O’Neill fell in love with Lieutenant Marjetta on sight. Not the way he loved his hostess, Sammy—a mild and, he hoped, harmless, if exciting, flirtation. Not the way he loved any of the objects of his crushes on Iona, not even the way he loved Tessie. No, this is, Seamus mentally insisted, the real thing. Marjetta was his fate, his destiny, the one great love of his life. It had taken him a long time to make that decision—slightly in excess of a half minute.
This conclusion might notably affect his mission to Zylong, if only by distracting him something terrible. It would certainly involve the eventual landing of Iona on the island in the river that Podraig had tentatively chosen. Marjetta would have to forsake her heathen ways. All these were minor details. This was the proper woman Seamus had been searching for all his long and hectic life.
Well, for the last six months anyway.
To begin with, she treated Seamus with total contempt. He was, she implied by her tilted chin and stony brown eyes, a worthless derelict, a loudmouthed braggart, a bit of a biological freak, a poseur who might deceive the older folks on Zylong but was transparent to the superior wisdom of her nineteen years (Taran time).
No one appealed to Seamus O’Neill more than a woman who saw right through him.
Moreover, she was devastatingly lovely, tall for a Zylongi, tall even for a Taran, lithe and willowy, short brown hair, a gently curved face, strong, expressive mouth, flashing eyes, absolutely irresistible legs, the confident shoulders of a competent military officer—Ah, my dear Margie, you’re the most proper of proper women. ‘Twill be hard to win you, but that’s part of the fun.
She was not part of Sammy and Ernie’s crowd, but rather a friend of their son, Horor, and his “promised,” a cold, rather hard-eyed young woman named Carina, both of whom seemed to be students somewhere and neither of whom would give Seamus O’Neill the time of day—behaving, in other words, the way he had toward his elders only a few years ago. If the older generation on Zylong found him fascinating and interesting, the younger generation clearly found him boring if not disgusting. Red-bearded giant space tramp? What could be more deadly dull?
At first Seamus was annoyed. After all, didn’t his program claim he was a bit of a rebel? And shouldn’t young people identify with a rebel? Besides, didn’t he have a quick smile and a quicker tongue? Didn’t women invariably find him charming? Why, then, did Carina and especially Marjetta turn away in disgust when he would pay a certainly not undeserved compliment to one of the older women guests as they ate the candied fruits that apparently played the same preprandial role on Zylong as the poteen, straight up, did among Tarans?
(The “candy” in the fruit, or maybe even the fruit itself, contained a chemical at least as powerful as the poteen—loosening O’Neill’s admittedly loose tongue even more.)
Anyway, they didn’t like him, which was a challenge to O’Neill. He almost forgot that the space-lout mask he wore concealed the real O’Neill, whom, of course, Marjetta would find irresistible. Didn’t everyone? Why should he feel defensive about a persona which wasn’t his anyway?
“And so what do soldiers do on this planet?” he had inquired, harmlessly enough.
“Protect it from invaders,” he was told tersely, with a slight shrug of absolutely glorious shoulders.
“How many of those have you had lately, not counting myself of course?”
“None.”
“Ah then, there can’t be much work to do.”
“We manage to occupy ourselves.”
“Sure I suppose there are scores of you assigned to watch me and you’ll be my constant escort—to keep an eye on me, of course.”
“It would appear that no one believes you are much of a threat.”
“But you don’t agree?”
“I would not worry about a thousand red-bearded space tramps.” A contemptuous twist of her lovely lips. “Nor red-bearded gods of hordi legend who are supposed to return to redeem them.”
“Kind of confident of your military capability, aren’t you?”
Another pretty shrug. “It is adequate for our needs.”
“Where did the hordi get this legend?”
“Ask them. Perhaps it is a memory of the species which brought them here before we came.”
“Ah, is that what happened?”
“What do you think?”
“I think it is an interesting question of whether there is hordi blood in a lot of you folk.”
He waited for an explosion.
“Are you trying to shock me by challenging the official wisdom? Come now, Space Tramp O’Neill, surely you have noted the slightly pointed teeth?”
