understand astrophysics and cosmology.”
Hebo decided to smooth things over. “Just incidental, as I thought you realized.” The hell it is. “A change of pace from the Freydis work. And just in short little forays.”
“A hobby?” said Romon, likewise anxious to maintain politeness. “Good for you. To get practical, though, I repeat, possibly we can help each other as regards Freydis.”
“Possibly.” As he thought about it, Hebo felt more and more that the possibility might well be very real. Don’t tip the hand, though, especially bearing in mind that Lissa Windholm once mentioned having a certain coldness toward House Seafell. “I’ll have to see, or try to gauge, how things are developing. Maybe I’ll decide the business is not for me at all, and go away before I go broke. If something positive should occur to me, sure, I’ll let you know.” He knocked back his beer. “Before we have another round, what say we screen the menu?”
“Sheer genius!” Romon exclaimed with a bonhomie that Hebo didn’t think came natural to him. “Yes, indeed.”
The rest of the time passed fairly pleasantly, since Esker didn’t say much.
And then the next five years were amply eventful. And then Lissa returned.
XXXIV
At first the aircraft shone above the sea so much like a star that she felt something catch at her throat. Freydis was beautiful in the morning and evening skies of Asborg, but on Freydis itself there was never a glimpse of the sister planet, nor of anything in the heavens other than a vague sun-disc when clouds thinned to an overcast. Suddenly, sharply, a longing seized her for the cool green hills of home.
She thrust it away. Ridiculous. She’d had three months in them after her return from Jonna—when she wasn’t elsewhere boating or skiing or among the pleasures of the cities—and then barely as many weeks at New Halla and here. And right now she had a life to save.
If she could.
Recognizing the approaching object for what it was, she turned and trotted off the headland toward the landing strip. At her back, the ocean murmured against cliffs. It glimmered yellowish-green close in, darkened to purple farther out. A storm yonder hulked black and lightning-streaked, but overhead and eastward stretched silver-gray blankness. Before her rose forest, a wall of great boles, vines, brakes, foliage in hues of russet and umber, brilliant blossoms, shadowful depths. It dwarfed the clearing where the Susaian compound stood. The multitudinous smells of it lay heavy in the heat and damp.
Long, limber bodies were bounding from the huts. Glabrous hides sheened in a variety of colors; the New Hallan colonists were from many different ancestral regions, alike only in their faith and hopes. Several still clutched tools or instruments in their delicate hands. Excitement often spread with explosive speed through beings so directly perceptive of emotions. Not that it wasn’t justified. Lissa’s own eagerness had driven her onto the promontory to stare southwestward, once the curt acknowledgment came that help was on its way.
She reached the strip. It lay bare, soil baked bricklike. A hangar of wood and thatch gaped empty. The camp’s flyer had borne casualties away to medical care or eventual cremation, after leaving off the uninjured here. Impatient, she squinted up. “C’mon, move it,” she muttered. “What’re you dawdling for?” A drop of sweat got past her brows, into an eye. It stung. She spoke a picturesque oath.
Coppergold arrived and joined her. The botanist had thought to bring a translator. It rendered rustles, hisses, purrs into Anglay. “That is a cautious pilot, honored one.”
Lissa replied in her language, which the Susaian understood though unable to pronounce it intelligibly. “Well, I suppose this area is new to him, and he doesn’t want the airs to play some trick that catches him off guard. I’ve learned to fly warily myself.” She begrudged the admission, and knew that Coppergold felt that she did.
However, fairness compelled. She mustn’t lose her temper, her judgment, when she had Orichalc to save. The fact was that Freydis remained an abiding place of mysteries, and within some of them were deathtraps.
A whole planet, after all, she thought. (How often had she thought the same, here and elsewhere?) Not the global hell of jungle and swamp that most people imagined; no, as diverse as Asborg. But dear Asborg was well- nigh another Earth, renewed and again virginal. Humans soon made it theirs, and in its turn it claimed them for itself. Throughout the centuries that followed, few ever cared to set foot on Freydis, and none to make a home there. Occasional explorers: now and then a handful of scientists—until damned, destroying Venusberg Enterprises sprang up—scant wonder that most was still Mundus Incognitus, that she herself was more familiar with several planets parsecs away.
“Hs-s-s, he descends!” Coppergold exclaimed. She laid her blunt-snouted head on Lissa’s shoulder, an oddly mothering gesture. Glancing about, the human looked into big eyes that were not really onyx, being so warm. “Take heart, honored one. Our waiting time has been less than it seemed; observe your chrono. Surely Orichalc lives and you will find him soon enough.”
Could any human have been quite that sympathetic, in quite that way? “May it be, may it be,” Lissa half prayed. “For your sakes too, and mainly.”
Coppergold withdrew a few centimeters. “His loss would indeed strike a blow deep into us.” The trans failed to convey a gravity at which Lissa could well guess. “He is more than a symbol, the hero who won our new home for us. He has become a leader, in ways that I fear we cannot fully explain to your kind. Yet we, like you, would grieve most over the passing of a friend.”
Side by side, surrounded now by the rest, they gazed back aloft. The teardrop shape had ceased to hover and was bound slowly down. Landing gear made contact. Through the silence that followed, the nearby screech of a leatherwing and the distant roar of a deimosauroid sounded as insolently loud as the wild blossoms were gaudy.
Lissa advanced to meet the pilot. He slid a hatch aside and sprang to the ground. For a moment they stood motionless.
He was big, muscular, coverall open halfway down the front. The head was round, rugged-faced, blue-eyed, the brown hair less thick on it than on the bare chest. Amazement paralyzed her.
He grinned and offered a hand. “Greeting, milady Windholm,” he said. “I’ve waited a spell for this.”
Her tongue unlocked. “You’re… Torben Hebo,” she whispered.
“Last time I looked, I was.”
“But, but we called Venusberg headquarters—asking for help—do you work for them? I had no idea.”
“Not for them,” he said. “I pretty much am Venusberg. I haven’t publicized it, but I am, as you’d’ve found out if you’d inquired. Me and my old partner Dzesi of Rikha. You remember her, don’t you?”
She could not have foreseen the disappointment, almost dismay that shocked through her. Nor did she quite understand. The hand she had reached toward his dropped to her side. “I can’t believe—If you’re the head of that thing, you’d come yourself?”
“That’s exactly how come I can take off on short notice, or do whatever else I jolly well please.”
“But why? Somebody who knows the search area, has the skills, that, that’s what we need.”
He scowled. She saw him curb the temper she recalled. “Look,” he growled, “Forholt Station is ours, a Venusberg base on this continent, right? I helped start it up, bossing the job in person. I’ve scrambled around in the environs. Also, just reminding you, I’ve kicked about in space for more hundreds of years and in more different places than anybody else you’ve ever met, lady.”
She swallowed. “Well, then, this is—good of you, C-captain Hebo.”
He unbent a little. “Too bad I couldn’t bring Dzesi along. She’s got a real nose for tracking. But she’s at company HQ on the far side of the planet, or rambling somewhere else and out of touch. Nobody knows much about the section we’ve got to ransack, but I can cope there as well as any other human and better than most.”
“It’s… lucky for us you happened to be when you were.”
Now he laughed. “Not by accident. When I heard you’d come home and were visiting on Freydis—news, in so tiny a population—of course I wanted to look you up. But word also was that you don’t like what Venusberg is doing. So I squatted me down at the station, where they can use some straightening out of their operations anyway, and watched for a chance. This was it.”
Somehow, that jolted her back to—if not hostility, then a certain coldness. “We can’t stand here gabbing,”
