“Damn, can’t escape the blue-water-eyed daughters,” she said. “Ah well.” An immense and not unpleasant sadness filled her, like the soft silvery fog creeping through the streets outside. She went on:
Between the pedestals of Night and Morning,
Between red death and radiant Desire
With not one sound of triumph or of warning
Stands the great sentry on the Bridge of Fire.
O transient soul, thy thought with dreams adorning,
Cast down the laurel, and unstring the lyre:
The wheels of Time are turning, turning, turning,
The slow stream channels deep, and doth not tire
Gods on their Bridge above
Whispering lies and love
Shall mock your passage down the sunless river
Which, rolling all its streams,
Shall take you, king of dreams,
—Unthroned and unapproachable for ever—
To where the kings who dreamed of old
Whiten in habitations monumental cold.
“Seize the day, in other words,” she told herself. Nobody else was here tonight; Rapczewicz was on board
Eagle
, the other officers who’d roomed here temporarily had moved into the two buildings next door, and Swindapa was over at Smith’s Baths—
“I’m back,” she called, from the entrance hall below. Alston heard the door click shut, and feet bound up the staircase and down the hall. “Foggy out tonight.”
“Hello, ’dapa. So you are, so it is.”
The Fiernan was wearing a knee-length T-shirt and plastic sandals, with her hair loose and damp around her shoulders, the yellow of it darkened by the water. She came in and sat cross-legged by the fire, holding her hands out to either side with the hair draped over them to dry. The cerulean-blue eyes looked up at her, vivid by contrast with the summer tan, warm and full of affection.
And here I thought Whitney Houston was the very definition of hot stuff,
she thought.
May have to revise that
. Marian Alston closed her eyes for a second and sighed, then tried to concentrate on the book again, thumbing through the pages at random:
We that were friends tonight have found
A fear, a secret and a shame:
I am on fire with that soft sound
You make, in uttering my name . . .
It seemed even the poet had turned against her tonight, she decided ruefully.
Well, it isn’t the first case of unrequited love you’ve blundered into, woman
, she thought, scolding herself. Uusually she had better sense, but there was no way to get
away
on the island; in retrospect it’d probably been a mistake to have Swindapa living here, but she’d been much more fragile back then and needed a familiar, trusted face around. Alston recognized the symptoms in herself with mournful accuracy, although not until they’d been stealing up on her for a while. That combination of overwhelming tenderness and lust . . .
“I talked to Cindy Ganger at the baths,” Swindapa said after a while, smiling. “She asked me if I was your girlfriend.”
Alston choked, spraying bourbon across the page. Swindapa jumped up in alarm and pounded her helpfully on the back, then sat down beside her on the couch.
“Are you all right?” she asked, a little frown of worry between her brows.
“Yes. Just, mmm, surprised,” Alston said.
And my sinuses have diluted bourbon in them, goddammit.
She used a handkerchief to mop the page and blow her nose, which gave her a moment to collect her thoughts.
God damn all rumormongers.
When she looked up, Swindapa had an arm draped over the back of the blue Directoire sofa and one leg hooked up under the other. She was still smiling. “I don’t really understand you Eagle People,” she said after a moment. “I don’t know how to . . . hear what you’re saying when you’re not speaking, not really well. So I make mistakes like that.”
“Body language?” Alston said, her mouth a little dry. She took another sip of the whiskey. Swindapa picked the glass out of her hand and sipped herself before returning it.
“Yes, that’s a good way to say it—body language.” The smile lessened. “I’d like to be your girlfriend, you know. But you move away when I touch you, even though I think you like me. Back home it’s bad manners to come right out and ask someone older than you—you have to wait for them to ask you when you show you want them to. I keep showing you, and you never ask!”
“Ah . . .”
Oh, hell, what can you say to that?
“ ’Dapa, that’s very flattering, but it’s impossible.”
“Don’t you like me?” Swindapa asked, her eyes going wide and beginning to fill. “I thought you were getting to like me, not just feel sorry for me.”
Oh,
hell
and damnation.
“Of course I like you. I like you a great deal. But you’re too young, and you’re my . . . guest.”
“I know you want me. I can tell that.”