“Not on you.… And why did a lovely woman like you become a member of the officer caste?”
“My family has always been in command positions. I was assigned to my role.”
“When you were a wee lass.”
“When I was born. Were you assigned to be a wandering minstrel?” In a tone of voice that couldn’t have cared less.
“Ah, no. I chose it of my own free will.”
“How degenerate.”
“Would you want to be something else, I mean not a soldier at all?”
“That is an absurd question.”
Ah, thought Seamus proudly, I’m making great progress—well, maybe I am at that. There is contempt in some of them for the party line. And anger, lots of anger.…
The relationship between Horor, the son of the house, and his “promised” mate was strange. They snapped unpleasantly at one another and argued almost every time they opened their mouths. He treated her like an empty-headed flake, and she reacted to him like he was a stuffy dullard. Yet, later on they left the apartment, following the gorgeous Marjetta, hand in hand.
Sammy whispered a hasty explanation in his ear. On Zylong young people were assigned their spouses and their careers shortly after birth, based on a careful study of their antecedents, so that the best possible genetic combinations would result. Sometimes they resisted this sorting process and refused to mate with their “promised.” This was possible. Marjetta, a truly remarkable young woman, Sammy declared nervously, had insisted in delaying indefinitely her mating with the soldier to whom she had been promised. This could mean a life in which one did not marry, though sometimes the Committee would make exceptions, particularly if the petitioner was more humble than Marjetta was ever likely to be. Other young people would accept their fate but never become emotionally attached to their mate.
Yet others would find love after they had been mated for some time. Carina and Horor, the Most High be praised, were falling in love now, though they had to pretend to hate each other because that was the way with young people.
“They will be happy, we now know it with certainty,” Sammy concluded breathlessly.
“This is the way you and himself got together,” O’Neill nodded in the direction of his handsome, cultivated, gentle host.
“But of course. And you see how well we are matched. The Committee is very wise, is it not?”
O’Neill didn’t think that this intense, almost manic woman was at all well matched with her reflective, melancholy mate. Whether they loved each other or not was less clear. Sammy was, however, a Zylongi Panglossa, the kind of enthusiast who had to persuade others and herself that everything was for the best.
“Marjetta is a lovely girl,” he commented carefully.
“So you are of the same humanity as we,” she grinned, almost wickedly. “All men think that. Perhaps someday she will find a man for herself. She may have to pay a heavy price, however.”
O’Neill did not want to know what that heavy price might be. “And her parents are both dead.”
“Yes,” Sammy said, with a sad shake of her curls—and there was even more gray in them than O’Neill had noticed before, “both killed in battle.”
“I thought there were no invaders here. Who is there to fight?”
Sammy looked around nervously, fearful that other guests might hear them. “It is not wise to discuss that.”
Aha. It’s matters like that you’re supposed to be investigating, Seamus O’Neill, not taking off Lieutenant Marjetta’s clothes in your imagination.
Well, you can do both, can’t you? After all, you’re young and the juices are flowing like they’re supposed to.
So the party went on, and Seamus Finnbar O’Neill found himself even more puzzled by his strange hosts. On the one hand, they purported to kiss only their mates and them only in the “private chamber”; on the other hand, they seemed to be preparing to turn the party in his honor into an orgy. If they were going to be decadent—and at the moment Seamus was prepared to be tolerant on that point—why couldn’t they be consistently decadent?
Then the event for which everyone had anxiously waited—the arrival of the Guide and the Fourth Secretary. The former was a doddering old man who smiled politely, nodded in answer to his own routine questions, and fluttered around shaking hands with everyone. He apologized to Poet O’Neill for any discourtesy. The First Ones and especially the Founder had strictly forbidden discourtesy. Before Seamus could praise the courtesy, the old man went on in a singsong voice, “You are welcome. Strangers are always welcome. We are honored. Enjoy your stay. Tell good things about us. Thank you thank you.”
“If it’s all the same to you,” Seamus whispered to the Deity, “I’ll keep the Lady Deirdre if you don’t mind.”
