chapter SIX
“We had a bad one,” Don said without preamble as he opened the door of the Terzia’s chamber. “I left all the harvest so we could get back quicker with the wounded. Brought the dead; I know it didn’t matter, but I did and I don’t care cop what you think about it.”
The big man paused for the first time since he entered the room. He swallowed and said, “There were two missing. We searched, but there’s two missing.”
“That doesn’t matter, Don,” said the Terzia from the bed itself. “Come—come sit by me while I talk.”
The poison burns on Slade’s upper body were white with the SpraySeal which now covered them. Besides the sweat-streaked dust on his skin and trousers, Slade’s hands had a black patina. He had changed the barrel of his powergun as soon as he entered the Citadel. The one he had used on the giant carnivore was by no means shot out; but there was no reason to skimp on equipment, and a millimeter’s tighter focus on a bolt might mean a life.
“Lady,” Slade said, “the harvest’s all over the trail and beside it. I’m going out with another gang. I’ll be back as soon as we’ve gathered up the copper-pods—”
“They don’t matter, Don. Sit down.”
“—and found the bodies; Terzia, it matters to me,” Slade concluded. His weariness was no veil over the angry determination in his voice.
The Terzia lay on a glade-green spread in a pool of light muted to duplicate forest shadows. Slade had never been sure of the process by which Terzia controlled the light. At other times, it had seemed to him to be extremely sensual.
“Don,” the Terzia began. Then she lowered the hand with which she had beckoned him. In a changed, business-like voice, she said, “Both the bodies are with the carnivore, as you call it, some three kilometers from where it was shot. A party of workers has been sent out to retrieve the remains from the seventeenth-segment limb on the animal’s right side and from its gullet. That business does not require you. This does. Sit down, please.”
Slade’s lips worked—silently, because he could not decide quite what words he wanted them to form. His left hand, smudged already with carbon and metal, touched the fresh and gleaming barrel of his powergun for reassurance. “I don’t . . .” Slade said without the haste or hostility of a moment before.
“Don, come here if you think you might ever want to leave Terzia,” the other said. She held out her hand again.
Slade moved as he would have moved to mount his tank in an alert: quickly, but with the caution that kept haste from being a danger. He laid his weapon on the table that had held it in the past and stepped toward the bed. He wiped his palms nervously on the dirty fabric of his trousers. Slade was not fit to see a woman, to make love on a sleek, resilient bed to a beauty herself so sleek and as capable of innovation as of response.
He did not hesitate, because he knew by more than words that the Terzia cared for the customary graces only as it pleased her lover to provide them. Slade had made love in alleys and in trenches, once even on his own stretcher in the casualty holding station as an affirmation to himself of his intention to survive. The Terzia was a jewel, not some fellow-swimmer in the maelstrom as those other partners had been. Or again—
Slade’s groin was quickening with new excitement as he slid onto the bed.
“Is . . .” he said as his hands cupped her left shoulder and right buttock, calluses over smooth skin and the muscles supple beneath each. “Is there word of a ship coming in?”
“And any ship would be enough,” said the Terzia sadly. Her arms circled him, drawing her naked chest against the big man’s. His body quivered with a vibrancy she had not drunk from it in months. “You want to leave me so badly.”
“Lady,” Slade said. He squeezed her tighter in unconscious reaction to the words he was framing. “I don’t want to leave you, but I want to go home. I’d. . . . You’re a princess here, a queen.” He arched back slightly so that he could look at the Terzia’s face. “It’d be crazy for you to leave all this to come to Tethys. Gravel and sea, that’s all it’d be to you. But it’s my home.”
“No, I couldn’t leave my world, even with you,” the Terzia said. Her eyes were on Slade’s chest, on the black, springy delicacy of the hairs that doubled by their shadows on his skin. “I’ll arrange for you to leave, then, Don. I think you should know—” she looked up to meet his puzzled expression— “that matters on your homeworld are very unsettled. You might find yourself safer—and happier—if you chose some other destination in which to settle down. If not here, then—” the assumed humanity of the Terzia caused her voice to catch— “perhaps back on Friesland. Your friends there have not, have not forgotten you.”
Disbelieving, as tense and as careful as when he disarmed booby-traps, Don Slade said, “Lady, I thank you, but . . . it’s been a long road to get here, and I don’t think I’ll turn back now. If there’s trouble on Tethys, then I guess there’s trouble anywhere, one way or the other. I’m as used to it as the next man. And I’d—” he bent forward again and nuzzled the Terzia’s hair— “really like to go home.”
“You will,” said the almost woman. She shifted her body to free Slade’s trouser catches. “You will very soon, my darling.”