‘Why—why—’ she gasped—‘I thought you said you felt fine. I thought you were all right. I thought you wanted to go to bed with me.’
Yarrow groaned. He shut his eyes and lay back down. Sarcasm was lost on her. She insisted on taking everything literally. She would have to be reeducated. If he weren’t so exhausted, he would have been shocked by her open proposal—so much like that of the Scarlet Woman in The Western Talmud when she had tried to seduce the Forerunner.
But he was past being shocked. Moreover, a voice on the edge of his conscience said that she had merely put into hard and unrecallable words what he had planned in his heart all this time. But when they were spoken!
A crash of glass shattered his thoughts. He jerked upright. She was standing there, face twisted, lovely red mouth quivering, and tears flowing. Her hand was empty. A large wet patch against the wall, still dripping, showed what had become of the glass.
‘I thought you loved me!’ she shouted.
Unable to think of anything to say, he stared. She spun and walked away. He heard her go into the front room and begin to sob loudly. Unable to endure the sound, he jumped out of bed and walked swiftly after her. These rooms were supposed to be soundproof, but one never knew. What if she were overheard?
Anyway, she was twisting something inside him, and he had to straighten it out.
When he entered the front room, he saw she was looking downcast. For a while, he stood silent, wanting to say something but utterly unable to because he had never been forced to solve such a problem before, Haijac women didn’t cry often, and if they did, they wept alone in privacy.
He sat down by her and put his hand on her soft shoulder.
‘Jeannette.’
She turned quickly and laid her dark hair against his chest. She said, between sobs, ‘I thought maybe you didn’t love me. And I couldn’t stand it. Not after all I’ve been through!’
‘Well, Jeannette, I didn’t—I mean—I wasn’t …’
He paused. He had had no intention of saying he loved her. He’d never told any woman he loved her, not even Mary. Nor had any woman ever told him. And here was this woman on a faraway planet, only half-human at that, taking it for granted that he was hers, body and self.
He began speaking in a soft voice. Words came easily because he was quoting Moral Lecture AT-16:
‘ “… all beings with their hearts in the right place are brothers… Man and woman are brother and sister… Love is everywhere … but love … should be on a higher plane … Man and woman should rightly loathe the beastly act as something the Great Mind, the Cosmic Observer, has not yet eliminated in man’s evolutionary development… The time will come when children will be produced through thought alone. Meanwhile, we must recognize sex as necessary for only one reason: children
Slap! His head rang, and points of fire whirled off into the blackness before his eyes.
It was a moment before he could realize that Jeannette had leaped to her feet and slammed him hard with the palm of her hand. He saw her standing above him with her eyes slitted and her red mouth open and drawn back in a snarl.
Then, she whirled and ran into the bedroom. He got up and followed her. She was lying on the bed, sobbing.
‘Jeannette, you don’t understand!’
‘Fva tuh fe fu’!’
When he understood that, he blushed. Then he became furious. He grabbed her by the shoulder and turned her over so that she faced him.
Suddenly he was saying, ‘But I do love you, Jeannette. I do.’
He sounded strange, even to himself. The concept of love, as she meant it, was alien to him—rusty, perhaps, if it could be put that way. It would need much polishing. But it would, he knew, be polished. Here in his arms was one whose very nature and instinct and education were pointed toward love.
He had thought he had drained himself of grief earlier that night; but now, as he forgot his resolve not to tell her what had happened, and as he recounted, step by step, the long and terrible night, tears ran down his face. Thirty years made a deep well; it took a long time to pump out all the weeping.
Jeannette, too, cried, and said that she was sorry that she had gotten angry at him. She promised never again to do so. He said it was all right. They kissed again and again until, like two babies who have wept themselves and loved themselves out of frustration and fury, they passed gently into sleep.
