Jesus, it was beautiful. It was not LA and never would be. The lump in his throat throbbed.
“Listen, John? Are there other things to see away from here? Maybe…” Denton wracked his brain for vocabulary. “Maybe big water? Or other villages? Other people?”
John looked away into the distance as they walked, the smile fading from his face. “Away from here? I have never left the gorge in my life.”
“No? Maybe you heard stories?”
“No person leaves the gorge. Never.” John’s tone indicated that the very idea was inconceivable. His eyes went nervously to the others.
Denton got the idea that this was not a welcome topic of conversation, but he found the whole thing perplexing. The gorge was a gorgeous place, sure. But what kind of a people would not explore their own planet? Out of sheer boredom if nothing else.
“Why, John? Why do people never leave the gorge?”
John turned and met his eyes. He looked frightened and his words were quiet and urgent. “It is not safe. It is very dangerous out there. You must not go out there, friend.”
“Oh,” Denton said. “Okay.”
John had not been bragging by much. Of the eight of them, he was the only one who climbed the trees, the job apparently being his specialty. He chose a paava tree first, its trunk smooth and straight and covered with tough, needlelike spines. John wrapped rags around his wrists and feet and mounted the tree, agile as a circus performer.
Denton worked with two of the other males handling a large net. They manipulated it to catch the fruit as John tossed it down. Every few minutes they swooped the contents of the net to the ground and the remaining males gathered the fruit into bundles.
It was a short workday. None of the Sapphians ever worked past noon, the heat of the day. The others coddled him at first. But after a while, they seemed to forget that he was allook saheed, and that was all right. It wasn’t exactly a day of international thrills and adventure, but it beat the heck out of sitting outside his hut watching his toenails grow. And that was a little bit pathetic.
All morning, as he worked with the net, he kept remembering what John had said: It is not safe. He thought of the terrors he’d had those first days before he’d found the gorge, walking alone and wondering what deadly forms of life might exist on this planet. He remembered the large thing he’d heard far away in the jungle and the blood on the trees.
Maybe it wasn’t that important to find out if Molly Brad or any of the others had ever been here after all.
Denton tilted back his head, looking at the stars.
The stars on Sapphia were incredibly bright, and there were zillions of them. They formed a mesh across the sky far denser than the star pattern he remembered from home. It was like… like looking at downtown New York from the air.
The lump in his throat hurt. It was becoming chronic, that damned lump. It was like bad heartburn, only higher and… lumpier. He stopped looking at the stars.
He wished the party would start already. He was sitting on a log in the community circle. The place was crowded with Sapphians, as it was every night. And like every night, the minute he moved close to a log people got up, motioning for him to take their place. On the subway in New York or Paris this would be considered suspicious behavior. But here… well, the Sapphians had this generosity thing down cold. Yessiree. He smiled and nodded at people passing by until he thought his head would fall off. “Ta zhecta. Ta zhecta. Ta zhecta.”
He was waiting for the good stuff to be broken out—gancha, a fermented fruit juice that was sickly sweet but intoxicating enough to justify any insult to the palate. Gancha was especially effective at dissolving lumps. But before he could get his hands on some he had to wait through the weekly ritual. Finally one of the older males, his blond hair only lightly dusted with silver, got up and announced the list.
This was a thing they did every seven days; Denton had counted. In a world without Thursday Night Ladies’ Night or Monday Night Football, it was nice to have a way to mark your place in time. He had come to think of it as “the Saturday Night Special” and had named the other days of the week accordingly.
The Saturday Night Special went something like this: Someone would stand up and make a brief announcement. Then there would be an hour or so in which the Sapphians cried and yodeled and stomped around and in general acted like the world was coming to an end.
The first time Denton had seen it he’d been really freaked. He’d been sure something catastrophic was going down. But the crying gradually subsided and what followed was the biggest binge of the week, lots of drinking, lots of sex. And he could really go for a trip to Blottosville right about now. But first he had to get through the crying.
There was a female on his right. She sniffed out a few crocodile tears, working herself up to a genuine cry. She was nothing special. Denton tried, but he could not for the life of him remember if she had ever visited him in the mornings or not. That thought made the lump ache.
“Ta zhecta,” he said to her. “Are you okay?”
“Yes. It is sad.”
He leaned toward her, trying to get her to make eye contact. “Why is it sad? What the man said—it was a list of names, yes?”
She looked as if she didn’t understand the question.
“Are they…?” He didn’t know the word for “ancestors.” “Fathers? Fathers of fathers of fathers? And mothers of mothers of mothers? From a long time ago?”
She looked at his cheek in total bewilderment. “No.”
He didn’t know how to phrase the question any differently. He kind of figured this ritual was a memorial, a recounting of some tragic communal event—a plague or meteorite or something like that.
“We say good-bye to them now,” she said.
“Yes, I see,” he said, though he hadn’t a frigging clue.
“Do you want to take me to your hut?”
He was annoyed. “No. I want to talk.”
“Oh.”
She waited. Something about the way she waited made him feel stupid.
“What do you do in the day?”
“I collect grain at the river.”
So! Do you do a lot of traveling with that job? How are the benefits?
“Do you have children?”
“I have given birth three times.”
She looked young, but he wasn’t surprised. As much as he liked the Sapphians’ free-for-all attitude toward sex, he had to admit that the abundance of rug rats and pregnant females was a less than attractive result. Sometimes it seemed as though there were more children than adults in the village.
She was still staring at his cheek.
“So. You want to… uh… go to my hut?”
When Denton returned to the circle a little while later the party had started. He blinked at the nighttime brightness—a combination of starlight and firelight. Before he could take more than three steps, an older female brought him a plate loaded with roasted meat and grain. He thanked her three times, as she kept nodding and bowing at him. He looked at the plate and sighed.
What he really wanted, and badly, was the hard stuff. What he wanted even more was someone sympathetic to drink it with. And the only one who qualified was John. He and John had hung together a lot lately.
He scanned the crowd of Sapphians and saw the boy at the outer edge of the firelight talking to a young female. He headed over there, but by the time he arrived John and the female had taken off down a path into the jungle. Denton followed.
There was not a lot of light on the path. He walked, the plate warm in his hand, feeling a little uneasy. Something rushed toward him from the trees and snatched the plate.
He cried out, stumbling backward. But as the figure darted back into the trees, Denton saw what—or who—it was. It was the girl with the long white-gold hair, the one he’d seen first that night he’d found the village.