“No ma’am,” Ran said.
That wasn’t in the data he’d been chunked. Maybe the information didn’t exist in the system, maybe the way he’d been pulled out of the sequence to deal with the government types had cost him a piece of Szgranian custom that would have been really useful to know. He thought he could guess what it was now, though.
“Come,” said Lady Scour decisively. She put her left middle hand on the crook of Ran’s right elbow, a human gesture which she had obviously learned for the purpose. “You will act as my escort tonight.”
“Yes ma’am,” Ran said. His screw-up—his turning the ritual into a mating dance—might have put paid to his career with Trident Starlines. Lady Scour could ask Ran to turn backflips across the Social Hall without getting an argument from him.
She walked toward the refreshment buffet. Ran kept pace, and the four attendants followed in pairs.
“Normally custom wouldn’t permit a person of my status to appear in public without a male escort,” Lady Scour said conversationally, “but as I told Rawsl, ‘I am the clan mistress.’ Still, it’s better to obey custom whenever circumstances permit. You will protect me, won’t you?”
She laughed.
“Yes, ma’am,” Ran agreed. “From whatever threatens.”
“Except from yourself,” said the Szgranian, and she laughed again with overtones that Ran Colville had heard often in the flirting voices of human females.
NEVASA
The magnetic motors began to throb as Ran entered the Starlight Bar. Bridge was preparing to drop the Empress of Earth out of her parking orbit above Nevasa.
The bar in the Empress’s prow was more crowded than Ran had ever imagined he would see it. There were chairs for fifty, chromed frameworks that slid above the deck without friction but locked safely into place when a passenger sat down. A few seats were empty, but there were standees around the autobar also.
Ran saw Wanda Holly near the center of the room, seated at a table with two drinks—clear, with lemon slices—waiting on it. He sat down in the seat the second drink saved and said, “Umm, what did you need, Wanda?”
He wasn’t out of breath, but he’d moved pretty fast from the main lounge when he got the call, Ms. Holly requests your presence in the Starlight Bar at your earliest convenience. Not an emergency, maybe, but it wasn’t standard operating procedure either.
“You’ve never been on Nevasa, have you, Ran?” Wanda asked. She raised her glass and offered him a silent toast. “Hope you like sparkling water,” she added.
“If it’s wet, I drink it,” Ran said absently. He didn’t drink like he had on the Cold Crew, but he wouldn’t have turned down something stronger. All crewmen were on standby during docking maneuvers, but Ran had been officially off-watch for the past thirty minutes.
He considered the Second Officer’s question. “No,” he said, “I haven’t been here before. Worried about the authorities because of the war scare, you mean?”
Wanda shrugged. She was looking out the holographic panel that mimicked the curve of the starliner’s bow. “That’ll be a problem, sure. But right now, I just wanted you to see what it’s like to land on Nevasa.”
She glanced around the bar. She wore her hair in a brilliant blond swirl today. Ran liked blondes, but he thought Wanda probably looked her best as the brunette her genes had made her. “That’s what everybody’s here for,” she explained. “People who’ve landed on Nevasa before or talked to somebody who has.”
“Oh . . .” murmured a dozen throats.
Ran looked through the clear forward bulkhead. The sky around the Empress of Earth was beginning to fluoresce.
Streaks of bubbling color rippled through the stratosphere, similar to Earth’s auroras but momentary and a thousand times brighter. The Empress was dropping slowly, at a shallow angle, so she made about as much motion forward as down. The light bloomed from her magnetic motors and those of the eight tugs which coupled the starliner in orbit, streaming back over the ship and her wake through the disturbed air.
It was perhaps the most beautiful thing Ran had ever seen in his life.
“Nevasa’s atmosphere has a high proportion of noble gases,” Wanda explained. “A high-density magnetic flux excites them. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”