"Now I don't know," he admitted.
"You're afraid I'll laugh. You'll be clumsy. All men are. Silk. Patera. You're frightened of my laughter."
"Yes, I am."
"Would you kill me? Silk? For fear that I might laugh? Men do that."
He did not reply at once. Her hands were where Musk's had been, yet he knew they would bring no pain. He waited for her to speak again, but heard only the distant crackle of the dying fire in the kitchen stove and the rapid tick of the clock on the mantel. At last he said, "Is that why some men strike women, in love? So they won't laugh?"
"Sometimes."
"Does Pas strike you?"
She laughed again, a silver flood, whether at Pas or at him he could not have told. "No. Silk. He never strikes anyone. He kills ... or nothing."
"But not you. He hasn't killed you." He was conscious again other mingled perfumes, the mustiness of her gown.
"I don't know." Her tone was serious, and he did not understand.
Oreb whistled abruptly, hopping from Silk's shoulder to the tabletop. "She here! Come back." He hopped to the shade of the broken reading lamp, fluttering from there to the top of the curio cabinet. "Iron girl!"
Silk nodded and rose, limping to the garden door.
Chenille murmured, "I didn't mean, by the way, that we should spy on Viron for Crane. I don't think I'll be doing it anymore myself. What I meant to suggest was that we get your money from Crane."
She yawned again, covering her mouth with a hand larger than most women's. "He seems to have a lot. To control a lot, at least. So why shouldn't we take it? If you were the owner of this manteion, it would be awkward to transfer you, I'd think."
Silk gawked at her.
"Now you expect me to have an elaborate plan. I don't. I'm not good at them, and I'm too tired to think anymore tonight anyway. Since you won't sleep with me, you think about it. And I will, too, when I get up."
"Chenille-"
Maytera Marble's steel knuckles tapped the door.
"It's that mechanical woman of yours, like Oreb said. What is it they called them? Robota? Robotniks? There used to be a lot more."
"Chems," he whispered as Maytera Marble knocked again.
"Whatever. Open the door so she can see me, Silk." He did so, and Maytera Marble regarded the tall, fiery-haired Chenille with considerable surprise.
"Patera has been shriving me," she told the sibyl, "and now I need someplace to stay. I don't think he wants me to sleep here."
"You . . . ? No, no!" Although it was impossible, Maytera Marble's eyes appeared to have widened.
Silk interposed, "I thought that you-and Maytera Rose and Maytera Mint-might put her up in the cenoby tonight. You have vacant rooms, I know. I was about to come over and ask. You must have read my mind, Maytera."
"Oh, no. I was just bringing back your plate, Patera." She held it out. "But-but . . ."
"You'd be doing me an enormous favor." He accepted the plate. "I promise that Chenille won't give you any trouble, and perhaps you, and Maytera Rose and Maytera Mint, may be able to advise her in ways that I, a man, cannot-though if Maytera Rose is not willing, Chenille will have to stay elsewhere, of course. It's getting late, but I'll try to find a family that will open its home to her."
Maytera Marble nodded meekly. "I'll try, Patera. I'll do my best. Really, I will."
"I know," he assured her, smiling.
Leaning against the doorjamb with the plate in his hand, he watched the two women, Maytera Marble in her black habit and Chenille in her black gown, alike yet so very unlike as they walked slowly along the little path. When they had nearly reached the door of the cenoby, the second, lagging behind, turned to wave.
And it seemed to Silk at that moment that the face he glimpsed was not Chenille's, and not a conventionally good-looking face at all but one of breathtaking loveliness.
Hare was waiting outside the floater shed. "Well, it's finished," Hare said.
"Will it fly?"
Hare shrugged. He had noticed the bruise on Musk's jaw, but was too wise to mention it.
"Will it fly?" Musk repeated.
"How'd I know? I don't know anything about them."
Musk, a head shorter, advanced a step. "Will it fly? This's the last time."
"Sure." Hare nodded, tentatively at first, then more vigorously. "Sure it will."
"How the shag do you know, putt?"
"He says it will. He says it'll lift a lot, and he's been making them for fifty years. He ought to know."
Musk waited, not speaking, his face intent, his hands hovering near his waist.
"It looks good, too." Hare took a half step backward. "It looks real. I'll show you." Musk nodded almost reluctantly and motioned toward the side door. Hare hurried to open it.
The shed was too new to have the creeping greenish sound-activated lights that the first settlers had brought with them or, just possibly, had themselves known how to make. Beeswax candles and half a dozen lamps burning fish" oil illuminated its cavernous interior now; there was a faint, heavy odor from the hot wax, a fishy reek, and dominating both a stronger and more pungent smell of ripe bananas. The kite builder was bent above his creation, adjusting the tension of the almost invisible thread that linked its ten-cubit wings.
Musk said, "I thought you said it was finished. All finished, you said."
The kite builder looked up. He was smaller even than Musk; but his beard was gray-white, and he had the shaggy brows that mark the penultimate season in man's life. "It is," he said. His voice was soft and a trifle husky. "I was trimming."
"You could fly it now? Tonight?"
The kite builder nodded. "With a wind."
Hare protested, "She won't fly at night, Musk."
"But this. This'll fly now?"
The kite builder nodded again.
"With a rabbit? It'll carry that much?"
"A small rabbit, yes. Domestic rabbits get very large. It wouldn't carry a rabbit that big. I told you." Musk nodded absently and turned to Hare. "Go get one of the white ones. Not the littlest one, the next to littlest, maybe. About like that."
"There's no wind."
"A white one," Musk repeated. "Meet us on the roof."
He motioned to the kite builder. "Bring it and the wire. Anything you're going to need."
"I'll have to disassemble it again, then reassemble it up there. That's going to take at least an hour. Could be more."
"Give me the wire," Musk told him. "I'll go up first. You stay down here and hook it up. I'll pull it up. Hare can show you how to get up there."
"You haven't let out the cats?"
Musk shook his head, went to the bench, and got the reel. "Come on."
Outside, the night hung hot and still. No leaf stirred in the forest beyond the wall.
Musk pointed. "Stand right over there, see? Where it's three floors. I'll be up on that roof." The kite builder nodded and went back to the floater shed to crank open the main door, three floaters wide. When he picked it up, the new kite felt heavy in his hands; he had not weighed it, and now he tried to guess its weight: as much as the big fighting kite he'd built when he was just starting, with the big black bull on it.
And that wouldn't fly in any wind under a gale. He carried the new kite along the white stone path, then across the rolling lawn to the spot that Musk had pointed out. There was no sign of Hare and no dangling wire. Craning his neck, the kite builder peered up at the ornamental battlement, black as the bull against the mosaic gaiety of the skylands. There was no one there.
Some distance behind him, the cats were pacing nervously in their pen, eager for their time of freedom. He could not hear them, yet he was acutely conscious of them, their claws and amber eyes, their hunger and their frustration. Suppose that the talus were to free them without waiting for Musk's order? Suppose that they were free already, slinking through the shrubbery, ready to pounce?