"There wouldn't be any trouble if you'd just pick one of us and quit going to bed with the other," he told her brutally.
For a moment her anger almost burst forth. What possessive, self-centered pigs men were! The fact was that she loved both of the twins—and, naturally, did what was right and natural to do when you loved someone. But why did each of them feel he had to own her?
Then her sense of humor won out. She grinned. "Could be worse. Look at the bright side, Sork, dear. There's only two of you, and there are plenty of other human women—so count your blessings!" He was looking at her steadily. "I mean," she said, beginning to wonder if Sork's sense of humor was responding to her own, "how would you like it if you were Turtles, a whole race of males and only the one female Mother in all the universe?"
Sork gave the woman he loved a hostile stare. "It doesn't help to joke," he said.
"I'm only saying—"
"I know what you're saying, Sue-ling." He shook his head, suddenly wistful. "I wish you and I could go off somewhere by ourselves, just the two of us."
"Where would we go?" she asked sensibly.
"Anywhere! Anywhere but here, doing anything but working for the Turtles. This life just isn't good enough."
Sue-ling Quong studied him, trying to find some way of soothing his bad mood. "But Sork, dear," she said tentatively, "we're all better off this way. Think of everything the Turtles have done for us." She gestured out the window at the trains of scrap metal. "Look at all those rotten old war machines! I think it's fine that the Turtles take them off our hands for scrap. We don't need them any more, because we don't have any more wars. The Turtles have seen to that! And no more terrorists, no more crime, no more addictive drugs—it's a good bargain we made with them, Sork!"
Sork glared at her. "Faust," he snapped. And when she looked puzzled, "Didn't you ever hear of Faust? There was stuff about him on one of the old lecture tapes, before I got into the science ones. This Faust was supposed to have made that kind of bargain with the Devil, and it cost him his soul. No, Sue-ling, it isn't good enough. It never has been good enough."
Then he paused. Sue-ling, knowing this man so well, knew what was coming next. She could almost feel the sensation of Sork shifting gears in his mind, as he switched from one mode of thought to another. "Sue-ling," he said, his voice deeper and huskier, "have I ever told you that your eyes have sunshine in them? They make the whole day dawn for me."
She sighed, not because she wasn't pleased. "Oh, Sork," she said, "go on and get to work. You'll be late. And I'm about ready to sack in."
She put her face up to be kissed and watched him leave her office, pensive. Sork and Kiri, Kiri and Sork! They were so different.
There was no doubt in Sue-ling's mind that she loved them both dearly. She did her best to love them equally, too, though that was harder. It was Sork who usually made it so— aggressive Sork, always demanding what he wanted, which was generally more time in bed with her. Kiri was less demanding.
Kiri was not, however, less loved. She was certain of that. She was certain, too, that the twins loved each other, but it did sometimes occur to her that Kiri Quintero loved his brother a tiny bit more than he really needed to. When Sork demanded, Kiri nearly always gave way.
Yet each touched her heart. Even in the way they spoke to her. Kiri Quintero's most romantic speech to her was "You're beautiful," or, "I love you." Never anything more; and yet if he told her she was beautiful in those same words a thousand times, somehow each time was new. There would be a different look in his eye or quirk of his lips. If Kiri had few words, he made each one do for a thousand shades of meaning. And Sork—
Oh, Sork! Every day he made a new speech. The problem was that she never knew just what kind of speech it would be. There were times when Sork Quintero spoke to her in tones that were so curt as to barely miss being humiliating, the times when he was caught up in some design of his own and lost sight of everything else. Yet other times he could be a poet. He praised her eyes—and Sue-ling knew that, really, she had quite ordinary eyes—but according to Sork Quintero they were stars, they were deep wells of clear spring water, they were sparks of burning flame. Of course, they weren't any of those things. They were just eyes. And her skin was only skin (Peach blossom! Golden silk! Such nonsense!), as her lips were only lips and the rest of her body no more and no less than any reasonably healthy young female of her genetic background should have. It was all wordplay with Sork. Worse, some of it, she was nearly sure, was lifted almost bodily from the old lecture chips on romantic poetry that he had read so assiduously before moving on to other subjects. . . .
Still, it was endearing wordplay. It was meant to please her and, because Sork meant that so intently, it did.
Whereas Kiri—
Hell, she said to herself, getting up from her desk, stop this. There's no point.
Sue-ling Quong knew that sooner or later she would have to give up one of the twins if she wanted to keep either. She didn't dodge that responsibility in her mind, because Sue-ling was a responsible person.
But she knew that she was not the solution to their problems.
Certainly she was not to Sork's. He wanted something that she couldn't give him, perhaps something that the whole world couldn't give him. For Sork to be happy something had to change—radically change, with unimaginable consequences —and Sue-ling Quong could see no chance, anywhere, that that sort of immense change was in sight.
In this, as it happened, she was very wrong.
The great event that was going to change everything for Sork Quintero (and for everyone else in the universe) had already happened.
In fact it had occurred long before Sork began listening to his old lecture chips—even before he and his twin brother had been born, nearly thirty years earlier. The event itself had actually happened longer ago than that, more than seventy-three years ago, in fact. But as the place where it happened was a bit more than seventy-three light-years away in space, and, as the news could not reach them any faster than the speed of light, neither Sue-ling nor Sork nor anyone else on Earth—Turtle, Taur or human—knew about it yet.
But, all too soon, they would.
When Sork Quintero went to work he had to leave the human quarters and venture into those colder, meaner, underground sections the Turtles reserved for themselves.
He knew the route well. He could have walked it in his sleep, and sometimes he very nearly did, when he had been awake for hours puzzling over the old lecture chips. But still he gazed distastefully around as he crossed the busy streets of the compound. He was aware of the vast cables of the space ladder, which stretched up and out of sight into the clouds to the south and east of the reservation. There was no hope of seeing the top of the ladder, of course, though sometimes, on a clear night, the eye could follow a cable for a long, long way just after dusk or just before dawn, while its upper reaches were still lighted by the sun which had already set for those on the surface.
Sork Quintero knew when he had left the human areas. The difference was sharp. Now there were symbols of the First Mother all over, the great winged female Turtle figure that represented the—perhaps—goddess of the entire Turtle race. Or so people said. Sork wondered if it were really true 'that there was a real Mother of all the Turtles somewhere in space. That was another thing that some people claimed, but was it true? Certainly no human had ever seen a female Turtle.
But no one knew for sure. The Turtles did not care to discuss their religion—or whatever it was—with unenlightened human beings.
There were fewer humans in this part of the compound. There were a handful of Taurs, the adult-male castrated kind, all wearing memo chips of their own, none of them paying any attention to Sork Quintero as they went about the business the chips ordained for them. Taurs, of course, were common everywhere on Earth now—great meat animals, almost human in body, bull-like as the Minotaur in the head.