I shot Nova a look of What did you tell them? but she wasn’t listening. “Uh, thank you,” I said, meaninglessly.
We started across the work area before the dome, to a lock at the curving side. Li Wing took my arm and I found her a most appealing woman. Knife-thrower, huh? I couldn’t help thinking of the lurid overlay on this petite and ladylike woman.
“Yes, thank you, Mr. Braddock. I know that all introductions to sexual life are perilous and I must thank you again.”
Introduction to sexual life? I looked back over my shoulder at Nova, but they had been joined by Puma and one of the burly miners and no one was paying attention to me.
We passed through the lock and into a zome that connected to the home dome occupied by the Sunstrums. By the standards of Mars it was palatial. I quickly revised that: by any standards. It was nowhere as large as my smallest home, but it rivaled my best in the immediate feeling of home. All too often my expensive decorators had contrived marvelous showpieces, richly appointed sets for their talents. I had simply had too much to do and too many homes to live, or rather stay in, to do more than indicate basic directions and to Monday morning quarterback the results.
The Sunstrum home was warm in tone, with comfortable furniture, some of it the best of the Lifestyle lines, and other pieces homemade by loving hands and with an eye for design and detail. Each had been made for just the place it was in.
There was a big heater in a super-ellipse-shaped hole in one wall, a necessity of the Martian life. There was an enormous music-tape-projection unit by the far wall and a bar to the right. Over the bar was Puma’s portrait of Li Wing, and I was startled at how good it was. Back on Earth, when Puma had been Reymundo Santiago, he had been fairly popular, but not always good. Here he was good. I suspected he had been more than half in love with the beautiful oriental empress he had painted with such skill and insight.
I was suddenly aware that I was standing before it, and that they were watching me. I made an embarrassed face and a gesture of apology. “Forgive me, I—”
“Forgive, hell!” thundered Puma, “that’s the purest compliment you can give! Hot damn! Come on Sven, you dirt grubber, are you going to pour us some of that purply wine or not?”
I glanced at Li Wing and found her eyes coming from the painting back to me. “It is lovely,” I said and meant more. As all beautiful women, she understood the compliment and thanked me.
“I’m trying to get Puma to paint Nova,” she said.
“Hell, I’ll do her anytime,” Puma said, “but you sent her off to goddamn Earth!” He looked at her as she stood quietly, attentive but passive. “I do hate to sound like a goddamn cliché, but she sure has grown. Take a bigger canvas now!” He laughed and tasted the wine. He and Sunstrum fell into a conversation about vintages and solar strength and a longer season while I accepted a glass from Li Wing and sat down on the big tan couch.
“And what do you plan to do here on Mars during your visit, Mr. Braddock?” Li Wing asked. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Nova raise her head and she seemed to wait expectantly.
“Look,” I said.
“Just look?” There was the faintest blade of disdain in her voice as Nova’s mother questioned me. Wastrel. Wanderer. Tourist.
“He points,” said Nova. Li Wing raised her eyebrows at her daughter. “He points, and what he points at becomes famous,” she said.
“I work for Publitex,” I said, and felt like a liar. What I really wanted to say was Actually, I’m Brian Tharne and . . . and there I had to stop. What to say then? Even if they believed me, which they probably wouldn’t.
“That sounds like interesting work,” Mrs. Sunstrum said, as though she meant it.
“It got me here,” I said. I started to go on, but Sunstrum came over and sat down.
“Nova tells me you two slept together on the way out,” he said conversationally.
I looked at him and suddenly I was just a little tired of being examined, being tested, being the one who had to prove himself. “Yes, that’s right,” I said. “I love her.”
Sunstrum waved his hand, the one with the glass. “A lot of people love Nova.”
“I’m not a lot of people.”
“Just who are you, Mr. Braddock?”
I turned my head and looked at Nova, who was sitting tensely, trying to look calm, as if we were not talking about her. “I’m her lover.”
“Are you certain there are not legions of those?” Mrs. Sunstrum asked quietly.
“Yes.” My eyes locked to hers and bit by bit the ice melted.
“You killed a man over her,” Sunstrum said.
I did not look at him as I said, “You would have done the same.”
“Perhaps.” I felt, rather than saw him look at Li Wing. “I have killed. When men need killing they must be killed and no halfway measures. But they need not always be killed.”
I did not answer. I was somewhere in those dark eyes.
“Why do you want our daughter?” asked Li Wing.
“Why did Sven Sunstrum want you?”
She hesitated, then said, “First . . . for the sex. Then for love.”
I did not answer. Nova rose from her seat and took a deep breath, her eyes never leaving me. “We are going to bed,” she announced. “Goodnight.”
“Goodnight,” I heard Sunstrum rumble.
“Goodnight, dear,” Li Wing said.
I may have said something and I may not have said something. I had said words. Now I would speak with all of me. She took my hand and we went out and down a corridor and into a bedroom. It was not until morning that I discovered it was the bed she had been conceived in. 8
Nova swung lithely up into the sandcat cabin, and waved down to the others. I took Sunstrum’s hand and I kissed Li Wing on the cheek.
“Oh, come on, Diego, we’ll be back in a couple of days!”
I climbed into the cabin and sealed the door. Nova thumbed the cat into a throaty roar and started off with a fast left-hand turn and a racing run for the crater rim. I grabbed a stanchion and tumbled into a bucket seat and belted down.
She was laughing and the long black hair tumbled over the collar of her warmsuit and I loved her very much.
We stopped only once, at a place along the Athena where there was a little waist-high waterfall and enough air to go without masks. We made love on a warm rock and splashed briefly in the icy water and she was beautiful and golden-brown, all soft flesh and falling hair and sudden mouth.
It was sunset when we got into Bradbury, and Nova was seen by a group of jolly farmers with the purple Silverberg Kibbutz insignia on their shoulders. They hadn’t known she was back, and there was a lot of cheerful kidding and not a little outright lust.
Nova was gay and charming and steered them into gossip about the Canalgae farm, and then we were at Sunstrum’s office. His agent there kept a couple of sleeping cubicles that shared a vibrabath. As she rid herself of the day’s dust and dried river mud she said, “You know the only thing I really liked about Earth was all that water! I love showers, real showers!”
I’ll buy you a Niagara of showers, I thought. I’ll divert the Nile! Cleopatra’s water will flow over your body! “Vibrabaths get you cleaner,” I said.