Jennifer Fieldguide could not believe it when she saw the handsome captain approaching her to ask for a dance. She’d admired Quench from afar, and had even gone so far as to find out his name. And now he was asking her to dance. Jennifer had come to the dance as a part of the neo-Flares. Not that she was a poet herself, but she spent a lot of time in the coffeehouse where the Flares did their thing and, since finishing base school, had gotten a job there while she decided, as she told her parents, what to do about the future.
It was not that she wanted to give logical consideration to the question, though she knew that was what her parents assumed. Feeling was always the best guide; she knew this in her heart. It was just that feeling had not told her what to do after graduation. She would just wait until a thunderbolt struck her (although, she had to admit, that that was an unlikely event on Triton).
As the body of Captain Quench approached her, Jennifer felt distant rumblings that might signal a gathering storm. He was a large man, but also, somehow, fine-boned and elegant. His face suggested manly virtues and a feminine softer nature capable of deep compassion, at the same time. His voice was mellifluous when he asked her to dance. Quench executed the patterns perfectly, if a bit stiffly, Particularly when it came to the free-form section, but Jennifer interpreted this as the result of his being a military man. She had never particularly cared for soldiers before. In fact, among her friends, the Army was looked upon more as a necessary evil than as a good in and of itself. But there was something about the clean, stiff uniform and the smell of grooming—something else the neo-Flares were not overly fond of—that awakened Jennifer’s desire to impress. When they came away from the dance, Jennifer contrived to continue talking with Quench and to pull him to a corner sofa, where they sat and ordered up drinks from the grist.
“Is it really true that everyone on Nereid is turned into a plant?” Jennifer asked him.
Quench seemed alarmed for a moment, and Jennifer squeezed his hand. “You can hardly keep that a secret, Captain.”
“I’m afraid I can’t discuss such things, ma’am,” he said.
“Don’t ‘ma’am’ me, sir. The name is Jennifer.”
“Yes,” said Quench. “And I am . . . I suppose I’d better tell you something, Jennifer.”
“Have you got a girl?”
“Oh, no, not at all. I mean, I like them. It’s just . . . do you know what a free convert is?”
“Sure,” answered Jennifer. “We had them at school, and Dad works with one down at his law office. They’re nice enough. Very useful. I’m not sure if I could be friends with one, though.”
“You’re not?” Quench seemed alarmed.
Oh shit, Jennifer thought. Maybe his best friend is a free convert or something.
“I don’t have anything against them, I mean,” she stammered. “It’s not like I’m some bigot from the Met. I just . . . am not around many of them.” She felt herself trying to conform to some sort of expectation that she couldn’t even put a name to, and this angered her a bit. If you want to truly impress him, she thought, follow your feelings. “I find them bit creepy,” Jennifer said, “to tell the truth. But I would never let my feelings stand in the way of treating them as free and autonomous members of society. You know the drill. I believe it, I guess, even though I have to admit I haven’t given much thought to it.”
That’s it—admit that you’re an idiot right in front of him, she thought.
“The point is . . . what was the point? Got a little lost there—”
Jennifer looked at Quench to see if she’d wholly alienated him, and she found him blushing slightly. Poor guy is embarrassed. For me, she thought. Jennifer sighed. And she had thought the thunderbolt was so close to striking.
“Well, I guess you’ve had enough of my ill-considered opinions for one night, huh, Cap’n?” She favored him with a halfhearted smile.
Quench looked at her—he stared at her. For a moment, the intensity of his gaze frightened Jennifer. Then she felt something like a cool wind blowing through her.
“I should like very much to share another dance with you,” Quench said. “And I’d very much like it if I might have your company for the rest of the evening.”
Kablam! Jennifer thought. She felt her heart give a funny little sideways jump.
“Sure.”
They waited for an AK groanfest to be done, and then went through another fifteen minutes of dancing. Quench began to question her more closely about her opinions on free converts. Jennifer did her best to answer as truthfully as she could—Quench seemed to like that—but she hadn’t really given the matter a great deal of thought. Free-convert rights were just something you were for if you were outer system. The second dance ended, and she and Quench took a lift up to the new pressure dome that had been hastily constructed over the site of the old Meet Hall. A few bushes and flowers had been planted, and various of the revelers were seated on benches or standing about. Jennifer and Quench found an unoccupied bench near the dome’s wall. It was Triton day outside, and Neptune was full and nearly directly overhead, but at the moment, the Blue Eye was turned to the other side of the planet. There was a muon-replacement fusion “hot spot” at the top of the dome, but it was turned off. Though it was day, and the sun and Neptune both in the sky outside, there was still a twilight feel beneath the dome. For the local plants, the “hot spot” was what was important, and not the feeble, distant sun.
“I wish I had more to say about free converts and all,” Jennifer said. “Do you have to deal with them as a part of your job?”
“They are a specialty of mine,” said Quench.
“Well, what do you think about them? Don’t you get tired of their chopstick logic and the way they are always counting everything, as if that would tell you something about the overall thing’s properties?”
“Fascinating,” said Quench. “I’ve never really considered it from that viewpoint. So you sort of picture them as sort of giant buckets of beans or something like that?”
“I picture them all as being, you know, sort of like my parents’ accountant. He’s like, out of India, or something. Small guy with this face like a screw. He’s always sighting in on crumbs or pieces of lint or anything that the cleaning grist missed, and picking away at them. He had these pudgy fingers, but he uses them like tiny pincers to pick up stuff that I wouldn’t even have noticed.”
“I see,” said Quench. “So you see free converts as screw-faced accountants with obsessive-compulsive tendencies?”
“I told you, I don’t really know any of them very well,” Jennifer answered. “Do you want to kiss me?”
Quench seemed shocked. “Are you sure you want me to?”
“Of course.”
He leaned over and took her in his arms. She tilted her head back and, after a bit too long of a moment, his lips met hers. She drew him to her fervently, felt resistance at first, but then his giving himself back to her. She tickled his lips with her tongue, then slid it into his mouth. Quench drew back sharply.
“What are you doing?”
“French kissing you, Captain.”
For a moment, Quench remained nonplussed, then something seemed to click, and he said, “Oh.”
“Do you like it?”
“Strange,” he said. “Meaty.”
“Meaty! What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Like bodies. A thing only aspects can do.”
“Well, of course.”
Quench considered further. “I do like it, however,” he said. “It has been so long since—well, I’m over her now. She was—she was the opposite of you. That’s for certain.”
And with those words, Quench strode off quickly, leaving Jennifer sitting on the bench with Neptune shining down and the sun blazing like a fire coal in the blue-black sky.