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"Is that why you're with me, because I'm trusted?" he asked quietly.
That's a stupid, stupid thing to ask
.
"Not at all," she said. "I don't slick for status."
"I know you don't," he said. "I'm sorry." He stroked her face. "I wouldn't
call this slicking."
"Oh, it is," she said. "The very best. Don't be afraid of it."
"Of course not," Martin whispered, edging closer, careful not to let the
slight weight of his body oppress her. "I want you to live with me."
"Dyad?" she asked.
"I want more than that," he said. "I want to eat you up."
"Ah ha."
"I want you so much it hurts not to have you near me."
"Oh." She looked away, pretending embarrassment even as they moved against
each other.
"I want to marry you."
She stopped their rolling and lay quiet beside him, breasts moving up and
down, eyes flicking over his features. "We don't marry," she said.
"Nothing stops us."
"We're Lost Boys and Wendys. Pans don't get married."
"We could get married in a new way. No priests or churches or licenses."
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"Married is something different. It's for Earth, or back on the Ark. People
got married on the
Ark."
"I doubt we'll ever go back," Martin said.
"I know," she said softly.
"We're our own Ark. We have all the information here. All the living things in
memory.
They'll make every living thing we need, once we do our Job. We'll be like war
dogs."
"War dogs?"
"Too vicious to be taken back. Because of what we do. We have to rely on
ourselves alone.
That means we can get married, whatever being married means out here."
"We've only been lovers for a few tendays."
"That's enough for me," Martin said.
Theresa drew back to him. "Slicking is so much simpler."
"We make love," Martin insisted.
Theresa suddenly put on an innocent look. "Do you remember," she said, pushing
tongue behind her lower lip, pushing it out, gazing at him intently, "how
serious this would be on Earth?
How fraught with meaning, making love or slicking?"
"It isn't serious here?"
She put fingers to her lips, holding something: a cigarette, he remembered.
Lowered her lashes, looked at him seductively, deep sensual meaning, smiling,
drew back, flung back her hair.
"I could be a temptress," she said.
"Harlot," he said.
"We would spend ever so much time worrying, once we were married, on Earth,
about whether we were doing it right, whether we were in style."
"We have styles here," Martin said.
She made a bitter face, tossed the ghost cigarette away. "I read about it. In
some places, we could have been arrested for& " She touched his limp tip with a
finger, brought a drop of wheyish moisture to her mouth. "We could have been
arrested for& " She reached into his mouth with the finger, and he obligingly
tongued it. She moved the finger up her thigh, touched herself, moved without
effort into a melodramatic vamping posture. "How can we be married without
thousands knowing and approving or disapproving? Looking at us in our little
home, approving or disapproving." She whispered the words again, but there was
a strain in her face. "All those people. But it's okay." She looked at him
directly, struggling to hold back more tears. "And we know we can make
children. That's serious."
Martin smiled. His eyes focused not on her now, but on far dead Earth. He had
never thought or imagined such adult concerns on Earth. He had been a child
when Earth died. So had she.
"Knowing you can make children if you want. That's really making love," she
concluded, words catching in her throat. She closed her eyes and like a
dark-headed bird laid her cheek and palm on his chest.
"We make love," he persisted. "The moms will let us have children after we've
done the Job."
She wept in shaking silence in his arms.
If the children decided Wormwood was a source of killer probes, the Ship of
the Law would break in two. Stephanie Wing Feather suggested the separate
ships should be called
Hare and
Tortoise
.
The two ships would decelerate at different rates.
Tortoise
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, the smaller, would begin super deceleration one thousand g's days before
reaching the system, and would enter at maneuvering speed. The larger, Hare
, would shoot through the system at three quarters c, conduct reconnaissance
while passing between the two inner rocky planets, relay the information to
Tortoise
, then escape the system and wait for results. It would decelerate more
gradually, reaching maneuvering speed some hundreds of billions of kilometers
on the other side of
Wormwood.
If
Tortoise was severely damaged or destroyed, Hare could continue, hunting for
fuel around
the other stars in the group.
Before then, the Ship of the Law would pass through a section of Wormwood's
outlying haloes of pre-birth material: what around the Sun had been called the
Oort and Kuiper clouds. It was possible that Wormwood's inhabitants had mined
even these outer reaches of the pre-birth material, probably in the youth of
their civilization, when comets were used by "hitch-hikers" to ride far beyond
the orbits of the outer planets. It was also possible that the clouds had [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]