A Liaden Universe Constellation: Volume I

by Sharon Lee

  He looked at her then and his eyes were hungry; she doubted that hers were not.

  “I’ll check the boards, Cyra, and make sure that you have room to work this time, too.”

  CYRA TASTED THE SALT on her lips, and nearly wept as she relaxed against him. He was so inexhaustible and inventive a lover, she thought, that perhaps she should have invited the office manager to help out—and she laughed at the silliness, and he heard her, Bell with his hands still willing and eager, and his quirky Terran words dragged out of him in the midsts.

  “Now I’m funny. Oh, woe, oh woe . . .”

  She could see him in the half-light he preferred for lovemaking; just bright enough that the mirrors on the wall might tell an interesting tale to a glancing eye. She remembered that he’d brought beeswax candles, along with wine and flowers that first evening after his very first return, when he’d somehow parlayed her concern—

  She laughed again, this time finding his hair and beard wooly near her face, and she gently moved to brush them orderly. He had something more on his mind though, as her hands came in contact with his cheek; but she held him a moment and he was willing to be calmed.

  Of course, she should not stroke his beard and his cheek; she should not kiss his nose, nor lay her palm on his face, this Terran who never knew the taboo of it . . .

  “Let’s trade,” he said, very gently. “A story for a story, a touch for a touch.”

  Then he laid his hand on her cheek, spreading his wide hand so that his thumb and his forefinger spanned her face.

  It was late in the night, very nearly morning; the sounds from the road were not yet impinging on their lair. His breathing, and hers, and his touch.

  “I,” he said after a moment. “ I cannot go to the Healers, because when someone in my family is cured, we loose the art. My father, my grandfather, my uncle—myself. I tried, there once—”

  He paused, brushed her hair away from her eyes, kissed her on her nose, covered the marks on her face as if he would wipe them away. “After that painting was stolen from me I could have been locked up forever there, but for the good luck of a scout’s intercession. So, I thought I should get over the crash. I spoke to a doctor and he seemed to make sense, and they gave me a therapy and drugs and an implant . . .”

  “Here!”

  He guided her hand and held it against that long scraggly scar on his leg. She’d found that scar before, but never dared question—there were things lovers were not to ask, after all; the Code was clear on that.

  “Three months,” he said very quietly. “Let me say about two of my usual cycles, though they change sometimes—be warned!—and I had not even the slightest twinge of being able to paint, and what I drew was stick figures and bad circles and patterns, and I spoke politely to people and one night I went home and picked up a cooking knife and thought that I would cut my throat.”

  He took her hand and placed it under his beard, where it was just above his throat, and let her feel the pulse of him, and the smaller, more ragged scar.

  “I’d made a start, actually, when I realized that what I wanted was not my throat cut, but my art back. And so I took the knife and opened my leg and took the thirty-four months’ worth of implant that was left out of me, and I washed it down the drain.”

  She stared at him, at once fascinated and horrified, not knowing what to say.

  “My cousin,” he went on, after a moment. “My cousin Darby. He took the cure and has stayed on it. He’s married, he goes to work, comes home, goes to work, comes home—and I have the last piece of sculpture he did before the implant. He was brilliant. He made me look like a bumbling student. But it is gone. Five years and he can’t draw a face much less model one; he can’t see the images in the clouds!”

  He brushed his lips over the mark under her left eye, then kissed the one under her right eye.

  “You know,” he said quietly, “you are beautiful. I have known beautiful ladies, my friend, and you are very beautiful.”

  The realization hit her—what he would ask, in exchange for this tale from his soul. Very nearly, she panicked, but he caught her mouth with his, and in a few moments she relaxed against him.

  “My friend,” she said, “you can be as cruel as you are wonderful. To cut yourself so—the pain! But I am not so brave as you. I took the cuts from my delm, in punishment—cut with the blade my family keeps from the early days. Then I wept and cried, and was cast from the House . . .”

  “Does this person yet live?” Not in his deepest despair had she heard his voice so cold.

