Star Rigger's Way (14 page)

"All right," she said. "But we have to switch positions." They shifted, Carlyle tensing as she brushed close to him. "Cast us free," she said to the attendant. Before Carlyle had a chance to protest, they were drifting away from the dock. "Remember what I said," she cautioned, "I don't know exactly how to do this. So hang on."

That wasn't quite the way he remembered hearing her say it, but he kept his mouth shut and hung on. The wind shifted suddenly, and the boat pitched backward. "Lean forward!" Alyaca cried. He scrambled up on his seat and leaned out over the bow. Alyaca hunched forward and pulled the flaps, and slowly the boat leveled. The wind surged and pitched them forward, and they both scrambled to shift again, but the wind had them, and they kited very fast toward the lagoon bank, the tie-anchor causing only a slight drag at its angled position just under the water surface. "To the right a little," Alyaca said, playing the flap lines uncertainly. Carlyle leaned right, but it was instantly clear that she had meant
her
right, not his. They slewed, and finally Alyaca got them into a right turn, which was what she'd wanted; heeling perilously, they sped through the channel and out into the lake.

"Damn!" he said as they cleared the end of the channel. His fingers were clenched onto the edge of the cockpit. Alyaca grinned and shifted her weight experimentally, trying to gain more control over the boat. They were heeled forward and flying fast, the wind in their hair, a vibration reaching them from the strut and tie-anchor rushing through the water—but now they had clear space ahead of them. Carlyle decided that they were moving correctly, though it felt more dangerous than dashing past the lightyears. "Are we doing okay?" he asked.

Alyaca fiddled with the lines, squinting up at the sail, and nodded. "To the left, not too much.
My
left."

They slowly rolled and came around to the port, to a more windward heading. The wind was at their beam now, and Alyaca took a lever beneath the gunwale, which Carlyle had not noticed before, and moved it back a few centimeters. She explained, "That controls the swivel of the sail at the mast. You have to really hitch it around when you're sailing close into the wind—otherwise you'd never get home."

At that moment they both leaned too far to the port-side, and the cockpit rocked over as though on a wheel. They threw themselves to the starboard to compensate, and the cockpit hesitated, then heeled suddenly to the starboard, and Carlyle yelled, "We're going over!" The starboard gunwale dipped close to the water, and he hung on desperately, sure that he would fall—and Alyaca was hanging on, too, except that she was shrieking with laughter—and the moment that the boat hung there on its side seemed an eternity to him, but slowly, slowly it lifted up and righted itself. The kite-sail swung madly back and forth, but it, too, stabilized, and then the boat pitched
forward
, and Carlyle was straining to avoid falling backward over the bow, and they were thundering forward at top speed, Alyaca laughing like a lunatic.

"What . . . !" he shouted. He gulped, grabbed, and shouted again. "What's—so—funny?"

She leaned back, gasping, until he was ready to plead—he was
scared
—and then she cried, "Don't worry! We can't go over!"

"What?"

"We can't go over! The levitators will keep us up! They'll—" Then their balance went off again, and water was rushing dizzyingly past Carlyle's head—and suddenly he too was laughing uncontrollably, though he was nearly upside down.

When they reached the far end of the lake, Alyaca, with some effort, got them turned on a reverse tack. Carlyle made a cautiously sarcastic remark about the likelihood of their getting back, and she nearly dumped them in reply. Their return took an hour and a half and many zigzags, and they decided to quit while they were ahead.

They docked the boat and spent the rest of the afternoon walking. They walked through the cedaric groves bordering the east shore of the lake—which immediately made Carlyle wonder about Cephean—and they sat on a ledge by the shore farther up, and they talked. Carlyle got to thinking about Janofer and all the rest, and that made him moody, and after a while Alyaca prodded him into talking about it.

He had already told her about his most recent voyage, but this was the first time he had talked about his life on
Lady Brillig.
"We were very close friends. It was just the flying of the ship that we couldn't quite get together on.
I
couldn't, I mean." That wasn't too clear to Alyaca, but he couldn't explain it easily. It was the intimate blending of fantasies and memories and real abilities that was the elusive goal. "Sometimes you can manage that better with people you're not so close to, so personal troubles don't get in the way." But that wasn't what he wanted; that wasn't the ideal.

