Voyage Across the Stars by David Drake Page A

searching for it when his rescuers turned the dogs from outside and the walls fell away. Slade was surrounded by nymphs on a sunlit meadow.
    Slade’s first thought was that they were girls and very pretty. A moment’s further consideration showed that in fact, his four rescuers were women and beautiful—but there was a level of truth to the initial impression as well. Three of them were dark-haired and stood nearly as tall as the man’s shoulder. The fourth had the same elfin features, but she was fifty millimeters short of the others’ height and her hair was red. None of them were as old as eighteen standard years, so far as the castaway could judge. The red-haired girl reached to hand Slade out of the capsule. If the others were nymphs, then surely the fourth was a pixie princess.
    A girl giggled. “Lord have mercy!” Slade muttered. He had been too logy until that moment to remember that he was still as naked as he had been during the long, lonely Transit from Terzia.
    All of his rescuers were laughing, now, though it was not a cruel sound. “Here, you’ve come this far,” said the red-haired one as Slade tried to hide back in the capsule. She gave his hand an encouraging tug. “We shouldn’t laugh,” she said. “Liet, toss me my wrap from under the seat.”
    Slade swallowed. He should have learned more about Elysium before he left Terzia, but Lord! he’d been launched and gone before he really had time to think about what was happening to him. You don’t really cross cultures when you have a gun in your fist and orders to execute. Your culture is that of your unit, and what surrounds your unit is so much glassware—to be spared where practical. This was different; and a gun, while intrinsically useless, would have made a useful pacifier for Slade’s soul.
    “Thank you, lady,” he said to the girl who handed him the wrap. It was just that, a cape with a brooch fastener. The metal was a copper alloy, hand-worked and very delicate. With the cape upended, what would have been the lower hem for the owner could be pinned around Slade’s solid waist. The rest hung down as a tawny apron, a natural wool of some sort, and quite adequate for modesty. Slade had soldiered too long to have any personal taboos about nudity. He had, however, a lively appreciation of how the parents of these girls might react to the naked man who suddenly appeared with them. He stepped carefully out of the capsule.
    Flustered, Slade had last spoken in his birth tongue. In Spanglish, “lady” would have been replaced by “donya” in the vocative. It was in the same true English that one of the girls now said, “But how are we going to carry him, Risa? He must weigh two hundred and—” She flicked her eyes back to Slade in a glance that appraised more than his weight, correcting the phrase already begun. “A hundred and ten kilos at least.”
    “Oh, that’ll be all right, Sare,” said the red-haired girl, the leader as the castaway’s instincts told him. “He’ll ride with me. We’ll stay low and slow. If the drain’s still too much for my power, you can jumper me.”
    “Ah, ladies?” Slade said. “You’re going to take me to your government? I was sent here by the ruler of a neighboring world—” Via! The Mayday had mentioned Terzia, and they must have heard it or they couldn’t have snagged him out of his streaming plunge. Think! “Ah, I was sent here by the Terzia, who thought your rulers could help me.”
    The air cars, though light, showed a heartening sophistication that belied the wool wrap and the hand-crafted brooch. Dainty bronze-ware wasn’t going to get Don Slade home in his lifetime.
    Liet giggled again, but Risa said, “We’ll take you to the city, of course. There aren’t many visitors here on Elysium, not many people know about us; but I’m sure we’ll be able to help any friend of the Terzia.”
    They were all looking at Slade in some wonder. He had suspicion that Risa’s “not many