“I hope not.” More passion in that voice, boy. “Lord, I hope not!”
“We have had awfully good times together. My colleagues are fine, you know, but—” She blinked hard. “You’ve been special.”
“Same as you to me.”
She was shivering a bit, meeting my eyes now, lips a bare few centimeters away. Since she seldom drank alcohol, I guessed that what I’d more or less forced on her had gotten a good strong hold, under these circumstances. Remember, she’s no urbanite who’ll hop into bed and scarcely remember it two days later. She went directly from a small town to a tough university to here, and may actually be a virgin. However, you’ve worked toward this moment for months, Pete, old chum. Get started!
It was the gentlest kiss I think I have ever taken.
“I’ve been, well, afraid to speak,” I murmured into her hair, which held an upland sunniness. “Maybe I still am. Only I don’t, don’t, don’t want to lose you, Jo.”
Half crying, half laughing, she came back to my mouth. She didn’t really know how, but she held herself hard against me, and I thought: May she end up sleeping with me, already this night?
No matter, either way. What does count is, the Wilderness Administration allows qualified husband—and-wife teams to live together on the job; and she’s a ranger and I, being skilled in using monitoring devices, would be an acceptable research assistant.
And then-n-n:
I didn’t know, I don’t know to this day what went wrong. We’d had two or three more drinks, and a good deal of joyous tussling, and her clothes were partly off her, and dinner was beginning to scorch in the oven when
I was too hasty she was too awkward and/or backward-holding, and I got impatient and she felt it.
I breathed out one of those special words which people say to each other only, and she being a bit terrified anyway decided it wasn’t mere habit-accident but I was pretending she was Marie because in fact my eyes were shut she wasn’t as naive as she, quite innocently, had led me to believe, and in one of those moments which (contrary to fantasy) are forever coming upon lovers asked herself, “Hey, what the hell is really going on?” or whatever. It makes no difference. Suddenly she wanted to phone Marie.
“If, if, if things are as you say, Pete, she’ll be glad to learn—”
“Wait a minute! Wait one damn minute! Don’t you trust me?”
“Oh, Pete, darling, of course I do, but—”
“But nothing.” I drew apart to register offense.
Instead of coining after me, she asked, as quietly as the night outside: “Don’t you trust me?”
Never mind. A person can’t answer a question like that. We both tried, and shouldn’t have. All I truly remember is seeing her out the door. A smell of charred meat pursued us. Beyond the cabin, the air was cold and altogether pure, sky wild with stars, peaks aglow. I watched her stumble to her flitter. The galaxy lit her path. She cried the whole way. But she went.
However disappointed, I felt some relief, too. It would have been a shabby trick to play on Marie, who had considerable love invested in me. And our apartment is quite pleasant, once it’s battened down against the surroundings; I belong to the fortunate small minority. We had an appropriate reunion. She even babbled about applying for a childbearing permit. I kept enough sense to switch that kind of talk immediately.
Next evening there was a rally which we couldn’t well get out of attending. The commissioners may be right as far as most citizens go. “A sensiphone, regardless of how many circuits are tuned in, is no substitute for the physical togetherness of human beings uniting under their leaders for our glorious mass purposes.” We, though, didn’t get anything out of it except headaches, ears ringing from the cadenced cheers, lungs full of air that had passed through thousands of other lungs, and skins which felt greasy as well as gritty. Homebound, we encountered smog so thick it confused our vehicle. Thus we got stopped on the fringes of a riot and saw a machine gun cut a man in two before the militia let us move on. It was a huge relief to pass security check at our conurb and take a transporter which didn’t fail even once, up and across to our own place.
There we shared a shower, using an extravagant percentage of our monthly water ration, and dried each other off, and I slipped into a robe and Marie into something filmy; we had a drink and a toke which Haydn lilted, and got relaxed to the point where she shook her long tresses over her shoulders and her whisper tickled my ear: “Aw, c’mon, hero, the computers’ve got to’ve edited your last year’s coverage by now. I’ve looked forward all this while.”
I thought fleetingly of Jo. Well, she wouldn’t appear in a strictly wilderness-experience public-record documentary; and I myself was curious about what I had actually produced, and didn’t think a revisit in an electronic dream would pain me, even this soon afterward.
I was wrong.
What hurt most was the shoddiness. Oh yes, decent reproduction of a primrose nodding in the breeze, a hawk a-swoop, spurning whiteness and earthquake rumble of a distant avalanche, fallen leaves brown and baking under the sun, their smell and crackle, the laughter of a gust which flirted with my hair, suppleness incarnate in a snake or a cougar, flamboyance at sunset and shyness at dawn—a competent show. Yet it wasn’t real; it wasn’t what I had loved.
Marie said, slowly, in the darkness where we sat, “You did better before. Kruger, Mato Grosso, Baikal, your earlier stays in this region—I almost felt I was at your side. You weren’t a recorder there; you were an artist, a great artist. Why is this different?”
“I don’t know,” I mumbled. “My presentation is kind of mechanical, I admit. I suppose I was tired.”
“In that case—” she sat very straight, half a meter from me, fingers gripped together, “—you didn’t have to stay on. You could have come home to me long before you did.”
But I wasn’t tired rammed through my head. No, now is when I’m drained; then, there, life flowed into me.
That gentian Jo wanted to see … it grows where the land suddenly drops. Right at the cliff edge those flowers grow, oh, blue, blue, blue against grass green and daisy white and the strong gray of stone; a streamlet runs past, leaps downward, ringing, cold, tasting of glaciers, rocks, turf, the air which also blows everywhere around me, around the high and holy peaks beyond…
“Lay off!” I yelled. My fist struck the chair arm. The fabric clung and cloyed. A shade calmer, I said, “Okay, maybe I got too taken up in the reality and lost the necessary degree of detachment.” I lie, Marie, I lie like Judas. My mind was never busier, planning how to use Jo and discard you. “Darling, those sensies, I’ll have nothing but them for the rest of my life.” And none of the gentians. I was too busy with my scheme to bother with anything small and gentle and blue. “Isn’t that penalty enough?”
“No. You did have the reality. And you did not bring it back.” Her voice was like a wind across the snows of upland winter.