Ran forced a smile, hugged the woman close for a moment, then turned her loose.
"You know," he said in a falsely cheerful voice as they headed toward a kiosk selling home-brewed beer in plastic cups, "I thought Dad was a cold-hearted bastard. He never gave me a pat on the back when I did something right, and he never let it pass when I screwed up. And then he died."
Ran reached over without seeming to look and caught Wanda's hand, squeezing it. "He was a bastard, I guess. But I wish the poor bastard was around. So I could apologize for all the things I thought about him."
* * *
The single monorail car rocked around an outcrop almost concealed by the jungle. A trio of long-necked female herbivores cocked their heads at the vehicle. The male, forty meters long and twice the bulk of the members of his harem, hooted querulously and puffed out his bright red throat wattles. Ms. Dewhurst gasped in delighted amazement.
The car hummed back into its tunnel through the vegetation.
Wade chuckled contentedly. "There, old fellow," he said to Dewhurst "I told you this is the way to sightsee on Hobilo. Basic passage on one of the local runs, none of this nonsense about renting an aircar."
"If we'd rented a car, we wouldn't have just whipped by them and gone," Dewhurst grumbled, fulfilling his end of the symbiotic relationship.
"I shouldn't have thought you'd be driving under the canopy, here," Belgeddes said. "I wouldn't, at any rate. I leave that sort of thing to people like Dickie, here. He never saw a risk without wanting to take it."
"Tsk!" said Wade. "If I'd been thinking, I'd have suggested that we bring a cooler like that vendor at the back of the car has. This would be a good time for a beer—if I'd only thought ahead."
"Vendor?" asked Da Silva, looking at the half dozen Hobilo natives sharing the vehicle with the tourists. One of them was a woman of indeterminate age, seated on an insulated cooler that looked bigger than she herself was.
"So I surmise," agreed Wade. He looked tactfully away. Da Silva stood up, fumbled out a credit chip, and made his way down the swaying aisle toward the woman.
"Well then, Belgeddes," Dewhurst said. "We could all have rented one car and Wade here could have driven us himself. What were you here on Hobilo, Wade? Afield marshal?"
Dewhurst turned to glance out at the landscape of fleshy, spike-edged leaves just as a pair of lizards banked away from the window. The creatures were only thirty centimeters long nose to tail, and they were cruising for arthropods stirred up by the monorail's passage. They glided on flaps of skin stretched by their hind legs while they used their webbed forepaws like canard fins to steer.
Dewhurst saw open jaws of needle teeth fringing scarlet palates. He shouted and jumped back while his wife, who'd watched the lizards' approach, oohed in delight.
"Actually, my friend . . ." Wade said as he looked toward the jungle. His mouth held only the slightest twist of satisfaction. "The last time I drove in this tangle, I hit a tree and had to hike the next twenty klicks. Nothing I'd choose to do again, either one of those things, I assure you."
Da Silva came back with five glass-bottled beers, jeweled with condensation.
Ms. Dewhurst looked at the local brew with an expression mingled of curiosity and horror, the way she might have viewed the thing her cat was playing with on the rug. She waved the offer away.
"All the more for the rest of us," Belgeddes said contentedly.
Dewhurst mopped his face with a kerchief and settled his expression behind the cloth. "Racing to rescue hostages during the Long Troubles, I dare say, Wade?" he said in a slightly wheezy voice. "When you had the crash, I mean?"
"Coming back, actually, weren't you, Dickie?" Belgeddes said around the mouth of his beer.
"Yes, that's right," Wade agreed. "And they put a burst into the rear linkages—firing from the church dome." He shook his head sadly. "I was a young fellow then, idealistic. I didn't dream the rebels would put armed men in their churches, for pity's sake!"
"Dewhurst was wondering if you were a field marshal," Belgeddes said. "That's not how I remember it."
"Certainly not," Wade said. "Civilian, purely a civilian at the time. But the poor fellow's daughters—Varkezadhy, it was, planetary manager for Simourgh Corporation—had been kidnapped as hostages. Whatever you thought of the chap—"
"Simourgh gives a bad name to greed," Da Silva said through pursed lips.
"—or of Simourgh," Wade agreed, nodding, "I couldn't let that happen to a pair of sweet little children. Slipped in from behind on foot—"