"Deal, Alyaca. Perone." He swallowed, trying to hide his embarrassment. Perhaps he wouldn't have felt so awkward, except for the fact that she was so attractive. Absurdly, he wanted to make a good impression.
She was watching him, with a grin playing at her mouth.
"Miss—I mean, Alyaca. Why—why are you going to all this trouble?"
"No trouble."
"But still, you're—"
"Does there have to be a reason?"
"No—yes. No."
"So—there we are. Would you like another roast?"
He nodded. For a few moments, while she went to refill their cups, he sat quietly and watched the boats kiting back and forth across the lake. She set a fresh cup before him and sat down again. They watched the lake together, until he realized that she was watching him. He blushed and started to look her up and down, then caught himself and turned his gaze quickly back to the window. He concentrated very hard on a bright blue kiteboat which was skimming above the water, and hoped that she hadn't noticed. "That looks like fun," he said inaudibly.
She was relaxed, sipping her roast. He tried to conceal his agitation. "Hey, really," he blurted. "Why?"
"Why what?"
"You know. Why are you going out of your way to be nice to me?" No outsider was ever like this.
She thought for a moment before answering. "Well," she said. "If there has to be a reason, let's just say that I had a friend, and he left to become a rigger. That was a long time ago. But I thought, well—maybe it would be nice for me to be nice to another rigger." She looked at him, and this time he thought she was embarrassed. "That an okay reason?"
"Sure," he said. But it sounded false. She did not look to him like the kind of person who would have been involved with the kind of person who would have become a rigger.
Involved? he chided himself. She just said he was a friend. Now don't start making it something—
"Gev."
"Yes?"
"Do you want to stay? Because if not, you should be going now to catch the flyer. I wouldn't want you to miss it on account of me."
"Oh no, no, it wouldn't be on account of you. Anyway—" He looked at her and looked at the window. It was quite clean, but when one looked carefully, one could see a few small haze marks right down near the bottom, where perhaps someone had put his foot.
So did he want to stay or not? Conflicting urges knotted in his gut until he thought, well, he didn't want to get up this very instant and go running to the flyer, and it couldn't hurt anything to stay for the day. If he got lonely and depressed here, would it be any better back at the Guild quarters?
"I could show you around a little if you'd like to stay."
Impulsively, he grinned and nodded.
"Good! Now I have to go up to the office for a few minutes, and you can call the lodge from there and see about getting yourself a room." She put her cup down and got to her feet and, quite unsure of what he was doing, Carlyle followed.
While Alyaca was in her office, Carlyle called the nearest of the two lodges. Unfortunately, their accommodations were filled, and were in fact reserved for the next three weeks. Disappointed, he called the other lodge. They were less popular; they were only reserved for the next nine days. He signed off gloomily. Well, it wasn't as though he had planned to stay here in the first place, so he wasn't really losing anything. He could take the evening flyer back to Jarvis.
The gloom inside his head was so deep he couldn't see out. He didn't even notice Alyaca standing in front of him.
"Gev?" she said, for what must have been the third time.
"Oh! Hi," he said disconsolately.
"What's the matter?"
"No rooms."
She looked perplexed for a moment, then said, "Okay. Wait just a second." She disappeared back into the office. A minute later she came back and said, "All set. I've gotten you one of the Kloss guest rooms at the Taratelle."
"Is that all right?"
"Sure," she said, her eyes twinkling. "Irwin keeps three suites there—all the companies do that—and none of them are in use now. Don't worry, Irwin won't mind. He has to pay for them anyway."
He could hardly argue with that, so he went with her over to the Taratelle, which was a luxurious structure near the lake. Alyaca left him, saying that she'd be tied up for the next couple of hours. So he went up to see his room, which turned out to be a dazzling suite of three rooms. Dazed, he came back down and went out to see the lake and the beaches.
The late morning air was mild and the sun bright, and the sky deep and clear. The front terrace gave way to a stretch of twine-grass lawn, and then cream-colored sand sloping to the water's edge. He walked along the sand toward the boathouse, on a lagoon connected to the lake. A sailboat was moving out of the lagoon, past a kiteboat, which was heeled over at an impossible angle. That kiteboating looked interesting, he decided. He wondered if Alyaca would go with him.
Questions sprang into his mind with that thought. Such an attractive woman—just "being nice to a rigger"? Why? With what motive? Was it just possible that she found him attractive? His blood rose to his skin. Alyaca with a rigger? With him?
The notion was absurd.
Hold it, Carlyle, he thought. She was only being friendly. She had merely been courteous to him, and certainly there was nothing wrong in that.
He let the question wash over him for a minute, and then his real troubles rushed back. He had gotten nowhere in his efforts to connect his future with his past, and really he should be back at the Guild trying to see if anyone had a lead on the whereabouts of Janofer or Legroeder or Skan. He should be doing something.
He went to the lodge and found a call booth. It took him three minutes to get Walter Freyling on the phone. "Hello, Gev. I heard you were out at Lake Taraine. Are you having any success?"
"Not yet." He explained his situation to Freyling and said, "What I was hoping was that you might have found something on Janofer or Skan or Legroeder by now." His hope rose as he spoke. Surely something had been learned by now.
