“Yes.”

“And you won’t let me sleep too long?”

“No.”

“Just a few hours. Here.” She reached over him to the small stand on his side of the bed where the telephone and a glowing timepiece sat. She pulled out a drawer, unerringly finding paper and a writing stylus within, and quickly wrote. “When this—” She tapped the timepiece’s display. “Looks like this—” She indicated the characters written on the paper. “Wake me up.”

Tagen’s hand rose of its own power and drifted through the soft cloud of her hair as she lay tensely draped over his lap. Immediately, some of the nervous energy inhabiting her small frame sapped itself away. She settled there, pillowed on his stomach, her arm encircling his waist. His back was already beginning to ache from pressing on the rigid headboard, but she looked so comfortable and felt so close, he could not bring himself to move her.

“Sleep,” he told her. “I will wake you.”

She sighed and pressed her face against him briefly. “Talk to me,” she said. “Just for a little bit. I need to hear your voice.”

“What would you have me say?”

“Tell me something good. Tell me…what’s the happiest day of your life?”

Tagen thought first of making love with her in the grass before her little garden, the blue sky above them and her lindaria twining through stone behind him. That was happiness, to be freed of Heat at last and in the welcoming arms of beautiful Daria, understanding only then why it was that human sexplay was so slowly carried out. Because it demanded to be savored. It deserved to be.

But he could not tell her this. He was not a man of great intuition, but he sensed that this was not a memory to speed her into sleep. Nor was it a memory he could invoke, and then sit quietly alongside while she lay in his arms and the end of his time on Earth loomed.

He said, “When I received my commission. When I became an officer. I had served some six years as…as a ‘beat cop’, I believe is the term, or as near as I can approximate it. To be made an officer so soon was a point of fiercest pride to me. I knew that it had been an inevitability, due to my father’s name and reputation, but I believed that I had earned it as well.”

“So soon,” Daria echoed. “Six years.”

“How long is one a beat cop on your world before one is expected to see promotion?”

“I don’t know. I suppose it depends more here on whether or not a cop wants to stay on a beat. I know in the army you can go pretty far up the ladder under the right conditions in just a two-year tour of duty, but the rules are different for policemen. I don’t know, really.” She was quiet for a while, long enough that he’d begun to wonder if she’d faded into sleep, when she said, “Did you celebrate? When you received your commission and became an officer?”

“Ha. Yes. I suppose you might say I did celebrate. I purchased a som sommora, a kind of plant, for my new officer’s quarters, solely because the regulations now allowed such things to be kept.” He’d also celebrated with several bottles of ul and a like-minded female, followed by more ul, a meal too expensive for even his new eighth-rank officer’s salary, and another female. He kept this to himself, however.

“Was it a flowering plant?”

“Not in my hands,” he said wryly. “Mine suffered and surrendered swiftly to death. In your care, surely it would someday have flowered.” He paused, and then said, “The som sommora has many long, slender leaves. Very long, like strands of hair. The blooms emerge on broad, curling stems, all along the sides in beads. They can be blue, white, or a deep purple. I no longer recall which mine would have been.”

“It sounds beautiful,” she said sleepily.

“I suppose it was. The things most familiar to us are often unappreciated,” he added. “I have seen little on Jota to compare with the beauty of certain of Earth’s treasures.”

“Like what?”

He stroked her cheek free of stray hairs. “It’s lindaria,” he said.

She smiled, her eyes still shut. “I still think it’s an ugly plant, but you’re entitled to your opinion.”

He said nothing. The plant had not been the only meaning of his words, but he would not emphasize this if she couldn’t hear it on her own. She was weary and sleep was close. There were times appropriate to such conversations and this was not one of them.

Yes, and if he were fortunate, he could continue not having such a conversation until he stood at the airlock of his ship, when all he would have to say was goodbye.

Once again, the thought of leaving swallowed him. Earth, beautiful but despised. A world of hostility and Heat. Farewell to it and good riddance, but Daria…

A snatch of song came to him now and he sang it in his own tongue, in a low and musing tone scarcely above a breath and carrying no more than a tint of melody:

“Many suns I’ve seen

And knocked the dust of tens of worlds from my traveled feet,

But when I am called to home

It is not to the house that my name is carved upon that I return

But to your arms

Wherever you may be.”

Silly, idealistic drivel. He wished he remembered more of it.

Daria murmured something faintly inquiring, but it was not discernable and not repeated. She was asleep at last.

Tagen turned his head, watching the numbers on the timepiece turn. His back ached from its awkward lie against the headboard, his legs were burning and numb, but Daria was warm against his side and her cheek soft against his stomach. He wondered how he could be so contented with that and yet despair so completely whenever her name drifted through his mind.

It was a human thing, he decided. Just one more little thing he’d picked up along with the language and a taste for the food she called ‘ice cream’. Emotions were like any other accent, they had a way of creeping in. He would deal with it when the time came, but this was not the time.

Tagen drew a slow breath and shut his heart away. Then he picked up the earpiece of the telephone and began to dial the first number on his list.

*

“Waken, Daria. The hour has come.”

She had drifted off to the sound of that voice, and she was sure the rise and fall of it had influenced her dreams of him, but now that same voice was a well-oiled knife separating her skillfully from sleep. She stirred languidly, hugging his waist a little tighter, and kept her eyes shut. “You’ve come a long way from ‘Now is not the time to be open,’” she remarked.

“Thank you.”

Daria rolled onto her back, stretching every sore and car-cramped muscle. She knew she could easily sleep out the rest of this day. A three-hour nap did nothing for the bone-deep weariness that had settled into her, but it was all she dared to take. This was no Sunday summer drive they were taking.

Her eye had a way of sliding to him as she lay trying to rub the need for sleep from her brain, and the sight that met her was not a heartening one. He was staring fixedly out the window at the parking lot and his jaw was too tight. It was the same look he’d been wearing since he told her to stay and rest a while. She half-wished she knew what he was thinking, but was afraid she already did. It was the same expression, the same aura of grim stillness that Dan had worn that last day at the hospital, the day he’d brought her flowers and told her he wasn’t coming home.

Well, what did she expect? She’d known from the start that this was temporary. Even after she’d slept with him, she’d known that much. Nothing had changed, except of course, that now it hurt.

She thought she loved him. She really thought she did, and the knowledge didn’t bring her the same giddy amazement she remembered feeling as she fell in love with Dan, but a deep, throbbing ache. How could she let that happen? It wasn’t just the sex, although God knew the sex was a big part of it—his tenderness, his control, his intensity and passion—it was all of him. She loved his patience and his quiet strength; she couldn’t begin to imagine going door to door to all those motels if she hadn’t had his calm to center her afterwards. She loved his forthright manner, even when it was expressed by his near-total lack of diplomacy; he could be careful about how much he said, but she always knew he was telling her the truth. She even loved the strange, archaic way he had of speaking, and the awkwardness of his efforts to modernize his English. Sex had been the breaking point, that was all, the point at which she’d had to admit that there was an attraction there. Once she’d taken that leap, the line between like and love had passed unnoticed.