Fire Season

by David Weber

  “Definitely not a zork,” Stephanie assured her.

  She grinned and bit into her sandwich. Then a thought hit her that started a new set of butterflies up to join the others.

  Anders was coming. Anders, who definitely wasn’t all the things she usually despised in Trudy’s crowd. Anders, who was actually good-looking and smart and had that great way of listening so you felt he really understood.

  And this time he’d probably not even talk to her except to say “Happy Birthday.” Trudy would be there, and the guys always noticed Trudy. And Jessica, who was nearly as shapely. And Christine, who had lots of guys asking her out.

  Anders was coming. But probably he wouldn’t notice her at all…

  Chapter Six

  Since he wasn’t taking part in the hang gliding, Anders arrived at Stephanie’s birthday party dressed for dinner. His dad had meditated on renting Anders a tuxedo, so he’d be in local fashion, but had decided against it.

  “You have good dress clothes with you already. I know I protested when your mother insisted we pack an outfit, but she was right. You can’t prepare after the fact.”

  Dr. Whittaker himself was dressed for a day in the field—part of his “I’m just dropping the boy off before getting back to work” routine.

  Dr. Marjorie met them as they landed. After greetings were exchanged, she gestured in the direction of the sky, where brightly colored hang gliders could be seen darting and hovering like dragonflies.

  “The hang-gliding party got off the ground a bit late,” she said. “A couple of the guests misunderstood and came dressed for dinner, then had to change.”

  She looked at Anders and smiled. “You look wonderful. Is that traditional formal wear for your planet?”

  Anders nodded. “My mom picked it out,” he said. “The color, too, I mean. We don’t all need to wear tunics in tan trimmed with green. It is pretty usual for the trousers to echo the trim, though.”

  “I like the combination,” Dr. Marjorie said, leading the Whittakers from the landing pad to a shaded area mid-point between the house and the flying field, where stood a long table arrayed with a tasteful variety of finger foods. “I understand that at one point on Old Terra, men all wore black to formal occasions. They must have looked like a bunch of rusty old crows.”

  She gestured toward the food. “Please, help yourselves. This is just a bridge to hold us until dinner. The rest of the dinner guests should show up fairly soon.”

  Anders noticed that the spread featured a wide array of very interesting-looking fruits and vegetables. He picked up one that resembled a star fruit, except this one was a dark indigo blue, rather than the more usual golden-yellow.

  “Is this your work?” he asked, remembering Dr. Marjorie was a specialist in plant genetics.

  “It is,” she said, “a cross between a purple berry Richard noted the treecats eat and some Terran plants. It’s rather tart, but completely safe. As you may know, humans can eat a wide variety of the native plants on Sphinx. They don’t contain all the necessary nutrients, but if you know your foraging, you could survive for a while.”

  “Rather as treecats can eat human food,” Dr. Whittaker said, “and sometimes thrive. Still, do you find yourself needing to give Lionheart supplements?”

  “I think we would,” Dr. Marjorie said, “if he only ate human foods. However, Richard insists that Lionheart do some of his own foraging. Lionheart doesn’t seem to mind. In fact, he seems to enjoy hunting. Still, his attitude may be different when winter rolls around again.”

  The conversation drifted to treecat eating habits in the wild. Dr. Marjorie didn’t claim to be an expert, but admitted that since early 1519, when Lionheart had come to live with them, she had both observed what he chose to eat (other than celery) and tried out various of her hybrids on him.

  “He likes that purple star Anders noticed,” she commented. “Not as much as celery, but quite a bit.”

  Eventually, the hang gliders began dropping out of the air one by one. Dr. Whittaker took this as his cue to get going, although it was obvious to Anders that he had really enjoyed talking with Dr. Marjorie.

  After waving good-bye to his dad, Anders drifted over to where the hang gliders were coming in for landing.

  Dr. Marjorie walked with him. “Stephanie’s glider is the one with the orange-and-black striped wings. We gave her one with that pattern after she smashed up her first Sphinx model and she’s kept the theme since. She calls them all the Flying Tiger and numbers them. Very methodical, our Steph.”

