The Star Fox (13 page)

‘But can’t you see what harm the French have done? It looked as if the dispute with Alerion could be settled peacefully. Now the peacemakers have been tied in a legal knot, and it’s all they can do to prevent the extremists from taking over control of Parliament. The Aleriona delegation announced they
weren’t going to wait any longer. They went home. We’ll have to send for them when our deadlock is broken.’

‘Or come after them, if it breaks
my
way,’ he said. ‘What you can’t see, you won’t see, is that they’ve no intention of making any real peace. They want Earth out of space altogether.’

‘Why?’ she pleaded. ‘It doesn’t make sense!’

He frowned into his glass. ‘That’s something of a puzzle, I admit. It must make sense in their own terms; but they don’t think like us. Look at the record, however, not their soft words but their hard deeds ever since we first encountered them. Including the proof that they deliberately attacked New Europe and are deliberately setting out to exterminate the French colonists there. Your faction denied the evidence; but be honest with yourself, Joss.’

‘You be honest too, Gunnar—No, look at me. What can a single raider do but make the enmity worse? There aren’t going to be any more privateers, you realize. France and her allies have been able to keep Parliament from illegalizing your expedition, so far. But the Admiralty has frozen all transfers of ships, and it’ll take more of a legislative upheaval than France can engineer to get that authority out of its hands. You’ll die out there, Gunnar, alone, for nothing.’

‘I’m hoping the Navy will move,’ he said. ‘If, as you put it, I make enmity worse—Uh-uh, not a delusion of grandeur. Just a hope. But a man has to do what little he can.’

‘So does a woman,’ she sighed.

Abruptly, sweeping to her feet, taking his glass for a refill, smiling with an effort but not as a pretense: ‘No more argument. Let’s be only ourselves this evening. It’s been such a long time.’

‘Sure has. I wanted to see you, I mean really see you, when you came back to Earth, but we were both too busy, I guess. Somehow the chance never seemed to come.’

‘Too busy, because too stupid,’ she agreed. ‘Real friends are so rare at best. And we were that once, weren’t we?’

‘Rawthuh,’ he said, as anxious as she to walk what looked like a safe road. ‘Remember our junket to Europe?’

‘How could I forget?’ She gave him back his glass and sat down again, but upright this time, so that her knee brushed his. ‘That funny little old tavern in Amsterdam, where you kept bumping your head every time you stood up, till finally you borrowed a policeman’s helmet to wear. And you and Edgar
roared out something from the Edda, and—But you were both awfully sweet outside Sacre Coeur, when we necked and watched the sun rise over Paris.’

‘You girls were a lot sweeter, believe me,’ he said, not quite comfortably. A silence fell. ‘I’m sorry it didn’t last between you and him,’ he ventured.

‘We made a mistake, going outsystem,’ she admitted. ‘By the time we realized how much the environment had chewed our nerves, it was too late. He’s got himself quite a good wife now.’

‘Well, that’s something.’

‘What about you, Gunnar? It was so dreadful about poor Connie. But after five years, haven’t you—?’

‘After five years, nothing,’ he said flatly. ‘I don’t know why.’

She withdrew herself a little and asked with much gentleness, ‘I dare not flatter myself, but could I be to blame?’

He shook his head. His face burned. ‘No. That was over with long ago. Let’s discuss something else.’

‘Sure. This is supposed to be a merry reunion.
A nuestra salud
.’ The glasses clinked again.

She began to talk of things past, and presently he was chiming in, the trivia that are so large a part of friendship – do you remember, whatever became of, we did, once you said, we thought, do you remember, and then there was, we hoped, I never knew that, do you remember, do you remember? – and the time and the words and the emptied glasses passed, and finally somehow she was playing her flute for him, ‘Au Clair de la Lune’ and ‘Gaudeamus Igitur’, ‘September’ and ‘Shenandoah’, Pan-notes bright and cool through the whirl in him, while he had moved to the lounger and lay back watching the light burnish her hair and lose itself in the deep shadows below. But when she began ‘The Skrydstrup Girl’

Was it her that I ought to have loved, then,

In a stone age’s blossoming spring
—’

the flute sank to her lap and he saw her eyes shut and her mouth go unfirm.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. Wasn’t thinking. You taught it to me, Gunnar.’

He sat straight and laid a clumsily tender hand on her shoulder. ‘Forget that business,’ he said. ‘I should’ve kept my big mouth shut. But there was no real harm done. It was no more
than … than one of those infatuations. Connie didn’t hold it against you. She nursed me through the spell okay.’

