the gravitational constant, had broken away at one end from its induction surface.
A fly circled through the sunlight, wings glinting, and shot suddenly to the panel. It hung upside down for a few seconds, cleaning its legs, before strolling across to peruse the horizon of its flat-earth world.
Theri turned her face away from the sun and kissed Kael’s neck. It wasn’t often they woke in contact with each other, like this, though they usually drifted to sleep in some sort of embrace. Sighing, she resumed her catalogue of their holiday room.
A collection of holograms smiled from the mantelpiece in random directions: cognates, presumably, or ancestors, of the people who’d rented them the house. From the largest frame an elderly youth in mortarboard and academic gown looked down, a slightly bewildered expression on his mustachioed face. He clutched a roll of paper to his chest.
Strange how you could tell he wasn’t a baby. Some hint of desperation in his eyes. Must have worked for years at night for that thing, chasing the education he’d missed in his frontier youth. Earning enough in daytime drudgery to pay for his clan-kin or to meet his world’s amortization debt; hurrying to evening peptide shots, scouring his Databank, cudgeling his brains through the law of torts and the case of Imperator vs Boggs.
And now caught by the laser on his final triumphant day, the image providing documentary evidence just as necessary and admissible as the rolled-up diploma in his hand and the numerical record filed forever with maximum precautionary redundancy in deep core.
Maybe they ought to grant degrees carved on blocks of stone, something with a bit of substance to it, something to put you at risk of a hernia every time you picked it up.
Theri sat up in bed, looked down at her lover: graduate educer now, due shortly to join Anla in her profession. If not in her avocation as libertarian revolutionary. He slept on his back with his mouth half open, showing his teeth. Strong, even teeth, one of his best features, giving a bit of firmness to the softness of his mouth. His mouth was weak, really, and small.
The bristles on his face took the alien sunlight like unevenly worn sandpaper, growing thick along his upper lip and chin, patchy along his jaw. Theri occasionally persuaded him to grow a beard, but he always smeared it off after two or three weeks, finding some pretext for being clean cheeked. He might instead have used an enzyme boost, and flowered like a prophet, but that was hardly old Socrates’ style.
She slid her fingers into his hair which fanned out, matted and leonine, on the pillow. Fine, light hair; her fingers caught in a knot and pulled at his scalp. Kael shifted a little, turning his head. Not wanting him to wake yet, she drew back.
The hoot of a cargo-vessel, long and muffled, came from the harbor, warning swimmers and free craft of its impending set down. Someone clattered around in the back garden of the terrace. Ben or Catsize, up already.
That Neanderthal scientist, Ben, she reflected, had produced a fine endogenous black beard after he’d married Anla. It lent him the look of a half-crazed frontier doctor. The sort of physician who loomed out of the midnight rain on a broken-down hack, delivered the badly breached baby in the nick of time, cursed the lack of trained midwives and civilized pharmaceuticals, revived the expiring mother with a quick whiff of pungents instead, conjured an ampoule of buzz from the soaked pocket of his frock-coat, shot half, passed the rest to the tribe, and disappeared into the rain again.
The mad doctor probably hadn’t slept at all. Theri slipped from the bed and padded to the window. There was Ben, working his way along the garden fence, checking for chinks, securing the gate (no classy safe-fields at these rental prices), creating a haven for last night’s foddle.
She could see the animal eagerly chewing the rented grass, its little teeth crunching rhythmically, its head nodding purposefully. Industrious little beast, building useless ruth precursors with every chomp.
Christ, she thought, they can’t really be going to kill that thing, for all the forbidden delights of its nonsynthesized proteins. We’d look pretty stupid waiting around for Anla to come home and slay it for us.
Pity about Anla and Ben, but that’s their style, here or on Victoria or anywhere. Anla taking off with some impossible man. Ben wandering around gloomily picking his nose, going for walks, competing without heart with a chessmaster program. Two days, three, never longer. Anla returning: triumphant, unrepentant, radiant.
Lusty wench, our Anla, long black hair and long fingers, good at haranguing the masses and telling everyone where they get off and what’s what.
Anla floating around the house as if nothing has happened. Ben almost catatonic with sullenness, vidding his library. Bright Anla coming and going through the rooms of the house with no interface to his gloomy world.
Suddenly the recriminations, the real hurt out in the open. Anla flaring back. A day, a day and a half, of hot angry words. Reconciliation. All’s well for another couple of months. Been going on for four orthoyears now, Theri thought, funny way to live. Not like me and the sleeping Socrates, but at least each of them knows what the other thinks.
What have you been thinking about, Kael, as we’ve drifted through this holiday? Eating and drinking our way around Newstralia. Relaxed and expansive in the cafes and restaurants, feeding your face with garlic crustaceans cooked in oil, with crisp-skinned nightingsnail, with felafel, with ednafish in puce-bean sauce. And in the long afternoons in the buzz gardens of half-deserted pubs and in the garden of this house and this strange bedroom?
Kael, what goes on behind your blue eyes, your warm sleepy words? Are you happy with me on those littered beaches, among the bodies and the crushed cups, or in the crowds under the garish lights, making fun of the vulgar feelie come-ons with their neuroinducers limited by law to a zone no greater than three-quarters of the width of the sidewalk so that prudes of both sexes blanch at the tingle in their loins; what do you think of me at times like that?
A good man at keeping your own counsel, not one for the claws of argument, the knives of passion.
Kael, sweet Kael, what goes on in your head? What do I know about you, or you about me? All we’ve really done here is put on mass in the wrong places and celebrate a mutual languid happiness, an absence of tension. We’ve got nothing to be tense about. I really mustn’t eat so much, neither of us must.
§
In silence, barely awake, Kael watched through half closed eyes his Theri spread her elbows like wings.
Standing by the window, she ran her hands over her stomach, straightened her back and tightened the muscles of her abdomen. Her hair flowed down her back almost to her bum—a nice bum, white from the kini.
Kael felt, even if he did not see, her splayed fingers pressing from her pelvic arch, across her belly, up over the jut of her ribcage, passing to right and left of her breasts. Theri stretched, crucified on the morning (nice image, that, he thought; at least the Christers’ fifth millennial comeback has done some small good, even if it’s turned Theri into a masochist), and she pivoted with the sunlight on her face and shoulders, and padded barefoot to the door. Funny toes the girl’s got.
She reached for her sombrero, breasts silhouetted. Sweet tits for the holding. Theri under the black sombrero drew an imaginary weapon, took steady aim at the helpless Kael.
The invisible flash would have blinded him if he hadn’t had his eyes nearly closed.
Theri spun the gun nonchalantly on her index finger, slid it easily into a holster low on her hip, and left, sombrero aslant, for the shower.
Kael