Freyling gave just the slightest nod to acknowledge Carlyle's hope, but his words were a gentle letdown. "No, I'm afraid I don't know anything more than the day before yesterday. So far we've come up with nothing beyond their original departure assignments. The only other thing is that I've issued a request for any staffer or rigger who knew your friends to come see me, but that hasn't turned up anything either." Freyling's eyes moved away from the phone for a moment, then he nodded and looked back at Carlyle. "Nothing on that missing letter, either. It seems fairly certain that Janofer Lief did not leave the letter on deposit here. Do you think she might have simply forgotten to leave it for you?"
Carlyle nodded reluctantly. It was all too possible. "I'm staying here for a few days, then, until Mr. Kloss comes back. Taratelle Lodge. Could you send out some of my clothes? And call me if—if—"
"We will," Freyling said. "Good luck, and enjoy yourself. Good-bye."
Enjoy yourself?
* * *
By the time Alyaca met him, he had become so edgy he found himself wishing that Cephean were here to complain and be temperamental.
She apologized for being late as she steered him into the restaurant for lunch. "That office is supposed to be just a front for vacationing, but there's always something coming up anyway. Did you get a good look around the place?"
"Uh-huh." He hesitated. "Do you know how to sail one of those kiteboats?"
"Sort of," she said. "Do you want to take one out?"
He shrugged. "Looks like it could be fun, if you know what you're doing."
"Oh, they're fun even if you don't."
"Does that mean—would you want to do it?"
She nodded with that grin playing at her lips again. Then she changed the subject and got him to order lunch, and they talked throughout the meal. Afterwards they went down to the boathouse and signed out a kiteboat.
The cockpit was just large enough for two people in fairly close quarters. In t
he vertical position they were riding about a meter and a half above water, with the feeling that nothing was holding them up. The keel-strut which bound them to the submerged tie-anchor unit was completely out of sight from inside the cockpit; and though in fact the keel-strut and tie-anchor held them down rather than up, that fact seemed like a lie when one watched other kiteboats gliding past. The levitators which actually held the boat in the air were mounted beneath the cockpit.
Alyaca got in first and took the front seat. "You can do the piloting," she said.
Carlyle looked up at the kite-sail buffeting over his head, freewheeling on the mast, and he picked up the lines which controlled the dump flaps at the top of the sail. The boat, he knew, was controlled primarily by shifting weight in the cockpit and changing the heel angle of the sail and strut, but the flaps presumably did something, too. He shook his head. "No." He handed the lines to Alyaca. "You drive. And show me how to do it." He couldn't help being embarrassed (a star pilot, afraid to handle a two-meter kiteboat?), but he was sure that he would only capsize them, and that would be a lot more embarrassing.
"All right," she said. "But we have to switch positions." They shifted, Carlyle tensing as she brushed close to him. "Cast us free," she said to the attendant. Before Carlyle had a chance to protest, they were drifting away from the dock. "Remember what I said," she cautioned, "I don't know exactly how to do this. So hang on."
That wasn't quite the way he remembered hearing her say it, but he kept his mouth shut and hung on. The wind shifted suddenly, and the boat pitched backward. "Lean forward!" Alyaca cried. He scrambled up on his seat and leaned out over the bow. Alyaca hunched forward and pulled the flaps, and slowly the boat leveled. The wind surged and pitched them forward, and they both scrambled to shift again, but the wind had them, and they kited very fast toward the lagoon bank, the tie-anchor causing only a slight drag at its angled position just under the water surface. "To the right a little," Alyaca said, playing the flap lines uncertainly. Carlyle leaned right, but it was instantly clear that she had meant her right, not his. They slewed, and finally Alyaca got them into a right turn, which was what she'd wanted; heeling perilously, they sped through the channel and out into the lake.
"Damn!" he said as they cleared the end of the channel. His fingers were clenched onto the edge of the cockpit. Alyaca grinned and shifted her weight experimentally, trying to gain more control over the boat. They were heeled forward and flying fast, the wind in their hair, a vibration reaching them from the strut and tie-anchor rushing through the water—but now they had clear space ahead of them. Carlyle decided that they were moving correctly, though it felt more dangerous than dashing past the lightyears. "Are we doing okay?" he asked.
Alyaca fiddled with the lines, squinting up at the sail, and nodded. "To the left, not too much. My left."
They slowly rolled and came around to the port, to a more windward heading. The wind was at their beam now, and Alyaca took a lever beneath the gunwale, which Carlyle had not noticed before, and moved it back a few centimeters. She explained, "That controls the swivel of the sail at the mast. You have to really hitch it around when you're sailing close into the wind—otherwise you'd never get home."
At that moment they both leaned too far to the port-side, and the cockpit rocked over as though on a wheel. They threw themselves to the starboard to compensate, and the cockpit hesitated, then heeled suddenly to the starboard, and Carlyle yelled, "We're going over!" The starboard gunwale dipped close to the water, and he hung on desperately, sure that he would fall—and Alyaca was hanging on, too, except that she was shrieking with laughter—and the moment that the boat hung there on its side seemed an eternity to him, but slowly, slowly it lifted up and righted itself. The kite-sail swung madly back and forth, but it, too, stabilized, and then the boat pitched forward, and Carlyle was straining to avoid falling backward over the bow, and they were thundering forward at top speed, Alyaca laughing like a lunatic.
