“Changed, haven’t I?”
Gurgeh nodded. Yay looked as well and handsome as ever, and androgynous.
“Just changing back,” she said. “Another few months and I’ll be back where I started. Ah, Gurgeh, you should have seen me as a man; I was dashing!”
“He was unbearable,” Chamlis said, pouring some mulled wine from a pot-bellied jug. Yay threw herself on to the couch beside Gurgeh, hugging him again and making a growling noise in her throat. Chamlis handed them gently steaming goblets of wine.
Gurgeh drank gratefully. “I didn’t expect to see you,” he told Yay. “I thought you’d gone away.”
“I went away.” Yay nodded, gulping her wine. “I came back. Last summer. Chiark’s getting another Plate-pair; I put in some plans… and now I’m team coordinator for farside.”
“Congratulations. Floating islands?”
Yay looked blank for a second, then laughed into her goblet. “No floating islands, Gurgeh.”
“Plenty of volcanoes, though,” Chamlis said sniffily, sucking a thread of wine from a thimble-sized container.
“Perhaps one little one,” Yay nodded. Her hair was longer than he remembered; blue-black. Still as curly. She punched him gently on the shoulder. “It’s good to see you again, Gurgeh.”
He squeezed her hand, looked at Chamlis. “Good to be back,” he said, then fell silent, staring at the burning logs in the fireplace. “We’re all glad you’re back, Gurgeh,” Chamlis said after a while. “But if you don’t mind my saying so, you don’t look too good. We heard you were in storage for the last couple of years, but there’s something else… What happened out there? We’ve heard all sorts of reports. Do you want to talk about it?”
Gurgeh hesitated, gazing at the leaping flames consuming the jumbled logs in the fire.
He put his glass down and started to explain.
He told them all that happened, from the first few days aboard the Limiting Factor to the last few days, again on the ship, as it powered out of the disintegrating Empire of Azad.
Chamlis was quiet, and its fields changed slowly through many colours. Yay grew slowly more concerned-looking; she shook her head frequently, gasped several times, and looked ill twice. In between, she kept the fire stocked with logs.
Gurgeh sipped his lukewarm wine. “So… I slept, all the way back, until two days out. And now it all seems… I don’t know; deep-frozen. Not fresh, but… not decayed yet. Not gone.” He swilled the wine around in his goblet. His shoulders shook with a half-hearted laugh. “Oh well.” He drained his glass.
Chamlis lifted the jug from the ashes at the front of the fire and refilled Gurgeh’s goblet with the hot wine. “Jernau, I can’t tell you how sorry I am; this was all my fault. If I hadn’t—”
“No,” Gurgeh said. “Not your fault. I got myself into it. You did warn me. Don’t ever say that; don’t ever think it was anybody’s responsibility but mine.” He got up suddenly and walked to the fjord-side windows, looking down the slope of snow-covered lawn to the trees and the black water, and over it to the mountains and the scattered lights of the houses on the far shore.
“You know,” he said, as though talking to his own reflection in the glass, “I asked the ship yesterday exactly what they did do about the Empire in the end; how they went in to sort it out. It said they didn’t even bother. Fell apart all on its own.”
He thought of Hamin and Monenine and Inclate and At-sen and Bermoiya and Za and Olos and Krowo and the girl whose name he’d forgotten…
He shook his head at his image in the glass. “Anyway; it’s over.” He turned back to Yay and Chamlis and the warm room. “What’s the gossip here?”
So they told him about Hafflis’s twins, both talking now, and Boruelal leaving to go GSV-ing for a few years, and Olz Hap — breaker of not a few young hearts — being more or less acclaimed/embarrassed/forced into Boruelal’s old post, and Yay fathering a child a year back — he’d get to meet mother and child next year probably, when they came for an extended visit — and one of Shuro’s pals being killed in a combat game two years back, and Ren Myglan becoming a man, and Chamlis still hard at work on the reference text for its pet planet, and Tronze Festival the year before last ending in disaster and chaos after some fireworks blew up in the lake and swamped half the cliffside terraces; two people dead, brains splattered over lumps of stonework; hundreds injured. Last year’s hadn’t been half so exciting.
Gurgeh was listening to all this as he wandered round the room, reacquainting himself with it. Nothing much seemed to have changed.
“What a lot I’ve miss—” he began, then noticed the little wooden plaque on the wall, and the object mounted on it. He reached out, touched it, took it down from the wall.
“Ah,” Chamlis said, making what was almost a coughing noise. “I hope you don’t mind… I mean I hope you don’t think that’s too… irreverent, or tasteless. I just thought…”
Gurgeh smiled sadly, touching the lifeless surfaces of the body that had once been Mawhrin-Skel. He turned back to Yay and Chamlis, walking over to the old drone. “Not at all, but I don’t want it. Do you?”
“Yes, please.”
Gurgeh presented the heavy little trophy to Chamlis, who went red with pleasure. “You vindictive old horror,” Yay snorted.
“This means a great deal to me,” Chamlis said primly, holding the plaque close to its casing. Gurgeh put his glass back on the tray.
A log collapsed in the fire, showering sparks up. Gurgeh crouched and poked at the remaining logs. He yawned.
Yay and the drone exchanged looks, then Yay reached out and tapped Gurgeh with one foot. “Come on, Jernau; you’re tired; Chamlis has to head back home and make sure its new fishes haven’t eaten each other. Is it all right if I stay here?”
Gurgeh looked, surprised, at her smiling face, and nodded.
When Chamlis left, Yay put her head on Gurgeh’s shoulder and said she’d missed him a lot, and five years was a long time, and he looked a lot more cuddleable than when he’d gone away, and… if he wanted… if he wasn’t too tired…
She used her mouth, and on her forming body Gurgeh traced slow movements, rediscovering sensations he’d almost forgotten; stroking her gold-dark skin, caressing the odd, almost comic unbuddings of her now concaving genitals, making her laugh, laughing with her, and — in the long moment of climax — with her then too, still one their every tactile cell surging to a single pulse, as though alight.
Still he didn’t sleep, and in the night got up out of the tousled bed. He went to the windows and opened them. The cold night air spilled in. He shivered, pulled on the trous, jacket and shoes.
Yay moved and made a small noise. He closed the windows and went back to the bed, crouching down in the darkness beside her. He pulled the covers over her exposed back and shoulder, and moved his hand very gently through her curls. She snored once and stirred, then breathed quietly on.
He crossed to the windows and went quickly outside, closing them silently behind him.
He stood on the snow-covered balcony, gazing at the dark trees descending in uneven rows to the glittering black fjord. The mountains on the far side shone faintly, and above them in the crisp night dim areas of light moved on the darkness, occluding star-fields and the farside Plates. The clouds drifted slowly, and down at Ikroh there was no wind.
Gurgeh looked up and saw, amongst the clouds, the Clouds, their ancient light hardly wavering in the cold, calm air. He watched his breath go out before him, like a damp smoke between him and those distant stars, and shoved his chilled hands into the jacket pockets for warmth. One touched something softer than the snow, and he brought it out; a little dust.