently at Ellers, who had matched Ragan drink for drink.  This wasn't the way he had wanted to spend his first night back on the world whose image he'd carried in his mind since childhood.  He didn't know quite what he did want - but it wasn't to sit in a spaceport bar all night and get drunk!

"Look, Ellers -"

Only a gentle snore answered him; Ellers had slid down in his seat, out cold.

The plump Darkovan bar girl came with refills - Kerwin had lost track of how many - and looked at Ellers with a professional mixture of disappointment and resignation.  Then, with a quick glance at Kerwin, he could see her shift her focus of interest; bending to pour, she brushed artfully against Kerwin.  Her loose robe was unpinned at the throat so that he could see the valley between her breasts, and the familiar sweet smell of incense clung to her robe and her hair.  A thread of awareness plucked a string deep in his gut, as he breathed in the scent of Darkover, of woman; but he looked again and saw that her eyes were hard and shallow, and the music of her voice frayed at the edges when she crooned, "You like what you see, big man?"

She spoke broken Terran Standard, not the musical idiom of the City dialect; that, Kerwin knew afterward, was what had bothered him most.  "You like Lomie, big man?  You come 'long with me, I nice and warm, you see..."

There was a flat taste in Kerwin's mouth that wasn't just the aftertaste of the wine.  Whatever the sky and sun, whatever they called the world, the girls around the Terran Trade City bars were all the same.

"You come?  You come -?"

Without knowing quite what he was going to do, Kerwin grabbed the edge of the table and heaved himself up, the bench going over with a crash behind him.  He loomed over the girl, glaring through the dim and smoky light, and words in a language long forgotten rushed from his lips:

"Be gone with you, daughter of a mountain goat, and cover your shame elsewhere, not by lying with men from worlds that despise your own!  Where is the pride of the Cahuenga, shameful one?"

The girl gasped, cowered backward, a convulsive hand clutching her robe about her bared breasts, and bent almost to the ground.  She swallowed, but for a moment her mouth only moved, without sound; then she whispered, "S'dia shaya... d'sperdo, vai dom alzuo...." and fled, sobbing; the sound of the sob and the scent of her musky hair lingered in the room behind her.