"Might as well. We've learned all we need."
"Mm.... Second thoughts about the daddy of Dorothy's second----"
"No no. We settled that. She's proud to be carrying it."
"Good genetics could be damn bad psychology."
"No, Jocko. Don't think that. She's close to me as ever."
Sears waited and spoke softly: "New York late on a rainy night, a few
car lights moving, street-lamp reflections like golden fish----"
"Orange paintbrush in New Hampshire meadows----We'd better stop."
"We better. I want boat whistles--floating city coming out of the fog.
Call it a slow-healing wound.... And look across the channel."
Paul saw it presently: a cliff formation in the coastal range made a
brow, nose, and chin. Below this, rounded rock could be a shoulder
straining in heroic effort; then, tumbled reality of mountain-fancy
must supply whatever held the figure in bondage. "Yes. He looks west.
Past us, at the sun."
"Why, no, Paul. I think he looks west of the sun...."
A red-furred girl wandered down from the woods. "I got tired." Arek
had lived twenty-two years; she was seven feet tall, not yet
adolescent but near it. In the next Red-Moon-before-the-Rains, ten
months away, she might take adult part in the frenzy of love if her
body demanded it: if not, she would go apart with the other children,
whose play also became innocently erotic at that time, and help care
for the youngest. Sears grinned as she sat down with them. "Tired or
lazy?"
"Both. You Charins are never lazy enough." The name Charin, Paul
thought, was almost natural now, a pygmy word for "halfway," intended
by Pakriaa merely to convey that Wright and his breed were halfway in
size between her people and the giants, but Wright took sardonic
satisfaction in it as a generic name. "Work and loafing are both good.
Why can Ed Spearman never sit still in the sun? Or maybe I like to
talk too much."
"Never," Sears chuckled. "Well--his best pleasure is in action. Maybe
it's the technician in him--he must always be doing something."
"Like always waking, never sleeping." She sprawled in comfort; her
broad hands plucked grass, scattered it over the furry softness of her
four breasts. "Green rain.... I want to stay on this island. Will they
come?"
"We hope so. Mijok will as soon as Doc does."
She sighed. "Mijok is a beautiful male. I think I'll take him for my
first when I'm ready.... And soon the pretty boat will be no more
good. It's sad we can't make another. Tell me again about Captain
Jensen. He was as tall as me? He had hair on his head, red like my
fur. He spoke----"
"Like storm wind," said Paul, supplying the wanted note in a favorite
fairy tale, remembering a brother on Earth who was--perhaps--not dead.
"Hear the ocean," Arek whispered. Paul could hardly separate the sound
from the mutter of the pond's outlet. This ridge of high ground ended
short of the island's northern limit. A white beach, where the
lifeboat was shaded from late sun, faced the mainland. West of the
beach a red stone cliff ran to the tip of the island, shouldering away
the sea. Wind out of the west allowed no soil to gather on it. Now and
then a rainbow flashed and died above the rock, when a wave of
uncommon grandeur spent itself in a tower of foam. "Hear what it says?
'I--will--try--aga-a-ain....' Why must the others wait to come here?"
"Pakriaa's people are not ready."
"Oh, Sears!" Arek laughed unhappily and sat up. "I think of how my
mother taught me the three terrors. She took me to the hills, beat two
stones before a burrow till one blundered out maddened, afraid of
nothing but the light. She crushed it, made me smell it. I was sick;
then we fled. I think of how she flung an _asonis_ carcass into meadow
grass, so the omasha came. She wounded one with a stone, made me watch
while the others tore it apart. Later still, when I could run
fast--ah, through night to a village of the Red Bald----"
"Please, dear--pygmies. That's a name they accept."
"I'm sorry, Sears.... Yes, we hid in the dark, waited until a sentry
moved--careless.... It was wrong. You've shown us how such things are
wrong. And memory's someone talking behind you, out of the big dark."
"The laws we've agreed on----"
"I do honor them," she said gently. "The law against murder was my
first writing lesson. But--what if Pakriaa's tribe--"
"They're slower," Sears said in distress, and the distress would be as
much a message to Arek as any words. There was no hiding the heart
from these people: green eyes and black ears missed no smallest
nuance.
"When will they know they must not dig pits, with poisoned stakes--"
"But Pakriaa's tribe don't do that now. Do they?"