gotten his motor out of first gear in years.

Sex. That was the gulf between them. He thought young, and he lusted young. Donna Jean faded and didn’t even care.

He reckoned Donna Jean could last until Judgment Day without another roll in the hay, and never miss it, but he was getting hornier by the hour. That’s when he’d started noticing Tanya Faith at services. She was fifteen then, but she had a ripening body and a sultry look about her that could have sold apples to the seraphim guarding postserpent Eden. He’d found himself at the pulpit, preaching straight to her and gauging the success of his sermon on her reactions. The time she got up and started speaking in tongues, slumping back against him in a swoon afterward, he thought he would sweat a bucketful. How could he live out his life in tapioca nothingness with Donna when he burned for Tanya Faith?

Maybe the Lord had put the idea in his head. Chevry had got to thinking about roosters and stallions, and it suddenly occurred to him that man was not meant for monogamy. Didn’t the biblical King David have scores of wives, and didn’t his son Solomon have a gracious plenty, too? And God had liked both of them well enough. Surely, a modern prophet like himself was entitled to one over the limit.

The revelation of multiple wife taking had been a miracle, as far as Chevry was concerned, but, of course, Donna Jean was furious over it, and now Tanya Faith was being cold and stubborn, claiming she couldn’t be a real wife until he gave her a home of her own to be a wife in. If he didn’t finish these renovations soon, he’d catch pneumonia from cold showers. And now he was getting frosty letters from some lawyer in Danville, threatening him with legal action for sexual improprieties. Chevry sighed with the weariness of the unhonored prophet in an unwired kitchen. He wished the Lord had given him a little help in persuading the rest of the planet that this idea was divinely inspired, that was all.

His reverie was cut short by a howl of pain, and he bent double, clutching his abdomen and gasping for breath. His gut felt like somebody was inside him with a weed-whacker. In a wave of dizziness, he lowered himself to the kitchen floor. What the hell had Donna Jean put in those sandwiches? he thought as the decor of the room faded to black.

In the whiptail lizards, everyone is female- and the hatchlings have no biological fathers. But reproduction still requires heterosexual foreplay-the formality of copulation with males of other, still sexual, lizard species, even though they cannot impregnate the females-or a ritual pseudo-copulation with other females of the same species.

– CARL SAGAN AND ANN DRUYAN,

Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

6

BILL MACPHERSON HESITATED as he gazed through the windshield at his mother’s new home. “I didn’t expect to see so many cars here. Do you think I’m dressed properly for the occasion?” he whispered to his sister. He fingered his second-best necktie and attempted to look at his reflection in the rearview mirror of his car.

“Oh, I don’t think anyone will take much notice of you, Bill,” Elizabeth MacPherson murmured sweetly.

“That’s a great dress,” he said generously. “It looks like a party frock. It’s stylish. Basic black, right? I mean, it makes your point without being obtrusive.”

Elizabeth raised her eyebrows. “If you mean that I’m not wearing jet beads, elbow-length black gloves, and an opaque veil, then, yes, in a simple black dress I’m not being obtrusive. It doesn’t matter to me whether anyone knows that I’m wearing black for mourning. I know.”

“Sorry I mentioned it,” muttered Bill. “You won’t brood about it all evening, will you?”

“I never brood.” Elizabeth made a mental note to disparage Bill at her next session with Dr. Freya.

They had driven out from town to attend their mother’s Saturday dinner party at the home of her new roommate, Casey. Elizabeth had described it to Bill as a get-acquainted party, arranged to introduce Margaret MacPherson’s family to her new set of friends. She had not managed to be more specific than that about the nature of their mother’s new life, so Bill was happily unaware of anything unusual. He’s so amazingly dim in social matters that he may not even notice, Elizabeth told herself. She resolved to keep a watchful eye on him, though, for the duration of the evening.

Margaret MacPherson’s hand-drawn map had led them down a pleasant country road into the rolling green hills of the county, and finally up a long, graveled drive to a two-story white farmhouse, gleaming in the last rays of the evening sun. “This looks quite homey,” Bill remarked as he maneuvered the car onto the grass beside half a dozen vehicles belonging to the other dinner guests. “Very nice. Two women on a farm, managing on their own. Reminds me of a book by somebody or other.”

“D. H. Lawrence?” Elizabeth suggested.

“No, that wasn’t it,” said Bill, frowning with the effort of recollection. “I think it was a chapter in Huckleberry Finn. Or was it Anne of Green Gables?”

“Never mind,” said Elizabeth. “It isn’t a working farm, anyhow. Mother says they plan to have a small herb- and-vegetable garden, and maybe a few free-run chickens, but nothing in the way of major crops or livestock.”

“Good, because Mother never took any agriculture courses at the community college, did she? Just conversational Spanish and macrame.”

“I believe she’s been branching out lately,” murmured Elizabeth, thinking of the unfortunate white-water rafting episode the previous spring.

“But not into farming, I hope,” said Bill. “I was afraid that sooner or later we might be invited to a barn raising.”

“No,” said Elizabeth. “Since Phyllis Casey is an English professor, specializing in nineteenth-century literature, I doubt you’re qualified to give her any help whatsoever.”

They got out of the car and walked to the front porch. “Maybe we should have brought a house-warming gift,” Elizabeth murmured, with a last anxious glance at the lawn full of strange cars.

“I have some root beer in the trunk,” said Bill. “Some pork and beans, too. Actually, I forgot to unload the groceries this morning.”

Elizabeth shuddered. “Never mind. We’ll bring flowers next time.”

“Okay. Well, is there anything else I should know about this party?”

Elizabeth’s hand froze in midair on its way to the door knocker. “Why? What do you mean?”

“Oh, you know. Taboo subjects? Is the new roomie a Republican, or a vegetarian, or a fan of pro wrestling? Any conversational hints?”

His sister shrugged. “I’ve never met her,” she said truthfully. She hit the knocker against the brass plate. “You might not want to say anything caustic about k.d.lang. Otherwise, just be your usual charming self.”

Bill was still trying to place k.d.lang within the ranks of nineteenth-century authors when, moments later, the door opened, and a beaming Margaret MacPherson ushered them in. “Just in time!” she said. “The hors d’oeuvres have just come out of the oven. Come in and meet everybody.”

She led them into a cozy parlor with a freshly polished pine floor, overstuffed sofas covered in rose chintz, and a collection of large, well-tended plants, all of which were visible only in glimpses around various clumps of people. The guests were congregated in groups of three and four, laughing and talking over Celtic harp music in stereo, most of them holding glasses of white wine or balancing paper plates on their laps.

“Do you know anybody?” Bill whispered to Elizabeth.

“No,” she hissed back through an unmoving smile. “Just wing it.”

“There certainly are a lot of women here,” Bill muttered. “You don’t think Mother’s trying to match me up with someone, do you?”

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