Aboard the blimp, Polly perched on a settee that groaned underneath her weight. She was peering out through the slanted windows at the ground and commenting acidly on what she saw. “Your Earth people,” she commented dispassionately to Sandy, “certainly are wasteful. Look at all this space down here, and hardly anyone using it.”
Sandy didn’t answer. He wasn’t thinking about the faults of Earth humans. He was thinking of his dead friend. Halfway across what had once been the province of Manitoba, he had not yet gotten used to Obie’s loss.
Yet . . . he was on a “blimp,” and the blimp was taking him to new experiences in the world of mankind.
It was certainly an interesting experience. It wasn’t in the least like any of the other forms of transportation he had already experienced. The blimp was helium filled and carried three hundred people with staterooms, music rooms, lavatories, and a dining room. One didn’t sit strapped in a seat on the blimp, one moved around. And yet it wasn’t like the interstellar vessel, either, because it moved underfoot; it throbbed with the noise of its engines and bobbled in the winds that struck it, and most of all it had windows you could look out of to see the ground.
As the blimp found an altitude without much turbulence, Sandy began to get used to the physical sensations, and his mood lightened. When Marguery Darp knocked on the door and invited him to join her for a drink, he accepted, glad enough to get away from Polly; even more glad to have Marguery for company.
They sat side by side on a light, soft settee, gazing out. The trip, Marguery said, would take a day and a half, and the dark of the first night was coming early, because they were heading toward it. Below them the darkening plains rolled past, and Marguery took Sandy’s hand.
“I’m really sorry about what happened to your friend, Oberon,” she said.
He squeezed her hand—gently, as she began to wince. “I know you are. He was my best friend, you know.”
“Yes.” She was silent for a moment, regarding him. Then she said, “Do you want to talk about him?”
“Oh, can I?” And, yes, he discovered, that was exactly what he wanted, very much. He wanted it even more than he wanted to work on the new poem he was meditating—even more than any of the other things he wanted to do with Marguery Darp. And so she listened, quietly sympathetic, while he told her about their childhood on the Hakh’hli ship, and the scrapes they’d gotten into together, and the way Oberon would be his buffer and bodyguard in the roughest of the Hakh’hli games, and how they’d share their “cookies and milk,” sometimes, just off by themselves—and about the funny scene when Oberon came into season with the Major Seniors, and how proud he was to have fertilized the Fourth Major Senior’s eggs. “And I miss him,” he said, squeezing her hand again.
She didn’t wince this time. She squeezed back. Then she said, “There’s something that surprises me. I mean, the other Hakh’hli don’t seem really broken up about it, do they?”
“Well, death isn’t a big thing with the Hakh’hli,” he explained. “See, there was my old teacher—well, maybe you’d call her a nursemaid. Her name was MyThara, and she was pretty nearly a mother to me.” And he told Marguery about the way MyThara had gone uncomplainingly to the titch’hik when the medical examination showed she was wearing out. Marguery shuddered. Sandy said quickly, “That’s the way they are. MyThara felt she was doing the right thing, you know? She was making room for another egg to hatch. Nobody ever really objects when it’s time to die, that I ever heard of. And nobody mourns.”
“But you do, Sandy,” she pointed out.
“But I’m not a Hakh’hli,” he said with pride.
The door opened and Polly stalked into the lounge toward them. “Sandy,” she complained, “it is sleeping time. I wish you would come to bed with me. I’m, what is the word, lonesome!”
“But I don’t want to come to bed with you,” Sandy said reasonably. “I want to be with Marguery.”
Polly licked her tongue out unhappily. “Will she come to bed with us?”
“Certainly not,” Sandy said, flushing. “Polly, you are on Earth now, and you must learn Earth ways. Earth people sleep alone, except during amphylaxis.”
“But I don’t like it,” she wailed. “I miss Obie, too!”
