Puma grinned at me. “So don’t you let that lady’s ways get you to figuring she’s out of it. I did a portrait of her about, oh, six, eight turns back. She was young and frisky then and full of hell, for a China lady, that is. They still got it over the bar.”
That brought us to a discussion of painters and he was interested in knowing what was going on in the art world back on Earth. He seemed very interested in sensatrons, but figured he could never master the electronics. Later on he added a note to his Sunstrum dossier.
“That Nova . . . well, she’s sort of special out here. We tried not to spoil her but that was pretty hard. Not many kids out here, and none as pretty as that one. Everyone wanted to teach her everything. I guess she’s handled about every kind of sandcat, transporter, scoop, pinholer, and laser rig there is. It just makes you feel good being around her, doesn’t it?”
We topped up over the edge of a crater and a small dome cluster on the far wall told us where the Sunstrum complex was. Puma took us across the flat crater floor at high speed, laughing about the bumps and the big plume of dust behind. “Let ’em know we’re coming!”
he said. The cargo slugs rattled along behind us and we came to a halt before the main dome lock after pulling three wild circles in the area in front. Puma sounded a couple of incredibly loud beeps on the signal horn and unsealed as several people came out of the lock.
The air was thin and cold here but only Puma and I wore warmsuits. I saw the big blonde man first, in a weathered gray jumper, and a couple of grinning, bearded faces beyond. Then they parted for a smiling Oriental woman with thick, piled-up hair, wearing an emerald-green dress.
“Puma!”
“Li Wing, Li Wing, you get better looking every day!”
There were cheek kisses and back slaps and hugs and then hurried, good-natured complaints as they pulled Puma back toward the warmth of the dome lock. They looked at me with tentative we-haven’t-been-introduced-but-any-friend-of-Puma’s looks, but all I saw was Nova.
She stood back by the lock, wearing something simple but thin, and the cold had brought out her nipples. She was trying to look both unconcerned and polite, her lady-of-the-manor style that didn’t come off all that badly, considering she was nineteen.
Nova.
Daughter of a tigress, daughter of a bear.
Would I ever be able to say, “My Nova”?
She stood by the edge of the lock and her elegant pose was ruined by a sudden hug and cheek kiss from Puma, who evidently had
“rights.” Then they had swept past her and I was on their heels. She looked at me with a carefully neutral face and I gestured her in. She turned and entered without comment and the lock hissed and thumped home and the air was pumped in to equalize.
Puma was as bombarded with questions as I had been, but most of them were personal, or about people they mutually knew. Nova and I were very much aware of each other.
As the inner door hissed open Sven Sunstrum came over to me and shook my hand in a blonde bearpaw. “Mr. Braddock, you honor us.” He grinned shrewdly and said, “I hope you are not going to dramatize our little operation here for some video show.”
The way he said dramatize told me how he felt about the vidtab way of “electrifying” reality, as they put it. “We take things out of the crust and we barter for the things we cannot make. It’s a simple life and we would hate to see it disturbed.”
I looked at him and said, “Minimum disturbance on all sensors, Mr. Sunstrum.” He smiled with more friendliness and released my hand.
“Nova has told us how you kept her from causing a mutiny on the ship.” He smiled fondly at her and I raised my eyebrows slightly. She looked serene and aloof. “Oh, father,” she said without rancor. Sunstrum looked back at me. “My thanks, as well.” Then he laughed. “I’m sorry, but your face is so carefully unexpressive! Li Wing!”
Nova’s mother turned from the cluster around Puma and joined us as we exited the lock. “Li Wing, this is Diego Braddock . . . Mr. Braddock, my wife.”
We acknowledged the introductions with pleasantries and then Sunstrum broke in. “I was just thanking Braddock for the way he handled the sexual situation on the Balboa.”
Li Wing smiled shyly at me and nodded. “Oh, yes. We were very worried about that long trip, with Nova grown.”
I shot Nova a look of What did you tell them? but she wasn’t listening. “Uh, thank you,” I said, meaninglessly.
