Nova (9 page)

More laughter as others arrived at the bridge.

Above the crowd, girls in powdered, towering, twenty-third-century, pre-Ashton Clark coiffures, tossed confetti from a balcony. A man was pushing up the street with a bear. Lorq thought it was someone in costume till the fur brushed his shoulder and he smelled the musk. The claws clicked away. The crowd caught him up,

Lorq was ears.

Lorq was eyes.

Bliss filed the receptive surface of each sense glass-smooth. Perception turned suddenly in (as the vanes of a ship might turn) as he walked the brick street, mortared with confetti. He felt the presence of his centered self. His world focused on the now of his hands and tongue. Voices around him caressed his awareness.

"Champagne! Isn't that just airy!" The transparent plastic rat had cornered the griffon in the flowered vest at the wine table. "Aren't you having fun? I just love it!"

"Sure," Brian answered. "But I've never been to a party like this. People like Lorq, Prince, you— you're the sort of people I only used to hear about. It's hard to believe you're real."

"Just between us. I've occasionally had the same problem. It's good to have you here to remind us, Now you just keep telling us— "

Lorq passed on to another group.

" ...on the cruise boat up from Port Said to Istanbul, there was this fisherman from the Pleiades who played the most marvelous things on the sensory-syrynx. .

" ...and then we had to hitchhike all the way across Iran because the mono wasn't working. I really think Earth is coming apart at the seams ..."

" ...beautiful party. Perfectly air ..."

The very young, Lorq thought; the very rich; and wondered what limits of difference those conditions defined.

Barefoot, with a rope belt, the lion leaned against the side of a doorway, watching. "How you doing, Captain?"

Lorq raised his hand to Dan, walked on.

Now, specious and crystal, was within him. Music invaded his hollow mask where his head was cushioned on the sound of his own breath. On a platform at a harpsichord a man was playing a Byrd pavane. Voices in another key grew over the sound as he moved further on; on a platform on the other side of the street, two boys and two girls in twentieth-century mod re-created a flowing antiphonal work of the Mommas and the Poppas. Turning down a side street, Lorq moved into a crowd that pushed him forward, till at last he confronted the towering bank of electronic instruments that were reproducing the jarring, textured silences of the Tohu-bohus. Responding with the nostalgia produced by ten-year-old popular music, the guests, in their bloated mache and plastic heads, broke off in twos, threes, fives, and sevens to dance. A swan's head swayed to the right. Left, a frog's face wobbled on sequined shoulders. As he moved even further, into his ear threaded the thirdless modulations that he had heard over the speaker of the Caliban, hovering above the Himalayas.

They came running through the dancers. "He did it! Isn't Prince a darling!" They shouted and cavorted. "He's got that old Turkish music!"

Hips and breasts and shoulders gleaming beneath the vinyl (the material had pores that opened in warm weather to make the transparent costume cool as silk), Che-ong swung around, holding her furry ears,

"Down, everybody! Down on all fours! We're going to show you our new step! Like this: just swing your— "

Lorq turned under the exploding night, a little tired, a little excited. He crossed the street edging the island and leaned on the stone near one of the floodlights that shone back on the buildings of the Ile. Across the water on the opposite quay people strolled, in couples or singly, gazing at the fireworks or simply watching the gaiety here.

Behind him a girl laughed sharply. He turned to her—

— head of a bird of paradise, blue feathers about red foil eyes, red beak, red rippling comb—

— as she pulled away from the group to sway against the low wall. The breeze shook the panels of her dress so that they tugged at the scrolled brass fastenings at shoulder, wrist, and thigh. She rested her hip on the stone, sandaled toe touching the ground, one inch above it. With long arms (her nails were crimson) she removed her mask. As she set it on the wall, the breeze shook out her black hair, dropped it to her shoulders, raised it. The water reticulated below them as under flung sand.

He looked away. He looked back. He frowned.

