Wrapt in Crystal

by Sharon Shinn

  “I recognized her handwriting.”

  “It’s a poem. You can read it if you like.”

  She touched the letter again, dropped her hand, shook her head. “Did you make love to her?” she asked abruptly.

  He had no wish to hide the truth. “Yes. Once.”

  “What was that like?”

  “Like coming to life again.”

  She nodded; he could not tell what she was thinking. He added, “She gave me something, like she gave you something—or took something away. I can’t exactly explain it. But I didn’t lie to her. She knew I was in love with someone else, and she gave it—this thing—herself—to me anyway. She’s the most generous woman I’ve ever met.”

  “Yes,” Laura said, and he realized that she knew Jovieve better than he did; she would understand that tangled explanation. “She’s always been generous. She says it’s easy when you have so much to give. It’s harder when you have very little.”

  “And I suppose it counts more if you give when you have very little.”

  “No,” she said, surprising him. “It always counts. It’s just harder sometimes.”

  He nodded. He had no answer for that, either.

  She circled the room again, coming to a halt a few feet before him. “When are you leaving Semay?” she asked.

  “Tomorrow morning,” he said. “I’ve been here too long as it is, and it’s past time for me to get back.”

  “Why have you stayed, then?”

  He gazed up at her. Why did she think? “I thought I would get a last chance to see you,” he said.

  She spread her hands again. She was definitely smiling. “You see me,” she said. “But you’re like that student from Saville. Do I have to cry before you tell me what you think?”

  He came slowly to his feet. “I think you’re flirting with me,” he said, “and I can’t believe my ears.”

  She laughed. “I told you,” she said. “I could be merciless.”

  “And you want me to go back to New Terra astonished and insane.”

  “No,” she said softly. “I want you to make love to me.”

  He thought perhaps he had not heard her correctly. She came a step closer and automatically his hands went out to her. She settled inside his embrace and lifted her arms, deliberately, to wrap them about his neck.

  “What did you say?” he asked faintly.

  She had tilted her face up in mute invitation, but at his words muffled laughter broke from her. She swayed backward as if to leave him, but he tightened his hold.

  “What did you say?” he insisted.

  “I want you to make love to me,” she said, clearly and distinctly. “Now, tonight. If you would be willing.”

  For an answer, he kissed her, abruptly, drawing her body suddenly and tightly against his own. Something fiercer than rage washed over him, something cleaner than desire; he thought it might be exultation. She clung to him with a strength to equal his own. She covered his face with kisses when he drew back once to try and look into her eyes. Her whole body was extended as she stretched upward to meet his mouth with hers. He lifted her off her feet and he felt her laughing.

  “You’re too tall for me,” she whispered.

  “Won’t matter,” he whispered back.

  On the bed, he lay beside her, kissing her mouth, imprisoning her hands when she reached out to undo the buttons of his shirt. That one kiss in the spaceport had not been enough; if this was to be his one chance in his life to kiss her, he would prolong the occasion as long as he could.

  She wriggled and got her hands free, and this time she changed her tactics. It was her own clothes she reached for, slipping out of her tunic and her undergarments. Her hair fell across her body like starlight, illuminating its planes and angles. She returned his kisses with her mouth, but she reached for his hand, guided it to the arc of her hip and up her smooth stomach to her breast.

  “No fair,” he murmured.

  “I know.”

  He moved his mouth downward, then, covering her body with kisses. Her ribs were a patchwork of bruises, discolored even in this faint light. Her skin had the texture of a child’s, silken and unused; he was afraid the calluses on his hands would catch in that perfect fabric and mar it. He touched each individual black mark with his mouth.

  Her own hands were busy, seeking at his belt and buttons. It was easier to discard his clothing himself, so he sat up quickly and shed everything, not caring where it fell. When he lay back beside her, her skin was cool. He put his arms around her and kissed her forehead.

  “I never thought I would make love to a man again,” she said, speaking into his throat.

  He could not read the tone; was she afraid? He tried to pull back to see her eyes, but she burrowed her face more deeply into his neck. “You don’t have to,” he said. “We can stop.”

  “I don’t want to stop,” she said. She raised her face, so he kissed her again. “I just don’t know how much I may have forgotten.”

  He was surprised into a breathless laugh. “So far you seem to have remembered everything.”

  Her smile was guileless. “But how does the rest of it go?”

  He showed her. Not that it was necessary; she had remembered it all.

  * * *

  * * *

  He did not know what he had expected, but it had not occurred to him that she would leave him before morning. When she sat up to wrap herself in her tunic, he thought she was just cold.

  “Here,” he said, turning down the covers. “Get warm.”

  She shook her head. She was actually pulling the tunic over her head and buttoning it in place. “I have to be getting back,” she said. “They’ll worry if I’m out all night.”

  “Please stay,” he said.

  She retrieved her undergarments from the floor and began to pull them on. “I can’t.”

  He sat up beside her, watching her dress. He felt like a man who had been drugged, like the world revolved around him in convolutions he could not control. He did not know how he was going to be able to let her leave. “Just till morning?” he asked.

