Ada did not bring up conversational absurdities such as books or spaceships, but spent the late morning with him, serving as guide, reacquainting him with Ardis Hall’s many wings and gabled corridors, its elaborate wine cellars and secret passages and ancient attics. He remembered a similar tour on his first visit there and the feckless girl-Ada leading him up a rickety ladder to the rooftop jinker platform and Daeman, alert as ever to such revelations, had half glimpsed a young man’s heaven up her hoisted skirt as she climbed above him: he perfectly remembered the milky thighs and dark, stippled shadows there.
This morning they climbed the same ladder to the same jinker platform, but this time Ada gestured him ahead, only smiling at his gentlemanly protests that she go first, the smile suggesting some vixen memory of the event he had thought had gone unnoticed by her at the time.
Ardis Hall was a tall manor and the jinker platform, its mahogany planks still gleaming, thrust out between gables to an overhang sixty feet above the gravel drive where voynix stood like rusted upright scarabs. Daeman stayed back from the unrailed edge, but Ada ignored the exposure and walked right to the brink, gazing wistfully at the long lawn and distant line of forest.
“Wouldn’t you give anything to have a working jinker?” she said. “Even if just for a few days?”
“No. Why would I?”
Ada gestured with her long-fingered hands. “Even with just a child’s jinker you could fly over the forest and river, over those hills to the west, fly on for days and days away from here, away from any faxport.”
“Why would anyone want to do that?”
Ada looked at him for a moment. “You’re not curious? About what’s out there?”
Daeman tapped at his vest as if brushing away crumbs. “Don’t be absurd, my dear. There’s nothing of interest out there . . . pure wilderness . . . no people. Why, everyone I know lives within a few miles of a faxport. Besides, there are Tyrannosaurus rexes out there.”
“A tyrannosaurus? In our forest?” said Ada. “Nonsense. We’ve never seen one here. Who told you that, cousin?”
“You did, my dear. The last time I visited, half a Twenty ago.”
Ada shook her head. “I must have been teasing you.”
Daeman thought about this, about his years of anxiety over the thought of ever visiting Ardis again, about his tyrannosaurus nightmares over the years, and could only scowl.
Ada seemed to read his thoughts and smiled slightly. “Did you ever wonder, Cousin Daeman, why the posts decided to keep our population at one million? Why not one million and one? Or nine hundred thousand, nine hundred ninety-nine? Why one million?”
Daeman blinked at this, trying to see the connection in her thoughts between talk of a Lost Age child’s jinker and dinosaurs and the human population that had been the same . . . well . . . forever. And he didn’t like her reminding both of them that they were cousins, since old superstitions sometimes inhibited sexual relations between family members. “I find that such idle speculations lead to indigestion, even on such a beautiful day, my dear,” he said. “Shall we return to a more felicitous topic?”
“Of course,” said Ada, blessing him with the sweetest of smiles. “Why don’t we go down and find some of the other guests before lunch and our trip to the pour site?”
This time she went first down the ladder.
Luncheon was served outside on the northern patio by floating servitors and Daeman chatted amiably with some of the young people—it seemed that several more guests had faxed in for the evening’s “pour”—whatever that was to be—and after the meal, many of the guests found couches in the house or comfortable lounge chairs on the shaded lawn in which to recline while draping their turin cloths over their eyes. The usual time under turin was an hour, so Daeman strolled near the edge of the trees, keeping an eye out for butterflies as he walked.
Ada joined him near the bottom of the hill. “You do not use the turin, Cousin Daeman?”
“I do not,” he said, hearing that he had sounded more prissy than he had intended. “I’ve accustomed myself to the things after almost a decade, but I don’t indulge. You also abstain, Ada, my dear?”
“Not always,” said the young woman. She was twirling a peach-colored parasol as she strolled, and the soft light gave her pale complexion a beautiful glow. “I check in on the events now and again, but I seem to be too busy to become as addicted as so many are these days.”
“Turins do seem to be ubiquitous.”
Ada paused in the shade of a giant elm with broad, low branches. She lowered and closed the parasol. “Have you tried it?”
“Oh, yes. It was all the rage halfway between my Twenties. I spent some weeks enjoying the . . . excess of it all.” He could not completely strain out the tone of distaste at the memory. “Since then, no.”
“Do you object to the violence, cousin?”
Daeman made a neutral gesture. “I object to its . . . vicariousness.”
Ada laughed softly. “Precisely Harman’s reason for never indulging. You two have something in common.”
The thought of this was so unlikely that Daeman’s only response was to flick away dead leaves on the ground with the point of his walking stick.
Ada looked up at the sun rather than calling up a time function on her palm. “They will be rousing themselves soon. ‘One hour under the cloth equals eight hours of turgid experience.’ “
“Ah,” said Daeman, wondering if her use of the cliché had been in the form of a double entendre. Her expression, always pleasant but bordering on the mischievous, gave no clue. “This pour thing—will it last long?”
“It’s scheduled to go most of the night.”
Daeman blinked in surprise. “Surely we’re not bivouacking down at the river or wherever this event is to be staged?” He wondered if sleeping out under the stars and rings would improve his chances of spending the night with this young woman.
“There will be provisions for those who want to stay all night at the pour site,” said Ada. “Hannah promises that this will be quite spectacular. But most of us will come back up to the manor sometime after midnight.”
“Will there be wine and other drinks at the . . . ah . . . pour?” asked Daeman.
“Most assuredly.”
It was Daeman’s turn to smile. Let the others stay for this spectacle, he would keep pouring Ada drinks through the evening, follow up on her “turgid” line of suggestive conversation, accompany her home (with luck and proper planning, just the two of them in a small carriole), pour the full force of his not-inconsiderable powers of attention upon her—and, with only an added bit of additional luck, this night he would not have to dream of women.
By late afternoon, the twenty or so guests at the manor—some babbling about the day’s turin-experienced events, going on and on about Menelaus being shot by a poisoned arrow or somesuch nonsense—were gathered together by helpful servitors and everyone departed for the “pour site” in a caravan of droshkies and carrioles. Voynix pulled the vehicles while other voynix trotted alongside as security, although—Daeman thought—if there were no tyrannosauruses in the woods, he failed to see a reason for security.
He had maneuvered to be in the lead carriole with their hostess, and Ada pointed out interesting trees, glens, and streams as they rumbled and hummed two or more miles down the dirt path toward the river. Daeman took up more room on their side of the red leather bench than he had to even given his pleasant plumpness, and was rewarded with the feel of Ada’s thigh alongside his for the duration of the voyage.
Their destination, he saw as they came out on the limestone ridge above the river valley, was not the river, exactly, but a tributary to the main channel, a literal backwater some hundred yards across, where erosion and flooding had created a wide shelf of sand—a sort of beach—on which a tall, rickety structure of logs, branches, ladders, troughs, ramps, and stairways had been constructed. It looked like a crude gallows to Daeman, although he had never seen an actual gallows, of course. Torches rose from the shallow tributary and the rickety contraption itself stood half on sand and half over water. A hundred yards out, blocking this channel from the actual river was a narrow island—overgrown with cycads and horsehair ferns—from which birds and small flying reptiles exploded into flight with a maximum of cries and frenzied flapping. Daeman wondered idly if there were butterflies on the isle.