And did Vismaan like their little town? It was, as always, difficult to detect emotional response in him. They walked up one street and down another, past the haphazardly planned plazas and the flat-faced scruffy shops and the little lopsided houses with their overgrown gardens, and he said very little. She sensed disappointment and disapproval in his silence, and for all her own dislike of Narabal she began to feel defensive about the place. It was, after all, a young settlement, an isolated outpost in an obscure corner of a second-class continent, just a few generations old. "What do you think?" she asked finally. "You aren't very impressed by Narabal, are you?"
"You warned me not to expect much."
"But it's even more dismal than I led you to expect, isn't it?"
"I do find it small and crude," he said. "After one has seen Pidruid, or even—"
"Pidruid's thousands of years old."
" — Dulorn," he went on. "Dulorn is extraordinarily beautiful even now, when it is just being built. But of course the white stone they use there is—"
"Yes," she said. "Narabal ought to be built out of stone too, because this climate is so damp that wooden buildings fall apart, but there hasn't been time yet. Once the population's big enough, we can quarry in the mountains and put together something marvelous here. Fifty years from now, a hundred, when we have a proper labor force. Maybe if we got some of those giant four-armed aliens to work here—"
"Skandars," said Vismaan.
"Skandars, yes. Why doesn't the Coronal send us ten thousand Skandars?"
'Their bodies are covered with thick hair. They will find this climate difficult. But doubtless Skandars will settle here, and Vroons, and Su-Suheris, and many, many wet-country Ghayrogs like me. It is a very bold thing your government is doing, encouraging offworld settlers in such numbers. Other planets are not so generous with their land."
"Other planets are not so large," Thesme said. "I think I've heard that even with all the huge oceans we have, Majipoor's land mass is still three or four times the size of any other settled planet. Or something like that. We're very lucky, being such a big world, and yet having such gentle gravity, so that humans and humanoids can live comfortably here. Of course, we pay a high price for that, not having anything much in the way of heavy elements, but still — oh. Hello." The tone of her voice changed abruptly, dropping off to a startled blurt. A slim young man, very tall, with pale wavy hair, had nearly collided with her as he emerged from the bank on the corner, and now he stood gaping at her, and she at him. He was Ruskelorn Yulvan, Thesme's lover for the four months just prior to her withdrawal into the jungle, and the person in Narabal she was least eager to see. But if there had to be a confrontation with him, she intended to make the most of it; and, seizing the initiative after her first moment of confusion, she said, "You look well, Ruskelorn."
"And you. Jungle life must agree with you."
"Very much. It's been the happiest seven months of my life. Ruskelorn, this is my friend Vismaan, who's been living with me the past few weeks. He had an accident while scouting for farmland near my place — broke his leg falling out of a tree — and I've been looking after him."
"Very capably, I imagine," Ruskelorn Yulvan said evenly. "He seems to be in excellent condition." To the Ghayrog he said, "Pleased to meet you," in a way that made it seem as though he might actually mean it.
Thesme said, "He comes from a part of his planet where the climate is a lot like Narabal's. He tells me that there'll be plenty of his country-people settling down here in the tropics in the next few years."
"So I've heard." Ruskelorn Yulvan grinned and said, "You'll find it amazingly fertile territory. Eat a berry at breakfast time and toss the seed away, you'll have a vine as tall as a house by nightfall. That's what everyone says, so it must be true."
The light and casual manner of his speaking infuriated her. Did he not realize that this scaly alien creature, this offworlder, this Ghayrog, was his replacement in her bed? Was he immune to jealousy, or did he simply not understand the real situation? With a ferocious silent intensity she attempted to convey the truth of things to Ruskelorn Yulvan in the most graphic possible way, thinking fierce images of herself in Vismaan's arms, showing Ruskelorn Yulvan the alien hands of Vismaan caressing her breasts and thighs and flicking his little scarlet two-pronged tongue lightly over her closed eyelids, her nipples, her loins. But it was useless. Ruskelorn was no more of a mind-reader than she. He is my lover, she thought, he enters me, he makes me come again and again, I can't wait to get back to the jungle and tumble into bed with him, and all the while Ruskelorn Yulvan stood there smiling, chatting politely with the Ghayrog, discussing the potential for raising niyk and glein and stajja in these parts, or perhaps lusavender-seed in the swampier districts, and only after a good deal of that did he turn his glance back toward Thesme and ask, as placidly as though he were asking the day of the week, whether she intended to live in the jungle indefinitely.
She glared. "So far I prefer it to life in town. Why?"
"I wondered if you missed the comforts of our splendid metropolis, that's all."
"Not yet, not for a moment. I've never been happier."
"Good. I'm so pleased for you, Thesme." Another serene smile. "How nice to have run into you. How good to have met you," he said to the Ghayrog, and then he was gone.
Thesme smouldered with rage. He had not cared, he had not cared in the slightest, she could be coupling with Ghayrogs or Skandars or the gromwark in the pond for all it mattered to him! She had wanted him to be wounded or at least shocked, and instead he had simply been polite. Polite! It must be that he, like all the others, failed to comprehend the real state of affairs between her and Vismaan — that it was simply inconceivable to them that a woman of human stock would offer her body to a reptilian offworlder, and so they did not consider — they did not even suspect—