“You look very pretty,” he said.
“So do you,” she replied, with a giggle.
Flustered, he stood tongue-tied.
“I brought some fresh clothes for you from the supply shop,” Angela said. “I hope they fit okay. If they don’t, I can fix them for you.”
“Thanks.”
She dropped the clothes on the bed. Looking around the room she asked, “Is everything okay? Do you need shaving things?”
“No,” he answered. “I won’t need another depilatory treatment for six months or so.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“Is there someplace to eat around here? Have you had dinner?”
“The mess hall will be open in an hour. If you’re really hungry I can fix you something at my place. It’s not far from here.”
“Uh, no, that’s all right. Guess I’d better get dressed.”
“Okay.” She started for the door.
“No, wait.” For Christ’s sake, this is idiotic.
We’ve made love together! “Don’t go… Let’s have dinner together.”
She nodded and smiled at him.
Feeling utterly silly, Alec took the clothes into the bathroom and tried them on. Turtleneck shirt, dark blue and thickly ribbed. Gray slacks that were too large in the waist and so long that he had to turn the cuffs up twice. A pair of solid boots, good size. A belt to pull the pants tight. And they all smelled clean, felt soft.
“How do I look?” he asked as he came out of the bathroom.
She smiled and frowned at the same time. “I wasn’t too good about the sizes, was I?”
“Only the pants. The rest fits fine.”
They had dinner in the noisy, crowded, clattering mess hall, sitting on benches at long wooden tables surrounded by steam and pungent odors and other people who chattered their conversations, oblivious of Alec and Angela. They sat side by side, saying almost nothing to each other. The food was hot and solid, nothing fancy, but more of it than Alec had been able to get since leaving the Moon.
Outside afterward, it was dark and their frosty breaths hung in the air before them. The buildings were all alight. Why not? Alec thought. He’s probably got nuclear generators buried underground somewhere, using the fuel we need.
They walked under the chilled stars to Angela’s home, a separate little house at the head of a curved row of white wooden houses.
“I have some wine,” she said. “The villagers make it.”
Inside, the house was a combination of warmth and utilitarianism. Furniture was sparse. The front room was completely empty except for a single old wooden chair with a high straight back and a rug made from some sort of animal fur, rolled up in a corner. The fireplace looked cold and empty. Angela led Alec back to the kitchen, which had a table and three mismatched chairs, as well as a small refrigerator, stove and sink, all lined against one wall. Through another doorway Alec could see the bedroom. There was nothing in it except a mattress on the floor with a sleeping bag half unrolled atop it.
“You have this place all to yourself?”
“Yes,” she said, reaching down to a cabinet under the sink and pulling out a dusty green bottle. “I just moved in a few weeks ago. Da… uh, Douglas said it was time for me to have a place of my own. He lives in the house down at the other end of the row. Will and most of the other leaders live here… or really, their families do. Most of the time the men are out in the countryside somewhere.”
“Will has a family?”
She set the bottle on the table next to Alec and took two glasses from a cabinet. “He was going to marry a girl from one of the villages west of here. But she was taken by one of the raider gangs. No-one’s been able to find her since.”
Somehow that hit Alec like a physical blow.
Angela brought the glasses to the table. Sitting next to Alec, she said softly. “It happened years ago… he got over it.”
“Did he?”
She shrugged. “He functions. He lives. He even sings, sometimes.”
Alec let his breath out in a pent-up sigh. “It’s a lousy world.”
“It’s the only one we’ve got.”
No, it isn’t, he answered silently.
Eyeing the wine bottle, Angela asked, “Will you pour, or shall I?”
He took the bottle and pulled the stopper out of it. Funny, spongy thing. Cork? he wondered.
Somewhere he had heard about the substance.
Very carefully, conscious for the first time in months of Earth’s six-fold gravity pull, he half filled the two glasses with bright red wine.
It tasted marvelous. Smooth and warm and warming.
He put the glass down firmly on the table. “It’s not the only world we’ve got, Angela. There’s an entirely different world, where all this insanity of raiders and killing doesn’t exist.”
“The lunar settlement,” she said.
“Right. Civilization. Where you don’t have to carry weapons all the time and worry if you’ll make it through the night.”
“But we have that here!” Angela said. “That’s what Douglas has built for us here.”
“Yes… by force, by war, by betraying the people who trusted him.”
Her eyes flashed, but she caught herself and changed the subject. “Tell me more about the lunar colony. What’s it like up there?”
With an effort, Alec pushed his own smoldering anger aside. “It’s peaceful. Polite. People can be ! human beings instead of jungle animals. You don’t have this heavy gravity pulling on you all the time. You can sail in the aerogymn and dance all the ballets ever written.”
“Ballets?” Angela looked puzzled.
Never heard of them, he realized. “Up on the surface,” Alec went on, “you can see real beauty. I mean, it’s beautiful here on Earth, of course, wild and unpredictable and all… but on the Moon, watching the sunrise takes a whole day. And the stars… and Earth itself, hanging there blue and beautiful. You can go for a thousand klicks in any direction and never see another person, alone, just by yourself, with the whole universe hanging up there and watching you…”
“It sounds lonely.”
“No, it’s beautiful. Watching the ice vents outgas right after the perigee quakes. There’s just enough sulfur dioxide in the rocks to tint the’ vapor pink—the stuff puffs up and out like a ghost escaping from its grave.”
Angela shuddered. “That doesn’t sound beautiful to me.”
“Wait ’till you see it.”
“I’ll never see it,” she said. Sadly.
“Yes you will. I’m taking you there, remember?”
“No…”
He hunched forward in his chair. “God, you’re beautiful. Let’s go to bed.”
She didn’t look surprised. “There’s more to it than that, Alec.”
“What?”
“If Douglas finds out…”
He pulled back from her. “He means more to you than I do.”
“No, it’s not that,” she said. “Alec… I don’t mean anything to you. Not really. You can screw me one minute and try to trick me the next.”
“You did the same damned thing!”
“Because I knew that’s what you were doing! You didn’t fool me, not for one minute.”
“Then why did you go to bed with me?”
Her voice rising, “Because you saved me and I was scared and you were kind—no, you killed those two… oh, hell! I don’t know. I did it because I wanted to.”
“And you don’t want to now.”
“Yes, I do want to.”
It took a moment for Alec to realize what she had said. Then, leaning back in his chair, he wondered aloud, “Then what are we arguing about?”
Angela shook her head. “You don’t understand any of it, do you? Not a bit of it.”
But she got up from the table and took him by the hand and led him into the bedroom.