“It’s not exactly ‘why,’ dear…People who don’t respect other people’s property will do anything…and will steal any­thing that’s not nailed down. Even if they have no use for it.” He added, “Had I known this earlier, I would have given them no chance. Such people should be destroyed on sight. The problem is to identify them.”

  Minerva, Dora is the only woman I ever loved unreservedly. I don’t know that I can explain why. I did not love her that way when I married her; she had not had a chance as yet to teach me what love can be. Oh, I did love her, but it was the love of a doting father for a favorite child or somewhat like the love one can lavish on a pet.

  I decided to marry her not through love in any deepest sense but simply because this adorable child who had given me so many hours of happiness wanted something very badly—my child—and there was only one way I could give her what she wanted and still please my own self-love. So almost coldly, I calculated the cost and decided that the price was low enough that I could let her have what she wanted. It could not cost me much; she was an ephemeral. Fifty, sixty, seventy, at the most eighty years and she would be dead. I could afford to spend that trivial amount of time to make my adopted daugh­ter’s pitifully short life happy—that’s how I figured it. It wasn’t much, and I could afford it. So be it.

  All the rest was just a case of no half measures; do whatever else is necessary to your main purpose. I told you some of the possibilities; I may not have mentioned that I considered tak­ing back the captaincy of the Andy J. for Dora’s lifetime, have Zaccur Briggs take the ground side of the partnership or buy him out if that didn’t suit him. But while eighty-odd years in a starship would not stonker me, to Dora it would be a life­time and it might not suit her. Besides, a ship is not an ideal place to raise kids—what do you do when they grow up? Drop them off somewhere not knowing anything but ship’s routine? Not good.

  I decided that the husband of an ephemeral had to be an ephemeral, in every way possible to him. The corollaries to that decision caused us to wind up in Happy Valley.

  Happy Valley—The happiest of all my lives. The longer I was privileged to live with Dora, the more I loved her. She taught me to love by loving me, and I learned—rather slowly; I wasn’t too good a pupil, being set in my ways and lacking her natural talent. But I did learn. Learned that supreme hap­piness lies in wanting to keep another person safe and warm and happy, and being privileged to try.

  And the saddest, too. The more thoroughly I learned this— through living day on day with Dora—the happier I was and the more I ached in one corner of my mind with certain knowledge that this could be only a brief time too soon over—and when it was over, I did not marry again for almost a hundred years. Then I did, for Dora taught me to face up to death, too. She was as aware of her own death of the certain briefness of her life, as I was. But she taught me to live now, not to let anything sully today… until at last I got over the sadness of being condemned to live.

  We had a wonderfully good time! Working our arses off, always too much to do, and enjoying every minute. Never too rushed to enjoy life no matter what. Sometimes just pat-ass and squeeze-titty as I hurried through the kitchen, with her quick smile acknowledging it, sometimes a lazy hour on the roof invested in watching sunset and stars and moons, usually with “Eros” to make, it sweeter.

  I guess you could say that sex was, our only active amuse­ment for a number of years (and never stopped being in first place as Dora was as enthusiastic at seventy as at seventeen— just not as limber). I was usually too tired to play good chess even though I made us a set of chessmen; we had no other games and probably would not have played them anyhow— too busy. Oh, we did do other things; often one of us would read aloud while the other knitted or cooked or something. Or we would sing together, coonjining the rhythm while we pitched grain or manure.

  We worked together as much as possible; division of labor came only from natural limits. I can’t bear a baby pr suckle it, but I can do anything else for a child. Dora could not do some things that I did because they were too heavy for her, especially when she was far gone in pregnancy. She had more talent for cooking than I (I had centuries more experience but not her touch), and she could cook while she took care of a baby and tended the smallest children, ones too small to join me in the fields. But I did cook, especially breakfast while she got the kids organized, and she did help work the farm and especially the truck garden. She knew nothing of farming; she learned.

