Nova (6 page)

In the pit, a man in high boots tramped back and forth, motioning the crowd to sit.

On the other side, behind the rail, Lorq suddenly recognized the silver-haired woman. She was leaning on the shoulder of the Senegalese student, Lusuna. Her hair stuck to her forehead like confused and twisted knives. The student had opened his shirt. His vest was gone.

The pitman shook the bell rope again. A piece of down had fallen on his gleaming arm and adhered, even as he waved and shouted at the crowd; now he rapped his brown fist on the tin wall for silence.

Money was wedged between the boards of the rail. The wagers were jammed between the planks. As Lorq looked along the rail, he saw the young couple further down. He was leaning over, trying to point out something to her.

The pitman stamped across the mash of scales and feather. His boots were black to the knees. When the people were nearly quiet, he went to the near side of the pit where Lorq couldn't see, bent down- A cage door slammed back. With a yell, the pitman vaulted onto the fence and grabbed the center post. The spectators shouted and surged up. Those squatting began to stand. Lorq tried to push forward.

Across the pit, he saw his father rise, streaming face twisted below blond hair; Von Ray shook his fist toward the arena. Mother, hand at her neck, pressed against him. Ambassador Selvin was trying to push between two miners shouting at the rail.

"There's Aaron!" Ruby exclaimed.

"No!" from Prince.

But now there were so many people standing, Lorq could no longer see anything. Tavo stood up and began to shout for people to sit, till someone passed him a bottle.

Lorq moved left to see; then right when the left was blocked. Unfocused excitement pounded in his chest.

The pitman stood on the railing above the crowd. Jumping, he had struck the lantern with his shoulder so that shadows staggered on the canvas. Leaning against the pole, he frowned at the swaying light, rubbed his bulging arms. Then he noticed the fluff. Carefully he pulled it off, then began to search his matted chest, his shoulders.

The noise exploded at the pit's edge, halted, then roared. Somebody was waving a vest in the air.

The pitman, finding nothing, leaned against the pole again.

Excited, fascinated, at the same time Lorq was slightly ill with rum and stench. "Come on," he shouted to Prince, "let's go up where we can see!"

"I don't think we ought to," Ruby said.

"Why not!" Prince took a step forward. But he looked scared.

Lorq barged ahead of him.

Then someone caught him by the arm and he whirled around. "What are you doing out here?" Von Ray, angry and confused, was breathing hard. "Who told you you could bring those children up here!"

Lorq looked around for Tavo. Tavo was not there.

Aaron Red came up behind his father. "I told you we should have left somebody with them. Your baby sitters are so old-fashioned out here. Any clever child could fix it!"

Von Ray turned briskly. "Oh, the children are perfectly all right. But Lorq knows he's not supposed to go out in the evening by himself!"

"I'll take them home," Mother said, coming up. "Don't be upset, Aaron. They're all right. I'm terribly sorry, really I am." She turned to the children. "Whatever possessed you to come out here?"

The miners had gathered to watch.

Ruby began to cry.

"Dear me, now what's the matter?" Mother looked concerned.

"There's nothing wrong with her," Aaron Red said. "She knows what's going to happen when I get her home. They know when they do wrong."

Ruby, who hadn't thought about what was going to happen at all, began to cry in earnest.

"Why don't we talk about this tomorrow morning." Mother cast Von Ray a despairing glance. But Father was too upset by Ruby's tears and chagrined by Lorq's presence to respond.

"Yes, you take them home, Dana." He looked up to see the miners watching. "Take them home now. Come, Aaron, you needn't worry yourself."

"Here," Mother said. "Ruby, Prince, give me your hands. Come, Lorq, we're going right— "

Mother had extended her hands to the children.

Then Prince reached with his prosthetic arm, and yanked - Mother screamed, staggered forward, beating at his wrist with her free hand. Metal and plastic fingers locked her own.

