Chapter 16

XVI

Change

Perni is sitting on the side of her bed in her hospital gown when Cubi enters. She looks expectantly at the large plastic bag he holds.

"You got it?" she asks eagerly. "It feels like my birthday."

"It's just clothing isn't it? I haven't forgotten something?"

"No, just clothes. Lemme see."

Cubi opens the bag. Inside, coat hangers are neatly dangling from his hand. He passes each item of clothing to Perni.

"I'll give you the money for them as soon as I can," she says. "I just don't want to go back to my workshop today. Back to my unfinished project."

"I understand," Cubi says. "But, let me pay for them."

Perni dismisses the thought with a wave of her hand. "You don't have any money."

"I can afford to pay for clothes," Cubi says. Just not multi-million rupee contracts, he adds silently.

Perni shakes her head, adamantly. "I'm paying you back, you know you won't be able to stop me."

"Probably not."

She lays the clothes on the bed by her side and turns to Cubi earnestly. "Would you do something else for me, Cubi?"

"Sure."

"Could you leave me to get changed?"

"Oh! Yeah. I'll wait outside."

"Thanks. Is that what you're wearing?" she asks, adding, "You look very respectable."

Cubi looks down at his own almost-fitting suit. "Good. I left the tie at home, I'm no good with knots. I don't think they'll mind, though. They get all sorts in Honeyjewel Place. I could probably go naked and they wouldn't mind."

"Now there's a thought."

"No," Cubi says, "there's not. I'll leave you and your sense of humour to get changed, shall I?"

*

"Do I look okay?"

Cubi just nods.

"I look awful? Be honest."

"No! You look, well, you look beautiful."

"Shut the fuck up, liar," Perni says, nevertheless smiling as she says it.

She does look beautiful, Cubi thinks. She wears a black trouser suit, made of sleek apian silk. It flatters her long-limbed, broad-shouldered figure perfectly, as well as fitting her personality like a glove.

"Okay, well let's get out of here," Perni says.

"Don't forget the manuscript," Cubi says, looking around.

Perni leans around the side of her bed and grabs the bag with the manuscript in it. "I'll hold on to it for now."

"How far have you got into it?"

"Quite far, actually. What else did I have to do while lying around in here? I'll tell you about it over dinner."

"Dinner? But I only just had breakfast."

"You'll have to be very patient then, won't you?"

"Perhaps I can bribe or flatter it out of you."

Perni folds her arms thoughtfully. "I won't stop you from trying."

"So, what are we doing?"

"Good question. Spending the day together, I think. If you'll have me."

Cubi just turns to the door. "Let's go."

*

There's not much sun in Fernheath Park now. The trees are sickly and bare, petrified in some cases. They are nothing more than mooring points for the balloon houses that cluster over the park, drifting back and forth in the breeze. There are so many, they blot out the sun. The grass is long dead, only bare earth remaining.

Cubi and Perni sit slumped on a park bench, their feet in the mud.

Cubi looks up. "It's amazing that they don't all fall."

"They can't," Perni says. "They're lighter than air."

"I don't know about that. I just look up and see spherical houses hanging in the air. Maybe they just got stuck. Maybe any second from now they'll un-stick and fall on us."

Up above, an airphibian leaps into the blue gulf and crosses to a neighbouring balloon house, clinging onto the ropes wrapped around its bulk and recklessly clambering around to the front door.

"Did you know," Cubi begins, "that religious airphibians have only a passing belief in gravity? It's not an especially useful force for them, and they think that Quip may revoke it any time, purely on a whim. It would be lovely for the airphibians, of course. They'd finally have proper flight, instead of just the ability to glide long distances. But they rarely seem to think about what that would be like for the rest of us, all the humans and wingless apians and nematodes. Except perhaps to insinuate that we somehow deserve it."

"Tell me more about this skull woman," Perni says. "The one you slept with."

