The Man-Kzin Wars 06

Chapter 18

(2438 A.D.)

Chloe Blumenhandler had joined the Young Woman’s Auxiliary on her seventeenth birthday. A significant sector of Wunderland society believed in early military training for the young and there were dozens of semi-military corps, militias, stellar scouts, rangers, and young guardians. It wasn’t just an underlying unease about the kzin that fostered these groups.

Wunderland’s culture had been founded on a sense of profound interstellar isolation from its root stock. Then… Warriors descending from the empty black. Subjugation for a people who had left Sol honoring their freedom more than comfort. Loss of land. Confiscation of property relatives, children. Terror. Taxes. Death. Running like a fox in the hunting parks. Soul-breaking work in slave camps with strange imported slave races. And Outsiders selling military might. Wunderland had suffered a fundamental reality shock.

No parents want their children to be as naive as they once were when they were young. And so the older generation founded quasi-military groups and inducted their children-building bard-won wisdom into institutions that couldn’t forget “Will our children be ready for them?” Were there others out there?

Chloe was not interested in a military career. She had grown up in a military family without a mother. Her babysitters had been petty officers and sometimes burly marine sergeants. Her fantasies were about a landholder’s castle on Wunderkind, or a run-down artist’s studio in a twenty-second-century ranch house on the French Somme. (She’d walked through a virtual seventeenth-century French house and didn’t like the plumbing.)

In her dreams she fell in love with Wunderkind statesmen, or crashlander explorers, or Jinxian scientists or deep space artists. In one of her recurring fantasies she lived with a musician who worked with his instruments in a great house on Plateau at the void edge of Mount Lookitthat overlooking the Long Fall River where it broke out into the tallest waterfall in Known Space. The man with a view.

Flatlanders both repelled and fascinated her. Earth was so crowded! It was like Tiamat turned into a whole planet! And flatlanders had such odd jobs-like reconstructing ancient Portuguese caravels dredged up from a watery Pacific grave. Her best flatlander fantasy was filled with the laughing Romans and Italians of a rosy Naples where the sun was always setting on a golden bay; she was one of a saucy menagerie of teen-aged girls held prisoner by a gay old Neapolitan classics scholar who was a sexual athlete and wit. The fantasy had lasted her a delicious week until she got bored with Italian men and moved on to the Chinese Imperial Court.

Whatever her dreams of civilian splendor, in real life she fell madly in love with military men. And so it was natural that at the age of seventeen, in total revolt against her father’s military life, she should declare her independence by joining a military organization so that she could pursue her one-sided love affair with a handsome older officer of the UNSN.

Chloe was devastated when Major Yankee Clandeboye was transferred to Barnard’s Starbase, something that Admiral Jenkins had demanded and something that fitted nicely into one of General Fry’s more nefarious schemes. She sent her major letters, five in all. He replied once. That short note was signed with the scrawl, “Fondly, Yankee.” It was all the encouragement she needed.

In a state of euphoria, with his short note tucked in her bra, she just happened to notice a recruiting ad. The Young Woman’s Auxiliary needed twenty girls who were looking for a disciplined and rewarding experience at Barnard’s Starbase. The “discipline” didn’t appeal to her but the “rewarding experience” did. Being only seventeen, she needed her father’s permission. The rear admiral objected and fought a losing war for three days before surrendering. He signed her away for a two-year contract and groaned.

Chloe, of course, had not told her father about her intentions toward the forty-nine-year-old Yankee, knowing that there were limits to Admiral Blumenhandler’s permissiveness. To her father Yankee was just another one of those men upon whom she practiced her flirtation skills. The rear admiral, used to command, and respecting Yankee as a competent officer and gentleman, sent the major an almost pleading letter to take his daughter under his wing and see that no harm befell her. In effect the plea amounted to an order.

So at Barnard’s Starbase it was very easy for her to find a need for counseling and to fall into small mishaps for which she needed extracting. Often they ate in the cafeteria together, a bleak humongous hut of “temporary” wartime construction. She told him horror stories of the matron who was her first officer and he sneaked her into some of the private beer parties, where she flirted outrageously with all of the men. That made him feel safe.

