Chapter Five
LUCIANA CLIMBED OUT OF THE taxiboat and straightened up her dress. “Thank you,” she told the bot, while trying to ignore the big house.
“You’re more than welcome, Luciana Hume,” the bot replied. “Do you need a ride back tonight?”
“Most definitely!” she said quickly. “Only I don’t know how long I’ll be.” Not long at all, if she had her way.
“Then you can call for a taxi when you are ready and we will arrive as soon as we can.”
She wasn’t sure if the bot was referring to itself in the third person plural, or all the taxiboats. Since she had last been in the Palatine, all the human taxiboat drivers had gone. All the boats were bot-driven now. She had always preferred human drivers.
The taxiboat lifted up from the pad and barely ruffled the hem of her dress, while she stood examining the house the boat had delivered her to.
She only recalled now the fuss that had been made when the house was built.
It had been designed in an ancient Earth style called “Brutalist,” that someone had found in the archives.
She supposed that “someone” was Brice, as he lived here.
Or perhaps he had bought it from the historical architecture buff.
The house was all concrete and angles, with dark glass surrounding the living spaces.
A cantilever deck hung off one end of the house.
Vines and green growing things dangled from all the horizontal surfaces.
It shouldn’t fit in with the flower-filled glade it occupied, yet it did. It looked as though it had been here forever, and would last another millennium.
Not for the first time, Luciana considered the wisdom of stepping into this house. Only, she had agreed to come, so she was committed to at least presenting herself at the front door.
If she could find the front door.
Then she noticed the path of tamped down pebbles, lined with ferns that softened the edges. The path wound around to the side of the house under the deck. She followed it, and found herself at a door that was glass like the rest of the walls under here.
Brice was standing at a kitchen counter, doing something that she couldn’t quite determine, because the darkened glass hid details. She knocked on the door, for there was no call pad.
Brice looked up. He moved around the counter, cane in hand, wove through low couches and armchairs (which were not big like the one in his office, her jittery, yammering mind whispered), and opened the door.
He didn’t smile. “I’ve left something boiling.
Come in.” He turned and moved back to the counter, moving fast.
Bewildered, Luciana stepped inside and shut the door.
It was surprisingly heavy. Then she moved over to the counter.
It was a lot wider than the standard peninsulas that came with the standard houses in the Capitol and the Esquiline.
Although it was hard to judge the true width because at the moment it was covered in vegetables.
She had only seen vegetables in videos and once at an Endurance Day picnic, when someone who had painstakingly grown vegetables in soil, here in the Palatine, had brought them to the picnic to show them.
His table had been surrounded by curious people for hours, who prodded and sniffed at them.
“Vegetables?” she asked. “You…grow them?”
Brice didn’t smile. “I printed them.”
“I didn’t know the food printers could print whole vegetables,” she confessed.
“The food printers can print a lot more than that, if you dig into the files.” He was standing behind a silvery metal container that had steam coming from the top of it and he shook something into it as she watched.
“You’re…cooking, aren’t you? I’ve heard that some people like to cook things from scratch. I’ve never seen it done before.”
“Cooking is soothing,” he said. “I learned how after…” He frowned into the container. “After the accident.”
After his tankball playing days ended.
He looked to his right. “Crunch!” he called.
From an open doorway well beyond the big counter, a mobile bot rolled into the room.
“Sit down, Luciana,” Brice told her. “Crunch has a glass of wine for you. I’d carry it over to you myself, but I’d end up wearing more of it than the glass would have left in it. Crunch, the wine.”
“Where should I sit?” Luciana asked, because there were many seats in the room.
“Right there, where you can watch, if you like,” Brice said. “You like stools, I recall.”
She spotted the stools pushed under the overhang of the counter. She pulled one out, sat and arranged her dress. The bot rolled right up to her and a compartment on the top opened to reveal two glasses.
“Would you prefer red or white?” the bot asked.
“Oh, definitely red,” she said, and picked up the glass with the ruby red liquid in it. “Um…thank you?”
“You’re welcome, Luciana.” It rolled away almost silently.
“You’re not used to domestic bots,” Brice observed.
“No. What are you cooking?”
“Spaghetti sauce.”
That seemed…simple. And the red sauce the printers produced didn’t seem as though it would need all these vegetables.
