'He doesn't spend time with people very often,' Victoria said. 'He's given you a unique gift.'
'What's wrong?' Satoshi asked her. 'The way you rushed out ... '
'I'm okay now, but I'm going home.' 'Wait just a minute and we'll all go.'
'There's no reason for you to leave, too—'
'Stephen Thomas is already making our excuses. It's getting late. There he is.'
Stephen Thomas walked toward them, staring at the ground.
When he reached them he stopped and looked up. His fair skin was pale, his blue eyes dark-circled.
'Stephen Thomas—?'
'Let's go,' he said shortly, and strode into the darkness.
People began drifting home soon after the light faded. Infinity was spared having to urge anyone to go, since everyone had to work the next day. Stephen Thomas surprised him by leaving so early—he could usually be counted on to close out any gathering, no matter how late it ran. He had bid good night to Florrie, then he had risen from his kneeling position as smoothly as if he had knelt at her feet only for a moment. Infinity wondered how he kept his feet from going to sleep.
The AS from the campus kitchen had already collected the bento boxes and taken them away. The housekeeper rolled about, looking for other things to do. As usual after parties on campus, no litter remained. Disposable eating utensils and suchlike did not exist out here. The AS carefully placed crumpled wrapping paper in a stack by Infinity's feet. Infinity smoothed the sheets out and folded them.
'You should keep this, too, Florrie,' he said. 'It's as much a gift as anything else you got tonight. Nobody manufactures wrapping paper out here.'
She hardly heard him. She had not calmed down from her 156 vonda N. Mclntyre
Inaction to Griffith. Though she trembled with weariness, excitement and fear brightened her eyes.
'You will watch him, won't you?' she said. 'Whatever he's about, you'll find out and make him stop.'
'I can't do that,' Infinity said. 'How could I make him stop anything? He's a government representative, I'm a gardener. ''
'You've got to, that's all. You've got to.'
'Please try to be easy. There's nothing I can do, and if there were I couldn't do it tonight. And, look, if he is some kind of spy or something, maybe you ought to be careful what you say about him, or anyway who you say it to. It might get back to him.'
She glanced at Infinity, quickly, sidelong, and immediately fell silent.
'I don't mean me,' Infinity said. 'I don't like him either.' He stopped, wishing he had kept that admission to himself. 'FIorrie, do you need any help, or shall I leave you alone?'
'I don't need help.'
'Okay, then, I just live over the next hill if you want to call me.'
'But . . . you could brush my hair.'
'All right,' he said uncertainly. 'Sure.'
Except for the three long locks, she kept her hair cropped so close that he worried about scratching her scalp with the well-wom bristles of her brush. Her papery skin felt fragile.
The brush made a soft, whispery noise, like her voice. A bristle caught against one of the unshorn and braided patches.
He disentangled it. The shells and small pierced stones rattled together.
'Go ahead and take those out,' she said.
Three diamond-shaped patches of hair lay in a diagonal line across the back of her head. There, her hair was heavy and thick. She had divided each section into two hanks and braided them with a soft leather thong from which dangled the shells and stones. He laid the thongs on the counter and brushed the long sections. She let herself relax into the chair;
she pushed her foot against the floor. Just once, then stopped trying to rock a chair that had no rockers.
Infinity found it pleasant to brush her hair. He had never
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done that for anyone before. After a while he thought FIorrie had gone to sleep. He stopped brushing. He would have to wake her—
'Thank you,' she said. She opened her eyes. 'Maybe I'll see you tomorrow.'
'Sure,' Infinity said. He put the brush beside the shells and stones and left her alone.
He walked home across the darkened campus, thinking about the strange day. Once he heard a noise: he stopped short and spun toward it, expecting to see Griffith gazing expressionlessly at him half-hidden by shadows.
The miniature horse herd's miniature stallion scamped the ground with its miniature hoof, snorted at him, and reared and whinnied. A moment later the whole herd galloped away into the darkness, making a noise like rain. Infinity smiled. When he got home, he took a blanket into his own garden, to sleep in the reflected starlight.
Griffith returned to the guesthouse in the dark, knowing he could walk safely anywhere and anytime up here, yet unable to shake off a practiced tension. His aggressive swagger let potential assailants know he was no easy target. Here he tried to tone it down, for it did not fit the character of Griffith of
GAO. On the other hand, he was not willing to be accosted even for the sake of his assignment.
He had complied with the rules of campus—of all the orbital habitations—to the extent of going unarmed. Even Griffith of GAO would never do that in the city. Being unarmed made him uncomfortable, and he wished he had at least tried to circumvent the laws.
He went to bed in his silent room. Lying on the thin hard futon, he listened. He heard nothing, no sign of the other guest, only the evening breeze brushing through the open windows.
Cherenkov had talked to him.
Griffith's thoughts kept returning to the question of how to persuade the cosmonaut to continue talking to him, to continue answering his questions. Griffith's mission to Starfarer seemed inconsequential in comparison to his need to leam everything he could about Nikolai Cherenkov. Today was the first time in a long time that he had felt the drive to know
158 vonda N. Mclntyre
everything about anything or anyone. At the party, Griffith had felt as if he wore his nerves outside his skin, sensitive to every stimulus that passed. He gathered everything in: observations ofCherenkov and information about the rest of the faculty and staff of the expedition as welt, the kind of indiscriminate data that would collect in the back of his mind, work like fermenting beer, and help him discover a way to complete his mission. But after Cherenkov left, the party bored him, the interactions between the people bored him;
their negative opinions about the new administration bored him.
The agreement he had made with Cherenkov must not stop him. As Griffith lay in bed, he let the prospect of the quest excite him. It pushed away the depression that had settled when he could no longer keep Cherenkov in sight. It recharged him.
In the darkness, he drafted a quick memo to his superiors.
Before he ever came here he had tried to tell them that directly co-opting the personnel would be hopeless. Now he could demonstrate it. The hope had been a foolish one to begin with. The crew of Smrfarer, the faculty and staff, as they referred to themselves, would all have to be recalled in one way or another. Then the starship could be converted.
Griffith encrypted his message, sent it back to earth, and fell asleep- He dreamed all night.
Kolya wanted to go outside again, but he knew that
Arachne, fussing over his radiation exposure, would go so far
as to call out human help to persuade him to stay inside.
Since he recognized his desire as a selfish one, he refrained from indulging in it. The only result would be that someone would be fetched, probably out of a warm bed. to come and talk to him.
He feared he had made a tactical error in conversing with Marion Griffith. The intensity of the officer's questions troubled him. He should have seen the problem coming when the fellow waited in the access tunnels for him. Even before that. Kolya tried to excuse himself on the grounds of having been spared the more obvious forms of hero worship during the past few years.
The person he looked forward to talking to was the alien STARFARERS 15 9
