by John Boyd
“Gravy has a terrific sense of humor.” She smiled. “When he announced you from the doorway, he said that the Navy had finally let my privy councilor out of the privy.”
“You couldn’t help but be charmed by such a witty man.”
“Personally Gravy’s a darling, but on Kanab we consider warriors as the vestigial remnant of a society of brutes. They’re lowest in a caste society.”
“They still have power on earth, and I’ve got to talk to you about them. There’s an expression ‘Business before pleasure,’ and I want to get this subject out of the way before we speak of lighter matters. I’ll begin by asking if you’ve met a man called Slade.”
“Ben? Of course. He’s a warrior who dislikes uniforms. If they don’t get me out of committee fast enough, he wants to organize a little army to liberate me. He says I’ll be his Joan of Arc.”
“That’s Ben, all right. He’s a fantasist, but he has clout in the real world. He wanted me to tell you that Admiral Harper’s trying to get me to pinpoint the location of your spaceship. Harper’s up to no good, but if I refuse to tell him under oath, he might be able to put me in jail.”
“Then, you tell him exactly what he wants to know.”
“But Harper’s a military man, and the military men on this planet could blast your ship to smithereens.”
She shook her head in disagreement and said slowly, “Ben asked you to tell me this because Ben walks one way and looks another. He himself hinted to me of this danger, and I laughed at his fears. He thinks I will be truthful with you. He does not believe I speak only the truth or remain silent. So I will tell you, Breedlove, it is not your military caste I fear but the slowness of your committees. If I am held beyond my time, millennia-old urges of my nature will command me to stay. Earth cannot hold me hostage. If I cannot leave of my own free will, earth will become my hostage.”
She took his hand, as if to reassure him, and said, “My ship can defend itself. True, it cannot rise without a propellant, but it converts the sunlight to its defense. It could destroy mankind. This is not a threat, and certainly it does not apply to you. Far from harming you, I would grant you an immortality of sorts. You would become the Lord Breedlove of my manor, but your grandchildren would see the last of the race of men.”
Her words were gentle. They held both a threat and a promise, and he was more interested in the promise.
“Could you wave a wand and make me immortal?”
“No, you would wave the wand, and the immortality I give you could be given to you by any woman of your race. Now the lady of the manor has spoken. I hear my steward arriving. Let us lay aside the business of state and go to chow.”
He arose at her imperial bidding, wondering and curious. From her remark he gathered that she was promising him genetic immortality if she was compelled to remain on earth, and by implication she was informing him that she could mate with a member of a different species. Somehow, despite the apocalyptic vision he had seen in the meadow, the idea was potentially attractive. To be the father of a new race.
Particularly with Kyra as the race mother. Her effervescence charmed him. Her lightness and wit delighted him. But beneath her shimmering, girlish vivacity beckoned a woman, more heavy-bodied and fecund, who exerted a compelling allure. That woman anchored Kyra’s lightness and gave her grace notes deeper tones.
In the wardroom the steward had lighted the candles and turned off the overhead. The light played over the snowy napery, the silverware, the translucent china.
“Look, Breedlove. This beats sucking paste from a tube.”
The woman he had sensed momentarily was gone, and the laughing girl had returned. It was better this way. He was more at ease with the girl, and he could trip lightly into areas where a more deliberate pace might have alarmed her. Helping her to be seated, he said, “I’d like to seat you this way for the next ten thousand years, but, if not, I’d be perfectly willing to fly away with you and suck on a tube of paste.”
“Breedlove, Myra would have you in the tube. But we promised to speak only pleasantries at dinner, and I have the ideal subject for light comedy: earth scientists I have met.”
As the mess attendant moved silently in the background, she gave imitations of her interrogators so accurate he recognized many of them from his debriefing sessions. Her mimicry fascinated him, but she ventured no information on the subjects they had questioned her about. It was as if she had been coached on his “need to know” and was avoiding areas off-limits to his knowledge.