  Nor did she know construction—she learned. While I did most of the high work, she made most of the adobe bricks, always with the right amount of straw. Adobe was not well suited to the climate—too much rain and it can be discourag­ing to see a wall start to melt because an unexpected rain has caught you before you’ve topped it.

  But you build from what you have, and it helped that I had the tops from the wagons to peg against the most exposed walls, until I worked out a way to waterproof an adobe wall. I did not consider a log cabin; good timber was too far away. It took the mules and me a full day to bring in two logs, which made them too expensive for most construction. Instead, I made do with smaller stuff that grew along the banks of Buck’s River and dragged in logs only for beams.

  Nor did I want to build a house that was not as near fire­proof as I could make it. Baby Dora had once almost been burned to death; I would not risk it again for Dora, or for her children.

  But how to make a roof both watertight and fireproof nearly stumped me.

  I walked past the answer hundreds of times before I recognized it. When wind and weather and rot and lopers and insects have done their worst on a dead dragon, what is left is almost indestructible. I discovered this when I tried to burn what was left of a big brute that was unpleasantly close to our compound; I never did find out why this was so. Perhaps the biochemistry of those dragons has been investigated since then, but I had neither equipment nor time nor interest; I was too busy scratching a living for my family and was simply delighted to learn that it was true. Belly hide I cut into fireproof, waterproof tarpaulins; back and sides made excellent roofing. Later I found many uses for the bones.

  We both taught, school, indoors and out. Perhaps our kids had a weird education…but a girl who can shape a com­fortable and handsome saddle starting with a dead mule and not much else, solve quadratics in her head, shoot straight with gun or arrow, cook an omelet that is light and tasty, spout page after page of Shakespeare, butcher a hog and cure it can’t be called ignorant by New Beginnings standards. All our girls and boys could do all of that and more. I must admit that they spoke a rather florid brand of English, especially after they set up the New Globe Theater and worked straight through every one of old Bill’s plays. No doubt this gave them odd notions of Old Earth’s culture and history, but I could not see that it hurt them. We had only a few bound books, mostly reference; the dozen-odd “fun” books were worked to death.

  Our kids saw nothing strange in learning to read from As You Like it. No one told them that it was too hard for them, and they ate it up, finding “tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in every thing.”

  Although it did sound odd to hear a five-year-old girl speak in scansion and rolling periods, polysyllables falling gracefully from her baby lips. Still, I preferred it to “Run, Spot, run. See Spot run” from a later era than Bill’s.

  Second only to Shakespeare in popularity, and first whenever, Dora was swelling up again, were my medical books, es­pecially those on anatomy, obstetrics, and gynecology. Any birth was an event—kittens, piglets, foals, puppies, kids—but a new baby out of Dora was a super-event, one that always put more thumbprints on that standard OB illustration, a cross section of mother and baby at term. I finally removed that one and several plates that followed it, those showing normal de­livery, and posted them, to save wear and tear on my books— then announced that they could look at those pictures all they wanted to, but that to touch one was a spanking offense— then was forced to spank Iseult to keep justice even, which hurt her old father far more than it did her baby bottom even though she saved my face by applauding my gentle paddling with loud screams and tears.

  My medical books had one odd effect. Our kids knew from babyhood all the correct English monosyllables for human anatomy and function; Helen Mayberry had never used slang with Baby Dora; Dora spoke as correctly in front of her children. But, once they could read my books, intellectual snobbery set in; they loved those Latin polysyllables. If I said “womb” (as I always did), some six-year-old would inform me with quiet authority that the book said “uterus.” Or Undine might rush in with the news that Big Billy Whiskers was “copulating” with Silky, whereupon the kids would rush out to the goat pen to watch. Somewhere around their middle teens they usually recovered from this nonsense and went back to speaking English as their parents spoke it, so I guess it didn’t hurt them.