  Cyra looked into his face and saw he meant it—that he contemplated Balance or revenge or—

  “No, Bell, you cannot. My delm was doing duty. I was cut to remind me and to warn others.”

  He said nothing, but kissed her face again, gently, waiting.

  “We are not as rich a house as some others, Clan Nosko; and my delm, my uncle, is not so easy a spender as you or I. As I was youngest of the daughters of the house—and lived at the clan seat, it being close to my shop—it fell my duty sometimes to spend an afternoon and a night, or sometimes two, doing things needful. And so . . .”

  Here she paused a moment, gently massaging Bell’s neck under the beard, imagining all too well . . .

  “So it was,” she went on very quietly, with the blood pounding in her ears, “that I was briefly in charge of the nursery, the nurse having been given a discharge for cost or cause, I know not. I had put the child Brendar to bed; a likely boy come to the clan through my sister’s second marriage. I changed him once, but he was otherwise biddable. I was trying for my Master Jeweler’s license, so I was at study with several books. I read, and read more, hearing no fuss. Then my sister came home, and the child was not asleep, but had died sometime in the night.”

  There was quiet then.

  Finally, he kissed her again, each scar, very carefully.

  “I’d thought there must be more, but I see the story now, and I am near speechless. The child died of an accident—

  “My incompetence and negligence . . .”

  He pressed a finger to her lips so hard it nearly hurt.

  “I am a fool, Cyra, my beautiful friend. I thought it was your own anger, or your own desire, that placed those marks on your face; that you had rebelled against the rules of this world and even now wore them as badges. That they were inflicted by your family to humiliate and destroy you never came to mind . . .”

  He brushed the hair out of her face again.

  “I will paint your picture one day, I promise. Your face will be known as among the most beautiful of this world. And they will see that they have lost you, for I’ll not let them have you back!”

  She had no quick answer for this, and then he said, “Here!” and placed her hand again on the long leg scar.

  She felt the welt there—he laughed, nibbled on her earlobe, and moved her hand a bit, murmuring, “Now, Lady, here if you wish to be pleased!”

  She did, and she was.

  THREE DAYS LATER, Cyra was not so very pleased.

  To begin, Bell had become inspired sometime in the night of their pillow talk and when she awoke alone in the dawn she found him sketching like a madman on her couch, barely willing to drag himself away from his work long enough to share a breakfast with her.

  He packed his sketches and walked with her to the shop, his eyes as elsewhere as his mind. Twice she had to repeat herself while she spoke with him, and then he disappeared into the back room to work as soon as they reached the store.

  In the afternoon he had rushed out of the back room, complaining that she’d not told him the time, and stormed out, on his way to a lecture he particularly wanted to see. Worse, he stormed back, having left his sketchbook and wallet, and dashed off with nary a backward glance. When he didn’t return by closing—he sometimes went to discussion groups after the lectures—she’d not expected him to come by her apartment, and he didn’t, which grated mightily.

  In the morning, he wandered in ver
y late, hung over and exhausted, explaining that he’d met a pack of scouts at the lecture and talked with them until the barkeep announced shift-change at dawn. He was animated, nearly wildly so, explaining that he might “have a line on” the scout who had helped him at Djymbolay; that his conversations of the evening had revealed that he owed Balance to that scout; that he might have an idea for yet another painting; and that when he had more money there was a world he’d have to travel to and—

  “I have an appointment, Bell,” Cyra said abruptly. “Tell me later!”

  She rushed out the door, barely confident—and barely caring—that he’d heed the advent of a customer.

  Her appointment was with her tongue—had she stayed and heard more she surely would have said hurtful words.

  So she walked, nearly oblivious to the sounds of transports—more this day than others since a portion of the port would be closed late in the afternoon for some final tricksy bit of work for the expansion—and found herself several blocks from her usual streets, in a very old section, where the buildings and the people were barely above tumbledown.