“Meeting all those experts must be interesting.”
“It’s tedious,” she admitted. “Here I am, surrounded by old men and parking lots. Out there is water, trees, mountains, a great blue sky. I’d rather run naked through the woods or go swimming in the sound.”
“Do you swim?”
“Superbly. I’m so buoyant.”
“Father and I own a cabin on a lake near Mount Rainier. Pine trees scent the air, and a mountain stream tumbles by within sound of the cabin.”
“Could we go there after they let me out?”
“Certainly. We could live there if you’re stranded on earth. You’d be happy in the green summers with birds and chipmunks for company. You could let your hair grow green again, run naked through the forest, and go swimming in the lake.”
She was leaning forward, intent on his words. “How would you earn your living?”
“I’d open a general store in the village. Supporting you would be easy. With you around, I wouldn’t need a television set, even, for entertainment. I’d grow for you an acre of the sweetest, most succulent alfalfa you ever tasted and store enough in the barn for winter. I’d set up a beehive to provide you with fresh honey, and you could lie on the beach of the lake, storing up sunlight while I tended store.”
As his mind grew engrossed with the vision, her eyes glowed with the shared fantasy.
“When I came home at night, we’d always dine by candlelight and we could swap stories about what happened to us during the day. Your wit would make the most trivial happening an event.”
“Breedlove,” she asked anxiously, “would you be happy with a woman who knows more than you do?”
“I’d sip your knowledge as a bee sips nectar. And as men go, I’m not without some intelligence. I could write you sonnets. You’d be happy with me. Each morning would be a fresh awakening to a fresh earth, and each twilight would be a separate peace.”
“That I know I’d love!”
“I can even keep house. All the rangers’ wives at Selkirk agree I keep the neatest cabin. And we’d have children, a green-haired girl for me and a blue-eyed boy for you.”
“Could we have an apple tree, Breedlove?”
“Several. Winesaps and Golden Delicious, for blossoms in the spring and fruit in the fall. In winter I’d teach you to ski on the slopes and skate on the pond. We’d snowshoe through the forest. There’s a grandeur to a snowbound forest, and the sunlight’s never wasted when it shines on snow. And we’d teach our children to skate on the pond.”
“I can hear our children laughing, Breedlove.”
It was then he asked her, “Could we have children?”
“Dozens, in all varieties,” she answered blithely. “Why stop at two?”
“Any number and style would be welcome. I could add rooms to the cabin.”
“Oh, being married to you would be fun. You give me the feeling of forests already, and to live with you among the trees would be heavenly. When you came home at night the cabin would be spotless. Does our cabin have a fireplace?”
“A huge one.”
“Terrific. In winter I’d have a fire blazing, and when my big, handsome husband came through the door, he would lift me and whirl…”
Her voice trailed into silence. The wardroom seemed to darken as the light went out of her eyes. She no longer looked at him but through him with a weird fixity of gaze, and a mood as palpable as another presence entered the room with them. Frozen by a horror beyond te
rror, she stared through him into an abyss. He could feel the void arcing beyond the end of worlds and filled with a loneliness and a sadness as poignant as the weeping of lost children.
Speaking softly, as a man awakening a sleepwalker, he asked, “Kyra, what’s wrong?” He was trying to draw her back from the precipice with his voice, and he saw her eyes struggle to regain focus.
She shuddered, and now she was looking at him again. Her voice trembled slightly, and she said, “It’s gone.”
“What was it?”
“I suffered a… slight dislocation. In my tongue it’s called a frilling. Sitting here, imagining that we loved in the manner of earth, I felt the premonitory mating pangs of my own species.”
“But there was fear in your eyes.”
“Not fear alone. With us, love is the agony of the incomplete, a yearning for fulfillment, and it begins in a desolation of the spirit. Nature prepares my body to accept such longings when my time comes, and I am readied for my season by the swelling sun. The urge itself commences when the declining sun reminds us that all who live must die, that fresh generations are waiting to be born, and that the old must prepare for the new. Tonight my biological clock ticked prematurely.” She forced a wan smile. “You tilted the planet for me, Breedlove, and you did it while we were on its dark side.”
