Nova (8 page)

As they passed the gate (and the Draco column ringed with the Serpent gleaming in the sunset), Brian hazarded conversation. "That's quite an outfit," he said to Prince.

"There'll be a lot of people on the Ile. I want everybody to be able to see where I am."

"Is that glove something new they're wearing here on Earth?"

Lorq's stomach caught itself. He glanced quickly between the two boys.

"Things like that," Brian went on, "they never get out to Centauri till a month after everybody's stopped wearing them on Earth. And I haven't even been in Draco for ten months anyway."

Prince looked at his arm, turned his hand over.

Twilight washed the sky.

Then lights along the top of the fence flicked on: light lined the folds on Prince's glove.

"My personal style." He looked up at Brian. "I have no right arm. This"— he made a fist of silver fingers— "is all metal and plastic and whirring doohickeys." He laughed sharply. "But it serves me ... about as well as a real one."

"Oh." Embarrassment wavered through Brian's voice. "I didn't know."

Prince laughed. "Sometimes I almost forget too. Sometimes. Which way is your ship?"

"There." As Lorq pointed, he was acutely aware of the dozen years between his and Prince's first and present meetings.

Draco, Earth, Nepal, 3162

"All plugged?"

"You're paying me, Captain," Dan's voice grated through. "Strung up and out."

"Ready, Captain," from Brian.

"Open your low vanes— "

Prince sat behind Lorq, one hand on Lorq's shoulder (his real hand). "Everybody and his brother is coming to this thing. You just got here tonight, but people have been arriving all week. I invited a hundred people. There're at least three hundred coming. It grows, it grows!" As the inertia field caught them up, De Blau dropped, and the sun, which had set, rose in the west and crescented the world with fire. The blue rim burned. "Anyway, Che-ong brought a perfectly wild bunch with her from somewhere on the edge of Draco— "

Brian's voice came over the speaker. "Che-ong, you mean the psychorama star?"

"The studio gave her a week's vacation, so she decided to come to my party. Day before yesterday, she took it into her head to go mountain climbing, and flew off to Nepal."

The sun passed overhead. To travel between two points on one planet, you just had to go up and come down in the right place. In a vane-projector craft, you had to ascend, circle the Earth three or four times, and glide in. It took the same seven/eight minutes to get from one side of the city to the other as it did to get to the other side of the world.

"Che radioed me this afternoon they were stuck three-quarters of the way up Mt. Kenyuna. There's a storm below them, so they can't get through to the rescue station in Katmandu for a helicopter to come and pick them up. Of course, the storm doesn't stop her from getting a third of the way around the world to tell me her troubles. Anyway, I promised her I'd think of something."

"How the hell are we supposed to get them off the mountain?"

"You fly within twenty feet of the rock face and hover. Then I'll climb down and bring them up."

"Twenty feet!" The blurred world slowed beneath them. "You want to get to your party alive?"

"Did you get that ion-coupler Aaron sent?"

"I'm using it now."

"It's supposed to be sensitive enough for that sort of maneuvering. And you're a crack racing captain. Yes or no?"

"I'll try it," Lorq said warily. "I'm a bigger fool than you are." Then he laughed. "We'll try it, Prince!"

Reticulations of snow and rock glided under them. Lorq set the loran co-ordinates of the mountain as Prince bad given them. Prince reached over Lorq's arm and tuned the radio ...

A girl's voice tumbled into the cabin:

" ... Oh, there! Look, do you think that's them? Prince! Prince, darling, have you come to rescue us? We're hanging here by our little frozen nubs and just miserable. Prince ...?" There was music behind her voice; there was a babble of other voices.

"Hold on, Che," Prince said into the mike. "Told you we'd do something." He turned to Lorq. "There! They should be right down there."

Lorq cut the frequency filter till Caliban was sliding down the gravitational distortion of the mountain itself. The peaks rose, chiseled and flashing.

"Oh, look, everybody! Didn't I tell you Prince wouldn't let us languish away up here and miss the party?"