  She shook her head. Leaning over, she felt on the floor till she had retrieved his shirt and trousers. “If you can’t come with me,” she said, “I’ll walk back alone.”

  He shrugged into his clothes, still in a daze. She watched him. They were only sitting a few inches apart on the bed, but she had moved miles from him in spirit. Yet she still wore this night’s soft and open look, not the cool mask with which he was so familiar.

  “I think you’ve broken my heart,” he said when he was dressed.

  “I didn’t mean to.”

  “I love you,” he said. “Give me something.”

  She looked at him seriously. “You don’t mean you want a thing,” she said.

  “No. Tell me something I can remember.”

  She was silent for a long moment, thinking. “You want me to say I love you,” she said at last. “I can’t tell if that’s true or not. I know that since I met you, you have been able to—to almost reach behind my eyes and lay your hands upon my soul. I have felt that I could trust you. I’ve thought about you.” She smiled up at him, a shade of mischief in the smile. That was the look he imprinted on his brain for time everlasting. “Thought about you as a man, which a proper Fidele should never have done, not once, not for an instant. And I knew, before you said so, that you loved me, and it gave me a sort of bitter, fierce elation. And I wanted to come here tonight.”

  She lifted a hand as if to stroke his hair, let it fall without touching him. “And if I never see you again, I won’t forget you. And if I ever see you again, I will want you to make love to me once more. And I would like to think the same things are true for you.”

  “You know they are,” he whispered. “Whatever you’re feeling, know that I am feeling it too—have felt it, will feel it. When you think of me, say to yourself,
‘Cowen is thinking of me at this moment,’ because if that will give you any comfort, that will always be true. Every minute, every day, from here until I die.”

  She smiled and shook her head. “Not a promise anyone can keep,” she said.

  “Not a promise I can break,” he said. “Even if I wanted to.”

  She rose to her feet and held out her hand to him. “Come on,” she said. “Take me back.”

  He could stand up only because he wanted to stand next to her. He followed her from the room only to follow her. He could not believe his hands actually opened the car doors, turned the key in the ignition, moved the steering wheel to set them in motion back toward the temple.

  “Almost dawn,” she commented, after they had driven a few moments in silence.

  “Aurora del oro,” he said. It amazed him that he could speak. “Golden dawn.”

  “And another one tomorrow,” she said gently. “Life does go on.”

  It was hard for him to answer. He was concentrating on landmarks, staring at street signs, memorizing the texture of the sky and the feel of the night air, all the details of this final ride with Laura. This is the last time I will turn into the road that leads into the temple while she is sitting beside me, his brain said, stupidly giving him a running commentary. This is the last time I will see the shape of her profile by that particular street lamp. She had stopped making conversation as well. Her hand was laid across the door frame along the open window, the fingers spread wide. He could almost imagine she was holding herself in. But her face remained serene.

  Too soon, too soon, they arrived at the Fidele temple. He wanted to get out and walk her to the door, but he could not. He sat there, turned toward her, waiting helplessly. She had turned his way and was smiling at him, but the smile was sad.

  “Tell me how you want me to say goodbye,” she said.

  “I don’t want you to,” he said.

  She held out both hands to him, and he took them, trying not to hold them too tightly. “What time are you leaving?” she asked.

  “In a few hours. Flying myself to Fortunata, taking a starship from there to New Terra.”

  “And from New Terra? Where to?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. Wherever they send me.”

  She hesitated. “Will you let me know? That is—I don’t know—would you be willing to write to me?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “And have me write back?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Then I’ll do that.” She bowed her head over their clasped hands, then lifted them, one after the other, to kiss his fingers.

  “Ava te ama,” she said. “Para siempre, Ava te ama.”

  “Yo te amo,” he replied. “Also forever.”

  She smiled, nodded, and got out of the car.

  He watched her hurry up the walk, suddenly eager to return; waited till the door opened under her hand. She did not look back before the door closed behind her. Drake sat there for a long time, watching the door, waiting for her to return and say one last farewell, but she didn’t. She didn’t.

  He drove slowly back to the hotel, as slowly and as carefully as he would have driven if he had received some mortal wound in combat, fighting to stay conscious and alive. Back in his room, he moved aimlessly from window to chair to bed, unable to settle, unable even to think clearly. Jumbled images of the night pressed themselves against the interior of his head. Fragments of their conversation returned to him. He wanted to write them down, to make sure he never forgot them, but he knew he would never forget them anyway.

  Finally he headed for the shower, stripping off all his clothes and leaving them carelessly on the floor as he crossed the room. In the bathroom, he stood a moment before the full-length mirror, staring at his body. Here and there were marks from Laura’s hands and Laura’s mouth. He placed his fingers over a small red blotch at the join of his neck and shoulder, remembering when she had done that to him. He wanted by the pressure of his hand to burn the mark in place, brand himself, in fact. He wanted to feel that primitive kiss forever.

