He seemed almost relieved. “Thirteen-hundred at the Cal?”
“Sure. I’ll bring my teeth.” She was outraged at herself for saying such a stupid thing but it was already out of her mouth. I’ll bring my teeth! She cringed. And she was outraged at the way he had crawled back inside his straitlaced self. She wanted to shout Kakabuni! at his hastily retreating back but she didn’t dare. Growing up wasn’t pleasant She’d never had any trouble with sex when she was thirteen.
Lunch was terrible. They had ground guinea-pig steak and veggies that had been programmed with the wrong spice. They had nothing to talk about. They had come to that horrible time in their relationship when they had already said everything that they had to say to each other. Finagle’s Eyes, they were talking about the color of the veggies!
“You know what this parsnip looks like? It looks like one of those old brass naval cannons of the seventeenth century”
That saved them. It reminded her of weapons tradeoff analysis. Soon they were comfortable old friends again discussing the impact that hyperdrive ships might have on a millennia-old kzinti military tradition. That culture was based on a bedrock of subluminal assumptions. Supply depots were dispersed. Manufacturing was dispersed. A son could be executed for not carrying out the orders issued to his father-unto the fourth generation. Local conquest commanders had wide authority. The military kzin valued truth so highly because that was the only way of keeping messages from degrading over the centuries.
Chloe became resigned to a Yankee stuck back in his old shell. She knew she was never going to get him to talk about love, not in the Caf. He was more like a cozy confrere than a lover. Her damn father had ordered him to take care of her and that’s what that damn Yankee was doing. Maybe he didn’t even like her. Here she had gone to all the damn trouble of chasing down a damn romantic hero of the war and he’d turned out to be just another awkward damn adolescent like the damned boys she’d been trying to avoid.
Two days later everything was back to normal and she could even tease him without having him go stiff on her.
“Kakabuni” remained a taboo word. They never talked about sex. Worse, they never even talked about relationships. Having an admiral for a father was like having an anchor chained to her neck. She was six and a half light-years from Alpha Centauri and she was still winched to her father.
Four days later he actually put his arm around her and gave her a quick squeeze.
Two weeks later “fellow-prisoner” Jinny of the Young Woman’s Auxiliary invited her on a double date. Her date turned out to be intellectually challenged so she left Jinny to manage both their dates and found her own double date. It was fun to wit-lash young men who were in such good shape physically that their brains recovered in minutes-not like a certain senile old man of her acquaintance.
A month later she missed her period. She thought about that for a few days and then went to the pharmacy for a pregnancy patch. It was positive. She returned for a more expensive test in the pharmacy’s autodoc booth. It too was positive, predicting a completely normal pregnancy. That meant she could ask the autodoc for a nonprescription abortion right then. It was between her and the autodoc. No one had to know.
Chloe took a walk instead. She didn’t believe that a human life started at conception. Your life didn’t start until you got out of the womb and began to make your own decisions-like whether you wanted to breathe or not and which rattle to bang. So she wasn’t thinking about the fetus. She was thinking about whether she was ready to be a mother. She hadn’t built a nest yet. She was on a military base. She thought a lot about the problems of her father, a lone parent during the time of troubles just after the Battle of Wunderland with the devastation of war all about them and the economy in a shambles.
She’d been such a brat to him, pushing, demanding, and learning how to con each of her new caretakers. She was still looking for a mother even now. She walked to the very center of Starbase, a seven-story atrium where you could catch your breath at a vista of balconies and get away from the claustrophobia of corridors. The bench in the central rock garden was an inviting place to sit. One of the cacti was flowering: a rare sight. On the bench she cried silently and watched the people go by in the shallow ethereal glides of low gravity Chloe slipped her mother’s iron wedding ring out of her blouse, still on its chain where it had always been, forgotten, and thought about the mother she had never known.
At headquarters, where she seldom went, she wandered among the desks of busy men and women in uniform. Some nodded. No one stopped her-they all knew she was the daughter of a powerful admiral. She peeked into Yankee’s cubbyhole with its clutter of screens and plotters, a VR helmet on his cabinet, another on the plotter, and another on the floor.
“Hi, stranger,” she said.
He took her hand and pulled her inside. The unexpected touch of his hand made her eyes water and she couldn’t finish what she had started to say. She let him fill the void. “Good to see you today,” he said brightly. “The problems have been coming in all morning and you’re a breath of fresh air. I’d ask you to sit, but there isn’t any room.”
“Problems seem to make you happy,” she said bravery. “We found my cousin. A flash came in from Gibraltar this morning.”
“Nora? Is she alive?”
“Yeah. Nora and all of her babies. She has six babies!” Yankee seemed both stunned and excited.
Chloe burst out sobbing-it gave her an excuse.
“That doesn’t sound like a problem to me! That’s wonderful! I mean about finding her,” she said after quickly recovering.
He took both her hands. “You’ve got something on your mind.”
“Just a little problem. I came to talk to you about it. It can wait.”
“Can it wait till this evening? How about dinner?”
“Dinner is fine.” She was relieved. That put off the awful moment. “If you’ve got time.” She began to hope that he had a good excuse to put it off even longer. Tomorrow she’d be more herself.
Yankee continued. “My problem is that even though we’ve found Nora, she’s on W’kkai and we’ll have to extract her. Do you know W’kkai? That’s seventeen light-years from here deep inside kzin space. It’s a major kzin stronghold. They’ve given me Jay Mazzetta and my old sidekick, Beany Heinmann, to help with planning. We’ve got to do some fancy juggling in the next few hours.”
“We could talk tomorrow”
“Tonight I might not even be here tomorrow. Not dinner at the Caf-at my place. I saw a drum of apples in the hydroponics market. Get some. I make a good flatlander apple pie. Think up something for the main course. Make it simple-marinated rabbit stew with onions or something. At seventeen hundred.” He gave her his key “Since you don’t have my fingerprints to get in.”
“We could postpone it”
“Girls don’t cry for nothing.”
Chloe fled.
She had to hurry and bustle kept her mind off what she was going to say at dinner. She didn’t want to get the meat from the Cafs lockers, which was where they usually got it when they cooked at his apartment, so she took the maglev to the ranch where Honest Al raised chickens, turkeys, guinea pigs, and rabbits on an assembly line in the caves. Al was thinking of getting into real pigs, midget pigs, but he wasn’t sure how they’d take to cages. “Any pig I ever knowed could snort and root his way out of any cage ever built”
She thought about turkey but Al and his Sons were butchering rabbits for freezing, so she took two because she was short on time and she was damned if she was going to pluck her own turkey! Bypassing the autochef was Yankee’s hobby but she’d already plucked and cleaned one chicken for him and enough was enough!
At hydroponics she picked up the usual potatoes and onions, but they had some kohlrabi and peppers and leeks so she bought those, too. And a peck of green apples. The nice thing about a stew was that you could make it out of anything. In his apartment she piled up the groceries and went straight to the autochef. Yankee laughed at her, but she needed the autochef for advice. It was a baseline military model-except for the luxury spice attachment- and it was a terrible cook but it gave very good advice.
She told it what she had bought and asked for a good recipe. It started with a lecture on how to prepare kohlrabi without ruining its taste. “But I want a stew.” It suggested stews. “But I want to marinate the rabbit! And I haven’t got time because he’s going to be here at seventeen hundred!” It provided her with an enzyme-enhanced sauce for quick marinating. She chopped up the rabbit and mixed rim a bowl with the sauce before attacking the
