by Wil McCarthy
“No.” He shook his head. “Not you. Shall we continue the sweep?”
She leaned forward, put a hand on his knee. “Miguel, will we see the planet?”
“I don't know. I have more pull now, as an officer, and even before all this hypermass stuff the schedule had us in system for almost a standard year. But the way things have gone... I guess I kind of doubt it.”
“Well, if we go,” she said, “I hope we can go together. I have seen Mars, and Luna, but never... with a friend.”
Miguel returned her smile tiredly. “Shore leave with the bossman, eh? It sounds nice. I hope we get the chance.”
She nodded, taking her hand back, putting her smile away. “I know, I know. Back to the instrument sweep, right?”
“Yes.”
And they turned back to it, Miguel more dispirited than ever. His interest in Beth Lahler had grown, even as his awe for the mystic ellipsoids had begun to wane. His leg still tingled where she had touched it. Useless! Self-destructive! Lord, weren't there enough mysteries dangling out of his reach already?
Sullenly, he pushed his awareness up into the link harness, and let the more orderly mind of thing-Barta take over the analysis for him. Once this shift was over, he'd head for his quarters and shower up three days' water ration, on the coldest possible setting!
~~~
“So,” Tom said, “You have everything?”
Yezu rolled his eyes. “I possess almost nothing, and most of that is still aboard Introspectia. What can I possibly have forgotten?”
A new ship, the Rockhammer, had arrived at the centrokrist mines with the equipment Tom and Dade had agreed on, laughable instruments of Unuan manufacture which would somehow have to suffice. With all the work and turmoil going on in the face of all these grand discoveries, he supposed he should feel lucky that anyone was worrying about his research at all. And yet, he did not.
And now, even Yezu would abandon him! Rockhammer would proceed next to the Aurelo, the debris ring surrounding the Lacigo/Malsato pair, to drop off more pathetic equipment for the researchers at the small centrokrist deposits there. And Yezu would go with it.
“I've basically finished here,” Yezu had said. “And nobody at the Aurelo deposits has my background in...”
Bah. Yezu had abandoned an entire life back on Earth, and by comparison Wedge certainly offered little to hold him. Tom didn't even know why he'd tried to argue about it.
“You've forgotten to say goodbye,” he said now to his friend.
“No, I haven't.” Yezu skated forward and, shockingly, opened his arms to embrace Tom. “I shall miss your company.”
Tom stiffened, acutely uncomfortable with this display. Right out in front of everybody!
Yezu released him, withdrew once more to a respectable distance. “We always have the radio, although I suppose we'll soon have troubles with time lag. Several light hours to the Aurelo, yes?”
Tom resisted, successfully, the urge to brush himself off. He did not wish to offend Yezu, this man who had somehow become his best and closest friend. “I guess we will,” he said. “I think we can cope, though. I've heard people used to play chess by mail. Actual, physical, hand-carried mail. It must have taken a long time.”
“Chess? Ech, I've grown to hate that game.”
“Yeah,” Tom agreed. “Me too. Take care of yourself, all right?”
Yezu gave the helmet a final twist, locking it down against its seals. “Always.”
He tipped a salute, and the airlock door whoomped shut.
~~~
“Remember, Doc, that's dinner tomorrow at my house.”
“I'll remember,” Jhoe said, and let the ferry door close itself with soft, pneumatic sounds.
Lars waved at him, then lowered his hands to the controls. The ferry pulled away from the curb and rolled off down the road on its four rubber wheels, electric motors humming faintly as it rounded the curve and vanished.
Leaving him, in a sense, stranded. After that blistering row with Luna, Uriel had ceased to guide and shuttle him in his wanderings. Ceased, in fact, to speak to him at all. Fortunately, the Verva Hotelo had made arrangements for him with a ground ferry company. More fortunately still, driver Lars had offered Jhoe a friendly hand, and, aside from brief show-and-tell sessions with his family, seemed to want nothing in exchange. Getting around had not been a problem, of late.
