Jafre stared out his office window, stared out across the meadow as the park lights brightened, as Lacigo slowly dimmed and dipped below the horizon. Half-night: Vano still hung high against the stars, like heap of coal someone had shoveled up into the sky. Too red to read by, as they said, and too dim to dance.
“Mister President, are you even listening to me?” said the man on the other side of Jafre's desk.
On Earth, the meadow would have been green, dappled here and there with colored flowers. The setting sun would be yellower and much, much brighter than wan Lacigo, and framed in sky of rich blue. Here, all of it was gray and brown. Ugly, but still it was with reluctance that Jafre pulled his gaze away.
“I was hoping you'd left,” he said finally. “Would you care to? There's still time.”
The young man, one Rodgar Twidd, fumed. “Mister President, I'm quite serious. Unless those demands on your screen are met, to the letter, the Youth Coalition will picket the docks at Port Chrysanthemum. I'm sure the Earthers will be curious to learn—”
“The Earthers,” Jafre cut in with his no-kidding-now voice, “have better things to do than listen to whiny children.” He glanced down at the list before him. “Eliminate the children's curfew? Full suffrage at age twenty-five? Are you actually serious about this?”
Rodgar Twidd leaned forward, his eyes and nostrils flaring, fingers spread on the far edge of the desk. “Yes. We are.”
“'We?'“ Jafre leaned back and grinned humorlessly. “The Youth Coalition is, what, about twelve people? I'm not exactly quaking in my shoes.” He touched a button on the desk, and spoke loudly: “Martin, would you send security in here, please?”
“Yes, sir,” said a voice from the desk.
Twidd recoiled, looking both insulted and alarmed as the door opened up and two of Jafre's guards hulked in.
“You can't arrest me,” Twidd protested. “I'm just speaking my mind. I've got the right—”
Four meaty hands grabbed him and hauled him to his feet.
“We can't arrest him,” Jafre told the guards in mocking voice. “He's got the right. Help me out, hah? Call this kid's mother.”
Now Rodgar Twidd turned bright red, and struggled hard against his captors. “Oh, come on! Mister President, come on, I'm not some fifteen year-old—”
“The Earthers have child activity laws, too, you know,” Jafre told the young man as the guards led him away. “Stricter than ours, I believe. I doubt you'd find sympathetic audience with them. And—” his voice dropped in pitch “—if I were you I wouldn't try it.”
“Darkness,” Twidd cursed, “we won't be ignored! You can't...” But he was out the door by then, and his protests faded quickly into the background.
Twidd and his cohorts would, in fact, be ignored. It seemed the only fitting punishment for their annoying him like this.
Jafre swiveled in his chair, looked out through the window again. But Lacigo had gone, leaving Vano and the park lights the only sources of illumination. Damn. He'd waited over eight decades for the Terran ship to arrive, counted the setting of Lacigo nearly four thousand times, literally counting the days of his Malhelan exile. And here he'd missed the last one.
Well damn the Youth Coalition.
A bell chimed. “Jafre?” said the voice from his desk.
“Yes, Martin?”
“Your wife is on the line.”
Jafre put a hand to his brow. “Tell her I'm dead,” he said, and then sighed, because he knew Martin would do no such thing.
Indeed, on Jafre's telkom screen, the eighteen demands of the Youth Coalition vanished, and the image of Asia Gill replaced them.
“Why aren't you here?” she demanded without preamble.
“Because I haven't left yet,” Jafre said reasonably. The matching reasonable expression had found its way onto his face, and he made the extra effort to keep his hands relaxed in his lap. It would not do to let Asia know she'd annoyed him, to let her know she had affected him at all. Such knowledge was never of positive benefit to their relationship, or to Jafre's end of it, at least. “Just some small affairs to attend to. Did you get my suit fluffed?”
“Have you tried on your new boots?” she countered, unwilling to answer his question directly.
“My new boots?” Jafre said, not questioning her but musing privately, as if he couldn't quite remember the answer but would in a moment or two. In fact, he had tried the boots on several times, and was quite satisfied with their fit. But Asia's eyes had that shifty look that said she was in the middle of something, that she was hurrying through this call as part of grander schedules, and Jafre simply couldn't resist dragging things out a bit for her. Never mind that he should be hurrying himself.
But Asia knew this game as well as he did, and she was ahead of him this time; she just rolled her eyes and clucked. “Get your ass up on the next shuttle, my dearest. I expect you on Chrysanthemum in four hours.”
“Yes, dear,” Jafre said, and smiled thinly, acknowledging both his defeat and his grudging admiration. It never ceased to amaze him that for all her power, for all her burdens and responsibilities, the Director of Port Chrysanthemum and the Fleets of Malhela still had the time to call him up nag like any other wife.
Before she vanished from his screen, light played momentarily across her necklace as she reached for the cutoff switch. The necklace sparkled with a dozen examples of that most beautiful of stones. Centrokrist.
We'll have some trouble on account of that, he realized, and at that his smile split into a wide, unself-conscious grin. The thought displeased him not at all.