My Romeo and I had our first fight.
“I thought you were going to pack the food.”
“I didn’t know we needed food. Ships are supposed to recycle everything.”
“When you recycle everything, you don’t recycle everything. You run out eventually. Don’t you know Newton’s laws?”
“I know Newton’s laws, and they don’t say anything about food!”
Remember, this is a true story.
We made up and made love, as always happens with first fights. Making love after a fight can be very bad or very good. It is awkward, but vigorous.
We were lucky and did not starve. God looked down, said “Tsk-tsk, such blockheads,” and saved us.
We came upon a great creature in space. A giant; a friendly Titan, like Prometheus or Atlas.
Why do you immediately believe me when I say we found a Titan in space, but you giggle when I say I was a great girlish beauty? No, don’t answer.
Like Atlas, the Titan carried a world on its back, and inside that world, we found a temple for worshipping the Titan. The temple area was bright and warm, filled with growing green plants. Many of the plants were edible; some were edible even after we had overcome the first pangs of our ravening hunger.
We stayed at the temple for two weeks. At dawn, we would wake naked in each other’s arms and watch the sun rise; we would eat breakfast, then spend the morning gathering leaves. In the afternoon, we would go back to the yacht and take turns shoving leaves down the toilet, to replenish the bio-mass the ship needed to make food. In the evening, we would return to the temple, recite worshipful poems of our own devising, and sprawl ourselves reverently on the altar. We fell asleep only when we had wrung out our bodies in every way, and we dreamed of the new universes we would discover.
Here is what we really discovered.
I discovered my Romeo had never heard of Scarlatti, Haydn, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Cage, or Laurier-Leyrac. He was not keen to learn.
I discovered he was an enthusiast for types of music called Synthereg and Mexihowl. Mexihowl required drumming on your thigh. Or someone else’s thigh.
I discovered he thought my mother was a greedy bitch because of some deal where she’d outmaneuvered New Frontier.
I discovered he was unwilling to admit that many New Frontier trade practices were unethical, if not outright illegal.
I discovered whisker-burn.
He discovered menstruation.
We flew back to Venus-Wheel and were met with teary hugs. Afterwards, our parents got very very angry, but hugs first. That is the way good parents are.
My Romeo and I were sent to apologize to the man whose yacht we had stolen. The man was wealthy and good-natured. It amused him, the way things turned out. He laughed and laughed when I told him about stuffing the leaves into the toilet. I laughed with him. We had a very good laugh, and my Romeo joined in with us. Then he went away with his family, leaving me alone with the wealthy man.
So the true story is, I met your father by stealing his yacht to run away with someone else. And the moral is, making love is glorious, and someday you will do it and revel in it, as your father and I do it and revel in it. But when you pick someone to be with, think about everything except making love.
Any two people can make love if they want to.
VARIATION H: DRAGON
(SCHERZANDO MA CON FUOCO)
(PLAYFULLY, BUT WITH FIRE)
CONTACT: JULY 2076
Sacred Daughter of the Sun,
Forgive an old woman’s presumption for writing to You, Honored Child, and forgive the many tricks I have used to smuggle this message past Your Regents. The Regents are all fine people, yes, but they are not the Empress. Some things are meant for Your August Ears alone.
I am Mariko Naruki, wife to Yushio Naruki, who is chief executive of Laughing Dragon Entertainment Industries Company Limited. He is a dear man because he is mostly a child. He has invented many games in his life, not to mention many fine rides in Laughing Dragon Entertainment Parks throughout the Inner Planets; but I have never trusted him with the grocery money. Never mind. A good man, and good at building fun and happiness. Not so good at building strong fiscal structures. So—and I pray it will be forgotten by the time You reach Your Majority and are given this letter—my dear Yushio led Laughing Dragon to the brink of ruin.
One day he phoned from work and asked me to make a large withdrawal from our savings account. Why? I asked. He needed the money to buy something. What did he want to buy? He wouldn’t say. So I did what a good wife should: I gave him the money, then followed him when he left the office.
He bought a sword. A very fine sword of strong bright steel, with a hilt covered in real leather and a fine embroidered sheath. A good choice for a decoration hanging in the living room, but I knew he wanted it for a different reason. What a child he was! I confronted him there in the store, berated him about what he was up to, attracted a big crowd, never mind. In the end, I let him make a down payment on the sword—it really was excellent, and the price quite reasonable—but I made him leave it in the store on layaway.
Still, that was not the end of it. He could see disaster looming for the company and wanted to pay the honorable price of failure. Which meant he just wanted to run away. We women know many men are just little boys whose swagger has become convincing.
Finally I suggested flying into the sun. It was the kind of gesture that appealed to Yushio: a flamboyant idea, but austere in execution. It appealed to me too because the flight would give him time to reconsider his rash decision. I thought I could persuade him to start a new life instead of ending the old one: perhaps becoming a Flare-Fisher on Mercury, which would suit Yushio’s sense of romance while paying very well.
We set off secretly in the executive yacht, well provisioned and weighted down with our life savings converted to platinum. (We had no children to whom we could leave an inheritance…my fallopian tubes had growths, I nearly died at fifteen, never mind.) Soon Yushio was treating our trip as an adventure. He had never been in space, though he had designed entertainments for all the colonies and for many spacefaring vessels. Long hours at a time, he forgot himself and scribbled designs on paper: new games, new rides, new adventure areas. But then suddenly he would remember the reason he was in space, the catastrophe facing his company, and he would sink into gloom.
Then the hand of the gods. Just outside the orbit of Venus, we encountered a dragon.
It didn’t look like a dragon. More like a dragon’s egg: black with shimmers, huge and beautiful. Silent and serene as space, but when you looked at it, you felt a million eyes looking back.
Almost everywhere, its hide was smooth as a girl’s cheek; but in one spot, on its back, the skin rose in the shape of the sacred mountain (I do not lie) with a small hole at the top. Like the sacred mountain’s cone.
Except that this opening was an airlock. Inside, there was fresh air, sunlight, gravity, and a reproduction of the Musubi Shrine to Amaterasu O-mikami, Your Own Celestial Ancestress.
I swear this is true.
“We have found Heaven,” I said to Yushio.
“Nonsense,” he answered. “We have found an Environment my company built for a Mars freighter. The Edo Maru. I wonder what it’s doing here.”
“The gods put it here.”
He looked around. “The gods haven’t been taking very good care of it, have they?”
It was true—the shrine was in a shambles. Vandals had hacked off much of the foliage. Inside the torii gate, where Your Majesty knows there should only be peace and serenity, there were instead a few broken lawn chairs and some playing cards bearing pictures of hairy people in rut. And the altar…I cannot describe the altar, but it needed a very good cleaning.