14
At 0900 Ship’s Time, Yarrow walked into the Gabriel, the scent of morning dew on the grass in his nostrils. As he had a little time before the conference, he looked up Turnboy, the historian joat. Casually, he asked Turnboy if he knew, anything of a space flight emigration from France after the Apocalyptic War. Turnboy was delighted to show off his knowledge. Yes, the remnants of the Gallic nation had gathered in the Loire country after the Apocalyptic War and had formed the nucleus of what might have become a new France.
But the swiftly growing colonies sent from Iceland to the northern part of France, and from Israel to the Southern part, had surrounded the Loire. New France found itself squeezed economically and religiously. Sigmen’s disciples invaded the territory in waves of missionaries. High tariffs strangled the little state’s trade. Finally, a group of Frenchmen, seeing the inevitable absorption or conquest of their state, religion, and tongue, had left in six rather primitive spaceships to find another Gaul rotating about some far-off star. It was highly improbable that they had succeeded.
Hal thanked Turnboy and walked to the conference room. He spoke to many. Half of them, like him, had a Mongolian tinge to their features. They were the English-speaking descendants of Hawaiian and Australian survivors of the same war which had decimated France. Their many-times great-grandfathers had repopulated Australia, the Americas, Japan, and China.
Almost half of the crew spoke Icelandic. Their ancestors had sailed from the grim island to spread across northern Europe, Siberia, and Manchuria.
About a sixteenth of the crew knew Georgian as their native tongue. Their foreparents had moved down from the Caucasus Mountains and resettled depopulated southern Russia, Bulgaria, nothern Iran, and Afghanistan.
The conference was a memorable one. First, Hal was moved from twentieth place to the Archurielite’s left to sixth from his right. The lamedh on his chest made the difference. Second, there was little difficulty about Pornsen’s death. The gapt was considered a casualty of the undeclared war. Everyone was warned, again, about the nightlifers and other things that sometimes prowled Siddo after dusk. It was not, however, suggested that the Haijacs quit their moonlit espionage.
Macneff ordered Hal, as the dead gapt’s spiritual son, to arrange for the funeral the following day. Then he pulled down a huge map from a long roller on the wall. This was the representation of Earth that would be given to the wogs.
It was a good example of the Haijacs’ subtlety and Chinese box-within-a-box thinking. The two hemispheres of Earth were depicted on the map with colored political boundaries. It was correct as far as the Bantu and Malay states were concerned. But the positions of the Israeli and Haijac nations had been reversed. The legend beneath the map indicated that green was the color of the Forerunner states and yellow the Hebrew states. The green portion, however, was a ring around the Mediterranean, and a broad band covering Arabia, the southern half of Asia Minor, and northern India.
In other words, if, by an inconceivable chance, the Ozagen succeeded in capturing the Gabriel and built ships with it as a model, and used the navigational data aboard to find Sol, they would still attack the wrong country. Undoubtedly, they would not bother to contact personally the people of Earth, for they would want to use the element of surprise. Thus, the Israeli would never get a chance to explain before the bombs went off. And the Haijac Union, warned, would hurl its space fleet against the invaders.
‘However,’ said Macneff, ‘I do not think that the pseudofuture I have just suggested could ever become reality. Not unless the Backrunner is more powerful than I believe. Of course, you cou
ld take the attitude that this course might be best. What better shape could the future take than to wipe out our Israeli enemies through means of these nonhumans?
‘But, as you all know, our ship is well guarded against’ attack by open assault or stealth. Our radar, lasers, audiodetection equipment, and starlight scopes are operating at all times. Our weapons are ready. The wogs are inferior in technology; they have nothing to bring against us that we could not easily crush.
‘Nevertheless, if the Backrunner were to inspire them to superhuman cunning, and they did get into the ship, they would fail. If the wogs should reach a certain point in the ship, one of two officers always on duty on the bridge will press a button. This will wipe out all navigational data in the memory banks; the wogs will never be able to locate Sol.
‘And if the wogs—Sigmen forbid—should reach the bridge, then the officer on duty there will press another button.’
Macneff paused and looked at those around the conference table. Most of them were pale, for they knew what he was going to say.