We started across the work area before the dome, to a lock at the curving side. Li Wing took my arm and I found her a most appealing woman. Knife-thrower, huh? I couldn’t help thinking of the lurid overlay on this petite and ladylike woman.
“Yes, thank you, Mr. Braddock. I know that all introductions to sexual life are perilous and I must thank you again.”
Introduction to sexual life? I looked back over my shoulder at Nova, but they had been joined by Puma and one of the burly miners and no one was paying attention to me.
We passed through the lock and into a zome that connected to the home dome occupied by the Sunstrums. By the standards of Mars it was palatial. I quickly revised that: by any standards. It was nowhere as large as my smallest home, but it rivaled my best in the immediate feeling of home. All too often my expensive decorators had contrived marvelous showpieces, richly appointed sets for their talents. I had simply had too much to do and too many homes to live, or rather stay in, to do more than indicate basic directions and to Monday morning quarterback the results.
The Sunstrum home was warm in tone, with comfortable furniture, some of it the best of the Lifestyle lines, and other pieces homemade by loving hands and with an eye for design and detail. Each had been made for just the place it was in.
There was a big heater in a super-ellipse-shaped hole in one wall, a necessity of the Martian life. There was an enormous music-tape-projection unit by the far wall and a bar to the right. Over the bar was Puma’s portrait of Li Wing, and I was startled at how good it was. Back on Earth, when Puma had been Reymundo Santiago, he had been fairly popular, but not always good. Here he was good. I suspected he had been more than half in love with the beautiful oriental empress he had painted with such skill and insight.
I was suddenly aware that I was standing before it, and that they were watching me. I made an embarrassed face and a gesture of apology. “Forgive me, I—”
“Forgive, hell!” thundered Puma, “that’s the purest compliment you can give! Hot damn! Come on Sven, you dirt grubber, are you going to pour us some of that purply wine or not?”
I glanced at Li Wing and found her eyes coming from the painting back to me. “It is lovely,” I said and meant more. As all beautiful women, she understood the compliment and thanked me.
“I’m trying to get Puma to paint Nova,” she said.
“Hell, I’ll do her anytime,” Puma said, “but you sent her off to goddamn Earth!” He looked at her as she stood quietly, attentive but passive. “I do hate to sound like a goddamn cliché, but she sure has grown. Take a bigger canvas now!” He laughed and tasted the wine. He and Sunstrum fell into a conversation about vintages and solar strength and a longer season while I accepted a glass from Li Wing and sat down on the big tan couch.
“And what do you plan to do here on Mars during your visit, Mr. Braddock?” Li Wing asked. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Nova raise her head and she seemed to wait expectantly.
“Look,” I said.
“Just look?” There was the faintest blade of disdain in her voice as Nova’s mother questioned me. Wastrel. Wanderer. Tourist.
“He points,” said Nova. Li Wing raised her eyebrows at her daughter. “He points, and what he points at becomes famous,” she said.
“I work for Publitex,” I said, and felt like a liar. What I really wanted to say was Actually, I’m Brian Tharne and . . . and there I had to stop. What to say then? Even if they believed me, which they probably wouldn’t.
“That sounds like interesting work,” Mrs. Sunstrum said, as though sh
e meant it.
“It got me here,” I said. I started to go on, but Sunstrum came over and sat down.
“Nova tells me you two slept together on the way out,” he said conversationally.
I looked at him and suddenly I was just a little tired of being examined, being tested, being the one who had to prove himself. “Yes, that’s right,” I said. “I love her.”
Sunstrum waved his hand, the one with the glass. “A lot of people love Nova.”
“I’m not a lot of people.”
“Just who are you, Mr. Braddock?”
I turned my head and looked at Nova, who was sitting tensely, trying to look calm, as if we were not talking about her. “I’m her lover.”
“Are you certain there are not legions of those?” Mrs. Sunstrum asked quietly.
“Yes.” My eyes locked to hers and bit by bit the ice melted.