That decided him. He knew that what Polly missed, of course, was only warmth and company in the sleeping tangle. Nevertheless, there was nothing she could have said that would have melted Sandy’s heart more. “I think I should keep her company, just for a while,” he told Marguery Darp. “I’ll be back, I think. Probably.”
But the fact of the matter was that he, too, was tired. These long twenty-four-hour Earth days were taking their toll on him, too. In Polly’s stateroom, his arms around her and her arms around him, he found himself relaxing.
He really wanted to go back to Marguery Darp, too. When Polly’s gentle, hiccoughing snores told him she was asleep he tried gently disengaging himself. He didn’t succeed. Polly moaned and reached out, pulling him back . . .
And the next thing he knew he was waking up next to her, and he knew that a good many hours had passed.
As he moved, Polly snorted a huge sigh and rolled over. He detached himself and scuttled out from under just in time to avoid being crushed. Moving as quietly as he could, he stood up, looking around. The stateroom window was still black. He had no idea of the time. He thought for a moment of lying down next to Polly again, soaking in the warmth of her great, muscular torso; but there was, he thought, the possibility that Marguery Darp was still in the blimp’s lounge, waiting for him to return.
It was a silly thought, and of course it was wrong. No one moved in the narrow passageways of the blimp. The lights were all turned down. The lounge was empty.
Sandy sat down on a window seat, gazing out. The sky was dark, but filled with bright stars. The gentle motion of the blimp wasn’t worrying any more; it was almost comforting. Perhaps he was getting his “sea legs,” Sandy thought, and then leaned forward, perplexed. For a moment he thought he saw another constellation of stars, actually below him, a bright cluster of red and white and green lights.
It wasn’t stars. It could only be another blimp, sliding silently along a thousand feet below them, crossing their track from somewhere to somewhere else.
“Sir?”
He turned around guiltily. A sleepy-eyed crew member was peering at him from the doorway. “Would you care for some coffee, sir?” she asked.
“Oh, yes, please,” he said at once. “With a lot of cream and sugar.”
“Right away, sir,” she said, and hesitated. “I can turn the television on for you, if you like. Or there’s music on the ship system—there are headphones at your seat.”
“Maybe later,” he said politely. He wasn’t quite ready to watch Earthly television. He wasn’t even quite ready to talk to Marguery Darp, he decided, even if she had been available, because there was a lot that he needed to think about. The first, and worst, thing, of course, was Obie. He felt the tingle at the back of his nose that warned him that tears were nearby as he thought about Obie. He didn’t try to restrain them. He was, he realized, probably the only person in the universe who would even consider crying over Obie. Certainly no one on this planet would. Just as certainly, no one on the Hakh’hli ship would mourn, though a few members of the ship’s crew might be interested enough to check the name and lineage of HoCheth’ik ti’Koli-kak 5329 against their own, out of curiosity, to see what sort of kin they might have been.
But Obie was dead.
And Obie was not the first. One after another, the people dearest to Sandy went and died on him—his mother, before he was born; MyThara, going voluntarily to feed the titch’hik; and now Oberon, foolishly showing off and paying for his folly. But he wasn’t the only one who had paid! Sandy had to pay, too! He wasn’t merely grieving for Oberon, he realized; he was definitely angry at him.
When the coffee came, Sandy swallowed the first sweet, thick cup fast enough to make his throat burn, then poured another. The sugar relieved the nagging hunger he hadn’t realized he was feeling. It also, for some trivial reason he could not quite identify, elevated his mood—not a lot, maybe, but to a point where the tears were no longer threatening. Partly, he thought, it might have been the fact that “coffee” contained “caffeine” and “caffeine” was called a “stimulant.” Partly it was a kind of interior pride that he was adjusting so well to Earthly foods and drinks. The next time Marguery suggested a “drink,” he decided, he would be a little more adventurous than diluted wine. He had seen Hamilton Boyle drinking what was called a “Scotch on the rocks,” and if Boyle could enjoy it, Sandy could, too.