Utopia

No. Never mind. Worry about it all later. Lentrall’s idea had-had disturbed him. No question about it. He needed to hear what Fredda would say about it.

Kresh turned away from the view of the city, and headed toward his aircar. “Come on, Donald,” he said again, “let’s go home.”

IT WAS LUCKY. Kresh told himself as Donald flew him home, that Spacers had a long tradition of respecting each other’s privacy, and of defending their own. Otherwise, the scandalous nature of his own domestic arrangements might well have brought a thunderstorm of controversy down upon his head.

To get the worst of it over with first, Alvar Kresh and his wife, Fredda Leving, lived together, and maintained only one household. In the typical Spacer marriage, husband and wife each had their own household, and spent a large fraction of their time apart from each other.

It was more or less expected that newlyweds would spend an inordinate amount of time together, but the typical pattern was for a couple to spend less and less time together as the years went by. A couple who had been married some years might see each other once a week, or once a month. Some older marriages didn’t so much end as wear out; the two partners might never see each other at all, from year’s end to year’s end. While divorce was simple enough on Inferno, many couples couldn’t even work up the energy to go through the legal motions. They stayed married out of sheer inertia.

Alvar Kresh had discovered, much to his own surprise, that his own marriage was not corning anywhere close to following any such pattern. Three years after their wedding, he and Fredda still spent every night not only under the same roof but, even more scandalously, in the same room-and the same bed.

While there was nothing seen as actually wrong or immoral in such an arrangement, it was most unusual in Infernal society. If it had gotten around, the good people of Inferno would Rave thought their governor and his wife most peculiar.

And that in itself was strange, in Kresh’ s mind, at least. He stared out the window, at the green and lovely city below, reflecting once again on the peculiar ways of his own people. Infernals prided themselves on being quite open-minded when it came to questions of personal relationships. And so they were-at least in theory. But Kresh had learned, over the years, that while their minds might be open to the idea of most sorts of physical relationships, their hearts were far less prepared to deal with the idea of emotional intimacy. The idea, the theory, of sex was something an Infernal could deal with. The fact, the reality, of sex would bring a blush to an Infernal’s face, but he or she could at least countenance such a thing. The idea of love was something most could not deal with at all.

Infernals were Spacers, and Spacers had always been a people who kept their distance, physical and emotional, from each other. At least Infernals had never gone to the extremes of some Spacer worlds, worlds that had no real cities, no towns, no villages, only widely scattered villas, with one human and an army of robots making up the average household. But Infernals were not exactly a gregarious people.

That Kresh and Fredda slept together on occasion would be seen as perfectly acceptable. That they slept together every night, in the same bed, would be seen as a trifle odd. That they had their meals together, spent their free time together, and were in each other’s company as much as possible-that would be seen as quite beyond the pale. Infernals simply did not open up to each other, expose themselves to each other, that way. They did not make themselves vulnerable to each other.

More fools they, Kresh told himself. They would never know the strength, the confidence, the sense of security that Fredda gave to Kresh. He could only hope he gave as much to her.

Kresh knew the Infernals, and what they would say if they knew. He knew how the idea would float up from somewhere that his unconventional home life made him unsuited to continue as governor, or that Fredda obviously had an undue influence on him. Even as it was, they said she was far too young for him-and Infernals were suspicious of youth. They said she was entirely too cozy with the Settlers. Simcor Beddle, leader of the Ironheads, was never reluctant to put that notion about at one of his mass meetings-and there was at least a grain of truth in it. Fredda did tend toward the Settler view on a number of subjects. Beddle was already leading a whispering campaign, putting it about that her radical ideas were dangerous. But then, Kresh was inclined to believe that himself. Fredda and he had some remarkably vigorous arguments on the subject of robots, among other things.