Barnard’s Starbase was not Known Space’s best posting. It was built hastily in secret during the war as a staging area for raids into kzinti space, at a time when a major worry was that the Outsiders might go on and sell hyperdrive technology to the Patriarchy for a handsome sum. The UNSN needed safe bases about which the kzinti knew nothing.

It was built on a rocky Mars-sized world glaciated with ices and dark hydrocarbons, the moon of an inhospitable planet of about eight Earth masses. The Base was conveniently at the edge of the Barnard’s Star system, far enough inside Barnard’s singularity to be immune from surprise hyperdrive attack, but close enough to it so that UNSN ships could quickly reach hyperspace launching distance. Inward there were two gas giants for an ample supply of hydrogen and helium, and a thin belt of rubble for heavier metals. The original intent had been to make Barnard’s Starbase an independent manufacturing center but other priorities and the end of the war left the manufacturing centers incomplete. Postwar budget restraints meant that temporary facilities were still in use, even the original construction bunkers.

Yankee’s main job, again, was training. General Fry had singled out Barnard’s Star as a nucleus for fomenting dissatisfaction with ARM policies. Without a kzinti threat there was little purpose in Barnard’s Starbase. Men need a purpose. Where better to do some long-range thinking than on a base which had been designed with a possible hyperdrive kzinti threat in mind? Here men were liable to find their purpose in preparing for a hyperarmed Patriarchy.

Yankee found his charge to be an often pleasant diversion. She listened to his worries and never hesitated to give an off-the-wall opinion on any subject. That irritated him but it often forced him to explain strategic concepts about which he was not himself clear. He began giving her research assignments, even requisitioning some of her official on-the-job time. He was delighted to find that she had inherited her father’s sense of strategic thoroughness. What she had inherited from her mother, he did not know. Her mother had been killed swinging an axe at a kzin, and she certainly seemed to have that kind of aggressiveness.

The crisis in their relationship came unexpectedly. They were in the Starbase’s honor library-their infocomps were not powerful enough to do the particularly difficult and tedious weapons tradeoff analysis that Yankee needed.

He was in a bad mood, which killed her enthusiasm. She only meant to tease him enough until he laughed so that they could get back to work. It was easier to be gay and irreverent than bored.

Glibly she began to mutate the weapons discussion into free-flowing nonsense. It eventually blossomed into a free-for-all about ancient Japanese pornography. She was doing her brush strokes in the air and faking geisha flirtations about which she knew nothing-and he was richly enjoying himself pretending to be a sake-saturated teen-aged samurai on his first groping visit to the pillow world of a light-gravity planet. At least he was giggling like a teenager. She was so fascinated-she’d never seen him so wonderfully foolish-that she couldn’t stop provoking him. It was true, she thought, that being alone in a public place brings out the devil in men. The devil keeps whispering that someone may walk in and that makes it impossible not to be silly. Even she felt silly and dangerously bold.

Though the eight terminal booths were empty, the library was heavily used-but mostly accessed from distant terminals. They were alone and they were likely to remain alone. For no sane reason they decided to rob the library of Kakabuni’s Instructive Erotica, though robbing was entirely unnecessary in a library that took less than a second to copy a chip into a personal infocomp. Their crazy mood told them that they had to own the Starbase’s only copy of Kakabuni. To get at it they needed to unlock and pull out one of the hundred sliding ROM doors- something that only the librarian was supposed to do. They managed to slide out the chip-rack but their chip was near the floor and required a chip-puller that they didn’t have so they made love on the floor with their clothes on instead. He even put his arm around her when he walked her back up through the maze to her dorm.

The next day she woke up anxiously because she’d never done something so stupid in her life! On the floor! In her clothes! She faked sickness and did not report for work. All morning on the day after the next day she kept telling herself that her mother was brave enough to swing an axe at a kzin (even though her bravery had killed her). She found a way to wander up and down a corridor that Yankee would have to pass through, carrying a package so that she could pretend to be delivering messages.

She saw him coming before he saw her and tried to duck behind a support pillar but it was too thin. The package stuck out. She looked the other way in panic.

“Hi, Chloe,” he said.

