The Girl With the Jade Green Eyes (16 page)

She had quoted a Cavalier poet, another indication of Laudermilk’s influence.

“I’ve spent a long day extolling your wit and wisdom to men more interested in your femur and the articulation of your knee joint.”

“Gravy says they’re shaping me up to ship me out.”

The reference to Laudermilk irritated him, and he said, “Gravy’s another one more interested in your parts than in your whole.”

“I got the opposite impression.” She laughed and sat beside him. “Quit being moony. If I took a mortal lover, everyone in the hospital would know it right away.”

“What did he mean when he called you
kaleema?
”

“Oh, that! I’ve been teaching him protocol. He wants to learn the Kanabian language of state.”

“Then,
kaleema
must mean ‘your highness.’ ”

“Not exactly,” Kyra said thoughtfully. “In your language,
kaleema
would mean ‘the lady of the manor.’ ”

“Laudermilk set me up to ask you that question,” he said, groaning in self-disgust. Then he told her of Laudermilk’s contrived explanation of the history of his name.

“Gravy has a terrific sense of humor.” She smiled. “When he announced you from the doorway, he said that the Navy had finally let my privy councilor out of the privy.”

“You couldn’t help but be charmed by such a witty man.”

“Personally Gravy’s a darling, but on Kanab we consider warriors as the vestigial remnant of a society of brutes. They’re lowest in a caste society.”

“They still have power on earth, and I’ve got to talk to you about them. There’s an expression ‘Business before pleasure,’ and I want to get this subject out of the way before we speak of lighter matters. I’ll begin by asking if you’ve met a man called Slade.”

“Ben? Of course. He’s a warrior who dislikes uniforms. If they don’t get me out of committee fast enough, he wants to organize a little army to liberate me. He says I’ll be his Joan of Arc.”

“That’s Ben, all right. He’s a fantasist, but he has clout in the real world. He wanted me to tell you that Admiral Harper’s trying to get me to pinpoint the location of your spaceship. Harper’s up to no good, but if I refuse to tell him under oath, he might be able to put me in jail.”

“Then, you tell him exactly what he wants to know.”

“But Harper’s a military man, and the military men on this planet could blast your ship to smithereens.”

She shook her head in disagreement and said slowly, “Ben asked you to tell me this because Ben walks one way and looks another. He himself hinted to me of this danger, and I laughed at his fears. He thinks I will be truthful with you. He does not believe I speak only the truth or remain silent. So I will tell you, Breedlove, it is not your military caste I fear but the slowness of your committees. If I am held beyond my time, millennia-old urges of my nature will command me to stay. Earth cannot hold me hostage. If I cannot leave of my own free will, earth will become my hostage.”

She took his hand, as if to reassure him, and said, “My ship can defend itself. True, it cannot rise without a propellant, but it converts the sunlight to its defense. It could destroy mankind. This is not a threat, and certainly it does not apply to you. Far from harming you, I would grant you an immortality of sorts. You would become the Lord Breedlove of my manor, but your grandchildren would see the last of the race of men.”

Her words were gentle. They held both a threat and a promise, and he was more interested in the promise.

“Could you wave a wand and make me immortal?”

“No, you would wave the wand, and the immortality I give you could be given to you by any woman of your race. Now the lady of the manor has spoken. I hear my steward arriving. Let us lay aside the business of state and go to chow.”

He arose at her imperial bidding, wondering and curious. From her remark he gathered that she was promising him genetic immortality if she was compelled to remain on earth, and by implication she was informing him that she could mate with a member of a different species. Somehow, despite the apocalyptic vision he had seen in the meadow, the idea was potentially attractive. To be the father of a new race.

Particularly with Kyra as the race mother. Her effervescence charmed him. Her lightness and wit delighted him. But beneath her shimmering, girlish vivacity beckoned a woman, more heavy-bodied and fecund, who exerted a compelling allure. That woman anchored Kyra’s lightness and gave her grace notes deeper tones.

In the wardroom the steward had lighted the candles and turned off the overhead. The light played over the snowy napery, the silverware, the translucent china.

“Look, Breedlove. This beats sucking paste from a tube.”