  It was only after he had stood there a good ten minutes that his eyes lifted to his face, and he realized that he was crying. Had been crying for some time. It surprised him. Something else he thought he had forgotten how to do.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  It was bitterly cold on New Terra. Most people walking the streets wore the tissue-thin, translucent, form-fitting suits that had no equal as devices to keep the chill out and the body warmth in. Drake, however, preferred to wear the long olive-green wool coat that had once belonged to his father, and which he usually kept in his storage locker at the Transient’s Dorm. It was not as impervious to cold, but he thought it had a little more style.

  He thrust his hands into the deep pockets and shouldered his way against the wind. He had nowhere in particular he had to go, so he walked back from Comtech Central instead of taking an aircab. In fact, the cold that seeped through his wool coat didn’t bother him. He felt that his body was still radiating the accumulated desert heat of Semay, and that it would be months or even years before he had dissipated it all.

  He had been on New Terra four days now, after a return trip that had taken almost as long as the mission itself. Although he had faithfully filed his report the day he arrived, today he had made a return trip to the assignment bureau to make a sudden request for six months’ leave. He had been thinking about it for weeks now, and he knew where he wanted to go. Ramindon.

  He had even told Jovieve so, in a long, rambling letter he wrote her to beguile some of the stupendous tedium of the journey to New Terra. “It’s been thirty years since I’ve seen my aunt,” he wrote. “I don’t even know if she’s alive. I just thought I would look for her.”

  That was not all he had thought over and committed to the paper marked with Jovieve’s name, though he was not sure he would ever send the letter. He had been mulling over the issues of religion and faith, the possible existence of the gods, their duplicity, their unreliability, their magnificence.

  “I don’t know that I came to believe,” he wrote, printing the words by hand because it was too easy to send a stel-letter electronically and he wanted to ponder over this a bit longer before he sent the missive on. “I came to believe that belief is possible. Or—better than that—that to believe does not make you a doomed fool, as it made my father and my family. That there may be a god, though not everyone knows how to worship wisely. That there will come a time in any person’s life that he will want something badly enough to pray for it, because only divine providence can bring it about. Does this make me a believer? I don’t know. I don’t think so. Makes me a hoper, maybe. All comes to the same thing in the end, anyway.”

  He had been on New Terra four days and he still had not sent the letter. Not that it mattered. Jovieve would know what was in his heart without being told.

  * * *

  * * *

  But letter-writing could only take up so much time, and there were so many hours to get through. The days had been bad enough, but the nights were almost unlivable. Since he had arrived on New Terra, Drake had spent most of his nights—and late nights and early dawns—on Scarlatti, the artificial moon that circled New Terra and served as its mammoth spaceport. Scarlatti was infamous throughout the federated system as a dangerous place to hang around, for it received ships and visitors from the entire civilized universe, and the mix was often uneasy. The highest percentage of its population at any given time consisted of Moonchildren off-duty—and a more unpredictable, uncontrollable and violent subspecies of man it was impossible to find.

  Drake was not, as a rule, fond of Scarlatti, but since he had returned from Semay it was the one place he could find some relief from the pictures in his head. He had learned, on that impossibly slow star voyage from Fortunata, the pitfalls of solitude, the dangers of the untenanted hour. The instant his mind was not actively engaged i
n some other pursuit, thoughts of Laura took over. He envisioned the soft loam of his brain as a stretch of porous sand along the sea, and all the events of the day were laid down as by giant feet leaving prints on the beach. As soon as the feet were lifted, the water came rushing in again to flood the empty space; and Laura was that vast, uncontainable, ever-present ocean.

  So he sought company, he who had never been much of a man for fellowship. On the voyage, he had struck up friendships that led to late-night card games and sports tournaments in the ship’s gym. Back on New Terra, he had joined the Moonchild community in the Transient’s Dorm, participating in the mess-style dinners and taking the nightly commuter hop to Scarlatti. He could drink with the best, scrap with the rowdiest, and fight alongside the most reckless. These attributes made him welcome in any Moonchild enclave, and he ran with a fast crowd those first few days back at Interfed headquarters.

  Tonight was no different. During dinner he sat with the group of seven or eight young officers who had come to constitute his friends. There were three women and four men present. Despite the outrageous, multicolored civilian clothing, despite the differences in shape and voice and sex, they were all pretty much interchangeable to Drake: smart, fast, tough, bored and ready. He couldn’t even keep their names straight unless he concentrated.

  “Hey, our pet Sayo’s back from Comtech,” one of the men greeted him as he joined their table. This particular Moonchild was always called Doberman, though Drake was certain he must have another name. “You sure your shit isn’t too hot for you to sit with us?”

  “I’m spying,” he said easily, sitting down next to a redhead with a vibrant green scarf wound through her flaming hair. “My new assignment. Find out what the troops are really thinking.”

  “The troops are thinking that the crap they serve at mealtime could be better used to fertilize the fields on Kansas or Argosy.”

  “Oh, quit bitching, Halvert! Jesus. If it’s not one thing, it’s another.”