And in the background:

"Oh, Cecil, I can't do that step— "

"Turn the music up louder— "

"But I don't like anchovies— "

"Prince," cried Che, "do hurry! It's started to snow again. You know this would never have happened, Cecil, if you hadn't decided to do parlor tricks with the hobenstocks."

"Come on, sweetheart, let's dance!"

"I told you, no! We're too close to the edge!"

Below Lorq's feet, on the floor screen, transmitting natural light, ice and gravel and boulders shone in the moonlight as the Caliban lowered.

"How many of them are there?" Lorq asked. "The ship isn't that big."

"They'll squeeze."

On the icy ledge that slipped across the screen, some were seated on a green poncho with wine bottles, cheeses, and baskets of food. Some were dancing. A few sat around on canvas chairs. One had scrambled to a higher ledge and was shading his eyes, staring up at the ship.

"Che," Prince said, "we're here. Get everything packed. We can't wait around all day."

"Good heavens! That is you up there. Come on, everybody, we're on our way! Yes, that's Prince!"

There was an explosion of activity on the ledge. The youngsters began to run about, picking things up, putting them in knapsacks; two people were folding the poncho.

"Edgar! Don't throw that away! It's 'forty-eight, and you can't just pick up a bottle any old where. Yes, Hillary, you may change the music. No! Don't turn the heater off yet! Oh, Cecil, you are a fool. Brrrr!— well, I suppose we'll be off in a moment or two. Of course I'll dance with you, honey. Just not so close to the edge. Wait a second. Prince? Prince ...!"

"Che!" Prince called as Lorq settled still closer. "Do you have any rope down there?" He put his hand over the mike. "Did you see her in Mayham's Daughters where she acted the wacky, sixteen-year-old daughter of that botanist?"

Lorq nodded.

"That wasn't acting." He took his hand from the mike again. "Che! Rope! Do you have any rope?"

"Oodles! Edgar, where's all that rope? But we climbed up here on something! There it is! Now, what do I do?"

"Tie big knots in it every couple of feet. How far are we above you?"

"Forty feet? Thirty feet? Edgar! Cecil! Jose! You heard him. Tie knots!"

On the floor screen Lorq watched the shadow of the yacht slip over the bergs; he let the boat fall even lower.

"Lorq, open the hatch in the drive-room when we're—

"We're seventeen feet above them," Lorq called over his shoulder. "That's it, Prince!" He reached forward. "And it is open."

"Fine!"

Prince ducked through the doorway into the drive-room. Cold air slapped Lorq's back. Dan and Brian held the ship steady in the wind.

On the floor screen Lorq saw one of the boys fling the rope up at the ship— Prince would be standing in the open hatchway to catch it in his silver glove. It took three tries. Then Prince's voice came back over the wind: "Right! I've got it tied. Come on up!" And one after another they mounted the knotted rope.

"There you go. Watch it— "

"Man, it's cold out there! Soon as you get past the heating field-"

"I've got you. Right in— "

"Didn't think we'd make it. Hey, you want some Chateauneuf du Pape 'forty-eight? Che says you can't get— "

The voices filled the drive-room. Then:

"Prince! Luscious of you to rescue me! Are you going to have any nineteenth-century Turkish music at your party? We couldn't get any local stations, but there was this educational program beaming up from New Zealand. Airy! Edgar invented a new step. You get down on your hands and knees and just swing your up and down. Jose, don't fall back onto that silly mountain! Come in here this instant and meet Prince Red. He's the one who's giving the party, and his father has ever so many more millions than yours. Close the door now and let's get out of the engine room. All these machines and things. It isn't me."

"Come inside, Che, and annoy the captain awhile. Do you know Lorq Von Ray?"

"My goodness, the boy who's winning all those races? Why, he's got even more money than you— "

"Shhhhh!" Prince said in a stage whisper as they came into the cabin. "I don't want him to know."

Lorq pulled the ship away from the mountain, then turned.

"You must be the one who won those prizes: You're so handsome!"

Che-ong wore a completely transparent cold suit.

"Did you win them with this ship?"

She looked around the cabin, still panting from the climb up the rope. Rouged nipples flattened on vinyl with each breath.