“Oh. You.” She tried to bat her eyes but they froze. “I’ve been sick.” Sick? She saw him seeing her wan and in crutches and desperately cast around for a more appropriate bright conversation. Yankee, damn him, wasn’t saying anything. Food was all she could think of. Even Murphy couldn’t get you in trouble with food. “Lunch?”

He seemed almost relieved. “Thirteen-hundred at the Cal?”

“Sure. I’ll bring my teeth.” She was outraged at herself for saying such a stupid thing but it was already out of her mouth. I’ll bring my teeth! She cringed. And she was outraged at the way he had crawled back inside his straitlaced self. She wanted to shout Kakabuni! at his hastily retreating back but she didn’t dare. Growing up wasn’t pleasant She’d never had any trouble with sex when she was thirteen.

Lunch was terrible. They had ground guinea-pig steak and veggies that had been programmed with the wrong spice. They had nothing to talk about. They had come to that horrible time in their relationship when they had already said everything that they had to say to each other. Finagle’s Eyes, they were talking about the color of the veggies!

“You know what this parsnip looks like? It looks like one of those old brass naval cannons of the seventeenth century”

That saved them. It reminded her of weapons tradeoff analysis. Soon they were comfortable old friends again discussing the impact that hyperdrive ships might have on a millennia-old kzinti military tradition. That culture was based on a bedrock of subluminal assumptions. Supply depots were dispersed. Manufacturing was dispersed. A son could be executed for not carrying out the orders issued to his father-unto the fourth generation. Local conquest commanders had wide authority. The military kzin valued truth so highly because that was the only way of keeping messages from degrading over the centuries.

Chloe became resigned to a Yankee stuck back in his old shell. She knew she was never going to get him to talk about love, not in the Caf. He was more like a cozy confrere than a lover. Her damn father had ordered him to take care of her and that’s what that damn Yankee was doing. Maybe he didn’t even like her. Here she had gone to all the damn trouble of chasing down a damn romantic hero of the war and he’d turned out to be just another awkward damn adolescent like the damned boys she’d been trying to avoid.

Two days later everything was back to normal and she could even tease him without having him go stiff on her.

“Kakabuni” remained a taboo word. They never talked about sex. Worse, they never even talked about relationships. Having an admiral for a father was like having an anchor chained to her neck. She was six and a half light-years from Alpha Centauri and she was still winched to her father.

Four days later he actually put his arm around her and gave her a quick squeeze.

Two weeks later “fellow-prisoner” Jinny of the Young Woman’s Auxiliary invited her on a double date. Her date turned out to be intellectually challenged so she left Jinny to manage both their dates and found her own double date. It was fun to wit-lash young men who were in such good shape physically that their brains recovered in minutes-not like a certain senile old man of her acquaintance.

A month later she missed her period. She thought about that for a few days and then went to the pharmacy for a pregnancy patch. It was positive. She returned for a more expensive test in the pharmacy’s autodoc booth. It too was positive, predicting a completely normal pregnancy. That meant she could ask the autodoc for a nonprescription abortion right then. It was between her and the autodoc. No one had to know.

Chloe took a walk instead. She didn’t believe that a human life started at conception. Your life didn’t start until you got out of the womb and began to make your own decisions-like whether you wanted to breathe or not and which rattle to bang. So she wasn’t thinking about the fetus. She was thinking about whether she was ready to be a mother. She hadn’t built a nest yet. She was on a military base. She thought a lot about the problems of her father, a lone parent during the time of troubles just after the Battle of Wunderland with the devastation of war all about them and the economy in a shambles.

She’d been such a brat to him, pushing, demanding, and learning how to con each of her new caretakers. She was still looking for a mother even now. She walked to the very center of Starbase, a seven-story atrium where you could catch your breath at a vista of balconies and get away from the claustrophobia of corridors. The bench in the central rock garden was an inviting place to sit. One of the cacti was flowering: a rare sight. On the bench she cried silently and watched the people go by in the shallow ethereal glides of low gravity Chloe slipped her mother’s iron wedding ring out of her blouse, still on its chain where it had always been, forgotten, and thought about the mother she had never known.

At headquarters, where she seldom went, she wandered among the desks of busy men and women in uniform. Some nodded. No one stopped her-they all knew she was the daughter of a powerful admiral. She peeked into Yankee’s cubbyhole with its clutter of screens and plotters, a VR helmet on his cabinet, another on the plotter, and another on the floor.

