I smiled in relief, demurred, insisted it wasn’t all that important, just that I thought we would digest our meals far better (tasteless though they were) if we were less overwrought.
Once in a great while thereafter, he would begin a tirade, only to shake his head at himself, and say, “Forget it, it isn’t important.” Instead we talked about books, about an experimental theater movement, about music. One night, I went home with him for an hour or so, leaving him breathlessly to return to my parent’s apartment. The next time I told Mother I was spending the night with friends. Neither parent questioned this. Both of them had fallen back into the Phobos habit, speaking constantly of work or speaking of nothing at all.
When Bryan and I could take a panting moment from our lovemaking, we decided, quite independently, that we were perfect for one another. Preoccupied by sensations that were completely new to us both (since early youth, Bryan had been kept far too busy to get sexually involved with anyone), fearful of saying, feeling, or doing anything that might threaten our delight, we played with one another very carefully, avoiding anything that might be in the least annoying. With Bryan, I felt complete. Those strange splittings-off that I had imagined happening on Mars when I was nine and here on Earth when I was twelve seemed to have healed. I didn’t have that arms-reaching-out feeling with Bryan. My arms were delightfully full.
The fact that we didn’t speak much about our relationship seemed natural to me. It was the way things had been on Phobos, it was in keeping with my upbringing. To Bryan, I realized it was purposeful, the result of continuing resolution, his perseverant gift to me, not to involve me in his rages, disappointments, frustrations. For this honeymoon of time, we rejoiced in one another, avoiding all irritating subjects, each of us remaining blissfully unaware of the other’s true desires or plans or hopes for the future.
I Am Naumi/on Thairy
On Thairy, during dry-time’s height, I spent a lot of time at the swimming hole by the river. Every year the wet-time runoff dug the hole anew; each year a deep spring welled a fresh coolness from beneath it; each year it stayed icily fresh, even when the sun-scorched riverbed mummified under its wandering wrappings of sand. I swam by myself sometimes, and sometimes Mr. Weathereye or Lady Badness went with me. Mr. Weathereye was forty at least, maybe older, and Lady Badness was variable, depending on how she felt: sixty-two on a good day and a hundred-two on a bad one. I called her Lady Badness because Mr. Weathereye called her that, and because whenever she talked about her life, she always said, “Ah, but there was so much badness then.”
A school of tiny snout fish lived in the pool, along with a tangle of slimy green noomis and every wet-time a silver-scaled gammerfree spawned a litter of pups in a hollow at the bottom of the tree. The mother gammerfree sat on a protruding root and talked to me, or so I thought, at least, and it occurred to me that since I knew several languages, I should be able to decipher what the gammerfree was telling me.
She greeted me with a lilting whistle. Pursing my lips, I did my best to copy the sound. “Pheeeew,” said the mother gammerfree before repeating the whistle again.
This time I did it better. “Pheeet,” said the gammerfree, going on to another whistle. By the time the gammerfree was tired, I had several words I was sure of. Pheeew meant no good. Pheeet meant all right, or passable. Another whistle meant something to do with food, and that first whistley bit meant “Good day.” Or maybe “Hello.”
Lady Badness and Mr. Weathereye wandered by, she to soak her shins from the diving rock and Mr. Weathereye to study the botany of the area. Not long after, looking for trouble, here came wandering an ineradicable lout—which is what Mr. Weathereye called the type. He saw me sharing my sandwich with the gammerfree pups and promptly shied a stone at them while demanding I get out of the way so he could kill them. I jumped up when I first saw the lout, putting myself between stone and gammerfree pups and receiving a nasty cut on my chest for my efforts. When I said the lout should go away, he threatened to beat me flat. I braced himself for battle, but just then Mr. Weathereye came tripping up behind the lout and hit him across the butt with his walking staff. It was a long walking staff, and the far end of it achieved a considerable velocity during the swing.
“Why’d you do that?” screamed the lout.
“Why’d you threaten to beat my friend?” asked Mr. Weathereye. “Why’d you throw a stone at those little creatures?”
“They’re vermin, stonin’s all they’re good for,” cried the lout. “And he wouldn’t get out of my way.”
“What if I think you’re vermin, and beating’s all you’re good for and you’re in my way?” asked Mr. Weathereye, advancing as the lout withdrew in some confusion.
I settled back on the stone, and shared out what was left of my lunch with the frightened pups, all huddled together in fear. The mother gammerfree nuzzled me and gave me a quick lick with her rough tongue while I stroked her from her scaly nose to the tip of her scaly tail.
“Will the lout change his ways?” I asked around a mouthful of egg salad.
“They seldom do,” said Mr. Weathereye, adjusting the patch over his bad eye, caused by an accident in the long, long ago when he was a mere youth. “By the way, Naumi, the schoolmaster’s looking for you. I meant to tell you earlier.”
School was out for the dry season, and since I had concluded the term satisfactorily,
