A Separate War and Other Stories (14 page)

“Well, in point of fact, it's uninhabitable now, except for people like you. We could survive inside these domes for a long time, if it were just a matter of the outside getting hotter and hotter. For those of you able to withstand the nanophages, it will probably be too hot within a decade, here; longer near the poles. But the weather is likely to become very violent, too.

“And it may not be a matter of a simple increase in heat. In the case of normal evolution, the Sun would eventually expand, becoming a red giant. It would take many billions of years, but the Earth would not survive. The surface of the Sun would actually extend out to touch us.

“If the Fwndyri were speeding up time somehow, locally, and the Sun were actually
evolving
at this incredible rate, we would suffer that fate in about thirty years. But it would be impossible. They would have to have a way to magically extract the hydrogen from the Sun's core.”

“Wait,” I said. “You don't know what they're doing now, to make it brighten. I wouldn't say anything's impossible.”

“Water Man,” Norita said, “if that happens, we shall simply die, all of us, at once. There is no need to plan for it. We do need to plan for less extreme exigencies.” There was an uncomfortable silence.

“What can we do?” White Hill said. “We artists?”

“There's no reason not to continue with the project, though I think you may wish to do it inside. There's no shortage of space. Are any of you trained in astrophysics, or anything having to do with stellar evolution and the like?” No one was. “You may still have some ideas that will be useful to the specialists. We will keep you informed.”

Most of the artists stayed in Amazonia, for the amenities if not to avoid purging, but four of us went back to the outside habitat. Denli om Cord, the composer from Luxor, joined Lo and White Hill and me. We could have used the tunnel airlock, to avoid the midday heat, but Denli hadn't seen the beach, and I suppose we all had an impulse to see the Sun with our new knowledge. In this new light, as they say.

White Hill and Denli went swimming while Lo and I poked around the ruins. We had since learned that the destruction here had been methodical, a grim resolve to leave the enemy nothing of value. Both of us were scouting for raw material, of course. After a short while we sat in the hot shade, wishing we had brought water.

We talked about that and about art. Not about the Sun dying, or us dying, in a few decades. The women's laughter drifted to us over the rush of the muddy surf. There was a sad hysteria to it.

“Have you had sex with her?” he asked conversationally.

“What a question. No.”

He tugged on his lip, staring out over the water. “I try to keep these things straight. It seems to me that you desire her, from the way you look at her, and she seems cordial to you, and is after all from Seldene. My interest is academic, of course.”

“You've never done sex? I mean before.”

“Of course, as a child.” The implication of that was obvious.

“It becomes more complicated with practice.”

“I suppose it could. Although Seldenians seem to treat it as casually as…conversation.” He used the Seldenian word, which is the same as for intercourse.

“White Hill is reasonably sophisticated,” I said. “She isn't bound by her culture's freedoms.” The two women ran out of the water, arms around each other's waists, laughing. It was an interesting contrast; Denli was almost as large as me, and about as feminine. They saw us and waved toward the path back through the ruins.

We got up to follow them. “I suppose I don't understand your restraint,” Lo said. “Is it your own culture? Your age?”

“Not age. Perhaps my culture encourages self-control.”

He laughed. “That's an understatement.”

“Not that I'm a slave to Petrosian propriety. My work is outlawed in several states, at home.”

“You're proud of that.”

I shrugged. “It reflects on them, not me.” We followed the women down the path, an interesting study in contrasts, one pair nimble and naked except for a film of drying mud, the other pacing evenly in monkish robes. They were already showering when Lo and I entered the cool shelter, momentarily blinded by shade.

We made cool drinks and, after a quick shower, joined them in the communal bath. Lo was not anatomically different from a sexual male, which I found obscurely disturbing. Wouldn't it bother you to be constantly reminded of what you had lost? Renounced, I suppose Lo would say, and accuse me of being parochial about plumbing.

I had made the drinks with guava juice and ron, neither of which we have on Petrosia. A little too sweet, but pleasant. The alcohol loosened tongues.

Denli regarded me with deep black eyes. “You're rich, Water Man. Are you rich enough to escape?”

“No. If I had brought all my money with me, perhaps.”

“Some do,” White Hill said. “I did.”

“I would too,” Lo said, “coming from Seldene. No offense intended.”

“Wheels turn,” she admitted. “Five or six new governments before I get back.
Would
have gotten back.”

We were all silent for a long moment. “It's not real yet,” White Hill said, her voice flat. “We're going to die here?”

“We were going to die somewhere,” Denli said. “Maybe not so soon.”

“And not on Earth,” Lo said. “It's like a long preview of Hell.” Denli looked at him quizzically. “That's where Christians go when they die. If they were bad.”

“They send their bodies to Earth?” We managed not to smile. Actually, most of my people knew as little as hers, about Earth. Seldene and Luxor, though relatively poor, had centuries' more history than Petros, and kept closer ties to the central planet. The Home Planet, they would say. Homey as a blast furnace.

By tacit consensus, we didn't dwell on death anymore that day. When artists get together they tend to wax enthusiastic about materials and tools, the mechanical lore of their trades. We talked about the ways we worked at home, the things we were able to bring with us, the improvisations we could effect with Earthling materials. (Critics talk about art, we say; artists talk about brushes.) Three other artists joined us, two sculptors and a weathershaper, and we all wound up in the large sunny studio drawing and painting. White Hill and I found sticks of charcoal and did studies of each other drawing each other.

