“Sharrow?” she heard Miz whisper, uncertain.

She smiled into the darkness. “No,” she whispered. “Ysul.”

“Oh, yeah.” Miz coughed quietly. “Your dinner repeating on you, too?”

“No,” she whispered, wanting to laugh. “The lightning.”

“Oh.”

She looked over, trying to see him. Eventually the lightning flared again. He was standing facing her, looking towards her the way she was looking towards him. She suppressed a giggle. “Forgot your jim-jams, huh?”

“Hey,” he said, his whisper close in the utter darkness. “These balconies aren’t that far apart. I bet I could get over there.” He sounded innocently delighted, like a small boy.

“Don’t you dare?” she whispered. She thought she could hear him moving; skin on thin, heat-cured cable.

She stared at where she knew he was, as if trying to force her eyes to see by sheer force of will. Then she looked deliberately away, hoping to see him from the side of her eye. She couldn’t.

“Miz!” she whispered. “Don’t! You’ll kill yourself. It’s three sto-”

The lightning came again, and there was Miz, standing on the outside of his balcony, holding on to its railing with one hand while reaching out towards her with the other. She had time to see the expression on his face; eager, happy and mischievous, then as the blue light disappeared she heard his breath and felt the draught of air as he leapt over to her balcony. She reached out and grabbed him, fastening her arms round him.

“Madman!” she hissed into his ear.

He chuckled, swung over the railing and hugged her.

“Isn’t this romantic?” he sighed happily. He smelled of sweet male sweat and smoke and-faintly-of scent.

“Get back to your room!” she told him, squirming in his embrace. “And use the doors!”

He moved sensuously against her, working her back against the bark-clad wall; he nuzzled her neck, smoothed his hands down her flanks and to her thighs and behind. “Mmm, you feel good.”

“Miz!” she said, pushing his arms down and away from her, taking his wrists in her hands. He made a plaintive noise and licked at her neck.

Then he just broke her grip on his wrists and took her face in his hands, kissing her.

She let him for a while, and let his tongue explore her mouth, but then (seeing again, without wishing to, the billowing curtains and the stone balustrade of another hotel bedroom, light-minutes and eight years away from here, and his face above her, beautiful and ecstatic and lit by the stuttering spasms of annihilation light swamping the dawn above Lip City) gradually she calmed the tempo of the kiss down, and guided his hands behind her shoulders and put her arms around him, and moved her head to one side of his, and rested her cheek on his shoulder and patted his back.

She felt him heave a deep sigh.

“What’s a chap got to do to get to you these days, Sha-Ysul?” he said, sounding sad and a little bewildered.

She hugged him tighter and shrugged, shook her head, knowing he could feel each movement.

The Entraxrln sky above them lit up again as the lightning moved closer.

“Hey,” he said, raising his head. “Remember that time in the inn in Malishu, in the top storey, with the fireworks and all that stuff?”

She nodded her head.

“That was fun, eh?” he said softly.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, it was.”

She kept hold of him and he kept hold of her, and she looked out to where the lightning played, and saw another couple of flashes, and even heard a little distant rumbling, and then eventually he shivered in her arms and kissed her forehead and let go of her. “ I’d better get back and make sure Dloan’s still snoring,” he whispered.

“Come by the door, then,” she said, taking his arm and trying to pull him towards the open windows. He resisted, staying where he was.

“Can’t,” he said. “Our door’s locked. Either I go back the way I came or I sleep with you.”

“Or on the floor,” she told him.

“Or with Zef,” he whispered brightly. “Hey, or both of you!”

“You have my bed,” she said. “I’ll sleep with Zef.”

“You did that once before,” he said, sounding unconvincingly hurt, “and I was very upset.”

“Only because we wouldn’t let you watch.”

“True,” he agreed. “Is that supposed to make it better?”

“Are you going in through this window or not?”

“Not. I’m going back the way I came; Dloan’s snoring needs me.”

“Miz-” But he had already slung one leg over the balcony; she felt the wind on her cheek as he swung the other one over too. “Maniac!” she whispered. “Be care-”

The lightning came and he made his leap; he gasped, then she heard the skin-on-railing noise again, and he whispered triumphantly, “There. Almost too easy.”

“You’re insane, Kuma.”

“Never denied it. But I’m so graceful. Good-night, my lady.”

“Good-night, madman.”

She heard him blow a kiss, then move away. She waited. A moment later there was a muffled thud and she heard him say, “Ouch!”

She smiled into the darkness, quite sure that he had bumped into something deliberately just for a laugh, just for her.

The lightning swept above, flooding the enclosed landscape with a quick, sharp, monochrome light that seemed to be over before it had fully begun, and-in providing such vanishingly brief instants of contrast-somehow only intensified the darkness.

12 Snow Fall

They had been lovers for a few months. It was only the second time they had been back to Miykenns since the perfume festival and their ride in the little canal-boat through the long, dark, scented vein of the canal. They delighted in their luck; Malishu was celebrating again when they returned, just entering a huge retro binge of ancient costumes and sporadically cheap food and drugs as people celebrated the 7021st Founding Week.

They had dined and danced and drunk; they had taken a short ride in a canal-boat and watched vivid holos flicker and pulse in the air above the city, depicting the arrival of the first explorers, scientists and settlers seven millennia earlier. The holos went on to display a brief history of Miykenns which they both watched as they strolled hand in hand down the narrow streets back to their inn beneath the bare hill near the city Signalling Museum.

The last part of the holo display was made up of edited highlights of the current war. They stood on the threshold of the inn, watching. Above the city they saw darkly shining fleets of liberated excise clippers flying in formation; the bombardment of the laser pits on the Phrastesis-Nachtel asteroid bases; rioting miners on Nachtel’s Ghost; and a Tax cruiser blowing up. “Hey,” Miz said, as the blossoming light of the cruiser’s death faded slowly above Malishu. “Wasn’t that the one we got, out past the Ghost?”

She watched the secondary detonations burst like sparkling flowers within the sphere of glowing wreckage that had been the Tax cruiser. “Yes,” she said, cuddling closer to him, fitting herself around him. “One of ours, indeed.” She rubbed one hand over the chest of his uniform jacket. “Anyway, let’s get back to the room, eh?” She turned away, taking a grip of his shoulder and trying to pull him in through the door.

“Hell,” he said, allowing himself to be pulled. “We took those pix; shouldn’t we get royalties or something?”

Their room was on the top floor, a tall, wide space roofed with translucent woven Entraxrln membrane, bowed like a loose tent over the supporting poles and beams.

They made love sitting on the end of the bed, facing a wall of mirrors; he beneath her and she on his lap, facing the same way so that they could see themselves in the dim city-light filtering down through the translucent roof as he put his arms up underneath hers, gripping her shoulders, holding her breasts, rubbing her flat belly, sliding down to the tight curls of hair and moist cleft beneath while her head kept turning to one side then the other, kissing him as her hands moved up and down his sides and thighs, holding his balls as he flexed slowly under her and she moved, clenching and loosening, up and down on him.