scheme to another. And they were all flawed.
Sometimes her lust for knowledge got mixed up with her liking for people and her own physical wants. At the begin-ning of any relationship, people see what they want and hear what they want and take as clues what may be nothing more than accidental gibberish or cant. She knew that. On the other hand, it did help that Bill Hawkins was big and strong and nice looking. She allowed her warm thigh to brush his as he made a great show of studying the menu. Marianne was no intellectual yet, but she was a young woman of ambition, at a stage of her life when men who knew something she didn’t know were the sexiest men of all.
VII
All afternoon, after their awkward luncheon with Blake Red-field and his odd local friend, Hawkins and Marianne wan-dered through the corridors of the exotic city, unburdened by an itinerary. They visited the more famous tourist sights—a stroll through the crowded ice gardens, a ride on a sampan through steaming-cold canals lined with tourist shops—and they talked about what Hawkins knew of the worlds: about his earliest desire to be a full-fledged xeno-archaeologist, his vacation trips to Venus and Mars, his studies under Professor Forster. The history of Culture X was virtually a blank, he told her, although it was known that beings who spoke—or at least wrote—their language had visited Earth in the Bronze Age, while other references made it seem they had been around at least a billion years before that.
And the language of Culture X presented far more dif-ficulties than the layperson would believe, in this day of computer translation. For the computer translated according to rules that had been programmed into it, no matter how well it might understand what it was saying (and some com-puters were bright enough to understand a lot); different rules based on different assumptions yielded different meanings, and thus each translation was like the invention of a new language. What relationship Forster’s program for the speech of Culture X bore to the lost language, and es-pecially to its sounds, was a matter of continuing discussion.
“Forster discusses it?” Marianne asked shrewdly.
“Other people’s discussions,” Hawkins said, smiling. “He, of course, considers the matter closed.”
Evening came. Miraculously, they were both staying at the same luxurious hotel, and Marianne had not let Hawkins run out of things to talk about by dinner time, or even afterward.
“Come upstairs with me,” she said, when they’d put down their empty coffee cups.
“Well, of course I’ll ride up with you. Aren’t we both staying on the . . . ?”
“Oh shut up, Bill. Think about it a minute, if you want to—that’s all right, that’s the kind of person you are. Then say yes or no.” She smiled wickedly. “I prefer yes.”
“Well, of course.” He blushed. “I mean, yes.”
The Interplanetary’s rooms were small but lavish, with piles of soft cotton carpets covering woven-reed floors and screens of pierced sandalwood in the corners; warm yellow light, turned low, came through the myriad openings in the fretwork like patterned stars. In a gossamer net of light, wearing nothing, her limbs long and smooth and muscular, with glistening darkness flowing in her hair and shining in her eyes and touching the mysterious places of her body, Marianne was so beautiful Bill Hawkins could think of ab-solutely nothing more to say.
But much later, she started murmuring questions again. They passed the night in bouts of mutual interrogation.
“You are Mrs. Wong?” Randolph Mays asked the woman in the high-collared green silk dress.
She gave him a hard stare, then forced a sincere if un-accustomed smile. “Sir! I am very honored making your ac-quaintance, Sir Randolph Mays.”
“The honor is mine ,” said Mays, taking her small, mus-cular hand. “Do I understand that you are the owner of this handsome establishment?” He threw his
Sometimes her lust for knowledge got mixed up with her liking for people and her own physical wants. At the begin-ning of any relationship, people see what they want and hear what they want and take as clues what may be nothing more than accidental gibberish or cant. She knew that. On the other hand, it did help that Bill Hawkins was big and strong and nice looking. She allowed her warm thigh to brush his as he made a great show of studying the menu. Marianne was no intellectual yet, but she was a young woman of ambition, at a stage of her life when men who knew something she didn’t know were the sexiest men of all.
VII
All afternoon, after their awkward luncheon with Blake Red-field and his odd local friend, Hawkins and Marianne wan-dered through the corridors of the exotic city, unburdened by an itinerary. They visited the more famous tourist sights—a stroll through the crowded ice gardens, a ride on a sampan through steaming-cold canals lined with tourist shops—and they talked about what Hawkins knew of the worlds: about his earliest desire to be a full-fledged xeno-archaeologist, his vacation trips to Venus and Mars, his studies under Professor Forster. The history of Culture X was virtually a blank, he told her, although it was known that beings who spoke—or at least wrote—their language had visited Earth in the Bronze Age, while other references made it seem they had been around at least a billion years before that.
And the language of Culture X presented far more dif-ficulties than the layperson would believe, in this day of computer translation. For the computer translated according to rules that had been programmed into it, no matter how well it might understand what it was saying (and some com-puters were bright enough to understand a lot); different rules based on different assumptions yielded different meanings, and thus each translation was like the invention of a new language. What relationship Forster’s program for the speech of Culture X bore to the lost language, and es-pecially to its sounds, was a matter of continuing discussion.
“Forster discusses it?” Marianne asked shrewdly.
“Other people’s discussions,” Hawkins said, smiling. “He, of course, considers the matter closed.”
Evening came. Miraculously, they were both staying at the same luxurious hotel, and Marianne had not let Hawkins run out of things to talk about by dinner time, or even afterward.
“Come upstairs with me,” she said, when they’d put down their empty coffee cups.
“Well, of course I’ll ride up with you. Aren’t we both staying on the . . . ?”
“Oh shut up, Bill. Think about it a minute, if you want to—that’s all right, that’s the kind of person you are. Then say yes or no.” She smiled wickedly. “I prefer yes.”
“Well, of course.” He blushed. “I mean, yes.”
The Interplanetary’s rooms were small but lavish, with piles of soft cotton carpets covering woven-reed floors and screens of pierced sandalwood in the corners; warm yellow light, turned low, came through the myriad openings in the fretwork like patterned stars. In a gossamer net of light, wearing nothing, her limbs long and smooth and muscular, with glistening darkness flowing in her hair and shining in her eyes and touching the mysterious places of her body, Marianne was so beautiful Bill Hawkins could think of ab-solutely nothing more to say.
But much later, she started murmuring questions again. They passed the night in bouts of mutual interrogation.
“You are Mrs. Wong?” Randolph Mays asked the woman in the high-collared green silk dress.
She gave him a hard stare, then forced a sincere if un-accustomed smile. “Sir! I am very honored making your ac-quaintance, Sir Randolph Mays.”
“The honor is mine ,” said Mays, taking her small, mus-cular hand. “Do I understand that you are the owner of this handsome establishment?” He threw his
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