While we were comparing them, she quietly asked “Do you sleep lightly?”

“I can. What did you have in mind?”

“Oh, looking at the ruins by starlight. The moon goes down about three. I thought we might watch it set together.” Her expression was so open as to be enigmatic.

Two more artists had joined us by dinnertime, which proceeded with a kind of forced jollity. A lot of ron was consumed. White Hill cautioned me against overindulgence. They had the same liquor, called “rum,” on Seldene, and it had a reputation for going down easily but causing storms. There was no legal distilled liquor on my planet.

I had two drinks of it, and retired when people started singing in various languages. I did sleep lightly, though, and was almost awake when White Hill tapped. I could hear two or three people still up, murmuring in the bath. We slipped out quietly.

It was almost cool. The quarter-phase moon was near the horizon, a dim orange, but it gave us enough light to pick our way down the path. It was warmer in the ruins, the tumbled stone still radiating the day's heat. We walked through to the beach, where it was cooler again. White Hill spread the blanket she had brought, and we stretched out and looked up at the stars.

As is always true with a new world, most of the constellations were familiar, with a few bright stars added or subtracted. Neither of our home stars was significant, as dim here as Earth's Sol is from home. She identified the brightest star overhead as AlphaKent; there was a brighter one on the horizon, but neither of us knew what it was.

We compared names of the constellations we recognized. Some of hers were the same as Earth's names, like Scorpio, which we call the Insect. It was about halfway up the sky, prominent, imbedded in the galaxy's glow. We both call the brightest star there Antares. The Executioner, which had set perhaps an hour earlier, they call Orion. We had the same meaningless names for its brightest stars, Betelgeuse and Rigel.

“For a sculptor, you know a lot about astronomy,” she said. “When I visited your city, there was too much light to see stars at night.”

“You can see a few from my place. I'm out at Lake PÃ¥chlÃ¥, about a hundred kaymetras inland.”

“I know. I called you.”

“I wasn't home?”

“No; you were supposedly on ThetaKent.”

“That's right, you told me. Our paths crossed in space. And you became that burgher's slave wife.” I put my hand on her arm. “Sorry I forgot. A lot has gone on. Was he awful?”

She laughed into the darkness. “He offered me a lot to stay.”

“I can imagine.”

She half turned, one breast soft against my arm, and ran a finger up my leg. “Why tax your imagination?”

I wasn't expecially in the mood, but my body was. The robes rustled off easily, their only virtue.

The moon was down now, and I could see only a dim outline of her in the starlight. It was strange to make love deprived of that sense. You would think the absence of it would amplify the others, but I can't say that it did, except that her heartbeat seemed very strong on the heel of my hand. Her breath was sweet with mint, and the smell and taste of her body were agreeable; in fact, there was nothing about her body that I would have cared to change, inside or out, but nevertheless, our progress became difficult after a couple of minutes, and by mute agreement we slowed and stopped. We lay joined together for some time before she spoke.

“The timing is all wrong. I'm sorry.” She drew her face across my arm, and I felt tears. “I was just trying not to think about things.”

“It's all right. The sand doesn't help, either.” We had gotten a little bit inside, rubbing.

We talked for a while and then drowsed together. When the sky began to lighten, a hot wind from below the horizon woke us up. We went back to the shelter.

Everyone was asleep. We went to shower off the sand, and she was amused to see my interest in her quicken. “Let's take that downstairs,” she whispered, and I followed her down to her room.

The memory of the earlier incapability was there, but it was not greatly inhibiting. Being able to see her made the act more familiar, and besides, she was very pleasant to see, from whatever angle. I was able to withhold myself only once, and so the interlude was shorter than either of us would have desired.

We slept together on her narrow bed. Or she slept, rather, while I watched the bar of sunlight grow on the opposite wall and thought about how everything had changed.

They couldn't really say we had thirty years to live, since they had no idea what the enemy was doing. It might be three hundred; it might be less than one—but even with bodyswitch that was always true, as it was in the old days: sooner or later something would go wrong and you would die. That I might die at the same instant as ten thousand other people and a planet full of history—that was interesting. But as the room filled with light, and I studied her quiet repose, I found her more interesting than that.

I was old enough to be immune to infatuation. Something deep had been growing since Egypt, maybe before. On top of the pyramid, the rising Sun dim in the mist, we had sat with our shoulders touching, watching the ancient forms appear below, and I felt a surge of numinism mixed oddly with content. She looked at me—I could only see her eyes—and we didn't have to say anything about the moment.

And now this. I was sure, without words, that she would share this, too. Whatever “this” was. England's versatile language, like mine and hers, is strangely hobbled by having the one word, love, stand for such a multiplicity of feelings.

Perhaps that lack reveals a truth, that no one love is like any other. There are other truths that you might forget, or ignore, distracted by the growth of love. In Petrosian there is a saying in the palindromic mood that always carries a sardonic, or at least ironic, inflection: “Happiness presages disaster presages happiness.” So if you die happy, it means you were happy when you died. Good timing or bad?