“I got it cut like the offworlders.” Ariele shook her head, feeling the giddy lightness of the motion, as if a weight had been lifted from her soul, along with the weight of her waist-length hair, which she had left on the floor of an offworlder’s shop only this afternoon. What was left was bare inches long, and stood out all over her head like cat’s fur. Elco Teel had dared her to do it; but once she had gone ahead, none of the others had dared not to follow her lead. Most of the crowd of bobbing heads behind her sported newly shorn hair, one cut more bizarre than the next. “Don’t you love it—?”
Tor raised her eyebrows, and then nodded, smiling. “I think it’s perfect. Your mother will hate it.”
Ariele grinned. “I hope so,” she said, feeling her own smile pinch. “At least I don’t look like her anymore.” She shook her head again, pushing back off the table surface, taking a drink with her. She sipped it, pleased and a little surprised to find that Tor had actually given her a drink with alcohol in it. “Thanks, Tor.”
Tor lifted her hand in good-natured dismissal, moving away from the table, which suddenly came alive with a hologramic vision of an alien city.
Ariele’s gasp of astonishment was lost in the murmurs of amazement around her. She stood between Elco Teel and Tilby Atwater, watching as eager offworlders materialized out of the crowd, elbowing her friends aside, flocking to the display to try their hand at a new game which was probably long since an old game to them.
She watched, trying to get a feel for the way it was done, murmuring observations, gasping and pointing with the others; all of them, all the while, still trying not to look as though they had never seen anything like it before. Music filled the air around her with loud, insistent rhythms, the imported heartbeat of some other world. They moved on after a time, drifting from one table to another, sipping their drinks, surreptitiously staring at the astonishing varieties of humanity who filled the space around them—all shapes and sizes, with hair that came in every conceivable style and texture, with colors of eyes and skin that she would have laughed at the very idea of, a year ago. She loved the sight of them, the sense of diversity that they symbolized, the living proof of life’s endless possibilities.
“Gods.” Tilby’s sister Sulark spoke the offworlder oath selfconsciously behind her. “How does anyone ever get enough points even to call it a truce? These games are impossible…. Even the offworlders can’t win.” She pointed as a red-faced player turned and stalked away from the jumbled ruins of a world shimmering in front of them.
“That one can,” Ariele murmured, nudging Tilby with her shoulder. She had been watching the man two tables away, who was doing something that seemed completely incomprehensible to her, but doing it brilliantly, from the awed cries and laughter that surrounded him. The crowd followed his every move, as she had done, ever since she glanced his way. “Look at him, Tilby, oh Lady’s Tits, I’d like to see the rest of that one, wouldn’t you—?” He was fair enough to pass for Tiamatan; but she was sure he was an offworlder, by the bizarre swirls of decoration that spiraled up his bare arms to his shoulders. She could barely take her eyes from the burning beauty of his face, the intent, perfectly controlled dance of his hands inside the showers of phantom gold that rained down on him, even to take in what she could glimpse of his body through the shifting crowd.
“Mmm,” Tilby said, ruffling her hair with a hand. “I sure would.”
“But I saw him first,” Ariele said peremptorily, pulling Tilby back when she would have started forward.
Tilby pouted, and Elco Teel said, “You’re depraved, Ariele—how can you want to do that one? Look at his skin. Do you think he was born mottled like that, or does he have some kind of disease?”
“It’s tattooing,” she said, impatiently superior. “You know that. Like a sibyl—”
“Hardly.” He made a face.
Ariele lifted her middle finger, let it droop, significantly, in front of his face.
“Do you suppose he’s tattooed all over—?” Tilby asked, with wide eyes.
“Let’s find out.” Ariele pushed between them, making her way on across the crowded floor. But as she reached the gaming table where the offworlder was playing, she saw him withdraw his hands from the golden hallucination, saw it beginning to fade from the air. She squeezed in beside him before he could back away through the crowd, edging aside a youth with night-black skin and hair, and a man whose head barely topped the height of the table. She saw startled surprise on both their faces, and utter boredom in the piercingly blue eyes of the player himself. Intentionally she brushed up against him, letting the curve of her body slide along his hip as her hand grasped his arm. “Teach me,” she murmured, to his face.
He stared at her with what seemed to be incomprehension, for a moment. She held him pinned against the table with the subtle, suggestive pressure of her body.
“Boss—?” the short man said, behind her.
The player gestured sharply with his hand, and the short man fell silent. The offworlder shook his head slightly, but it was not a refusal; a smile that was nothing but amused pulled up the corners of his mouth. His eyes remained expressionless. “Sure,” he said. His own hands rose, circled her, slid down her back to hei metal-jangling hips. He turned her where she stood until she was facing the gaming table in front of him. She felt his body move up against hers now, not so subtly; felt the pressure of his sudden erection against her spine.
He held her hands inside his, slipping filigreed mesh over them, lifting them as if he were about to play music on an instrument. The swarming fireflies began to fill her eyes. She was only vaguely aware that her friends had gathered around her, watching her with varying degrees of amusement and envy as the game began.
He began to force her hands to move to his rhythms, murmuring explanations and encouragement in her ear as she struggled to match his artless grace. “Let go,” he said softly. “Winning means nothing. Only the act, only the flow, let it carry you like a river—”
She let go, and felt herself swept away by the flow of motion, the overflow of her senses. The light, the music, the warm pressure of his body fed the hunger inside her; the proof of his desire was a dizzying torment against the small of her back. She dissolved into the sensual heat and flow until she became one with them: her movements were his movements, she saw with his eyes, and as the gold rained down on them, she felt herself winning, and winning, the crowd’s awed cries, their applause and laughter, the shining faces of her friends, the shining gold….
And then the faultless motion of her hands began to fail; she missed the capture of one golden trajectory, and then another and another. The spell that had held her was broken, and all at once she became aware that the hands which held hers, guiding them through the arcane ritual of control, were gone as well. Startled, wondering, she watched the light fade; the crowd began to murmur and drift apart. She peeled the golden filaments from her nerveless fingers. There were no fantastically decorated arms caging her, no warm insistent pressure against her back.
Turning, she found that the offworlder was gone; that she had no idea even of how long he had been gone. He had slipped away and left her without a word.
Her friends surrounded her, their mindless, taunting envy and praise raining down on her, as insubstantial as the rain of gold. Elco Teel was beside her with a smile of knowing mockery as he saw the look on her face. “He’s too slick for you, my little Motherlover.” It was a term of insult the offworlders used for Tiamatans, and she frowned. “Caught you in your own trap, didn’t he?” he murmured, with smug satisfaction. She brought her knee up sharply, hitting him in the groin—not hard enough to double him over, but hard enough to make him swear.