Her dark, mocking eyes looked back at him from behind the mask. A small smile creased her lips.
A flower grenade landed between them in the well of the little boat. She laughed a dark-brown laugh, electrifying him. She kicked the grenade over to him; he kicked it back; the perfumed fuse burned smokily. She trapped the fist-sized ball beneath her naked foot, watching it (and he could feel the SNB kicking in, this becoming a tactical situation for both of them, and he knew the possibilities and the potential courses she would be evaluating right then. He waited, in that lengthened instant, to see what she would do), then just as the fuse seemed to go out, she kicked the grenade over to him; he laughed, outlucked, and tried to kick the ball out of the way.
The flower grenade burst with a loud pop, scattering a cloud of colour all around him, surrounding him in a thousand tiny, expanding blooms. Some stuck to him; others were so small and dry they went up his nose and made him sneeze; the scent reeked.
He coughed and sneezed and tried to wave the flowers away, distantly aware of her clapping her hands and laughing uproariously. People on shore cheered and whistled.
He sat, wiping his nose on a handkerchief and brushing the sticky flowers off his dress jacket. Some of the blooms had landed in his glass; he wrinkled his nose, threw the scent-contaminated spirit overboard.
“Streme Tunnel!” shouted a ceremonially robed official sitting on a high seat on the canal path. “Streme Tunnel! Fifty metres!” He nodded to them as they acknowledged, waving.
Miz turned, looking forward over the bows of the small boat. Ahead, the tube-canal entered a wide basin where most people were decanting from their boats.
The circular canal-twenty kilometres long and one of two girdling what had once been the outer city-was really just an Entraxrln root-transport tube with the top half cut off; the section they were approaching now had not been sliced open, and soon disappeared into a dark mass of Entraxrln mat the size of a small range of hills and covered with the houses and tenements of Streme prefecture; Streme Tunnel was five kilometres long and took over an hour for the average boat to negotiate. Most people not asleep or amorously inclined tended to get out here.
He turned back to her, sighing and shrugging.
“Well,” he said, trying to put just the right note of regret into his voice, “it would appear to be de-boating time, up ahead.”
She set her mouth in a line; an expression he knew was not neutral, but which he still could not fully interpret. It might be annoyance or merely acceptance. Still, something in his chest seemed to release like a spring. Maybe, he thought.
She drank from her glass, frowning.
He sat back, deliberately relaxed, and crossed his arms. He thought quickly; do I want to do this? Yes. But it’s breaking the code we’ve all followed without ever discussing or agreeing it; no sex between neurobondees. With people from other groups, yes; with anybody else in the military habitats where they were based ninety per cent of the time, yes. But not in-group. Too many people thought it would upset the delicate web of anticipation and response that existed between the teams when they flew combat missions together.
I know, he thought, and I don’t fucking care. She’s the commander; let her decide; I want her.
So he uncrossed his arms and glanced back at the tunnel mouth as they entered the basin and the canal fluted out, broadening around them. He looked back into her eyes and said calmly, not too loudly, “So, what shall we do? Get out or go through?”
Her gaze slid from his eyes to the tunnel ahead, then back again. She took a breath.
She’s mine, he thought. Oh, don’t let me be wrong!
“What do you want to do?” she asked him.
He shrugged, adjusted a pillow at his side. “Well, I’m comfortable here…”
“You want to go through,” she said, the mirror-mask rising as she tipped her head back, as if daring him.
He just shrugged.
She looked at the people on the shore, and up at the sporadic bursts of fireworks above the city’s dark twinkle of lights. “I don’t know,” she said, looking back at him. And suddenly she was all haughty Golter noble, nose in the air, imperious and straight-backed, her voice commanding: “Persuade me.”
He smiled. A year ago, that would have been it; he’d have bridled at that arrogance, and laughed and said, Na, it’d be boring in the tunnel; let’s rejoin the others and have some real fun (and would secretly have hoped that she had wanted to go through, and so would be hurt that he’d said it would be boring)… but now he was a little older and a lot wiser, and he knew her better, too, and he was fairly sure now that he knew what it meant that she should suddenly revert to the behaviour of her earlier life.
And even then, even in that instant when he knew he was on the tremulous brink of something he wanted more desperately than he’d ever wanted anything before, and knew that it was going to break new and dangerous ground, and maybe endanger him, her and the others, and knew that he knew, and didn’t care, because life was there to be lived just this one time, and that meant gambling, seizing each and every chance for happiness and advancement; even then he found time to think, to be struck by the realisation: How old we have become.
Not one of us over twenty; her-this stunning, glorious creature in front of him-only just nineteen. And yet in the last year we have become ancient; from children to cynical, war-worn, half-careless, half-uncaring veterans who will take their enemies when and where they can in the darkness and the single-ship loneliness of the battle, coupling with them across microseconds of space, tussling and teasing and tangling with them until only one was left… and took their pleasures cut from the same template; total, intense and furiously concentrated involvement, immediately followed by utter indifference.
Persuade you, he thought. “Okay,” he said, smiling at her. “Come on through the tunnel and I promise I’ll tell you what I toasted to.”
She made a funny expression, drawing both ends of her mouth down, the tendons in her neck standing out. It was an expression he’d never seen on her before. He smiled despite himself, thinking how suddenly young she had looked.
“I don’t know,” she said, the mirror-mask looking down at her glass. “Then I’d have to tell you what I toasted to…”
She looked up into his eyes, and he wondered if it was possible to give a come-hither look from behind a mask. He settled back in the plushness of the cushions. Something sang in his soul. The tunnel entrance drifted closer.
Boat marshals called to them, reminding them this was their last chance to decant. People on shore made knowing, lowing noises and shouted ribald advice. He scarcely heard them.
“You’re persuaded?” he said.
She nodded. “I’m persuaded.”
He sat very still.
She reached up and took off the rainbow-mirror mask, just as the tunnel mouth came up to swallow them.
“This is it,” Zefla said. “31/3 Little Grant Terrace.”
The three-storey structure was even more darkly ramshackle than its neighbours. It was Malishu-vernacular in style, sculpted from bluey-purple layer-mat supported by fire-hardened beams of brown stalk-timber. It looked out over a narrow-railinged, bark-cobbled street to a view of the steeply raked roofs-some tented, some bark-tiled-of the Modern History Department, and out towards the city’s northern suburbs.
The place looked dead. The ground floor had no windows and the tall windows in the two upper floors were dark and dirty. The door, made from poorly cured bark that had warped and split over the years, hung crooked over a nailed-on extra sill. Zefla pulled on a string handle. They couldn’t hear any sound from the interior. Zefla tested the door but it was either locked or badly stuck.