The Fourth Secretary was something else, a gombeen man if Seamus ever met one—short, fat, oily, leering at the women (which no one else on Zylong did), patronizing the men with false geniality, reveling in the power he obviously had over their lives.
He especially offended O’Neill by his frankly lascivious fascination with Marjetta—who in her turn treated the Fourth Secretary with the same contempt she had turned on Seamus.
I’m not that type at all, at all, he protested in his head.
“Well, I see the red-bearded god has come at last,” the Fourth Secretary smiled at Seamus. “You are, of course, most welcome.”
“Only if impoverished space travelers without fuel or money can be considered gods,” Seamus replied evenly.
“You are too modest. Our probes reveal that you are a man of many talents.”
“All which pale before the talents of the population of this astonishing civilization.”
“You speak well.” The Fourth Secretary did not seem happy about that fact.
“Poets do.”
“So do you like our planet? What about our women? Have you seen anything like them in the universe?”
“There is much beauty in the universe. Zylong is especially rich in it.”
Sure did Margie actually smile a little at that?
“You will stay with us long?”
“Only till my vehicle is repaired or till you grow tired of me.”
“Oh, we never grow tired of giant red-bearded gods.”
“Don’t you now?”
If you’re listening up there, Your Ladyship, this one is the Enemy.
With a crude guffaw, the Fourth Secretary took his leave. Everyone seemed to unwind; the worst was over.
The three young people wanted to leave a few minutes after the politician, but Sammy demanded that they stay while Seamus sang for them.
“Space bards are noted singers,” she said primly.
The three kids made faces of resigned disgust. Seamus chose to ignore them and to concentrate on the lovely Lieutenant while he sang.
It is well for small birds that can rise up on high
and warble away on the one branch together
Not so with myself and my millionfold love
that so far from each other must rise every day.
She’s more white than the lily and lovely past Beauty,
more sweet than the violin, more bright than the sun,
with a mind and refinement surpassing all these …
O God in Your Heaven give ease to my pain!
“Good-bye, Honored Guest,” Marjetta said with what in someone else would be described as a sneer. “I’m sure we’ll not meet again.”
Not a word about my song, even though I did it just for you?
“That would be a tragedy for me. Don’t I get a little credit because himself doesn’t like me.”
“A very little,” she said, blessing him with a grudging smile.
“Not enough to say you’d like to meet me again?”
“Certainly not.”
Women, they’re the devil.
A half hour later he was telling himself—in mental tones of vigorous warning, not unmixed with anticipation—that if the woman reclining next to him brushed her hair against his shoulder once more, he would go to pieces altogether. He took another wee sip of “refreshment” to calm his nerves and contemplate the torso of Energy Supervisor Niora, which was hardly an inch away from his face.
It looked like he had gotten himself into a Zylongi orgy all right, a cultivated, civilized orgy indeed, but then those might be the worst kind. From wondering which of the women he might be supposed to sleep with, he had turned to fearing that he might have to sleep with them all.
A fantasy which, for all his self-image as a horny young male, scared the living daylights out of Seamus Finnbar O’Neill.
And for all his talk and fantasy about love, when it came to action—Seamus O’Neill was prepared to admit to himself at the moment—he was not particularly experienced or confident. Not when faced with these mature and certainly practiced beauties who lolled around the table, blatantly flirting with him while their husbands watched with no stronger emotion than amusement.
Brigid, Patrick, and Columcile, save and protect me, he pleaded with considerable fervor.
Soft light glowed from the lemon-colored walls of the “living space.” Matching music and odors filled the air. The bodies of the guests were languid. Hairless male chests and soft female shoulders crowded around the table. Hemming him on either side, the relaxed forms of Energy Supervisor Niora and State Painter Reena were almost enough to keep his mind off the legs of his hostess as she padded around the table serving food with the aid of a chimpanzeelike hordi.
Research Director Samaritha, he mused, you have as satisfactory a pair of legs as I’ve ever seen, save for Marjetta’s, of course, but that was another matter. No, your legs and thighs are not too stocky at all. And the rear end is practically perfect.
