Worlds Enough and Time by Joe Haldeman Read Free Book Online Page B

around the yeast farm. The ag offices were bright and busy, which for some reason depressed me. Farmers ought to go to bed with the sun, get up bright and early to milk the chickens.
    The pool was crowded for the late hour, more people socializing than exercising. I saw Dan in the deep end and called out to him. He didn’t show any sign of hearing, but must have seen me after he made his turn. He came over to the towel shelf while I was undressing.
    “Harry keep you this long?”
    “No, I had to go by the office, check some things. Here.” I handed him the wine.
    “Thanks.” He took a gulp and put it back on the shelf. “So how do you feel?”
    “How am I supposed to feel? You know what he talked to me about?”
    “That’s not what I meant.” He put his hand on mine. “I mean how do you
feel?
” I slept with John last night, was what he meant.
    “Like a shuttlecock, sometimes, if you want to know the truth. How do
you
feel?”
    “Well, I put us in for a fuckhut, just in case.” Nobody calls them zero-gee saunas except the Entertainment Director.
    “Thanks for asking me.”
    “Just in case.”
    “I’m not in the mood, Dan. I’m in
a
mood, but not
the
mood.”
    “Okay, okay.” He found his clothes and stepped into his pants. “So what did you and your favorite professor talk about?”
    “Can’t say.” I finished undressing. Funny that I didn’t want to take my pants off until he had his on. With fifty other men I wasn’t married to in the same room.
    “Oh. I think I see.”
    “You probably do.” I tried to keep the frost out of my voice. If our positions had been reversed, I would have kept it secret from him. “I’m not supposed to discuss it with anyone until I talk to him again Thursday. Presumably that’s when I’ll get the secret handshake.”
    He smiled and gave me a neutral pat on the small of the back. “I’ll be up in the room.”
    “I’ll be up after a few laps. Take the wine.” Maybe he’d be asleep when I got there.
    It’s interesting to watch eye movements as you approach the pool. Most women look directly at your face, and so do some men—the shy, the gentlemanly, and presumably those more interested in males. Most men’s eyes do a little dance: crotch, then past the knees to about shin-level, then back up past the center to pause at the breast-and-shoulder level, and then a concentrated stare at the face. I noticed other people staring before I realized I did it, too. Otherwise you can walk right by somebody you work with every day and not recognize him or her. Faces look different on top of a pile of clothes.
    I said hello to a couple of casual acquaintances and shook my head “no” to a stranger who made the thumb-through-circled-thumb-and-finger query. You didn’t see that as often as when I was a girl—or maybe it was just I who didn’t see it as often. (There were places on Earth, like Magreb, where you could be killed for making a gesture like that at another man’s wife. I had hated that place, forced to wear heavy robes in the desert heat, just your eyes showing—and my memory, unbidden, supplied the smell, when we rounded the corner in Tangier and came up to the public square, the smell of the previous rent-a-robe customer’s rancid sweat mingling with the sudden stench of putrid flesh, the hands and heads of thieves and adulterers rotting on spikes.)
    “Marianne. You okay?”
    “Oh, hi, Sam. Just tired.” Samuel Wasserman, historian and kosher loverboy.
    “You looked right through me.”
    “Brain’s someplace else. Swim?” I took his elbow and steered him toward the shallow end.
    The water was too warm, as usual. I could make it cooler, by executive fiat, but I knew that this was what most people preferred. Maybe I could have a new poll commissioned, and fake the results. We started off slowly, side by side.
    “How about Purcell’s little surprise?”
    I hadn’t talked to Sam after the meeting. “He does have a flair for the dramatic, in his