“I remember you.”

“Prince does too. He was seven. That means I was five.”

“What have you been doing for the last dozen years?”

“Growing older gracefully, while you’ve been the enfant terrible in the raceways of the Pleiades, flaunting your parents’ ill-gotten gains.”

“Look!” He gestured toward the people watching from the opposite bank. Some apparently thought he waved; they waved back.

Ruby laughed and waved too. “Do they realize how special we are? I feel very special tonight.” She raised her face with eyes closed. Blue fireworks tinted her lids.

“Those people, they’re too far away to see how beautiful you are.”

She looked at him again.

“It’s true. You are—”

“We are…”

“—very beautiful.”

“Don’t you think that’s a dangerous thing to say to your hostess, Captain Von Ray?”

“Don’t you think that was a dangerous thing to say to your guest?”

“But we’re unique, young Captain. If we want, we’re allowed to flirt with Dan—”

The streetlights about them extinguished.

There was a cry from the side street; the strings of colored bulbs as well were dead. As Lorq turned from the embankment, Ruby took his shoulder.

Along the island, lights and windows flickered twice. Someone screamed. Then the illumination returned, and with it laughter.

“My brother!” Ruby shook her head. “Everyone told him he was going to have power trouble, but he insisted on having the whole island wired for electricity. He thought electric light would be more romantic than the perfectly good induced-fluorescence tubes that were here yesterday—and have to go back up tomorrow by city ordinance. You should have seen him trying to hunt up a generator. It’s a lovely six-hundred-year-old museum piece that fills up a whole room. I’m afraid Prince is an incurable romantic—”

Lorq placed his hand over hers.

She looked. She took her hand away. “I have to go now. I promised I’d help him.” Her smile was not a happy thing. The piercing expression etched itself on his heightened senses. “Don’t wear Prince’s mask any more.” She lifted the bird of paradise from the rail. “Just because he chooses to insult you, you needn’t display that insult to everyone here.”

Lorq looked down at the pirate’s head, confused.

Foil eyes glittered at him from blue feathers. “Besides”—her voice was muffled now—”you’re too handsome to cover yourself up with something so mean and ugly.” And she was crossing the street, was disappearing in the crowded alley.

He looked up and down the sidewalk, and did not want to be there.

He crossed after her, plunged into the same crowd, only realizing halfway down the block that he was following her.

She was beautiful.

That was not bliss.

That was not the party’s excitement.

That was her face and the way it turned and formed to her words.

That was the hollow in him so evident now because moments before, during a few banal exchanges, it had been so full of her face, her voice.

Trouble with all of this is that there’s no cultural solidity underneath.” (Lorq glanced to the side where the griffon was speaking to earnest armadillos, apes, and others.) “There’s been so much movement from world to world that we have no real art any more, just a pseudo-inter-planetary…”

In the doorway, on the ground, lay a lion’s head and a frog’s. Back in the darkness, Dan, his back sweating from the dance, nuzzled the girl with sequined shoulders.

And halfway down the block, Ruby passed up a set of steps behind scrolled iron.

“Ruby!”

He ran forward—”Hey, watch—”

“Look out. Where do you—”

“Slow down—”

“—swung round the banister, and ran up the steps after her, “Ruby Red!” and through a door. “Ruby…?”

Wide tapestries between thin mirrors cut all echo from his voice. The door by the marble table was ajar. So he crossed the foyer, opened it.

She turned on swirling light.

Beneath the floor, tides of color flowed the room, flickering on the heavy, black-in-crystal legs of Vega Republic furniture. Without shadow, she stepped back. “Lorq! Now what are you doing here?” She had just placed her bird mask on one of the circular shelves that drifted at various levels around the room.

“I wanted to talk to you some more.”

Her brows were dark arches over her eyes. “I’m sorry. Prince has planned a pantomime for the float that goes down the middle of the island at midnight. I have to change.”

One of the shelves had drifted toward him. Before it could respond to his body temperature and float away, Lorq removed a liquor bottle from the veined glass panel. “Do you have to rush?” He raised the bottle. “I want to find out who you are, what you do, what you think. I want to tell you all about me.”

“Sorry.” She turned toward the spiral lift that would take her up to the balcony.

His laughter stopped her. She turned back to see what had caused it.

“Ruby?”

And continued turning till she faced him again.

He crossed the surging floor and put his hands on the smooth cloth falling at her shoulders. His fingers closed on her arms. “Ruby Red.” His inflection brought puzzlement to her face. “Leave here with me. We can go to another city, on another world, under another sun. Don’t the configurations of the stars bore you from here? I know a world where the constellations are called the Mad Sow’s Litter, the Greater and Lesser Lynx, the Eye of Vahdamin.

She took two glasses from a passing shelf. “What are you high on anyway?” Then she smiled. “Whatever it is, it becomes you.”

“Will you go?”

“No.”

“Why not?” He poured frothing amber into tiny glasses.

“First.” She handed him the glass as he placed the bottle on another passing shelf. “Because it’s terribly rude—I don’t know how you do it back on Ark—for a hostess to run out on her party before midnight.”

“After midnight then?”

“Second.” She sipped the drink and wrinkled her nose (he was surprised, shocked that her clear, clear skin could support anything so human as a wrinkle). “Prince has been planning this party for months, and I don’t want to upset him by not showing up when I promised.” Lorq touched his fingers to her cheek. “Third.” Her eyes snapped from the brim of her glass to lock his. “I’m Aaron Red’s daughter and you are the dark, red-haired, high, handsome son”—she turned her head away—”of a blond thief!” Cold air on his fingertips where her warm arm had been,

He put his palm against her face, slid his fingers into her hair. She turned away from his band and stepped onto the spiral lift. She rose up and away, adding, “And you haven’t got much pride if you let Prince mock you the way he does.”

Lorq jumped onto the edge as the lift came around, She stepped back, surprised.

“What’s all this talk of thieves, piracy, and mocking mean?” Anger, not at her but at the confusion she caused. “I don’t understand and I don’t know if it sounds like anything I want to. I don’t know how it is on Earth, but on Ark you don’t make fun of your guests.”

Ruby looked at her glass, his eyes, her glass again. “I’m sorry.” And then his eyes. “Go outside, Lorq. Prince will be here in a few minutes. I shouldn’t have spoken to you at all—”

“Why?” The room revolved, falling. “Whom you should speak to, whom you shouldn’t; I don’t know what brings this all up, but you’re talking as if we were little people.” He laughed again, a slow low sound in his chest, rising to shake his shoulders. “You’re Ruby Red?” He took her shoulders and pulled her forward. For a moment her blue eyes beat. “And you take all this nonsense that little people say seriously?”

“Lorq, you’d better—”

“I’m Lorq Von Ray! And you’re Ruby, Ruby, Ruby Red!” The lift had already taken them past the first balcony.

“Lorq, please. I’ve got to—”

“You’ve got to come with me! Will you go over the rim of Draco with me, Ruby? Will you come to Ark, where you and your brother have never been? Or come with me to Sao Orini. There’s a house there that you’d remember if you saw it, there at the galaxy’s edge.” They rose by the second balcony, rotated toward the third. “We’ll play behind the bamboo on the stone lizards’ tongues—”