The silence got deeper.
“I mean, seriously, have a little respect,” Kit muttered into it.
Most of the group looked abashed. Ronan looked innocent.
“No, he’s absolutely right!” Matt said, looking around. “Completely inappropriate! So cut it out and let’s talk about something besides Carmela’s sex life.”
Kit breathed out a sigh of relief.
“Let’s talk about Kit’s sex life.”
Kit stopped breathing.
Penn, Nita thought, shaking her head.
She visited one of the drinks tables again—I am so smoothied out, no more of those—and found some kind of unfamiliar Australian lemonade, extremely sharp and very refreshing. With this she strolled to the outside terrace and leaned on the railing there, watching the lights of the city twinkle on the water of the lake across the road.
Down the railing, something moved. Nita glanced that way and got a glimpse in the dimness of an orange jumpsuit. “Liss!”
“It’s getting warm in there again,” she said. “Even here they don’t seem to have the hang of the air-conditioning . . .”
Nita laughed and made her way down the terrace. “More kinds of heat going ’round in there than one,” Nita said.
“Uh oh,” Lissa said. “Don’t tell me. Penn?”
“He keeps getting weird with me and I’m not sure how to handle it.”
Lissa sighed. “Well, I don’t know that I’m the right one to be asking for advice,” she said, “as I’ve got absolutely no interest in any boys that way, so I’m short on data.”
That made Nita blink. Oh my God, is she like Matt and again I haven’t noticed? “Yeah, I know, he—”
“Or any girls, either. Or anybody.”
“Oh,” Nita said. I am such an idiot. She’s a virgin and she’s perfectly okay with me knowing that, she is so brave—And then she lost her train of thought, because Lissa had kind of an unexpected smile on her face.
“Because the sex thing,” Lissa said, “I don’t do that.”
“Yeah, I thought I was getting that,” Nita said.
“I didn’t say I hadn’t done it,” Lissa said. “I didn’t say I couldn’t do it. I said, I don’t do it.”
“Uh. You’re . . . you’re, uh, celibate?” Nita had meant it to come out as a statement. But instead it came out as a question as Lissa’s smile changed again and she seemed positively amused.
“Nope, I’m ace,” she said. Nita blinked.
“Asexual,” Lissa said.
Nita took a breath. “Wow” was all she could think of to say. I keep saying that lately. To everything. I am the least interesting person in the world.
But Lissa was grinning, and now she burst out laughing. “That is the best reaction,” she said, “the very best—!” And peal after peal of her laughter rang out and she wrapped her arms around herself. “Perfect, just perfect, what a breath of fresh air!”
Nita felt both relieved and somehow obscurely annoyed. “Have I been some kind of idiot again?” she said. “Please say no.”
“No,” Lissa said.
“Relationship and physicality,” said a dark voice from off to one side, sounding a touch amused. “Always so fraught . . .”
They both looked farther down the railing. Darkness loomed in darkness there, wrapped in shadows.
“Uh, hi,” Lissa said, sounding uncertain.
“Pluto, Lissa,” Nita said. “Lissa, Pluto.”
Lissa’s eyes went wide in the darkness and the near-full moonlight on the water. “As in the Planetary?”
“That’s him,” Nita said. “Come on over, elder cousin, don’t be shy. . . .”
The shadows moved closer, coming to rest at Nita’s left elbow. “I wouldn’t like to intrude.”
“You’re not.” She looked up into that darkness, trying again to catch a glimpse of the difficult-to-see eyes. “Relationships, though . . . Don’t tell me you’ve got trouble that way. Sounded like you didn’t mind what Jupiter and Saturn had going . . .”
“Of course not. They’re of consenting age,” Pluto said. “When one’s over two billion or so, what one does with another body is one’s own business.”
Lissa spluttered with delight.
“But out in the further reaches it can be different, the distances are so great. One can feel a bit left out. Even in my original system, I was the furthest distant. The last formed . . . all the best elements pretty much gone at that point.” He paused. “You gather yourself together as best you can from what’s available. And then start circling, doing the eternal Round: trying to find out what’s going to happen in your life . . .”
Nita looked over at Lissa. “Left out . . . You ever feel that way?”
Lissa shook her head. “About sex? No. Do you feel dragged in?”
Nita laughed helplessly. “God yes! And not by Kit. By other people.”
Lissa nodded. “So did I until I realized it just wasn’t for me. But once I found a special friend, someone who mattered without the sex being what it was about . . .” She smiled. “Things got sorted.”
Nita looked over to the darkness at her elbow. “You’re so far out there,” she said, “and you can’t do the resonance thing quite the way Jupiter and Saturn do . . .”
“There are differences,” Pluto said. “Neptune and I have an old periorbital relationship; the occasional amiable gravitational interaction . . . two neighbors waving as they pass on opposite sies of the street.” There was a slight smile to be sensed inside that darkness. “But there are many other consolations, other ways to fulfill your passions and be intimate with the universe in singularity: for even great distance need not imply isolation. In my place, you learn darkness, and the uses of it. Cold, and the mastery of it. Emptiness, and the secrets it holds. You learn strength: the certainty of iron, the stability of stone. You hold those places, those states, as a reference for others. Let stone melt to magma elsewhere, let iron melt to slag: you know solidity, and hold the reference true. And because that’s what Life’s given you to do, you do it well and steadfastly. There’s joy in that.” He was silent for a bit: but then, all his words seemed to Nita to rise out of a great silence. “And if sometimes you yearn for closeness to the inner circle, you learn to know that you already have that closeness in the work Life’s given you. You guard the outer boundary of the circles of Life, sweeping up matter that could come to threaten lives closer to the warm heart of things. In their name you hold the space of Strength in Emptiness, and gladly make your rounds . . . and maintain.”
Lissa nodded. “I did that for a long time,” she said. “Just kind of waited, you know? I always knew something else was going on with me but I didn’t know the words for it. It wasn’t anything to do with not being able to be in love! God, I crushed as hard as anyone else. But the whole physical end of things? Pff.” She waved a hand in the air. “No interest.”
“But then things changed,” Nita said.
“Yeah, I found the Special One,” Lissa said. “The one who got that there were other ways to be close.” Her voice went quiet and musing. “Kind of sudden and unexpected. But I should have expected it, really. Change is what life’s about . . .”
“It was so for me as well,” Pluto said. “When I was a far smaller planitesimal, my star died. Oh, nothing spectacular! It swelled, it ate its inner worlds; then everything collapsed and went cold. So I waited: maintained, as I’d always done. And things shifted, as they always do. Turbulence in the starstream, gravitational fields shifting; benevolent chaos brushes up against you. A black hole wandered by from the madder spaces near the Galaxy’s heart. It knocked me loose and sent me tumbling out into the dark. And then I traveled hopefully, as they say, for a long time. And finally, there came that first brush of gravity and warmth, out at the edge of the Sun’s radiopause. Such a kind eager little star, so small and solid and golden. It reached for me and drew me in, and so I found a home again in the outer reaches, among many others; some of whom have become one with me since.”