“Why would you be sorry? She irritates me, too. She irritates all of us; she’s always been the bossiest one in the cohort.”
“Oh, really?” Marguery seemed to relax. “Well,” she said, “I’m glad to hear that. I wouldn’t like to think that all the Hakh’hli were as snotty as she is.”
“ ‘Snotty’?”
“Mean, uh, well, unlikeable. As a matter of fact,” she added, looking to the far end of the terrace, where Obie was practicing high jumps, “I do like Obie. He’s a little, ah, youthful, isn’t he? But he’s cute.”
“He’s my best friend,” Sandy said. He thought about asking exactly what “cute” meant in that context and decided against it. “He and I, well, we’ve been together all our lives, you know—” And he yawned.
“Aren’t you getting enough sleep?”
“I just can’t sleep as long as you people do,” he said defensively. “We only sleep two twelfth-days, back on the ship, and it’s hard to stay in bed longer than that. Anyway,” he added, “I was awake last night doing something.”
“Oh?”
“It’s another poem,” he said, and passed the paper over to her.
This
is to
my
dearest Marguery
whom I much love
with all my sins
of which I do hope
there will be shared
great numbers, jointly
undertaken with Marguery
herself, happily and often
Love Yes!
Love Yes!
Love Yes!
Love You!
Yes! You!
She gave him an ambiguous look and thought for a moment before speaking.
“Well, I guess you got the gender right this time, anyway,” she commented at last, handing it back.
Sandy had hoped for more. “Don’t you like it?”
She looked at him with fond exasperation. “Well, hell, of course I like it. Kind of. You do come right to the point, don’t you? But anybody would like having a poem written to her, wouldn’t she?”
“I don’t know. I hoped so.”
“Well, she would. I would. Only—” She hesitated. “Only, look, Sandy, this is all very confusing, you know? I’ve got a job to do, and I don’t want to be mixed up.”
“No more kissing, you mean?” Sandy asked doubtfully.
She laughed, and then ducked as Obie landed near her. He peered over her shoulder and then said, “He finally showed the poem to you?”
“He showed it to me, all right.”
“I think it’s a really good poem,” Obie said loyally. “For one in English, I mean. He could write a lot better in Hakh’hli if you wanted him to.”
“Why don’t you leave us alone?” Sandy demanded. Obie gave him an injured look but leaped away. Sandy said apologetically to Marguery Darp, “He’s pretty excited about going to New York.”
“It isn’t exactly ‘New York’ any more, Sandy—”
“Well, York, then. Or whatever you call it. Anyway, we’ve seen so many old films about it . . . and, really, he’s quite young, you know.” And the funny thing was that when he heard himself say that he realized that he had been thinking it for some time. Marguery’s comment had been right on target. The Hakh’hli of his cohort, with all their rambunctious, playful, heedless, sometimes sulky ways were really rather childish—not at all like John William Washington, who was not only adult but, something no Hakh’hli would ever understand, “in love.”
But Obie heard him. “I am not a child,” he cried, “Look how far I can jump! Could a child do this?”
And, eyes on Sandy, he launched himself to the top of the elevator housing and squatted there, grinning down at them.
“I guess he is a little young,” Sandy said apologetically.
Marguery nodded without comment. Then she looked over Sandy’s shoulder. “Oh, there it is!” she cried. “See it, off to the left there, just above that cloud? It’s our blimp! It’ll stay here overnight, and then we’ll get on it tomorrow for the trip to York.”
Sandy craned his neck to see, delighted. From behind him he heard Obie call, “Here I come!”
And he jumped—his eyes on the blimp, and not on the parapet he was aiming for.
That was a mistake. He misjudged his trajectory—just slightly—too much. He did hit the railing, but he didn’t stop there. Marguery screamed; Sandy shouted and jumped up to reach for the Hakh’hli, but it was too late. Obie, legs scratching in terror as he tried to stop himself, hit the parapet. He bounced and kept right on going, over the edge. They could hear him squealing all the way down to the ground.
