She entered the rooftop through the pop-up levitator. Carefully she did not look in his direction, not caring whether he noticed her or not. Through the soaring glass windows and the dangling vegetation she had a magnificent view of the pressurized buildings of a city crafted for a tenuous atmosphere. She pretended to be selecting a quiet spot to eat.
Then she picked the moment. Looked. She simulated uncertain surprise and walked over to his table, standing at a civil distance. His meal had already been served. He was intently shoveling sauteed fish into his mouth. It looked like tank-grown blue trout. He hadn’t seen her.
“Don’t I know you?” she interrupted him.
He looked up from his fish, not recognizing her.
She waited. Still he evinced only blankness. She was going to have to prompt him. “You look like a Hiranimus I once knew. Hmmm? Not quite. You seem more handsome and even worldly!”
“Nemia of l’Amontag!” He grinned. “I didn’t recognize you...” He paused.
“... out of the shower,” she finished for him. “Wasn’t youth wonderful!”
“Well, now! This is a small Galaxy. What are you doing here\”
“This is my planet! What are you doing here!”
“Visiting Mendor.”
“I haven’t seen him since school. You liked him, didn’t you? You two always seemed to be together.”
“Plotting revolution.”
“But you are alone now?” Her tiny hand gesture took in the hanging vines.
“How could I be alone with a l’Amontag! Sit down and tell me all your troubles so I can reciprocate and tell you mine.”
“Your troubles are probably some fake part of a cover story. I should listen to crocodile tears?”
“Not everything about me is fake. The troubles I can talk about are really quite fascinating.”
“Oh, all right.” With a snap of her fingers, she called a chair up out of the floor—it grew and flowered as she waited—then sat down, propping her elbows on the table and placing her face as close to his as she could manage. “I’ll listen to be polite.”
“You first,” he said with a gentlemanly flourish of his fork.
“Nothing out of the ordinary. I’ve been sent home from a wonderful job to marry an oaf. I haven’t thought up a clever way to poison him yet.”
“Ah, you belong to an orthodox Helmarian clan? I presume they are now in their heated breeding mode?”
“Yes”
“Me, too. But they are there”—he pointed at the sky— “and I am here .” His warm gaze took in Nemia, and she was obviously his here.
“Do you think you’ll escape their long arm?” she asked slyly.
“Of course. Why do you think I went to school? Why else would I take secret assignations and secret identities and flit about the darker comers of the Galaxy if it wasn’t to escape the clan?”
“Do you think you’ll ever get married?” she mused.
“I would consider it as a preemptive strike against my parents if I could only find a woman they disapproved of.”
“You couldn’t be pushed into a marriage with a mezartll” Mezartl was a peculiarly Helmarian word that carried all the implications of clan approval, rightness, and duty, flavored by a kind of mystical happiness that came from letting wiser minds choose one’s destiny.
“A mezartl shrew?” He shuddered. “No. I’ve known myself to be a free man since I was ten.”
“I’ll bet you an emperor’s face that you’ve never found yourself cornered by your whole clan, all at one time. You wouldn’t be so glib otherwise.”
“I move too fast.”
“You think so, do you? They’ll get you,” she said. “The Helmarians keep track of their own. The Galaxy isn’t big enough.”
“Hey, girl, you’re really taking the pressure seriously! They haven’t got that much power! It’s just an illusion they support. Just say no.”
“Impossible. They’ve already sent out the banns.”
She had brought out the protective male in him. “Let’s go out together and make a big scene.” Hiranimus laughed. “Give your fiance something to be upset about.”
“You’d do that for me? They’ll shoot at you!”
“Of course. We could even have dinner together tonight.
Don’t leave. Forget your business. Stay with me. Let me order you something. Special.”
She shook her head and let him misinterpret the gesture. His parents were very wise in not telling him what they had already agreed to with Nemia’s family—in unalterable, legally binding code. “You’re chasing me.” She was annoyed that she was pleased.
“Don’t say no to me,” he implored.
“Why not?”
“Nemia. Think of me! What could be more pleasant than chasing a girl of your charms and braving the wrath of two incensed clans in the name of illicit sex?”
“Ho, slaverer! Back to your food! I recall that at the Fortress you were running away from me when I was desperately trying to seduce you.”
“True. But that was all before I became a wise man. They posted me to a planet where farmen are consistently mistaken for eunuchs. Being an outside observer gives one a perspective on life and a fondness for one’s own people—even a melancholy longing for one’s people.” A melancholy look washed over him as he entertained fantasies that he didn’t expect her to share but that he was having fun expressing. “You’ll need a fling before you marry this oaf. I need a fling. Come home with me to Mendor’s place. It is just the right dream world for an impossible romance. A lake. An estate. I’ll get you a cottage on the lake.” Silence. He stared at her and decided that he had made her very, very wary. He called over their waiter. “Boy, the lady wants the Gitofene. The full treatment. All the courses, right up to the mousse.” He turned back to Nemia. “See, I remember how much you liked Grandfa’s Gitofene. Here the chef does it differently—but I assure you, just as deliciously.”
“Is this the kind of ragged flummery you use on all of your women?” She was half amused, half biting.
He smiled back good-naturedly. “Not a chance. There is no other woman than you. You don’t know my story. I own a fam that can run an imposed persona. Think of that. Worse, one not subject to my control. The last place I was at, I worked under heavy celibate constraints.”
She was glad that he didn’t know that she had designed that persona. Her eyes widened in (mock) horror. “Isn’t that dangerous, to be in the field like that? I don’t mean the celibacy—that’s good for men like you.”
“I never thought of fieldwork as dangerous.”
“Of course not! Fieldwork is an extended vacation.” She found herself in a teasing mood. “I didn’t mean the silly old fieldwork. I meant, letting your fam be modified to hold an imposed persona!” She knew that was dangerous. It just wasn’t dangerous for Scogil. His fam had been built from the ground up as a special agent. Not that he knew she knew.
He grimaced ruefully. “Danger is being forced to do what you’re not built to do. I was designed as a walking impersonator, compliments of my parents’ ambition. I can fam-feed a constructed personality as fast as I can change my clothes. It’s not dangerous when you grow up with the extra personas feature. No surgery. My parents knew what they wanted from me and what I was going to become before I was bom. So it was all built in. I’ve never been free. I was given a fam to match my parents’ expectations. I wanted to be a psychohistorian. What I am is a second-rate field agent. My whole life is tracked out.”