“So what’s the difference?”
By’s hand reached out and closed, as if trying to grasp something elusive. “Rish with the Jewels looks like a woman with a beating heart. Rish in exile looks like…a woman with a muscle in her chest that pumps blood.”
Ivan tried to unravel this. “Y’know…I haven’t the least idea what you’re on about, By.”
By rubbed his forehead and laughed shortly. “Yeah, neither do I. You should watch the vids sometime, though.”
“Is Tej in any of ’em?”
“No.”
“Ah.”
They walked on; Ivan coded open his door. A sound of bells and rhythmic thumping wafted out.
They entered to find Tej and Rish engaged in some sort of vigorous dance practice. Tej spared Ivan a flashing smile, as she turned and stomped. She seemed to dance with every part of her, from her toes to her face; the expressive movements of her arms reminded him, for a moment, of the quaddies. The cadences moved through her generous flesh as though her body danced with itself, joyously. Ivan’s lips parted.
Rish, spotting By, glinted a grin like a sickle moon hung in an evening sky, and switched from spinning along around a wide circle like some planetary epicycle, to a kind of precise hand-to-hand-to-foot-to-foot rotation, a blue spider turning cartwheels. Ivan blinked dizzily as the grin rolled upside down with each turn.
“Now…now that’s just showing off,” he muttered to By.
For just a second, By grinned back, though not at him.
Tej, who seemed to be performing the same function as the drummer in a band backing the lead singer, brought the bells and thumps to a graceful closure. The two women stretched and made obeisance to each other, for all the world like two martial arts players completing a satisfactory round. Ivan wasn’t sure who’d won.
Rish waved at By and dashed toward the lav. “A quick shower, and I’ll be right with you.”
Ivan put the dinner bags down on the table and watched as Tej, arrestingly warm and breathless, sat on the carpet and began to unbuckle the ankle bells. By folded his arms and leaned against the wall, till Tej and Ivan drafted him to help pull furniture back into place. Ivan sighed meaningfully at his couch, but he wasn’t sure if By got the message. The Creatures absconded without dropping any further hints of their intentions, anyway.
All right, Ivan supposed he was slow. He’d been told so often enough by his assorted relatives, colleagues, and so-called friends. But it wasn’t until tripping over the ankle bells on the way back from the lav in the night, and wrapping himself around a warm, squirmy, sleeping Tej, that the thought crossed his mind like a bright, evasive-unhelpful-shooting star.
So…how does a fellow ask his own wife to marry him…?
It took him a long time to fall asleep again, after that.
“Tej? Tej!” A hand shook her shoulder; Tej swam up out of slumber. A dim yellow pool of light from the bedside lamp pushed back the shadows. Ivan Xav was sitting on her side of the bed with his trousers on, his face in that scrunched expression it wore when he’d bitten into something he didn’t quite like.
Tej rubbed her eyes and sat up on one elbow. “What time ’zit?” She tried a sleepy smile on him, but it won only a return lip-twitch.
“A little after oh-three-hundred. I just got a rather strange call from a Customs amp; Security officer out at the Vorbarr Sultana Shuttleport. Says they’ve detained some fellow out there who claims to be a relative of yours. Or at any rate, he was asking for Madame Tejaswini Arqua Vorpatril, which is at least part-right.”
“What?” Tej sat bolt upright. “ Who?”
“Supposedly, some Escobaran tourist named Dr. Dolbraco Dax. Held up because of irregularities, Customs said, although the fellow’s documentation seemed to be all in order. I’m not sure what that meant, except that this Dax fellow was insistent that if you would come identify him, you could straighten it all out.”
“That’s Amiri’s identity!” Tej cried, scrambling from her covers. “Oh, what’s he doing here? We have to go out there!”
Ivan Xav prudently ducked out of the way as she lunged for her clothes. “Well, either your brother, or some really clever bounty hunter. Morozov was pretty sure some of those would be showing up in due course. Although a bounty hunter would have to be downright crazy to try a snatch in the middle of shuttleport security.” Ivan Xav scratched his stubbled chin. “Or maybe just lazy. Not as far to drag you to the exit, after all.”
“Most of them actually are crazy, but…” Tej’s thoughts whirled, as she shoved her head through her turtleneck and clawed her hair free. “If it’s really Amiri, how did he find me? Here, put your shirt on.” She crawled back across the rumpled bed in search of her socks. “Did your ImpSec people contact him or something?”
“Shouldn’t think he’d have been detained, in that case.” Ivan Xav shook his head. “Though I could see…If Miles gossiped to Mark or Kareen about you and me, and he probably couldn’t resist doing so, Mark might have told this Lily Durona woman who runs his clinic. Who could have said something to your brother. I can’t guess how much information might have been dropped out or added with each link. Or how it was spun. Mark and I, um…don’t always get along.”
As Tej got him dressed and pulled him toward the door, Ivan Xav added, “I’m leaning toward bounty hunters, myself. I did alert my ImpSec outer perimeter, though I don’t much care to talk to those fellows if I don’t have to. But at least it’ll give the night shift something to do that doesn’t involve voyeurism. I expect they’ll like that.”
“Voyeurism?” Despite her hurry, Tej froze. “I hope that’s a joke.”
“Well, I hope so, too,” confessed Ivan Xav. “Grant you, I gave up asking them questions I didn’t want to hear the answers to some time back.”
Shaking her head, Tej abandoned this side issue and shoved him into the hallway.
For the first time ever, as his two-seater arrowed out through the wintry margins of the city, she thought that Ivan Xav was driving too slowly. She leaned forward anxiously into her seat straps as the civilian shuttleport at last rose into view. This was her first look at the place, as they’d come downside before via the military shuttleport, where arrangements had been very different. VBS Main looked very much like every other big galactic port she’d ever seen-under construction. Ivan Xav wove handily around worksite barricades. Fortunately, he seemed to know where he was going, and the place was thinly populated at this dark off-hour.
His military ID whisked them past the first layer of security like a magic wand, at which point they were met by a man in a customs uniform, a lieutenant in military undress greens with ImpSec Horus-eyes on his collar, and, hurrying up last, Byerly and Rish, out of breath. The customs man stepped back at the sight of Rish, his lips parting in astonishment, but he glanced at the unreactive ImpSec fellow, swallowed, and carried on.
“I’ve arranged a preliminary look through a monitor for you, Madame Vorpatril,” the customs man told her, and it was a sign of something that Ivan Xav didn’t correct the title. “As it seemed to be thought that there could be some safety and security issue.” Tej wasn’t sure if his irritated glance at the ImpSec officer suggested a conflict of jurisdictions or procedures, or just the accumulated frustrations of trying to get ImpSec to give a straight answer to any question.
The customs man guided them through a code-locked door labeled Authorized Personnel Only and threaded a maze of office corridors, mostly with doors shut for the night. Down two floors, through some utilitarian tunnels smelling of dry concrete and machine oil, up again, then to an unlabeled door in a broader corridor. Some kind of satellite security office, judging by the consoles; on duty was only a single clerk, who gave way to the customs officer and gestured to the vid. “Nothing of interest so far, sir.”