He was in a bad mood, which killed her enthusiasm. She only meant to tease him enough until he laughed so that they could get back to work. It was easier to be gay and irreverent than bored.
Glibly she began to mutate the weapons discussion into free-flowing nonsense. It eventually blossomed into a free-for-all about ancient Japanese pornography. She was doing her brush strokes in the air and faking geisha flirtations about which she knew nothing—and he was richly enjoying himself pretending to be a sake-saturated teen-aged samurai on his first groping visit to the pillow world of a light-gravity planet. At least he was giggling like a teenager. She was so fascinated—she’d never seen him so wonderfully foolish—that she couldn’t stop provoking him. It was true, she thought, that being alone in a public place brings out the devil in men. The devil keeps whispering that someone may walk in and that makes it impossible not to be silly. Even she felt silly and dangerously bold.
Though the eight terminal booths were empty, the library was heavily used—but mostly accessed from distant terminals. They were alone and they were likely to remain alone. For no sane reason they decided to rob the library of Kakabuni’s Instructive Erotica, though robbing was entirely unnecessary in a library that took less than a second to copy a chip into a personal infocomp. Their crazy mood told them that they had to own the Starbase’s only copy of Kakabuni. To get at it they needed to unlock and pull out one of the hundred sliding ROM doors—something that only the librarian was supposed to do. They managed to slide out the chip-rack but their chip was near the floor and required a chip-puller that they didn’t have so they made love on the floor with their clothes on instead. He even put his arm around her when he walked her back up through the maze to her dorm.
The next day she woke up anxiously because she’d never done something so stupid in her life! On the floor! In her clothes! She faked sickness and did not report for work. All morning on the day after the next day she kept telling herself that her mother was brave enough to swing an axe at a kzin (even though her bravery had killed her). She found a way to wander up and down a corridor that Yankee would have to pass through, carrying a package so that she could pretend to be delivering messages.
She saw him coming before he saw her and tried to duck behind a support pillar but it was too thin. The package stuck out. She looked the other way in panic.
“Hi, Chloe,” he said.
“Oh. You.” She tried to bat her eyes but they froze. “I’ve been sick.” Sick? She saw him seeing her wan and in crutches and desperately cast around for a more appropriate bright conversation. Yankee, damn him, wasn’t saying anything. Food was all she could think of. Even Murphy couldn’t get you in trouble with food. “Lunch?”
He seemed almost relieved. “Thirteen-hundred at the Cal?”
“Sure. I’ll bring my teeth.” She was outraged at herself for saying such a stupid thing but it was already out of her mouth. I’ll bring my teeth! She cringed. And she was outraged at the way he had crawled back inside his straitlaced self. She wanted to shout Kakabuni! at his hastily retreating back but she didn’t dare. Growing up wasn’t pleasant. She’d never had any trouble with sex when she was thirteen.
Lunch was terrible. They had ground guinea-pig steak and veggies that had been programmed with the wrong spice. They had nothing to talk about. They had come to that horrible time in their relationship when they had already said everything that they had to say to each other. Finagle’s Eyes, they were talking about the color of the veggies!
“You know what this parsnip looks like? It looks like one of those old brass naval cannons of the seventeenth century.”
That saved them. It reminded her of weapons tradeoff analysis. Soon they were comfortable old friends again discussing the impact that hyperdrive ships might have on a millennia-old kzinti military tradition. That culture was based on a bedrock of subluminal assumptions. Supply depots were dispersed. Manufacturing was dispersed. A son could be executed for not carrying out the orders issued to his father—unto the fourth generation. Local conquest commanders had wide authority. The military kzin valued truth so highly because that was the only way of keeping messages from degrading over the centuries.
Chloe became resigned to a Yankee stuck back in his old shell. She knew she was never going to get him to talk about love, not in the Caf. He was more like a cozy confrere than a lover. Her damn father had ordered him to take care of her and that’s what that damn Yankee was doing. Maybe he didn’t even like her. Here she had gone to all the damn trouble of chasing down a damn romantic hero of the war and he’d turned out to be just another awkward damn adolescent like the damned boys she’d been trying to avoid.
Two days later everything was back to normal and she could even tease him without having him go stiff on her.
“Kakabuni” remained a taboo word. They never talked about sex. Worse, they never even talked about relationships. Having an admiral for a father was like having an anchor chained to her neck. She was six and a half light-years from Alpha Centauri and she was still winched to her father.
Four days later he actually put his arm around her and gave her a quick squeeze.
Two weeks later “fellow-prisoner” Jinny of the Young Woman’s Auxiliary invited her on a double date. Her date turned out to be intellectually challenged so she left Jinny to manage both their dates and found her own double date. It was fun to wit-lash young men who were in such good shape physically that their brains recovered in minutes—not like a certain senile old man of her acquaintance.
A month later she missed her period. She thought about that for a few days and then went to the pharmacy for a pregnancy patch. It was positive. She returned for a more expensive test in the pharmacy’s autodoc booth. It too was positive, predicting a completely normal pregnancy. That meant she could ask the autodoc for a nonprescription abortion right then. It was between her and the autodoc. No one had to know.
Chloe took a walk instead. She didn’t believe that a human life started at conception. Your life didn’t start until you got out of the womb and began to make your own decisions-like whether you wanted to breathe or not and which rattle to bang. So she wasn’t thinking about the fetus. She was thinking about whether she was ready to be a mother. She hadn’t built a nest yet. She was on a military base. She thought a lot about the problems of her father, a lone parent during the time of troubles just after the Battle of Wunderland with the devastation of war all about them and the economy in a shambles.
She’d been such a brat to him, pushing, demanding, and learning how to con each of her new caretakers. She was still looking for a mother even now. She walked to the very center of Starbase, a seven-story atrium where you could catch your breath at a vista of balconies and get away from the claustrophobia of corridors. The bench in the central rock garden was an inviting place to sit. One of the cacti was flowering: a rare sight. On the bench she cried silently and watched the people go by in the shallow ethereal glides of low gravity. Chloe slipped her mother’s iron wedding ring out of her blouse, still on its chain where it had always been, forgotten, and thought about the mother she had never known.
At headquarters, where she seldom went, she wandered among the desks of busy men and women in uniform. Some nodded. No one stopped her—they all knew she was the daughter of a powerful admiral. She peeked into Yankee’s cubbyhole with its clutter of screens and plotters, a VR helmet on his cabinet, another on the plotter, and another on the floor.
“Hi, stranger,” she said.
He took her hand and pulled her inside. The unexpected touch of his hand made her eyes water and she couldn’t finish what she had started to say. She let him fill the void. “Good to see you today,” he said brightly. “The problems have been coming in all morning and you’re a breath of fresh air. I’d ask you to sit, but there isn’t any room.”