Anyway, Jhoe had begun to grasp the flows and rhythms of the city. No longer the lost little boy, he moved about as he pleased, saw what he needed or wanted to see, on his own loosely defined schedule. And his peculiar status, guest of the city and planetary governments, celebrity ambassador and visiting researcher, had not hurt matters either. It seemed nearly every door would open for a man of distant suns.
Tonight, he would bring Luna to the kickball games, and dancing afterward. He had set the whole thing up himself, though of course she would have to do the driving. He stepped away from the curb, and turned toward her house.
The tent fabric, muddy orange in the dying light, glowed from within. The building, arched and domed and sprawling at the edges, looked to Jhoe like a great dragon that had curled up and gone to sleep. Luna's friends seemed to think it quite a nice little home, so he tried to think of it that way.
A path of flat stones led him up to the door, where a yellow light burned in welcome for him. He took a breath and then released it, and reached out to knock on the door. Rap! Rap! It felt thin and oddly flexible beneath his knuckles. From within the house there came rustling and thumping noises, and then Luna's voice: “Just one minute!”
He smiled. On Earth, at least in North America, the door would have studied him and, finding him on the roster of invited guests, opened automatically to admit him. Spouting platitudes as likely as not, in a smooth and annoyingly polite tone of voice. Really, he liked it better this way, this much more personal, much more intimate Unuan way.
His pulse quickened. Images and textures flashed though his mind like silent fireworks. Luna's hair, shining in the full-moon light of Lacigo. Her feet on the top of a desk, knocking the telkom over. Her lips, soft against his own, her hands on his back.
Smitten, he thought, with a sense of embarrassment and, comically, of loss. So much for objectivity! Every note, every memory and observation came back with the taint of his personal involvement. And to hell with it anyway! Every time she kissed him it felt like his shoes would pop off, like his feet would leave the ground and never return to it. Her lips burned against his, leaving him painfully conscious of her body heat, and his own, and of the thin layers of clothing that kept them apart.
A clattering, a squeaking, a wash of yellow-white light—the door swung open and there she stood, a slim silhouette against the brightness. A gauzy skirt hung down past her knees, but the light shone right through it, revealing long and supple legs, set slightly apart. His eye followed them upward into shadow, then traced higher still, past the curves of her waist to the curves of her upper body, also plainly outlined through the backlit translucence of her blouse.
“Salutes,” she said brightly. He couldn't see her face, but a kind of top hat crowned her head, her longish hair spilling out beneath it. She paused. “Is something wrong?”
“What?” he said. “No! No, of course not. How do you do this evening?”
“Fine,” she said, still brightly. “You certainly look nice.”
“Oh, thanks.” He looked down at himself, at the hideous clash of colors the Verva Hotelo's resident tailor had dressed him up in. Yellow slacks, bright blue tunic, a strip of shiny, shocking red dangling from his neck, two more wrapped in bows around his shoulders. “I decided to go native for the occasion. Do you like it?”
“Yeah.” She stepped back from the doorway, her body language inviting him in. As he turned, the light caught her face from the front and he could really see her.
Good heaven. The top hat shone a bright and sparkly green, and the band encircling its base actually glowed a luminous blue. Her blouse l
ooked brighter and yellower than Jhoe's slacks, and her skirt, blue and white in alternating diagonal slashes, topped high boots of blinding, sequined white. Her hand clutched something, a vest, he supposed, whose color matched the sparkly green of the top hat.
“And how am I?” she asked, spreading her arms wide, baring her off-duty plumage for his inspection. Unfortunately, the gesture drew Jhoe's eye toward her breasts, which bobbed, light and unencumbered, beneath the fabric. With effort, he looked back up at her face again, but something dragged his gaze right back down again. He felt a blush coming on. How uncouth and uncontrolled his behavior! But when he finally turned his eye back up to her face, she simply looked amused.
“Uh, very nice,” he said.
She winked. “Thanks. Can I show you around?”
Her arms still spread wide. Her breasts still bobbed. Her legs, still slightly apart, seemed to beckon him.