“Your agony I could feel—”
“You are so sensitive to my feelings, Breedlove, I’ve noticed before, and I think I’ve been given a clue to our understanding…”
For once he would not let her divert him from a subject. Still shaken and frightened for her, he grew blunt. “You’re right, I am sensitive to your feelings, and you were more than frightened, you were terrified. Why were you so afraid?”
Her poise crumbled. Her body slumped. For a moment she was on the verge of tears, a frightened child asking not for his aid but for comfort, wanting to lean on his strength, and in her vulnerability she was overwhelmingly appealing. The little girl in her compelled his devotion more profoundly than the siren he had sensed in her earlier.
“I was afraid for you. Breedlove, no matter how much you romanticize me, I’m no damned wand-waving goddess. There’s lots I don’t know about this planet and more I don’t know about me. For one thing, earth’s axial tilt is greater than that my body evolved from, and what will all the extra sunlight do to me? The life force is as much a mystery to me as to you. When I felt the frilling begin, I was petrified by the fear that it might be my true summons, and before it, my darling, we would have been as helpless as if before a hurricane. I would have been rapacious, and you couldn’t have resisted me.”
Because she was frightened and concerned for him, she was open to him as never before, he realized. And she had revealed more about her biological urges and about her feelings toward him. She had called him “darling” with a tenderness that signified the term was not chosen because of her faulty knowledge of English. He wanted to prolong the moment and its openness. He wanted to explore her definition of love as “the agony of the incomplete” and to learn more about her mating cycle. Above all, he wanted to put his arms around her and assure her he had no fear of her amorous rapacity.
Yet at the moment it was Breedlove who evaded intimacies with decorum and sought conversational diversions. Kyra’s emotional storm had battered her defenses. Her wariness was weakened. In response to a show of his affection she might confide in him as an earth girl to her lover, and her quarters were surely wired, their words being recorded. He would not be an unwitting agent of electronic eavesdroppers or help earth’s manipulators gain an advantage over her.
His suspicions gave him a logical diversion, and he said, “I couldn’t resist you in a light breeze. You don’t need a hurricane. And there’s something else bugging me, or rather bugging Admiral Harper. What’s the purpose of the implant in your skull?”
“Its main purpose was to get you invited here to dinner. It’s an acoustic converter I haven’t needed on earth. It permits me to communicate with any intelligent species which vocalizes at a higher frequency than that which you and I use.”
“Harper thought it was something that kept you in communication with your spaceship.”
“He would.” She laughed, her composure regained. “He’s a suspicious old bastard. Actually it has a limited use as a homing device in fog or darkness when I’m in the sound range of a howler on my ship… Isn’t this a delicious dessert?”
The steward had served them baklava, a Greek pastry steeped in honey.
“Somebody around here is very solicitous of your comfort, I see. They’re learning your tastes.”
“I think they’ve learned a lot from you,” Kyra said, surprising him with her knowledge. “Ben was telling me that there was something in your psychological profile that made it easy for my security project director to get you free and unsupervised entry into my presence. He tells me you and I are going to share a bridal suite.”
“The suite’s got two bedrooms,” Breedlove said, “so the setup is less intimate than Slade might lead you to believe. But what’s this about my psychological profile? I haven’t talked to any shrinks except those I’ve lectured to at the debriefings. How could Slade know anything about me I haven’t told him?”
“Oh, you know Ben,” she said. “He won’t tell you but a little bit at a time. He claims you don’t need to know, but what he’s really doing is making your curiosity get up on its hind legs and beg for his tidbits. But he did finally tell me I’ll be rejoining you after tomorrow’s examinations. My hearing before the Atomic Energy commissioner is Tuesday.”
“Why not Monday?” he asked.
“Monday is the Memorial Day holiday,” she answered.