  The reason my own goatiness was not a spectator sport for children that all the animals afforded was, I think, only my own unreasoned but long-standing habits. I don’t think it would have fretted Dora because it did not seem to fret her’ the times it happened—as it did; privacy was scarce and got scarcer until I got our big house built some twelve or thirteen years after we entered the valley—time indefinite because for years I worked on it when I could; then we moved into it unfinished because we were bulging the walls of our first house and another baby (Ginny) was on the way.

  Dora was untroubled by lack of privacy because her sweet lechery was utterly innocent, whereas mine was scarred by the culture I grew up in—a culture psychotic throughout and especially on this subject. Dora did much to heal those scars. But I never achieved her angelic innocence.

  I do not mean the innocence of childish ignorance; I mean the true innocence of an intelligent, informed, adult woman who has no evil in her. Dora was as tough as she was innocent, always aware that she was responsible for her own actions. She knew that “the tail goes with the hide, that you can’t be a little bit pregnant, that it is no kindness to hang a man slowly.” She could make a hard decision without dithering, then stand up to the consequences if it turned out that her judgment was faulty. She could apologize to a child, or to a mule. But that was rarely necessary; her self-honesty did not often lead her into faulty decisions.

  Nor did she flagellate herself when she made a mistake. She corrected it as best she could, learned from it, did not lie awake over it.

  While her ancestry had given her the potential, Helen Mayberry must be credited with having guided it and allowed it to develop. Helen Mayberry was sensitive and sensible. Come to think of it, the traits complement. A person who is sensi­tive but not sensible is all mixed up, cannot function properly. A person who is sensible but not sensitive—I’ve never met one and am not sure such a person can exist.

  Helen Mayberry was born on Earth but had shucked off her bad background when she migrated; she did not pass on to Baby Dora and growing-girl Dora the sick standards of a dying culture. I knew some of this from Helen herself, but I learned more about Helen from Dora the Woman. Over the long course of getting acquainted with this stranger I had married (married couples always start out as strangers no matter how long they’ve known each other) I learned that Dora knew exactly the relationship that had once existed be­tween Helen Mayberry and me, including the fact that it was economic as well as social and physical.

  This did not make Dora jealous of “Aunt” Helen; jealousy was only a word to Dora, one that meant no more to her than a sunset does to an earthworm; the capacity to feel jealousy had never been developed in her. She regarded the arrange­ments between Helen and me as natural, reasonable, and ap­propriate. Indeed I feel certain that Helen’s example was the clinching factor in Dora’s picking me as her mate, as it could not have been my charm and beauty, both negligible. Helen had not taught Dora that sex was anything sacred; she had taught her, by precept and example, that sex is a way for people to be happy together.

  Take those three vultures we killed— Instead of what they were, had they been good men and decent—oh, such men as Ira and Galahad—and given the same circumstances, four men with only one woman and the situation likely to stay that way, I think Dora would have entered easily and naturally into polyandry…and would have managed to convince me that that was the only happy solution by the way she herself treated it.

  Nor would she, in adding more husbands, have been breaking her marriage vows. Dora had not promised to cleave unto me only; I won’t let a woman promise that because a day sometimes arrives when she can’t.

  Dora could have kept four decent, honorable men happy. Dora had none of the sickly attitudes that interfere with a person loving more and more; Helen had seen to that. And, as the Greeks pointed out, one man cannot quench the fires of Vesuvius. Or was it the Romans? Never mind, it’s true. Dora probably would have been even happier in a polyandrous marriage. And if she were happier, it follows, as the night the day, that I would have been also—even though I cannot imagine being happier than I was. But more big male muscles would have made life easier on me; I always had too much to, do. More company could have been pleasant, too, I am forced to assume the company of men whom Dora found ac­ceptable. As for Dora herself, she had enough love in her to lavish it on me and a dozen kids; three more husbands would not have used up her resources, she was a spring that never ran dry.