"What . . . !" he shouted. He gulped, grabbed, and shouted again. "What's—so—funny?"
She leaned back, gasping, until he was ready to plead—he was scared—and then she cried, "Don't worry! We can't go over!"
"What?"
"We can't go over! The levitators will keep us up! They'll—" Then their balance went off again, and water was rushing dizzyingly past Carlyle's head—and suddenly he too was laughing uncontrollably, though he was nearly upside down.
When they reached the far end of the lake, Alyaca, with some effort, got them turned on a reverse tack. Carlyle made a cautiously sarcastic remark about the likelihood of their getting back, and she nearly dumped them in reply. Their return took an hour and a half and many zigzags, and they decided to quit while they were ahead.
They docked the boat and spent the rest of the afternoon walking. They walked through the cedaric groves bordering the east shore of the lake—which immediately made Carlyle wonder about Cephean—and they sat on a ledge by the shore farther up, and they talked. Carlyle got to thinking about Janofer and all the rest, and that made him moody, and after a while Alyaca prodded him into talking about it.
He had already told her about his most recent voyage, but this was the first time he had talked about his life on Lady Brillig. "We were very close friends. It was just the flying of the ship that we couldn't quite get together on. I couldn't, I mean." That wasn't too clear to Alyaca, but he couldn't explain it easily. It was the intimate blending of fantasies and memories and real abilities that was the elusive goal. "Sometimes you can manage that better with people you're not so close to, so personal troubles don't get in the way." But that wasn't what he wanted; that wasn't the ideal.
"What about that other ship?" she asked, turning to face him at an angle, the sun glowing on one side of her face. "You did all right on that one, didn't you?"
"Sedora? Yes, but those men weren't really my friends in any close way. And then later, with Cephean—that was more battle than cooperation."
"He sounds very interesting." Her eyes were golden brown, fixed intently on him.
"Who, Cephean?"
"Mm-hm."
"Well—" He shrugged, then said, "Yes, he's interesting. I like him, but it's hard to feel just one way about him. Anyway, I don't know if I'll ever see him again, or if I'll ever get to really know what goes on in his mind."
Her eyes closed and opened, still intent. "You're interesting, too," she said.
He swallowed. "You know, what really gets to me, though, is that all of them left. All three of them. Not one of them stayed behind to meet me after Lady Brillig was sold. And Janofer, with that letter she said she wrote and then she didn't even leave it for me!" Blood was rushing through his temples, beating. He shouldn't be spilling all this to someone he hardly knew. But she was interested, and he felt better talking about it.
"I guess," Alyaca said, "they all had to carry on with their lives. Maybe they thought you'd want to stay with your new crew."
His throat stopped up on that. It was probably true, what she had just said. But, he thought, I told them I was coming, they knew all along. They even helped me fly the ship so I could make it back!
But they hadn't. His fantasy-memory of them had, but they hadn't.
Suddenly he began trembling, first at the elbows and the back of his neck, then in the shoulders, and finally through his entire body. He started choking quietly.
"Gev—"
He couldn't answer. He didn't look at her.
"Gev. Hey, it'll be—" But she didn't finish. She leaned forward and touched a slim hand to his shoulder and massaged him gently; and when that didn't comfort him she took his hand and held him by one hand and one shoulder. He felt foolish—sure that she didn't really understand why he felt this way—but her touch was soothing, and he began to laugh sadly. He saw that her eyes were wide and serious, and then his vision blurred for a moment with tears from his laughter. He blinked and focused on the sensation of her touch. Strangely, her face seemed to come into clearer focus no
w—eyebrows crunched around peering eyes, lips not quite closed, hair falling forward throwing shadows over her cheeks—a face he could almost fall in love with.
If only she were a rigger.
* * *
They spent the evening quietly in the lodge, dining late. Alyaca had met him in the restaurant, after changing. She now wore a gown of tan and pastel orange wrappings, cut low on the left side and across part of the back. She was so beautiful he was almost afraid to be seen with her. He wore simple light pants and a maroon-trimmed tunic with its cowl pushed back. They sat in a quiet corner of the dining room and looked out at the night, at the lake gleaming under stars and the pale light of the smaller of the two moons, and mostly he listened as she talked. She mentioned that there had been a RiggerGuild strike several months earlier, shutting down all traffic into and out of the Verjol system. He had heard nothing about it at the Guild Haven; but that was not entirely surprising. The Guild policy was to command a strike swiftly, in need, and to forget it as swiftly after amends had been made. The causative party in this case had been a company based in a neighboring system; but it had violated Code in dealing with riggers shipping into Chaening's World. Carlyle felt awkward learning about this from Alyaca, especially since she worked for a company which probably was hurt by the strike, but she assured him that from what she knew the strike had been justified.
Star Rigger's Way Page 11
