Loose Cannon

by Sharon Lee

  “Pastry shop? What does that have to do with anything?” She sputtered a moment, and— “Eleven days!” She got out finally, which was both more and less than she wished to say.

  He lived very much in his face, the way Terrans do; his eyes were bright and his smile reached from the corners all the way to his bearded chin. He laughed gently, patting the counter, where there were now half-a-dozen pastries for her to choose from.

  “Yes,” he acknowledged. “Eleven. Not too bad. The worst was twenty-four, but that was before I knew enough to keep food by, and I’d been partying instead of painting.”

  “But what did you do for eleven days?”

  He shook his head and the grin dissolved. He glanced down, then looked back to her, eyes and face serious.

  “I crashed. I slept and I tried to sleep. I spent hours counting my failures, numbering my stupidities. I counted transports and the explosions and watched the crack in the wall get larger with each. Every so often I knew I’d never see my painting again, and I would know that I’d been taken and that you’d fled the city and I would never see you again, either.”

  He raised his hand before she could protest. “And then I would pull myself together and say ‘Fool! Bewitched by beauty again!’ And that way I’d recall your face and the painting, and try to sleep, knowing you’d be here, if only I could recall the shop name when I walked by. I nearly didn’t, you know. I had to focus on that set of ear cuffs that match yours before I was sure.”

  She nearly reached for her ear, and then she laughed, somehow.

  “Forgive me. I am without experience in this crashing you do. I was concerned for you, for your health, for your art!”

  He smiled slowly. “We’re both concerned for my health then, which I’m sure will be greatly improved if I can eat. My stomach has been growling louder than the shuttles! Please, join me! Afterward I will need to visit the port—it would be good if you could do me the favor of retaining my art until I return.” The smile broadened. “I promise—I will not be gone eleven days, this time.”

  The noise of the street invaded their moment then, as two young and giggling girls entered. They stopped short, staring at the towering, bearded figure before them.

  “Please,” said Cyra to Bell. “If you will come back here we can let my patrons look about!”

  He nodded, and moved without hesitation.

  She opened the counter tray to let him pass, indicated a low stool for him (his knees seemed almost to touch his ears!) and moved the pastries to the work table, where they would both be able to reach them.

  He smiled at her as she lifted a pastry to her lips. She felt almost giddy, as if she’d discovered some new gemstone or precious metal.

  *

  DEBBIE, THE HALF-TERRAN pastry maker from the shop four doors down was in, again, when Cyra returned from apartment hunting. It didn’t improve her mood much; the girl hardly seemed as interested in the goods as in Bell, and her language was sprinkled with Terran phrases Cyra could just about decipher on the fly. Likewise the assistant office manager from the Port Transient Shelter. Didn’t they realize that—she shushed her inner voice, nodding, Terran fashion, to Bell in his official spot behind the trade counter. He winked at her and she sighed. Were Terrans always so blatant?

  The conversation continued unabated: and there on the counter were actual goods; an item she didn’t recognize, so it was for sale to the shop.

  “Now,” Bell was saying carefully, “I’ve seen places that these might have been in the absolute top echelon.”

  The women gazed at him.

  Drawn to the story and the voice despite the crowd, Cyra leaned in to hear.

  “Of course, that would only be if the local priestess had purified the stone before it was cut, blessed the ore the silver had come from, sanctified the day the day the ring was assembled, and then prayed over the ring-giver and scried the proper hour for giving.”

  “In other corners of the universe,” he went on, “as, say, on Liad or Terra, the flaws in the stone might mark it ordinary. If I were you, I would ask Cyra if she’ll set a price, knowing it for a nubiath’a hastily given…”

  Cyra moved behind the counter to take up the office of buyer, but the women had both apparently heard tall tales from Terrans in the past—

  “Bell, now really, were you on that planet,” asked the assistant office manager, “—or have you merely heard of it?”

