“When must you leave?” she asked, her head against his chest, her lips trembling on his skin with the words she spoke.
“My notes are pretty complete.”
“Soon, then?”
“I can’t put them off much longer. Suspicions will grow.”
“What can we do?”
He took a deep breath, filling his lungs, trying to clear his head to think. “There are two possibilities, I guess. First, I could fight the miscegenation laws through the courts. That’s going to take most all the money I have. And I still might lose—most likely will lose—and go to jail anyway. The other way is for me to leave, have you smuggled off Demos, smuggled onto another world—some backwoods place—and buy a place deep in some wildland area where the neighbors wouldn’t be a problem. Then live in secrecy. There are a good many danger points, like smuggling you off, getting you onto a second world without customs finding you
“The first would not be so criminal. Maybe they would take that into consideration.”
He said nothing, suddenly filled with a panic that threatened to take control of him. It had been all right to theorize about what they could do, to let plans roil over one another in his mind—but to speak them, to talk about them as if a decision must be reached, was more than he could stand up to. He lit a cigarette, savored the smooth smoke of the drug weed, hoping it would relax him more quickly than usual. He tried to speak, to talk over the problem with her, but the words wouldn’t come. When she asked what was the matter, he found he could not even look at her. A coldness, a terror, a calculated emotionlessness had seeped into his mind and was struggling to take over the reins and guide his actions.
For a long while, they lay together, saying nothing, listening to the occasional noise of animals in the trees outside and the far and melancholy cry of the Wintercrest, a white, lavishly feathered bird common in the cold months on this part of the continent.
Finally, she asked, “Are you married?”
His voice bounced into his throat unbidden, “Yes.” It fell into the air like hot, smoking lead. It was the way out, the way to avoid losing everything. He was not married, of course. But if he could lie, if he could say that he was, if he could dismiss all of this so swiftly with that one, three-letter word, didn’t that prove that there wasn’t the kind of love here that he had once thought there was? Yes. That was it. He had been following along a dangerous trail with only disaster at the end, lulled by infatuation and mistaking that for love. If he had really loved her, he would not have hesitated a moment to risk everything to have her. He would not have lied so glibly, so quickly, so easily. He had very nearly blown everything for infatuation, for lust mixed with curiosity, and that had been sheerest folly.
They were silent a time.
“It’s just as well,” she said at last. She hesitated, blushed for the first time since he had known her. “So am I.”
He tensed against her. “You’re married?”
“Do you mind?”
“Uh—”
If you do—” She started to move as she spoke.
“No. Don’t go yet.”
Silence. Time passing. The roar of the future speeding darkly on to meet the present and be thrust into the past.
“Is he—a winged man?”
“One of my own? Of course, yes.”
“Then why—”
“What?”
“Why leave him to love me like this. I couldn’t compare with—” He was furious, and the words stuck in his throat, clung to his lips and would not come forth. He felt that she had been making a fool of him. Surely, loving a man as free as the birds, being enfolded within his wings in joy, could be much better, much more fulfilling than anything a cumbersome, landbound brute such as he. could offer. His tenderest movements would seem gross and stupid in comparison.
“He isn’t impotent,” she said, “but sterile, just as I am sterile. You are not. I wanted a fruitful man, even if I cannot bear children.”