Not, she thought justly, that that in itself was wrong; why should they not? It was not Ana’s concern if other persons had moral standards different from her own, so long as they did not try to inflict them on her. And splashing would in fact be great fun in this muggy heat -
“Dimitrova!” She jumped up and ran inside the tent for her answer, but it was only:
“Ahmed Dulla is not available at present. The message will be given to him.”
In English. And English with a very bad accent, at that; whatever Heir-of-Mao had sent, it was not good translators. She thanked the comm clerk, concealing her disappointment, and strolled toward the perimeter. Off duty, not time to eat, too early to sleep; what should she do since she could not do the thing she wanted most?
Really, it was too disappointing! Where could he be?
She was annoyed to discover that she was beginning another headache. How infuriating! For some reason she had not had very many in her first days on Jem — perhaps because everything was so intensely exciting that she had no time to think of headaches. She did not want one now. Ana was an industrious person by nature, and it occurred to her that idleness was not likely to prevent the headache, but only to make it worse. What to do? If she only had a proper costume, how agreeable it would be to help the boatbuilders on the beach. Or to climb the slope and assist in planting — but no, at the moment they were only plowing, and she did not know how to run the tractor. The power plant? She knew nothing of it, of course, but she had sturdy limbs and a willingness to use her muscles. Why not?
Unfortunately, as she approached she discovered that one of the noncoms working on the project was Sergeant Sweggert.
She changed course and walked briskly away.
She had avoided Sweggert since the night she had come back with the colonel’s orderly and found the two of them in rut, out in the open for all to see! Of course, no other had seen. Nan had turned away at once, sweating with embarrassment, and there had been no one else, or all the camp would have been talking of it. Tinka would not speak, Sweggert would perhaps not dare to, and the colonel — well, Ana did not have the delusion that she understood the colonel. But Colonel Marge Menninger she had not been able to avoid, and the woman had said nothing of the incident, had in fact showed no signs that it had ever taken place. That bleached American, copulating with a man whose name she perhaps did not even know! No, that was unfair; they knew each other.
But certainly not socially. Oh, yes, to be sure, she would blame it on the aphrodisiac effect of the — the mist, she put it to herself, that the wounded balloonist emitted. One had heard all about that by now. Still, how appallingly lewd! Not to say — what was the word? — “tacky.”
Ana found herself at a guard post in the perimeter fence, and at once it became clear what she wished to do. “I am going for a walk,” she told the corporal in charge, who shrugged and watched impassively as Ana squeezed between the strands of the barbed wire.
In a few steps she was out of sight of the camp.
If she could not see Ahmed, at least she could see Jem. She pushed through the violet-oily growth, here all flickering with blue-green lights, and paused to listen: tiny skittering sounds from the underbrush, the rustle of the plants in the wind. There was no wildlife here that would harm her, she had been assured. Because of the presence of the camp, there were not many animals at all. Some had been frightened away, some poisoned away; where the garbage details had brought a day’s collection of slops into the woods and buried them, you could see the ferns withered, the crabgrass ground cover dry. Terrestrial biochemistry was as hostile to Jemman as the other way around, but the Jemmans had not had a Camp Detrick to make them salves and injections against the rot.
But what was left — how fascinating and how strange! Forests of plants like ferns, but fruiting and with woody stems; succulents almost like bamboo (the hollow stems would make good structural materials, and Ana’s thrifty soul instructed her to tell the colonel not to waste precious iron on tent stakes anymore); vines like grapes, with hard seeds no doubt meant to be spread in the excrement of small animals (if any survived in this part of the forest); and the mangrovelike giants called “many-trees,” a dozen or more trunks linking together at the crown, which made a canopy over her.
She stopped and looked around. There was no question of getting lost, she reassured herself, as long as she kept the red-glinting water in sight on her left. At any time she could simply climb down to it and return along the beach.
And there was no question of being tired here, either, when one climbed so lightly over fallen logs and rocks. It was an excellent time for taking a nature stroll, she thought, squirming between the trunks of a many-tree that glittered blue-green in firefly beads — if only her head did not hurt so.
In front of her was a lump of fungus, gray-pink and without lights of its own. It looked quite like a brain, she thought. In fact, rather like her own. Since the brain splitting had been done under local anesthesia she had seen every step, sometimes in the mirror overhead, sometimes in the closed-circuit likris screen. That was how her brain had seemed to her, quite remote and unfeeling. Even when the sharp hooked blade had halved it in one smooth motion, it had been hard to connect that sight with the insistent dragging pressure that was all she felt… Later, when they were reconnecting some of the necessary nerves, she suddenly felt the reality of it. She would have been ill except for the surgeon’s motherly scorn. “A great strong girl like you!” she had laughed. “No. Nonsense! You will not vomit.” And Nan had not…
What was that noise?
It sounded like distant sticks rattling against hollow logs and someone moaning. It was the sort of sound she had heard before, on tapes at Camp Detrick. The crustaceans, yes! But perhaps not the social race. Perhaps those wild and surely dangerous ones that had been only rumored -
The human voice that came from behind her was severe.
“Is it sensible for you to be alone here, Ana?”
In Urdu! With that stern compassion she had heard so often! She knew before she turned that it was Ahmed.
An hour later, a kilometer away, she lay in his arms, unwilling to move lest she wake him. The Krinpit’s sound was always audible, sometimes near, sometimes moving farther away; she smiled to herself as she thought that the creature had surely been near while they were making love. No matter. It was not a matter for shame, what she would proclaim anywhere. It was not at all like that American bleached blond, because — well, of course, because it was with Ahmed.
He twitched, snorted, and woke up. “Ah, Ana! Then I did not dream this!”
“No, Ahmed.” She hesitated and then said in a softer voice, “But I have had that dream many times… No! Not so quickly again, please, dear Ahmed — or yes, whenever you like; but first let me look at you.” She shook her head and scolded, “You are so thin! Have you been ill?”
The black-bead eyes were opaque. “Ill? Yes, sometimes. Also sometimes starving.”
“Starving! How terrible! But — but—”
“But why starve? That is simple to answer. Because your people shot down our transports.”
“But that is quite impossible!”
“It is not impossible,” he contradicted, “because it happened. Food for many days, scientific instruments, two ships — and thirty-four human beings, Ana.”
“It must have been an accident.”