  Surprisingly, she saw Debbie-the-pastry-girl hurrying from one of the least kept brick-fronts; Number 83 it was, a regrettable four-story affair sporting ungainly large windows and peeling paint. The peaked, slate roof suggested that the building was several hundred Standards old, and it looked like it had no repair since the day it was built.

  Heart falling, she reached into her card case, and removed the slip of paper she had from Bell the day he’d agreed to share his direction with her: Number 83 Corner Four Ave, Room 15.

  A shuttle’s long rumble began then; she could feel the sidewalk atremble as she watched the pastry girl’s blue-and-green hair disappear in the distance. Also on the paper was the pad combination, and with the whine of the shuttle rising behind her, and then over, she stood, and for a moment was tempted to enter Number 83 and find Room 15, open the door, and see if—if . . .

  She turned and walked all the way home for lunch, grasping the paper tightly in her fist.

  When she got back to the store, calmer, but heartsore, there was Bell’s back vaguely visible in the back room. He heard her enter and yelled out over his shoulder “Any luck?”

  “No,” she said, quietly. “No luck, Bell.”

  She slept badly alone, and the rumble of the transports, joined with the not entirely foreign sounds of proctor-jitneys blaring horns as they answered a nighttime summons hadn’t helped.

  And now, on her store step across the road in the dawn light?

  Debbie, cuddling Bell’s good jacket in her arms.

  “BELL’S OK,” THE GIRL said quickly, shaking her absurd hair back from a remarkably grimy face. “He wasn’t bleeding all that much and the medic said he’ll do. The proctor, now, he’ll be okay, too, other’n his pride’s pretty well hurt by getting really whomped—I mean decked in front of all his buddies. But there’s gonna be some fines to pay, I guess, and he’s gotta have a place to live and—”

  Cyra stood staring, hard put to sort this tumbled message, clinging at last to the simple, “Bell’s OK . . .”

  Debbie was looking at her with desperate eyes. “Cyra, you’re a lucky girl, you know? But you’re gonna have to get someone down to the jail to get him out. He’s not the kind of guy that’ll get along there, and hey—what it’ll take is ‘a citizen of known melant’i, moral character, and resources.’ I sure don’t qualify for the resources part, the melant’i I ain’t got and I’m not sure if I qualify for the character part . . .”

  Cyra wasn’t too sure about the character part either, though the fact that the girl was here with so many of Bell’s belongings argued for her. Arrayed on the step was a ship bag with “Belansium” printed on a tag, four or five studies—paintings and sketches of a woman, who Cyra realized must be herself by the detail of the face—nude in different positions, some small odds and ends in boxes, a small paint kit, a picnic box . . .

  “Tell me again,” Cyra demanded. “After we get these inside. From the beginning. I’ll make tea.”

  DEBBIE RUSHED OFF while the tea was heating and returned with pastries, and a damp towel, which she was using on the dust and grime on her bare arms.

  “I was having company over and wasn’t much paying attention to other stuff when I heard one of the transports go over. Things started trembling and—well, wasn’t at the stage I thought, then the next thing I know there was a big cherunk kind of noise and the front wall just fell out into the street. The whole place got shaky and we all got out. Bell come dashing out from his room carrying something big and square and rushing down the steps with it whiles bricks and roof-stuff falling all around.

  “We was outside standing and staring—most everyone out by then, when the whole building kind of slanted over backwards and leaned into the alley. My guy, he’s pretty smart, he’d grabbed a bottle of wine on the way out, and we all had a sip, and when it looked like there wasn’t any more up to fall down we went in to see what we could save and to make sure no one was inside—and a bunch of snortheads showed up. One grabbed one of them sketches of you and yelled for some of the others—

  “That Bell picked up part of a drainpipe and started hitting and bashing at them guys, and then my guy hit one of ’em with the empty bottle, and then the proctors showed up and Bell wasn’t letting no one near his stuff. Proctor kind of waved something in his direction and Bell did this neat little dance step and brought his hand out and lifted the proctor right off his feet. Right quick they was all on him . . . and I had to explain—see it was my Ma’s building, and all—but they still got Bell for drunk-and-disorderly, striking a proctor, and I don’t know what else. And I can’t speak for him!”