  But the matter is hypothetical. Those three Montgomerys were so little like Galahad and Ira that it is hard to think of them as being of the same race. They were vermin for killing, and that’s what they got. I learned only a little about them, from reading the contents of their wagon. Minerva, they were not pioneers; there was not the barest minimum in that wagon for starting a farm. Not a plow, not a sack of seed—And their eight mules were all geldings. I don’t know what they thought they were doing. Exploring just for the hell of it, perhaps? Then go back to “civilization” when they grew tired of it? Or did they expect to find that some one of the pioneer parties that had started over the pass had made it—and could be terrorized into submission? I don’t know, I never will know. I have never understood the gangster mind—I simply know what to do about gangsters.

  As may be, they made a fatal mistake in tackling sweet and gentle Dora. She not only shot at the right instant, but she shot his gun out of his hand instead of taking the much easier target, his belly or chest. Important? Supremely so, for me. His gun was aimed at me. Had Dora shot him, instead of his gun, even if her shot killed him, his last reflex would probably— certainly, I think—have caused his fingers to tighten and I would have been hit. You can figure it from there in half a dozen ways, all bad.”

  Lucky accident? Not at all. Dora had him covered from the darkness of the kitchen. When he pulled that gun, she in­stantly changed her point of aim and got the gun. It was her first—and last—gunfight. But a true gunfighter, that girl! The hours we had spent polishing her skill paid off. But more rare than skill was the cool judgment with which she decided to try for the much more difficult target. I could not train her in that; it had to be born in her. Which it was—if you think back, her father made the same sort of correct split-second decision as his last dying act.

  It was seven more years before another wagon appeared in Happy Valley—three wagons traveling together, three families with children, true pioneers. We were glad to see them and I was especially happy to see their kids. For I bad been juggling eggs. Real eggs. Human ova.

  I was running out of time; our oldest kids were growing up.

  Minerva, you know all that the human race has learned about genetics. You know that the Howard Families are inbred from a fairly small gene pool—and that inbreeding has tended to clear them of bad genes—but you know also the high price that has been paid in defectives. Is still being paid, should add; everywhere there are Howards there are also sanctuaries for defectives. Nor is there any end to it; new unfavorable mutations unnoticed until they are reinforced is the price we animals must pay for evolution. Maybe there will be a cheaper way someday—there was not one on New Be­ginnings twelve hundred years ago.

  Young Zack was a husky lad whose voice was firmly bari­tone. His brother, Andy, was no longer a boy soprano in our family chorus although his voice still cracked. Baby Helen wasn’t such a baby any longer—hadn’t reached menarche, but as near as I could tell it would be any day, any day.

  I mean to say that Dora and I were having to think about it, forced to consider hard choices. Should we pack seven kids into the wagons and head back across the Rampart? If we made it, should we put the four oldest with the Magees or someone, then come home with the younger three? By our­selves? Or sing the praises of Happy Valley, its beauty and its wealth, and try to lead a party of pioneers back over the range and thereby avoid such crisis in the future?

  I had expected, too optimistically, that others would follow us almost at once—a year or two or three—since I had left a passable wagon trail behind me. But I’m not one to fume over spilled milk after the horse is stolen. What might have been was of no interest; the problem was what to do with our horny kids now that they were’ growing up.

  No point in talking to them about “sin” even if I were capable of such hypocrisy—which I am not, especially with kids. Nor could I have sold the idea. Dora would have been shocked and hurt, and her skills did not extend to lying con­vincingly. Nor did I want to fill our kids with such nonsense; their angelic mother was the happiest, most ever-ready lecher in Happy Valley—even, more so than I and the goats—and she never pretended otherwise.

  Should we relax and let nature take its ancient course? Accept the idea our daughters would presently (all too soon!) mate with our sons and be prepared to accept the price? Ex­pect at least one defective grandchild out of ten? I had no data on which to estimate the cost any closer than that, as Dora knew nothing about her ancestry and, while I did know a little about mine, I did not know enough. All I had was that old and extremely rough thumb rule.

 

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