‘An H-bomb will utterly destroy this ship. It will also annihilate the city of Siddo. And we will be honored forever in the eyes of the Forerunner and the Sturch.
‘Naturally, we would all prefer that this not happen. And I wish I could warn Siddo so that they would not dare to attack. However, to do so would spoil our present good relations with them and might result in our having to launch Project Ozagenocide before we are ready.’
After the conference, Hal gave orders for the funeral arrangements. Other duties kept him till dark, when he returned home.
When Hal locked the door behind him, he heard the shower running. He hung his coat up in the closet; the water stopped splashing. As he went towards his bedroom door, Jeannette stepped out from the bathroom. She was drying her hair with a big towel, and she was naked.
She said, ‘Baw yoo, Hal,’ and walked into the bedroom, unselfconsciously. Feebly, Hal replied. He turned and went back into the front room. He felt foolish because of his timorousness and, at the same time, vaguely wicked, unreal, because of the pounding of his heart, his heavy breathing, the hot and fluid fingers that wrapped themselves, half-pain, half-delight, around his loins.
She came out dressed in a pale green robe which he had bought for her and which she had recut and resewn to fit her figure. Her heavy black hair was piled on her head in a Psyche knot. She kissed him and asked if he wanted to come into the kitchen while she cooked. He said that would be fine.
She began making a sort of spaghetti. He asked her to tell him about her life. Once started, she was not hard to keep going.
‘… and so my father’s people found a planet like Earth and settled there. It was a beautiful planet; that is why they called it Wuhbopfey, the beautiful land.
‘According to my father, there are about thirty million living there on one continent. My father was not content to live the life his grandfathers had lived—tilling the soil or running a shop, and raising many children. He and some other young men like him took the only spaceship left of the original six that had come there, and they sailed off to the stars. They came to Ozagen. And crashed. No wonder. The ship was so old.’
‘Is the wreck still around?’
‘Fi. Close to where my sisters and aunts and cousins live.’
‘Your mother is dead?’
She hesitated, then nodded. ‘Yes. She died giving birth to me. And my sisters. My father died later. Or rather, we think he did. He went on a hunting party and never came back.’
Hal frowned, and he said, ‘You told me that your mother and aunts were the last of the native human beings on Ozagen. That isn’t so. Fobo told me that there are at least a thousand small isolated groups in the back-lands. And you said once before that Rastignac was the only Earthman to get out alive from the wreck. He was your mother’s husband, naturally … and incredible as it sounds, their union—one of the terrestrial and an extraterrestrial—was fertile! That alone would rock my colleagues on their heels. It’s completely contrary to accepted science that their body chemistry and chromosomes should match! But—what I’m getting at is that your mother’s sisters had children, too. If the last human male of your group died years before Rastignac crashed, who was their father?’
‘My father, Jean-Jacques Rastignac. He was the husband of my mother and my three aunts. They all said that he was a superb lover, very experienced, very virile.’
Hal said,’Oh.’
Until she had the spaghetti and salad ready, he watched her in silence. By then he had regained some of his moral perspective. After all, the Frenchman was not too much worse than he himself was. Maybe not as bad. He chuckled. How easy it was to condemn somebody else for giving way to temptation until you yourself faced the same situation. He wondered what Pornsen would have done if Jeannette had contacted him.
‘… and so, after we’d been going down that jungle river,’ she was saying, ‘they quit watching me so closely. We’d taken two months to get from my home, near where they’d captured me, so they thought I‘d never dare to try to get home alone. There are too many deadly things in the jungle. They make the nightlifer look like a minor nuisance.’
She shuddered.
‘When we got to a village which was on the very edge of their civilization, they let me wander around in the enclosure. By then I’d learned some of their language and they some of mine. But our conversation was on a very simple level. One of their party, a scientist named ‘Asa” atsi, put me through all sorts of examinations and tests, physical and mental. There was a machine at the village hospital which took photographs of my insides. My skeleton, my organs. Maw tyuh! My everything.
