was forgetful too. Well, look if you wish, darling. What harm? You must
have seen the holograms … ” She lifted her arms and made a slow turn
before his eyes. “Do you like what you’re getting?”
“Sun and stars–”
She stopped to regard him, as if unaware of chill. He barely heard her:
“Would it be wrong? Here in these clean spaces, under heaven?”
He took a step in her direction, halted, and grinned his most rueful.
“It would not be very practical, I’m afraid. You deserve better.”
She sighed. “You are too kind to me, Dominic.” She put on her
bedclothes. They kissed more carefully than had been their way of late,
and got into the bags that lay side by side in the heavy shadow of a
furbark tree.
“I’m not sleepy,” she told him after a few minutes.
“How could I be?” he answered.
“Was I wanton just now? Or unfair? That would be much worse.”
“I was the Fabian this time, not you.”
“The what? … Never mind.” She lay watching the final stars and the
first silvery flush before daybreak. Her voice stumbled. “Yes, I must
explain. You could have had me if you’d touched me with a fingertip. You
can whenever you ask, beloved. Chastity is harder than I thought.”
“But it does mean a great deal to you, doesn’t it? You’re young and
eager. I can wait awhile.”
“Yes–I suppose that is part of what I feel, the wanting to know–to
know you. You’ve had many women, haven’t you? I’m afraid there’s no
mystery left for me to offer.”
“On the contrary,” he said, “you have the greatest of all. What’s it
like to be really man and wife? I think you’ll teach me more about that
than I can teach you about anything else.”
She was mute until she could muster the shy words: “Why have you never
married, Dominic?”
“Nobody came along whom I couldn’t be happy without–what passes for
happy in an Imperial Terran.”
“Nobody? Out of hundreds to choose from?”
“You exaggerate … Well, once, many years ago. But she was another
man’s, and left with him when he had to flee the Empire. I can only hope
they found a good home at some star too far away for us to see from
here.”
“And you have longed for her ever since?”
“No, I can’t say that I have in any romantic sense, though you are a lot
like her.” Flandry hesitated. “Earlier, I’d gotten a different woman
angry at me. She had a peculiar psionic power, not telepathy but–beings
tended to do what she desired. She wished on me that I never get the one
I wanted in my heart. I’m not superstitious, I take no more stock in
curses or spooks than I do in the beneficence of governments. Still, an
unconscious compulsion–Bah! If there was any such thing, which I
positively do not think, then you’ve lifted it off me, Kossara, and I
refuse to pursue this morbid subject when I could be chattering about
how beautiful you are.”
At glaciation’s midwinter, a colter of ice opened a gap in the Kazan
ringwall. Melt-begotten, the Lyubisha River later enlarged this to a
canyon. Weathering of mostly soft crater material lowered and blurred
the heights. But Flandry found his third campsite enchanting.
He squatted on a narrow beach. Before him flowed the broad brown stream,
quiet except where it chuckled around a boulder or a sandbar near its
banks. Beyond, and at his back, the gorge rose in braes, bluffs, coombs
where brooks flashed and sang, to ocherous palisades maned with forest.
The same deep bluish-green and plum-colored leaves covered the lower
slopes, borne on trees which grew taller than the taiga granted. Here
and there, stone outcrops thrust them aside to make room for
wild-flower-studded glades. A mild breeze, full of growth and soil
odors, rustled through the woods till light and shadow danced. That
light slanted from a sun a third again as bright as Sol is to Terra,
ardent rather than harsh, an evoker of infinite hues.
Guslars trilled on boughs, other wings flew over in their hundreds, a
herd of yelen led by a marvelously horned bull passed along the opposite