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had stood in their dressing-room, all fussed around by servants (and enjoying
the attention and the luxury of it, because their father had lost a lot of
money that year, and had dismissed all their own staff save his android
butler), and seen her half-sister in her first ball-gown (albeit borrowed,
like her own, from a better-off second cousin), with her hair piled up like a
woman's, her budding breasts pushed by the bodice to form a cleavage, and her
eyes, made-up, glowing with confidence and a kind of power, Sharrow had
thought, with some amusement and only
a hint of jealousy, that perhaps dear, tedious old Geis might just find Brey
attractive after all.
She'd watched Geis as he and some of his officer-cadet friends entered the
parry. They were in the uniform of the
Alliance Navy; the ball itself was a fund-raising event for the Tax Alliance
and Geis had been into space for a couple of months on an Alliance warship.
She realised then that she hadn't really looked at Geis for a year or two; not
properly looked at him.
She had never liked uniforms, but Geis looked almost handsome in his. He moved
less awkwardly; he spotted a dark, trimmed beard which quite suited him and
made him look older, and he had lost the puppy fat he'd carried through his
mid-teens. She had drifted close to him, unseen, early on in the evening
before the ball properly started, hearing him laughing lustily with his
friends and hearing them laughing at what he said, and - perhaps, she told
herself later, in the spell of those gales of male laughter - had determined
then not to treat Geis with her usual disdain, should he ask her for a dance.
She would see what happened, she thought, walking away from the young men. She
would do nothing so petty and low as try to entrap her cousin just to prove
something to her foolish little half-sister, but if he really had improved so,
and if he did, at some point, maybe, ask her for a dance . . .
He asked her for the first dance. For the rest of the evening they hardly left
each other's side between dances, or each other's arms during them.
She watched, as she stepped and moved and was held and turned and displayed
and admired on the dance floor:
Breyguhn's eyes took on a look of surprise at first; then that slowly became
hurt, until that was replaced by scorn and what she must have thought was
recognition; upon which her eyes filled with tears, and finally with hate.
She danced on, exulting, not caring. Geis looked as dashing and handsome as
Breyguhn had said. He had changed, he had more to talk about, had become more
like a man than a boy. Even his remaining gaucheness seemed like enthusiasm;
gusto, indeed. She listened to him and looked at him and danced with him and
thought about him, and decided that had she not been exactly who she was, had
she been just a little more like everybody else and just a little less
difficult to please, she could almost have fallen for her cousin.
Breyguhn left the ball early with their father and his mistress, in a storm of
tears. A duenna was left to wait for
Sharrow. She and Geis danced until they were the last couple left on the dance
floor and the band were making deliberate mistakes and taking long pauses
between numbers. She even let Geis kiss her - though she didn't respond -
when they went out to the dawn-lit garden for some fresh air (her chaperone
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ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
coughing delicately from a nearby bower), then she'd had herself taken home.
She had seen Geis face-to-face only twice in the two years after that; she had
been away at finishing school, then started at Yadayeypon University, in both
places discovering the fresh, unexpected and surprising pleasures of sex, and
the power her looks and her birthright (judiciously deployed) gave her over
young-and not so young-men who were vastly more moodily interesting and
intellectually stimulating than cousin Geis, the part-time Navy goon and
geekishly successful businessman.
The following year, at her father's funeral, they'd exchanged a few words
(though she'd overheard rather more), and when she did finally agree to meet
him properly - at the launch of an airship (which he had named after her! The
embarrassment!) - she had been rather curt with him, claiming she had been too
busy to answer his letters, and just hated talking on the phone. He had looked
hurt, and she'd felt a terrible, cruel urge to laugh.
She'd seen him once more before the war, a few months later, at a New Year
party he'd thrown in a villa in the
Blue Hills, in Piphram.
Then the Five Per Cent War had finally broken out, and she had joined the
anti-Tax forces, partly because theirs seemed the more romantic cause, partly
because she considered them the more politically progressive side, and partly
as a kind of revenge.
And if it had done nothing else - she thought, as she drained her glass and
smiled ruefully at the great wide screen that was the window into Bencil
Dornay's party - the war had finally signalled the end of her wilfully
extended and determinedly wanton girlhood.
And more, she thought, smiling sadly at the dancing, happy people on the other
side of the windows, remembering that last engagement, frantic and terrible
and pitiless in the cold and the silence of the dark seconds of space between
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