a blinking lightsign bottle above a door;
inside, gloom and sour smells;
a few slumped, sullen men;
an obscene moving mural;
a girl who turns away when she recognizes a Kithman;
a bartender who refuses to serve vodsan to a "tumie" (Kith);
a lean, hairless, dead-white, cat-eyed, tentacle-fingered, dice-throwing petty criminal, possibly an assassin, who defies the barman to give Kenri a drink.
Kenri realizes that the criminal is a Special-X, created for a particular purpose, then released. The Special-X wanted to go to space but the Kith would not have him. He sounds like the embittered artificial mutants in that Harvest Of Stars bar - which I have now found: see Dives.
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I looked up your "Dives" note and your comments about the "Asilo" bar makes it a very fascinating, if some what ominous place to "visit." Will some of these speculations about genetically modifying humans actually come to pass?
I also thought of "Quixote And The Windmill," in another series, where we see TECHNOLOGICALLY unemployed humans in yet another bar. In both cases some humans are discarded, no longer wanted, marginalized, embittered, etc.
Sean
Paul and Sean:
Off the top of my head, I recall two of Andre Norton's stories (1959's *Secret of the Lost Race* and 1961's *Star Hunter*) in which a main character is, when introduced, working in a bar of rather shady nature. Although Joktar in *SotLR* is a gambling dealer and something of a protégé to the proprietor of the comparatively ritzy "SunSpot," whereas Vye Lansor in *SH* is a low-grade janitorial type in the VERY low-class "Starfall."
Kaor, DAVID!
I've read a fair bit of Andre Norton's books when I was a boy, but I don't remember these stories of her. What I clearly recall is reading some of her "Forerunner" and "Witch World" books.
I'm a bit surprised the worst dives will have any kind of janitorial work, cleaning up and basic maintenance, done at all! I would have thought public houses and bars that far down the ladder would have clientele who no longer cared about such things.
Sean
Sean:
I don't go in for bars of any degree, but I suspect most of their customers would object to such smells as that of vomit nobody bothered to clean up. So they need a guy with a mop and a bucket, and that was most of what Vye was doing — before he got shanghaied to impersonate a long-lost heir "now found" on a jungle planet ... in fact, basically to pretend he was Tarzan with a different name....
Kaor, DAVID!
Gotcha! Even the worst dives will have SOME cleaning up done. Seems as tho I missed a good read in STAR HOPE. Darn!
Sean
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