“You killed a man over her,” Sunstrum said.
I did not look at him as I said, “You would have done the same.”
“Perhaps.” I felt, rather than saw him look at Li Wing. “I have killed. When men need killing they must be killed and no halfway measures. But they need not always be killed.”
I did not answer. I was somewhere in those dark eyes.
“Why do you want our daughter?” asked Li Wing.
“Why did Sven Sunstrum want you?”
She hesitated, then said, “First . . . for the sex. Then for love.”
I did not answer. Nova rose from her seat and took a deep breath, her eyes never leaving me. “We are going to bed,” she announced. “Goodnight.”
“Goodnight,” I heard Sunstrum rumble.
“Goodnight, dear,” Li Wing said.
I may have said something and I may not have said something. I had said words. Now I would speak with all of me. She took my hand and we went out and down a corridor and into a bedroom. It was not until morning that I discovered it was the bed she had been conceived in. 8
Nova swung lithely up into the sandcat cabin, and waved down to the others. I took Sunstrum’s hand and I kissed Li Wing on the cheek.
“Oh, come on, Diego, we’ll be back in a couple of days!”
I climbed into the cabin and sealed the door. Nova thumbed the cat into a throaty roar and started off with a fast left-hand turn and a racing run for the crater rim. I grabbed a stanchion and tumbled into a bucket seat and belted down.
She was laughing and the long black hair tumbled over the collar of her warmsuit and I loved her very much.
We stopped only once, at a place along the Athena where there was a little waist-high waterfall and enough air to go without masks. We made love on a warm rock and splashed briefly in the icy water and she was beautiful and golden-brown, all soft flesh and falling hair and sudden mouth.
It was sunset when we got into Bradbury, and Nova was seen by a group of jolly farmers with the purple Silverberg Kibbutz insignia on their shoulders. They hadn’t known she was back, and there was a lot of cheerful kidding and not a little outright lust.
Nova was gay and charming and steered them into gossip about the Canalgae farm, and then we were at Sunstrum’s office. His agent there kept a couple of sleeping cubicles that shared a vibrabath. As she rid herself of the day’s dust and dried river mud she said, “You know the only thing I really liked about Earth was all that water! I love showers, real showers!”
I’ll buy you a Niagara of showers, I thought. I’ll divert the Nile! Cleopatra’s water will flow over your body! “Vibrabaths get you cleaner,” I said.
“They only get my body cleaner,” she said. “There are other factors to getting clean.”
We dressed and went out for dinner and that’s when they tried to kill me.
There was a gritty ripping noise and bits of a storage dome fell from a sudden long slit. Nova stared at it curiously, then protested as I grabbed her wrist and threw us into the dark between domes. She protested, both verbally and physically.
“Here? My god, Diego, don’t you get enough? Hey, what are you doing?” I was dragging her, kicking and fighting, further into the dark. I saw a shadow move on the dome across the street and I had no time to explain things. I found her jaw in the dark and punched her out. I lay very still, my heart pounding, my mind racing.
Why were they trying to kill me? Us? No, it had to be me. A good marksman could take me out with a laser and leave Nova holding a hand with no arm attached.
I watched the light patch on the dome across the narrow street, hoping to see a shadow, although what I was going to do then I hadn’t the faintest idea. I had no weapon, except my brain.
I felt around in the dark and found a rock, a wedge of permaplast, a broken electronic plug-in, all things that had escaped the notice of the cleansweepers. I took a good grip on Nova’s wrist and threw the three bits high into the night. I started to drag Nova away and I felt a plasticon box by my foot and I flipped that back toward the light. The bits of trash fell on domes and started sliding to the ground. The box skidded noisily and crashed against the far dome. A shadow moved and I yanked the limp Nova around the curve as I saw the ruby light glowing. Behind me something suddenly hissed and there was a crumbling and a gushing of liquids.
