The Girl With the Jade Green Eyes Read Online Free PDF Page B

brushed her cheek against its fabric. Others pinched him. One tried to pluck the hairs from his wrists, but there was nothing essentially feminine about their curiosity. In their faces he read admiration, delight, and—he could have sworn—the premonitory pride of ownership.
    Kyra voiced their possessiveness, calling to him, “They want to take you with us, Breedlove, but first they’d like to see you with your clothes off.”
    “I’ve gone as far as I’m going, Kyra. Call them back.”
    Kyra spoke once, sharply, and the females fell away reluctantly, moving toward the exhibits. The slender girl returned the coat, bending her knees in a dipping motion, in what he took to be a Kanabian curtsy, as she handed the garment to him. For a moment she stood facing him, hand on hips, and delivered her parting judgment, “ Cricket atelya .”
    Kyra stood apart on the mound, her arm over the shoulder of the boy. With obvious understanding of their purpose, the boy had taken Breedlove’s field glasses and was intently studying the rocky terrain to the southeast. The presence of the boy in the group aroused Breedlove’s curiosity. A well-muscled man would have contributed more to the expedition, however sophisticated its technology.
    He walked over to the pair and asked Kyra, “What’s his name?”
    “Karilet, which means ‘big oak.’ Usually we call him Crick.”
    Et at the end of a word apparently meant “big,” he deduced, and the women had called him a Cricket. Whatever it was, he was a big Crick.
    “What does Crick mean?”
    “In a general way it means ‘boy,’ or ‘little man.’ In your scientific language it might mean more accurately a sperm bank.”
    In their language, then, he was a big sperm bank. The term was dehumanizing.
    “What does atelya mean?”
    “ ‘Gorgeous,’ or ‘fantastic,’ or ‘wow.’ ”
    Then the inspection had not been as objective as he thought, he decided, looking at the boy now with an understanding of the child’s future function in the group.
    “Introduce me to him, Kyra.”
    Kyra took the binoculars from the boy’s hands and turned his face to Breedlove, introducing the ranger as urritha cricket Brreeedlove . In an instinctively male gesture, Breedlove extended his hand to the boy, who grabbed it in both his own and clung to it, looking up at Breedlove with a beginning hope, a longing, and finally a stark plea.
    “He needs a father, Kyra. May I show him how to fish before sundown?”
    “No. He must stay close to us.”
    The boy continued to cling to Breedlove’s hand, and the ranger was loathe to disengage the child. Kyra called over to the tall girl, “Flurea,” and the girl came. She tapped Crick’s wrist, and he released Breedlove’s hand. Flurea led him away.
    Despite their meticulous cropping of the grass, the Kanabians were not herbivores. With delicate mincing bites they ate the trout he cooked, bones and all, flavoring it with sprigs of clover they plucked from the ground. They relished the cheese, jams, and jellies they found in the C rations. They only tasted the canned meat and gave Crick all the chocolate bars, which he loved, but they only tossed the candy casually toward the boy. He was watched, but he was not doted on.
    After supper he gave them, through Kyra as interpreter, the standard park lecture on the geological formation of the area. They listened but asked no questions. Afterward he commented to Kyra about their lack of curiosity, at such a variance with her own, and she answered, “It is not their function to be curious. Besides, this is your planet, and they have the pride of the hungry poor who will not ogle diners at a feast to which they have not been invited.”
    The pathos inherent in her remark so stirred him he veered away from the subject to ask bluntly, “And what is your function?”
    “At the moment,” she said, “I function as a diplomat.”
    Her reference to the function of each individual and the disparity in their