The woman he had sensed momentarily was gone, and the laughing girl had returned. It was better this way. He was more at ease with the girl, and he could trip lightly into areas where a more deliberate pace might have alarmed her. Helping her to be seated, he said, “I’d like to seat you this way for the next ten thousand years, but, if not, I’d be perfectly willing to fly away with you and suck on a tube of paste.”

“Breedlove, Myra would have you in the tube. But we promised to speak only pleasantries at dinner, and I have the ideal subject for light comedy: earth scientists I have met.”

As the mess attendant moved silently in the background, she gave imitations of her interrogators so accurate he recognized many of them from his debriefing sessions. Her mimicry fascinated him, but she ventured no information on the subjects they had questioned her about. It was as if she had been coached on his “need to know” and was avoiding areas off-limits to his knowledge.

“Meeting all those experts must be interesting.”

“It’s tedious,” she admitted. “Here I am, surrounded by old men and parking lots. Out there is water, trees, mountains, a great blue sky. I’d rather run naked through the woods or go swimming in the sound.”

“Do you swim?”

“Superbly. I’m so buoyant.”

“Father and I own a cabin on a lake near Mount Rainier. Pine trees scent the air, and a mountain stream tumbles by within sound of the cabin.”

“Could we go there after they let me out?”

“Certainly. We could live there if you’re stranded on earth. You’d be happy in the green summers with birds and chipmunks for company. You could let your hair grow green again, run naked through the forest, and go swimming in the lake.”

She was leaning forward, intent on his words. “How would you earn your living?”

“I’d open a general store in the village. Supporting you would be easy. With you around, I wouldn’t need a television set, even, for entertainment. I’d grow for you an acre of the sweetest, most succulent alfalfa you ever tasted and store enough in the barn for winter. I’d set up a beehive to provide you with fresh honey, and you could lie on the beach of the lake, storing up sunlight while I tended store.”

As his mind grew engrossed with the vision, her eyes glowed with the shared fantasy.

“When I came home at night, we’d always dine by candlelight and we could swap stories about what happened to us during the day. Your wit would make the most trivial happening an event.”

“Breedlove,” she asked anxiously, “would you be happy with a woman who knows more than you do?”

“I’d sip your knowledge as a bee sips nectar. And as men go, I’m not without some intelligence. I could write you sonnets. You’d be happy with me. Each morning would be a fresh awakening to a fresh earth, and each twilight would be a separate peace.”

“That I know I’d love!”

“I can even keep house. All the rangers’ wives at Selkirk agree I keep the neatest cabin. And we’d have children, a green-haired girl for me and a blue-eyed boy for you.”

“Could we have an apple tree, Breedlove?”

“Several. Winesaps and Golden Delicious, for blossoms in the spring and fruit in the fall. In winter I’d teach you to ski on the slopes and skate on the pond. We’d snowshoe through the forest. There’s a grandeur to a snowbound forest, and the sunlight’s never wasted when it shines on snow. And we’d teach our children to skate on the pond.”

“I can hear our children laughing, Breedlove.”

It was then he asked her, “Could we have children?”

“Dozens, in all varieties,” she answered blithely. “Why stop at two?”

“Any number and style would be welcome. I could add rooms to the cabin.”

“Oh, being married to you would be fun. You give me the feeling of forests already, and to live with you among the trees would be heavenly. When you came home at night the cabin would be spotless. Does our cabin have a fireplace?”

“A huge one.”

“Terrific. In winter I’d have a fire blazing, and when my big, handsome husband came through the door, he would lift me and whirl…”

Her voice trailed into silence. The wardroom seemed to darken as the light went out of her eyes. She no longer looked at him but through him with a weird fixity of gaze, and a mood as palpable as another presence entered the room with them. Frozen by a horror beyond terror, she stared through him into an abyss. He could feel the void arcing beyond the end of worlds and filled with a loneliness and a sadness as poignant as the weeping of lost children.

Speaking softly, as a man awakening a sleepwalker, he asked, “Kyra, what’s wrong?” He was trying to draw her back from the precipice with his voice, and he saw her eyes struggle to regain focus.

