"We're going to spend the night together," she said. "Do you understand that?"
"Of course I do."
"Do you now? Well, I'll tell you anyway. It means that we can make love for as long as our bodies can last. That there will be nothing else to consider; no timetable, no having to go home, no caution about someone coming in. Just you and me alone with as much joy as we can create. And then when we're done with each other, we're going to fall asleep in each other's arms. We've never known that before, Lawrence. And it's going to be the most exquisite moment of all for me, because I'll do it knowing I'm going to wake up with you beside me. You don't know how long I've wanted that to be."
Even in the dusky light he could see the admiration on her face, and the hope. "I want that just as much as you do," he said. "I wish you'd said something before. We could have worked out a way to make it happen before now."
"Would you have done that? For me?"
"Yes."
"I love you, Lawrence." Her expression became rueful. "And you know all of me now, everything I am, however foolish that is." She swung her legs around and straddled him just above his hips.
"You're not foolish," he told her earnestly.
The grin that dawned on her mouth was wicked and knowing. Fingers slid back up his chest. "You're so fit now," she said huskily. "It's indecent."
"You're the one who wanted me in this condition."
"I did. And I'm a grateful girl." She arched her back, then slowly, tauntingly, began to undo the lace bows running down the front of her negligee.
* * *
They missed their first scheduled skiing lesson, staying in their room together for over a day. Not that it particularly mattered. Amethi wasn't going to move into Nizana's penumbra for another sixty hours. It would remain light for all of that time.
After they did finally get out of bed to have breakfast, Lawrence called the school and arranged another lesson. The AS receptionist told them another slot wasn't available for five hours.
They took a walk through the town, looking at the restaurants and cafes and bars. Pavements were slatted aluminum walkways set up between the buildings, standing on the same kind of legs. Lawrence loved it. The first open-air town he'd ever been in; the sensation of freedom was invigorating. Temperature was at least fifteen to twenty degrees below freezing. Not that he cared about that; they both wore their brand new ski-suits: colorful one-piece garments with a lace-work of active thermal strips whose conductivity could be set by an integral thermostat, allowing you to choose whatever temperature you wanted to be at. The hoods were close-fitting and had extra flaps, which could be pulled across the face. They were essential to stop windburn when you were skiing, but in town most people let them hang free.
"It's like you can feel the ice pulling heat from your skin," Lawrence exclaimed. He was leaning over a walkway's rail, looking down what passed for Orchy's main street. Buses and ice bikes roared about, carrying vacationers between the hotels and the runs.
"Nice to know," Roselyn said. Every flap on her hood was closed tight, leaving just her goggles poking through. Even so, she stood slightly hunched, as if fighting the cold.
Lawrence laughed and kept walking. They stopped off in a couple of stores. The only difference they could find between them were the names of the owners. Both were franchises to the company that ran Orchy. And both of them sold the same ski equipment; there weren't many manufacturers on Amethi yet.
"Business opportunity," Roselyn observed. She giggled at Lawrence, who was trying on a different hood: its style was awful, all pink and orange stripes. "Two business opportunities," she corrected.
"I want to be seen on the slopes," he said with pained dignity.
"What as?'
They moved on. The trouble with a town made out of identical modules, they decided, was that you didn't know what kind of businesses they contained until you were inside. The names flashing over the doors didn't offer much of a clue. Accessing the datapool for a local directory was a pain, and too functional. They just wanted to stroll and take in the sights. Orchy wasn't really built for that. There was no civic identity; its purpose was simply to house and feed people in between skiing jaunts.
They did find a reasonable cafe eventually. The Flood Heights was positioned as close to the edge of the rift as safety would allow. So Lawrence and Roselyn sat at one of the window tables and ordered hot chocolate and a plate of Danish pastries.
He sat sipping at his mug, looking up into the sky with a kind of wistful admiration. He'd never seen Nizana like this, not with his own eyes. Here on the near-side it hung directly overhead, a massive circle sliced by a thousand compacted cloud bands, clearly defined lines of rust red and grubby white grating and tearing at each other with hooked curlicues. Hundreds of runaway cyclone storms the size of moonlets were constantly on the prowl amid the upper layers. They distorted the neat arrangement of bands, chaos engines churning the usual colors into freakish shades with oceanic-sized upwells of weird chemicals from the unseen depths. Sheets of electricity surged outward from their eyes, too vast to be called mere lightning bolts: continents of electrons birthed and extinguished in microseconds. Their ephemeral illumination ensured that Nizana's nightside was never dark; a jade aural phosphorescence writhed permanently within the cage of the ionosphere, while the discharges themselves fluoresced ragged patches of cloud thousands of kilometers across.
"They're going so fast," Roselyn said, gazing down at the skiers sliding along the snow. "Do you think we'll learn to go that fast this time?"
"Huh?" Lawrence brought his attention back to the ground, looking where she was. "Wrong question. You've got strips of polished composite strapped to your feet, and you're standing at the top of a mountain of ice. The trick is learning to go down slowly."
She stopped dropping sugar lumps into her chocolate and flicked one at him. "Prat. You know what I mean."
"Yeah. I don't suppose it's that difficult, not on the nursery slopes. They claim they can get you up to moderate grade by the end of a week."
"It looks scary, but I think I'm going to like it." She watched several skiers as they reached the bottom of the main slope, curving to a halt in a graceful spray of snow. The cable lift began tugging them up to the top again. On the other side of the rift, slim-line fissures extended deep into the ice cliff, intersecting each other and twisting around in convoluted geometries. Sunlight shone into them to be refracted in glorious iridescent rainbows, forever encased below the translucent surface.
Roselyn sighed contentedly. "I'm so happy. I've got you, I've got a life. It's funny, I never thought leaving Earth would allow me to be happy. You know the only thing I miss?"
"What's that?"
"Boats." She gestured around extravagantly. "I mean, Amethi's leisure industry is starting to lift off. There's this, and all those hotel domes in the middle of nowhere, and that ridiculous five-city motor rally race they've got planned for next year. But there are no boats."
"Give it time. Our oceans are filling up, and there are lakes forming on the continents."
"Ha! It'll take another thousand years to melt this glacier. So I'll see none of that till I'm either dead or too old to care. Such a shame. It would have been nice to stand on the prow with the sails creaking away, and feeling the wind on my face."