Cubi sighs. "Okay, firstly, when speaking about the skull women in my life, there's no need to narrow it down with such suffixes as 'the one you slept with'. Secondly, if she slept with anyone, it was not me, but my sofa."

"Okay, but tell me more about her," Perni persists.

"She helped to threaten me, but was otherwise nice… um, she had tattoos of all her bones…"

"All of them?"

"So she said, yes. But not on her face or neck."

"How much of the rest of her did you see?"

"Her arms and her feet."

"What colour were her eyes?"

"I don't remember."

Perni covers her face with her hands and turns to Cubi. "What colour are my eyes?"

"Brown with a slight greenish tint. And there's a little blue fleck in the corner of your left iris."

Perni lowers her hands. "There is?"

"Sure. I seem to remember it, anyway. Let me have a look."

Perni bites her lip and brings her face a little closer to Cubi's. She looks off, over his shoulder.

"Um," Cubi says, "you have to look at me, or I can't see your irises."

"Oh, yeah. That makes sense."

She looks into Cubi's eyes.

He leans close to her and touches his fingers to her cheeks. "Hold still."

"Is it there?" she asks softly.

"You're blushing," Cubi says gently.

"Unlikely," Perni says, affecting indifference. "My skin tone must have experienced a random quantum fluctuation in the last minute."

"Your cheeks are hot."

Her face grows redder. "No, your hands are cold. Anyway, I take it there's no blue fleck, or you wouldn't have changed the subject."

"It's there."

"Oh. So you know my eyes better than I do myself."

Neither of them says anything for what seems like the longest time. Perni swallows and starts to say something.

"Cubiform Judge, call me Cubi!" someone shouts.

Cubi pulls back from Perni with a start. An airphibian glides down from above. "I'm sorry," he calls. "You two were having a moment, weren't you? And then I go and spoil it. Just thought I'd say hi, is all."

"Flib," Cubi says. "How are you doing?"

The gyrocabby touches down with a lightness one wouldn't think his portly frame capable of. "Fine, fine. I should ask you the same thing." He turns to Perni and adds, "You're feeling better, I hope."

"It wasn't a moment," she says. "It was an eye exam."

"Oh right," Flib says, clearly not following. "Here, let me just give you my card. If you ever need a gyro, you can rely on me, okay?"

Cubi takes the card and slips it into his pocket next to his mobile. "Will do. I'm not much of one for flying, though."

"Actually," Perni says. "We may need a gyro for a long distance journey over the next few days."

Cubi looks at her and she shrugs.

"Rightio," Flib says, grinning from eye to eye. "I'll leave you both to it, shall I?"

He winks at them and then crouches down, his long legs folding right back on themselves. With a pounce, he leaps high into the air, spreading his arms and legs to glide towards the nearest balloon house's tether.

As Cubi follows Flib's path up into the air, he can't help but notice the small black bird that, startled, flaps rapidly up into the midst of the balloons and disappears.

*

"This place is so posh," Cubi mutters for the umpteenth time.

Perni doesn't seem at all bothered by their surroundings. Merely says, "You look fine."

"I can feel them summing me up and disliking the end number."

"You look very smart."

"I feel like a little rat. Crawling on the ground with the winged ones flying overhead."

"Okay, the only people here with wings are the waiters, and the humans here outnumber everyone else put together."

"Oh, the humans here have wings, trust me. Metaphorical wings, but they're there."

"Shut up and have dinner with me."

"I am having dinner with you. I'm just simultaneously providing a witty commentary to the social situation."

Perni laughs. She laughs freely. Much more freely than a woman with a few days to live should be able to. "I said shut up and have dinner with me."

"Your wish is my command."

It is an exceedingly posh restaurant. Beeswax, brightly lit, lofty architecture aping a light, classically human style. Winged apian waiters move smoothly between the tables, heads held high. The diners are mostly humans in evening wear, but there are a few groups of quivers, their shadowy forms a blur of graceful motion, and even an airphibian couple sharing a romantic meal over a candle.

"Don't look," Perni says, "but the Queen of Cats just walked in."

