The Lovers   ::   Фармер Филип Хосе

17



One day, Yarrow, returning from the market with a large box, said, 'You've really been putting away the groceries lately. You're not eating for two? Or maybe three?'

She paled. 'Maw choo! Do you know what you're saying?'

He put the box on a table and grabbed her shoulders.

'Shib. I do. Jeannette, I've been thinking about that very thing for a long time, but I haven't said anything. I didn't want to worry you. Tell me, are you?'

She looked him straight in the eye, but her body was shaking. 'Oh, no. It is impossible!'

'Why should it be?'

' Fi . But I know – don't ask me how – that it cannot be. But you must never say things like that. Not even joking. I can't stand it.'

He pulled her close and said over her shoulder, 'Is it because you can't? Because you know you'll never bear my children?'

Her thick, faintly perfumed hair nodded.

T know. Don't ask me how I know.'

He held her at arm's length again.

'Listen, Jeannette. I'll tell you what's been troubling you. You and I are of different species. Your mother and father were, too. Yet they had children. However, you may know that the ass and the mare have young, too, but the mule is sterile. The lion and the tigress may breed, but the liger or tigon can't. Isn't that right? You're afraid you're a mule!'

She put her head on his chest; tears fell on his shirt.

He said, 'Let's be real about this, honey. Maybe you are. So what? Forerunner knows that our situation is bad enough without a baby to complicate it. We'll be lucky if you are... uh... well, we have each other, haven't we? That's all I want. You.'

He couldn't keep from being reflective as he dried her tears and kissed her and helped her put the food in the refrigerator.

The quantities of groceries and milk she had been consuming were more than a normal amount, especially the milk. There had been no telltale change in her superb figure. She could not eat that much without some kind of effect. A month passed. He watched her closely, she ate enormously. Nothing happened.

Yarrow put it down to his ignorance of her alien metabolism.

Another month. Hal was just leaving the ship's library when Turnboy, the historian joat, stopped him.

'The rumor is that the techs have finally made the globin-locking molecule,' the historian said. 'I think that this time the grapevine's right. A conference is called for fifteen hundred.'

'Shib.'

Hal kept his despair out of his voice.

When the meeting broke up at 1650, it left him with sagging shoulders.