“Hi, stranger,” she said.

He took her hand and pulled her inside. The unexpected touch of his hand made her eyes water and she couldn’t finish what she had started to say. She let him fill the void. “Good to see you today,” he said brightly. “The problems have been coming in all morning and you’re a breath of fresh air. I’d ask you to sit, but there isn’t any room.”

“Problems seem to make you happy,” she said bravery. “We found my cousin. A flash came in from Gibraltar this morning.”

“Nora? Is she alive?”

“Yeah. Nora and all of her babies. She has six babies!” Yankee seemed both stunned and excited.

Chloe burst out sobbing-it gave her an excuse.

“That doesn’t sound like a problem to me! That’s wonderful! I mean about finding her,” she said after quickly recovering.

He took both her hands. “You’ve got something on your mind.”

“Just a little problem. I came to talk to you about it. It can wait.”

“Can it wait till this evening? How about dinner?”

“Dinner is fine.” She was relieved. That put off the awful moment. “If you’ve got time.” She began to hope that he had a good excuse to put it off even longer. Tomorrow she’d be more herself.

Yankee continued. “My problem is that even though we’ve found Nora, she’s on W’kkai and we’ll have to extract her. Do you know W’kkai? That’s seventeen light-years from here deep inside kzin space. It’s a major kzin stronghold. They’ve given me Jay Mazzetta and my old sidekick, Beany Heinmann, to help with planning. We’ve got to do some fancy juggling in the next few hours.”

“We could talk tomorrow”

“Tonight I might not even be here tomorrow. Not dinner at the Caf-at my place. I saw a drum of apples in the hydroponics market. Get some. I make a good flatlander apple pie. Think up something for the main course. Make it simple-marinated rabbit stew with onions or something. At seventeen hundred.” He gave her his key “Since you don’t have my fingerprints to get in.”

“We could postpone it”

“Girls don’t cry for nothing.”

Chloe fled.

She had to hurry and bustle kept her mind off what she was going to say at dinner. She didn’t want to get the meat from the Cafs lockers, which was where they usually got it when they cooked at his apartment, so she took the maglev to the ranch where Honest Al raised chickens, turkeys, guinea pigs, and rabbits on an assembly line in the caves. Al was thinking of getting into real pigs, midget pigs, but he wasn’t sure how they’d take to cages. “Any pig I ever knowed could snort and root his way out of any cage ever built”

She thought about turkey but Al and his Sons were butchering rabbits for freezing, so she took two because she was short on time and she was damned if she was going to pluck her own turkey! Bypassing the autochef was Yankee’s hobby but she’d already plucked and cleaned one chicken for him and enough was enough!

At hydroponics she picked up the usual potatoes and onions, but they had some kohlrabi and peppers and leeks so she bought those, too. And a peck of green apples. The nice thing about a stew was that you could make it out of anything. In his apartment she piled up the groceries and went straight to the autochef. Yankee laughed at her, but she needed the autochef for advice. It was a baseline military model-except for the luxury spice attachment- and it was a terrible cook but it gave very good advice.

She told it what she had bought and asked for a good recipe. It started with a lecture on how to prepare kohlrabi without ruining its taste. “But I want a stew.” It suggested stews. “But I want to marinate the rabbit! And I haven’t got time because he’s going to be here at seventeen hundred!” It provided her with an enzyme-enhanced sauce for quick marinating. She chopped up the rabbit and mixed rim a bowl with the sauce before attacking the vegetables. She didn’t know anything about spices. “What spices do I use, and they better be perfect or I’ll kill you!” It recommended five combinations and manufactured a pinch of each for her to taste with a wet finger. “Number two,” she ordered. It all went into the pot and the stew was simmering when Yankee arrived, late.

His eyes lit up and he grabbed a green apple to taste it before he gave her his usual brotherly kiss. “A Grandma, no less!” He began to chop up each apple with six quick whacks. He never bothered to peel them. “Stew smells good. Did you fight with autochef?”

“No. We had a very civil discussion. I had to shut him up sometimes.”

