Burning Bright

Damian stood for a moment longer, glaring down at him, automatically tugging his own thick hair into a neat queue. He remembered perfectly well howhe’d acquired the stranger—he was a bungee-gar, and C/B Cie., the holding group that managed the Chrestil-Brisch import/export interests, had successfully received a shipment of red-carpet, the fungus that fed the family distilleries. Red-carpet was expensive enough on its own, especially on a world that had few native sources of alcohol, valuable enough to justify employing bungee-gars, but it had also served to cover the two capsules of lachesi that had traveled with the declared cargo. Oblivion was made from lachesi, and Oblivion was legal inside the Republic, but the Republican export taxes on drugs were deliberately high. Evading those duties not only increased his own profits, but allowed him to do favors for two important parties, one in the Republic, the other in HsaioiAn. And that was how Burning Bright had survived free of control by either of the metagovernments: the web of favors given and received that made it entirely too dangerous for strangers to interfere in Burning Bright’s internal politics. It was never too early to start collecting favors, either, not when he intended to be governor in five years.

The stranger shifted uneasily against the mattress, drawing Damian out of the pleasant daydream. His head was really throbbing now— Oblivion and bai-red rum, not a wise combination—and he wondered again why he’d invited the stranger aboard. He was decent-enough looking—a dark man, young, canalli dark, with coarse waves in his too-long hair, heavy muscles under the skin, and buttocks Damian could vaguely remember describing as “cute”—but not cute enough, not with that silly mustache shadowing his full mouth. He hadn’t been that good a fuck, either: if the previous night’s performance had represented his sexual peak, his future partners were in for some serious disappointment. Damian slipped his foot under the sheet, flipped it nearly away. The stranger rolled over, groping blindly for it, mumbling something that sounded regrettably like darling, and fetched up with his shoulder resting on the edge of the boat. Damian Chrestil smiled slowly, and stepped onto the bunk beside him, his feet sinking only a little way into the hard foam of the mattress. He dug his foot under the stranger’s rib cage, saw him start to roll away automatically. The stranger’s eyes opened then, a sleepy and entirely too cocksure smile changing to alarm as Damian tipped him neatly out of the boat. Instinct kept him from yelling until he surfaced again.

“What the hell—?”

“Rise and shine.” Damian smiled, some of his temper restored, and turned his attention to the mess in the snuggery.

The stranger trod water easily, shaking his hair out of his eyes, but knew better than to try to climb back aboard. “What’d I do?” he asked plaintively, and pushed himself a few strokes farther down the channel, out of reach of the cargo-hooks racked along the gunwales.

Damian paused, the stranger’s clothes in one hand. He had them all now, except for one crumpled shoe, and he found that almost in the instant he realized it was missing, tucked in between the mattress and the bulkhead. He rolled them all together into a compact ball, and tossed it, not into the canal as he’d intended, but up onto the walkway between the pilings. It was not, after all, entirely the stranger’s fault.

“I have work to do,” Damian said.

For an instant it looked as though the stranger might protest, but Damian scowled, and the other lifted both hands in dripping apology, the water drawing him down for an instant.

“Fine.” The stranger stopped treading water, lay back, and let the current take him, exerting himself only when he spotted the splintering ladder nailed to one of the piers.