All you can think about, O’Neill, is women.
Well, under the circumstances, how can I think of anything else?
“You think it strange,” Niora said softly, “that we do not try to improve on Mozart?”
O’Neill tried to focus his attention. He had matched the other guests drink for drink. They apparently were able to drink a good Taran under the table. Not that la-ir, a pink ice cream concoction, was all that weak a drink; it reminded Seamus of a twenty-third—century beverage he once consumed called a stinger. “To tell you the truth, lovely lady, I’m not sure what to think just at the moment.”
His eyes followed the curve of her throat and the slope of her shoulders to the top of the thin blue wraparound that was evening dress for Zylongi women. He fantasized about the corsetlike affair that was presumably under it. The garment, he had learned, was called a lentat, the same name as for his undergarment, but presumably of rather different structure and purpose, given the strapless gowns and flowing but disciplined charms of the Zylongi women.
How would one go about removing it? Ah well, you can figure out anything if you have to. Who cares about Mozart?
“Your Guardians permit complete license in music, Honored Guest O’Neill?” Niora asked, seductively caressing her goblet.
“They don’t see any harm in it. We let men like Music Director Ornigon compose their own music and interpret other composers any way they want.”
“But that is very strange, Honored Poet. Does it not make for great competition?” Her lovely brow furrowed.
Are all the Zylongi women so sumptuously beautiful? And are there others around like Marjetta?
That would be something terrible altogether.
He paused before answering. Why had there been only a few polite queries about his trip, his background? Maybe they weren’t interested, or maybe courtesy or orders forbade them to ask. Finally he replied cautiously, “We believe that competition makes for excellence.” Niora began to say something but then sipped her drink instead.
He tried to concentrate on the creamy food, of which he was eating too much. It puzzled him—the extremely formal talk combined with the disconcerting sensual atmosphere.
Niora interrupted his thoughts. “Was not the Honored Music Director’s recording of Mozart that we heard before the nourishment excellent? There are many paths to excellence within the official interpretation.” Seamus shifted his weight to put a little more distance between his lips and her shoulders.
He thought it had been a clever but stilted and wooden Haffner symphony, but one that fit the atmosphere perfectly. He dug into the cream thing again. You’re making a pig out of yourself, O’Neill.
Niora moved her body closer than ever. “Do you not find me attractive, Poet O’Neill?”
He choked on the cream. “Sure, I’d have to be a hunk of stone not to think you’re one of the most lovely women in the cosmos.”
“Now you exaggerate, Honored Poet,” she scolded him. “But you often do not look at me. During formal nourishment we are to enjoy one another’s bodies. It does not mean violation. Does it in your culture? I find your body very attractive.”
Brigid, Patrick, and Columcile, what have I gotten into? Here she is sitting next to her husband, Secondary Principal Gemmoff! “I’ve been wandering through space alone for such a long time, I guess I’m numb,” he said weakly.
“But please enjoy me while we eat. It is good to be admired by an Honored Guest.” She lowered her eyes, smiled shyly, and began eating again. “Is admiration a prelude to violence in your world?”
“Uh … no, of course not. I guess we … well, we are a little more restrained in the way we do it.”
“And less restrained in your violence.”
“We don’t believe in violence to women,” he said firmly, noting to himself that practice didn’t always follow theory.
“How unusual. Does admiration mean that you will enter a woman’s body?”
“Of course not!”
“Well then, neither does it for us.” He took another strong drink of their poteen and decided that he wouldn’t do anything until someone else did. What if they were all waiting for him? He slopped up some more of the thick black cream.
“I see you like our dark cream, Poet O’Neill,” said the Music Director, a thin man with iron-gray hair and a warm, lovely smile.
“’Tis wonderful altogether. I suppose it comes from your heathenish furry cattle.”
“Heathenish?”
“Ah, just a manner of speaking.” O’Neill turned his attention away from the languid form of State Painter Reena.
“All our food comes from the same common crops and from the milk of our cattle. Our scientists, like my Honored Mate, have developed many ways of synthesizing these simple staples into a variety of foods.” He talked briskly, like a gombeen man trying to make a sale. O’Neill didn’t think his heart was in it, though.