She sipped the wine. It was one of the wines she liked. She sipped it. She wanted a clear head. She put the glass down on the edge of the counter, the only space that was left.
Brice made a sound of satisfaction, put a lid on the steaming container and moved around the counter so he was standing at the end of it. “It shouldn’t be too much longer now.”
“You just let it…cook?”
“Boil. The sauce is already done. That’s just the pasta. I put it in the water when I saw the taxiboat land.” He rested the cane against the counter and looked at her. “I shouldn’t have gone to your house after the soiree.”
She drew in a startled breath. “You meant it when you said it’s just dinner and you wanted to talk in private, didn’t you? No pleasantries, straight into it.”
“I didn’t think you’d want the pleasantries.” He rested his hand on the counter. “I shouldn’t have gone to your house, and you shouldn’t have gone to my office, but we did, and it can’t be undone. And I’ve spent two days thinking about it, and I’m not sure I want it undone, anymore.”
She rubbed her forehead. “Oh, holy cow bells,” she breathed and reached for the wine.
“You haven’t been sleeping,” he added.
Her heart jumped a bit at that. “You hacked my biorhythms?”
“I didn’t have to. You’ve got shadows forming under your eyes, you’re rubbing the tension away from your forehead, and you can’t lie convincingly to save the ship. I believed you as much as you believed me when you said you were sleeping just fine, this afternoon.”
She dropped her hand. “It was two good nights, Brice. That’s all. I mean, two…occasions. That’s it. I don’t know what you mean by you don’t want it undone, because there’s nothing to undo. You and I…we’re incompatible. We move in two different worlds.”
“There’s only one world on the Endurance.”
“Is there? Then how is it that despite our ages, until the soiree, we have never met in person? There are only five thousand people on the ship at any one time. We should have at least seen each other across a room, yet we haven’t. That speaks volumes all by itself.”
“You rarely move out of the Capitol,” he said. “That explains why we haven’t met until now.”
“While you whizz by on the Artery each day, from one end of the ship to the other, by-passing the plebians.”
His brow furrowed.
“Sorry, that was a cheap shot,” she said.
“Followed by an immediate apology…” he muttered. His gaze met hers. “And this is why I don’t want to undo anything. There are depths in you.”
She shivered. “No, there aren’t. Brice, get this out of your head. We can’t…whatever you’re thinking about. It wouldn’t work.”
“You don’t know that.”
“What are you thinking, anyway?” she demanded.
If it was just more sex, business-opponents-with-benefits, that would be…
well, she wasn’t sure she liked that idea from a business perspective.
Anything beyond that was edging into relationship territory, and that was just ridiculous.
So, first, she had to know what he was thinking so she could dismantle his argument one piece at a time.
“Why do you want the stalls, anyway?” he asked. It was unexpected.
She wanted to say it was none of his business. Because it wasn’t. And if she told him the real reason, he might use it as leverage to say no.
However, she couldn’t push through to the end of this uncomfortable conversation and be able to leave if she threw up blocks and refused to answer his questions. If she cooperated just a little, that would hurry things along.
“Once I have bought your five stalls, I will be the largest commerce management company on the ship,” she said truthfully.
“Hmm.” His gaze shifted away from her. She sensed he was disappointed.
“Why won’t you sell them?” she returned, not liking the implied criticism. “They’re so badly managed they can’t be making any money for you.”
His gaze shifted back to her. “Is that so?”
“It is,” she said as calmly as she could.
“Do you even check in with the managers? They’re lazy and have no idea how to sell.
The product displays aren’t maximized for the space, so they lead the customer’s gaze along the stall, and the signage is awful—” She made herself halt.
“Anyway, you would be off-loading a negative asset.”
“They’re not for sale.” He said it flatly.
“Just to me, or to anyone?” she asked curiously.
He moved back around the counter and did something with the metal container with the pasta in it. Then he picked up the whole container and turned around to the sink against the wall and poured everything into the sink.
Luciana’s lips parted as her jaw sagged. Did he just…throw away the pasta?
He put the container on the counter beside the sink, then reached in and picked up another metal container, this one with holes in it. Water poured through the holes.
Oh… Her mental voice was pathetic. She felt just a little bit stupid.