made a figure of ridicule, and every other man will look at his wife, wondering if she's offering herself to someone else to put a cuckoo in the nest. So you're out. For the sake of everyone.'
'If you make it that obvious, then it'll do the same damage to people's trust in marriage as if we'd actually done it!'
Sel sat down on the greenhouse floor and buried his face in his hands.
'I'm sorry,' said Afraima. 'I only half meant it.'
'You mean that if I had said yes, you'd have told me you were just kidding and left me humiliated for having agreed to adultery?'
'No,' she said. 'I'd do it. Sel, you're the smartest, everyone knows it. And you shouldn't be cut off without having children. It's not right. We need your genes in the pool.'
'That's the genetic argument,' said Sel. 'Then there's the social argument. Monogamy has been proven, over and over, to be the optimum social arrangement. It's not about genes, it's about children — they have to grow up into the society we want them to maintain. We voted on this.'
'And I vote to carry one baby of yours. Just one.'
'Please leave,' said Sel.
'I'm the logical one, since I'm Jewish and so are you.'
'Please go. Close the door behind you. I have work to do.'
'You can't turn me away,' she said. 'It would hurt the colony.'
'So would killing you,' said Sel, 'but you're making that more and more tempting the longer you stay here to torture me.'
'It's only torture because you want me.'
'My body is human and male,' said Sel, 'and so of course I want to engage in mating behavior regardless of consequences. My logical functions are being suppressed already so it's a good thing I made the decision irrevocably. Don't make me turn my decision into a painful reality by cutting the little suckers off.'
'So that's it? You castrate yourself, one way or the other. Well, I'm a human female, and I hunger for the mate that will give me the best offspring.'
'Then look for somebody big and strong and healthy if you want to commit adultery, and don't let me catch you because I'll turn you in.'
'Brain. I want your brain.'
'Well, the kid would probably have your brain and my face. Now go and get the reports on the D-4 treatment and take it over to chem.'
'I'm not fired?'
'No,' said Sel. 'I'm resigning. I'm going out into the fields and leaving you here.'
'I'm just the backup XB. I can't do the work.'
'You should have thought of that before you made it impossible for us to work together.'
'Who ever heard of a man who didn't want a little roll in the hay on the side?'
'This colony is my life now, Afraima. Yours too. You don't shit in your own soup. Can I put it any plainer than that?'
She began to cry.
'What have I done that God would punish me like this?' said Sel. 'What comes next? Interpreting dreams for Pharaoh's baker and butler?'
'I'm sorry,' she said. 'You have to stay on as the XB, you really are a genius at it. I wouldn't even know where to start. Now I've ruined everything.'
'Yes, you have indeed,' said Sel. 'But you're right about all my solutions, too. They'd be almost as damaging as your original idea. So here's what we'll do.'
She waited, the tears still coming out of her eyes.
'Nothing,' he said. 'You will never mention this again. Never. You won't touch me. You'll dress with perfect modesty around me. Your communication with me will be work only. Scientific language, as formal as possible. People will think you and I detest each other. Because I can't afford to drug down my libido and still try to do this work. Get it?'
'Yes.'
'Forty years till the colony ship arrives with a new XB and I can quit this lousy job.'
'I didn't mean to make you miserable. I thought you'd be happy.'
'My hormones were thrilled. They thought it was the best idea they'd ever heard.'
'Well, then I feel better,' she said.
'You feel better because I'm going to be going through hell for the next forty years?'
'Don't be stupid,' she said. 'As soon as I'm having babies, I'll get fat and unattractive and way too busy to come here to help. Child production is everything, right? And soon the next generation will provide you with an apprentice to train. The most it will bother you is a few months. Maybe a year.'
'Easy for you to say.'
'Dr. Menach, I'm truly sorry. We're scientists, I start to think of human reproduction just like the animals. I didn't mean to be disloyal to Evenezer, I didn't mean to make you miserable. I just felt a wave of desire. I just knew that if I was going to have a baby, it should be yours, it should be the baby most worth having. But I'm still a rational person. A scientist. I will do exactly as you said — all business. As if we disliked each other and neither could ever desire the other. Let me stay until I need to quit this work to have babies.'
'All right. Get up, take the formula to chem, and leave me alone to work on the next problem.'
'And what is that? After the dustworm and the corn and amaranth mold, what are we working on?'
'The next problem I'm working on,' said Sel, 'is burying myself in whatever tedious task I can find that does not involve you in any way. Will you please go away now?'
She went.
Sel wrote his report and sent it to the governor's machine so it could be queued up for ansible transmission. If it turned out that the mold was something that cropped up on other worlds, his solution might work there, too. Besides, that's what science was — the sharing of information, the pooling of knowledge.
That's my gene pool, Afraima, he thought. The meme pool, the collective knowledge of science. What I discover here, what I learn, the problems I solve — those will be my children. They will be part of every generation that lives on this planet.
When the report was done, Afraima was still not back. Good, thought Sel. Let her spend all day with chem.
Sel walked through the village and out into the communal fields. Fernao McPhee was foreman on duty. 'Give me a job,' Sel said to him.
'I thought you were working on the mold problem.'
'I think it's solved. It's up to chem now to figure out how to deliver it to the plants.'
'I've already got all the crews working on all the jobs. Your time is too valuable to waste on manual labor.'
'Everybody does manual labor. The governor does manual laborer.'
'The crews are full. You don't know the jobs, you know your job, which is much more important. Go do your job, don't bother me!'
He said it jokingly, but he meant it. And what could Sel answer? I need you to give me a hot, sweaty job so I can work off the steam from my beautiful assistant having offered me her body to put babies into!
'You're no help to me at all,' said Sel to Fernao.
'Then we're even.'
So Sel went on a long walk. Out beyond the fields, into the woods, gathering samples. When you don't have an emergency to deal with, you do science. You collect, classify, analyze, observe. Always work to do.
No fantasizing about her, about what might have happened. Sexual fantasies are scripts for future behavior. What good will it do to say no today, and yes six months from now, after rehearsing the adultery over and over in my mind?
It would be so much easier if I weren't determined to do what's best for everybody. Whoever said virtue was its own reward was full of crap.
