Martinez felt his spirits lift the second he was outside of the palace and into the mellow twilight. In the pre-dinner hour there was little traffic on the streets, and few walkers. A scattering of stars were visible in the darkening sky, and Zanshaa’s shadow had cut a wide slice out of the silver accelerator ring. A ship’s antimatter torch blazed directly overhead, brighter than anything in the sky, and heading—Martinez guessed—for Wormhole 4 and Seizho. Thoughts of Sula set his nerves tingling.
Martinez bought an armful of flowers from the Torminel pushcart vendor on the corner—a carnivore selling blossoms—then turned the corner and walked on to Sula’s building. She met him at the door of her apartment, fading surprise still in her eyes.
“You’re early,” she said. She wore a green Fleet fatigue coverall, apparently her usual dress at home.
“Sorry,” Martinez said. “I couldn’t wait.” He offered her the flowers. “I thought I’d replace those stolen daffodils.”
Sula looked at the extravagant bouquet with bemused pleasure. “You’re going to have to give me a lot more vases at this rate,” she said.
He stood in the hideous Sevigny extravagance of the front room while Sula busied herself filling some vases, equally hideous, that had been sitting empty on stands, intended apparently as objects of admiration. Fleet officers, raised in a tradition in which every object had its proper drawer or bay or locker, were a tidy breed, but Sula’s room was preternaturally neat: even papers with arithmetical jottings, worksheets from her hobby of mathematical puzzles, were squared neatly on a table, slightly offset so that the numbers on the upper right corners were visible. Aside from the vases with their flowers there was no indication that Martinez had ever been present in the room at all, something that sent a waft of depression sighing through him.
“I was just about to take a bath and change,” Sula said as she returned a vase to its stand.
Martinez brightened. “Would you like company in the bath?”
“Good grief, no,” she said. Martinez blinked in surprise.
And then, as if Sula had begun to suspect she’d been too blunt, she stepped close to him and put her arms around him. “My baths are for me alone,” she said. “It’s one of those things I’m fussy about. Sorry.”
“That’s all right,” Martinez said. How Sula’s standards of privacy could possibly have been maintained in the Fleet was something he couldn’t imagine.
He kissed her. “Would you mind terribly if I left my family and joined yours?”
She gave him a curious look. “My family’s dead,” she said.
“There are advantages to that,” Martinez said. “And in any case it’s you I want to join.”
Her expression softened. He kissed her again, and her hands cupped the back of his head to hold his kiss to hers.
Join Sula’s family? he thought.
He could. He believed he could.
EIGHT
Sula watched as the juggler spun and danced in the center of a whirl of blades. Torchlight glowed on keen-edged steel. The knives were attached by elastic to the juggler’s wrists, ankles, and hips, and snapped back as she threw them out over the heads of her audience. To control them she had to catch them and throw them again, or let the elastic wrap around her limbs or body or head, and then cast the knives off with a jerk of the head or a spin of the body.
The timing was exquisite, and breathtaking. One slip and the girl would be cut, or if the elastic was cut instead someone in the audience could get a knife in the eye.
Sula’s breath frosted in the chill midnight air. Martinez’s arms coil around her from behind, and she leaned back against his warmth.
He had taken her to a series of clubs in the Lower Town, and on their return had encountered a group of street performers presenting their act on the wide apron before the lower terminal of the funicular railway. Surrounded by torches, Cree drummers had beaten a rhythm while Daimong acrobats balanced atop chairs or barrels or each other; and nocturnal Torminel, huge eyes wide in the semidarkness, had performed a slapstick routine. The air was heavy with the scents of roasting chestnuts and ears of maize produce shipped up from Zanshaa’s southern hemisphere, sold by vendors from portable charcoal braziers. Now a Terran girl barely in her adolescence was mastering the flying knives with an intent stonefaced courage that left Sula dry-mouthed with admiration.
“Here,” Martinez said. “Try one of these.”
In one hand he held a crystalized taswa fruit just purchased from a vendor. Sula bit down on it, and bright sparks of sugar exploded on her tongue, followed at once by a tartness that flooded her mouth with flavor.
“Thank you,” she said as the acid puckered her lips.
The juggler was a blur of motion now, the bright knives whipping around her. Sula could hear the sound of her soft leather soles on the flagstones. The juggler bounded into a twisting somersault, landing on her feet just outside of the knives’ danger zone. Her hands were a blur as she snatched the steel from the air. Metal clacked on metal. And then the girl was motionless, the knives bunched in her hands, and in the absolute silence she drew her feet together and bowed.
The audience, a hundred or so drifting toward the High City from their evening in the Lower Town, burst into applause and cheers. Sula cheered wildly with the rest, applauding till her palms grew red, and when one of the Torminel came by with a little portable terminal for contributions, she keyed in a generous contribution.
Another act followed, a mournful-looking Terran whose performance consisted entirely of bouncing a ball on the pavement, but doing it in surprising ways. Martinez’s arms were still around Sula. She took another bite of the candied taswa fruit.
I am sitting in a circle of torches watching a grown man bounce a ball,Sula thought, and I am feeling…what?
Happiness…The surprise was so strong that she took a sudden astonished breath of the charcoal-scented air.
Happiness. Bliss. Contentment.
The thought that she might be happy was so startling that she had to probe the thought carefully, as if it might explode. She found herself suspicious of the very idea. Moments of happiness had been rare in her life, and nonexistent since she’d stepped into the role of Lady Sula. She had not thought happiness possible, not when her whole life was an imposture and when she had to remain constantly on guard against the lapse that could expose her.
The man with the ball reacted to an unexpected bounce, and Sula laughed. She hugged Martinez’s arms to her. Lazy pleasure filled her mind.
Happiness.
What a shock.
“No,” said Lord Tork. “Never. Abandon the capital? Such a thing can never happen.”
Lord Chen feigned a curiosity he did not feel. “Both my sister and Lord Squadcom Do-faq have endorsed the plan. What is your objection?”
“Zanshaa is the heart of the empire!” Tork chimed. “The capital cannot be surrendered!”
“To defend Zanshaa is to stake everything on a battle where the odds are against us from the start,” said Chen.
“If the governmentcan be moved—” began Lady Seekin.
“The government will not move,” Lord Tork said. “Lord Saïd would not permit such a radical step.”
We’ll see about that, Lord Chen thought grimly. He would seek a personal appointment with the Lord Senior.
The eight members of the Fleet Control Board sat around their broad black-topped table in their large, shadowy room in the Commandery. Someone had forgotten to tell the staff to remove the ninth chair, the one suitable for cradling the long breastbone of a Lai-own, and it sat empty as a reminder of Lady San-torath, flung from the rock of the High City two mornings ago.