Miz came out, wandering across the terrace, smoking some-thing sweet-smelling from a little cup-kettle. He leant back beside her and offered her the gently fuming cup, but she shook her head.
“Haven’t seen you up dancing yet,” he said, breathing deeply.
“That’s right.”
“You used to dance so well,” he said, glancing at her. “ We used to dance so well.”
“I remember.”
“Remember that dance competition in Malishu? The endurance one where the prize was to go to dinner with the brave and heroic pilots of the Clipper Squadrons?” He laughed at the memory.
“Yes,” she said. “I remember.”
“Hell,” he said, turning round to look out over the dark valley. “We’d have won, too, if the MPs hadn’t arrived looking for us.”
“We were AWOL; taught me never to trust you with dates again.”
“I got confused; we’d crossed the date-line during the party the night before.” Miz looked bewildered and squinted up at the dark clouds. “Several times, actually, I think.”
“Hmm,” she said.
“Anyway,” he said. “Want to try it again?” He nodded back at the hall and the dancing people. “This lot look feeble; give them a couple of hours and they’ll be falling like raindrops.”
She shook her head. “I don’t think so,” she said. “Not right now.”
He sighed and turned round, taking another snort from the cup-kettle. “Well, if it comes to the end of the night,” he said, pretending snootiness, “and you don’t get offered a lift home; don’t come crying to me.” He nodded once, primly emphatic, and headed back to the reception hall, practising his dance steps on the way, drink held out in one hand, the fuming cup-kettle in the other. She watched him go.
She had been remembering a ball in Geis’s father’s house, in Siynscen, when she’d been fifteen or sixteen. Breyguhn had fallen in love with Geis that summer-or thought she had, at least-when they had all stayed at the estate. Sharrow had told her she was silly, and far too young; Geis was almost twenty. What would he want with a child like her? And anyway, Geis was an altogether tiresome person; an awkward, over-eager fool with funny eyes and a plump behind. In fact she herself was quite fed up with him wanting to dance with her at these sorts of functions, and wanting to kiss her and give her stupid presents.
Nevertheless, Breyguhn was determined she would declare her undying love for Geis at the ball, stubbornly maintain-ing that Geis was kind and dashing and poetic and clever. Sharrow had poured scorn on all this, but then, when she had stood in their dressing-room, all fussed around by servants (and enjoying the attention and the luxury of it, because their father had lost a lot of money that year, and had dis-missed all their own staff save his android butler), and seen her half-sister in her first ball-gown (albeit borrowed, like her own, from a better-off second cousin), with her hair piled up like a woman’s, her budding breasts pushed by the bodice to form a cleavage, and her eyes, made-up, glowing with confidence and a kind of power, Sharrow had thought, with some amusement and only a hint of jealousy, that per-haps dear, tedious old Geis might just find Brey attractive after all.
She’d watched Geis as he and some of his officer-cadet friends entered the party. They were in the uniform of the Alliance Navy; the ball itself was a fund-raising event for the Tax Alliance and Geis had been into space for a couple of months on an Alliance warship.
She realised then that she hadn’t really looked at Geis for a year or two; not properly looked at him.
She had never liked uniforms, but Geis looked almost hand-some in his. He moved less awkwardly; he spotted a dark, trimmed beard which quite suited him and made him look older, and he had lost the puppy fat he’d carried through his mid-teens. She had drifted close to him, unseen, early on in the evening before the ball properly started, hearing him laughing lustily with his friends and hearing them laughing at what he said, and-perhaps, she told herself later, in the spell of those gales of male laughter-had determined then not to treat Geis with her usual disdain, should he ask her for a dance. She would see what happened, she thought, walking away from the young men. She would do nothing so petty and low as try to entrap her cousin just to prove something to her foolish little half-sister, but if he really had improved so, and if he did, at some point, maybe, ask her for a dance…
He asked her for the first dance. For the rest of the evening they hardly left each other’s side between dances, or each other’s arms during them.
She watched, as she stepped and moved and was held and turned and displayed and admired on the dance floor: Breyguhn’s eyes took on a look of surprise at first; then that slowly became hurt, until that was replaced by scorn and what she must have thought was recognition; upon which her eyes filled with tears, and finally with hate.
She danced on, exulting, not caring. Geis looked as dash-ing and handsome as Breyguhn had said. He had changed, he had more to talk about, had become more like a man than a boy. Even his remaining gaucheness seemed like enthusiasm; gusto, indeed. She listened to him and looked at him and danced with him and thought about him, and decided that had she not been exactly who she was, had she been just a little more like everybody else and just a little less difficult to please, she could almost have fallen for her cousin.
Breyguhn left the ball early with their father and his mistress, in a storm of tears. A duenna was left to wait for Sharrow. She and Geis danced until they were the last couple left on the dance floor and the band were making deliberate mistakes and taking long pauses between numbers. She even let Geis kiss her-though she didn’t respond-when they went out to the dawn-lit garden for some fresh air (her chaperone coughing delicately from a nearby bower), then she’d had herself taken home.
She had seen Geis face-to-face only twice in the two years after that; she had been away at finishing school, then started at Yadayeypon University, in both places discovering the fresh, unexpected and surprising pleasures of sex, and the power her looks and her birthright (judiciously deployed) gave her over young-and not so young-men who were vastly more moodily interesting and intellectually stimulating than cousin Geis, the part-time Navy goon and geekishly successful businessman.
The following year, at her father’s funeral, they’d exchanged a few words (though she’d overheard rather more), and when she did finally agree to meet him properly-at the launch of an airship (which he had named after her! The embarrassment!)-she had been rather curt with him, claiming she had been too busy to answer his letters, and just hated talking on the phone. He had looked hurt, and she’d felt a terrible, cruel urge to laugh.
She’d seen him once more before the war, a few months later, at a New Year party he’d thrown in a villa in the Blue Hills, in Piphram.
Then the Five Per Cent War had finally broken out, and she had joined the anti-Tax forces, partly because theirs seemed the more romantic cause, partly because she considered them the more politically progressive side, and partly as a kind of revenge.
And if it had done nothing else-she thought, as she drained her glass and smiled ruefully at the great wide screen that was the window into Bencil Dornay’s party-the war had finally signalled the end of her wilfully extended and determinedly wanton girlhood.
And more, she thought, smiling sadly at the dancing, happy people on the other side of the windows, remembering that last engagement, frantic and terrible and pitiless in the cold and the silence of the dark seconds of space between Nachtel and Nachtel’s Ghost.
And more.
She made to finish her drink, but the glass was already dry.