He had failed to remember the holiday because he was wondering about Slade’s possession of his profile, where it had come from, who had evaluated it, and how it had provided him with a free entry into Kyra’s boudoir.
Chapter Ten
Slade was waiting in Breedlove’s room when the ranger returned, and Slade’s debriefing procedure was to rub his hands together expectantly, grin, and say, “Okay, Breedlove, tell me all about it.”
Breedlove hung his coat in the closet, straightened its drape on the hanger, removed his tie and hung it in the closet, unbuttoned his shirt, and said, “I know you’ve got top clearance, Slade, but this report is on my own ‘need-to-know’ basis which I call tit for tat. If you want the details of my wild evening with Kyra, you’ve first got to tell me what it was in my profile that earned me the right to share her living quarters?”
“Boy howdy, this is going to be fun. I know more about you, son, than your mother knows, which is a break for her. You’ll remember you took a placement test for your ranger’s job. It was comprehensive enough to draw up your profile from. Naturally when you showed up here, I ran a make on you, and the psychologist who wrote you up should have been jailed for purveying hard-core pornography. One interesting little kink of yours is that you have Oedipal fixations on trees. Seems your mother put your crib under one when you were a baby, and you thought the tree was your mammy. There’s many a lumberjack who identifies his father with a tree and goes around axing his old man down, but you’re the first man in the history of psychological testing with strong Oedipal longings toward trees. Boy, you’re a knothole Casanova if there ever was one!”
Slade took such obvious relish in detailing a profile as unlikely as Laudermilk’s history of the Breedlove name that Breedlove could not restrain a smile of sympathetic glee.
“When I spotted your little kink,” Slade continued, “I wanted to check it against a bend in Kyra’s chart. I fed the two profiles into a dating computer, and when the kinks connected with the transistors, the computer shook, rattled, and rolled. It’s a perfect blend of compatibilities. Kyra has an Electra complex toward trees. To top it off, you both observe a code of sexual ethics that went out of style in 1889. For reasons you don’t need to know, we have to protect our heroine from ‘a fate worse than death,’ and you�
�ve got just the right morality for the job. Also, her high regard for you might affect her political judgment of the United States, and, if it comes down to it, leave her feeling kindlier toward all the earth.”
“Well, thanks for reposing special trust and confidence in my discriminating libido, Slade, but we may have a problem.” He told of Kyra’s remarks about the defensive capabilities of her spaceship, and Slade listened intently, dropping his burlesqued role of the uproarious Texan as quickly as he had donned it.
“She could still be bluffing,” he mused aloud, “but I don’t think so. Anyhow, it doesn’t matter to you and me, since we want what she wants. But she’s wrong if she thinks we’re not aware of her threat to the planet. I am. Now, what’s this thing behind her ear?”
“Oh, that. It’s just a simple device that permits her to hear and interpret high-frequency sounds.”
“You think that’s simple?” Slade’s question did not demand an answer. He was thinking. Then he whistled, low and thoughtfully, slapped his thigh in agreement with some inner argument, and stood up, saying with a note of exultation, “Boy, we don’t have to worry about the Navy’s vote any more. Our little lady’s given us a chance to grab Harper by the whingding.”
He turned from the room so excited and preoccupied with his plans he forgot to tell Breedlove good night.
On Friday morning, at the Federal Building, Breedlove lectured the scientists who had interrogated Kyra Thursday afternoon. After lunch he was walking back to the ready room when Harper stopped him in the passageway. “There’ll be no afternoon session, Ranger Breedlove.”
“What happened to my Friday-morning group?”
“That’s a national security matter.”
Vaguely curious about the cancellation, Breedlove drove back to the motel, and when he pulled into the parking lot he saw immediately that the lot was almost empty. The explanation came when he got to the desk and found a note from Slade.
Breedlove, I’m gone. Your baggage has been transferred to the bridal suite. You sleep in the ready room and give Kyra the recovery room. See you Tuesday.