"Prince!" Aaron reached for him, but the boy ducked away, twisted, then dodged across the floor.

Mother went to her knees on the dirt floor, gasping, letting out tiny sobs. Father caught her by the shoulders. "Dana! What did he do? What happened?" Mother shook her head.

Prince ran straight against Tavo.

"Catch him!" Father shouted in Portuguese.

And Aaron bellowed, "Prince!"

At the word, resistance left the boy; he sagged in Tavo's arms, face white.

Mother was on her feet now, grimacing on Father's shoulder. " ...and one of my white birds ..." Lorq heard her say.

"Prince, come here!" Aaron commanded.

Prince walked back, his movements jerky and electric.

"Now," Aaron said. "You go back to the house with Dana. She's sorry she mentioned your hand. She didn't mean to hurt your feelings."

Mother and Father looked at Aaron, astounded. Aaron Red turned to them. He was a small man. The only thing red about him Lorq could see were the corners of his eyes. "You see— Aaron looked tired— "I never mention his deformity. Never." He looked upset. "I don't want him to feel inferior. I don't let anyone point him out as different at all. You must never talk about it in front of him, you see. Not at all."

Father started to say something. But the initial embarrassment of the evening had been his.

Mother looked back and forth between the two men, then at her hand. It was cradled in her other palm, and she made stroking motions. "Children," she said. "Come with me."

"Dana, are you sure that you're— "

Mother cut him off with a look. "Come with me, children," she repeated. They left the tent.

Tavo was outside. "I go with you, Senhora. I will go back to the house with you, if you wish."

"Yes, Tavo," Mother said. "Thank you." She held her hand against the stomach of her dress.

"That boy with the iron hand." Tavo shook his head. "And the girl, and your son. I brought them here, Senhora. But they asked me to, you see. They told me to bring them here."

"I understand," Mother said.

They didn't go down through the jungle this time, but took the wider road that led past the launch from where the aquaturbs took the miners to the undersea mines. The high forms swayed in the water, casting double shadows on the waves.

As they reached the gate of the park, Lorq was suddenly sick to his stomach. "Hold his head, Tavo," Mother instructed. "See, this excitement isn't good for you, Lorq. And you were drinking that milk again. Do you feel any better?"

He hadn't mentioned the rum. The smell in the tent, as well as the odor that lingered around Tavo kept his secret. Prince and Ruby watched him quietly, glancing at one another.

Upstairs Mother got the sitter back in order, and secured Prince and Ruby in their room. Finally she came into the nursery.

"Does your hand still hurt, Mommy?" he asked from the pillow.

"It does. Nothing's broken, though I don't know why not. I'm going to get the medico-unit soon as I leave you."

"They wanted to go!" Lorq blurted. "They said they wanted to see where you all had gone."

Mother sat down on the bed and began to rub his back with her good hand. "And didn't you want to see too, just a little bit?"

"Yes," he said, after a moment.

"That's what I thought. How does your stomach feel? I don't care what they say, I still don't see how that sour milk could be any good for you."

He still hadn't mentioned the rum.

"You go to sleep now." She went to the nursery door.

He remembered her touching the switch.

He remembered a moon darkening through the rotating roof.

Pleiades Federation, Ark, New Ark, 3162

Lorq always associated Prince Red with the coming and going of light.

He was sitting naked by the swimming pool on the roof, reading for his petrology exam, when the purple leaves at the rock entrance shook. The skylight hummed with the gale outside; the towers of Ark, vaned to glide in the wind, were distorted behind the glittering frost.

"Dad!" Lorq snapped off the reader and stood up. "Hey, I came in third in senior mathematics. Third!"

Von Ray, in fur-rimmed parka stepped through the leaves. "And I suppose you call yourself studying now. Wouldn't it be easier in the library? How can you concentrate up here with all this distraction?"

"Petrology," Lorq said, holding up his note-recorder. "I don't really have to study for that. I've got honors already."