“Don't toy with me, Luna,” he said, oggling her once again, but exaggeratedly this time. “I think I remember how to find everything.”
Had he actually just said that? Had he actually let his gonads run his mouth that way, actually spouted that rude nugget of juvenalia?
But Luna Shiloh tipped her head back, covered her mouth and laughed with surprise. “Oh! I'm sorry! I was asking for that one, wasn't I?”
Jhoe's face had grown hot, his stomach cold and quivery. “Luna, I apologize. Such a comment—”
“I accept,” she said, and planted a kiss firmly on his mouth. “I'll show you the house later. Let's get good seats at the game!”
With that, she threw on her sparkly green vest and bounded out the door like a twenty-year-old preparing to break curfew for the first time. Jhoe's feelings, none too clear to begin with, jumbled up inside him in a big, messy ball. His shoes had not, after all, popped off.
He closed the door behind him and followed her down the stone path toward her personal ferry. Car, he reminded himself. They call it a car. The term struck him as typically, almost annoyingly, quaint.
Getting into the car proved a little uncomfortable, too. His new slacks seemed to have grown awfully tight.
~~~
The kickball hit the bell atop its yellow and red striped post, ringing it soundly, and the crowd went mad. With three thousand other people, Luna rocketed to her feet and let out a low, ululating yell, slapping her hands together several times above her head. Lagging behind a little, Jhoe imitated the gesture.
“What happened?” he asked over the roar of the mob.
Luna leaned close to his ear. “Teller and Koto just shared the point.”
“Shared? Why?”
“Because Koto got it off the ground, and Teller hit the goal.”
“Koto has the darker hair? And the red jersey?”
“Yeah!”
Below in the arena, fifteen men leaped and capered, vaulting over cube-shaped obstacles, chasing and kicking the hollow and surprisingly springy rubber ball. Above, a triple row of lights cast whiteness down upon the field, banishing shadows. The field, green with simulated grass, and marked up by orange lines and the white obstacles, seemed the brightest place on the entire planet. The players, decked out in fifteen different schemes of fluorescent color, actually hurt Jhoe's eyes at times.
Considering the temperature and the lights and the stillness of the air within the arena walls, Jhoe wondered how hot they got down there. Pretty damn hot, he would bet. And yet they played on, tirelessly.
The bell rang again, and the crowd, still standing, continued its enthusiastic display. Jhoe leaped in the air and clapped his hands.
“Did you see that?” Luna cried. “Two goals in thirty seconds. Did you see that?”
“I sure did!”
What a show, what an experience! Earthly sport offered nothing so dynamic, so quick and savage and unpredictable. Never mind that Jhoe had no idea what was going on.
The players sometimes cooperated, sometimes competed, sometimes actively tripped and mauled one another. No teams, at least not in the usual sense, but not a free-for-all either. Alliances seemed to form and dissolve and form again with the ball still airborne, and to shatter completely on the rare occasions when it rolled flat across the ground. And watching the ball proved no easy trick as it careened from the walls and field and obstacle cubes, quick as a frightened bird.
Two of the players smashed together while closing on the ball. Knee and shoulder pads flew, and the men fell sprawling, one of them tumbling backward over a cube. But the ball popped high in the chaos, and the other players pursued it, heedless of their fallen colleagues.
“Are they hurt?” He shouted at Luna.
“I doubt it, but—well, here comes the clown.”
A man in spotted clothing and white face-paint trotted out onto the field, ducking and dodging around a knot of players struggling for the ball, and made for one of the fallen men. But the man had got up already, grabbing up his pads and shoving them back into place as he ran after the ball. Which had bounced free and changed direction again!
The other man did not rise so quickly, and the clown, without pausing, angled low and scooped him off the ground. Luna cheered wildly as the injured party was hurried clear of a rushing wall of players.
“Rescue! Rescue!” the crowd chanted.
Running hard, the clown came up against the wall. Then, incredibly, he climbed it with his feet, transferring and transforming his speed so that he sort of floated up into the air and then settled back down again. He set his burden down gently. The man sat up right away, looking alert and uninjured. Within moments he was up again, and rushing after his comrades. Such verve, such grit! For sure, they grew them tough here on the frontier.