  Stephanie seemed to be taking her time landing, so Anders took the opportunity to observe the other flyers. He found Karl beneath a cobalt-and-white glider coming in for a slightly clumsy landing on the far side of the field.

  Already landed, closer to where Anders stood, was a dark-complexioned boy about Stephanie’s age, his silky, dark curls tousled by the wind, his bright brown eyes laughing as he struggled to get the wings of his yellow-and-brown glider stowed.

  Another boy, a year or so older, swooped in next to him, neatly tucking his scarlet wings as if he was some sort of human hawk. Anders guessed that this boy had used counter-grav assist at the very end, but that didn’t make it any less a neat trick. The younger boy obviously agreed, calling out, “Nice landing, Chet! You’ve got to teach me that one.”

  “You bet, Toby,” Chet said. “Look at Christine. She’s going to do me one better.”

  He pointed up toward where a long-bodied, slimly built girl—either a genie like Stephanie or a newcomer to Sphinx—was sweeping through the sky, her steel-blue-and-white hang glider moving through an elegant swirling pattern as it descended.

  Rather like one half of a DNA spiral, Anders thought. I wonder if two really good flyers could make that into a full pattern?

  He had his answer in a moment. Another glider, this one patterned in shades of green that evoked a fanciful collage of springtime leaves, echoed Christine’s pattern. The pilot—a girl, obviously, from the curves in her coverall—never came in low enough to risk fouling Christine’s wings, but nonetheless managed to make Anders “see” the other glider’s earlier progress. The illusion was so vivid that he found himself rubbing his eyes, checking for a tracer.

  Chet said enthusiastically to Toby, “Jessica was a super addition to the club. I’m glad she came today. Steph’s a great flyer, but a soloist by nature. Christine loves tandem work.”

  Toby nodded wistful enthusiasm.

  “Someday,” he said, his tone that of a young knight making a vow, “I’m going to be as good at the three of them combined!”

  Christine touched ground and folded her wings, shrugging out of her harness so that she could rush over and offer Jessica a squeeze, squealing with excitement.

  “That was so hexy! Like ballet or something. We’ve got to practice it more.”

  Jessica shrugged out of her leaf-patterned glider and returned Christine’s hug. “I’d like that, but later. I don’t know about you, but I’m starved!”

  As she spoke, Jessica tugged off a close-fitting cap that matched her coveralls, revealing exuberantly untidy masses of long, curly light auburn hair.

  When Christine pulled off her cap, she immediately began to comb her much shorter white-blond hair into a style rather like a cockatoo’s crest. Her eyes proved to be ice-blue. The light hair and eyes made a marvelous contrast to the sandalwood hues of her complexion. Anders spent an enjoyable moment contemplating this delightful proof that female beauty could come in such contrasting packages.

  “I’m starved, too,” Christine agreed. “I’m sure Stephanie’s folks will have laid out plenty of food, but we should wait for Stephanie, don’t you think? I mean, this is her party.”

  “Absolutely,” Jessica agreed. “Only she and Trudy are still up. I think they’re having another go at the bulls-eye target.”

  Trudy must be the owner of the pale pink polka-dotted glider. It had seemed to Anders’ untutored eye that she and Stephanie were competing for who wou
ld stay up longest. Then he realized the situation was more subtle. Both were aiming to land within a large target laid out in an open field. While Stephanie was apparently merely trying to hit center, Trudy was actually impeding Stephanie’s descent. Her moves were subtle, but Anders figured if he could tell, so could the rest of the club members.

  “There they go again,” Toby said, his tone one of long-suffering. “I wonder why Trudy is even here. I mean, Stephanie can’t stand her.”

  “The social mystery of the century,” Chet agreed in the tones of a veteran newsie. “It’s like the Monarchists inviting the Levelers to tea.”

  At that moment, the pattern of dodge and feint above changed. Stephanie broke hard right. When Trudy moved to block her, Stephanie swirled higher, cut over Trudy to the left, then dove. If Chet’s dive had resembled that of a hunting hawk, Stephanie’s looked like an orange-and-black brick hurtling toward the ground.

