‘—spring to mind,’ I finished. I felt as weak as if I had been away on a long swim. I could hardly focus on those violet-coloured eyes looking into mine.
‘It’s all over,’ said Mary Fangold, kindly, stroking my hand. The nanobots have removed your tumour. Now you will be well again. But you must rest awhile. I have a neat little ward waiting for you, next to my apartment.’
She came to me quietly at the first hour of the night, when the sigh of air circulation fell to a whisper. Her lips had been reddened. Her hair lay about her shoulders. Her pale breasts showed through a semi-transparent nightdress. She stood by my bedside, asking if I slept, knowing well the answer.
‘Time for a little physiotherapy,’ she murmured.
I sat up. ‘Come in with me, Mary.’
Slipping her garment from her body, she stood there naked. I kissed the bush of dark hair on her mons veneris, and pulled her into the bed. There we were in joy, all night, our limbs interlocked, hers and mine. At times it seemed to us that we were back on the great fecund Earth, rolling on its course with its ever changing mantle of blue skies and cloud and its restless oceans.
I remained in hospital for a week, indifferent to what was happening elsewhere. Every night, at the first hour, Mary came to me. We sated ourselves with each other. By day she was again the rational, professional person I had known until then, until the revelation of her lovely body.
During my recuperation period, Cang Hai visited me, accompanied by her precocious child, Alpha. And many other visitors, Youssef, Choihosla among them.
On one visit, finding that I looked perfectly well, Cang Hai ventured to ask me why it was that my late wife had not undergone nanosurgery for her cancer. I was mortified to feel that I had ceased, or almost ceased, to mourn the death of Antonia.
‘My distrust of religion springs in part from this. Antonia was a Christian Scientist all her life. She was brought up in her parents’ creed. She held that her cancer could be healed by prayer. Nothing would persuade her otherwise.
‘I could not force her,’ I said. ‘She had every right to her beliefs, however fatal.’
A tear trickled from under the neat epicanthic fold of Cang Hai’s eye. ‘You surely can’t believe that still, Tom.’ But I believed I caught her thinking, even as she wiped the tear away, that some good had come from my dear wife’s death, whereby I had sublimated grief by striving to change society.
Little Alpha liked to be told stories of bikers and their gang warfare in the days before I was born. In the underprivileged part of the world where my boyhood had been spent, it was sometimes possible to obtain a magazine entitled Biker Wars, which I had greatly relished at the time.
As I was telling the child one such story, we were interrupted by a tiny cry, something between the bleat of a goat and the shrill of a gull.
‘Scuse me, unkie,’ said the child. ‘My little Yah-Yah needs attention.’
She brought forth from the basket she was carrying what appeared to be a small cage. It contained a kind of big-eyed red animal. Alpha showed it to me when she had attended to its needs. So I had my first close look at a tammy.
‘Crispin gave it to me,’ she said, with pride.
The men and women in the fire prevention force had been rendered virtually unemployed by the success of the Sim White Mars operation. Rather than remain idle they had cannibalised some of their equipment, making an improved version of a toy that had enjoyed a vogue on Earth many decades previously.
In Alpha’s cage was a small VR pet. It was born and it grew, constantly needing feeding, cleaning and loving care from the child who owned it. If neglected, the pet could die or ‘escape’ from its cage. In adolescence, it became rather rebellious and needed tactful handling. Conveniently, at this age a pet of the opposite sex entered the cage. With some guidance from the small owner, the two pets could mate and eventually bring forth another generation of pet.