The Dragon Variation Read Online Free Page A

in return? We're getting a little top-heavy, here."
    "What're you, Liaden? Take some advice and skip that meeting. Go home, eat something sexy, glass of wine, play yourself a lullaby and go to sleep. Tomorrow's your study day, right? Jerzy will deliver kid latish in the a.m. If I don't decide to steal him, instead."
    "Jerzy—"
    "Enough, already! Seeya tomorrow." The screen went blank.
    Anne sighed, closed the line at her end and sat looking at the screen long after the glow had faded into dead gray.
    There had to be a better way, she thought, not for the first time. Certainly, there were worse ways than the path she was pursuing—the Central University creche leapt forcibly to mind, with its sign-in sheets and its sign-out sheets and its tidy rows of tidy cribs and its tidy, meek babies all dressed in tidy, identical rompers. Horrible, antiseptic, unloving place—just like the other one had been.
    She was doing all right, she assured herself, given the help of friends like Jerzy. But she hated to impose on her friends, good-natured as they were. Even more she hated the hours she was of necessity away from her son, so many hours a day, so many days a week. She was growing to resent her work, the demands of departmental meetings, class preparations. Her research was beginning to slack off—fatal in the publish-or-perish university system. Her allotted study days more and more often became "Shan days" while she tried to cram the work that needed to be done into late nights and early mornings, using her home terminal to the maximum, piling up user fees she could have easily avoided by using her assigned terminal at the Research Center.
    Abruptly, she stood and began to gather her things together. Her own mother had been a pilot, gone six months of every local year, leaving her son and daughter in the care of various relatives and, one year, at the New Dublin Home for Children.
    Anne shuddered, scattering a careful stack of data cards. That had been the worst year. She and Richard had been sequestered in separate dorms, allowed one comm call between them every ten days. They had found ways to sneak away after lights-out, to hold hands and talk family talk. But sneaking away was against the rules, punishable, when they were inevitably caught, by hard labor, by imposed silence, by ostracism. The year had seemed forever, with their mother's ship long overdue, and Anne certain it was lost . . .
    She looked down at her clenched fists, puzzled. It had all been so long ago. Her mother had died three years ago, peacefully in her bed. Richard was a pilot in his own right, and his last letter had been full of someone named Rosie, whose parents he was soon to meet. And Anne was a professor of comparative linguistics, with several scholarly publications to her name, teaching a Liaden Lit seminar that was filled to capacity every session.
    Anne shook her head and wearily bent to pick up the scattered cards. Jerzy was right; she was tired. She needed a good meal, a full night's sleep. She'd been pushing things a little too hard lately. She needed to remember to relax, that was all. Then, everything would be fine.
     
    WEARILY, Er Thom climbed the curving marble staircase that led to the Administrative Center for University's Northern Campus. It was slightly warmer in the building than it had been outside, but still cool to one used to Liad's planetary springtime. He left his leather pilot's jacket sealed as he approached the round marble counter displaying the Terran graphic for "Information."
    A Terran woman of indeterminate years came to the counter as he approached. She had a plenitude of dark hair, worn carelessly loose, as if fresh-tousled from bed, and her shirt was cut low across an ample bosom. She leaned her elbows on the pinkish marble and grinned at him.
    "Hi, there. What can I do for you?" she asked, casually, and with emphasis on "you".
    He bowed as between equals—a flattery—and offered a slight smile of his own.
    "I am