‘I wasn’t so lucky,’ she whispered.

Dumbfounded, he could only stammer: ‘Joss, you never let on!’

‘I didn’t dare. But that was the real reason I talked Edgar into leaving Earth. I hoped—Gunnar, when I came back, why were we both such idiots?’

Then suddenly she laughed, low in her throat, came to him and said, ‘We’re not too late, are we? Even now?’

S
TAURN
rotated once in about eighteen hours. Seven such days had passed when Uthg-a-K’thaq finished work on the naval computers and rode a tender down to Orling spaceport.

As his huge cetacean form wallowed into the yacht’s chart-room, Endre Vadász, who had been waiting for him, backed up.
Phew!
the minstrel thought.
Decent and capable he is, hut I always have to get reacclimated to that swamp stench
. …
How do I smell to him?

‘Hallo, C.E.,’ he greeted. ‘I hope you are not too tired to depart at once. We have spent too much time here already.’

‘Quite,’ replied the rumbling, burbling voice. ‘I am inwatient as you wy now. Ewerything else can ‘roceed without me and, I weliewe, reach com’letion simultaneously with this swecial missile tur-ret. That is, iw the Staurni system is as good as claimed.’

‘Which is what you are supposed to decide.’ Vadász nodded. Another irritating thing about Naqsans was their habit of solemnly repeating the obvious. In that respect they were almost as bad as humans. ‘Well, I’ve seen to your planetside supplies. Get your personal kit together and meet us at the lift platform outside in half an hour.’

‘Us-s-s? Who goes to this Nest?’

‘You and the skipper, of course, to make decisions, and Gregorios Koumanoudes to interpret. Myself … ah, officially this falls in the steward’s department also, since the extra armament
will affect stowage. But in practice the steward’s department is idle, bored, and in dire need of a jaunt. Then there are two from the
Quest
, Victor Bragdon and Jocelyn Lawrie.’

‘Why come they with?’

‘They’re here for xenological research, you know. Accompanying us on a business trip to an important kin-father is a unique opportunity to observe laws and customs in action. So Bragdon offered to lend us one of his flyers, provided he and the woman could ride along. He wanted several of his people, actually, but Nesters limit the number of visitors at one time. Suspicious brutes. In any event, by using the flyer, we save this yacht for shuttle work and so expedite our own project.’

‘I scent. No, you say “I see” in English.’ Uthg-a-K’thaq’s tone was indifferent. He turned and slap-slapped on webbed feet towards his cabin.

Vadász looked thoughtfully at his back until he had disappeared. I
wonder how much of our interhuman quarrels and tensions come through to him
, the Hungarian reflected.
Perhaps none. Surely he will think the business between Gunnar and Jocelyn is utter triviation, if he even notices
.

And he may well be right. Thus far, at least, it has only amounted to Gunnar’s being often absent from our vessel. Which has done no harm at the present stage of things. The men gossip, but the tone I hear is simple good-natured envy. For myself, I am the last to begrudge a friend what scrap of happiness he can stumble upon. Therefore – why does it make me uneasy, this?

He threw off worry and pushed buttons on the radiophone extension. A middle-aged, scholarly-looking man glared from
Quest’s
saloon.

‘Good day, Dr. Towne,’ Vadász said cheerily. ‘Would you please remind Captain Heim that we’re leaving in half an hour?’

‘Let him remind himself,’ the glossanalyst snapped.

‘Do you so strongly oppose our little enterprise over here that you will not even give a man an intercom call?’ Vadász leered. ‘Then kindly remind Mme. Lawrie.’

Towne reddened and cut the circuit. He must have some very archaic mores indeed. Vadász chuckled and strolled off to complete his own preparations, whistling to himself.

‘
Malbrouck se va-t-en guerre
—’

—And aboard the
Quest
, Heim looked at a bulkhead clock, stretched, and said, ‘We’d better start.’

Jocelyn laid a hand on his roan hair, another beneath his chin, and brought the heavy-boned homely face around until it was close to hers. ‘Do we have to?’ she asked.

The trouble in those eyes hurt him. He tried to laugh. ‘What, cancel this trip and lose Vic his data? He’d never forgive us.’

‘He’d be nearly as happy as I. Because it’s far more important that … that you come out of this lunacy of yours, Gunnar.’

