The man himself appeared around the side of his house as Armsman Rykov brought the aircar down for a neat landing on a graveled patch. Penney wore tattered shorts, worn sport shoes, and a deep tan scarified by a few old plague-worm marks; he waved amiably. He was a stocky man about ten years older than Oliver, and had been among the earlier settlers to make their passage by the shortcut of mustering out of the Service right from here. At the time Cordelia and Aral had first arrived thirteen years back, Penney was already an old Sergyar hand, working on his second shack, but Cordelia hadn’t met him till after Oliver had found this place as a cheap and private slip to launch his sailboat. Foremost among Penney’s many virtues, from Cordelia’s point of view, had been his unruffled willingness to treat Oliver and his occasional incognito guests just like any other Kareenburg weekenders.
“How de’ do, Adm’ral Oliver. Ma’am. Ryk. Long time no see,” he greeted them as they clambered out of the aircar. Oliver and Cordelia received a retired-soldier salutelike gesture, the armsman a handclasp; those two had always rubbed along well, being of similar ages and service histories. There would probably be beer on the verandah, later, while Rykov’s principals bobbed about on the lake, and a good long exchange of mission-critical information, bragging and lies optional.
After the necessary preliminaries including a visit to the privy and the ritual offer and refusal of food—they’d brought their own picnic—they strolled down toward the dock. Cordelia veered aside abruptly. “Good heavens, what’s this lovely thing, Penney?”
It appeared to be a flawless crystal canoe, held up on sawhorses, but a tap on the hull gave the duller thump of some unbreakable plastic.
Penney smiled in satisfaction. “M’ stepson brought it to us—latest thing, he says. Transparent hulls for see-through rides—fellow who makes them up in New Hassadar wants to branch out to different shapes, soon as he can work out the prototypes. That plastic has positive buoyancy, too, so’s you can’t sink it for trying. It’s really popular with the guests—I mean to get a couple more soon, but he’s backordered.”
“Is it available today?”
Penney squinted out over the lake. “Maybe later? It’s a mite windy for it now anyways. Good for your sail, though.”
The wind was, indeed, picking up. Cordelia enjoyed its ruffle through her hair as they stepped down onto the creaking dock. Oliver frowned a little into the west, perhaps disappointed that it wasn’t brisker; but this was nearly ideal for her, although she admitted Aral would have found it tame.
“Your old boat’s held up well, Adm’ral,” said Penney, as he and Rykov helped them into it. “It’s proved good for my rentals—very stable, so the amateurs don’t turn it turtle and make me have to go out and rescue them. I’m thinking of offering it to that New Hassadar fellow as a model for his next design, maybe get a trade.”
“You’ve taken good care of her,” said Oliver in return appreciation.
Rykov pointed sternly to the float-belts lying across the seat, and Cordelia and Oliver dutifully put them on. Part of the many little tacit deals she had worked out with her armsman over time; she would play safe, and he would stay out of her hair. Rykov at least had learned to be sensible about what was a risk and what wasn’t, unlike the hyper-keen young ImpSec fellows Vorbarr Sultana kept sending out as the Vicereine’s official security, whom she occasionally wanted to beat to death with their own rulebook. She’d had to pull rank quite firmly to keep them from tagging along today. A private life. What a concept. Well, that was coming, if she had her way. She could hardly wait.
The old moves came back to her as Oliver raised the mainsail and she tended to the jib, letting it luff till Penney and Rykov shoved them off far enough out for her to drop the centerboard. Then Oliver tightened up the boom and took the tiller, and she hitched down the jib-sail line to its cleat, and they were off, skimming over the water. “Perfect!” she called back to him as she took the front seat, facing rearward. The lake was lovely, the distant striated cliffs striking, but scenery in this direction was even better, improved still further when he slid off his shirt to bare his spacer-pale (though more, these days, just office-pale) skin to the sun. All right, so he wasn’t twenty-seven anymore, but who was? And he’d never been weedy. It was good to see him looking so relaxed and happy, squinting into the light till the crow’s-feet seemed to wink at her.
“Too bad we couldn’t lose our wristcoms,” he sighed, with a glance at his.
Cordelia held up her own. “I don’t know about you, but I’ve set mine to ‘volcanoes.’”
“What?” he laughed.
“I’ve trained my staff. I have five levels of interruptions, ranging from one, ‘If you must know,’ two, ‘Diplomatic crisis,’ then three, ‘Has to involve emergency medical teams,’ through four, ‘Only in case of erupting volcanoes.’”
“What in the world is Level Five, then?”
“‘Family,’” Cordelia intoned. “Although, since they are all quite a number of wormhole jumps away, I’m usually safe there.”
“What level would you use for Emperor Gregor, then?”
“Oh, he’s family, too.”
“Ah. Yes. He would be.”
As the wind heeled the boat over and they picked up speed, she grinned back at him, exhilarated, and moved her weight to the side for balance, secure in the knowledge that Oliver would not make her hang bodily out on some stupid little rope, toes curled around the thwart and spine rigid, with the black water skidding under her butt like racing pavement. There were a few things in these Sergyaran lakes one did not want to swim with.
Oliver made the hand-signal warning, Coming about, and together they shifted everything to take them on a heading out past the opposite promontory and into the widest section of the lake. Clear sailing, indeed. He offered her a turn on the tiller, which she took, while he stretched out in the prow and smiled sleepily at her, then stared up at the sail and the sky as if trying to read the future there. Or maybe he was just reverting to worrying about his billion tons of assorted troubles in orbit, which would not be so fine. Counterproductive, even.
After a while she glanced to the west and frowned, not liking the future she was seeing edging up over the kilometers-distant rift wall. “Those clouds look pretty dark. Was this predicted?”
“There’s no front due. I checked.” He roused himself to follow her glance. “Local pop-up thunderstorm, I think.”
“Maybe it’ll pass to the south.”
“Eh…”
By mutual, unspoken assent, they switched to a course that would head them back past the peninsula toward Penney’s Place. This involved a lot more tacking and scrambling about, as the breeze shifted unfavorably. They weren’t quite back to shore when the wind whipped the water to whitecaps, the sky turned dark, and the cold rain began to pelt down in sheets. Oliver still brought the old boat into the dock under jib alone, perfectly aligned and without undue crashing. Penney and Rykov waited anxiously to receive the painter and tie ropes, and to help hoist the hooting Cordelia onto the slippery boards.
“We’ll put ’em to dry in the sun later!” Penney yelled over the wind’s bluster, helping Oliver wrestle down the sails. “This blow won’t last. Sorry for the timing, though!”
“Aye!”
Boat secured, they scrambled up the flat stepping stones on the bank to the somewhat alarming shelter of the lashing trees, and then, more prudently as the next sheet of rain hit them, to the front porch of old Shack One.