Chapter 12
A person falling off the top of a twelve-story building hits the ground at a speed a little faster than seventy miles an hour, and that is easily enough to kill him. A Hakh’hli falling the same distance strikes the ground at the same velocity. True, a Hakh’hli is used to a gravitational force forty percent higher than the Earth’s. A Hakh’hli can survive decelerations that would cripple or kill any Earthman, but even for a Hakh’hli there is a limit. In relative terms Obie’s fall was only as though he had fallen, say, seven or eight stories. But a fall of seven or eight stories is enough to kill either human or Hakh’hli, anyway, and the impact was quite enough to do the job.
“But he was my friend,” Sandy wailed. He could not get out of his mind the picture of Oberon splatted on the sidewalk of Dawson, the eyes wide and empty and the body simply burst open. Twelves of human beings had crowded around to stare, fascination and revulsion mixed. They had no right to gape at Obie, so exposed.
“Of course he was your friend,” Marguery Darp soothed. “Sandy? I know you don’t want to think of such things now, but—well, are there any special Hakh’hli funeral arrangements that should be made?”
“Funeral arrangements?”
“For the disposal of the body,” she said. “They’ve, uh, picked it up in an ambulance, but what do we do now?”
He stared at her. It did not seem the time to remind her what the Hakh’hli used for “funeral” arrangements, especially as there was no possible way to manage them in this place. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Ask Polly.”
“But Polly’s not here,” Marguery pointed out. “She’s in her room, talking to somebody—the people on the big ship, I suppose. And when we asked her she said she didn’t care.”
“Well, she doesn’t,” Sandy muttered. “I don’t suppose any of them do. What do you do here for that kind of thing?”
“It depends. Whatever the family wants. Burial sometimes. Cremation, usually.”
“Burial?” He winced at the thought; Obie’s corpse thrust into the Earth, to rot and decay? He shuddered. “Whatever you think best. Cremation’s all right—but, oh, Marguery, this is terrible!”
When at last Polly came grumpily out of her room she showed little enough interest in what had been done with Obie’s body. It was the future that concerned her. “This is terrible,” she said, in Sandy’s exact words but a context all her own. “HoCheth’ik ti’Koli-kak was our only—what? Oh, Oberon, then. Oberon was our assigned astronomical specialist. ChinTekki-tho says the Major Seniors do not wish to send another one down.”
Marguery asked tentatively, “Does that mean you don’t want to go to York for the conference?”
Polly sniffed and writhed her torso in disgust. “Not at all! The Major Seniors direct that I take Oberon’s place; after all, I am well informed in the area of astronomy, too. So I suppose we might as well go on with it. And anyway,” she added, looking almost amiable for a moment, “I do think it would be interesting to ride in a ‘blimp.’ Don’t you, Sandy?”
But Sandy was too deep in misery to agree.
Chapter 13
If a world traveler of the twentieth century were brought back he would wonder greatly at the map of the Earth. The coastlines are all different. All the land San Francisco and Chicago had stolen from the lake and the bay the waters have won back as they rose. Libya’s Qattara Depression is a brackish lake, half rainwater and half overspill from the Mediterranean Sea. Bermuda is a memory. The polders of the Netherlands are part of the North Sea again, and a sluggish oozing of the lower Mississippi River has drowned out New Orleans—the main channel of the river has long since broken through the dams put up by the Corps of Engineers and forced its way through the Atchafalaya. Hawaii has lost the tourist traps of Waikiki, though there is plenty of the islands left—they began as volcanic mountains, after all. All along the east coast of North America the low, sandy barrier islands are only shoals now. Sharks nose hungrily through the gambling casinos of Atlantic City, and coral grows on the golf courses of Georgia’s sea islands. New York Bay is three times its former size, pocked with islands, and the Statue of Liberty stands with her feet wet up to the ankles. When the ice around the North Pole began to melt it made no difference. It was floating anyway, and so it added nothing to the oceanic water levels. The glaciers were a different matter. But even they were as nothing, nothing at all, compared to what happened when Antarctica lost the Ross Ice Shelf. So the edges of the continents are awash; and in their centers the searing, drying winds have left new dust bowls.