The German was the last straw, anyhow. I haven’t felt so edgy since school days, what with the physical discomfort, anxious clockwatching, drugs screwing up my hormones . . . and comparing my wretched state to Gus’s obvious comfort. And suspecting that I was the object of a certain amount of ribald speculation by the adults on the planet, ninety percent of whom were female.
Gus has that irritating Germanic habit of constantly correcting your grammar while you’re trying to talk, muttering the proper forms sotto voce. It got me rattled; in the course of assembling a complicated sentence I managed to use the wrong mood, and put the primary verb phrase in the wrong place, with the wrong declension.
He laughed.
I slugged him.
He was more startled than injured. I hit him on the shoulder, not too hard, but neither of us was accustomed to three-fourths gravity, and the blow was sufficient to tip his chair back. His Tamer reflexes took over; he twisted out of the chair, made a soft landing on fingertips and toe, and sprung back up.
I got out of my chair to help him, anger gone as quickly as it came. He looked at me in a puzzled way and explained that he hadn’t been laughing at my German, which wasn’t bad for one so out of practice, but at the unconscious pun I’d made on the verb schiessen. I apologized and laughed at the joke and tried to explain my mental state. He understood perfectly, he said, but was distant. I wondered what kind of report he was going to file.
An hour early, Ellen came to the tavern door and signaled me. We hustled back to her cabin. She proved to be a tender and humorous lover. My own performance was remarkable in certain unsettling ways, but she was accustomed to that. She said we would have to get together under more conventional circumstances one day.
And remarked wistfully that two of her three previous mates didn’t live long enough to keep their appointments.
Our going-away party was fun, but it was a little strange to be at an affair where most of the people were pregnant (the seven men who were stationed there semipermanently all wore vasectomy bracelets and a haggard look). The steamed “crabs”-if you can call something with twelve legs a crab-were exotic and delicious, a rare treat for the natives as well as for Gus and me. The children eat them all the time, but the adults have to strictly limit their intake of alien protein. Otherwise the slingshot xenasthenia can be fatal.
At the appointed time we jumped back to Colorado Springs. After a short debriefing we went our separate ways.
There was a note from Carol in my box, saying she had rented a cottage in Nassau for a couple of weeks. I was to call if I didn’t want to come; she would find another companion.
There was a Denver-Miami flight leaving the next hour. I managed to get on it, then chartered an aged floater to Nassau. I’d telephoned from Miami, so she was waiting for me at the Paradise Island heliport.
Tamers don’t make quite enough to stay on Paradise Island, not by an order of magnitude. We took a jinriksha to the place she’d rented on Nassau proper.
It had been some time since I’d gone anyplace more foreign than Denver, at least on earth. Nassau was full of strange sights and sounds and smells, and it was crowded. God, was it crowded. A half-million people on a tiny speck of land.
I’m as cynical as any Tamer about the highflown rhetoric the AED uses to justify its colonization program. Anyone with basic macroeconomics knows the real story. But the comparison was inevitable between this packed island and the bucolic village I’d left a few hours before. Maybe things will fall apart again; maybe this time will be the last time. One rash person in the right place and the earth could be a sterile cinder in seconds, but that’s been more-or-less true for a century.
Still, I was glad that all those babies were up there in the sky. And comforted that one of them would be partly me.