Then, to turn the tables on Moses, she asked a single precisely pertinent question: ‘Why are you so set on getting Dr Benedict and me back to town when we can best do our work in the Wild?’
A silence – as if we were subtemporally radioing another planet and had to endure a brief transmission lag. Into this silence I read the archaic Victorian and modern neocolonial social biases of Moses Eisen, as well as his very human chagrin at being so logically defied.
At last he said, ‘I just don’t want to lose anybody else to the boonies, Civ Cather. Your father was plenty, I think.’
‘Nor do we want to lose Kretzoi to the Asadi, Governor Eisen,’ said Chaney’s daughter.
‘I’ll expect you and Dr Benedict back in Frasierville in five days. Six at the very most. Good night, Civ Cather. Good night, Ben.’
The radio clicked off, and we were alone again in the claustrophobic coziness of the Wild.
Asadi males, when they indulge their brief but vicious sexual appetites, mount from the rear. Almost all terrestrial primates also approach their partners from behind. It seems possible to conclude – a posteriori, if you will – that on whatever world it has evolved, the basic primate morphology demands this approach. Moreover, in many primate social units the responsibilities of paternity are principally a matter of begetting rather than of nurture. Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am, and daddy’s duty’s done. Did Asadi males play any part in the upbringing of their species’ infants? Chimpanzee fathers do not, although upon occasion an older male sibling will take an inquisitive interest in his mother’s most recent issue and later attempt to involve it in friendly, fraternal roughhouse. Closely spaced brothers often become fast friends as adults. Other males, however, are either only briefly curious or almost totally indifferent to new arrivals.
Among the Asadi – beyond Sankosh’s film proving that birth did indeed occur on BoskVeld – we didn’t even know to what extent the females were involved in the nurture of their offspring. Females as well as males had been seen to mount their partners from the rear, however, and large females climbed parodically aboard diminutive males at least as often as they themselves suffered such assaults. In the Calyptran Wild the sexual act always seemed as degrading and faceless as rape. It took place in public, on the assembly ground, and its social context resembled that of an altercation between masked strangers. On BoskVeld, as on Earth, genuine love between consenting adult primates of opposite sexes was even rarer than the private, face-to-face sexual embrace that is almost exclusively specific to humankind . . .
Why do I inject this comparison/contrast of terrestrial and alien primate sexuality precisely here? Primarily because it was on my mind that night. I was trying, perhaps within a grandiosely encompassing frame, to interpret the meaning of what happened to Elegy and me after Moses’s voice had faded off into the garble of intersellar static.
Face to face in the Dragonfly’s cabin, we smiled at each other – as content in the triumph of the moment as we were comfortable in the knowledge that Moses had been embarrassed by the thought of our manifold chances for intimacy. Elegy’s smile encouraged me, and I leaned toward her and brushed her lips with mine. I, the male, initiated this contact, keeping my eyes open to see what effect it would have on her. Her eyes remained open, too. She watched as from an Olympian height, her gaze steady and penetrating even when we were nose to nose in the follow-through of my calculating kiss. My temples pounded, my hands began to sweat, and I felt fifteen again. Meanwhile, her face – illumined by the glow of the instrument panel – grew to oceanic dimensions and wavered in my vision like a mist. Then, still without closing her eyes, she returned the pressure of my lips.
Tentatively pleased, I drew back and looked at her.
‘Lust?’ Elegy inquired with straightforward curiosity.
‘Probably,’ I admitted. ‘With at least an equal measure of purely romantic feeling deriving from – well, the situation itself.’ I nodded upward through the windscreen at the jungle and the frond-veiled moon.
‘All right, then. Come on.’ She jumped to the clearing’s floor and ducked out of sight beneath the nylon awning supported by the helicraft. I got out of my chair and followed her.
Sitting cross-legged on the uninflated mattress she’d been struggling with earlier, Elegy nodded me to a place at her side while pushing determinedly at the heel of her right boot. ‘De Lambant’s problem was lust unmixed with any feeling but the desire to subjugate and possess,’ she said, at last getting the boot off and beginning to work on the other.
‘De Lambant?’ I eased myself down.
‘The Wasserläufer’s captain,’ Elegy reminded me. ‘I refused her, though, because she enjoyed implying that Kretzoi and I—’ She stopped. ‘Maybe you can deduce the rest for yourself.’
‘I believe I can,’ I said.
‘Once she asked me point-blank what it was like, and I told her thrilling beyond belief if you were surgically adapted for the experience – a response I thought might discourage any more overtures but which really just increased de Lambant’s curiosity about both of us. As you know, my refusals eventually led to her nearly getting Kretzoi quarantined by
