"Not at all."
"You should. But then, you don't know any of us well, do you. Oh, the bright young people who come here, with their bright, lively imaginations. They do nothing all day long but think of ways to kill. It's a terribly placid society, really. But, why shouldn't it be? All its aggressions are vented from nine to five. Still, I think it does something to our minds. Imagination should be used for something other than pondering murder, don't you think?"
"I do." Concern grew for the weighty woman.
Just then they were stopped by clotted guests.
"What's going on here?" demanded the Baroness. "Sam, what are they doing in there?"
Sam smiled, stepped back, and the Baroness wedged herself into the space, still clutching Rydra's arm.
"Hold 'em back some!" Rydra recognized Lizzy's voice. Someone else moved and she could see. The kids from Drive had cleared a space ten feet across, and were guarding it like junior police. Lizzy crouched with three boys, who, from their dress, were local gentry of Armsedge, "What you have to understand," she was saying, "is that it's all in the wrist." She flipped a marble with her thumbnaiclass="underline" it struck first one, then another, and one of the struck ones struck a third.
"Hey, do that again!"
Lizzy picked up another marble. "Only one knuckle on the floor, now, so you can pivot. But it's mostly from the wrist."
The marble darted out, struck, struck, and struck. Five or six people applauded, Rydra was one.
The Baroness touched her breast. "Lovely shot! Perfectly lovely!" She remembered herself and glanced back. "Oh, you must want to watch this, Sam. You're the ballistics expert, anyway." With polite embarrassment she relinquished her place and turned to Rydra as they continued across the floor. 'There-There, that is why I'm so glad you and your crew came to see us this evening. You bring something so cool and pleasing, so fresh, so crisp."
"You speak about us as though we were a salad." Rydra laughed. In the Baroness the 'appetite’ was not so menacing.
"I dare say if you stayed here long enough we would devour you, if you let us. What you bring we are very hungry for."
"What is it?"
They arrived at the bar, then turned with their drinks. The Baroness' face strained toward hardness. "Well, you . . . you come to us and immediately we start to leam things, things about you, and ultimately about ourselves."
"I don't understand.
“Take your Navigator. He likes his drinks big and all the hors d'oeuvres except the anchovies. That's more than I know about the likes and dislikes of anyone else in the room. You offer Scotch, they drink Scotch. You offer tequila, tequila they down by the gallon. And just a moment ago I discovered"—she shook her supine hand—"that it's all in the wrist. I never knew that before."
"We're used to talking to each other."
"Yes, but you tell the important things. What you like, what you don't like, how to do things. Do you really want to be introduced to all those stuffy men and women who kill people?"
"Not really."
"Didn't think so. And I don't want to bother myself. Oh, there are three or four who I think you would like. But I'll see that you meet them before you leave." And she barreled into the crowd.
Tides, Rydra thought. Oceans, Hyperstasis currents. Or the movement of people in a large room. She drifted along the least resistant ways that pulsed open, then closed as someone moved to meet someone, to get a drink, to leave a conversation.
Then there was a corner, a spiral stair. She climbed, pausing as she came around the second turn to watch the crowd beneath. There was a double door ajar at the top, a breeze. She stepped outside.
Violet had been replaced by artful, cloud-streaked purple. Soon the planetoid's chromadome would simulate night. Moist vegetation lipped the railing. At one end, the vines had completely covered the white stone.
"Captain?"
Ron, shadowed and brushed with leaves, sat in the corner of the balcony, hugging his knees. Skin is not silver, she thought, yet whenever I see him that way, curled up in himself, I picture a knot of white metal. He lifted his chin from his kneecaps and put his back against the verdant hedge so there were leaves in his com-silk hair.
"What're you doing?"
“Too many people."
She nodded, watching him press his shoulders downward, watching his triceps leap on the bone, then still. With each breath in the gnarled, young body the tiny movements sang to her. She listened to the singing for nearly half a minute while he watched her, sitting still, yet always the tiny entrancements. The rose on his shoulder whispered against the leaves. When she had listened to the muscular music a while, she asked:
"Trouble between you, Mollya, and Calli?"
"No. I mean . . . just . . ."
"Just what?" She smiled and leaned on the balcony edge.
He lowered his chin to his knees again. "I guess they're fine. But, I'm the youngest . . . and . . ." Suddenly the shoulders raised. "How the hell would you understand! Sure, you know about things like this, but you don't really know. You write what you see. Not what you do." It came out in little explosions of half whispered sound. She heard the words and watched the jaw muscle jerk and beat and pop a small beast inside his cheek. "Perverts," he said. "That's what you Customs all really think. The Baron and the Baroness, all those people in there staring at us, who can't understand why you could want more than two— And you can't understand either."
"Ron?"
He snapped his teeth on a leaf and yanked it from the stem.
"Five years ago, Ron, I was . . . tripled."
The face turned to her as if pulling against a spring, then yanked back. He spit the leaf. "You're Customs, Captain. You circle-Transport, but just the way you let them eat you up with their eyes, the way they turn and watch to see who you are when you walk by: you're a Queen, yeah, but a Queen in Customs. You're not Transport."
"Ron, I'm public. That's why they look. I write books. Customs people read them, yes, but they look because they want to know who the hell wrote them. Customs didn't write them. I talk to Customs and Customs looks at me and says: 'You're Transport.' " She shrugged. "I'm neither. But even so, I was tripled. I know about that."
"Customs don't triple," he said.
"Two guys and myself. If I ever do it again it'll be with a girl and a guy. For me that would be easier, I think. But I was tripled for three years. That's over twice as long as you've been.
"Yours didn't stick, then. Ours did. At least it was sticking together with Cathy."
"One was killed," Rydra said. "One is in suspended animation at Hippocrates General waiting for them to discover a cure for Caulder's disease. I don't think it will be in my lifetime, but if it is—" In the silence he turned to her. "What is it?" she asked.
"Who were they?"
"Customs or Transport?" She shrugged. "Like me, neither really. Fobo Lombs, he was captain of an interstellar transport; he was the one who made me go through and get my Captain's papers. Also he worked planetside doing hydroponics research, working on storage methods for hyperstatic hauls. Who was he? He was slim and blond and wonderfully affectionate and drank too much sometimes, and would come back from a trip and get drunk and in a fight and in jail, and we'd bail him out—really it only happened twice—but we teased him with it for a year. And he didn't like to sleep in the middle of the bed because he always wanted to let one arm hang over."
Ron laughed, and his hands, grasping high on his forearms, slid to his wrists.
“He was killed in a cave-in exploring the Ganymede Catacombs during the second summer that the three of us worked together on the Jovian Geological Survey."