Captain Leicester watched the young woman stretch back and ease her cramped body. “Damn these bridge seats, they were never meant for use in full gravity conditions. I hope comfortable furniture gets put on a fair priority; Junior here doesn’t approve of my sitting on hard seats these days.”
Lord, how I love that girl, who’d have believed it at my age! To remind himself more forcefully of the gap, Leicester said sharply, “Are you planning to marry MacAran, Camilla?”
“I don’t think so,” she said with the ghost of a smile. “We haven’t been thinking in those terms. I love him–we came so close during the first Wind, we’ve shared so much, we’ll always be part of each other. I’m living with him, when he’s here–which isn’t very often–if that’s what you really want to know. Mostly because he wants me so much, and when you’ve been that close to anyone, when you can–” she fumbled for words, “when you can feel how much he wants you, you can’t turn your back on him, you can’t leave him–hungry and unhappy. But whether or not we can make any kind of home together, whether we want to live together for the rest of our lives–I honestly don’t know; I don’t think so. We’re too different.” She gave him a straightforward smile that made the man’s heart turn over and said, “I’d really be happier with you, on a long-term basis. We’re so much more alike. Rafe’s so gentle, so sweet, but you understand me better.”
“You’re carrying his child, and you can say this to me, Camilla ?”
“Does it shock you?” she asked, grieved, “I’m sorry, I wouldn’t upset you for the world. Yes, it’s Rafe’s baby, and I’m glad, in a funny way. He wants it, and one parent ought to want a child; for me–I can’t help it, I was brainwashed–it’s still an accident of biology. If it was yours, for instance–and it could have been, the same kind of accident, just as Fiona’s having your child and you hardly know her by sight–you’d have hated it, you’d have wanted me to fight against having it.”
“I’m not so sure. Maybe not. Not now, anyhow,” Harry Leicester said in a low voice. “Saying these things still upsets me, though. Shocks me. I’m too old, maybe.”
She shook her head. “We’ve got to learn not to hide from each other. In a society where our children will grow up knowing that what they feel is an open book, what good is it going to be to keep sets of masks to wear from each other?”
“Frightening.”
“A little. But they’ll probably take it for granted.” She leaned a little against him, easing her back against his chest. She reached back and took his fingers in hers. She said slowly, “Don’t be shocked at this. But-if I live-if we both live-I’d like my next child to be yours.”
He bent and kissed her on the forehead. He was almost too much moved to speak. She tightened her hand on his, then drew it away.
“I told MacAran this,” she said matter-of-factly. “For genetic reasons, it’s going to be a good thing for women to have children by different fathers. But–as I said–my reasons aren’t quite as cold and unemotional as all that.”
Her face took on a distant look–for a moment it seemed to Leicester that she was looking at something invisible through a veil–and for a moment contracted in pain; but to his quick, concerned question, she summoned a smile.
“No, I’m all right. Let’s see what we can do about this year-length thing. Who knows, it might turn out to be our first National Holiday!”
The windmills were visible several miles from the Base Camp now, huge wooden-sailed constructs which supplied power for grinding flour and grain (nuts, harvested in the forest, made a fine slightly-sweet flour which would serve until the first crops of rye and oats were harvested) and also brought small trickles of electric power into the camp. But such power would always be in short supply on this world, and it was carefully rationed; for lights in the hospital, to operate essential machinery in the small metal shops and the new glass-house. Beyond the camp, with its own firebreak, was what they had begun to call New Camp, although the Hebrides Commune people who worked there called it New Skye; an experimental farm where Lewis MacLeod, and a group of assistants, were checking possibly domesticable animals.