Throy Read Online Free Page B

“I’ll be speaking in about twenty minutes or thereabouts,” he reminded her.
    “No problem! We will listen to you on the screen.”
    “As you like.”
    Wayness left the taproom, climbed to the second level and set off at a brisk half trot to the east. Before long she saw ahead, the tall green serpentine-faced house where she had spent the years of her childhood. Then she had considered it unique: the nicest house of all Stroma, by reason of details and color which at the time had seemed of great significance. For a fact the houses of Stroma were much alike, tall, narrow, built one against the other, with the same clusters of tall narrow windows and high-peaked roofs, differing only in their somber colors, which might be dark blue, maroon, umber, ash gray, black, green, with the architectural detail picked out in white, blue or red.
    The house where Wayness had lived was dark green, with white and blue trim, and was situated toward the eastern end of the second level: a prestigious area in status-conscious Stroma.
    Wayness had been a thin little girl, pensive and self-contained. Her dark curls and olive-pale skin had been inherited from one of her great-grandmothers, a Cantabrian from Old Earth; her features were so regular as to seem unexceptional until the delicate modelling of the short straight nose, the jaw and chin, and the wide sweet mouth were noticed. She had been a warm-hearted friendly child, but neither gregarious nor aggressive. Her brain roiled with wonder and intelligence; more often than not she preferred her own company to that of her peers, and she was not as widely popular as some of her more conventional acquaintances. From time to time she felt a trifle lonely and a bit forlorn, yearning for something far away and unattainable, something she could not quite define, but presently the boys began to notice that Wayness Tamm was remarkably pretty, and the odd moods dissolved.
    During those days there had been little dissension or factional dispute at Stroma, and even then it had been almost entirely confined to light-hearted argument and philosophical debate when friends gathered in each other’s parlours. Almost everyone considered existence to be settled, static and for the most part benign; only a few persons seemed to take their iconoclastic social theories seriously, and these became the nucleus of the Life, Peace and Freedom Party: the LPF.
    As a child, Wayness had been indifferent to the disputes; the doctrine of Conservancy was after all a basic fact of life; was this not the planet Cadwal, totally subject to the regulation of the Great Charter? Egon Tamm, her father, was a staunch if soft-spoken Conservationist; he disliked polemics and kept well clear of the fist-pounding disputes which had started to trouble the atmosphere of Stroma and turn friend against friend. When the time came to appoint a new Conservator, Egon Tamm who was modest and reasonable and showed no signs of activism was the compromise choice.
    When Wayness was fifteen the family moved to Riverview House near Araminta Station, and the dark green house on the second level at Stroma was relinquished to an elderly aunt and uncle.
    The house would now be empty; the aunt and uncle were traveling off-world. Wayness climbed two steps to the porch, pushed the door open; it was unlocked, like most doors of Stroma. She entered an octagonal foyer, paneled with slabs cut from baulks of driftwood. High shelves displayed a collection of ancient Pewter plates and a set of six grotesque masks, representing whom or what no one had ever known.
     Nothing had changed. To the left an archway opened upon the dining room; at the back spiral stairs and a lift provided access to the upper floors. To the right another archway opened upon the parlor. She looked into the dining room, and saw the same round table of polished wood around which she had sat so many times with her family. And now, Milo was gone. Her eyes misted, she blinked. Too much