He had no idea what to say to this. Screaming was right out. He shifted a bit closer to her instead.
She eyed him thoughtfully. "Some fellows, when I tell them this, get spooked and veer off. It's not contagious."
Roic swallowed hard. "I'm not running away."
"I see that." She rubbed her neck with her free hand; an orchid petal parted from her hair and caught upon her velvet-clad shoulder. "Part of me wishes the medics would get it settled. Part of me says, the hell with it. Every day is a gift. Me, I rip open the package and wolf it down on the spot."
He looked up at her in wonder. His grip tightened, as though she might be pulled from him as they sat, right now, if he didn't hold hard enough. He leaned over, reached across and picked off the fragile petal, touched it to his lips. He took a deep, scared breath. "Can you teach me how to do that?"
Her fantastic gold eyes widened. "Why, Roic! I think that's the most delicately worded proposition I've ever received. S' beautiful." An uncertain pause. "Um, that was a proposition, wasn't it? I'm not always sure I parlay Barrayaran."
Desperately terrified now, he blurted in what he imagined to be merc-speak, "Ma'am, yes, ma'am!"
This won an immense fanged smile-not in a version he'd ever seen before. It made him, too, want to fall over backward, though preferably not into a snowbank. He glanced around. The softly lit room was littered with abandoned plates and wineglasses, detritus of pleasure and good company. Low voices chatted idly in the next chamber. Somewhere in another room, softened by the distance, a clock was chiming the hour.
Roic declined to count the beats.
They floated in a bubble of fleeting time, live heat in the heart of a bitter winter. He leaned forward, raised his face, slid his hand around her warm neck, drew her face down to his. It wasn't hard. Their lips brushed, locked.
Several minutes later, in a shaken, hushed voice, he breathed, "Wow."
Several minutes after that, they went upstairs, hand in hand.
The End.
About the Author.
[Lois McMaster Bujold]
Lois McMaster Bujold was born in Ohio in 1949. She developed a passion for science fiction at the age of nine and having identified the techniques of the genre, started developing her own style.
After a spell as a biologist she turned to writing full time. The author of over twenty works of fiction and non-fiction, her first three novels, Shards of Honour, The Warrior's Apprentice and Ethan of Athos were all published in 1986.
Lois has remarked that her plots are often predicated on "the worst possible thing you could do" to a character. She writes with an apparently effortless fluidity of both style and story. Her work repeatedly shifts focus from the successes, exploits and glory of war to their human cost. For Bujold, characterization is the paramount concern and her plots depend both on character and the novums of technology.
She humanizes but does not idealize her casts of characters and accomplishes a feat rare in any form of fiction in developing that of her central protagonist, Miles Vorkosigan, throughout the series. We witness him progressively changing and maturing in each successive story.
On one hand Lois McMaster Bujold has been compared to Ursula Le Guin by female critics for her strong feminist stance, which she deftly subsumes, rather than overtly preaches in her work; on the other she has been praised by male critics for "writing like a man". ( "writing like a man" = "dumbing down". ;-)) Bujold herself, though acknowledging both viewpoints, says she would rather call herself "a human beingist".
Lois won the Nebula Award for Falling Free and The Mountains of Mourning and the Hugo Award for The Vor Game, Barrayar, Mirror Dance and The Mountains of Mourning. She was nominated for the John W Campbell Award in 1987. She lives in Minneapolis and has two children.
Lois M. Bujold's home page, a web site devoted to her work, The Bujold Nexus, may be found at www.dendarii.com.
[Version History]
1.0 - scanned, formatted, and spell-checked from trade paperback.
This is only one of the novellas from the multi-author anthology Irresistible Forces, ed by Catherine Asaro (which also has a novella written by Asaro in her Skolian world as well). At some point, I will get around to editing the rest of the anthology.
2.0 - September 9, 2004 - The_Ghiti - proofed in detail against deadtree format. As usual, if there was an oddity in dialogue, or an obscure alternate form, I left "as is." Armstrong uses a lot of mammoth paragraphs-this isn't a proofreading or scanning error. It's also apparent that major publishers are cutting back on their proofreading budgets-although the book had been spellchecked, it obviously hadn't been manually proofread ("want" instead of "went"; "at" instead of "it"; "then" and "than" interchanged frequently; many more).
Overall, this book doesn't have many error's or omissions.. if any. It is a very readable book, and is better when you use the yBook reader.
[MaK]