It was a warm evening, more humid than Ulanbat, and the faxpad was centered in a grassy meadow surrounded by low hills. Twenty feet beyond the pad circle stood an ancient two-person, one-wheeled, open carriole, with an equally ancient servitor floating above the driver’s nook and a single voynix standing between the wooden tongues. It had been more than a decade since Daeman had visited Ardis Hall, but now he remembered the barbaric inconvenience of all this. Absurd, not having one’s home on a faxnode.
“Daeman Uhr?” queried the servitor, although it obviously knew who he was.
Daeman grunted and held out his battered gladstone. The tiny servitor floated closer, took the luggage in its padded cusps, and loaded it in the carriole’s canvas boot while Daeman climbed aboard. “Are we waiting for others?”
“You are the final guest,” replied the servitor. It hummed into its hemispherical niche and clicked a command; the voynix clamped onto the carriole tongues and began jogging toward the setting sun, its rusty peds and the carriole’s wheel raising very little dust on the gravel roadway. Daeman settled back on the green leather, rested both hands on his walking cane, and enjoyed the ride.
He had come not to visit Ada but to seduce her. This is what Daeman did—seduce young women. That and collect butterflies. The fact that Ada was in her mid-twenties and Daeman was approaching his Second Twenty made no difference to him. Neither did the fact that Ada was his first cousin. Incest taboos had eroded away long ago. “Genetic drift” was not even a concept to Daeman, but if it had been, he would have trusted the firmary to fix it. The firmary fixed everything.
Daeman had been visiting Ardis Hill ten years earlier in his role as cousin—and trying to seduce Ada’s other cousin, Virginia, out of sheer boredom since Virginia had all the attractiveness of a voynix—when he had first seen Ada nude. He had been walking down one of the endless Ardis Hall corridors in search of the breakfast conservatory when he had passed the younger woman’s room, the door was ajar, and there reflected in a tall, warped mirror was Ada, bathing from a basin with a sponge and wearing only a mildly bored expression—Ada was many things, but overly hygienic was not one, Daeman had learned—and her reflection, this young woman just emerging from the chrysalis of girlhood, had arrested him, this adult man just a bit older then than Ada was now.
Even then, with the puffiness of childhood still present in her hips and thighs and bud-nipple breasts, Ada was a sight worth stopping to appreciate. Pale—the girl’s skin stayed a soft, parchment white no matter how long she stayed outside—her gray eyes, raspberry lips, and black-black hair was an amateur eroticist’s dream. The cultural mode had been for women to shave their armpits then, but neither young Ada nor—Daeman sincerely hoped—her adult counterpart had paid any more attention to that than she did to most other cultural modalities. Frozen in the tall mirror then (and pinned and mounted in the collection tray of Daeman’s memory now) was that still-girlish but already voluptuous body, heavy pale breasts, creamy skin, alert eyes, all that paleness punctuated by the four dashes of black hair—the wavy question mark of hair she kept carelessly pinned up except when she played, which was most of the time, the two commas under her arms, and the perfect black exclamation mark—not yet matured to a delta—leading to the shadows between her thighs.
Riding in the carriole, Daeman smiled. He had no idea why Ada had invited him to this birthday celebration after all these years—or whose Twenty they were celebrating—but he was confident that he would seduce the young woman before he faxed back to his real world of parties and long visits and casual affairs with more worldly women.
The voynix trotted effortlessly, pulling the carriole with only the gravel-hiss underped and the soft humming of ancient gyroscopes in the carriage body. Shadows crept across the valley, but the narrow lane went up over a ridge, caught the last bit of the sun—bisected as it was on the next ridge west—and then descended into a wider valley where fields of some low crop stretched out on either side. The tending servitors flitted above the field, Daeman thought, like so many levitating croquet balls.
The road turned south—left to Daeman—crossed a river on a wooden covered bridge and then switchbacked up a steeper hill and entered an older forest. Daeman vaguely remembered hunting for butterflies in that ancient forest ten years ago, later on the day he had seen young Ada nude in the mirror. He remembered his excitement at collecting a rare breed of mourning cloak near a waterfall, the memory mingling with the excitement at seeing the girl’s pale flesh and black hair. He remembered now the look Ada’s reflection had given him when the pale face looked up from her ablutions—disinterested, neither pleased nor angry, immodest but not brazen, vaguely clinical—looking at twenty-seven-year-old Daeman frozen by lust in the hallway much the way Daeman himself had studied his captured mourning cloak.
The carriole was nearing Ardis Hall. It was dark under the ancient oaks and elms and ash trees nearing the top of the hill, but yellow lanterns had been set along the roadway and lines of colored lanterns could be glimpsed in the primeval forest, perhaps outlining trails.
The voynix padded out of the woods and a twilight view opened up: Ardis Hall glowing on its hilltop; white gravel paths and roads winding away from it in every direction; the long, grassy sward extending down from the manor house for more than a quarter mile before the greenway was blocked by another forest; the river beyond, still glowing, reflecting the dying light in the sky; and through a gap in the hills to the southwest, glimpses of more forested hills—black, devoid of lights—and then more hills beyond that, until the black ridges blended with dark clouds on the horizon.
Daeman shivered. He hadn’t remembered until that minute that Ada’s home was somewhere near the dinosaur forests on whatever continent this was. He remembered being terrified during his previous visit, although Virginia and Vanessa and all the rest had assured him that no dangerous dinosaurs were within five hundred miles—all the rest being reassuring, that is, except for fifteen-year-old Ada, who had merely looked at him with that calculating, mildly amused look he soon learned was her habitual expression. It had taken butterflies to get him outdoors for a walk then. It would take more now. Even though he knew it was perfectly safe with the servitors and voynix around, Daeman had no urge at all to be eaten by an extinct reptile and to wake up in the firmary with the memory of that indignity.
The giant elm on the downhill side of Ardis Hall had been festooned with scores of lanterns; torches lined the circular drive and the white-gravel paths from the house to the yard. Sentinel voynix stood along the driveway hedges and at the edge of the dark woods. Daeman saw that a long table had been set out near the elm tree—torches flickering in the evening breeze all around the festive setting—and that a few guests were already gathering there for dinner. Daeman also noted with his usual hint of pleased snobbery that most of the men here were still dressing in off-white robes, burnooses, and earth-tone evening oversuits, a style that had gone out of fashion months ago in the more important social circles Daeman inhabited.
The voynix padded up the circular drive to the front doors of Ardis Hall, stopped in the shaft of yellow light from those doors, and set the carriole tongues down so gently that Daeman did not even feel a bump. The servitor flitted around to fetch his bag while Daeman stepped down, glad to feel his feet on the ground, still feeling a bit lightheaded from the day’s faxing.