She shuddered, and now she was looking at him again. Her voice trembled slightly, and she said, “It’s gone.”

“What was it?”

“I suffered a… slight dislocation. In my tongue it’s called a
frilling
. Sitting here, imagining that we loved in the manner of earth, I felt the premonitory mating pangs of my own species.”

“But there was fear in your eyes.”

“Not fear alone. With us, love is the agony of the incomplete, a yearning for fulfillment, and it begins in a desolation of the spirit. Nature prepares my body to accept such longings when my time comes, and I am readied for my season by the swelling sun. The urge itself commences when the declining sun reminds us that all who live must die, that fresh generations are waiting to be born, and that the old must prepare for the new. Tonight my biological clock ticked prematurely.” She forced a wan smile. “You tilted the planet for me, Breedlove, and you did it while we were on its dark side.”

“Your agony I could feel—”

“You are so sensitive to my feelings, Breedlove, I’ve noticed before, and I think I’ve been given a clue to our understanding…”

For once he would not let her divert him from a subject. Still shaken and frightened for her, he grew blunt. “You’re right, I am sensitive to your feelings, and you were more than frightened, you were terrified. Why were you so afraid?”

Her poise crumbled. Her body slumped. For a moment she was on the verge of tears, a frightened child asking not for his aid but for comfort, wanting to lean on his strength, and in her vulnerability she was overwhelmingly appealing. The little girl in her compelled his devotion more profoundly than the siren he had sensed in her earlier.

“I was afraid for you. Breedlove, no matter how much you romanticize me, I’m no damned wand-waving goddess. There’s lots I don’t know about this planet and more I don’t know about me. For one thing, earth’s axial tilt is greater than that my body evolved from, and what will all the extra sunlight do to me? The life force is as much a mystery to me as to you. When I felt the
frilling
begin, I was petrified by the fear that it might be my true summons, and before it, my darling, we would have been as helpless as if before a hurricane. I would have been rapacious, and you couldn’t have resisted me.”

Because she was frightened and concerned for him, she was open to him as never before, he realized. And she had revealed more about her biological urges and about her feelings toward him. She had called him “darling” with a tenderness that signified the term was not chosen because of her faulty knowledge of English. He wanted to prolong the moment and its openness. He wanted to explore her definition of love as “the agony of the incomplete” and to learn more about her mating cycle. Above all, he wanted to put his arms around her and assure her he had no fear of her amorous rapacity.

Yet at the moment it was Breedlove who evaded intimacies with decorum and sought conversational diversions. Kyra’s emotional storm had battered her defenses. Her wariness was weakened. In response to a show of his affection she might confide in him as an earth girl to her lover, and her quarters were surely wired, their words being recorded. He would not be an unwitting agent of electronic eavesdroppers or help earth’s manipulators gain an advantage over her.

His suspicions gave him a logical diversion, and he said, “I couldn’t resist you in a light breeze. You don’t need a hurricane. And there’s something else bugging me, or rather bugging Admiral Harper. What’s the purpose of the implant in your skull?”

“Its main purpose was to get you invited here to dinner. It’s an acoustic converter I haven’t needed on earth. It permits me to communicate with any intelligent species which vocalizes at a higher frequency than that which you and I use.”

“Harper thought it was something that kept you in communication with your spaceship.”

“He would.” She laughed, her composure regained. “He’s a suspicious old bastard. Actually it has a limited use as a homing device in fog or darkness when I’m in the sound range of a howler on my ship… Isn’t this a delicious dessert?”

The steward had served them baklava, a Greek pastry steeped in honey.

“Somebody around here is very solicitous of your comfort, I see. They’re learning your tastes.”

“I think they’ve learned a lot from you,” Kyra said, surprising him with her knowledge. “Ben was telling me that there was something in your psychological profile that made it easy for my security project director to get you free and unsupervised entry into my presence. He tells me you and I are going to share a bridal suite.”

“The suite’s got two bedrooms,” Breedlove said, “so the setup is less intimate than Slade might lead you to believe. But what’s this about my psychological profile? I haven’t talked to any shrinks except those I’ve lectured to at the debriefings. How could Slade know anything about me I haven’t told him?”