Against A Dark Background (26 page)

Zefla strolled - long-stepped in culottes and a light coat-shirt -with an almost disjointed looseness, head moving from side to side, smiling at everyone and no-one, walking with a kind of easy familiarity as though she belonged here, knew these people, made this walk every day.

Heads turned as they crossed the bridge over the trickle-throated bed of the Ishumin rivet and entered the partially walled warren of the university; merchants at stalls lost the thread of their sales pitch, people using phones forgot what they were talking about, passengers at tram stops neglected to press the call-button for the next tram so that it rushed clanking past them; at least two men, looking back over their shoulders, bumped into other people.

Sharrow started to get uneasy as they passed through Apophyge Gate into the dark clutter of the Literature Faculty prefecture. ‘You sure you weren’t followed?’ she asked Zefla.

Zefla looked mildly incredulous. ‘Of course I was followed,’ she said scornfully. ‘But never by anybody with anything lethal in mind.’ She put her arm through Sharrow’s and looked quietly smug. ‘Quite the opposite, I imagine.’

‘I’d forgotten we could be conspicuous,’ Sharrow admitted, but seemed to relax a little. She lifted her gaze from the cramped cobble-barks of Metonymy Street to the airy sweep of stay-cables describing elegant arcs above the distant grid of the Mathematics Faculty. She began to whistle.

They walked on, still arm-in-arm. Zefla looked thoughtful for a while, then smiled; a youth crossing the street in front of them with an armful of ancient books, caught unintentionally in the beam of that smile, promptly dropped the tomes. Zefla went, ‘Whoops,’ as she stepped over the crouching student’s head, then gazed at Sharrow.

‘Whistling. . .’ Zefla said.

‘Hmm?’ Sharrow looked at her.

They stopped at a street corner to study a Faculties map. Zefla bent, hands clasped behind her back, inspecting the map.

‘Whistling,’ she repeated. ‘Well, it used to mean only one thing.’

Sharrow had an uncharacteristically broad smile on her face when Zefla turned back to her. Sharrow shrugged and cleared her throat as they turned to head up a steep side street towards the History Faculty. ‘Damn, am I that transparent?’

‘You look tired, too.’

Sharrow rubbed under her eyes gently. ‘Worth every bag and line.’

‘Who was the lucky fellow?’

‘Musician.’

‘Strings? Wind? Keyboard? Composition?’ Zefla inquired.

Sharrow grinned at her, brown eyebrows flexing. ‘Percussion,’ she said huskily.

Zefla sniggered, then assumed a serious expression, lifting her head up and enunciating clearly. ‘Don’t brag, dear; it’s unbecoming.’

‘Ah, war is hell,’ Miz Gattse Ensil Kuma said, sitting back luxuriantly in the perfumed pillows of the small canal-boat. He lifted the stemmed glass of slushed trax spirit from the boat’s table and sipped at it delicately, watching the gently glowing lanterns as they floated past them. The boat’s own lantern shone softly, creaking on the end of a bowed, spindly branch above them. People in fancy-dress passed on the canal walkway a few metres away, trailing streamers and laughing, their faces hidden by grotesque and fabulous masks. Above, over the dark city, fireworks blazed distantly, their flashes lighting up the layers of Entraxrln membrane and sometimes silhouetting the open weavework of the composite trunks. The boat whirred quietly on along the raised, open section of canal.

Sharrow - actually, at that moment, Commander Sharrow of the anti-Tax League Irregular Forces Eleventh Clipper Squadron - sat across the little table from him. For the first time since they’d met almost a year ago she was out of uniform and not dressed in ease-fatigues or street sloppies. She wore a rainbow-mirrored half-mask that just covered her eyes and the bridge of her nose. It was topped by a cap of white and green-dyed lake-bird feathers; her dress was bright green, short, low-cut and clinging, and her legs, in the fashion of the day, were sheathed in a transparent covering of polymerised perfume-oil. She had long, perfectly shaped legs and they gleamed, they glistened, they glinted under the suspended lanterns that swung on bowed stalks over the dark canal.

