What a thrill that was for Jupe! Alone in a carry-bird pouch with one of the only two Real-American sisters on World!
What a thrill it was for Miranda, too. Nothing like it had ever happened in her life before. Nothing she saw was familiar. Even the farms were not the same as on Earth; Earth had nothing like erks to share a planet with. Everything she saw was exciting, even such silly and familiar things as herds of inklings pouring down a defile on their way to mate or released carry-birds preying on bird flocks. "Have you ever copulated in a carry-bird pouch?" asked Jupiter, generously. "No, of course not; you've never been in a carry-bird before. Here, let me show you what you have to do—"
And what a surprise that was! Because Miranda didn't want to copulate with him. She not only didn't want to do it in the pouch, which Jupiter could understand because although that was interesting it was also not really very comfortable, she didn't want to do it at all. Said she didn't, anyway. Said she was a "virgin," which caused Jupiter a whole incredulous shock of unbelief and almost revulsion; why would any sister want to be a virgin?
What she did want to do was talk. No. Not talk, really; she didn't offer much about Earth, although Jupiter's curiosity was immense. She acted as though she didn't enjoy the subject for some reason, almost as though there was something she didn't want to tell him, though he could not make out what it was. Annoyed, beginning to wish the flight were over, he resigned himself to answering her questions—"Because," she explained, "that's what the protocol is, right? First we all find out everything there is to know about you people and World. Then we confer, and then the President makes his address."
"You could tell me something," he complained.
"No, I couldn't. Won't, anyway. Now tell me: where did all you human beings come from?"
"From the interstellar probe, of course!"
"All of you? But there were only fifty or sixty people on the ship, they said."
"Ah, well," said Jupiter, marshaling his memories of the great story of the Original Landers, "that's true. But, you see, they collected all these fertilized ova and sperm..." He began to cheer up. The opportunity to lecture was rewarding, after all, if not in the way he had more or less decided he would allow her to reward him, and it made a nice break in the boring, long carry-bird ride.
Miranda was full of questions. "And how many of you are there now?"
"Oh, hell, Miranda, who can keep count? Around eighty-five hundred, I think."
"And how many are men?"
He paused while, frowning, he urged Flash's teats a little higher; she had seen a covey of resting birds on the woods ahead and he didn't want her getting ideas. "Fifty or so. Adults, I mean—over fourteen. There's usually only one male to each nest, and that's how many nests we have."
"Fifty men," said Miranda thoughtfully. Fifty men and 8,450 busy wombs. "And all the women are pregnant all the time?"
"Well, no—once a year at most, usually. Sometimes they wait a whole year for a new implant. And there are some, like my Mother Sister, that just don't get pregnant at all. See, she's married, and she wants to be the father, not the mother—"
"Oh, my God," said Miranda, when Jupe had finished explaining to her how the Mother Sister took her own ova, fertilized them in vitro with anonymous sperm from the banks, and implanted them in her "wife."
But by that time they were almost at the first nest on their list.
Mining nests, farming nests, industrial nests, teaching nests—there were fifty nests to be seen, and all fifty wanted their President and his colleagues to see them. Wanted urgently. Damn well demanded. Would not be refused. And of course it was impossible to accommodate them all, and then people like Jupe kept getting messages from friends in other nests, in his own for that matter, begging and demanding and pleading: "Come on, Jupe, you can talk them into it if you want to!" But he didn't want to. He was getting tired, too.
Not as tired as the Real-Americans, of course, not by far. After three days young Miranda was half-hysterical with strain and fatigue and, mostly (to Jupe's permanent astonishment), with fending off the courtesy copulations every male offered her.
Now, why in World would she want to do that?
When away from her, Jupe spent endless hours discussing this oddity with the other males, with senior sisters, with erks, with anyone who would listen. Their bafflement was as great as his: what woman (bar the oddies like his own Mother Sister) wouldn't want a penis inside her from time to time? As often as she could manage it, in fact?
When with her, Jupe spent endless hours on the same subject until, scarlet with rage, she forbade him to ask even one more question on pain of being thrown out of the escort party.
In school biology Jupe had studied the mating habits of the sting-beetles, tiny warm-blooded creatures like scorpions whose mating occurred only once in a lifetime, after which the male crept into the female's womb and lived on there, blind, limbless, brainless, for the rest of his and her life.
The mating habits of the Real-Americans were as strange, as repulsive, as incomprehensible to him. It took him a long time to figure out the pattern, and then he could hardly believe it. Miranda wanted to copulate Castor and nobody else. (Incredible!) Castor was in the habit of copulating Delilah, but was perfectly willing to copulate Miranda or any Yankee sister—or probably a tree-trunk, for that matter. However, Delilah wouldn't let him. Delilah copulated only Castor, and she got quite snappish at Miranda, or the Yankee sisters (or no doubt the tree-trunk) when Castor seemed to show an interest. She was going to lose that test of wills, Jupiter decided, but why bother in the first place?
How very strange it all was!
The strangeness did not end with their peculiar sexual practices—barely began there, to be sure, because what was of most interest to Jupiter was not how Real-Americans made love but how they lived. As to that there was only stubborn silence. The three Real-Americans differed on much, but on that they were united and resolute. They would tell all about what Earth was like—once they had learned what World was like, and not one minute before. The President's prepared statement had said nothing. They said nothing to add to that nothing.
But they asked—everything! Oh, what questions they asked! "Where did you Yankees get those dumb names?" demanded Miranda. How weird that she should not figure that out for herself! Were they not the names of the great male heroes of the past?—not only the Americans but the foreign, the real, and the mythicaclass="underline" Ulysses and Ajax, Robert E. Lee and Pickett, John Wayne, Thor, Brigham Young—and, of course, Jupiter. Why did they pick such names? Why, because they were heroes, for heaven's sake! All male Yanks were heroes! They lacked only the challenge to be heroic about!
And where did the erks get their names? Why, from the same source, naturally—except that the erks, not being really Yankees, were naturally even more patriotic than the native-born. They chose only the greatest of American statesmen. Abe Lincoln. George Washington. Franklin D. Roosevelt—"Damn it, Jupiter," complained Miranda, "why don't they say them right? They speak perfectly good English!"