His beloved Livy, sick for so many years, and dead, finally, in Italy, in 1904.
Restored to life and youth and beauty, but not, alas, to him.
She was walking toward him, carrying her grail by its handle, wearing a white scarlet-edged kilt that came halfway down her thighs and a thin white scarf for a bra. She had a fine figure, good legs, handsome features. Her forehead was broad and satiny white. Her eyes were large and luminous. Her lips were full and shapely; her smile, attractive; her teeth, small and very white. She customarily wore her dark hair parted, combed down smooth in front but twisted into a figure eight in the back. Behind an ear she wore one of the giant crimson roselike blooms that grew from the vines on the irontrees. Her necklace was made of the convoluted red vertebrae of the hornfish. Sam’s heart felt as if it were being licked by a cat.
She swayed as she walked toward him, and her breasts bounced beneath the semi-opaque fabric. Here was his Livy, who had always been so modest, had worn heavy clothes from the neck down to the ankle, and had never undressed before him in the light. Now she reminded him of the half-naked women of the Sandwich Islands. He felt uneasy, and he knew why. His queasiness among the natives had been as much due to their unwanted attraction for him as repulsion, each feeling dependent on the other and having nothing to do with the natives per se.
Livy had had a Puritanical upbringing, but she had not been ruined by it. On Earth she had learned to drink and to like beer, had even smoked a few times and had become an infidel or, at least, a great doubter. She had even tolerated his constant swearing and had let loose with a few blisterers herself if the girls were not around. The accusations that she had censored his books and thus emasculated them were off the target. He had done most of the censoring himself. Yes, Livy had always shown adaptability.
Too much. Now, after twenty years of absence from him, she had fallen in love with Cyrano de Bergerac. And Sam had the uneasy feeling that that wild Frenchman had awakened in her something that Sam might have awakened if he had not been so inhibited himself. But after these years on The River and the chewing of a certain amount of dreamgum, he had lost many of his own inhibitions. It was too late for him. Unless Cyrano left the scene . . .
“Hello, Sam,” she said in English. “How are you on this fine day?”
“Every day is fine here,” he said. “You can’t even talk about the weather, let alone do anything about it!”
She had a beautiful laugh. “Come along with me to the grailstone,” she said. “It’s almost time for lunch.”
Every day he swore not to come near her because to do so hurt too much. And every day he took advantage of the smallest chance to get as close to her as he could. “How’s Cyrano?” he said.
“Oh, very happy because he’s finally getting a rapier. Bildron, the swordsmith, promised that he’d have the first one—after yours and the other Councilmen’s, of course. Cyrano had taken so long to reconcile himself to the fact that he would never hold a metal sword in his hand again. Then he heard about the meteorite and came here—and now the greatest swordsman in the world will have a chance to show everybody that his reputation wasn’t a lie, which some liars say it was.”
“Now, Livy,” he said, “I didn’t say people lied about his reputation. I said that maybe they exaggerated some. I still don’t believe that story about his holding off two hundred swordsmen all by himself.”
“The fight at the Porte de Nesle was authentic! And it wasn’t two hundred! You’re the one pumping it up, Sam, just as you always do. There was a crowd of hired thugs that could have been a hundred or might just as well have been. Even if there had been only twenty-five, the fact is that Cyrano attacked them all single-handed to save his friend, the Chevalier de Lignieres.