I scooped Nova up in my arms and ran. I zig-zagged in a stumbling fashion, then found I was at the back of a bar, or at least a place with some people in it. I slumped against the curving dome, drawing air with ragged breaths, still holding Nova. Finally, I eased her to the ground and tried bringing her around, then I stopped. I had to think before she awoke and came at me with questions. Who the hell was trying to kill me? The first answer was that Nova had a jealous suitor, but I hadn’t expected this from any of them. The nuvomartians I had met were stand-up, punch-out types, not backshooters or assassins.
Who, then? I hadn’t made any enemies on Mars, except those connected with Nova.
But Brian Thorne had enemies. Nothing personal, mind you, but a thousand men would like to see me dead. A stock shift here, a chairmanship there, a directorate given to someone else. Five-to-four decisions made five-to-four the other direction. Nothing personal, Thorne, but drop dead.
Or one of the Neopolitikons, with their ideas of Communism mixed with a sort of ego fascism. Kill Thorne for the People’s Sake. Nothing personal, Thorne, you are just a symbol.
A nut, driven mad in the ghettos of the poor, one day sees me drive by in a car at the moment he goes manic, and I am the focus. Nothing personal, mister, because I am mad.
Or something personal. A failure who blames me. An incompetent employee fired by one of my managers and I am in the crosshairs. The son of a board chairman whom I have caught stealing and who turned suicide as a result of the discovery. The present lover of an ex-mistress who thinks there might be something in my will for her. A man with a laser.
I knew I would have to check. I wondered if they would have any Null-Edit tapes here. No, that would take too long. A tight beam was the only fast way. Would a Publitex flack be allowed to spend that kind of money? My only hope was that they knew nothing of the way a flack operates.
Then I grinned ruefully. Who was I hiding from? At least one man here knew who I was. I was either being killed because I was Nova’s lover or because I was Brian Thorne.
As gently as possible I slapped Nova awake and stifled her groaning questions with a hand over her mouth. I ignored her protests about a broken jaw and told her someone was trying to kill me and did she know who it might be?
“Sure, about ten or twelve diggers, a handful of grubbers, one computer jockey, and a Marine. At last count.”
“I’m serious, Nova.”
“So am I. But I don’t think they’d do it from the dark. Well, maybe one . . . no, he’d switch control units on your sandcat and it would seal the doors and exhaust the oxy about fifteen kilometers out. Or something. Jesus, Diego, don’t you have any old enemies?”
“You don’t seem surprised that people would try.”
She rubbed her jaw as she got to h
er feet. “That’s life. And death. Some people buy what they want, some charm it, some build it. Some kill for it. Someone either wants me bad enough to void you, or there’s more to you than flackery.”
“Come on,” I said wearily. “Let’s get in where there are people.”
She limped along next to me and shook her head. “Well, I must say being around you is not dull. Why did you knock me out? Oh, never mind, I understand. There was no time to explain. Next time I’ll be more alert. It isn’t often I’m next to Ground Zero at an assassination.”
I looked at her in amazement “Does this happen around here often?”
“No You are the first assassination I know of.”
“Attempted assassination.”
“Yeah, that, too. Well, this isn’t exactly Fun City Park, but it’s not the Vault of Horror either. The people here feel strongly about things. I’ll have Dad’s agent get that dome sealed up and the damages paid.”
“There are two domes. One full of something wet.”
“Oh, dear. We’d better tell Maintenance. Come on, there’s a telecom in Flynn’s.”
She walked on ahead of me, then stopped to take a rock out of her boot. “You sure mess up a girl dragging her like that,” she said. “I’m bleeding in a couple of spots.”
“Better red than dead,” I said.
“Better bed than dead. Listen, Diego, let’s make that call and go over to the Guild for tonight, huh? I suddenly feel very interested in life-enhancing actions.” She looked up at me with a sudden grin. “Don’t get yourself killed, huh? I haven’t used you up, yet.”
“Oh, thanks,” I said.
“You’re welcome. But don’t get a big head; I tell that to everyone who has failed an assassination assignation. You were a terribly uncooperative assassinee, Diego.”
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