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to the fate of the Fortune."
"Hoping to rescue me?" Her warm hand covered his. "Thank you, darling!" In a
moment she was graver, her face speculative. "I imagine the humanoids will
want to bring everybody home from the Zone. They won't need anything from
Malili. The news will be a jolt to my dear uncle. I can imagine his face when
he meets his first humanoid."
Chuckling softly, she bent closer.
"But we were talking about you." Her smile grew tender. "I need to know you
better, Keth. You and your family. I barely met your father and Cyra. Where
are they now?"
The question disturbed him a little, because she seemed too eager, leaning too
close, her eyes too intent. He reached for his glass to make time to think,
but suddenly he wanted no more of its hot tartness. Could the wine be drugged?
His hand shook, and a few drops spilled.
"Don't you like it?" Her concern seemed too quick. "An excellent vintage."
"I'm just clumsy." He fumbled for his napkin and mopped at the table. "Sorry."
"We were talking about your people."
"We're out of touch." He felt a surprising surge of confidence. "You know
we've never been close. A voicecard every month or so. Never much news."
"Maybe I have news for you." Her quick voice brightened. "I got your address
here from a receptionist at the fleet. When you were so long getting back to
your room, I asked around again. Bridgeman Greel told me you'd called on him.
He said Cyra and your father were staying at his south summer villa."
Though she still seemed casually unconcerned, he felt sick with himself. Very
gently, she was calling him a liar. Perhaps the wine had already dulled him.
He sat straighter, trying to seem merely surprised.
"I remember Cyra speaking of Greel," he said. "I think they were friends at
school."
"We've been calling the villa, but nobody answers." Her troubled frown was
only fleeting. "The Navarch wants us to talk to them just to assure them that
the humanoids will forgive all their Lifecrew silliness." She glanced at him
again, too keenly. "Can't you guess where they've gone?"
"I've no idea." He felt a little relieved; she hadn't directly accused him.
"We're out of touch."
"Greel says they've told him about their rhodo research." Her gentle
persistence began to seem relentless. "He says they claim to have a monopole
out of the old Deliverance. They wanted to use it to build some sort of
weapons system against the humanoids."
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Chilled and rigid, he sat silent, trying not to think about the tachyon
compass he had hidden in the air duct or the tiny rhodo weapon in his pocket.
"They ought to be warned." Urgency edged her tone. "Because the humanoids
reserve rhodomagnetics so strictly for themselves. They could get into
dreadful difficulties."
"I " He found the wine glass in his hand again and set it down so hard it
splashed. "You scared me," he muttered. "I'll certainly warn them, if I ever
see them. But I've no way to find them."
"Sorry, darling!" She was tenderly contrite. "I didn't mean to frighten you,
but they could be hurt. The humanoids are never evil, but they have to be
efficient. The occasional misguided people who have tried to defy them have
always been disarmed and restrained. Those who have accepted them have always
been glad. I want us to accept them, Keth."
He had begun to feel a new glow of pleasure in the lilt of her voice. Relaxing
a little, he let his arms sprawl on the table and leaned to admire her vivid
loveliness. Everything else seemed slightly out of focus.
"You'll soon see how very wonderful they are." Her charming arms opened and
her fine teeth gleamed. "But we've talked about too many things." She brushed
back her shining hair. "Let's enjoy our supper. Try one of these."
She put a silver-dusted berry to his lips.
"A moonfruit from my aunt's hothouse. You'll love it."
Its juice had a tangy sweetness, and he had to say he liked it. There was
smoked mutox from the Darkside ranch and a huge red-meated mushroom grown in a
worked-out mine. There were golden suncorn cakes.
And there was the wine.
She filled his glass again and kept lightly urging him to enjoy it. Sometimes
he nearly did. She was Chel, his best friend all his life, changed amazingly
since that time at Greenpeak when she wanted them to see each other nude, but
still too freshly innocent to mean harm to anybody. Yet he always recalled his
aversion to that peppery aftertaste. He thought he caught flashes of annoyance
when he didn't sip, but she always grew more tenderly alluring.
"I want to show you my new room," she told hun when he pushed his plate away.
"One my father built when he owned Vara Vorn, before he went off to die. A
shame the humanoids got there too late to save hun on Kyronia! My uncle's
study, later, till he went out to the Zone. My aunt had it redone for me."
They climbed a long spiral stair. The turns made him giddy and she caught his
arm once when he almost lost his balance. Her electric touch and her bright
scent swept him with a wave of warm desire, and he almost forgot to fear the
humanoids.
It was the topside room where he had talked to Admiral Vorn. The Wintersend
landscape, kilometers below the wide thermal windows, looked queerly luminous
and cold. Looking out and down across it, he swayed unsteadily again.
"Just in time!" Excitement hushed her to a throaty whisper. "I've always loved
eclipses."
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He had been facing the sun, a great orange ball bitten in half by the far
white horizon, but now he saw that she had cleared the windows behind hun to
show the shadow of Kai, small and round and very black, creeping across the
enormous copper-colored dome of Malili.
"When I was a child my uncle used to let me slip in here to watch them."
Gently, she touched his hand. "I used to think of my father and the plans he
had spoken of for me. I thought eclipses would be lucky for me." She swayed
closer, her whisper more intimate. "Perhaps this one will be lucky for us."
"When I was a child I never saw Malili eclipsed." His tongue seemed clumsy.
"It happens only in the moom moontimes, and I was always underground. I do
recall Malili eclipsing the sun. Blotting it out for hours. The sky dark and
strange, and cold winds blowing, and sometimes a thunderstorm."
He shivered, perhaps from his old terror of those black eclipses, perhaps from
the forbidding chill of the snowscape, perhaps from something he had
forgotten. Because she was so near and warm and dear, he caught her hand and
drew her closer. She raised her face to kiss him, and her mouth had the hot
sharp tang of the Navarch's wine.
The bed was a huge platform, round as the room, covered with silken white
mutoxen fur. She drew away from their kiss to get her breath and tugged him
gently toward the bed.
"I used to dream of this," she whispered. "When I still hoped you would come
into the fleet."
23
Wing IV The first humanoid planet and the site of the rhodomagnetic plexus
that drives and controls the humanoids. No human beings are allowed within
five light-years.
He staggered a little, as if that high room had rocked upon its ice-clad peak.
The Navarch's wine? Or Chelni herself? Everything else seemed blurred and
dimmed, but she was incandescent. Her sheer crimson wrapper was sliding down
to the rug, and her bare beauty stunned him.
For a moment he couldn't move at all. She had glided closer, her musky scent
intoxicating. Her nimble fingers helped shuck off his shirt. Her soft hair [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]