“Watch him. He doesn’t get angry He just poisons you when you push him too far” Yankee was already mixing up the dough for the pie crust

“How come he doesn’t make pie crust? I wanted everything ready for you when you came.”

“Thank Murphy for small blessings! Have you ever tasted one of his pies?” Yankee was grinning. He ordered lemon-cinnamon and the machine produced a brown powder-manufactured, of course. Starbase wasn’t on the spice trade-routes. She marveled that he knew whit to ask for.

“How did it go at work today?”

He waited to answer until the pie was in the oven and he was seated and relaxed. “You remember that crazy kzin we took to Hssin? That ratcat found out more than he was telling me. Fry thought as much and left him with a covert beamer.”

“You gave him hyperwave!” she exclaimed incredulously.

“No way. Electromagnetic. He sends out a message. Our patrol relays it. We just got the relay that he found Nora.”

“You’re sure?” She was skeptical.

“Hwass-Hwasschoaw sent us data about her DNA that he couldn’t know. He has her. He wants to exchange her and her children for a ride to Kzin, and I’ve been elected taximan.”

“It’s a trap! You be careful. He’s lying!”

“Kzinti don’t lie.”

“That’s what the alien psychologists say, but I don’t believe in kzin honesty for a minute! Do you? You’re a boy! You’re just like all the dumb adolescent boys I know! Do you really believe a kzin can’t lie?”

Yankee smiled and made the yes-no nodding gesture with his hand and head. “What is truth? There are endless ways to tell a half-truth-and no way that any finite language is capable of telling the whole truth. For instance, I can call you up from across town and tell you that your apartment door is unlocked, and that’s true, but what you really need to know is that I slagged your lock with a laser pistol and kicked the door off its hinges and stole your Tang Dynasty urns.”

“You told me that Hwass hates you.”

“He does.”

“So now he tells you that he has Nora and to come get him! It’s a trap. He doesn’t want to go to Kzin. He’s lying! He wants to kill you!”

“No, he’s not lying. He does want a ride to Kzin. He’s in some kind of political hot water. He needs to be met at the singularity boundary by a little ship that won’t attract the whole W’kkai navy He needs to get the hell out of there and he’s using my cousin as his ticket. I believe that. It’s what he is not telling us that worries me.”

“So you admit he’s lying?”

“In a culture where you are executed for lying, lying becomes a fine art indistinguishable from telling the truth.”

“No wonder the navy hates you!” She was exasperated. “You reach into black and pullout white!”

“Let’s get back to the subject” He was watching her eyes, waiting for the moment when she made eye contact with him. “And what have you been lying to me about?”

That made her furious. “I’ve always told you the truth! Always! You know that!”

“As honest as a kzin.”

“Oh,” she said. “You mean the things I haven’t told you about”

“Yeah.”

“That’s not fair. You’re older than I am. How about some rabbit stew first.”

He dished out two heaping plates and they ate. “Good stew. Great recipe.”

“Liar!”

The conversation died so he tried again. “I’m waiting.”

“There’s one thing I’ve never been able to say to you and it’s eating my heart out” She looked at him, begging permission to go on, a forlorn waif

“Go on.”

“Kakabuni!” And she was her old mischievous self again.

He grunted from this blow to his solar plexus. “You’ve floored me. Yeah. We haven’t been able to talk about that” The taboo word. And he concentrated on his stew for a while before he had the courage to look her grin in the teeth. “I’ll be a man and take my medicine. What else?”

“You want more? Let’s have some apple pie first,” she said miserably.

Somehow the conversation turned back to Nora Argamentine. The topic was safe and they each had a lot to say. The chime went off for the pie. He put on his mitts and took it out of the oven. He cut her a slice. “It’s hot,” he said.

Chloe took a forkful and blew on it “I’m pregnant.”

Yankee was half-expecting that. He had forgotten to make his offering to Murphy. Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. Murphy was a hard god who expected you to tend to the smallest details of your life. Fail him once and his wrath was upon you. Murphy, judge and executioner-and Kakabuni, tempter.

“You’re more worried that my father is going to chop your head off than you are about me,” she sulked.

“I did promise him I’d take care of you.”

“You’ve taken very good care of me considering what a pest I am. You can marry me. Otherwise I have to have an abolition.”

“Before now, have you ever thought about marrying me?” he asked.