He could hardly keep his eyes off those long, slinkily muscular legs. He knew the dry, slick touch of perfume-oil, the smooth, blissful feel of that slowly evaporating, few-molecules-thick covering; he had experienced it many times on other women and it was no longer quite so freshly erotic an experience as it had been once. But sitting here, alone with her in this little purring, gently bumping boat on the last night of the festival, he wanted to touch her, hold her, stroke and kiss her more than he could remember ever wanting any woman. The urge, the need was as scarifying and intense as he remembered from just before he’d first gotten laid; it burned in him, infested him, ran brilliant and urgent in his blood.

It was suddenly irrelevant to him that she was his Commanding Officer and an aristo - things that had, in some kind of piqued, invertedly snobbish way in the past prevented him from ever thinking of her as a woman (and a beautiful, attractive, intelligent one, at that; the kind he would normally know just from the first glance, the first word, that he would want to bed if he could) rather than his tactically brilliant but curt and scathingly sarcastic CO, or an arrogant over-privileged brat from Golter who had drop-dead looks and knew it.

‘A toast,’ Sharrow said, uncrossing her gauzily shining legs and sitting forwards. She raised her glass.

‘What to?’ Miz asked, looking at the colourfully distorted reflection of his face in her rainbow-mirror mask. His own mask lay on his chest, looped round his neck.

‘Iphrenil toast,’ she said. ‘The secret toast; we each toast what we choose to.’

‘Stupid custom.’ He sighed. ‘Okay.’

They clinked glasses. Masked figures dressed as deep country bandits ran along the canal, whooping and firing pop-guns. He ignored them and looked into her eyes as he drank from his glass. Here’s to getting you into bed, my commander, he thought to himself.

Her dark, mocking eyes looked back at him from behind the mask. A small smile creased her lips.

A flower grenade landed between them in the well of the little boat. She laughed a dark-brown laugh, electrifying him. She kicked the grenade over to him; he kicked it back; the perfumed fuse burned smokily. She trapped the fist-sized ball beneath her naked foot, watching it (and he could feel the SNB kicking in, this becoming a tactical situation for both of them, and he knew the possibilities and the potential courses she would be evaluating right then. He waited, in that lengthened instant, to see what she would do), then just as the fuse seemed to go out, she kicked the grenade over to him; he laughed, outlucked, and tried to kick the ball out of the way.

The flower grenade burst with a loud pop, scattering a cloud of colour all around him, surrounding him in a thousand tiny, expanding blooms. Some stuck to him; others were so small and dry they went up his nose and made him sneeze; the scent reeked.

He coughed and sneezed and tried to wave the flowers away, distantly aware of her clapping her hands and laughing uproariously. People on shore cheered and whistled.

He sat, wiping his nose on a handkerchief and brushing the sticky flowers off his dress jacket. Some of the blooms had landed in his glass; he wrinkled his nose, threw the scent-contaminated spirit overboard.

‘Streme Tunnel!’ shouted a ceremonially robed official sitting on a high seat on the canal path. ‘Streme Tunnel! Fifty metres!’ He nodded to them as they acknowledged, waving.

Miz turned, looking forward over the bows of the small boat. Ahead, the tube-canal entered a wide basin where most people were decanting from their boats.

The circular canal - twenty kilometres long and one of two girdling what had once been the outer city - was really just an Entraxrln roottransport tube with the top half cut off; the section they were approaching now had not been sliced open, and soon disappeared into a dark mass of Entraxrln mat the size of a small range of hills and covered with the houses and tenements of Streme prefecture; Streme Tunnel was five kilometres long and took over an hour for the average boat to negotiate. Most people not asleep or amorously inclined tended to get out here.

He turned back to her, sighing and shrugging.

‘Well,’ he said, trying to put just the right note of regret into his voice, ‘it would appear to be de-boating time, up ahead.’

She set her mouth in a line; an expression he knew was not neutral, but which he still could not fully interpret. It might be annoyance or merely acceptance. Still, something in his chest seemed to release like a spring. Maybe, he thought.

She drank from her glass, frowning.

He sat back, deliberately relaxed, and crossed his arms. He thought quickly; do I want to do this? Yes. But it’s breaking the code we’ve all followed without ever discussing or agreeing it; no sex between neurobondees. With people from other groups, yes; with anybody else in the military habitats where they were based ninety per cent of the time, yes. But not in-group. Too many people thought it would upset the delicate web of anticipation and response that existed between the teams when they flew combat missions together.

I know, he thought, and I don’t fucking care. She’s the commander; let her decide; I want her.

