"Damn fishermen, anyway," Gull grumbled. "They're always whining and complaining about how long it takes to get a permanent slip, like that's some excuse to take the transient spaces instead. I mean, if you think it takes forever to get a permanent slip in this harbor, you ought to hear what the parking situation is like around Enif Prime, especially since those pushy Nekkarians insisted on a whole friggin' degree of arc for their ambassadorial entourage."

"Crowded, is it?" Kate said sympathetically.

The harbormaster gave an indignant, emphatic nod. "Like salmon up a creek on a morning in July!"

"That is crowded," Kate agreed. She regarded him from one corner of her eye. He had a broad, smooth face (he plucked his whiskers out by the roots) dominated by high, wide cheekbones, widely spaced brown eyes, eyebrows that looked as if they could use a good raking and a mop of thick, naturally curly hair the color of wet sand that would not stay in braids, but Gull didn't let that stop him.

In his authority as harbormaster, Shitting Seagull retained the right to reserve transient parking for ships belonging to such extraterrestrial visitors as wandered out this far on the galactic rim. He had been doing so for twenty years, ever since he first took on the job. The mayor would have fired him for this partiality except that each month, rent for transient parking accumulated in the city account at the National Bank of Alaska, twenty cents per foot per day, for nine hundred feet of dock. It was deposited directly into the account, in the exact amount required per foot of slip space. When rents had gone up two years before, the amount had obligingly adjusted itself accordingly.

The mayor decided what he didn't know wouldn't hurt him, although it made sport fishermen in for the day a little irritable, because no one could see the visiting spaceships except Gull. The same size and mass that allowed Gull to keep the peace in the harbor had kept anyone, thus far, from arguing the point. It was infinitely easier to raft their boats together two and three at a time.

Besides, Alaskan fishermen, a race who embraced eccentricity as a way of life, were rather proud to call Gull one of their own, especially when they got a couple of beers down him and he began to hold forth on the price per pound of bantha tongue on Tatooine.

So Kate walked the floats with Shitting Seagull, Mutt padding patiently behind, listening as Gull rebroadcast the latest headlines from abroad, a tale involving the secretary-general of the Council of Planets, centrally located on Deneb Prime; the son and heir of the warlord of Dubhe; the nubile daughter of the prime minister of the United System of Sidus Ludovicia-num; a rare element called merakium found only on, you guessed it, Merak; the Free Traders; and pirates from Spica Four.

Kate was enthralled (this was better than a Heinlein novelhell, it was better than Star Wars on Bobby's VCR, with or without popcorn), and was just about to request a definition of "nubile" on Sidus Prime when a shout came from the head of the gangway at the end of the dock.