“That is not a good joke,” he protested. “No one would do a thing like that!”
“She did it, Hooay.” She added quickly, “Do not be frightened. You will not be punished. Only now bring the boy to me.”
Her soft eyes were brimming with tears. “How can I not be frightened? Perhaps I should awaken the Oldest One to tell him-“ Then the tears spilled over; he was terrified.
She comforted him and coaxed him, until other Old Ones came and he spilled his terrible joke to them. Janine lay down on her pad, closing her ears to their excited, woeful chatter. She did not sleep, but she was lying with her eyes closed when she heard Wan and Tor come to the door. When the boy was pushed inside she stood up to meet him.
“Wan,” she said, “I want you to put your aims around me.”
He looked at her grumpily. No one had told him what this was about, and Wan, too, had had his hour in the couch with Squint. He looked terrible. He had never really had a chance to recover from the flu, had not rested, had not accustomed himself to the great changes in his life since he had met the Herter-Halls. There were circles under his eyes and cracks at the corners of his mouth. His feet were dirty, and so were his frayed clothes. “Are you afraid you will fall down?” he shrilled.
“I am not afraid of falling, and I want you to talk to me properly. Don’t squeak.”
He looked startled, but his voice settled into the lower register she had tried to teach him. “Then why?”
“Oh, Wan.” She shook her head impatiently and stepped forward into his personal space. It had not been necessary for her to tell him what to do. His arms went around her automatically-both at the same height, as though she were a barrel to lift, the palms pressing against her shoulderblades. She pressed her lips against his, hard, dry and closed, then pulled away. “Do you remember what this is, Wan?”
“Of course! It is ‘kissing’.”
“But we are doing it wrong, Wan. Wait. Do it again while I do this.” She protruded the tip of her tongue between almost closed lips and ran it back and forth across his closed ones. “I think,” she said, moving her head away, “that that is a better way, don’t you? It makes me feel-it makes me feel-I feel a little bit as though I were going to throw up.”
Alarmed, he tried to step back, but she followed him closely. “Not really throw up, just real funny.”
He stayed tensely near her, face held away, but his expression was troubled. Carefully keeping the pitch of his voice down, he said, “Tiny Jim says people do this before copulating. Or one person does it sometimes to see if the other person is in heat.”
“In heat, Wan! That stinks. Say ‘in love’.”
“I think that ‘in love’ is different,” he said stubbornly, “but anyway to kiss is related to copulating. Tiny Jim says-“
She put her hands on his shoulders. “Tiny Jim isn’t here.”
“No, but Paul doesn’t want us to-“
“Paul isn’t here,” she said, stroking his slim neck with the tips of her fingers to see what that felt like. “Lurvy isn’t here either. Anyway, none of what they think matters.” The way it felt, she decided, was quite strange. It wasn’t really as though she were going to throw up, but as though some sort of liquid readjustment were going on inside her belly, a sensation like nothing she had ever known before. It was not at all unpleasant. “Let me take your clothes off, Wan, and then you can take off mine.”
After they had practiced kissing again she said, “I think we should not be standing up now.” And some time later, when they were lying down, she opened her eyes to stare into his wide-open ones.
As he raised himself for better leverage he hesitated. “If I do that,” he said, “perhaps you will get pregnant.”
“If you don’t do that,” she said, “I think I will die.”
When Janine woke up, hours later, Wan was already awake and dressed, sitting at the side of the room, leaning against the gold-skeined wall. Janine’s heart went out to him. He looked like himself fifty years later. The youthful face seemed to have lines graven by decades of trouble and pain.
“I love you, Wan,” she said.
He stirred and shrilled, “Oh, yes-“ Then he caught himself and dropped his voice to a grumble, “Oh, yes, Janine. And I love you. But I do not know what they will do.”
“Probably they won’t hurt you, Wan.”
Scornfully, “Me? It is you I worry about, Janine. This is where I have lived all my life and sooner or later this would have happened. But you-I am worried about you.” He added gloomily, “They are very noisy out there, too. Something is happening.”
“I don’t think they will hurt us-any more, I mean,” Janine corrected herself, thinking about the dreaming couch. The distant chirping cries were coming closer. She dressed quickly and looked around, as Tor’s voice hailed Hooay outside the door.
There was nothing to show what had happened. Not even a drop of blood. But when Tor opened the door, fussed and worried, he stopped to squint at them suspiciously, then sniffed the air. “Perhaps I will not have to breed you, Danine, after all,” he said, kind but frightened. “But Danine! Oowan! There is a terrible thing! Tar has fallen asleep and the old female has run away!”
Wan and Janine were dragged to the spindle, filled with nearly all of the Old Ones. They were milling around in panic. Three of them lay sprawled and snoring where they had been dumped-Tar and two others of Lurvy’s guards, failures in their missions, found sound asleep and brought back in fear and disgrace for the judgment of the Oldest One. Who lay motionless but alert on his pedestal, cascades of color rippling around his perimeter.
To the flesh-and-blood creatures the Oldest One showed nothing of his thoughts. He was metal. He was formidable. He could be neither understood nor challenged. Neither Wan nor Janine, nor any of his near hundred quaking children, could perceive the fear and anger that raced through his circulating memories. Fear that his plans were in jeopardy. Rage that his children had failed to carry out their orders.
