I can't see them—but I think Mark Valerian can."
"And you flew the first one," Romanoff said dreamily. "That must make you feel pretty special." She smiled. "It makes me feel special just being here to watch you."
"You were special to me a long time before you came to Woolston," Brim said quietly.
She looked at him with a soft expression in her eyes. "Thanks," she said, "I'll remember that."
Afterward, they walked back along the lakefront, Brim taking care to make frequent rest stops while they talked. He had never met anyone like Anna Romanoff. Quiet, unassuming, and genuinely beautiful—mostly because it hadn't occurred to her that she was.
Streaks of sunset crimson still tinted Woolston's darkening lavender hills and glens when Brim arrived at Romanoff's guesthouse amid the incomprehensible chanting of a billion unseen night creatures. Nearby, Hampton Water glowed radiant azure while twilight swept the last vestiges of daylight from the horizon, and the air was heavy with spice from a nearby stand of conifers. The earliest stars had just begun to show overhead when snatches of music and laughter started from the direction of the party hangar, a few cycles' walk distant.
While Brim paused for a moment at the doorstep, contemplating the twisted path that had brought him to this particular midsummer night, the door gently opened and Romanoff stepped lightly to the porch.
"Waiting for someone, Mr. Brim?" she asked, looking into his face with a mysterious smile. In the shadows, she looked like a lovely dream. As in Tarrott, she had dressed in a low-cut white dress that revealed precisely enough of her upthrust breasts to be provocative and at the same time tasteful.
However, Wilf Brim was her escort tonight, not Wyvern Theobold. That meant he could stare at neither her gorgeous bust nor the shapely legs and spike-heeled shoes that a short skirt revealed. What he could—and did—stare at, however, was her glorious hair. She'd let it down from the accustomed loose braid, and it flowed past her shoulders in buoyant waves that framed her face as if she were part of a portrait by some classic master. The strict businesswoman Brim had once met in Atalanta's Grand Koundourities Hotel had undergone a total metamorphosis. He found himself without words.
She took his arm, continuing to look up at him. "You are very quiet this evening," she whispered as mysterious tendrils of perfume caressed his nostrils.
"Merely speechless," Brim muttered at length, starting along the path toward the hangar. "I knew you were beautiful the moment we met, but I... I had no idea..."
Romanoff squeezed his arm more firmly. "Thank you, Wilf," she said, closing her eyes for a moment. "I wanted to be beautiful tonight."
Brim felt a thrill in the fading light of the lakeside road. "You've got your wish, then," he said, "and so do I." He frowned. "When I saw you in Tarrott, I never dreamed I might someday be here... I mean... with you on my arm and..." He laughed and shook his head. "Wyvern J. Theobold is a hard act to follow."
"Oh is he? Well, for your information, Mr. Wilf Ansor Brim, he doesn't often tell me that I'm beautiful.
Nor does he pilot starships." She pressed his arm and giggled happily. "But if I had to settle for one or the other, I like to hear that I'm beautiful."
Sherrington's great hangar doors were pushed all the way open, and the M-5 had been rolled into the entrance and decorated with strands of winking holiday lights. Outside on the apron, surplus battle lanterns bobbed overhead in the gentle breeze and a number of gaily decorated tents served as refreshment stands. A string orchestra played from a stage just below the gravity pad while couples swayed to music that Brim barely understood. For the first time in his life, he honestly wished he knew how to dance.
He need not have troubled himself. He and Romanoff never had time for such distractions. From the moment of their arrival, they were introduced to everyone: lab technicians, General Managers, even the custodians. Brim had never met so many engineers, scientists, architects, designers, and draftspersons—all of whom had complex questions and comments on the ship or the flight. Throughout it all, Romanoff remained at his side, conversing intelligently when she needed to, smiling quietly when she didn't, quite content to selflessly bask in Brim's reflected glory. Well into the morning metacycles, when the party began to wane, he turned and spoke quietly in her ear. "My feet hurt," he whispered, "how about yours?"
"I can't tell," she confided with a grin, "they went completely numb a couple of metacycles ago."
Brim winced. "I'm awfully sorry," he said. "I had no idea the party would turn out like this."
"Neither did I," she answered, "but I wouldn't have missed a moment of being here with you."
"It's nice of you to say that," Brim asserted, relieved that standing in one place for several metacycles apparently had no ill effects on this beautiful woman. Their afternoon walk had made him very much aware that he would have to look after her comfort. "What I wanted, though, was an evening with you.
All we had tonight was an evening with everyone else."
She smiled. "I've still had a wonderful time of it, Wilf."
"It doesn't have to be over, yet," Brim said, flabbergasted by the boldness of his words. "I'll bet we could find somewhere to have a drink all by ourselves."
Her brown eyes sparkled for a moment, but she shook her head. "I'd love to do something like that," she said, checking her timepiece. "Only... well, I'm due out on SS Sudla in the morning, and I mean early morning. She lifts almost five metacycles from now. I couldn't handle any more meem and still get to the terminal by then."
"It's fate," Brim grumped, shaking his head with a wry grin. "I nearly had to kill myself to get this evening with you in the first place; then I squandered most of it on everyone else. The next time I get up my nerve to ask you out, you'll probably be booked up for years."
A sad little smile clouded Romanoff's face for a moment, then she shrugged. "You don't know me very well, Wilf Brim," she said. "The fact is that you didn't have to kill yourself for tonight at all. I'd have gladly gone out with you the day we met." She shook her head. "And the next time we're both in Avalon, if you're interested, you'll find that I'm pretty much available anytime. I guess I spend a lot of my time making a living. It tends to frighten most men away."
"Doesn't say much for the guys in Avalon these days," Brim declared, again surprising himself. "If I lived there, you'd be mostly busy trying to get rid of me."
At that moment, Anna Romanoff's fragile countenance took on a look of such singular beauty that Brim found himself stunned. "I shall cherish those words," she said in a voice that was almost a whisper.
The short walk along the darkened lakefront to Romanoff's cottage seemed to be finished only moments after it was begun, even though Brim had stopped twice along the way ("to enjoy the lake"). Somehow, his emotions had gone into a turmoil that prevented him from further sensing the mysterious perfumes of the night or the waves lapping beside the road. He walked in silence, afraid to open his mouth, or take her hand. Anna Romanoff had taken on tremendous importance.
At the door, he desperately wanted to wrap her in his arms and... no, by Voot, he wanted a lot more than that—he wanted her in bed! But for the first time in his life, he was afraid. What if he'd misread her eyes? What if she recoiled from his touch? He couldn't help himself. Shutting his eyes, he touched her arm. "Anna," he said hesitantly, "c-could I have a goodnight... ah... h-hug?"
Suddenly—impossibly—she was in his embrace: warm and tiny with her arms around his neck. Now he wanted her lips in the worst sort of way, but she wouldn't turn her face to him. And she was shivering slightly, when it wasn't even cold.