"This is lovely. I haven't been on a yacht in days." And the crowd surged in behind her:

"Doesn't anybody want any of this 'forty-eight— "

"I can't get any music in here. Why isn't there any music— Cecil, do you have any more of that gold powder?"

"We're above the ionosphere, stupid, and electromagnetic waves aren't reflected any more. Besides, we're moving too— "

Che-ong turned to them all. "Oh, Cecil, where has that marvelous golden dust got to? Prince, Lorq, you must try this. Cecil is the son of a mayor— "

"Governor— "

"— on one of those tiny worlds we're always hearing about, very far away. He had this gold powder that they collect from crevices in the rocks. Oh, look, he's still got lots and lots!"

The world began to spin beneath them.

"See, Prince, you breathe it in, like this. Ahhhh! It makes you see the most marvelous colors in everything you look at and hear the most incredible sounds in everything you hear, and your mind starts running about and filling in absolutely paragraphs between each word. Here, Lorq— "

"Watch it!" Prince laughed. "He's got to get us back to Paris!"

"Oh!" exclaimed Che, "it won't bother him. We'll just get there a little faster, that's all."

Behind them the others were saying:

"Where did she say this goddamn party was?"

"Ile St-Louis. That's in Paris."

"Where— ?"

"Paris, baby, Paris. We're going to a party in— "

Draco, Earth, Paris, 3162

In the middle of the fourth century the Byzantine Emperor Julian, tiring of the social whirl of the Cite de Paris (whose population, then under a thousand, dwelt mostly in skin huts clustered about a stone and wooden temple sacred to the Great Mother), moved across the water to the smaller island.

In the first half of the twentieth century, the queen of a worldwide cosmetic industry, to escape the pretensions of the Right Bank and the bohemian excesses of the Left, established here her Paris pied a terre, the walls of which were lined with a fortune in art treasures (while across the water, a twin-towered cathedral had replaced the wooden temple).

At the close of the thirty-first century, its central avenue hung with lights, the side alleys filled with music, menageries, drink, and gaming booths, while fireworks boomed in the night, the Ile St.-Louis held Prince Red's party.

"This way! Across here!"

They trooped over the trestled bridge. The black Seine glittered. Across the water, foliage dripped the stone balustrades. The sculptured buttresses of Notre Dame, floodlit now, rose behind the trees in the park on the Cite.

"No one can come onto my island without a mask!" Prince shouted.

As they reached the bridge's center, he vaulted to the rail, grabbed one of the beams, and waved over the crowd with his silver hand. "You're at a party! You're at Prince's party! And everybody wears a mask!" Spheres of fireworks, blue and red, bloomed on the dark behind his bony face.

"Airy!' squealed Che-ong, running to the rail. "But if I wear a mask, nobody will recognize me, Prince! The studio only said I could come if there was publicity!"

He jumped, grabbed her vinyl glove, and led her down the steps. There, on racks, hundreds of full-headed masks glared.

"But I have a special one for you, Che!" He pulled down a two-foot, transparent rat's head, ears rimmed with white fur, eyebrows sequined, jewels shaking at the end of each wire whisker.

"Airy!" squealed Che as Prince clapped the shape over her shoulders.

Through the transparent leer, her own delicate, green-eyed face twisted into laughter.

"Here, one for you!" Down came a saber-toothed panther's head for Cecil; an eagle for Edgar, with iridescent feathers; Jose's dark hair disappeared under a lizard's head.

A lion for Dan (who had come protesting at everyone's insistence, though they had forgotten him the moment he had given his belligerent consent) and a griffon for Brian (whom everyone had ignored till now, though he'd followed eagerly).

"And you!" Prince turned to Lorq. "I have a special one for you too!" Laughing, he lifted down a pirate's head, with eyepatch, bandana, scarred cheek, and a dagger in bared teeth, It went lightly over Lorq's head: he was looking through mesh eyeholes in the neck. Prince slapped him on the back. "A pirate, that's for Von Ray!" he called as Lorq started across the cobble street.