"What about that other ship?" she asked, turning to face him at an angle, the sun glowing on one side of her face. "You did all right on that one, didn't you?"

"
Sedora?
Yes, but those men weren't really my friends in any close way. And then later, with Cephean—that was more battle than cooperation."

"He sounds very interesting." Her eyes were golden brown, fixed intently on him.

"Who, Cephean?"

"Mm-hm."

"Well—" He shrugged, then said, "Yes, he's interesting. I like him, but it's hard to feel just one way about him. Anyway, I don't know if I'll ever see him again, or if I'll ever get to really know what goes on in his mind."

Her eyes closed and opened, still intent. "You're interesting, too," she said.

He swallowed. "You know, what really gets to me, though, is that all of them left. All three of them. Not one of them stayed behind to meet me after
Lady Brillig
was sold. And Janofer, with that letter she said she wrote and then she didn't even leave it for me!" Blood was rushing through his temples, beating. He shouldn't be spilling all this to someone he hardly knew. But she was interested, and he felt better talking about it.

"I guess," Alyaca said, "they all had to carry on with their lives. Maybe they thought you'd want to stay with your new crew."

His throat stopped up on that. It was probably true, what she had just said. But, he thought, I told them I was coming, they knew all along. They even helped me fly the ship so I could make it back!

But they hadn't. His fantasy-memory of them had, but they hadn't.

Suddenly he began trembling, first at the elbows and the back of his neck, then in the shoulders, and finally through his entire body. He started choking quietly.

"Gev—"

He couldn't answer. He didn't look at her.

"Gev. Hey, it'll be—" But she didn't finish. She leaned forward and touched a slim hand to his shoulder and massaged him gently; and when that didn't comfort him she took his hand and held him by one hand and one shoulder. He felt foolish—sure that she didn't really understand why he felt this way—but her touch was soothing, and he began to laugh sadly. He saw that her eyes were wide and serious, and then his vision blurred for a moment with tears from his laughter. He blinked and focused on the sensation of her touch. Strangely, her face seemed to come into clearer focus now—eyebrows crunched around peering eyes, lips not quite closed, hair falling forward throwing shadows over her cheeks—a face he could almost fall in love with.

If only she were a rigger.

* * *

They spent the evening quietly in the lodge, dining late. Alyaca had met him in the restaurant, after changing. She now wore a gown of tan and pastel orange wrappings, cut low on the left side and across part of the back. She was so beautiful he was almost afraid to be seen with her. He wore simple light pants and a maroon-trimmed tunic with its cowl pushed back. They sat in a quiet corner of the dining room and looked out at the night, at the lake gleaming under stars and the pale light of the smaller of the two moons, and mostly he listened as she talked. She mentioned that there had been a RiggerGuild strike several months earlier, shutting down all traffic into and out of the Verjol system. He had heard nothing about it at the Guild Haven; but that was not entirely surprising. The Guild policy was to command a strike swiftly, in need, and to forget it as swiftly after amends had been made. The causative party in this case had been a company based in a neighboring system; but it had violated Code in dealing with riggers shipping into Chaening's World. Carlyle felt awkward learning about this from Alyaca, especially since she worked for a company which probably was hurt by the strike, but she assured him that from what she knew the strike had been justified.

She talked about herself, too, telling him that she had grown up on Opas III, circling a star of southern Aeregian space. But after leaving home at the age of twenty-five, and traveling to several planets, she had come to Chaening's World, found a job she liked, and stayed. When Carlyle asked her if she had really had a friend once who became a rigger, she said that it was true; but she had lost touch with the person completely. "So I've always wanted to know someone who really was, is, a rigger," she said, edging about in her seat, smiling.

After dinner, they went outside and said good night by the corner of the lodge. She lived in a Kloss-owned residence around the corner. "See you?" she said, looking at him in a peculiarly penetrating fashion.

"Sure," he said, nodding twitchily. He swallowed and turned, but not before he saw her eyes flickering in curiosity; and he went back inside the lodge and slowly, wanderingly, made his way up to his room.