  “Neither can I,” Cyra said. admitted, staring down into her tea and trying not to think of Bell at the hottest part of his cycle, locked away from his paints and pens. “Neither can I.”

  “YOU HAVE ARRIVED,” the receptionist told Cyra, “at a bad time. I have no one to spare to listen to your story, as interesting as it must be. The scouts are not in the habit of interfering with the proctors on matters of Low Port drunk-and-disorderly . . .”

  Cyra glared. “He was not drunk—not at this time in the cycle. Disorderly—he did strike a proctor, but—” she stopped, suddenly struck by a thought, and came near to the counter again.

  “Have you a scout named Jon?” she asked.

  “Only several,” a female voice said from close behind her. Cyra spun, face heating. The scout tipped her head, eyes bright and manic, as the eyes of scout’s so often were. “Would you wish us to know that it is a scout named Jon whom the proctors discovered to be drunk and disorderly? I don’t find that impossible. Why, I myself have been drunk and disorderly in Low Port. It is excellent practice for the dining situations found on several of the outworlds.”

  “Captain sig’Radia . . .” the receptionist began, but the scout waved a hand.

  “Peace. Someone has arrived with time to spare for a story about a drunk and disorderly in Low Port.” She cocked a whimsical eyebrow in Cyra’s direction, looking her full in the face, as if the disfiguring scars were invisible, or non-existent. “The acoustics of this hallway are quite amazing, but allow me to be certain—I did hear you say ‘struck a proctor’?”

  Cyra admitted it dejectedly. “But it is not the scout Jon who did this,” she continued, feeling an utter fool. “I had merely thought, since my friend—Bell—was known to the scout . . .”

  “Ah. And something more of your friend—Bell—if you please? For I do not believe, despite our abundance of Jons, that we have any scouts named Bell.”

  Cyra bit her lip. “He is a Terran—an artist. Last night, the apartment house he lived in fell down, and—”

  “Now I have the fellow!” Captain sig’Radia cried, and grinned with every appearance of delight. “What we heard on the Port is that he knocked down a prepared, on-duty proctor, barehanded. Quite an accomplishment, though I don’t expect the proctors think s
o. No sense of humor, proctors.”

  “It must be unpleasant,” Cyra murmured, “after all, to be knocked down.”

  “Oh, wonderfully unpleasant,” the scout agreed happily. “Especially with the rest of your team looking on.”

  “Yes,” Cyra bit her lip, wondering how possibly to explain the cycles, and the tragedy of Bell being without his paints now. “If you please, Bell—it is very bad . . .” she stammered to a halt.

  “Complicated, eh?” the scout said sympathetically. “Come, let us be private.”

  She took Cyra’s arm as if they were long friends, and escorted her out of the main room and down a hall.

  “Ah, here we are,” the scout said, and put her palm against a door, which opened willingly, utterly silent.

  The lights came up as they walked down the room to the table and chairs. Cyra looked about, marveling at the size of the chamber, her eye caught and held by a projection on the front wall—a planetscape, it was, showing a sun and a great-ringed planet in the distance and a close up portion of bluish-green atmosphere—

  Cyra gasped, recognition going through her like a bolt, though she had never seen this painting, but the composition, the eloquence the work—it could only be—

  “That is Djymbolay, is it not?” She asked the scout captain, her voice shaking.

  The woman looked at her in open wonder. “It is, indeed. How did you know?”

  “My friend Bell painted the original of that.” She used her chin to point.

  The captain looked, face very serious now. “I see. You will then be comforted to know that the original is safe in the World Room.” She looked back to Cyra, her smile crooked.

  “And your friend Bell is by extrapolations no more nor no less than Jon dea’Cort’s glorious madman. Allow me to see if the scout is within our reach.”