Ahead of him, the other swimmer churned the water. Zev remembered how astonished Chandra had been by the differences between male divers and male human beings. He did not want to startle the other swimmer. He let his penis withdraw again.
He touched the second swimmer with his voice. She did not react: she did not know how to listen.
At first he did not recognize her. She looked different underwater. People always did, with their bodies made transparent by echoes. But he was close enough to see her with his eyes. It was Ruth Orazio, the United States senator. Suddenly wary, Zev wondered if she had been involved in deciding that divers should work for the military.
He hung back, ready to dive and disappear, but willing to be friends. He cried out, in the air, with a questioning whistle, a sound of greeting.
She glanced over her shoulder, saw him, and stopped swimming. She turned toward him, treading water, and lifted one hand above the surface in a tentative greeting. Zev ducked, stroked once, and came up beside her. While he was underwater he traced her with his voice more completely, so he would be sure to recog-
nize her immediately next time he saw her swimming. Her bathing suit made it harder to see all the way through her. But not impossible.
"Hi," she said. "Getting some exercise, too?"
"Exploring the sea," he said. He reached up and pushed his wet hair off his forehead with his webbed hand.
"You're Zev, right?"
"Yes. And your name is Ruth Orazio." A strange way to be introduced, by speaking the other person's name, Zev thought. He wondered how two land people introduced themselves if they did not know each other. In the sea, when divers or orcas met, they gave their own names.
"Just Ruth. I'm beat. God, the water's cold today. I need to get where I can sit down, okay?"
Zev followed her toward shore. The waves were very gentle here. Soon Ruth could stand up and walk. She wrung the water from her hair.
Zev stood up and waded beside her. When she was thigh-deep in the gentle surf, she turned to look out over the sea, toward the rocky cliffs of Starfarer's end.
"It's so beautiful down here, I'm surprised there aren't more people. And more houses."
Zev fell to his knees before her, hugged her hips, and pillowed the side of his face against her belly. She stiffened, startled, then relaxed a little and looked at him curiously.
"What are you . . . T'
"I can't hear it, not yet." Zev smiled at Ruth Orazio, blissfully. "It's very little!"
She paled. "How did you . . . T'
"I saw, of course. Can I help teach it to swim?" It would be wonderful to have some youngsters here. He missed his little sister and his cousins. He splashed back in the water, gazing up at Ruth.
"You saw?"
"Underwater."
She did not understand.
"Everything's transparent, " he said.
"Oh. Sound. Of course. Everything would be."
Her expression was so different than what he expected: he was afraid he had misunderstood. He stood UP.
"Aren't you . . . aren't you going to keep it? 1-1 thought since you chose it, you would He stumbled to a stop.
He had not discussed this with J.D. But he had told her, as it was only polite to do, that he had not chosen to be fertile. She had assured him in turn that she too was in control of her reproductive abilities. So ordinary humans were like divers in the matter of deciding to bear children. Or J.D. was even more extraordinary than Zev already knrw.
Or something had gone wrong, and Ruth had to make a decision about it.
He felt confused and embarrassed, when he only wanted to feel joy for Ruth Orazio and her coming child.
"Did you choose?" he asked.
"Yes--of course I did. I want it She stopped and took a long, deep breath. "Zev, promise me something."
"If I can."
"My lover and I have been trying to have kids for a long time. I've had a couple of miscarriages." She hesitated. "Do you know what that means?"
"Yes. I'm sorry." Divers had an even higher rate of miscarriage than ordinary human beings. That did not make the loss any easier.
"It's hard to handle, when that happens," she said. "It's even harder when everybody knows, and then you have to tell them you've lost it."
No diver would have to be told; it would be obvious.
But it would be hard, Zev thought, if someone tried to congratulate you on your happiness, and you had to tell them you were sad instead.
"Yes," he said again.
"So . . . please don't tell anyone you know. Till I'm sure I won't lose it. All right?"
He could not help feeling that she was not telling him something-but he could not think what it might be.
,,Afl right." He agreed reluctantly; he did not know what else to do. "I have to go. A friend is waiting for me.
"Go ahead," she said. "And-thanks for giving me your word."
He waded toward deeper water. When the waves rose around his chest, he glanced back.
"I didn't mean to . . . to trouble you," he said. "Do you have friends to be with?"
"Sure," she said quickly. "Sure I do. You go on, now."
He stroked forward through the waves, and dove.
J.D. wondered why it was so hard to discuss, on land, a subject that was so easy and natural in the sea. She wondered why it was so hard to discuss it with Victoria, who found her attractive, whom she had kissed.
"Divers and ordinary humans have different manners," she said to Victoria. "Zev behaves differently on land than in the water. So do 1, but it's easier for me. The land manners, I mean, because they're what I'm used to. It took me a while to get used to the way divers behave with each other, back on Earth. They play a lot. And their play's very sexual." The words for sex and play were nearly indistinguishable in true speech, the language divers learned from the orcas.
"Yes?" Victoria said.
J.D. glanced out at the sea, and obliquely overhead. The ocean extended in a blue and silver circle all the way around this end of Starfarer. She could see nearly three-quarters of the circle; directly overhead it vanished behind the brilliance of the light tube, and she could not look in that direction.
"If it will make you uncomfortable," J.D. said to Victoria, "for either of us to touch you while you're
swimming, I'll tell Zev that we're using land manners in the ocean today." "It wouldn't make me uncomfortable to touch you," Victoria said. "Quite the opposite. And Zev . . . intrigues me. The question is, what do you want to do?"
"I'd like . . . I'm looking forward to playing. With both of you."
Victoria grinned. "That sounds like fun, eh?"
J.D. smiled in return. "Yes. It does. Let's go swimming.,,
She flipped off her sandals with her toes, stood up, and unbuttoned her shirt. She was not wearing a bathing suit, and she felt shy about undressing in front of Victoria. She faced the ocean and took off her pants. She was built like a long-distance swimmer, medium tall and stocky. She had done competitive endurance swimming when she was in school.
Recently her endurance swimming had consisted of trying to keep up with the divers, a task an order of magnitude harder than swimming a sea race.
Taking a deep breath, she let it out and dropped her shirt. Nearby,
Victoria dropped her bathing suit on the sand.
"Let's go!" She sprinted for the water, laughing, free and excited.
Swimming underwater, Zev heard his name-sound, in J.D.'s voice with her unique true-speech accent. He replied. He could hear her from both directions: without mechanized craft making engine noises, sound could bounce around and around the cylinder. He could hear multiple sets of echoes, each one fainter than the last.
JDA voice came a moment sooner from in front of him than from behind him.
He had swum more than halfway around the cylinder. The shortest way to return, and the most fun, was to swim the rest of the way around in the minus-spin direction. He plunged ahead. The faster he swam, the steeper downhill slope he perceived. He would be back to his starting point in a short time.