“And of combining them into delicious meals.” A wee compliment for the cook never hurts.
His host smiled proudly. “Ah, my mate has many gifts.”
It wasn’t what one would expect from a man contemplating swapping wives for an evening. O’Neill turned back to his own dinner companion, lying quietly next to him, delicately chewing on a small piece of pastry. “Am I supposed to pay compliments or would that be rude? You’re so pretty that my voice gets caught in my throat when I try to talk with you.”
A pleased rose glow spread over her dark skin. Her smile accepted him. “That in itself is a very nice compliment. To look is all that is required—really all that is proper.”
“I wouldn’t want to be improper. But I won’t take back the compliment,” he insisted.
“Certain exceptions are made for visitors, especially if they are poets.” She lowered her eyes modestly, now very satisfied indeed with her dinner companion. O’Neill relaxed. He was relieved altogether. No orgy.
Well, it might have been fun. No telling what I could have learned.
Looking was all that was expected. The guests reclined in intimate and proximate positions, but none of them touched. You had to be very observing of your partner’s moves to maintain the few inches of space that separated you. When her gorgeous little ass shifted too close to your thigh, you simply moved a fraction of an inch. Skillful, but what a waste of energy.
He managed once to “accidentally” brush his shoulder against Samaritha’s thigh as she leaned over to serve him what seemed to be the tenth or eleventh course. She jumped back, a look of anger and horror on her face. Seamus mumbled an apology about Tarans being a clumsy people. It was graciously, if formally, accepted.
To distract himself from Niora, he asked about the hordi. The subject was one on which everyone had an opinion—all of it spoken much the way children recite memory work at school. The hordi, Samaritha told him, were obviously not hominid; probably they were not even related to hominid ancestors. Their evolutionary progress was very slow, if it had not ceased altogether. They were quite savage in their native habitat but could be domesticated if captured early enough or born in captivity. They made pleasant pets and useful if dull servants. Some of Samaritha’s most important work was the selective breeding of the hordi to upgrade the strain of the domesticated type. It was a difficult and frustrating task, as there was so little in the hordi gene pool with which one could work.
Now all of this was patent nonsense. The tiny female hordi—four feet high—who waited on them clearly had a hominid body under her plain brown wrap. She was not anything like an ape. Her speech was rudimentary, clicks and grunts, but her hands were almost human. She was made for upright rather than quadruped movement; furthermore, one look at their pointed teeth showed where the Zylongi had acquired their “interesting difference” from the Tarans. The hordi could crossbreed with humanoids; at one time in the history of the Zylong planet, they had done so. Presumably such breeding was stopped, and now there was a cultural need to deny its possibility. O’Neill wondered how a scientist like Samaritha could talk such nonsense. He also found that the little creature could smile back at him, with a kind of knowing complacency: We both know they’re pious frauds, the servant girl seemed to be hinting. And we both survive by exploiting their fraud.
Was the domestic hordi attractive when she smiled, a young body, tiny but neat breasts, quick appealing motions? Sure she is attractive. O’Neill revised his opinion of the aborigines upward. Men without women could easily be tempted to make love to such creatures. Had it been that way with parallel species on Earth?
Once we evolved beyond the monthly “heat” phase, why the hell not?
So that’s what our ancestors were up to. The dirty things.
The last course finally came. Ornigon suggested that they must not keep the contestants waiting. The sensuality of the dinner ended. Niora’s gloriously relaxed charm became formal again—to both the relief and sorrow of O’Neill. Even the room temperature, which had risen to almost jungle heat during the meal, seemed to fall abruptly. Party’s over, kids, O’Neill thought. Off to the “contest”—whatever that is.
The arena was in the same quarter of the City as the apartment building in which his hosts lived. They descended in an elevator and walked across a brilliantly lighted and crowded plaza. Once more O’Neill felt like a bumpkin come to the big city—which of course was precisely what he was.
