Mokoena clapped her hands together. “What a surf!” she whooped. “I’m going in.”
“Not alone, please,” Zeyd cautioned. “The undertow may be bad.”
“Well, I appoint you my lifeguard,” she laughed.
Her mood captured him. “Why not your partner?”
“Why not indeed?”
For an instant they hesitated, but only an instant. After all, they had stripped before. Clothes fell off. They ran over the sand and into the waves.
The water brawled and surged. When they plunged, it slid sensuously around them, a pulsing whole-body caress. They frisked and frolicked like seals.
Still, they remembered not to get beyond their depth. A comber broke over their heads. They collided, caught at one another, found footing, and sank their toes into shifting grit. The wave rushed on past. Chest deep, Zeyd gazed down into Mokoena’s face. Her lips were parted, her breasts thrust against him as she snatched for breath. He kissed her. She responded.
Letting go, they saw the next breaker coming at them, taller yet, a glassy cliff maned with foam. They turned about, jumped clear of the bottom, swam, caught the onslaught, and rode it in.
As it receded they scrambled to their feet and waded ashore. “Hoo,” Mokoena panted, “that beast tumbled me!”
He looked her over. “It had the right idea,” he said.
She stopped. He moved closer. She lifted her hands and pushed at him, not very hard. “No.” Her tone wavered. “Hanny —”
“She’s away. For two years and more.”
“I won’t go behind her back.”
“We won’t. Mam, Hanny and I were — are — friends. We never owned each other. If we did, she would not have left. She told me again and again, as the time approached — the last night, too — she told me she won’t be jealous and you are her shipsister.”
“I don’t know — when she returns —”
“That will depend on you, Mam. You and no one else.”
She quivered. “Selim, if you mean that —”
He pulled her to him. “A lovely setting, this, for a lovely woman.”
“And a — lovely man …”
They hurried to the soft sward and sank down upon it.
Afterward, happily, she murmured, “I wonder if our friends have us under observation.”
He grinned. “Then they got their demonstration. Do you mind?”
“Not too much, now.”
Before Dayan left, Yu had traded cabins with her so that she might be next to Sundaram’s. He and she no longer slept apart.
They sat in the unit that had been his, among relics and keepsakes they had mingled, sipped wine, and gravely talked about their research. It was among their highest pleasures.
“No,” he said, “I do not think we can properly call this a conservative society, like old China or old India. That is too weak a word. I think it is posthistoric. It has renounced change in favor of a stable order that apparently provides universal peace, plenty, and justice.”
“Or so they tell us, if we understand them rightly,” she replied. “A majestic vision in its way. Like a saint reaching Nirvana, or a stately hymn at the end of a Catholic mass.”
“But how can we explain it to our shipmates? I fear several of them will find it ghastly.”
“Really? Why?”
“Because it may forecast what will happen to our own race.”
She considered. “Would it be tragic, actually? Not an eternity of boredom or anything like that. The riches and beauty of the world, the treasures of the past, aren’t they new to every newborn? A lifetime isn’t long enough to know and savor them all. And there can still be new creations. Ancient, fixed modes, I suppose, but new poems, pictures, stories, music.”
Sundaram smiled ruefully. “I doubt that the likes of Ricardo Nansen or Jean Kilbirnie will agree. For that matter, I doubt that every individual Tahirian is content with things as they are. I have an impression, almost a conviction, that some of them look at the stars with longing.”
She nodded. “That may be one reason the race ended its starfaring. Deliberately, as a policy decision. It carried the danger of bringing in something new and troublesome.” She winced. “What effect are we having? Is it for good or ill?”