There are two beauties (her face struck the thought in him, articulate and complete): with the first, the features and the body's lines conform to an averaged standard that will offend no one: this was the beauty of models and popular actresses; this was the beauty of Che-ong. Second, there was this: her eyes were smashed disks of blue jade, her cheekbones angled high over the white hollows of her wide face. Her chin was wide; her mouth, thin, red, and wider. Her nose fell straight from her forehead to flare at the nostrils (she breathed in the wind— and watching her, he became aware of the river's odor, the Paris night, the city wind); these features were too austere and violent on the face of such a young woman. But the authority with which they set together would make him look again, he knew, once he looked away; make him remember, once he had gone away. Her face compelled in the way that makes the merely beautiful gnaw the insides of their cheeks,

She looked at him: "Lorq Von Ray?"

His frown deepened inside his mask.

She leaned forward, above the paving that lipped the river. "They're all so far away." She nodded toward the people on the quay. "They're so much further away than we think or they think. What would they do at our party?"

Lorq took off his mask and placed the pirate beside her crested bird.

She glanced back at him. "So that's what you look like. You're handsome."

"How did you know who I was?" Thinking he might somehow have missed her in the crowd that had first come across the bridge, he expected her to say something about the pictures of him that occasionally appeared across the galaxy when he won a race.

"Your mask. That's how I knew."

"Really?" He smiled. "I don't understand."

Her eyebrows' arch sharpened. There were a few seconds of laughter, too soft and gone too fast.

"You. Who are you?" Lorq asked.

"I'm Ruby Red."

She was still thin. Somewhere a little girl had stood above him in the mouth of a beast— Lorq laughed now. "What was there about my mask that gave me away?"

"Prince has been gloating over the prospect of making you wear it ever since he extended the invitation through your father and there was the faintest possibility that you would actually come. Tell me, is it politeness that makes you indulge him in his nasty prank by wearing it?"

"Everyone else has one. I thought it was a clever idea."

"I see." Her voice hung above the tone of general statement. "My brother tells me we have all met a long time ago." It returned. "I ... wouldn't have recognized you. But I remember you."

"I remember you."

"Prince does too. He was seven. That means I was five."

"What have you been doing for the last dozen years?"

"Growing older gracefully, while you've been the enfant terrible in the raceways of the Pleiades, flaunting your parents' ill-gotten gains."

"Look!" He gestured toward the people watching from the opposite bank. Some apparently thought he waved; they waved back.

Ruby laughed and waved too. "Do they realize how special we are? I feel very special tonight." She raised her face with eyes closed. Blue fireworks tinted her lids.

"Those people, they're too far away to see how beautiful you are."

She looked at him again.

"It's true. You are— "

"We are ..."

"— very beautiful."

"Don't you think that's a dangerous thing to say to your hostess, Captain Von Ray?"

"Don't you think that was a dangerous thing to say to your guest?"

"But we're unique, young Captain. If we want, we're allowed to flirt with Dan— "

The streetlights about them extinguished.

There was a cry from the side street; the strings of colored bulbs as well were dead. As Lorq turned from the embankment, Ruby took his shoulder.

Along the island, lights and windows flickered twice. Someone screamed. Then the illumination returned, and with it laughter.

"My brother!" Ruby shook her head. "Everyone told him he was going to have power trouble, but he insisted on having the whole island wired for electricity. He thought electric light would be more romantic than the perfectly good induced-fluorescence tubes that were here yesterday— and have to go back up tomorrow by city ordinance. You should have seen him trying to hunt up a generator. It's a lovely six-hundred-year-old museum piece that fills up a whole room. I'm afraid Prince is an incurable romantic— "

Lorq placed his hand over hers.

She looked. She took her hand away. "I have to go now. I promised I'd help him." Her smile was not a happy thing. The piercing expression etched itself on his heightened senses. "Don't wear Prince's mask any more." She lifted the bird of paradise from the rail. "Just because he chooses to insult you, you needn't display that insult to everyone here."