  He rolled his eyes and surprised Cyra with a discreet pat as she squeezed by him.

  “What, am I a spaceman, or a Scout, to have all my stories disbelieved?”

  They laughed, but he continued, assuming a serious air.

  “Actually, it was almost all a disaster. The planet you should never go to is Djymbolay. I arrived just after I finished a painting on board the liner, and was pretty well spent. I had my luggage searched twice for contraband, and then they confiscated the painting as an unauthorized and unsanctified depiction of the world.”

  He shook his head, then tapped it with his finger. “They wanted to have me put away for blasphemy or something, I think. It took a Scout who happened by—all thanks to little John!—to let me keep my papers and my paint and my freedom. Off with my head or worse, I expect was the plan! But the Scout was there on another matter and interceded. The locals walked me across the port under armed guard, and the Scout came, too, to be sure that it was gently done—and they kept me confined to the spaceport exit-lounge for the twelve days the ship was there. If several kind ladies hadn’t taken pity, and brought me meals and blankets, I might well have starved and froze.”

  Cyra bit back a comment half-way to her lips; after all she knew not where he’d slept before she met him, nor, for that matter, that he always returned to his own rooms on the afternoons and evenings he went to the lectures at Scout Academy. She only knew he returned to the store with sketches and ideas and full of hope that he might eventually be permitted to visit a new world, to be the first painter, the first interpreter….

  In a few moments more, the transaction was made; she paid a fairly low price for the emerald ring—the one suggested by the seller—and agreed to look at earrings that might be a match.

  The two women gone. Bell looked at her carefully.

  “You’re tired—and you’ve been angry.”

  Exasperated by his grasp of the obvious, Cyra waved her hands in the air in a wild gesture, and snapped, “How else?”

  “You might be pleased, after all. The emeralds were got at a decent price.”

  “Yes, a decent price. But if I’m going to afford you, my friend, we’ll need to do better.”

  He looked at her with the same air of frankness he’d used when talking about the disaster that had cost him a painting, and shook his head.

  “Yes, I know; I am hardly convenient for myself, much less for anyone else.”

  “That’s not what I meant!” she protested. “I mean that—I mean that it is difficult to find a larger place to live hereabouts, and nearer to my apartment there are those who will not rent to someone who—”

  “Someone who might bring a Terran home of a night,” Bell finished, as she faltered. “Inconvenient I said, and I meant! ” he insisted with heat. “I don’t mind sleeping here in the store, after all, though the light is not always good. Perhaps you can offer to rent the corner place the next street over.”

  They had been over that before, too. Bell’s situation was so changeable that neither knew how long they might find each other’s company pleasant, useful, or convenient. He could hardly sign a lease, with his “transient alien” status in the port computers assuring that any who looked would laugh at his request. Even getting a room beyond the spaceport was difficult for him, except here in the Low Port area. Mid-port was too dear for his budget in any case.

  He could hardly co-sign with her, either. The conditions her Delm had set were strict and might well bear on that—if she wished to ever return to the House, she would, during her time of exile, refrain from form
ing formal alliances; she must not buy real estate; she was forbidden to marry, or to have children….

  There could be no co-signing; she could speak for none other than herself. But to add a place where some of his paintings could be shown—this close to the port, they might gain a better clientele with such a gallery.

  Truth told, though, Bell’s sometime presence permitted Cyra to cut her dependence on Ortega’s chancy employ; in fact, twice recently they’d been there as patrons.

  He looked at her, snatched the ring to his hand and began tossing it furiously into the air. This, after three previous ragged forty-day cycles, she recognized. Any day, perhaps any moment, he would drag out the rough sketches and ideas, choose one, and then hardly see her, even should she stand naked before him, while he took plasboard and tegg-paint and the secret odds and ends from his duit box and transformed them by touch of skilled hand and concentration and willpower unmatched to art as fine as ever she’d seen. Days, he would be one with the art.