Only in the last few years had Lorq learned to relax under his parents' demand for perfection. Having learned, he had discovered that the demands were now ritual and phatic, and gave way to communication if they were allowed to ride out.

"Oh," his father said. "You did." Then he smiled. The frost on his hair turned to water as he unlaced his parka. "At least you've been studying instead of crawling through the bowels of Caliban."

"Which reminds me, Dad. I've registered her in the New Ark Regatta. Will you and Mother go up to see the finish?"

"If we can. You know Mother hasn't been feeling too well recently. This past trip was a little rough. And you worry her with your racing."

"Why? I haven't let it interfere with my schoolwork."

Von Ray shrugged. "She thinks it's dangerous." He laid the parka over the rock. "We read about your prize at Trantor last month. Congratulations. She may worry about you, but she was as proud as a partridge when she could tell all those stuffy club women you were her son."

"I wish you'd been there."

"We wanted to be. But there was no way to cut a month off the tour. Come, I've got something to show you."

Lorq followed his father along the stream that curled from the pool. Von Ray put his arm around his son's shoulder as they started the steps that dropped beside the waterfall into the house. At their weight, the steps began to escalate.

"We stopped on Earth, this trip. Spent a day with Aaron Red. I believe you met him a long time ago. Red-shift Limited?"

"Out on New Brazillia," Lorq said. "At the mine."

"Do you remember that far back?" The stairs flattened and carried them across the conservatory. Cockatoos sprung from the brush, beat against the transparent wall where snow lay outside the bottom panes, then settled in the bloodflowers, knocking petals to the sand. "Prince was with him. A boy your age, perhaps a little older." Lorq had been vaguely aware of Prince's doings over the years as a child is aware of the activity of the children of parents' friends. Some time back, Prince had changed schools four times very rapidly, and the rumor that had filtered to the Pleiades was that only the fortunes of Red-shift, Ltd., kept the transfers from being openly labeled expulsion.

"I remember him," Lorq said. "He only had one arm."

"He wears a black glove to the shoulder with a jeweled armband at the top, now. He's a very impressive young man. He said he remembered you. You two got into some mischief or other back then. He, at least, seems to have quieted down some."

Lorq shrugged from under his father's arm and stepped onto the white rugs that scattered the winter garden. "What do you want to show me?"

Father went to one of the viewing columns. It was a transparent column four feet thick supporting the clear roofing with a capital of floral glass. "Dana, do you want to show Lorq what you brought for him?"

"Just a moment." His mother's figure formed in the column. She was sitting in the swan chair. She took a green cloth from the table beside her and opened it on the quilted brocade of her lap.

"They're beautiful!" Lorq claimed. "Where did you find heptodyne quartz?"

The stones, basically silicon, had been formed at geological pressures so that in each crystal, about the size of a child's fist, light flowed along the shattered blue lines within the jagged forms.

"I picked them up when we stopped at Cygnus. We were staying near the Exploding Desert of Krall. We could see it flashing from our hotel window beyond the walls of the city. It was quite as spectacular as it's always described. One afternoon when your father was off in conference, I took the tour. When I saw them, I thought of your collection and bought these for you."

"Thanks." He smiled at the figure in the column.

Neither he nor his father had seen his mother in person for four years. Victim of a degenerative mental and physical disease that often left her totally incommunicative, she had retired to her suite in the house with her medicines, her diagnostic computers, her cosmetics, her gravothermy and reading machines. She— or more often one of her androids programmed to her general response pattern— would appear in the viewing columns and present a semblance of her normal appearance and personality. In the same way, through android and telerama report, she "accompanied" Von Ray on his business travels, while her physical presence was confined in the masked, isolate chambers that no one was allowed to enter except the psychotechnician who came quietly once a month.

"They're beautiful," he repeated, stepping closer.

"I'll leave them in your room this evening." She picked one up with dark fingers and turned it over. "I find them fascinating myself. Almost hypnotic."