Free The Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon Page B

minutes of peace, before things started… Tom sat down beside Lucia, who had begun her stretches, and reached for his toes. It used to be easy. Marjory sat on Lucia’s other side and leaned forward, trying to touch her forehead to her knees.
    “Lou should be here tonight,” Lucia said. She gave Marjory a sideways look.
    “I wondered if I’d bothered him,” Marjory said.“Asking him to come with me to the airport.”
    “I don’t think so,” Lucia said. “I’d have said he was very pleased indeed. Did anything happen?”
    “No. We picked up my friend; I dropped Lou back here. That was all. Don said something about his gear—”
    “Oh, Tom made him pick up lots of the gear, and Don was going to just shove it in the racks anyhow.
    Tom made him do it right. As many times as he’s seen it done, he ought to have the way of it by now, but Don… he just will not learn. Now that he’s not with Helen anymore, he’s really backsliding into the slapdash boy we had years back. I wish he’d grow up.”
    Tom listened without joining in. He knew the signs: any moment now Lucia would tackle Marjory about her feelings for Lou and for Don, and he wanted to be far away when that happened. He finished stretching and stood up just as Lou came around the corner of the house.
    AS HE CHECKED THE LIGHTS AND MADE A FINAL SWEEP OF THE area for possible hazards that might cause injury, Tom watched Lou stretching… methodical as always, thorough as always. Some people might think Lou was dull, but Tom found him endlessly fascinating. Thirty years before, he might well never have made it in the ordinary way; fifty years before, he would have spent his life in an institution. But improvements in early intervention, in teaching methods, and in computer-assisted sensory integration exercises had given him the ability to find good employment, live independently, deal with the real world on near-equal terms.
    A miracle of adaptation and also, to Tom, a little sad.Younger people than Lou, born with the same neurological deficit, could be completely cured with gene therapy in the first two years of life. Only those whose parents refused the treatment had to struggle, as Lou had done, with the strenuous therapies Lou had mastered. If Lou had been younger, he’d not have suffered. He might be normal, whatever that meant.
    Yet here he was, fencing. Tom thought of the jerky, uneven movements Lou had made when he first Page 34

    began—it had seemed, for the longest time, that Lou’s fencing could be only a parody of the real thing.
    At each stage of development, he’d had the same slow, difficult start and slow, difficult progression…
    from foil to épée , from épée to rapier, from single blade to foil and dagger, épée and dagger, rapier and dagger, and so on.
    He had mastered each by sheer effort, not by innate talent. Yet now that he had the physical skills, the mental skills that took otherfencers decades seemed to come to him in only a few months.
    Tom caught Lou’s eye and beckoned him over. “Remember what I said—you need to be fencing with the top group now.”
    “Yes…” Lou nodded,then made a formal salute. His opening moves seemed stiff, but he quickly shifted into a style that took advantage of his more fractal movement. Tom circled, changed direction, feinted and probed and offered fake openings, and Lou matched him movement for movement, testing him as he was tested. Was there a pattern in Lou’s moves, other than a response to his own? He couldn’t tell. But again and again, Lou almost caught him out, anticipating his own moves… which must mean, Tom thought, that he himself had a pattern and Lou had spotted it.
    “Pattern analysis,” he said aloud, just as Lou’s blade slipped his and made a touch on his chest. “I should have thought of that.”
    “Sorry,” Lou said. He almost always said, “Sorry,” and then looked embarrassed.
    “Good touch,” Tom said. “I was trying to think how you were doing