could ever have heard of the Crusades; doubtless they were unknown on Utopia.
“Anyhow, that isn’t what I came here to talk about, either.”
The wall treacher opened and floated the drinks out. Amalfi captured them and passed one over silently, waiting.
She took her glass from him but, instead of sinking down with it as he had half-pictured her doing, she walked nervously back to the door and took her first sip as if she might put it aside and be leaving at any moment.
He discovered that he did not want her to go. He wanted her to walk some more. There was something about the gown she was wearing—
That there were fashions again was a function of being earthbound. One simple utilitarian style had sufficed both men and women all their centuries aloft when there had been the unending demands of the city’s spaceworthiness to keep all hands occupied. Now that the ex-Okies were busily fulfilling Franklin’s law that people will breed to the point of overpopulating any space available to them, they were also frittering away their time with pets and flower-gardens and fashions that changed every time a man blinked. Women were floating around this year of 3995 in diaphanous creations that totaled so much yardage a man might find himself treading on their skirts. Dee, however, was wearing a simple white covering above and a clinging black tubular affair below that was completely different. The only diaphanous part of her outfit was a length of something gossamer and iridescent that circled her throat under a fold of the white garment and hung down between her still delicate, still gently rounded breasts, as girlish in appearance as the day Utopia had sent her out to New York, in a battleship, to ask for help.
He had it. “Dee, you looked just as you look now when I first saw you!”
“Indeed, John?”
“That black thing—”
“A sheath-skirt,” she interpolated helpfully.
“—I noticed it particularly when you came aboard. I’d never seen anything like it. Haven’t seen anything like it since.” He refrained from telling her that during all the centuries he had loved her, he had pictured her in that black thing, turning to him instead of Hazleton. Would the course of history have been any different, had she done so? But how could he have done anything but reject her?
“It took you long enough to notice it tonight,” she said. “I had it made up especially for this evening’s dinner. I’ve been tired of all this float and flutter for a year. Essentially I’m still a product of Utopia, I guess. I like stern clothes and strong men and a reasonably hard life.”
She was certainly trying to tell him something, but he was still adrift. The situation was impossible on the face of it. He was not in the habit of discussing fashion with his best and oldest friend’s wife at an hour when all sensible planet-bound pioneers were abed. He said, “It’s very pretty.”
To his astonishment, she burst into tears. “Oh,
“All right, Dee.” Amalfi put the cloak out of her reach. “Your ‘King Mark’ sounds reasonably stern and hard. Suppose you sit down and tell me what this is all about.”
“I want to go with you, John. You won’t be the mayor of New York, you won’t be bound by the old rules, if you take the city aloft now. I want—I want to—”
It was weeks before he got her to state that ultimate desire. They had talked without ceasing after that blundering beginning. When it finally penetrated his cautious bald head that the message all his senses had been clamoring from the moment of her arrival was not another daydream from the chilly past, but warm actuality, he had folded her in his arms and they had been silent for a time. But then the flow of words began again and could not be checked. They had reminisced endlessly and how-it-might-have-beens and even of certain ways it had been. He was amazed to discover that she had taken into her household however briefly every companion whose bed he had honored during the officially celibate years; in her position as First Lady of New Earth, during the intensive family years, she could have installed twenty nursemaids simultaneously without attracting undue notice, just as she launched every new fashion and many of the fads that made New Earth what it was. That Dee had been cruelly bored had simply never occurred to him.
But she told him the full tale of that discontent, more indeed than he wanted to hear. They quarreled like giddy young lovers—except that their first and worst quarrel followed a complaint he could have wept to hear wrung from her.
“John,” she said, “aren’t you ever going to take me to bed?”
He spread his hands in exasperation. “I’m not at all sure I want to take Mark’s wife to bed. Besides,” he added, knowing he was being cruel, “you’ve already had it. You’ve pumped every woman I resorted to in half a thousand years. I should think I would bore you in actuality as much as everything else does.”
Their reconciliations were not much like those of young love; they were more and more like the creeping home of a rebellious daughter to her father’s arms. And still he held off. Now that he had for the taking what he had only dreamed of wanting for so many years, he made the Adamic discoveries all over again: there is wanting the unobtainable, and there is the obtaining of desire, and the greatest of these is the wanting. Especially since the object of desire always turns out to exist only in some other universe, to be mocked by actuality.
“You don’t believe me, John,” she said bitterly. “But it’s true. When you go, I want to go with you—all the way, don’t you understand? I want to—I want to bear you a child.”
She looked at him through a film of tears—somehow he had never, in all the centuries of fancy, imagined or seen her in tears, but the actuality wept as predictably as New Earth’s skies—and waited. She had shot her bolt, he saw. This was the supreme thing that Dee Hazleton wanted to give him.
“Dee, you don’t know what you’re saying! You can’t offer me your girlhood all over again—that’s irretrievably Mark’s, and you know it. Besides, I don’t want—”
He stopped. She was weeping again. He had never wanted to hurt her, although he knew he had done so unintentionally more times than he would ever know.
“Dee, I’ve
Now she was listening, wide-eyed, and he winced as he saw pity take the place of resentment. He laid the encysted pain bare like a surgeon before her. “When the population balance shifted after the landing and there were all those excess females—remember? Do you also remember the artificial insemination program? They asked me to contribute. The good old argument against it was supposed to be by-passed by the assurance that I’d never know which children carried my genes—only the doctors supervising the program would know. But there was an unprecedented wave of miscarriages and stillbirths—and some survivors that shouldn’t have survived, all with the same set of … disadvantages. I was told about it; as mayor, I had to decide what was to be done with them.”
“John,” she whispered. “No. Stop.”
“We were taking over the Cloud,” he continued implacably. Presenting him with a wizened, squalling, scarlet, normal baby boy was one favor she could not do him, and there was no way to tell her so but this. “We couldn’t afford bad genes. I ordered the survivors … dealt with; and I had a brief conference with the genetics team. They had planned not to tell me—they were going to keep up the farce, like good-hearted dolts. But I’d been in space too long; my germ plasm is damaged beyond hope; I am no longer a contributor. Do you understand me, Dee?”
Dee tried to draw his head down on her breast. Amalfi moved violently away. It irritated him unreasonably that she still thought she had anything to give him.
“The city was yours,” she said tonelessly. “And now it’s grown up and gone away and left you. I saw you grieving, John, and I couldn’t bear it—oh, I don’t mean that I was pretending. I love you, I think I always have. But I should have known that the time for us had gone by. There’s nothing at all left for me to give you that you haven’t had in full measure.”
She bowed her head, and he stroked her hair awkwardly, wishing it had never begun, since it had to end like this. “And what now?” he said. “Now that life with father has turned out to be nothing more than that? Can you leave home again and go to Mark?”
“Mark? He doesn’t even know I’ve been … away. As his wife, I’m dead and buried,” she said in a low voice. “Living seems to be a process of continually being born again. I suppose the trick is to learn how to make that crucial exit without suffering the trauma each time. Good-bye, John.”
She didn’t look as if she were being too successful at mastering the trick, but he made no move to help her. She was going to have to find her own way back; she was beyond his aid now.
He thought that what she had said was probably the truth—for a woman. For a man, he knew, life is a process
