“Kenri! Oh, Kenri, dearest!”
Nivala must have been keeping herself nearby, alert for his arrival. She ran straight to his arms. He wondered for a second whether that was shamelessness or ordinary upper-class behavior these days. Then they were embraced and kissing. Her misty cloak swirled about them. Her perfume smelled like roses.
She drew back. Her smile trembled away. He saw that she’d lost weight, and shadows lay below the silver-blue eyes. It struck him in the gut: This past couple of weeks, since Fleetwing took orbit, were worse for her than for me. “Maybe I’d better go,” he said.
“Not now,” she answered, stammeringly urgent. “I — I hoped you’d land earlier, but w-we have to meet them sooner or later, and a bold stroke — Come.” She caught his hand and tugged. With forlorn gaiety: “I want them to see the man I’ve got me.”
Side by side, they advanced. The dancers were stopping, pair after pair, awareness spreading like a wave from a cast stone, turning faces and faces and faces around. Voices choked off. The music persisted. It sounded tinny.
Nivala led Kenri to a dais. They mounted it. A troupe of erotic performers scampered aside. She lifted her head and beckoned to the amplifier pickup. Her voice rang as loud as the voice of some ancient storm goddess. “Stars and Standards, kindred and friends, I … I wish to announce — to present my . . . my affianced, . . . Lieutenant Kenri Shaun of the starship Fleetwing.”
For a time that dragged, nobody moved. At last someone made the ritual bow. Then someone else did, then all the rest, like jointed dolls. No, not all. A few turned their backs.
Nivala’s thunder went shrill. “Carry on! Enjoy yourselves! Later —” The music master took his cue and activated a bouncy tune. Couple by couple, the guests slipped into a figure dance. They didn’t know what else to do.
Nivala looked back at Kenri. “Welcome home.” She had forgotten the amplifier. Her words boomed. She guided him off the dais and around the wall.
“It’s been too long,” he said for lack of anything else.
A doorway gave on a corridor. It ended in a room screened off by trellises where honeysuckle climbed, a twilit room with a screen playing a view of moonlight on a lake. The music reached it, but faintly, not quite real.
Again she came to him, and now they had no haste. He felt how she shivered.
“This is a hard situation for you, isn’t it?” he said when they stood holding hands.
“I love you,” she told him. “Nothing else matters.”
He had no response.
“Does it?” she cried.
“We, uh, we aren’t alone on our private planet,” he had to say. “How’s your immediate family taken this?” The call in advance had amounted to endearments and the invitation.
“Some howled. But the colonel curbed them. My uncle, the head of us now Father’s gone. He ordered them to behave themselves till they see what happens.” Nivala gulped. “What happens will be you’ll show them, you’ll show everybody what you’re worth, till they boast about your being one of us.”
“One of you — Well, I’ll try. With your help.”
They sat down on a biopadded bench. She nestled close. His right arm was about her, his left hand closed over hers, and he breathed the sunniness of her hair. From time to time they kissed. Why did his damned thoughts keep straying?
I’ll try — what? Not to plan parties or purvey gossip or listen politely to idiots and perverts. No, that’s not for her, either. What can we do?
A man can’t spend all his waking hours making love.
They’d talked about it aboard ship, though he realized now how desultory the talk had been. He could join a trading firm. (Ten thousand pelts from Kali recd. pr. acct., arrange with Magic Sociodynamics to generate a vogue for them, and lightning flared above those wild hills. Microbes, discovered on Hathor, their metabolism suggesting certain useful variations in nanotechnics, and the jungle was a geometries of mystery. Intriguing customs and concepts recorded on a recently discovered world, and the ship had raced among foreign stars to a fresh frontier.) Or perhaps the military. (Up on your feet, soldier! Hup, hup, hup, hup! . . . Sir, this intelligence report from Mars. . . . Sir, I know the guns aren’t to spec, but we can’t touch the contractor, his patron is a Star-Free. . . . The General commands your presence at a banquet for the Lord Inspector. . . . Now tell me, Captain Shaun, how really do you think they’ll handle those rebels, you officers are so frightfully closemouthed. . . . Ready! Aim! Fire! So perish all traitors. Long live the Dominant!) Or the science centers. (Well, sir, according to the text, the formula is — )