“Why don’t we talk about this tomorrow morning.” Mother cast Von Ray a despairing glance. But Father was too upset by Ruby’s tears and chagrined by Lorq’s presence to respond.
“Yes, you take them home, Dana.” He looked up to see the miners watching. “Take them home now. Come, Aaron, you needn’t worry yourself.”
“Here,” Mother said. “Ruby, Prince, give me your hands. Come, Lorq, we’re going right—“
Mother had extended her hands to the children.
Then Prince reached with his prosthetic arm, and yanked – Mother screamed, staggered forward, beating at his wrist with her free hand. Metal and plastic fingers locked her own.
“Prince!” Aaron reached for him, but the boy ducked away, twisted, then dodged across the floor.
Mother went to her knees on the dirt floor, gasping, letting out tiny sobs. Father caught her by the shoulders. “Dana! What did he do? What happened?” Mother shook her head.
Prince ran straight against Tavo.
“Catch him!” Father shouted in Portuguese.
And Aaron bellowed, “Prince!”
At the word, resistance left the boy; he sagged in Tavo’s arms, face white.
Mother was on her feet now, grimacing on Father’s shoulder. “ …and one of my white birds …” Lorq heard her say.
“Prince, come here!” Aaron commanded.
Prince walked back, his movements jerky and electric.
“Now,” Aaron said. “You go back to the house with Dana. She’s sorry she mentioned your hand. She didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”
Mother and Father looked at Aaron, astounded. Aaron Red turned to them. He was a small man. The only thing red about him Lorq could see were the corners of his eyes. “You see—Aaron looked tired—“I never mention his deformity. Never.” He looked upset. “I don’t want him to feel inferior. I don’t let anyone point him out as different at all. You must never talk about it in front of him, you see. Not at all.”
Father started to say something. But the initial embarrassment of the evening had been his.
Mother looked back and forth between the two men, then at her hand. It was cradled in her other palm, and she made stroking motions. “Children,” she said. “Come with me.”
“Dana, are you sure that you’re—“
Mother cut him off with a look. “Come with me, children,” she repeated. They left the tent.
Tavo was outside. “I go with you, Senhora. I will go back to the house with you, if you wish.”
“Yes, Tavo,” Mother said. “Thank you.” She held her hand against the stomach of her dress.
“That boy with the iron hand.” Tavo shook his head. “And the girl, and your son. I brought them here, Senhora. But they asked me to, you see. They told me to bring them here.”
“I understand,” Mother said.
They didn’t go down through the jungle this time, but took the wider road that led past the launch from where the aquaturbs took the miners to the undersea mines. The high forms swayed in the water, casting double shadows on the waves.
As they reached the gate of the park, Lorq was suddenly sick to his stomach. “Hold his head, Tavo,” Mother instructed. “See, this excitement isn’t good for you, Lorq. And you were drinking that milk again. Do you feel any better?”
He hadn’t mentioned the rum. The smell in the tent, as well as the odor that lingered around Tavo kept his secret. Prince and Ruby watched him quietly, glancing at one another.
Upstairs Mother got the sitter back in order, and secured Prince and Ruby in their room. Finally she came into the nursery.
“Does your hand still hurt, Mommy?” he asked from the pillow.
“It does. Nothing’s broken, though I don’t know why not. I’m going to get the medico-unit soon as I leave you.”
“They wanted to go!” Lorq blurted. “They said they wanted to see where you all had gone.”
Mother sat down on the bed and began to rub his back with her good hand. “And didn’t you want to see too, just a little bit?”
“Yes,” he said, after a moment.
“That’s what I thought. How does your stomach feel? I don’t care what they say, I still don’t see how that sour milk could be any good for you.”
He still hadn’t mentioned the rum.
“You go to sleep now.” She went to the nursery door.
He remembered her touching the switch.
He remembered a moon darkening through the rotating roof.
Pleiades Federation, Ark, New Ark, 3162
Lorq always associated Prince Red with the coming and going of light.
He was sitting naked by the swimming pool on the roof, reading for his petrology exam, when the purple leaves at the rock entrance shook. The skylight hummed with the gale outside; the towers of Ark, vaned to glide in the wind, were distorted behind the glittering frost.
“Dad!” Lorq snapped off the reader and stood up. “Hey, I came in third in senior mathematics. Third!”
Von Ray, in fur-rimmed parka stepped through the leaves. “And I suppose you call yourself studying now. Wouldn’t it be easier in the library? How can you concentrate up here with all this distraction?”
“Petrology,” Lorq said, holding up his note-recorder. “I don’t really have to study for that. I’ve got honors already.”
Only in the last few years had Lorq learned to relax under his parents’ demand for perfection. Having learned, he had discovered that the demands were now ritual and phatic, and gave way to communication if they were allowed to ride out.
“Oh,” his father said. “You did.” Then he smiled. The frost on his hair turned to water as he unlaced his parka. “At least you’ve been studying instead of crawling through the bowels of Caliban.”
“Which reminds me, Dad. I’ve registered her in the New Ark Regatta. Will you and Mother go up to see the finish?”
“If we can. You know Mother hasn’t been feeling too well recently. This past trip was a little rough. And you worry her with your racing.”
“Why? I haven’t let it interfere with my schoolwork.”
Von Ray shrugged. “She thinks it’s dangerous.” He laid the parka over the rock. “We read about your prize at Trantor last month. Congratulations. She may worry about you, but she was as proud as a partridge when she could tell all those stuffy club women you were her son.”
“I wish you’d been there.”
“We wanted to be. But there was no way to cut a month off the tour. Come, I’ve got something to show you.”
Lorq followed his father along the stream that curled from the pool. Von Ray put his arm around his son’s shoulder as they started the steps that dropped beside the waterfall into the house. At their weight, the steps began to escalate.
“We stopped on Earth, this trip. Spent a day with Aaron Red. I believe you met him a long time ago. Red-shift Limited?”
“Out on New Brazillia,” Lorq said. “At the mine.”
“Do you remember that far back?” The stairs flattened and carried them across the conservatory. Cockatoos sprung from the brush, beat against the transparent wall where snow lay outside the bottom panes, then settled in the bloodflowers, knocking petals to the sand. “Prince was with him. A boy your age, perhaps a little older.” Lorq had been vaguely aware of Prince’s doings over the years as a child is aware of the activity of the children of parents’ friends. Some time back, Prince had changed schools four times very rapidly, and the rumor that had filtered to the Pleiades was that only the fortunes of Red-shift, Ltd., kept the transfers from being openly labeled expulsion.
“I remember him,” Lorq said. “He only had one arm.”