Kenmuir grimaced. “Hateful. The arts had never been anything to me but exercise and recreation. I never wanted them to be anything else.” He sighed. “Well, 1 don’t imagine Bruno has suffered permanent damage, other than to his ego and perhaps his social position.”
She laid her hand over his. “Just the same, you were wonderful,” she said.
“I couldn’t have stood by. Could I? The more so when I was—not responsible for the mess, but a, a factor in it.”
“You did accept his hospitality pretty, uh, thoroughly, didn’t you?”
At once she knew the remark was illogical, unfair, something that slipped free before she in her exhaustion saw it coming. He looked away. “I didn’t know how I could well refuse,” he mumbled.
“I’m sorry!” she blurted. “None of my damn business.”
Although … had he enjoyed it?
“Shall we try to sleep?” he proposed.
Still calm, still judicious, still the captain. Why should she vaguely resent that? Better be glad she had such a man at her side. Were there many spacers like him? (No, spacers were few, few, and most of them Lunarians.) How much of him was not inborn but was Fireball, ideals, rites, trothdom, a tradition as old as its Guthrie House? T
In summer the little Rydberg fleet lay at its dock when not in use, a ketch, a ten-seater hydrofoil, a dinghy for knocking about in the sheltering cove. Winter’s boathouse stood to one side. Behind it were an airstrip and a hangar that could accommodate three flitters. Lawn and flowerbeds led up to the dwelling. Stone-built, slate-roofed, it did not dominate the grounds with its size: for at its back the land rose beneath old fir forest, while westward the ocean swept across a fifth of the planet.
On this day a north wind blew strong. The treetops tossed and rustled with it, waves ran upward and inland through their murkiness, a hawk rode above the high horizon they made. Clouds flew in tatters, brilliant against the sun, gray when they passed over it and their shadows scythed below them. The sea ran steely in the distance, white and green where it roaredinto surf. Chop on the cove threw sunlight back and forth, blink-blink-blink, while boats rocked and their mooring lines creaked. Warmth still lay in the earth, but a chill went through the air, harbinger of autumn.
The flitter landed neatly. Lars and Ulla Rydberg waited nearby. They were clad much alike, in tunic and trousers over which they hugged cloaks. The wind fluttered stray locks of hair, his whitening blond, hers wheat-gold. The flitter door opened. A robot climbed out. It was a small multipurpose model, four legs under a cylinder which supported a control turret; two arms ended in hands, two in attachments for various tools. The optics in the turret gleamed about 130 centimeters above the ground. Ordinarily the computer inside would have been a neural net adequate for manual tasks that were not too demanding. This unit had been modified to hold a download.
The voice that rolled from it was Anson Guthrie’s: “Hola! Good seeing you again.”
“Welcome—“ Ulla hesitated for an instant “— jefe.” The honorific did not yet come quite naturally to her. She had only been Fireball for seven years, mainly by virtue of her marriage, and resident in North America for three; the English she learned in Europe was not Hispanicized; her direct contacts with him had thus far been comparatively few and brief. “You honor us.” That was meant for courtesy. She was a big, bluff, handsome woman, no sycophant.
“Gracias.” Guthrie must have been scanning the scene. “Uh, aren’t your kids here? I’d’ve thought they’d come on the gallop, except the baby, and she’d crank up her buggy to full speed.”
“We sent them off on an outing, together with Sefiora Turner,” Rydberg explained. He referred to the single assistant he and his wife needed, aside from machines, to run house and household comfortably. “When you called, you gave me to understand you wanted a confidential meeting.”
“Oh, not that hush-hush,” Guthrie said, shaking hands. “We could go for a sail or a walk in the woods—I’d enjoy that—or just close the door to a room for a couple of hours. The reason I came in person, instead of squirting my image through the usual code, was that I’d like to be with you for a short spell.”