Luna threw her arms around Jhoe and hugged him crushingly for a moment. “Oh, this is so great!” She said. “I haven't been to kickball forever! Thank you so much.”
Jhoe kissed her lightly on the forehead. “It pleases me, Luna, to—look! He has—”
The bell rung again, marking still another goal!
“Oh wow!” Luna screamed. “Go, Haggen! Go, Haggen!”
Jhoe's neighbor in the stands, a burly gentleman in shiny blue robes, whooped and thumped Jhoe firmly on the back. Merrily, Jhoe returned with an elbow to the man's shoulder.
“Go, Haggen!” the man shouted.
Jhoe thought he might just burst. All those years at NAU, all those decades of work and study and quiet aspiration. When had he ever had a night like this? Even the Olympics paled, shriveled in comparison.
“Look!” Luna shouted. “Koto's got the ball again!”
“All right!” Jhoe shouted back, happy just to bask in her enthusiasm. He hoped, at this rate, that he would have energy left for the dancing.
~~~
Whirling, whirling through the night air, watching the carnival lights sparkle in her eyes. The music, soft in his ears. The dance floor soft and springy beneath his feet.
There's a kind of magic, a recorded voice sang, over and over again. A kind of magic, a kiiiind of magic.
Sweet smell of the rose that Luna had put in her hair, mingling with dust and... just a hint of perfume? And perspiration, human and pleasantly real on her skin.
A kind of magic, a kiiiind of magic...
Wordlessly, he held her close. And whirled.
~~~
He pressed her against the car, kissing. Kissing her throat, her hair.
She led him up the path, and somehow they kept their feet even though they never stopped kissing. Never, at least, until the door rose up to baffle her. She opened it with a spike of blue metal. Light spilled out onto them.
She pulled away for a moment, leaned slightly to one side, flipping her hair and running fingers through it. It fell across the lower part of her face as she straightened in his arms.
“I'm ready to show you around,” she said, her voice low and breathy, mouth curling into a sort of smile. Her eyes seemed large, seemed to catch all the light and make things of it.
A sudden coldness s
hivered through Jhoe's middle. Shareen. Shareen had looked at him that way. All at once, the night seemed not quite so warm.
Luna did not miss the shift. “What?” she asked softly.
Jhoe went back half a step, and stopped. “I can't.”
Luna slumped, stiffened, cooled. Eyes narrowing, a shark about to bite. “Can't? You can't? What's that supposed to mean?”
“I...” Jhoe struggled for the words. “I've had... bad experiences. I mean, in the past.”
She sighed. “Jhoe, you're hundred and twenty-eight years old. Obviously you've had bad experiences.”
“I mean... I...”
“You've gone all cold inside? Lost your fire?”
He said nothing. Failure. Failure. What, really, had he hoped to accomplish?
“Jhoe,” Luna removed her vest, tossed it inside the open house. Then she spread her arms wide, as she had done earlier that evening. “It's nice and warm over here.”
From somewhere nearby came the musical tinkling of wind chimes, a soft breeze rustling the bells.
Luna's eyes were wide, her lips moist and inviting. Her breasts still danced beneath the thin fabric of her blouse. Jhoe felt dizzy just looking at her.
“Oh, to hell with it,” he said, and moved in to grab her around the waist. “I'm the kickball clown!”
She looked momentarily alarmed. “What?”
“Rescue! Rescue!” Jhoe called out as he lifted her up and carried her through the doorway.
“No!” She shrieked. “No! Put me down!” Her voice rang with laughter, then screamed with it.
Once inside, Jhoe put his heel against the door and kicked it back toward the frame. It swung closed, and latched with a satisfyingly solid click.
“Put me down,” Luna said again, more softly.
“Rescue,” Jhoe said, and kissed her on the hollow of her throat, just above the upper clasp on her blouse. He lowered her to the floor, then kissed her more firmly on the lips. “Rescue.”