  And then he would crash; folding into a hollow and dispirited being barely willing to feed himself, with a near-fear of sunlight and a monotone voice and no plans to speak of … until the cycle came full and from the gray, desperate being emerged Bell, fresh and whole and new. Again.

  He shook the ring, tossed it, glanced anxiously to his art kit where it was stashed near the door to the back room.

  “I know,” he said. “I know! It’s almost time. I think we should close early, perhaps, and go someplace fine to eat—I’ll pay!—and plan on a bottle of good wine and snacks—I’ve chosen them already—and a night, a glorious night, my beauty. And then, we can talk at breakfast, if the art’s not here yet, and if it is, we’ll talk in a few days.”

  In front of her then, the choice—and she knew already she’d take it, or most of it. Had she a clan to call on she would pledge her quartershare— to make this work, she’d—but what she would do if was no matter, now. Her quartershare would go—till the twelfth year, at least—into the account of a dead child, just as her invitations—large and small—would go to her Delm, and be returned with the information that she was in mourning and not permitted.

  She recalled the discreet caress a few moments earlier, her blood warming…

  Tonight she would forget the she was poor and outcast. Bell would take them somewhere with his stash of cash and they would spend as if he were a visiting ambassador instead of an itinerant artist, and then he would—

  “Bell,” she said gently, “perhaps we should stay until nearer closing. My friend. I followed your instructions last time, you know—there are three prepared boards waiting—and I have already an extra cannister of spacer’s tea and you gave me enough for two tins of Genwin Kaffe last time, so we have that. That is, if you are certain that you won’t talk to the Healers this time.”

  He looked at her then and his eyes were hungry; she doubted that hers were not.

  “I’ll check the boards, Cyra, and make sure that you have room to work this time, too.”

  *

  CYRA TASTED THE SALT on her lips, and nearly wept as she relaxed against him. He was so inexhaustible and inventive a lover, she thought, that perhaps she should have invited the office manager to help out—and she laughed at the silliness, and he heard her, Bell with his hands still willing and eager, and his quirky Terran words dragged out of him in the midsts.

  “Now I’m funny. Oh, woe, oh woe…”

  She could see him in the half-light he preferred for lovemaking; just bright enough that the mirrors on the wall might tell an interesting tale to a glancing eye. She remembered that he’d brought beeswax candles, along with wine, flowers, that first evening after his very first return, when he’d somehow parlayed her concern—

  She laughed again, this time finding his hair and beard wooly near her face, and she gently moved to brush them orderly. He had something more on his mind though, as her hands came in contact with his cheek; but she held him a moment and he was willing to be calmed.

  Of course, she should not stroke his beard and his cheek; she should not kiss his nose, nor lay her palm on his face, this Terran who never knew the taboo of it….

  “Let’s trade,” he said, very gently. “A story for a story, a touch for a touch.”

  Then he laid his hand on her cheek, spreading his wide hand so that his thumb and his forefinger spanned her face.

  It was late in the night, very nearly morning; the sounds from the road were not yet impinging on their lair. His breathing, and hers, and his touch.

  “I,” he said after a moment. ” I cannot go to the Healers, because when someone in my family is cured, we loose the art. My father, my grandfather, my uncle—myself. I tried, there once—”

  He paused, brushed her hair away from her eyes, kissed her on her nose, covered the marks on her face as if he would wipe them away. “After that painting was stolen from me I could have been locked up forever there, but for the good luck of a Scout’s intercession. So, I thought I should get over the crash. I spoke to a doctor and he seemed to make sense, and they gave me a therapy and drugs and an implant….”

  “Here!”

  He guided her hand and held it against that long scraggly scar on his leg. She’d found that scar before, but never dared question—there were things lovers were not to ask, after all; the Code was clear on that.

  “Three months,” he said very quietly. “Let me say about two of my usual cycles, though they change sometimes—be warned!—and I had not even the slightest twinge of being able to paint, and what I drew was stick figures and bad circles and patterns, and I spoke politely to people and one night I went home and picked up a cooking knife and thought that I would cut my throat.”