‘They said it was most interesting. Imagine that! I am exposed as no woman has ever been exposed, and to them I am just most interesting. Indeed!’
‘Well.’ Hal laughed. ‘You can’t expect them to take the viewpoint of a male mammal toward a female mammal … that is …’
She looked archly at him. ‘And am I a mammal?’
‘Obviously, unmistakably, indisputably, and enthusiastically.’
‘For that, you get a kiss.’
She leaned over him and placed her mouth over his. He stiffened, reacting as he had when his ex-wife had offered to kiss him. But she must have anticipated this, for she said, ‘You are a man, not a pillar of stone. And I am a woman who loves you. Kiss me back; don’t just take my kisses.’
‘Oh, not so hard,’ she murmured. ‘Kiss me. Don’t try to ram your lips through mine. Go soft, melt, merge your lips with mine. See.’
She vibrated the tip of her tongue against his. Then she stood back, smiling, her eyes half-closed, her red lips wet. He was shaking and breathing hard.
‘Do your people think the tongue is only to talk with? Do they think that what I did is wicked, unreal?’
‘I don’t know. Nobody ever discussed that.’
‘You liked it, I know. Yet this is the same mouth with which I eat. The one I must hide behind a veil when I sit across the table from you.’
‘Don’t put the cap on.’ he blurted. ‘I have been thinking about that. There is no rational reason why we should be veiled when we eat. The only reason is that I have been taught it is disgusting. Pavlov’s dog salivated when it heard the bell; I get sick when I see food go into a naked mouth.’
‘Let’s eat. Then we will drink and we will talk of us. And later do whatever we feel like doing.’
He was learning fast. He didn’t even blush.
15
After the meal she diluted a pitcher of beetlejuice with water, poured in a purplish liquid which made the drink smell like grapes, and dropped sprigs of an orange plant on the surface. Placed into a glass of ice cubes, it was cool and even tasted like grapes. It did not gag him at all.
‘Why did you pick me instead of Pornsen?’
She sat on his lap, one arm around his neck, the other on the table, drink in hand.
‘Oh, you were so good-looking, and he was so ugly, besides,
I could feel that you could be trusted. I knew I lad to be careful. My father had told me about Earth-men. He said they couldn’t be trusted.’
‘How true. But you must have an intuition for doing the right thing, Jeannette. If you had antennae, I’d say you could detect nervous emanations. Here, let’s see!’ He went to run his fingers through her hair, but she ducked her head and laughed.
He laughed with her and dropped his hand to her shoulder, rubbing the smooth skin. ‘I was probably the only person on the ship who wouldn’t have betrayed you. But I’m in a quandary now. You see, your presence here raises the Backrunner. It puts me in grave danger—but a danger I wouldn’t miss for anything else in the world.
‘However, what you tell me of the X-ray machines worries me. So far, we’ve seen none. Are the wogs hiding them? If so, why? We know that they have electricity, and that they’re theoretically capable of inventing X-ray machines. Perhaps, they’re hiding them only because they’re indications of an even more developed technology.
‘But that doesn’t seem reasonable. And, after all, we don’t know too much of Siddo culture. We’ve not been here long enough; we don’t have enough men to do extensive investigation.
‘Maybe I’m being too suspicious. That’s more than likely. Nevertheless, Macneff should be informed. But I can’t tell him how I found out; I wouldn’t even dare make up a lie about my source of information.
‘I’m on the horns of a dilemma.’
‘A dilemma? A beast I never heard of before.’
He hugged her and said, ‘I hope you never do.’
‘Listen,’ she said, looking eagerly at him with her beautiful brown eyes, ‘Why bother to tell Macneff? If the Siddo should attack the Haijac—or, as you say their enemies call them so aptly, Highjackers—and conquer them, why not? Couldn’t we make our way to my homeland and live there?’
Hal was shocked. ‘Those are my people, my countrymen! They—we—are Sigmenites. I couldn’t betray them!’
‘You are doing just that now by keeping me here,’ she said gravely.