‘My dear,’ he said, ‘the only thing that’s marred an otherwise delightful time has been your trying and trying to wheedle me into giving up the raider project. You can’t. In the old Chinese advice, why don’t you relax and enjoy it?’ He brushed his lips across hers.

She didn’t respond, but left the bed and walked across the cabin. ‘If I were young again,’ she said bitterly, ‘I might have succeeded.’

‘Huh? No, now, look—’

‘I am looking.’ She had stopped before a full-length optex beside her dresser. Slowly, she ran her hands down cheeks and breasts and flanks. ‘Oh, for forty-three I’m quite well preserved. But the crow’s feet are there, and the beginnings of the double chin, and without clothes I sag. You’ve been – good, kind – the last few days, Gunnar. But I noticed you never committed yourself to anything.’

He swung to his own feet, crossed the intervening distance in two strides, and towered over her; then didn’t know what to do next. ‘How could I?’ he settled for saying. ‘I’ve no idea what may happen on the cruise. No right to make promises or—’

‘You could make them conditionally,’ she told him. The moment’s despair had left her, or been buried. Her expression was enigmatic, her tone impersonal. ‘“If I come home alive,” you might say, “I’ll do such and such, if you’re agreeable.”’

He had no words. After some seconds she breathed out and turned from him. Her head drooped. ‘Well, let’s get dressed,’ she said.

He put on the one-piece garment which doubled as under-padding for an airsuit, his motions automatic, his mind awash.
Okay, what
do I
want? How much of what I felt (do I still feel it?) was genuine and how much was just a grab at the past when lonesomeness had me off balance?

I plain don’t know
.

His bewilderment didn’t last long, because he was the least self-analytical of men. He shoved his questions aside for later examination and, with them, most of the associated emotions. Affection for Jocelyn remained in the forefront of his awareness, along with regret that she had been hurt and a puzzled wish to do something about it; but overriding all else was eagerness to be away. He’d cooled his heels long enough on this island. The flight to Trebogir’s would be a small unleashing.

‘C’mon,’ he said with reborn merriment. His hand slapped the woman playfully. ‘Should be quite a trip, you know.’

She turned about. Grief dwelt in her eyes and on her lips. ‘Gunnar—’ She must look down at her fingers, tensed against each other. ‘You really don’t think I’m … a fool at best, a traitor at worst … for not wanting a war … do you?’

‘
Hvad for pokker!
’ he exclaimed, rocked back. ‘When did I give you that idea?’

She swallowed and found no reply.

He took her by the forearms and shook her gently. ‘You are a fool if you think I ever thought so,’ he said. ‘Joss, I don’t want war any more than you. I believe a show of force now – one warning snap of teeth – may head off a fatal showdown later. That’s all. Okay, you have a different opinion. I respect it, and I respect you. What’ve I done to make you suppose anything different? Please tell me.’

‘Nothing.’ She straightened. ‘I’m being silly,’ she said in a machine voice. ‘We’d better go.’

They went silently downhall. At the locker outside Boat-house Three, Victor Bragdon was donning his airsuit. ‘Hi, there,’ he called. ‘I’d begun to wonder what was keeping you. One of your men delivered your stuff last watch, Gunnar. Good thing, too. You’d never fit into anybody else’s.’

Heim took the stiff fabric, zipped it shut around himself, and put on gloves and ankle-supporting boots with close attention to the fastenings. If the oxygen inside mingled with the hydrogen outside, he’d be a potential torch. Of course, in a flyer it was only a precaution to wear a full outfit; but he’d seen too often how little of the universe is designed for man to neglect any safety measure. Connecting the helmet to high-pressure air bottles and recycler tank, he hung the rig from his shoulders, but left the valves closed and the faceplate open. Now, the belt of food bars and medicines; canteen; waste unit; not the machine pistol, for you did not come armed into a Nest…
He saw that Jocelyn was having some trouble with her gear and went to help.

‘It’s so heavy,’ she complained.

‘Why, you wore much the same type on New Mars,’ Heim said.

‘Yes, but that was under half an Earth gravity.’

‘Be glad we aren’t under the full Staurnian pull, then,’ Brag-don said genially. He bent to pick up a carrying case.

‘What’ve you got there?’ Heim asked.

‘Extra camera equipment. A last-minute thought. Don’t get alarmed, though. The field survival kit is aboard and double checked.’ Bragdon was still grinning as he walked to the entry lock. His aquiline profile was rather carefully turned towards Jocelyn. Heim felt amused.