Lorq looked down at the pirate's head, confused.

Foil eyes glittered at him from blue feathers. "Besides"— her voice was muffled now— "you're too handsome to cover yourself up with something so mean and ugly." And she was crossing the street, was disappearing in the crowded alley.

He looked up and down the sidewalk, and did not want to be there.

He crossed after her, plunged into the same crowd, only realizing halfway down the block that he was following her.

She was beautiful.

That was not bliss.

That was not the party's excitement.

That was her face and the way it turned and formed to her words.

That was the hollow in him so evident now because moments before, during a few banal exchanges, it had been so full of her face, her voice.

Trouble with all of this is that there's no cultural solidity underneath." (Lorq glanced to the side where the griffon was speaking to earnest armadillos, apes, and others.) "There's been so much movement from world to world that we have no real art any more, just a pseudo-inter-planetary ..."

In the doorway, on the ground, lay a lion's head and a frog's. Back in the darkness, Dan, his back sweating from the dance, nuzzled the girl with sequined shoulders.

And halfway down the block, Ruby passed up a set of steps behind scrolled iron.

"Ruby!"

He ran forward— "Hey, watch— "

"Look out. Where do you— "

"Slow down— "

"— swung round the banister, and ran up the steps after her, "Ruby Red!" and through a door. "Ruby ...?"

Wide tapestries between thin mirrors cut all echo from his voice. The door by the marble table was ajar. So he crossed the foyer, opened it.

She turned on swirling light.

Beneath the floor, tides of color flowed the room, flickering on the heavy, black-in-crystal legs of Vega Republic furniture. Without shadow, she stepped back. "Lorq! Now what are you doing here?" She had just placed her bird mask on one of the circular shelves that drifted at various levels around the room.

"I wanted to talk to you some more."

Her brows were dark arches over her eyes. "I'm sorry. Prince has planned a pantomime for the float that goes down the middle of the island at midnight. I have to change."

One of the shelves had drifted toward him. Before it could respond to his body temperature and float away, Lorq removed a liquor bottle from the veined glass panel. "Do you have to rush?" He raised the bottle. "I want to find out who you are, what you do, what you think. I want to tell you all about me."

"Sorry." She turned toward the spiral lift that would take her up to the balcony.

His laughter stopped her. She turned back to see what had caused it.

"Ruby?"

And continued turning till she faced him again.

He crossed the surging floor and put his hands on the smooth cloth falling at her shoulders. His fingers closed on her arms. "Ruby Red." His inflection brought puzzlement to her face. "Leave here with me. We can go to another city, on another world, under another sun. Don't the configurations of the stars bore you from here? I know a world where the constellations are called the Mad Sow's Litter, the Greater and Lesser Lynx, the Eye of Vahdamin.

She took two glasses from a passing shelf. "What are you high on anyway?" Then she smiled. "Whatever it is, it becomes you."

"Will you go?"

"No."

"Why not?" He poured frothing amber into tiny glasses.

"First." She handed him the glass as he placed the bottle on another passing shelf. "Because it's terribly rude— I don't know how you do it back on Ark— for a hostess to run out on her party before midnight."

"After midnight then?"

"Second." She sipped the drink and wrinkled her nose (he was surprised, shocked that her clear, clear skin could support anything so human as a wrinkle). "Prince has been planning this party for months, and I don't want to upset him by not showing up when I promised." Lorq touched his fingers to her cheek. "Third." Her eyes snapped from the brim of her glass to lock his. "I'm Aaron Red's daughter and you are the dark, red-haired, high, handsome son"— she turned her head away— "of a blond thief!" Cold air on his fingertips where her warm arm had been,

He put his palm against her face, slid his fingers into her hair. She turned away from his band and stepped onto the spiral lift. She rose up and away, adding, "And you haven't got much pride if you let Prince mock you the way he does."