“Hmm?” Sharrow looked at her.
They stopped at a street corner to study a Faculties map. Zefla bent, hands clasped behind her back, inspecting the map.
“Whistling,” she repeated. “Well, it used to mean only one thing.”
Sharrow had an uncharacteristically broad smile on her face when Zefla turned back to her. Sharrow shrugged and cleared her throat as they turned to head up a steep side street towards the History Faculty. “Damn, am I that transparent?”
“You look tired, too.”
Sharrow rubbed under her eyes gently. “Worth every bag and line.”
“Who was the lucky fellow?”
“Musician.”
“Strings? Wind? Keyboard? Composition?” Zefla inquired.
Sharrow grinned at her, brown eyebrows flexing. “Percussion,” she said huskily.
Zefla sniggered, then assumed a serious expression, lifting her head up and enunciating clearly. “Don’t brag, dear; it’s unbecoming.”
“Ah, war is hell,” Miz Gattse Ensil Kuma said, sitting back luxuriantly in the perfumed pillows of the small canal-boat. He lifted the stemmed glass of slushed trax spirit from the boat’s table and sipped at it delicately, watching the gently glowing lanterns as they floated past them. The boat’s own lantern shone softly, creaking on the end of a bowed, spindly branch above them. People in fancy-dress passed on the canal walkway a few metres away, trailing streamers and laughing, their faces hidden by grotesque and fabulous masks. Above, over the dark city, fireworks blazed distantly, their flashes lighting up the layers of Entraxrln membrane and sometimes silhouetting the open weave-work of the composite trunks. The boat whirred quietly on along the raised, open section of canal.
Sharrow-actually, at that moment, Commander Sharrow of the anti-Tax League Irregular Forces Eleventh Clipper Squadron-sat across the little table from him. For the first time since they’d met almost a year ago she was out of uniform and not dressed in ease-fatigues or street sloppies. She wore a rainbow-mirrored half-mask that just covered her eyes and the bridge of her nose. It was topped by a cap of white and green-dyed lake-bird feathers; her dress was bright green, short, low-cut and clinging, and her legs, in the fashion of the day, were sheathed in a transparent covering of polymerised perfume-oil. She had long, perfectly shaped legs and they gleamed, they glistened, they glinted under the suspended lanterns that swung on bowed stalks over the dark canal.
He could hardly keep his eyes off those long, slinkily muscular legs. He knew the dry, slick touch of perfume-oil, the smooth, blissful feel of that slowly evaporating, few-molecules-thick covering; he had experienced it many times on other women and it was no longer quite so freshly erotic an experience as it had been once. But sitting here, alone with her in this little purring, gently bumping boat on the last night of the festival, he wanted to touch her, hold her, stroke and kiss her more than he could remember ever wanting any woman. The urge, the need was as scarifying and intense as he remembered from just before he’d first gotten laid; it burned in him, infested him, ran brilliant and urgent in his blood.
It was suddenly irrelevant to him that she was his Commanding Officer and an aristo-things that had, in some kind of piqued, invertedly snobbish way in the past prevented him from ever thinking of her as a woman (and a beautiful, attractive, intelligent one, at that; the kind he would normally know just from the first glance, the first word, that he would want to bed if he could) rather than his tactically brilliant but curt and scathingly sarcastic CO, or an arrogant over-privileged brat from Golter who had drop-dead looks and knew it.
“A toast,” Sharrow said, uncrossing her gauzily shining legs and sitting forwards. She raised her glass.
“What to?” Miz asked, looking at the colourfully distorted reflection of his face in her rainbow-mirror mask. His own mask lay on his chest, looped round his neck.
“Iphrenil toast,” she said. “The secret toast; we each toast what we choose to.”
“Stupid custom.” He sighed. “Okay.”
They clinked glasses. Masked figures dressed as deep country bandits ran along the canal, whooping and firing pop-guns. He ignored them and looked into her eyes as he drank from his glass. Here’s to getting you into bed, my commander, he thought to himself.
Her dark, mocking eyes looked back at him from behind the mask. A small smile creased her lips.
A flower grenade landed between them in the well of the little boat. She laughed a dark-brown laugh, electrifying him. She kicked the grenade over to him; he kicked it back; the perfumed fuse burned smokily. She trapped the fist-sized ball beneath her naked foot, watching it (and he could feel the SNB kicking in, this becoming a tactical situation for both of them, and he knew the possibilities and the potential courses she would be evaluating right then. He waited, in that lengthened instant, to see what she would do), then just as the fuse seemed to go out, she kicked the grenade over to him; he laughed, outlucked, and tried to kick the ball out of the way.
The flower grenade burst with a loud pop, scattering a cloud of colour all around him, surrounding him in a thousand tiny, expanding blooms. Some stuck to him; others were so small and dry they went up his nose and made him sneeze; the scent reeked.
He coughed and sneezed and tried to wave the flowers away, distantly aware of her clapping her hands and laughing uproariously. People on shore cheered and whistled.
He sat, wiping his nose on a handkerchief and brushing the sticky flowers off his dress jacket. Some of the blooms had landed in his glass; he wrinkled his nose, threw the scent-contaminated spirit overboard.
“Streme Tunnel!” shouted a ceremonially robed official sitting on a high seat on the canal path. “Streme Tunnel! Fifty metres!” He nodded to them as they acknowledged, waving.
Miz turned, looking forward over the bows of the small boat. Ahead, the tube-canal entered a wide basin where most people were decanting from their boats.
The circular canal-twenty kilometres long and one of two girdling what had once been the outer city-was really just an Entraxrln root-transport tube with the top half cut off; the section they were approaching now had not been sliced open, and soon disappeared into a dark mass of Entraxrln mat the size of a small range of hills and covered with the houses and tenements of Streme prefecture; Streme Tunnel was five kilometres long and took over an hour for the average boat to negotiate. Most people not asleep or amorously inclined tended to get out here.
He turned back to her, sighing and shrugging.
“Well,” he said, trying to put just the right note of regret into his voice, “it would appear to be de-boating time, up ahead.”
She set her mouth in a line; an expression he knew was not neutral, but which he still could not fully interpret. It might be annoyance or merely acceptance. Still, something in his chest seemed to release like a spring. Maybe, he thought.
She drank from her glass, frowning.
He sat back, deliberately relaxed, and crossed his arms. He thought quickly; do I want to do this? Yes. But it’s breaking the code we’ve all followed without ever discussing or agreeing it; no sex between neurobondees. With people from other groups, yes; with anybody else in the military habitats where they were based ninety per cent of the time, yes. But not in-group. Too many people thought it would upset the delicate web of anticipation and response that existed between the teams when they flew combat missions together.
I know, he thought, and I don’t fucking care. She’s the commander; let her decide; I want her.
So he uncrossed his arms and glanced back at the tunnel mouth as they entered the basin and the canal fluted out, broadening around them. He looked back into her eyes and said calmly, not too loudly, “So, what shall we do? Get out or go through?”