I wonder how long you can sustain this cosmopolitan pace, Seamus me boy. Soon they’ll smell the aroma of cattle on you and know what you really are. The descendant of a people whose great epics are about stealing bulls from one another.
Outside, the night air was balmy and pleasant. Thousands of people crowded toward a tall pink tower located at the end of a short street that angled off the plaza. They entered the building, took an elevator down, and emerged at the edge of a vast arena that appeared to be part gymnasium and part swimming pool. The audience sat on tiers made up of deeply cushioned contour chairs. You watch your sports in comfort on this planet, O’Neill observed to himself.
The contest was between the Northeast Quarter—where Samaritha and Ornigon lived—and the South Central Quarter. His hosts had pinned small red and white ribbons to their coats; the other side wore yellow and blue. There was no attempt to segregate the supporters of the two teams.
The contest began with a formal ritual that made him think of the Japanese No plays he had seen on the Iona’s video screens. Then the contest began in earnest: a combination of volleyball, water polo, and field hockey, played by superbly conditioned young men and women with grace and skill—almost like an elaborate ballet—their strong young bodies covered only by lentats, the minimal undergarments worn by Zylongi of both sexes. (I still don’t see how you get them off a woman without tugging, he thought.)
It was a vicious and violent ballet. O’Neill never cringed from working mayhem with a hurling stick on the Iona’s playing field, but he knew he could never slash at a woman with the stick. The young Zylongi males had no such compunctions, and the young women were not reluctant to fight back.
Even worse, it seemed to O’Neill, was the contrast between the destructiveness of the contest and the demeanor of the audience. Calm and controlled to the point of blandness, they applauded skillful play and showed no reaction at all at the sight of a broken limb or lacerated face. The whole wild enterprise seemed only faintly amusing to them. It was hard to tell if they even cared about whether their team won or not.
He tried his best to remember his anthropological manners, but when a tiny girl was carried off the floor with a broken arm hanging limply, blood pouring from a wound in her forehead, he gasped in disgust. Leaning in his direction, Samaritha quietly reassured him. “Do not worry about her, Honored Poet Guest. The contest surgeons are very skillful. In a day or two there will be no trace of injury. She will play in the next contest.”
“But how does she feel now?”
“Perhaps pleased that she has played well. Much worse happened to me when I was in the contest. I was proud to have played well.” She drew back into her couch.
The bloodshed ended with a victory for the home team. Secondary Principal Gemmoff was congratulated—it was his school’s team. The glory of the Northeast Quarter was preserved. The other two couples, who lived in another tower, went home. O’Neill and his hosts returned to the family living space for yet more refreshment and more music.
“Do you have anything like the contest on Tara, Poet Guest?” the Music Director asked formally, as though it were now time to begin the “serious conversation” again.
O’Neill tried to describe hurley and Gaelic football. He was not at all sure, though, that the interest his hosts indicated meant either comprehension or appreciation. Both wild games were apparently too tame for their tastes. Samaritha was offended that young women were not permitted in the same contests as men. She seemed not to understand Seamus’s explanation of fear of injury.
He changed the subject. He asked whether the Music Director had played in the contest when he was in secondary school.
“Alas, it is not permitted to us who are programmed for the arts to participate in the contest. The Research Director brought glory to both of us. In the quarter there was much pride in her skill.” There was a curious melancholy in his voice.
“Well, when she gets mad at you, you must be careful to avoid letting her get hold of a stick.” The joke, which he would not have tried had it not been for the poteen, fell flat.
“But the Research Director does not grow angry with me. We are mates,” said Ornigon, obviously astonished and perhaps a little pained.
Samaritha’s blush was fiery red. “One does not hit another with the stick, save in the contest!” she exploded. “To use the stick outside the contest would be savage. I do not understand what you are saying.”
So there it was. Stylized but rigidly controlled violence and stylized but rigidly controlled sensuality were both enjoyed by the Zylongi in the lower depths of their personalities but kept under rigid social controls in their conscious lives.
It’s a way to live, thought Seamus O’Neill as he drifted off into a sleep crowded with voluptuous brown bodies and bloody sticks.