Lt. Leary, Commanding by David Drake

Welter Heights was the district of Xenos where Daniel was now renting an apartment. He’d meant, “Are you from off-planet?” but in fairness to the girls, he hadn’t said that. Mind, if he had, they might have asked him what a planet was.

“You must have been a lot of places since you’re a navy man, isn’t that so, Danny?” Elinor said, shifting slightly and bringing her knee in contact with Daniel’s. She lifted her hands to frame her hair, which swirled into a peak like a pale blond meringue.

The canal curved slowly between walls of stone covered with a Terran variety of moss. Daniel doubted that many of the Gardens’ visitors recognized that the entranceway was a display in its own right, but he at least appreciated the attention to hidden detail.

“Why, I’ve seen some of the universe, yes,” Daniel said with a broad smile to imply an exaggeration he would’ve choked before putting into words. In fact his two months on Kostroma was the only time he’d spent on a planet besides Cinnabar.

The boat’s powerful electric drive set up a hum in the fabric of the hull, easily distinguished from the slap of wakes from the preceding craft. The tiny trolling motor on the transom must be intended to move them between the islets, named for the planets whose transplanted vegetation adorned them.

“Then tell me the truth,” Elinor said. Her friend leaned toward Daniel from the other side, putting the fingertips of her left hand on his shoulder as if for balance. “Do the girls on Pleasaunce really wear their hair this way?”

Daniel blinked. “I can truthfully say,” he said truthfully, “that I never saw a woman on Pleasaunce—” the capital of the Alliance of Free Stars, and a planet Daniel could only have visited as a prisoner during the past five years of open war between Cinnabar and the Alliance “—who was anywhere near as beautiful as you—”

He put his left hand over the fingers on his shoulder. Shawna responded by massaging his trapezius.

“—or Shawna.”

Well, after all, he hadn’t chosen this seat because he expected brilliant conversation during the trip. Adele, placed beside Mistress Zane on a bench forward, seemed to be having that. She caught Daniel’s eye past Zane and gave him a sardonic grin—almost as if she could hear the girls.

The boat slowed, then turned sharply to enter the Gardens proper. Around the edge of the islet to the right grew amber trees from Albirus. Sap dripping from their horizontal branches down to the surface of the water had hardened into a curtain of translucent gold. There was a small dock and a passage through the wall, but the trees were planted to form a reentrant that screened the islet’s interior even from that direction. An orgy there would have been only shadows and laughter to those elsewhere in the Gardens.

Daniel laughed, exchanging pats and flattery with Shawna and Elinor. Conditioned reflex and his tongue muscles were sufficient for the task, letting his eyes and brain get on with cataloguing the minihabitats which the boat crawled past on the thrust of the trolling motor.

He didn’t recognize all the originals, though usually one plant or another was so distinctive that he could identify the source planet by that alone. The scarlet rippers from Swetna surprised him until he noticed that each leaf had a small cut at the base. The motive spines must have been removed, explaining how a plant which slashed animals’ throats for fertilizer could be grown in a pleasure garden. The flowers’ heavenly perfume floated over the water, stopping the girls in mid-sentence. Their faces took on a rapt, almost feral, look that was honest in a fashion no previous expression of theirs had been.

In the lead, Vaughn’s boat nosed up a ramp which was long enough to berth the whole miniature fleet. Rakoscy Islet was equipped for large parties. There were no grasses on it, but short-stemmed plants whose leaves were the size of five-florin pieces covered the ground with soft resilience. In the center of the islet were refrigerated containers on serving tables. Bowers of larger, soft-bodied shrubbery around the circumference sheltered couches and eating tables.