"Aw, sweetheart." He laid his pipe aside, to slide from the bench and stand holding her.
Head on his breast, fingers tight against his back, she let the words tumble forth, though she kept them soft. "Dan, dearest, understand, I know you love me. And I, after that wretched marriage of mine broke up, when I met you- Everything you've been says you love me. But you, your first wife, you were never happier than when you had Antonia, were you?"
"No," he confessed around a thickness. "Except you've given me-"
"Hush. I've made it clear to you I don't mind -enough to matter- if you wander a bit once in a while. You meet a lot of assorted people, and I don't usually go along on your business trips to Earth, and you're a mighty attractive bull, did I ever tell you? No, shut up, darling, let me finish. I don't worry about Joelle. From what little you've said, there's a kind of witchcraft about her -a holothete and- But you didn't ever invent excuses to go back to her. Caitlin, though-"
"Her either-" he tried.
"You haven't told me she was anything but a friend and occasional playmate. Well, you haven't told me that, openly, about anyone. You're a private person in your way, Dan. But I've come to know you regardless. I've watched you two when she came visiting. Caitlin is quite a bit like Toni, isn't she?"
He could only grip her to him for reply.
"You said I didn't have to be a monogamist myself," Lis blurted. "And maybe I won't always." She gulped a giggle. "What a pair of anachronisms we are, knowing what 'monogamy' means!
But since we got married, Dan, nobody's been worth the trouble. And nobody will be while you're away this trip and I don't know if you'll get back."
"I will," he vowed, "I will, to you."
"You'll do your damnedest, sure. Which is one blazing hell of a damnedest." She raised her face to his. He saw tears, and felt and tasted them. "I'm sorry," she got forth. "I shouldn't have mentioned Caitlin. Except. . . give her my love, please."
"I, I said earlier, your practical question reminded me what kind of people you are," he stammered. "Then, uh, this- You're flat-out unbelievably good."
Lis disengaged, stepped back, flowed her hands from his ribs to his hips, and said far down in her throat: "Thanks, chum. Now look, this'll be a short night-you'll want to catch your bus when the passengers are sleepy-and we've got a lot of plotting to do yet. First, however. . . m-m-m-m?"
Warmth rose in him. "M-m-m-m," he returned.
V
Three hundred kilometers east of the Hephaestian Sea, two thousand north of Eopolis, the Uplands rose. There a number of immigrants from northern Europe had settled during the past century's inflow. Like most colonists, once it became possible to survive beyond the original town and its technological support, they tended to clump together with their own kind. Farmers, herders, lumberjacks, hunters, they lived in primitive fashion for lack of machinery; freight costs from Earth were enormous. Later, when Demetrian industry began to grow, they acquired some modern equipment-but not much, because in the meantime they bad developed ways well suited to coping with their particular country. Moreover, most of them didn't care to become dependent on outsiders. They or their ancestors had moved here to be free of governments, corporations, unions, and other monopolies. That spirit endured.
The folk who bore it had evolved a whole ethos. In their homes, many of them continued to speak the original languages; but given that variety, English was the common tongue, in a new dialect. Traditions blended together, mutated, or sprang spontaneously into being. For instance, at winter solstice -cold, murk, snow, in this part of the continent which humans called lonia -they celebrated Yule (not Christmas, which still went by the Terrestrial calendar) with feasting, mirth, decorations, gifts, and reunions. Hallway around the Demetrian year they found a different occasion for gatherings, more frankly bacchanalian. Then bonfire signalled to bonfire across rugged distances, while around them went dancing-drinking, eating, singing, japing, gaming, sporting, lovemaking-from sundown to sunrise.
For the past three years, Caitlin Margaret Muiryan had given music at that season to those who met on Trollberg, when she wasn't busy with associated pleasures. She was again on her way, afoot along a dirt road, since the journey was part of the fun. As she went, she practiced the latest song she had made for the festival, skipping to its waltz time while her clear soprano lifted.
In silver-blue, the dew lies bright.
The midsummer night
Is a brim with light.
Come take each other by the hand,
For music has wakened
All over the land.
Fingers bounced across the control board of the sonador she held in the crook of her left arm. Programmed to imitate a flute, though louder, the mahogany-colored box piped beneath her chorus.
Go gladly up and gladly down.
The dancing flies outward like laughter
From blossom field to mountain crown.
Rejoice in the joy that comes after!
Dust puffed from under her shoes. Around her, the heights dreamed beneath the amber glow of a Phoebus declining westward, close to its northernmost point in a sky where a few clouds drifted white. The road followed the Astrid River, which rippled and gurgled, green with glacial flour, on her right, downward bound to Aguabranca where it would enter the mighty Europa. Beyond the stream lay untouched native ground, steeply falling into a dale already full of dusk, clothed in bluish-green growth wherever boulders did not thrust forth-lodix like a kind of trilobate grass or clover, gemmed with petals of arrowhead and sunbloom, between coppices of tall redlance and supple daphne. Insectoids swarmed, gorgeously hued flamewings, leaping hopshrubs, multitudinous humbugs. A bright-plumed frailie cruised among them, a minstrel warbled from a bough, a couple of bucearos swooped overhead, and a draque hovered lean, far
Above -not birds, these, but hypersauroids, like every well developed vertebrate which Demeter had brought forth. Pungencies that roused memories of resin and cinnamon drifted on a south breeze which was rapidly cooling off the afternoon.
On Caitlin's left ran a rail fence. Somewhat level, till it met a scarp three or four kilometers off, the soil thus demarked had been converted to pasture for Terrestrial livestock and, further on, barley fields for humans. To the invaders from space, Demetrian meat and vegetation were often edible, occasionally delicious; she had been plucking moonberries, pearl apples, and dulcifruct ever since she got off the bus at Freidorp. But they lacked the whole complement of vitamins and amino acids, while containing several that were useless. The imported plants were intensely verdant, the cattle that grazed them fantastically red.
Behind her, the road twisted out of sight around a hill. Ahead, it climbed like a snake. Beyond the next ridge she could see Trollberg, wooded and meadowed to its top. Ghost-faint at its back floated the Phaeacian snowpeaks, Mount Lorn their lord.
The music sparkles fleet and sweet.
She sways there before him
On eager feet,
So lithe and blithe, and garlanded
With roses and starshine
Around her dear head.
Go gladly up and gladly down.
The dancing flies outward like laughter- Caitlin halted. From a wilderness thicket had appeared a garm. Gray-furred, round-snouted, bob-tailed, tiger-sized, it flowed along in a gracefulness that brought a gasp of admiration from her. Neither need fear. Demetrian carnivores didn't like the scent of Terrestrial animals and never attacked them. For their part, human hunters tried to preserve the balance of a nature which provided them skins for the market, and the upland Folkmeet had declared garms a protected species.
