Free Nova by Samuel Delany

bed and began to rub his back with her good hand. "And didn't you want to see too, just a little bit?"
    "Yes," he said, after a moment.
    "That's what I thought. How does your stomach feel? I don't care what they say, I still don't see how that sour milk could be any good for you."
    He still hadn't mentioned the rum.
    "You go to sleep now." She went to the nursery door.
    He remembered her touching the switch.
    He remembered a moon darkening through the rotating roof.
     
     
     
    Pleiades Federation, Ark, New Ark, 3162
     
     
     
    Lorq always associated Prince Red with the coming and going of light.
    He was sitting naked by the swimming pool on the roof, reading for his petrology exam, when the purple leaves at the rock entrance shook. The skylight hummed with the gale outside; the towers of Ark, vaned to glide in the wind, were distorted behind the glittering frost.
    "Dad!" Lorq snapped off the reader and stood up. "Hey, I came in third in senior mathematics. Third!"
    Von Ray, in fur-rimmed parka stepped through the leaves. "And I suppose you call yourself studying now. Wouldn't it be easier in the library? How can you concentrate up here with all this distraction?"
    "Petrology," Lorq said, holding up his note-recorder. "I don't really have to study for that. I've got honors already."
    Only in the last few years had Lorq learned to relax under his parents' demand for perfection. Having learned, he had discovered that the demands were now ritual and phatic, and gave way to communication if they were allowed to ride out.
    "Oh," his father said. "You did." Then he smiled. The frost on his hair turned to water as he unlaced his parka. "At least you've been studying instead of crawling through the bowels of Caliban."
    "Which reminds me, Dad. I've registered her in the New Ark Regatta. Will you and Mother go up to see the finish?"
    "If we can. You know Mother hasn't been feeling too well recently. This past trip was a little rough. And you worry her with your racing."
    "Why? I haven't let it interfere with my schoolwork."
    Von Ray shrugged. "She thinks it's dangerous." He laid the parka over the rock. "We read about your prize at Trantor last month. Congratulations. She may worry about you, but she was as proud as a partridge when she could tell all those stuffy club women you were her son."
    "I wish you'd been there."
    "We wanted to be. But there was no way to cut a month off the tour. Come, I've got something to show you."
    Lorq followed his father along the stream that curled from the pool. Von Ray put his arm around his son's shoulder as they started the steps that dropped beside the waterfall into the house. At their weight, the steps began to escalate.
    "We stopped on Earth, this trip. Spent a day with Aaron Red. I believe you met him a long time ago. Red-shift Limited?"
    "Out on New Brazillia," Lorq said. "At the mine."
    "Do you remember that far back?" The stairs flattened and carried them across the conservatory. Cockatoos sprung from the brush, beat against the transparent wall where snow lay outside the bottom panes, then settled in the bloodflowers, knocking petals to the sand. "Prince was with him. A boy your age, perhaps a little older." Lorq had been vaguely aware of Prince's doings over the years as a child is aware of the activity of the children of parents' friends. Some time back, Prince had changed schools four times very rapidly, and the rumor that had filtered to the Pleiades was that only the fortunes of Red-shift, Ltd., kept the transfers from being openly labeled expulsion.
    "I remember him," Lorq said. "He only had one arm."
    "He wears a black glove to the shoulder with a jeweled armband at the top, now. He's a very impressive young man. He said he remembered you. You two got into some mischief or other back then. He, at least, seems to have quieted down some."
    Lorq shrugged from under his father's arm and stepped onto the white rugs that scattered the winter garden. "What do you want to show me?"
    Father