“He wears a black glove to the shoulder with a jeweled armband at the top, now. He’s a very impressive young man. He said he remembered you. You two got into some mischief or other back then. He, at least, seems to have quieted down some.”
Lorq shrugged from under his father’s arm and stepped onto the white rugs that scattered the winter garden. “What do you want to show me?”
Father went to one of the viewing columns. It was a transparent column four feet thick supporting the clear roofing with a capital of floral glass. “Dana, do you want to show Lorq what you brought for him?”
“Just a moment.” His mother’s figure formed in the column. She was sitting in the swan chair. She took a green cloth from the table beside her and opened it on the quilted brocade of her lap.
“They’re beautiful!” Lorq claimed. “Where did you find heptodyne quartz?”
The stones, basically silicon, had been formed at geological pressures so that in each crystal, about the size of a child’s fist, light flowed along the shattered blue lines within the jagged forms.
“I picked them up when we stopped at Cygnus. We were staying near the Exploding Desert of Krall. We could see it flashing from our hotel window beyond the walls of the city. It was quite as spectacular as it’s always described. One afternoon when your father was off in conference, I took the tour. When I saw them, I thought of your collection and bought these for you.”
“Thanks.” He smiled at the figure in the column.
Neither he nor his father had seen his mother in person for four years. Victim of a degenerative mental and physical disease that often left her totally incommunicative, she had retired to her suite in the house with her medicines, her diagnostic computers, her cosmetics, her gravothermy and reading machines. She—or more often one of her androids programmed to her general response pattern—would appear in the viewing columns and present a semblance of her normal appearance and personality. In the same way, through android and telerama report, she “accompanied” Von Ray on his business travels, while her physical presence was confined in the masked, isolate chambers that no one was allowed to enter except the psychotechnician who came quietly once a month.
“They’re beautiful,” he repeated, stepping closer.
“I’ll leave them in your room this evening.” She picked one up with dark fingers and turned it over. “I find them fascinating myself. Almost hypnotic.”
“Here.” Von Ray turned to one of the other columns. “I have something else to show you. Aaron had apparently heard of your interest in racing, and knew how well you were doing.” Something was forming in the second column. “Two of his engineers had just developed a new ion-coupler. They told us it was too sensitive for commercial use and wouldn’t be profitable for them to manufacture on any large scale. But Aaron said the response level would be excellent for small-scale racing craft. I offered to buy it for you. He wouldn’t hear of it; he’s sent it to you as a gift.”
“He did?” Lorq felt excitement lap above surprise. “Where is it?”
In the column a crate stood on the corner of a loading platform. The fence of Nea Limani Yacht Basin diminished in the distance between the guide towers. “Over at the field?” Lorq sat down in the green hammock hanging from the ceiling. “Good! I’ll look at it when I go down this evening. I still have to get a crew for the race.”
“You just pick your crew from people hanging around the spacefield?” Mother shook her head. “That always worries me.”
“Mom, people who like racing, kids who are interested in racing ships, people who know how to sail, they hang around the shipyards. I know half the people at Nea Limani anyway.”
“I still wish you’d get your crew from among your school friends, or people like that.”
“What wrong is with people who like this talk?” He smiled slightly.
“I didn’t say anything of that nature at all. I just meant you should use people you know.”
“After the race,” his father cut in, “what do you intend to do with the rest of your vacation?”
Lorq shrugged. “Do you want me to foreman out at the Sao Orini mine like last year?”
His father’s eyebrows separated then snarled over the vertical crevices above his nose. “After what happened with that miner’s daughter …?” The brows unsnarled again. “Do you want to go out there again?”
Lorq shrugged once more.
“Have you thought of anything that you’d like to do?” This from his mother.
“Ashton Clark will send me something. Right now I’ve got to go pick up my crew.” He stood up from the hammock. “Mom, thanks for the stones. We’ll talk about vacation when school is really over.”
He started for the bridge that arched the water.
“You won’t be too …”
“Before midnight.”
“Lorq. One more thing.”
He stopped at the crest of the bridge, leaning on the aluminum banister.
“Prince is having a party. He sent you an invitation. It’s at Earth, Paris, on the Ile St.-Louis. But it’s just three days after the Regatta. You wouldn’t be able to get there—“
“Caliban can make Earth in three days.”
“No, Lorq! You’re not going to go all the way to Earth in that tiny—“
“I’ve never been to Paris. The last time I was on Earth was the time you took me when I was fifteen and we went to Peking. It’ll be easy sailing down into Draco.” Leaving, he called back to them, “If I don’t get my crew, I won’t even get back to school next week.” He disappeared down the other side of the bridge.
Pleiades Federation/Draco (Caliban transit), 3162
His crew was two fellows who volunteered to help him unpack the ion-coupler. Neither one was from the Pleiades Federation.
Brian, a boy Lorq’s age who had taken a year off from Draco University and flown out to the Outer Colonies, was now working his way back; he had done both captaining and studding on racing yachts, but only in the co-operative yachting club sponsored by his school. Based on common interest in racing-ships, their relation was one of mutual awe. Lorq was silently agape at the way Brian had taken off to the other end of the galaxy and was beating his way without funds or forethought; while Brian had at last met, in Lorq, one of the mythically wealthy who could own his own boat and whose name had, till then, been only an abstraction on the sports tapes—Lorq Von Ray, one of the youngest and most spectacular of the new crop of racing captains.
Dan, who completed the crew of the little three-vaned racer, was a man in his forties, from Australia on Earth. They had met him in the bar where he had started a whole series of tales about his times as a commercial stud on the big transport freighters, as well as racing captains he had occasionally crewed for—though he had never captained himself. Barefoot, a rope around pants torn off at the knees, Dan was a lot more typical of the studs that hung around the heated walkways of Nea Limani. The high wind-domes broke the hurricane gusts that rolled from Tong across glittering Ark—it was the month of Iumbra when there were only three hours of daylight in the twenty-nine-hour day. The mechanics, officers, and studs drank late, talked currents and racing at the bars and the sauna baths, the registration offices and the service pits.
Brian’s reaction to continuing on after the race down to Earth: “Fine. Why not? I have to get back into Draco in time for vacation classes anyway.”
Dan’s: “Paris? That’s awful close to Australia, ain’t it? I got a kid and two wives in Melbourne, and I ain’t so anxious for them to catch hold of me. I suppose if we don’t stay too long—“
When the Regatta swept past the observation satellite circling Ark, looped the inner edge of the cluster to the Dim, Dead Sister, and returned to Ark again, it was announced that Caliban had placed second.