  A scream sounded from nearer to the house. Glancing back, Anders saw a man with flaming red hair beginning to run forward. Dr. Marjorie stood stock still next to a heavyset woman with brown hair who, from her open mouth, was probably the source of the scream. Despite the adult panicking, there was no doubt in Anders’ mind that Stephanie was in complete control of the situation.

  Well above the ground, Stephanie pulled out of her plummeting dive, caught a slowing air current, and came swirling in for a landing, her feet landing lightly in the very center of the black target placed on the meadow grass. Immediately, with what Anders guessed was proper etiquette in such games, she moved out of the way of the other flyer, and strode toward the gathered party, still wearing her glider harness.

  Strapped in behind her, Lionheart was chittering away. Anders had listened to enough hours of recorded treecat sounds to guess that the ’cat was scolding his human.

  Above, moving more like a butterfly than a hawk, Trudy came in for an elegant landing of her own, also touching down on the bulls’-eye’s center, but after Stephanie’s daredevil maneuver or Christine and Jessica’s ballet, her demo failed to be at all impressive. Most of the club members had run over to tease Stephanie about how she’d nearly not made it to fifteen and a day…

  Only Dr. Richard, standing to the side, his strong features just a bit too fixed, seemed less than enthusiastic about Stephanie’s performance.

  No. Make that two who looked less than happy. Karl Zivonik, his glider slung so he could carry it over one powerful shoulder, shared Stephanie’s father’s lack of enthusiasm for Stephanie’s risky acrobatics. Equally obviously, neither of them was going to call Stephanie on the incident—today.

  For her part, after unstrapping Lionheart, Stephanie stowed the Flying Tiger, accepting compliments with just the right balance of pleasure and enthusiasm. If she and Trudy had indeed been involved in some sort of private joust, no one would have known it from her.

  Trudy, on the other hand, looked more than a little miffed. Like Jessica, she had worn her hair under a cap. Now she pulled the cap off, combing out thick, dark tresses whose sausage curl certainly owed as much to art as to nature. Pretending to be completely absorbed in her primping, Trudy’s brilliant violet-blue eyes scanned the group.

  When she noticed Anders, he could have sworn those eyes flashed. Anders was aware he was attractive. His mother had made certain he had no illusions on that point, saying that ignorance would just leave him vulnerable. He’d even had his share of what she insisted on calling “puppy loves”—girls who called him up and left messages on his uni-link. But the look Trudy gave him as she sauntered over toward him was almost hungry.

  “Hel-lo!” Trudy said, pulling the word out into several syllables. “And who might you be, and where have you been all my life?”

  She’d thrown her shoulders back, raising her right hand to toy with the closure on her flight-suit, ostensibly because she was warm—out on the field, Anders could see that Toby and Chet had already divested themselves of their suits—but in actuality to draw attention to what she clearly thought of as irresistible assets.

  Those bouncing breasts were quite remarkable, especially on someone who was probably not much more than sixteen, but Anders thought the approach rather simplistic—and even sort of sad. What a pity she had to offer herself as if she was some sort of appetizer. Anders realized, though, that he must have been more distracted than he wanted to admit because the question still hung in the air between them.

  “I’m Anders Whittaker,” he said. “I’m new to Sphinx. My father’s in charge of a team of xenoanthropologists here from Urako to study the treecats.”

  Trudy clearly had to think about what that might mean to her. After consideration, she apparently decided that just because Dr. Whittaker was here to study the treecats, that didn’t mean Anders was interested in them.

  “How deadly for you,” she purred, coming up next to him and somehow slipping an arm through his. “Your father really must talk to my father and brothers on the subject. After all, a balanced view is important, isn’t it?”

  “Indeed it is,” came the voice of Dr. Richard from behind them. “However, Anders has been very politely waiting for the rest of you before getting something to eat. Here’s the plan. Grab a snack from the buffet, then go in and change. Oh! Save some room for dinner. We’ve made some very special dishes.”

  The mention of food caused a general rush, in the course of which Anders managed to get free from Trudy. He made his way over to Stephanie just as they all reached the buffet.

  “Happy Birthday!” he said. “That was quite a landing.”

  “I think Dad’s going to have my ears,” Stephanie said, forcing a laugh. “Lionheart has already chewed me out. I’m not supposed to do things like that.”