“You know I have-unless you’re blind. I’ve chased you mercilessly”

“You chase all men mercilessly.”

“Those are just boys. I keep looking for a man, and all I find are adolescent boys like you who do things on the floor and then run away.”

“It’s a fantasy, Chloe. I’m thirty-two years older than you are.”

“You’re lying like a kzin,” she said. “What you mean to say is that I’m thirty-two years younger than you are. You’re telling me that I’m too immature to understand you, too young to fit in your life, that I giggle too much, and that I run you ragged around your stuffy old edges.”

“Well, yeah.”

“You’re just afraid my father’s going to kill you!”

“There’s that.”

“Haven’t you ever even once thought about how nice it would be to be married to me?”

“More than you can imagine, I’m very fond of you. But it’s a fantasy.”

“Why?”

“The military life is hell.”

“I’m used to it. What am I supposed to do? Marry a painter and live in a Chinese junk in the San Francisco Bay slums? Many a Wunderkind sheep rancher?”

“I’m too old”

“I’ll be 178 when you are 210. Big deal. You’re such an ooze! You defy the whole navy but you’re terrified that your shipmates will laugh at you for marrying a gangly pubescent!”

“But I am too old for you.”

“I’d eat another slice of your superior pie but I’m too mad. Sit down. I’m prepared for you. I do my research.” She dragged him over to the couch and pushed him into a seat. She pulled out her infocomp and made a directory out of the word “aging” and a subdirectory out of the word “Jinx.” “I have an article for you.” She didn’t trust him to read it by himself so she read it to him.

More than forty-years ago the Jinxian laboratory at Sirius had produced something they called “boosterspice.” The new varieties were enormous improvements on the first product. It could run around in cells repairing DNA. It regulated the growth of cell types that had stopped reproducing-without inducing cancer. Some of the oldest test subjects were still alive.

Yankee put his arm around her soberly with the tender affection of a man who is trying to tell a youngster that they have rediscovered the wheel. “I know all about boosterspice. I’ve been reading up on it since before you were born. Every year Jinx turns out a better product and there is more ballyhoo. They are gradually nailing down all the side effects. Do you know what happens in your brain when neurons start to reproduce and connect up at the wrong places? Do you have any idea how expensive that stuff is? And what do you get for your money? Boosterspice has been known to extend lives. Or it might cripple you. Maybe even kill you. One of the richest old men on Earth jumped on the Boosterspice bandwagon. Now he’s very young-but he’s a mentally retarded youth and slightly musclebound.”

“That’s what rich people are for,” she said petulantly. “They are very useful experimental animals for us poor military types and carpenters. The rich pay through the nose for all the fancy new technology when it isn’t very good. They’re desperate to live so they pay thousands of crazy witch-doctors to kill them in fancy new ways. When the rich people stop dying, we know the product is ready for market and can be mass produced cheaply.”

“Chloe!”

“It’s like being a king and having a food-taster. The reason I want to many an older man is so you can test out the boosterspice for me. If you die, I get your money. If you stay young, I’ll know its safe to start taking boosterspice.”

“Chloe, how come you taste my pies for me? Through thick crust and thin?”

She snuggled. “How come you never tell me that you love me?”

“I love you.”

“That’s better. How come you never make love to me? I haven’t been a virgin since I was thirteen.”

“That’s why. When I was thirteen, seventeen-year-old girls were old crones. Every year since then they’ve been getting younger. It has gotten so that I can’t keep track of how old a seventeen-year-old girl is anymore.”

“That’s silly! Are we in a Kakabuni mood yet?”

“I have to decide whether you are grown-up or not.”

“I’m grown-up. I’m pregnant, remember. I’m in the army. My father is six light-years away.” She undid his belt.

“All right. You’re grown-up. I can’t go wrong. You’re getting older every year.” He picked her up, mostly to keep her from undressing him. He carried her across the threshold of his bedroom door and let her float dreamlike to the small navy bed in the light gravity. He sat down on its edge and began to undress her.

She grabbed his hand in both of hers, stopping him.

She wasn’t wearing a bra. “How come we are afraid of each other?”

He let her fingers stay with his hand. “Who knows? Maybe you’re afraid of yourself and I’m afraid of your father.”

