Laurent cleared his throat. "There's nothing wrong with cats . . . strictly speaking."
The trail began only a few meters from the door. It was shiny and slick, as if incised into the snow with lasers. On the mountain side of the trail the snow had been melted into an overhang, forming a half-cylinder of ice that wound downward around the peak. On the other side loomed a vertiginous drop.
Zai felt a bit dizzy, possibly from exhaustion. With only an hour of darkness every night, they hadn't slept much in the last three days.
He took a deep breath. "\ hope your house knows what it's doing." "Sometimes I think my house knows altogether too much," Nara said. "It has an excess of time on its hands."
Zai looked up at the building, which seemed quite modest from the outside. Most of its bulk was hidden within the stone of the mountain, its true extent revealed only by the glimmer of a hundred polarized windows. Not all looked out from Nara's living quarters, of course. He had toured the gardens this morning, or at least some of them. The warrens that had produced three days of sumptuous meals seemed endless.
That sort of decadence always resulted when machines were given too much autonomy. Zai adjusted his tunic waist, which was growing tighter by the day.
"I get the feeling it can still hear us," he said.
"Probably." She shrugged in her coat.
Laurent pulled the glove from his real hand and ran his fingers through the short, yellow-gray fur.
"Paracoyote," Nara said.
His eyes widened. "You're wearing a canine? That's a crime on Vada."
She laughed. "They're a pest on Vasthold, to say the least."
Zai wondered if Nara knew how extraordinary it was to come from a planet where "pest" could mean something bigger than an insect. On Vada, hunting was only allowed on stocked private lands, a sport for the unthinkably rich. "Vasthold is fortunate that terraforming has taken so well. Did you kill it yourself?"
"No, I haven't hunted since I was a kid." She smiled, fingering the fur. "And then only with a slingshot. This was a political gift from a conservationist group. But taken in the wild, with a bow, I think."
Zai shook his head. "We have no wild mammals on Vada."
He placed the sled on the snow.
"I wish I could take you on a proper sled ride, Nara. With a team of huskies, across a floe of new sea ice."
"Sea Zee? You mean without land underneath?"
"It's very smooth when it's new."
"No, thank you." "Well, after a few days of strong wind, pressure ridges break up he landscape."
She laughed. "It's not the monotony, Laurent. It's the thought of lothing but ice between me and an ocean!"
"There is safety equipment. When you fall through--"
"When?"
He cleared his throat again. "Perhaps we should get started."
"Yes. I'm beginning to think you're delaying us intentionally. Afraid Df heights, Laurent?"
He looked down the trail. The surface looked somewhat glassy, a 3it fast. Too slick for dogs' feet, certainly. He wondered if the runners .vould find any purchase to keep them on the track. The trail was Danked to keep them from flying off the mountain, but they had no way to control their speed.
"Not heights."
"What then?"
"Putting my life in the hands of an Al."
She smiled, and sat down on the front of the sled. "Come on, Laurent. It's a very clever house."
It was marvelous.
The sled accelerated quickly, like a dropship spiraling down a gravity well. Laurent clung to it fiercely, his fingers wound into the leather straps that held it together. The runners found the ruts pre-cut deep into the ice and stayed in them, banking comfortably with the turns.
The trail seemed never to pass into the shadow of the mountain; the clever house reflected sunlight from the surrounding peaks, the snow in their path glowing with the warm red of the rising sun. But his eyes still reduced to slits against the wind, the crisp air turned freezing by their velocity.
Nara leaned back into Laurent's chest, laughing hysterically, her arms wrapped around his legs. She was warm, and her chaotic hair 229 brushed his cheeks. He squeezed his knees together tightly to hold her in the plummeting sled, and to keep her warmth against him.
After four turns around the mountain, the trail slanted upward, slowing them as it straightened. The rise hid the terrain before them.
"I'd do that again," Laurent shouted as the sled came almost to a halt.
"I don't think it's done," Nara said, shaking her head. "Are you familiar with the term 'roller-coaster'?"
"I don't think-- Godspite!"
The sled had crested the rise, revealing a gut-loosening decline dotted with giant boulders. The trail ahead was lined with high snow banks, but the ruts guiding the runners suddenly disappeared, leaving the sled free for the straight decline. The slope was forty-five degrees at least.
"It's trying to kill us!" Zai shouted.
"We'll see!"
Laurent and Nara clutched each other, screaming, as the sled dropped into the canyon of ice.
After the acceleration of the first mad drop, the trail leveled, descending gradually between icy walls. The exposed interior of the glacier was deep blue, the color of a clear Vadan sky on the Day of Apogee. In the rift's protection, the air was still except for the wind of their passage, but Laurent held his lover closer. He touched his lips to her left ear, which was bright red and as cold as the metal buttons of her coat.
"Remember when I said we had no technology for slowing down time?" he whispered.
"Yes?"
"I was wrong. This lasts forever."
She reached back and put a gloved finger to his lips softly, and Laurent felt foolish. It wasn't right to speak of these things. This was a fragile endlessness, soon followed by an onrushing of events that would part them for decades.
Tomorrow, they would take the suborbital back to the capital. The commissioning of the Lynx was set for the day after. On Home, any such event would be a tremendous affair, lasting an entire night and filling the great square before the Diamond Palace with supplicants, zealots, and status-seekers. After that, Captain Zai had only a matter of weeks to train his crew in orbit before leaving for Legis.
But he had these moments here with Nara. Against the weight of years and the depredations of the Time Thief, he had only the sharp and brittle thing that was now. Laurent wondered if it were possible that any alliance formed across days could really last decades. Or would what they'd shared in this icy waste prove illusory, born of torturous memories, lack of sleep, and the romance of its own improbability?