The suite was so large that it made him uncomfortable. He paced through the three rooms, mulling over the day. Finally he settled into an easy-
g
chair in the bedroom, enjoying the floating feel of its reduced gravity field. He was tired but still wide awake. Alyaca went through his mind, and Janofer, and even Cephean. Clacking his teeth, he got up and went to the entertainment console. He flicked on the holo-screen and sampled the channels and storage cubes, but he found nothing that he liked, so he switched that off and turned on music instead, with lighted flo-globe. He went to the bar and drew himself a sting brandy, then returned and sat and listened to a windsong symphony. And kept thinking about Alyaca. And when he wasn't thinking about her, he thought about Janofer, and that hurt so much that he started thinking about Alyaca again.

He considered switching on a mood sparkle-pattern, but before he could make up his mind the door signal quavered. So he got up, wondering who it could be, and answered the door.

"Who is it?" he said cautiously.

"Don't you trust me?" It was Alyaca.

He started to pale the door, then remembered that it was a solid wood panel. He opened it, and Alyaca smiled, blushing a little. For a moment he just stood, his heart cutting, off his windpipe, his arm blocking off the doorway. Finally, she said, crunching her eyebrows together, "I got lonely. May I come in?"

He stumbled over his feet backing away to let her in. Suddenly he felt dizzy, thinking, Why has she come to see me?

She was inside and had the door closed before he recovered his footing, and she was pulling him toward her before he could begin to find his lost thoughts. His feelings blurred, and he succumbed to her embrace and to the warm pressure of her lips, and for a very long few moments he felt that this was all he needed, it was what he had needed all along, to be kissed like this by a lovely woman—and why had he kept himself in torment by such worries and fears?

Alyaca disengaged herself gently, with a caress to his cheek. She walked into the suite, across the room to the half-silvered picture window, and looked out. Then she turned back to face him, her eyes tracing a curious line about the room before meeting his. She smiled, letting out her breath with a little laugh. He laughed, too, uncertainly. Suddenly he was wondering what was coming, and whether it was something he wanted to do, ought to do, or could do without losing what was left of his equilibrium. He wished that his heart would stop beating as though it were going to bound right out of his chest.

She came to him and touched his hair, and then she walked to the bar and drew herself a sting brandy. He recovered enough to pick up his own glass, and when she returned they clinked their two glasses together. "To things working out," she said.

He agreed with a nod, wondering just what she meant. He could not speak.

"Are you glad I came?" she asked softly, sipping her drink.

He nodded again.

"Were you expecting me?" She didn't wait for him to answer; instead she peered at him over her glass and shrugged. "I really wanted to come, and when you didn't ask me I decided to ask myself." She grew somber and said, in a lower voice, "I really
was
lonely."

He sipped nervously. The brandy was potent, drilling straight to his head, mixing with adrenaline. He really couldn't think of anything to say. He was in shock, and he didn't want the shock to end, for fear that if he started thinking he would understand all the reasons why he shouldn't be in a situation like this with a nonrigger, especially someone he hardly knew.

She was standing very close to him, looking at him; and her perfume, musklike and dizzying, seemed to be affecting more than just his olfactory organs. The room seemed very hot. Her eyes were warm brown, and her mouth . . .

 . . . she pressed to his, soft and warm and moist and giving. He breathed very hard when they stopped kissing this time, and he kept his arms around her. Her eyes flashed and closed—what am I doing? he thought—and her lips parted warmly against his—why? she's not—and her hands stroked his neck and his hair, and he was totally compelled by the kiss, surrounded by her warmth, and he surrendered and his doubts were lifted away, forgotten.

She gently broke the kiss and looked at him, obviously pleased by the effect. She was flushed, and her eyes communicated arousal. She stepped back silently, and fingered a fastening at one shoulder of her gown. The fabric loosened, and the end fell back over her shoulder. She pulled away a swath of cloth and tossed it lightly to the floor. Both shoulders were bare now, as was her left side down to her hip. Two tapered stretches of cloth angled to cover the lower right halves of both breasts, leaving exposed the rounded tops of the breasts, semicircles of dark areolas, and a glimpse of the nipples. Her breasts rose and fell gently with her breath.