Alicia's shoulders sagged, and she drooped like an unwatered flower. "After all we've gone through together? Don't you love me any more?"
"I still love you with all my heart. It might make things easier if I said I didn't; but you've always been square with me." Except with Vizman, he thought.
"Then what prevents us from making another try? You know I love you, too."
"Because, darling, no matter how passionately we love each other, we simply cannot live together."
"You mean all those wretched quarrels and arguments?"
"Yes; not to mention my ducking in the Zora and the frying pan. I don't want to be a battered husband."
"I'll try to control my temper," she said. "I'll really, really try."
"I know you've tried, but you haven't succeeded, have you? The moving finger writes, et cetera."
"If you really loved me, how could you be so cold-bloodedly rational about us?"
"Just using my brain to save my hide, as sensible people do," he said.
"Maybe you should have been the scientist instead of me.
I'm too emotional ... Darling, I'm sure I could change my ways. I'll do anything you want. Before, I wouldn't have children because of my career. Well, I'll even give up my career and settle down as a housewife, and mother as many children as you want."
Reith sighed. "A pretty picture, Lish; but I know you too well. After a moon or two of housewifery, you'd get itchy and either tear off on some expedition or break a vase over my head."
"I have a confession to make," said Alicia. "Yes?"
"On the Zaidun, when I said I was safe, I lied. Well, not exactly; I said I'd begged FMs off Gorbovast—and that was true. But I didn't say I'd taken them. I hoped you would get me pregnant, so you couldn't let me go. But I'm not. Fergus, if you won't have me as I am, I'll undertake a basic personality change."
"How?" he asked.
"If you'll wait for me, I'll board the Juruá, go back to Earth, and put myself under Moritzian deep therapy. It takes a year, and it's drastic and painful; but they say it can actually change a person's basic traits."
He shook his head. "Won't work, Lish."
"Why not?"
"The time factor. It would take maybe a year and a half by subjective time—your time. But by objective time, my time, you'd get back to Krishna twenty-odd years after you left. By that time, I might be dead, or the patriarch of my own family, or a Krishnan sultan with a harem."
"I may take the Moritzian therapy anyway, since my present personality seems contraproductive. Maybe when I'm all fixed up, I'll come back with another research grant, to see how Krishnan society has changed."
"I'll always be glad to see you. But that's all."
She straightened her shoulders and, with a flash of her old intransigence, said: "Or maybe I'll settle down with a nice, dull, conventional husband—though I'll never love him the way I love you."
"The husband for you, darling, is a meek, submissive rabbit of a man, who'd let you boss, bully, and dominate him; who'd obey orders and let you make all the decisions; and who'd worship you even if you kept a stable of lovers."
"Good heavens!" she exclaimed. "I couldn't respect a man like that, and he'd bore the hell out of me! I want one with guts and character, a man like you."
"Thanks; but the trouble is, you want two incompatible things. A man of guts and character wouldn't permit you to push him around, the way you do with everybody who lets you get away with it. Can't have your cake—or as the Krishnans put it, you can't go swimming and expect to stay dry."
"You mean it's okay for husbands to domineer but not for wives?"
"Not at all. A man can be fair-minded and still refuse to be bulldozed. If either spouse, male or female, is domineering while the other is subservient, they may get along; but if both are dominant types, the marriage will be one long Donny-brook—while it lasts."
"Should I wave my alabaster body at Aristide on the way home? He's a good, kind man, even if he's the unsexiest Frenchman I ever met. He's about as exciting as one of his fossils; but at least he'd be a quiet, undemanding husband."
"You could try, though I doubt he'd take the bait. He once told me he knew he could never cope with a 'tornado of energy' like you and had better sense than to attempt it. But you don't really need a husband, Lish."
"What, then?"
"You need success in your career, and an occasional lover to flatter you and satisfy your sexual needs."
"Oh, to hell with my sexual needs! You make me sound like the cliché of the modem career woman, who cuts a new deal every day and screws a new man every night. I've told you sex as mere recreation doesn't interest me. You know all about my wretched little affairs, and you know I was never promiscuous, in spite of what some people say about field anthropologists. You're the only one I ever enjoyed it with, because we had love. Without love, it's just exercising the lower abdominal tissues.
"Besides, no money came on the Juruá. So either I marry you, or get a job here, or go back to Terra."
"What's wrong with a local job? I could pull wires."
"It would waste all my special knowledge, training, and experience."
"With the money from your necklace, you wouldn't have to work at all, for years anyway." Reith got up and paced the floor, back and forth in front of her.
She shook her head. "I don't see hanging around Novo for years, doing nothing useful and hoping you'll change your mind; I know you too well. Seeing you now and then would just tantalize me with false hopes. If I can't have you, roped and branded, I'll go back to Earth and try to pick up the pieces there. In time I suppose I'll get over loving you. But I'm not going to sit forlornly in my casement window, waiting for my knight in shining armor who never comes riding by."
"Oh, come! Any time you go sit in a casement window, you'll have a whole squadron of knights singing canzonets and roundelays beneath it." Reith halted his pacing before Alicia and made motions of strumming a guitar. She said:
"I want only one man, and you're he. There are so many things we can do as a couple that we can't do alone."
Reith smiled. "Like the tango?"
"That's only one. You know how much more effectively we work together than separately. It's a case where one and one makes more than two."
"But hitting each other with blunt objects isn't my idea of working together."
"Oh, dear! I don't suppose you'll ever forget that frying pan."
Reith gingerly touched his scalp. "You wouldn't, if it had been your skull. But I've forgiven you long since, if that's any comfort."
"But forgiving isn't forgetting, is it?"
"It never is, unless you hit the victim hard enough to cause permanent amnesia."
Reith sat down; this time Alicia got up and paced. She asked: "Isn't it true that, a couple of times on the way back from Zora, you almost proposed to me?"
"Yes," admitted Reith.
"Then, when did I blow it? You were so loving and tender at the ranch house in Kubyab, the day after the battle, that I thought I had you for sure."
"You almost did. To answer your question, it wasn't any one thing that blew it but a whole series of incidents. At times you seemed to be controlling the virago in you so well that I thought there might be hope for us. But every time I wavered towards proposing, you'd do something outrageous, like the rumpus over the visit of the Bákhite priest, or your tryst with Vizman—"
"I've regretted the Vizman thing every day since—because of what it did to us, not because it was altogether wrong in itself."
"Maybe it wasn't wrong in the abstract; but it sure gave a kick in the balls to my masculine ego. Most people have love affairs at some time or other. But if one is seriously courting somebody, one doesn't go frigging in the rigging with a third party practically under the loved one's nose, and then expect the courtee to like it. That's just Human Nature 1A. You of all people ought to know that, having written a thesis about it. Anyway, by the time we arrived here, you had finally convinced me that, much as I love you, to marry you again would be a dreadful mistake."