Alston’s tongue locked on a denial. She hated lying, particularly to friends. The necessity of doing so in the service had rasped her soul.
Swindapa frowned. “I’m not a child,” she said angrily. “I wish you wouldn’t act as if I was. I’ve got the Spear Mark; lots of girls my age back in the White Isle have babies and their own hearths. Do you Eagle People have some rule against sleeping with people who are your guests?”
“No, we don’t, not exactly,” Alston said.
Christ, I must have been a
monster
in a past life to deserve this
.
“Is it because I’m ugly, too pale, not beautiful like you?”
“
Christ
no.”
Swindapa’s voice took on a note of exasperation. “Then
why
?”
Alston opened her mouth to reply, then closed it. It was true; Swindapa was young, but not a child, not in the way an American her age would be. She wasn’t someone under Alston’s command, either, nor a dependent. What reasons did that leave?
Sheer cowardice
, she thought, and leaned forward.
Fear of rejection. Fear of public opinion. Rationalizations.
Their lips met.
This may be just the worst thing I could do, but the hell with it.
Minutes later she sighed breathlessly into the fine-spun blond hair. Deer Dancer certainly didn’t need any instruction on kissing. “I’ve wanted to do that for some time now.”
“Me too.” Softly. “I was afraid I never could, after the Iraiina. But I can.” They kissed again.
Alston felt a cold knot untie itself in her chest, then travel down from neck to spine as the warm closeness dissolved doubt and tension. After a moment the hug turned into a moving embrace. The T-shirt floated to the floor. She gave a sigh of wonder as her hands glided over the Fiernan’s back and stomach and moved up to cup her breasts. Swindapa wiggled and gave a little chuckle of delight, arching into the caress. Her hands began undoing the buttons of Alston’s uniform tunic. After a moment:
“How do you take this off?”
No bras in the Bronze Age
. “The catch is at the back.”
Fingers touched her. “Does that feel nice?”
“Oh, yes.”
Any nicer and I may faint.
“Stand up for a second, I can’t get at this buckle.”
Well . . .
Alston stood, grinning.
No bashfulness problem
.
“Oh, good! I
wondered
if your hair was lovely and . . . what’s your word . . . nappy down here too.”
I never did like bashful types, anyway,
Alston thought, dizzy. “Come
here,
girl.”
They lay on the bed, wrapping arms and legs around each other, kissing and nuzzling. A thought struck Alston:
“Ah . . . ’dapa, you
have
done this before, haven’t you?”
“Of course. I told you about my boyfriend, didn’t I?”
“Ah . . . I meant with another woman.”
“Oh.” Alston shivered as the other’s fingers traced up her spine and lips nibbled down her neck.
That feels
incredibly
good
. Involuntarily her thighs squeezed together with one of Swindapa’s between them.
“Not really,” Swindapa whispered.
Tickling fingers found the base of her spine. Alston shivered again and arched her back.
The Bronze Age isn’t
all
backward.
“Not—
ah!
—not
really
?” she said. She hadn’t thought it was the sort of thing you could be uncertain of.
“It was dark . . . some friends, after a feast, lots of mead . . . you know how it is. Does it matter?”
“Not really,” Alston laughed. The Fiernan Bohuguli seemed a lot like Trobriand Islanders in some ways.
“I like it better with these wonderful lamps,” Swindapa said. She looked down to where their breasts pressed together. “See how we go together, like the moon and the night sky. Isn’t it pretty?”
“Yes,” Alston said throatily.
It is also better to give than to receive. Or at least pleasantly excruciating to start with.
She pressed the girl back and stroked her lightly with her fingertips, just touching the fine down-hairs. Lips touched breasts and tongue curled around a nipple. The other’s soft explosive sigh made her own skin tingle from head to toe, like being caressed with heated mink gloves. After a while she worked her way downward, caressing the other’s inner thighs and urging them apart. The hands that stroked her head trembled, and she smelled the delicious musky scent of desire. She slid down, stroked a hand onto either hip, and began. Swindapa gave a shocked cry of surprise and delight at the delicate caress; then a whimpering moan.
Well, well, something new has been invented since the Bronze Age
, Alston thought happily.
“Yeah, it was a lot too much like hard work for my taste,” the man said.
