"Well, then, maybe you should go back to school," Irena suggested.
"No!" Jonny snapped with a sudden flash of anger.
A stunned silence filled the room. Inhaling deeply, Jonny forced himself to calm down. "Look, I know you're all trying to be helpful, and I appreciate it. But I'm twenty-four years old now and capable of handling my own problems." Abruptly, he put down his fork and stood up. "I'm not hungry. I think I'll go out for a while."
Minutes later he was driving down the street, wondering what he should do. There was a brand-new pleasure center in town, he knew, but he wasn't in the mood for large groups of people. He mentally ran through a list of old friends, but that was just for practice; he knew where he really wanted to go. Jame had suggested he call Alyse Carne before dropping in on her, but Jonny was in a perverse mood. Turning at the next corner, he headed for Blakely Street.
Alyse seemed surprised when he announced himself over her apartment building's security intercom, but she was all smiles as she opened her door. "Jonny, it's good to see you," she said, holding out her hand.
"Hi, Alyse." He smiled back, taking her hand and stepping into her apartment, closing the door behind him. "I was afraid you'd forgotten about me while I was gone."
Her eyes glowed. "Not likely," she murmured... and suddenly she was in his arms.
After a long minute she gently pulled away. "Why don't we sit down?" she suggested. "We've got three years to catch up on."
"Anything wrong?" he asked her.
"No. Why?"
"You seem a little nervous. I thought you might have a date."
She flushed. "Not tonight. I guess you know I've been seeing Doane."
"Yes. How serious is it, Alyse? I deserve to know."
"I like him," she said, shrugging uncomfortably. "I suppose in a way I was trying to insulate myself from pain in case you... didn't come back."
Jonny nodded understanding. "I got a lot of that on Adirondack, too, mostly from whichever civilian family I was living with at the time."
Alyse seemed to wince a bit. "I'm... sorry. Anyway, it's grown more than I expected it to, and now that you're back..." Her voice trailed off.
"You don't have to make any decisions tonight," Jonny said after a moment. "Except whether or not you'll spend the evening with me."
Some of the tension left her face. "That one's easy. Have you eaten yet, or shall I just make us some cahve?"
They talked until nearly midnight, and when Jonny finally left he had recaptured the contentment he'd felt on first arriving at Cedar Lake. Doane Etherege would soon fade back into the woodwork, he was sure, and with Alyse and his family back in their old accustomed places he would finally have a universe he knew how to deal with. His mind was busy with plans for the future as he let himself into the Moreau house and tiptoed to his bedroom.
"Jonny?" a whisper came from across the room. "You okay?"
"Fine, Jame—just great," Jonny whispered back.
"How was Alyse?"
Jonny chuckled. "Go to sleep, Jame."
"That's nice. Good night, Jonny."
One by one, the great plans crumbled.
With agonizing regularity, employers kept turning Jonny down, and he was eventually forced into a succession of the level-nine and -ten manual jobs he had hoped so desperately to avoid. None of the jobs lasted very long; the resentment and fear of his fellow workers invariably generated an atmosphere of sullen animosity which Jonny found hard to take for more than a few days at a time.
As his search for permanent employment faltered, so did his relationship with Alyse. She remained friendly and willing to spend time with him, but there was a distance between them that hadn't existed before the war. To make matters worse, Doane refused to withdraw gracefully from the field, and aggressively competed with him for Alyse's time and attention.
But worst of all, from Jonny's point of view, was the unexpected trouble his problems had brought upon the rest of the family. His parents and Jame, he knew, could stand the glances, whispered comments, and mild stigma that seemed to go with being related to an ex-Cobra. But it hurt him terribly to watch Gwen retreat into herself from the half-unintentional cruelty of her peers. More than once Jonny considered leaving Horizon and returning to active service, freeing his family from the cross-fire he had put them into. But to leave now would be to admit defeat, and that was something he couldn't bring himself to do.
And so matters precariously stood for three months, until the night of the accident. Or the murder, as some called it.
Sitting in his parked car, watching the last rays from the setting sun, Jonny let the anger and frustration drain out of him and wondered what to do next. He had just stormed out of Alyse's apartment after their latest fight, the tenth or so since his return. Like the job situation, things with Alyse seemed to be getting worse instead of better. Unlike the former, he could only blame himself for the problems in his love life.
The sun was completely down by the time he felt capable of driving safely. The sensible thing would be to go home, of course. But the rest of the Moreau family was out to dinner, and the thought of being alone in the house bothered him for some reason. What he needed, he decided, was something that would completely take his mind off his problems. Starting the car, he drove into the center of town where the Raptopia, Cedar Lake's new pleasure center, was located.
Jonny had been in pleasure centers on Asgard both before and after the tour on Adirondack, and by their standards the Raptopia was decidedly unsophisticated. There were fifteen rooms and galleries, each offering its own combination of sensual stimuli for customers to choose from. The choices seemed limited, however, to permutations of the traditional recreations: music, food and drink, mood drugs, light shows, games, and thermal booths. The extreme physical and intellectual ends of the pleasure spectrum, personified by prostitutes and professional conversationalists, were conspicuously absent.
Jonny wandered around for a few minutes before settling on a room with a loud music group and wildly flickering light show. Visibility under such conditions was poor, and as long as he kept his distance from the other patrons, he was unlikely to be recognized. Finding a vacant area of the contoured softfloor, he sat down.
The music was good, if dated—he'd heard the same songs three years ago on Asgard—and he began to relax as the light and sound swept like a cleansing wave over his mind. So engrossed did he become that he didn't notice the group of teen-aged kids that came up behind him until one of them nudged him with the tip of his shoe.
"Hi there, Cobra," he said as Jonny looked up. "What's new?"
"Uh, not much," Jonny replied cautiously. There were seven of them, he noted: three girls and four boys, all dressed in the current teen-age styles so deplored by Cedar Lake's more conservative adults. "Do I know you?"
The girls giggled. "Naw," another of the boys drawled. "We just figured everybody ought to know there's a celebrity here. Let's tell 'em, huh?"
Slowly, Jonny rose to his feet to face them. From his new vantage point he could see that all seven had the shining eyes and rapid breathing of heavy stim-drug users. "I don't think that's necessary," he said.
"You want to fight about it?" the first boy said, dropping into a caricature of a fighting stance. "C'mon, Cobra. Show us what you can do."
Wordlessly, Jonny turned and walked toward the door, followed by the giggling group. As he reached the exit the two talkative boys pushed past him and stood in the doorway, blocking it.