Evening covered his hurried foray down to the lake-front—the most awesome of the meteor flashes weren’t bright enough to betray him. As he had anticipated, the boathouse was unmanned, its doors unlocked, and he was able to sneak a runabout onto the lake without much hinge squeaking. He threw his pants and boots aboard and for a while, just to be safe, waded and pushed with his feet against the sand until he was clear—but he knew the motor was superbly silent and when he threw himself back in the boat, dripping, to engage the power, at low throttle, only a burble followed his wake. It sounded more like a brook than a thruster.
He had loaded his fam with a sim-overlay of the lake and he watched as the elegant map rotated in his mind’s eye, virtual stars orienting themselves to match the starscape he could see. Once he had his directions, a dismissive thought shut off the see-through landscape ghost. He was certain, at the bottom of his heart, that he shouldn’t be doing this to his best friend, but he was becoming more and more confident of his ability to handle Murek.
A father’s guidance was sometimes even more useful than a tutor’s. From that blood source he’d learned a lot about sneaking and subterfuge. Out here on the lake, with four of Neuhadra’s arrogant stars peering at him, and, hopefully, his tutor asleep, he was glad to have learned those lessons well even if his father hadn’t been consciously participating in every lesson, many of which Eron had conducted in a covert spying mode. He didn’t question why Nemia was attracted to him. Mature women always liked young boys, and being as handsome and debonair as he was made it all that much easier.
He goosed the motor and practiced his helmsmanship, steering up ahead to the left of Ore-Nose Point, now showing in blacks and dark blues and twinkles of stardust off the water. A sharp breeze made him huddle inside his coat but he refused to take his hands off the wheel—he wasn’t in the mood for automatic. She was just around the point. Soon he’d have to swing right to leave behind him a lazy curving wake of starlit ripples.
A balance between persistence of goal and the flexible ability to modify goals in the face of obstacle was the secret of staying in command. Out around Ragmuk his tutor had begun to flag and lose direction. Here at Neuhadra he had become positively gloomy, even defeated, but Eron himself hadn’t lost direction. He was a good helmsman. He’d kept at Murek to honor his commitment, prodding: get me into school, get my fam enhanced. Every time Murek seemed ready to quit, Eron kept after him until he realigned—and just in case Murek did fail him, he was assembling a new set of contacts. It was working. Everything was working perfectly.
Nemia had taken a small cottage on the lakefront not far from the Glatim estate—to be near her friend, she said. (She had used the circumspect word “friend” to refer to Murek, but Eron’s delicate spying had confirmed that a more accurate word might have been “lover”) She was evidently in hiding from her parents, who, she explained, had other plans for her. Eron approved of women who fought with their parents. When he turned into the cove, as she had promised, a soft robobulb was illuminating the dock. In fact, as he slowed for his approach, he saw her sitting there with her legs hanging over the water, woman and spider-legged robobulb both waiting for him.
She grabbed the rope he tossed to her and lashed the runabout to a poured stone pile and took his hand to help him clamber up onto the jetty. “I wasn’t sure you had the audacity to come,” she teased.
He wished he was older and taller. “You invited me,” he replied firmly.
“But it’s past your bedtime .” She was grinning behind a transparent oxygen facemask, shaped by some artist to give her an alien mystique.
“I may be younger than you are but I have more brains,” he chided. “It isn’t very bright of you to have me here.” He could trade insult for insult. That was part of the romance. He noticed the reflection of the four brightest stars in her eyes.
“It’s night. Our mutual friend won’t notice.”
“With us gawking here in the open and four suns in the sky?”
“Oh, dear; we’ll have to hide,” she challenged, and headed uphill toward the cottage. The robobulb hesitated, not quite knowing to which human its duty lay.
Eron chased after her into the dark and the sentient bulb bounded behind with eight-legged leaps that threw goblin-armed shadows around them. She ran ahead in the zigzag swings of an evasive prey but finally trapped him, predator-like, in a little hedged alcove by a garden where they sat down on the bench to catch their breath. “You run pretty
good for an old lady,” he commented suavely. The robobulb, arriving late, dimmed and hid itself discreetly in the bushes. “You’re not afraid to be here, little pup?”
“Of course I’m afraid. Murek impounded my kick.”
“Your kick?”
“My blaster!”
“You don’t have your blaster with you? You’re defenseless?” She was grinning behind her fairy facemask again.
“I’m all mush,” he said. “But I can still fight feebly for my honor if circumstance demands it.”
“You’d win. If I tried to kiss you here with these masks on us, I’d never be able to overwhelm you.” And she was off again toward the house.
He followed her inside, through the vestibule’s pressure lock. The leggy bulb resumed its patrolling of the grounds. They hung up their masks.
But they didn’t kiss right away. She had music to play. He was astonished to hear the strains of the Eighth Rombo Cantata of Aiasin seeping out of her walls. Seventy-first-century Imperial Court music was a favorite of his mother and was rarely played anymore, so his mother claimed. Ah. Nemia had been pumping Murek about his lifestyle! Very casually she began to ask him leading questions. It was a setup. But it was nice to have a woman so interested in him that he couldn’t stop talking—and to have comfortable antiques to sink into while he chatted, even if they were hideously old fashioned to his more colorful taste. Nemia was an easy conversationalist—not like Girl, who had a very weird brain/fam. He didn’t even know how he got onto the topic of how much he hated his father’s secrecy. That topic! It must have been the couch and the frilled pillows. It had nothing to do with her eyes, which he couldn’t escape.
“And you never keep secrets?” she taunted.
“Never. Can’t you see how frank I’m being with you? And my nefarious father manipulates people while deliberately keeping them in the dark!”
“But you never manipulate people in the dark?”
“Only when they pull me under the covers,” he hinted, inching along the couch. “I prefer to do it with the lights on.” “I see,” she said, holding him at bay with a finger on his nose. The room lights, as if on signal, began to creep across the high ceiling, swinging on little silver legs, dimming the study as they retreated into far comer burrows.
He began to notice that he had been talking too much— gushing out secrets he wouldn’t have dared tell a fellow Gandarian. A good love affair shouldn’t be so vainly onesided. He had to think of her He thought of her. She had balm-scented breasts. Love required a sharing of minds, but was she ever going to let him get off the topic of himself? He ignored her last question—he had questions for her, too—for instance, how had her breasts become so round? But it wouldn’t be polite to ask about her body. Concentrate. Her mind. The secret was to flatter the mind of a woman with a beautiful body. Early on he had deduced that she was an expert on fams and knew more about that subject than anybody he had ever met before. It was a topic that interested him, too, so he began by generating—perhaps too quickly—a list of important intellectual questions. People who knew things liked to talk about them.