  He took her hand and placed it under his beard, where it was just above his throat, and let her feel the pulse of him, and the smaller, more ragged scar.

  “I’d made a start, actually, when I realized that what I wanted was not my throat cut, but my art back. And so I took the knife and opened my leg and took the thirty-four months’ worth of implant that was left out of me, and I washed it down the drain.”

  She stared at him, at once fascinated and horrified, not knowing what to say.

  “My cousin,” he went on, after a moment. “My cousin Darby. He took the cure and has stayed on it. He’s married, he goes to work, comes home, goes to work, comes home—and I have the last piece of sculpture he did before the implant. He was brilliant. He made me look like a bumbling student. But it is gone. Five years and he can’t draw a face much less model one; he can’t see the images in the clouds!”

  He brushed his lips over the mark under her left eye, then kissed the one under her right eye.

  “You know,” he said quietly, “you are beautiful. I have known beautiful ladies, my friend, and you are very beautiful.”

  The realization hit her—what he would ask, in exchange for this tale from his soul. Very nearly, she panicked, but he caught her mouth with his, and in a few moments she relaxed against him.

  “My friend,” she said, “you can be as cruel as you are wonderful. To cut yourself so—the pain! But I am not so brave as you. I took the cuts from my Delm, in punishment—cut with the blade my family keeps from the early days. Then I wept and cried, and was cast from the house…”

  “Does this person yet live?” Not in his deepest despair had she heard his voice so cold.

  Cyra looked into his face and saw he meant it—that he contemplated Balance or revenge or—

  “No, Bell, you cannot. My Delm was doing duty. I was cut to remind me and to warn others.”

  He said nothing, but kissed her face again, gently, waiting.

  “We are not as rich a house as some others, Clan Nosko; and my Delm, my uncle, is not so easy a spender as you or I. As I was youngest of the daughters of the house—and lived at the clan seat, it being close to my shop—it fell my duty sometimes to spend an afternoon and a night, or sometimes two, doing things needful. And so…”

  Here she paus
ed a moment, gently massaging Bell’s neck under the beard, imagining all too well….

  “So it was,” she went on very quietly, with the blood pounding in her ears, “that I was briefly in charge of the nursery, the nurse having been given a discharge for cost or cause, I know not. I had put the child Brendar to bed; a likely boy come to the clan through my sister’s second marriage. I changed him once, but he was otherwise biddable. I was trying for my Master Jeweler’s license, so I was at study with several books. I read, and read more, hearing no fuss. Then my sister came home, and the child was not asleep, but had died sometime in the night.”

  There was quiet then.

  Finally, he kissed her again, each scar, very carefully.

  “I’d thought there must be more, but I see the story now, and I am near speechless. The child died of an accident—

  “My incompetence and negligence…”

  He pressed a finger to her lips so hard it nearly hurt.

  “I am a fool, Cyra, my beautiful friend. I thought it was your own anger, or your own desire, that placed those marks on your face; that you had rebelled against the rules of this world and even now wore them as badges. That they were inflicted by your family to humiliate and destroy you never came to mind…”

  He brushed the hair out of her face again.

  “I will paint your picture one day, I promise. Your face will be known as among the most beautiful of this world. And they will see that they have lost you, for I’ll not let them have you back!”

  She had no quick answer for this, and then he said, “Here!” and placed her hand again on the long leg scar.

  She felt the welt there—he laughed, nibbled on her earlobe, and moved her hand a bit, murmuring, “Now, lady, here if you wish to be pleased!”

  She did, and she was.

  *

  THREE DAYS LATER Cyra was not so very pleased.

  To begin, Bell had become inspired sometime in the night of their pillow talk and when she awoke alone in the dawn she found him sketching like a madman on her couch, barely willing to drag himself away from his work long enough to share a breakfast with her.