William Walker nodded, straddling the chair and resting his elbows on the back. “Over there in Europe, they’ve got peasants to do this sort of thing,” he said.
They were watching the parade from a roadside café on Easy Street, before it turned west on Main and stopped in the upper section near the Pacific Bank. The floats were a little amateurish, made up with what was to hand. The commonest theme was sheaves of grain, appropriate considering this was a harvest festival; some of them were made up into big human figures, and everyone wore a wreath of it. Most of the floats were horse-drawn, apart from one pulled by a chuffing steam traction engine, a miniature model about the size of a Volkswagen. People milled along in the parade as well, carrying torches; the school band tootled away. At the front rode the Bronze Ager, Swindapa—wearing a wreath of wheat around her hair and carrying a sheaf, and a sash with “Best Reaper” on it over a white dress. She was laughing and waving, and the hair falling past her shoulders had the same wheat-blond color as the ripe grain she carried in the crook of one arm.
What a fox,
he thought. Wasted on the captain, although he couldn’t fault her taste, and it
was
the traditional reward for rescuing the beautiful princess, although the application was a little . . . unorthodox in this case.
Chief Cofflin was waiting up on Main; there would be a speech and a barbecue, patting everyone on the head for working hard.
Suckers
, Walker thought. The priests and pastors would be there too, to bless the fruits of the fields and invoke Big Juju.
The oldest sucker racket in the world.
He made a mental note to himself to become
very
pious, once the Plan was in place. Nothing like having the supernatural on your side. People who thought Big Juju was looking over their shoulders, why, that was better than all the secret police ever foaled.
The man—Cuddy, he was called, Bill Cuddy—flexed his hands. “I can still feel my blisters,” he said.
“Yeah, like I said, it’s ridiculous we should be doing this stuff, as if we were Stone Age wogs,” Walker went on. “I mean, think of what our technology and what we know could do over across the ocean. Those spear-chuckers would be
glad
to do the donkeywork.”
Cuddy looked at Walker, his eyes narrowing thoughtfully. He was a nondescript-looking man a little older than the Coast Guard officer, brown of hair and beard, wary gray eyes in a tanned face.
“Look, Will,” he said. “You’ve been fan-dancing around this for days now, you and your friends there.” He nodded; Seaman Rodriguez and Cadet McAndrews sat behind Walker, lounging at their ease. “Gold and dancing girls, yeah, it sounds good. A lot better than shoveling shit for a living. How, though? Cut to the chase, man.”
“Okay, Bill,” Walker said. “You want to stay here all your life?”
“Not particularly,” Cuddy said. “Leaton’s a pretty good boss, but I don’t want to be a machinist, it’s just the best thing available. And I certainly don’t want to bust my ass cutting fucking wheat or chopping down trees. On the other hand, I don’t want to go live in a mud hut, either, even if it’s the biggest fucking hut in the village.”
Walker nodded with a charming grin. “There’s a lot more than mud huts over there, in some places,” he said. “There’s my friend Isketerol’s hometown, for example, or Greece. Shit, they’ve even got running water in the Mycenean palaces—flush toilets. Which we don’t, anymore. Plus we can get the natives to build what we want. Plenty of places a bunch of us could pretty well write our own tickets.”
“If the locals didn’t
punch
our tickets,” Cuddy said.
“Timid?” Walker asked, a slight edge of mockery in his tone.
“No, just cautious. We don’t have any fucking tanks, man.”
“Yeah, that’s a point. That’s why it’d have to be done in a group, with some organization.”
“And you to head up the organization?”
He shrugged. “Somebody has to,” he said. “Why not me? I’ve got the training, I know some history, and I’ve learned the languages. There’ll be plenty for everyone when it comes time to share out.”
Cuddy sipped at his drink. “Why me?” he said.
“You don’t have any local ties, you’ve learned a lot of useful stuff from Leaton, and I think you’re the ambitious type . . . but reasonable about it,” Walker said. “And hell, it’s not even illegal. The law’s back up in the twentieth. Nobody declared Cofflin’s goddam Town Meeting a sovereign state. The captain’s authority came from the Department of Transportation and the UCMJ; it ended when we got shoved here. They’ve got no right to tell us we have to stay here and make like farmers.”