Cubi looks over his shoulder at the entrance.

Perni rolls her eyes. "I said don't look!"

"She's smaller than I thought she'd be," Cubi says.

"She's only a cat," Perni answers.

"I've never seen one before. She walks on all fours."

The Queen of Cats is a lithe, black creature, not even a metre long. Her eyes are a bright, golden yellow, and something shiny and white glistens around her neck.

Perni coos. "She wears a diamond studded collar."

Cubi turns back to look at Perni as she speaks, and when he does so, he finds that the Queen of Cats is sitting on their table, casually licking her paw.

"She thanks you not to stare," the Queen of Cats says coolly, "or to talk about her when you think she can't hear."

Perni turns bright red. "Of course. I'm sorry."

The Queen of Cats jumps down from their table and winds off into the restaurant, disappearing under tablecloths and between legs.

Perni has a sip of water and tries to laugh off her embarrassment. "Cats work by different rules from the rest of us," she says.

"You're especially beautiful when you blush," Cubi says.

"Shut the fuck up," Perni retorts reflexively, grinning.

Cubi takes a few bites of his meal, honeycomb stuffed with zealous parsley, and some miscellaneous doughy thing on the side. "Tell me about Mec's book."

"I will. I'm only halfway through, but it's very interesting. I don't know about your friend's sources, but if he's not exaggerating-"

"He's not."

"-then he has a good case for Slink being an actual historical figure. A mortal, living one as well. And one quite removed from the mainstream Slinkist perception of him."

Cubi raises an eyebrow. "But Slink was a skeleton."

Perni shrugs. "Yeah, he says he's getting to that bit. I hope that he actually wrote it before- You know."

"I know."

"After dinner," Perni says suddenly, "I was thinking. I don't feel like going back to my workshop. It wouldn't feel especially safe. Neither would your place, what with the skull people threatening you and sleeping on your sofa and so on. So, I was thinking."

"Good," Cubi says. "Thinking is always a sound course of action."

"Well, I was thinking, there are some nice hotels in Honeyjewel Place. And I was thinking…"

"You told me that already. What was it that you were you thinking?"

"Can't you tell? Maybe we're not on the same wavelength on this. I think I'm getting ahead of myself. Ahead of you as well, maybe."

Cubi shrugs. "I don't think you are. Why don't you tell me exactly what's on your mind, just to be sure that we are both thinking about the same thing here."

"Okay," Perni says. She clears her throat and, toying idly with her fork, tells Cubi.

He nods, slowly. "Okay."

*

Cubi and Perni sit side by side on the edge of the bed, their jackets folded neatly away. The sheets are soft, clean cotton.

"So," Cubi says.

"So," Perni agrees.

Perni takes a deep breath and then slides her arms around Cubi's neck. He turns to face her and accepts her wary kiss, her lips touching his only lightly. Her hold on him tightens and he wraps his arms around her.

She breaks the kiss and pulls back. "Is this okay?" she asks.

"It's perfect," Cubi whispers.

Perni runs her hands over the sheets experimentally. "Shall we lie down?"

Cubi nods.

She laughs nervously. "This seems so strange. Unreal almost."

Cubi touches her cheek affectionately, feeling her grow warm as she blushes. "I'm glad though," he says, sensing the colour rise to his own cheeks.

"Yeah," she says. "Come on."

They lie down on their sides; heads on the soft, cold pillows; facing one another.

Cubi looks into Perni's eyes and says, "I think I'm laying on a complimentary mint."

"Yeah," Perni says. "Me too."

She suddenly sits up, and turns her back to Cubi. She moves the mint onto the bedside table and starts to unbutton her blouse. Cubi watches her silently, rolling his mint slowly between his thumb and forefinger. She glances over her shoulder at him nervously.

He smiles shyly.

And then she grins, involuntarily, the corners of her mouth spreading up towards her prominent cheekbones. Her eyes are radiant.

She lets the blouse fall.