Crashlander

The children! Protect the children! Where are the children? The Surgeon must be tickling my adrenal glands. I'm not awake, but I'm frantic, and a bit randy too. Then the sensations ease off. The Playmate program. It guards them and teaches them and plays with them. They'll be fine. Can't take them to Carlos's place … not tonight.

Sharrol was their mother and Carlos Wu had been their father. Earth's Fertility Board won't let an albino have children. Carlos's gene pattern they judge perfect; he's one of a hundred and twenty flatlanders who carry an unlimited birthright.

A man can love any child. That's hard-wired into the brain. A man can raise another man's children. And accept their father as a friend … but there's a barrier. That's wired in, too.

Sharrol knows. She's afraid I'll turn prickly and uncivilized. And Carlos knows. So why …?

Tonight was billed as a foursome, sex and tapas. That was a developing custom: dinner strung out as a sequence of small dishes between bouts of recreational sex. Something inherited from the ancient Greeks or Italians, maybe. There's something lovers gain from feeding each other.

Feather –

The memory blurs. I wasn't afraid of her then, but I am now. When I remember Feather, the Surgeon puts me to sleep.

But the children! I've got to remember. We were down. Sharrol was out of the 'doc, but we left Louis and Tanya frozen. We floated their box into the boat. Feather and I disengaged the lift plate and slid it under the 'doc. Beneath that lumpy jacket she moved like a tigress. She spoke my name; I turned …

Feather.

* * *

Carlos's sleepfield enclosed most of the bedroom. He'd hosted bigger parties than this in here. Tonight we were down to four, and a floating chaos of dishes Carlos said were Mexican.

«She's an ARM,» Carlos said.

Feather Filip and I were sharing a tamale too spicy for Sharrol. Feather caught me staring and grinned back. An ARM?

I'd expected Feather to be striking. She wasn't exactly beautiful. She was strong: lean, almost gaunt, with prominent tendons in her neck, lumps flexing at the corners of her jaws. You don't get strength like that without training in illegal martial arts.

The Amalgamated Regional Militia is the United Nations police, and the United Nations took a powerful interest in Carlos Wu. What was she, Carlos's bodyguard? Was that how they'd met?

But whenever one of us spoke of the ARM that afternoon, Feather changed the subject.

I'd have thought Carlos would orchestrate our sleepfield dance. Certified genius that he is, would he not be superb at that, too? But Feather had her own ideas, and Carlos let her lead. Her lovemaking was aggressive and acrobatic. I felt her strength that afternoon. And my own lack, raised as I was in the lower gravity of We Made It.

And three hours passed in that fashion, while the wonderful colors of the reef darkened to light-amplified night.

And then Feather reached far out of the field, limber as a snake … reached inside her backpurse, and fiddled, and frowned, and rolled back and said, «We're shielded.»

Carlos said, «They'll know.»

«They know me,» Feather said, «They're thinking that I let them use their monitors because I'm showing off, but now we're going to try something a little kinky. Or maybe I'm just putting them on. I've done it before —»

«Then —»

«Find a glitch so I can block their gear with something new. Then they fix it. They'll fix this one too, but not tonight. It's just Feather coming down after a long week.»

Carlos accepted that. «Stet. Sharrol, Beowulf, do you want to leave Earth? We'd be traveling as a group, Louis and Tanya and the four of us. This is for keeps.»

Sharrol said, «I can't.» Carlos knew that.

He said, «You can ride in cold sleep. Home's rotation period is fifty minutes shorter than Earth's. Mass the same, air about the same. Tectonic activity is higher, so it'll smell like there's just a trace of smog —»

«Carlos, we talked this to death a few years ago.» Sharrol was annoyed. «Sure, I could live on Home. I don't like the notion of flying from world to world like a, a corpse, but I'd do it. But the UN doesn't want me emigrating, and Home won't take flat phobes!»

The flatlander phobia is a bone-deep dread of being cut off from Earth. Fear of flying and/or falling is an extreme case, but no flat phobe can travel in space. You find few flat phobes off Earth; in fact, Earthborn are called flatlanders no matter how well they adjust to life elsewhere.

But Feather was grinning at Sharrol. «We go by way of Fafnir. We'll get to Home as Shashters. Home has already approved us for immigration —»

«Under the name Graynor. We're all married,» Carlos amplified.

I said, «Carlos, you've been off Earth. You were on Jinx for a year.»

«Yeah. Bey, Sigmund Ausfaller and his gnomes never lost track of me. The United Nations thinks they own my genes. I'm supervised wherever I go.»

But they keep you in luxury, I thought. And the grass is always greener. And Feather had her own complaint. «What do you know about the ARM?» she asked us.