  Anders shrugged. “Hey…It looked terrifying, but I never thought you were in trouble. Can you tell me what’s what on the buffet? I haven’t been on Sphinx long enough to know the local delicacies.”

  Stephanie giggled. Not a contrived girlish giggle, just a laugh that invited him to share a joke. “You won’t find a lot of this stuff anywhere else. Some is Meyerdahl-influenced. Some are my mom and dad’s creations. They both love to cook.”

  Christine, who had been spreading something orange and pink on a cracker, halted in mid-motion. “Creations in her kitchen or her lab?”

  Marjorie Harrington laughed. “Kitchen and lab—but all the stuff from the lab has been cleared for human consumption. You probably have most of it in your cooler at home.”

  Christine bit into the cracker and looked blissed-out. “Not this. Definitely not this. Can I have the recipe?”

  Chatter became general after that. Anders had more than Stephanie helping him select treats to try. All the hang-glider club members vied to get him to try river-roe and ice-potato paste, toasted near-pine nuts, and other oddities.

  Adults were arriving now. Anders was delighted to meet Scott MacDallan and Fisher, “his” treecat. MacDallan proved to be the red-haired man he’d seen rushing toward what had seemed like Stephanie’s inevitable crash—not a big surprise, since he was a medical doctor. The stocky woman with brown hair proved to be both Scott’s wife and Karl’s aunt, Irina Kisaevna, a very nice woman. Ranger Lethbridge came, making apologies for his partner, Ranger Jedrusinski, and saying that he couldn’t stay for dinner.

  “We drew straws for fire watch,” he said, “and she lost. I’ve promised to bring her a dry crust or two for consolation.”

  “We can do better than that,” Stephanie promised, and immediately started piling a plate with finger foods to set aside. “Mom won’t want me to cut the cake yet, but I’ll bring you both some tomorrow.”

  One by one, the members of the hang-gliding club emerged, each dressed in some interesting variation on formal wear. Karl, it turned out, actually owned a tuxedo, and looked very dashing in it. Toby’s outfit consisted of flowing robes made from a pale golden fabric that set off his dark skin and flowing black hair to perfection. He seemed momentarily shy about his attire until Christin
e and Jessica started gushing about how they wished Star Kingdom clothes were as elegant. Chet wore something less flashy, but still quite respectable.

  The girls all looked pretty good, Anders thought. Trudy—predictably, he thought, although he’d only known her for something like an hour—wore a pink-and-lavender gown with both slit seams on the sides and a plunging neckline. She claimed it was an ancestral costume from Old Earth itself.

  Christine and Stephanie both wore slacks and blouses, a simpler variation on the Star Kingdom tuxedo. The cummerbunds showed off trim waists and made an asset of their relative lack of busts. Jessica emerged arrayed in frothy layers of silk and taffeta in pale yellow and green touched with hints of white lace.

  “It’s actually my mom’s,” she explained shyly. “Neo-Victorian was all the rage on our last planet.”

  Talking about clothing inevitably led to discussion of birthday customs. Toby admitted that his culture didn’t even celebrate birthdays.

  “We celebrate Saint’s Days instead. Mine is Saint Tobias.”

  Christine, Chet, Karl, and Trudy all proved to have been born on Sphinx.

  “My father was one of the first children born on Sphinx,” Trudy boasted. “For a while, his birthday was practically a planetary holiday.”

  “There were problems with childbirth initially,” Scott MacDallan agreed. “The heavier gravity and air pressure made it difficult for women to carry to term. However, now, between nanotherapies and wider use of counter-gravity, more and more pregnancies are successful.”

  Karl added. “I remember when Scott was delivering my little brother Lev. A treecat showed up at the door all beat up. Scott ended up going to the rescue.”

  “And leaving your mother to suffer?” Trudy sounded genuinely shocked.

  “It wasn’t quite like that,” Scott MacDallan said. He might have explained further, but Irina called to him from the house.

  “Scott! We need a surgeon to carve the roast.”

  Most of the adults seemed to take this as a summons to dinner but, perhaps because Stephanie stayed outside, perhaps because there was still finger food, the younger guests lingered near the appetizers.