So he uncrossed his arms and glanced back at the tunnel mouth as they entered the basin and the canal fluted out, broadening around them. He looked back into her eyes and said calmly, not too loudly, `So, what shall we do? Get out or go through?’

Her gaze slid from his eyes to the tunnel ahead, then back again. She took a breath.

She’s mine, he thought. Oh, don’t let me be wrong!

`What do you want to do?’ she asked him.

He shrugged, adjusted a pillow at his side. ‘Well, I’m comfortable here . . .’

`You want to go through,’ she said, the mirror-mask rising as she tipped her head back, as if daring him.

He just shrugged.

She looked at the people on the shore, and up at the sporadic bursts of fireworks above the city’s dark twinkle of lights. `I don’t know,’ she said, looking back at him. And suddenly she was all haughty Golter noble, nose in the air, imperious and straight-backed, her voice commanding: ‘Persuade me.’

He smiled. A year ago, that would have been it; he’d have bridled at that arrogance, and laughed and said, Na, it’d be boring in the tunnel; let’s rejoin the others and have some real fun (and would secretly have hoped that she had wanted to go through, and so would be hurt that he’d said it would be boring) . . . but now he was a little older and a lot wiser, and he knew her better, too, and he was fairly sure now that he knew what it meant that she should suddenly revert to the behaviour of her earlier life.

And even then, even in that instant when he knew he was on the tremulous brink of something he wanted more desperately than he’d ever wanted anything before, and knew that it was going to break new and dangerous ground, and maybe endanger him, her and the others, and knew that he knew, and didn’t care, because life was there to be lived just this one time, and that meant gambling, seizing each and every chance for happiness and advancement; even then he found time to think, to be struck by the realisation: How old we have become.

Not one of us over twenty; her - this stunning, glorious creature in front of him - only just nineteen. And yet in the last year we have become ancient; from children to cynical, war-worn, half-careless, half-uncaring veterans who will take their enemies when and where they can in the darkness and the single-ship loneliness of the battle, coupling with them across microseconds of space, tussling and teasing and tangling with them until only one was left . . . and took their pleasures cut from the same template; total, intense and furiously concentrated involvement, immediately followed by utter indifference.

Persuade you, he thought. `Okay,’ he said, smiling at her. ‘Come on through the tunnel and I promise I’ll tell you what I toasted to.’

She made a funny expression, drawing both ends of her mouth down, the tendons in her neck standing out. It was an expression he’d never seen on her before. He smiled despite himself, thinking how suddenly young she had looked.

`I don’t know,’ she said, the mirror-mask looking down at her glass. ‘Then I’d have to tell you what I toasted to . . .’

She looked up into his eyes, and he wondered if it was possible to give a come-hither look from behind a mask. He settled back in the plushness of the cushions. Something sang in his soul. The tunnel entrance drifted closer.

Boat marshals called to them, reminding them this was their last chance to decant. People on shore made knowing, lowing noises and shouted ribald advice. He scarcely heard them.

‘You’re persuaded?’ he said.

She nodded. `I’m persuaded.’

He sat very still.

She reached up and took off the rainbow-mirror mask, just as the tunnel mouth came up to swallow them.

‘This is it,’ Zefla said. `31/3 Little Grant Terrace.’

The three-storey structure was even more darkly ramshackle than its neighbours. It was Malishu-vernacular in style, sculpted from bluey-purple layer-mat supported by fire-hardened beams of brown stalk-timber. It looked out over a narrow-railinged, bark-cobbled street to a view of the steeply raked roofs - some tented, some bark-tiled - of the Modern History Department, and out towards the city’s northern suburbs.

The place looked dead. The ground floor had no windows and the tall windows in the two upper floors were dark and dirty. The door, made from poorly cured bark that had warped and split over the years, hung crooked over a nailed-on extra sill. Zefla pulled on a string handle. They couldn’t hear any sound from the interior. Zefla tested the door but it was either locked or badly stuck.

Sharrow looked up at the guttering; a section hung loose, dripping water despite the fact the roof and street had now dried after the early-morning drizzle. She kicked fragments of a fallen roof tile into a weed-ruffed hole in the pavement, wrinkling her nose in distaste. ‘I take it being the world authority on the Kingdom of Pharpech doesn’t attract major funding.’