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“Don’t stay in there for too long,” Rhoden called out to them. His voice came out funny through the respirator, wheezy and distorted.
Steinberg stood up in the waves, his eyes following Rhoden’s figure walking along the shoreline. The opalescent flashes of green from the Eigna moon silhouetted him like a halo. Every now and then he’d bend down or get on his haunches, having spotted something in the tide, and inspect a potential find. He was looking, Steinberg knew, for the bones of local wildlife – as much as they could be called that, not being hydroxyapatite-based.
Steinberg’s wetsuit was getting unpleasantly hot against his skin, so he dove back into the crystalline blue waves. Consisting of a mixture of boiling and gaseous oxygen, this was not, strictly speaking, an ocean, but coming here, well. It still felt quite a lot like going to the beach.
Rhoden had taken him and Esther here after their unfortunate run-in with Poltanov back on Asteria. It was a small backwater planet, with nothing much on it except for a few native settlements and a closed human city. The local economy rested almost entirely on oxygen exports, and with the recent discovery of a bigger and more convenient reservoir closer to the Milky Way it was decidedly flagging.
In a word, it was perfect for them. Even tipped off by Poltanov, the agents of the Skein wouldn’t think to look here.
Steinberg grabbed Esther, nearly weightless in the foamy blue liquid, and gently dragged her towards the shore. Rhoden was right; swimming for too long wouldn’t be good for their suits.
Rhoden himself never went in. Dressed in an austere black hermetically sealed uniform IEVA, he either prowled the littoral zone for animal remains or sat motionlessly on some rocky outcrop or other, watching Steinberg and Esther splash around. Steinberg could only imagine the man was unbearably hot. Inbuilt IEVA temperature regulators had their limits.
“Aren’t you hot?” Steinberg asked him. Esther, who was drying the last bits of ice cold blue foam off her shoulders, gave them a curious glance.
Rhoden tilted his head a bit. “Not any hotter than usual.”
“That is rather my point,” Steinberg sighed.
He could just make out the light glint of Rhoden’s eyes through the visor. What Steinberg could see of his expression suggested a smile.
“Arno,” Esther piped up (Steinberg was a little jealous of the fact that she got to use this name when he could not, but he supposed it was a privilege of her age), “could I ride on your shoulders?”
Rhoden visibly considered this. Steinberg rather thought he hadn’t had to carry kids on his shoulders on many occasions. Possibly not ever.
“Go on, then,” Rhoden finally decided, getting down on one knee.
Esther got a hold of the neck of his IEVA and swung her leg over his back, quickly pulling herself up. Now that Steinberg thought of it, he wasn’t sure Esther had ever ridden on anyone’s shoulders, either – except, of course, his own.
When Rhoden stood up, however, she seemed comfortable enough. Her legs crossed on his chest, she rested her arms on the crown of his head and surveyed the moonlit sandy landscape around them with a good deal of satisfaction.
“Here, Firochka,” said Rhoden, handing her an exoskull. “Have a look. Your brother and I, we’ll teach you some osteology yet.”
Then he set about rummaging in his shoulder bag. After a while he turned back to Steinberg, his hands full of food tubes. He held them like one might hold a bouquet of flowers.
“What’s that?” Steinberg asked, curiously, and reached out to inspect one of the tubes.
“Ice cream,” Rhoden replied inscrutably. “There was a large cruise ship passing through a few days ago, the Galateia. They sold me some. You have a choice of, hm, sea pear, Earth cranberry and walnuts, and white Asterian tea.”
None of these flavours were familiar to Steinberg. Back home, ice cream came in three varieties: white, pink, and brown. Sometimes in two if there was a shortage.
Rhoden seemed to guess his thoughts.
“They smuggle a bunch of stuff from outside the Skein-controlled space,” he commented, shrugging a little. His breath crackled through the respirator in a short huff that hinted at amusement. “Wish they’d smuggle in some democratic elections or a little freedom of speech one of these days, but right now it’s just ice cream.”
Steinberg took one of the tubes. It was white and cold and read Asterian white tea in blocky Cimbric script. When he squeezed some through the straw in his respirator, it tasted sour, sugary, and flowery.
“I like it,” he said, prompting a satisfied nod from Rhoden.
Esther sucked on a tube of cranberry and walnut, holding the exoskull in the other hand. Her position on Rhoden’s shoulders was a bit precarious now, but Rhoden put up his hands and held Esther’s ankles, ensuring that she didn’t slip off. With the gravity here being what it was, such a fall wouldn’t injure her, but it would certainly hurt.
“What about you?” Steinberg asked.
“Maybe later,” Rhoden said. Steinberg knew, however, that if Rhoden was left to his own devices, there would be no “later”. He’d keep the ice cream for them, the way he took them to the beach so that they could swim without ever going in himself.
Sometimes Steinberg looked at the local families and was filled with wistfulness. What would their life have been if they’d been born here, to a perfectly ordinary loving family, with the nearest Skein komissariat somewhere far away on Asteria? What would it have been like – to have grown up without suffering?
Now, however, he glanced at a passing group of humans with a couple of kids and felt no longing.
“Eat the damn ice cream, Doctor,” he said, and touched Rhoden’s forearm in a gesture of gentle reproach. The feel of the coarse, warm ortho-fabric of Rhoden’s IEVA under his fingers was somehow reassuring. It gave the weight of reality to the happiness bubbling up in Steinberg’s throat.