She kissed his hand. “Are you a virgin? I mean before you met me.”

“Not likely. I’m a navy man-and I used to be handsome. I even had a flatlander marriage contract once.”

“You seem shy to me.”

“It depends upon whom I’m with.”

“How many women?”

“You ask too many questions, young lady” He kissed the tip of her nose.

She sat up. “I can undress myself I’ve had lots of men, too, you know. I sexed with your crashlander friend, Brobding What’s-his-Name.” She wasn’t used to her uniform-it didn’t come off gracefully, futz! “You can’t take off my wedding ring.” She fingered the iron ring hanging between her breasts. “I always wear it.”

“Was your mother as beautiful as you?”

“No. I’m prettier. I take after my father. Do I have to give you orders to strip? It’s a Wunderland custom for a man to make sex when he’s properly naked.”

He was smiling. “It’s a flatlander custom that love-partners help each other with their clothes. Unless, of course, when proceeding by the rules of unpremeditated Kakabuni.”

“You’re a pervert! I feel like a baby in diapers when a man tries to undress me. Is Clandeboye an Italian name?”

“I think it comes from a gloomy Scottish castle.” He said that to the ceiling because she was ripping his pants off. ‘Wait. I’ll help you with the shirt!”

Premeditated Kakabuni took over. The pleasure of flesh against flesh. Fond glances that cloak the human face in unnatural beauty. A hormonal passion driving bodies far past their design limits. “Had enough?” “No.” “Me neither.” It was strange to love a man who had no sweet talk.

Sleeping in a man’s arms was an unnatural thing to do unless you were in love with him. One had no choice in a navy bed. Her rump was pressed against the wall and a foot twisted by some kind of bar She couldn’t sleep. She was both comfortable and frightened. He didn’t talk. He hadn’t said anything. She rapped him on the skull with her knuckles. “Knock, knock. Are you there?”

“Mmmpf. Yah.”

“You haven’t proposed to me,” she accused.

He moved his head between her breasts and went back to sleep.

“Men always propose to me before they make love to me whether they are sincere or not. How come you haven’t proposed to me?”

“Formality… protocol… etiquette… propriety,” he muttered.

She crawled over him and sat on the edge of the bed. “I’m not feeling secure. We could get married right now” She was looking down at him. “Hey, you’re awake! I woke you up!” She switched on the glow light

“Hey, you’re beautiful. You look like a woman. What’s happening to my mind?”

“Don’t change the subject. We’re talking about marriage.”

“Never tried it.”

“Did you like my rabbit stew?”

“Yah.”

“It went very well with your pie so we should get married right now”

“Our wedding guests would be appalled by our dishabille!”

“Are you going to propose to me?

“I don’t know how”

“You’re supposed to propose to a woman before you make love to her. Don’t they teach you any manners on Earth? I’ve never been treated so inconsiderately in my life.” She lifted the chain from her neck and stared at the ring. The iron had been formed under high pressure and it was full of bright little diamond crystals. She liberated her talisman from its chain. “Do you want to by it on?”

“It wouldn’t fit”

“It’s a Swiss precision telescoping ring. It will fit any finger.” She slipped it on his special finger. “See. It fits. Now we’re married. And oh, I forgot… it has an inscription that reads ‘forever.”

“It must have been made before boosterspice.” He held up his hand to look at it “You’re supposed to wear one of these things, too, you know”

“Then I couldn’t flirt with the boys.” She crawled back in bed, hip-whacking Yankee in order to make some room for herself ‘love, I forgot to ask you-do you snore? If you snore I’m getting an abortion right now”

“With you around I just stop breathing. How about a trip to Kzin for our honeymoon? I’ve got the tickets.”

“No, thank you! If you want a honeymoon on Kzin I’m filing for divorce in the morning.” She kissed him good night and went to sleep happier than she had ever been.

Chloe dreamed about a wedding feast on Kzin in an ancient manorial hail with Major Yankee Clandeboye as the main course and Nora Argamentine and her children as dessert. She was watching from a cage that sing from the ceiling. Yankee dreamed of Earth and the ancient Royal Navy He was being keelhauled across the barnacles of a ships bottom by a very irate British admiral.