Darien laughed, but only out of friendship and good humor, not in the wounding way that would make the boy bottle up inside his sneering face. "It hasn't gone quite that far. I don't think anybody wants it to; I expect we're making plenty of mistakes, but I hope not the same ones all over again. No. What we trade is mostly food, some raw materials—and now and then information. Did you ever wonder how we knew you were coming?"
"We sent a message," Jeron said.
"You sent it by laser light. From Alpha Centauri. Did it ever occur to you superbrains that Alpha Centauri is never visible from the continental United States? It's too far south. But there are still telescopes on the mountains of Hawaii, and the King of Hawaii graciously allows the astronomers to use them-—and graciously traded us the message. Cost two hundred pounds of liquid nitrogen, though by the time he got it I suppose half of it had boiled away. Suppose you were worth it?"
The scowl flickered briefly back on his face—was she making fun of him? He did not want her to do that. What he wanted was for her to like him, very much, so that he would be able to like her as much as he wanted to—as much as he was coming to like all this complicated, strange, huge planet—
He was relieved to see that her smile was still friendly. Then it changed to concern. "Oh, hell, you're burning up, Jeron! You're just not used to this sun. Hold on a sec while I grease you up."
As she spread the sunscreen oil over his body he stretched slowly, pleased with the softness of her touch. No one had stroked him so gently since, at least, Aunt Mommy cared for the very young child he had been—
"Why, Jeron," she said softly, glancing at his face and then lower. "You seem to be falling in love again. Tell you what. It's about time I showed you where I live, eh? It's only up the hill. . . ."
Up the hill was what had once been a huge, rambling motor hotel, saunas and swimming pool, banquet rooms and lecture, facilities. There weren't enough transients or sales meetings to keep it busy anymore, and so it had become housing for nearly fifteen hundred Pugets. Mostly the occupants were singles, though there were some childless couples and, in the larger suites on the upper floors, a few families.
In energy terms it was a good bargain. Half of each picture window had been silvered over to keep out summer sun and keep in winter warmth, and the building was sturdy. It was true that the upper floors were unattractive without elevator service; the winches that pulled the cars imposed a considerable drain. But most of the inhabitants used the stairs by choice, except for moving furniture or carrying heavy loads of groceries, and lifting was energy-cheaper than heating. Things that go round use less energy than things that heat up; and "smart" cybernetics traded from the chip people down south in Santa Clara economized on trips. Each room had huge beds, a small refrigerator, a little stove, its own bath—it was not a bad life for a single. You didn't have much space for keeping knickknacks and family heirlooms, but who wanted all that stuff anyway?
Above all, the beds! How different from President Tupelo's soggy mattresses, or even the flower sacks back home! And what wonderful things one could do on them!
Although Darien was twice Jeron's age, it was at least an open question which brought more craftsmanship to their lovemaking. Or more puzzlement. Jeron's peculiar twitches and pokings in the middle of everything—they were off-putting, but how was Darien to know that they were what Jeron had picked up of the sex-as-communications modality the Constitution's grownups had evolved? The attempts were wasted on her, but not much else was; it was good. Explosively good, and then when at last they rolled apart and their breathing slowed it was Jeron's turn to be puzzled. His voice almost tender, he said, "Perhaps we should save this one."
Darien, who had been playing with the long, straight hair that lay across his shoulder, propped herself up to look at him. "Save what, Jeron?"
"The baby," he explained. "Aunt Eve's probably going to want to plant some of the cabbages pretty soon. Of course, you'd have to carry it for a few weeks until the vegetable womb grows out—"
Darien had not yet switched her reasoning mind back on. She was slow to respond; but then the meaning of the words penetrated and she sat up. "What baby?"
"What do you mean, what baby? Our baby. I've been thinking it might make a nice cross." He sat up too, nodding as he thought it out. "See, I'm Eve and Jim Barstow—you can tell that by the name—"
"Tell what by the name?"
"Breeding. All the first ten cohorts or so show their bloodlines in the name—then they began fooling around, but my name, for instance, shows E for Aunt Eve and O for Uncle Jim. The J means I'm from the third cohort, R just means I'm unedited. The N has no significance, that's just for pretty. 'Jeron,' you see? Well! A lot of the younger kids, like Jeromolo Bill, have been edited some—there are plenty that have been edited more than him—but basically, there's just been the same four male and four female lines to play with. So what I'm saying is, I think it's a good idea to breed out a little."
The last time Darien remembered blushing she was six years old, tripping on her skirt as she curtseyed to the most famous people she had ever met; but she could feel her shoulders and throat reddening. Sexuality never made her blush. But such light talk of childbearing! "I'm thirsty," she said, getting up to fetch two bottles of beer out of the tiny fridge. She showed Jeron how to pry off the cap without damaging it, so that it could be used again, and took a long swallow.
She seemed doomed to go on repeating What strange people! to herself for the rest of her life. She had been doing it now, she counted, for a week and a day, the brief meetings in Washington, the quick flight across the continent, showing the visitors around Puget—and still they had the capacity to astonish! Or this one did, anyway. "Jeron," she said, "around here we don't get pregnant that easy, in fact a lot of us don't ever expect to get pregnant at all. But when we do, we take it pretty seriously. Sounds like you folks do it a little different, eh?"
His astonishment was equal to her own, and for ten minutes they exchanged data on childbirth and rearing. They let the actual foetal development take place in a surrogate vegetable womb, he explained. Obstetrician? Was that some kind of doctor? No, of course not. What would they need a doctor for? Most everybody knew how to do it, just as in the old world most everybody knew, for instance, how to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation or perform the Heimlich maneuver. Finding the ovum was a little tricky, he admitted, but there was a douche with a selective stain that made it easier once you got the speculum and cannula deployed. Then you had to check if it was fertilized. If not you could always do it all in vitro—if you wanted to do any editing or cross-linking you pretty near had to— but mostly it seemed more fun to knock each other up in the old-fashioned way. Then you transferred the embryo to the vegetable womb. Any time in the first thirteen weeks was plenty of time, he assured her—you could let it go later if you wanted to, but who would want to? Then, for the next six or eight months, you could watch it swell with your child.
"Yes, but— Yes, but—" she kept saying. "Yes, but what about overpopulation?" (Not a problem when you were filling up a solar system!) "Yes, but suppose you don't want a child?" (Why wouldn't you?) "Yes, but suppose you don't even like the other person?"
He stared at her in increasing astonishment. ("What strange people!") "Now, what difference would that make?" he asked. "There's always somebody who likes to take care of babies. Don't you have any Aunt Mommies around here? Although," he added, with what Darien construed as a touch of embarrassment, "I did sort of teach my first two for a while. Not Bill, though. There was a second-cohort woman named Odirun who kind of liked to do that— Of course, I wouldn't interfere if you wanted to take that on . . ."