Once upon a time there was a woman who believed that the Sun rose when her husband got up in the morning, and that it set when he came home for his evening meal. The husband was careful to time his activities to fit her belief, although he often found it very inconvenient.
At last, as one might have expected, a day came when the husband was unavoidably delayed and did not come home until almost five o'clock in the morning. To his astonishment, he found that all the flowers in his front garden were shriveled and dead. He went around to the back of the house and found that his vegetables were in the same condition.
"Wife! Wife!" he shouted, wringing his hands in his distress. "Some terrible plague has struck our gardens during the night!" The woman looked at him in amazement, shaking her head. "Why, husband," she asked mildly, "what did you expect, with the Sun blazing down on them all night long?"
—Shavvy teaching fable
It had been a very pleasant week indeed. Coyote had enjoyed himself thoroughly. The Shavvy woman assigned to him as guide had taken him everywhere, and shown him everything, and they had gotten along like old friends. She had taken him to see a Shavvy altar-maker at work and had sat with him explaining each step of the process, from the rough hewing of the block of nishia-bella wood, and the hollowing out of a part of the top to hold earth for the planting of the giant fern, to the carving of the Shavvy emblem in high relief on the altar's front face. She had explained the emblem to him—it was the Tree and the Web, along which one Searched and did one's Choosing—and once it was pointed out to him, he saw that it was everywhere—even scratched on the Castle walls.
She had taken him to a Shavvy breakfast in the forest and encouraged him to join in the grave and elegant circle-dances that followed. When he had tripped over his own big feet she had laughed, but she had held his hand tightly and stayed with him when he began again.
She had told him Shavvy stories, pleasant fables about the adventures of pious fools all come to grief in the end, or puzzle stories where one meaning was hidden inside another and that one in yet another until his head ached. She had sung him Shavvy songs; long, intricate ballads that told stories or hid the instructions for the Shavvy telekinetic techniques, and simple hymns of utter ecstasy.
She had taken him down to the ocean's edge to sit on the sand and watch while Drussa Silver, surrounded by dozens of her flock in holiday tunics, had danced those same circle-dances far out on the surface of the waves, as unconcerned by the fathoms of water beneath their feet as he was by the tons of earth on which he stood. He had sat fascinated, watching them, too awed even for envy, thinking how like magnificent great birds of plumage they looked, dipping and bending among the waves in their tunics of emerald green and deepest azure blue. When the sun struck them, gold shattered against them again and again, like a gong of light, and broke into a million coin-flecks on the water.
He had even tried, when his guide teased him, to go out onto the water himself, and had gotten thoroughly soaked in the course of his foolishness, so that both he and the woman had finally rolled helpless with laughter through the surf like children and ended up on the beach covered with salt and sand and ropes of seaweed. They had been miserable when it all dried out, his hair and beard had been like a helmet of itching brass, and he had never had so welcome a bath as the one that followed that expedition. But it had been worth it.
Everything about their time together had been a delight, up to this moment. He had learned enormous amounts about the Shavvies, solemnly taking miles and miles of scholarly notes, he had had tremendous fun, and he had not had one moment's unease. Up to this moment. Now he stood and stared at her, and he had no idea what he was going to do next.
It wasn't that he was unaccustomed to having women ask him to take them to bed. He was fully accustomed to that. He was accustomed to giving a straightforward yes or a straightforward no, and when it was yes he was accustomed to seeing to it that they didn't regret having asked him. What he was not accustomed to was hemming and hawing and shuffling his feet like a ten-year-old caught wetting his bed, which was what he was doing now.
"Citizen," the woman said to him, her face betraying her own bewilderment at his behavior, "whatever is the matter? You need only say no, and we'll spend this evening in another way. It's not important, my friend—don't distress yourself so!"
Coyote swallowed hard and tried to think of some graceful way to do this. Worst of all was the idea that she might be feeling that he just pure and simply didn't want her, and that wasn't true. She was a lovely lady, and he was honored by her invitation. But there was a certain problem of self-image here that wasn't easy for him to handle.
"Citizen?" she asked wonderingly. "Have I offended you? Perhaps your customs in these matters are different ... "
And that did it. Be-damned with his self-image; he couldn't have her thinking she was in some way at fault.
"Look here," he said slowly, "I'm honored. I'm delighted. You must realize that loving you would be such a pleasure for me ... The problem is not in what I want to do, but in what I am able to do."
He saw her eyebrows go up, and went on hastily.
"No, no," he assured her, "it's not like it sounds. The difficulty is ... blast it all, Norda, I'm too old and too set in my ways to take up loving ladies in a synthowood box seven by five by three-and-a-half feet! Not only am I not sure I'm capable of the gymnastics involved, I'm not sure that claustrophobia wouldn't put an end to the whole thing before it even got started. There've been a few episodes in sleeping bags in my time, and one interesting sequence in a rocket ejectopod, but in all those cases I was out under the open sky, you see. Confined, yes, but confined in the open. This other business is something—"
She was laughing, and he didn't blame her. He sounded like a comset massplay, with some fool dithering about not being in the mood unless the bedsheets were pink.
"I know," he said miserably. "I do know how ridiculous it sounds, but do you really want to chance it? Assuming I have the guts even to try after all this preliminary speechmaking?"
She stepped right up to him, took his hands, and drew him close, her eyes dancing.
"Coyote Jones," she said, "you are worrying about a non-problem."
"I assure you—"
"Stop!"
He stopped.
"Do you think," she asked, still laughing, "that we Shavvies sleep in those grotesque banks of furniture drawers? We don't use the sleeping-slots, Citizen, we sleep on mats on our floors, if the weather is bad, and out of doors all the rest of the time."
"But wait ... " Coyote pulled away from her and held her off gently so that he could think. "What about the ferns?" he demanded. "What about the infamous narcotic fumes they give off at night, driving the sleeper mad? I don't think I'd be much use in an oxygen mask, either, friend, if you want to know the truth."
"That's all nonsense," she said. "A tale they tell for children and the ignorant. There's no danger from the ferns—they give off nothing but their own pure essence and perfume. The only drugged air on this planet is that piped into the sleeping-slots."
"You're joking!"
"Not at all." She chuckled and moved back into the circle of his arms, burying her face against her chest. "The air in the sleeping-slots is provided by the central computers as a public utility, and is an integral part of the government's birth-control program. It contains an anaphrodisiac, to keep the population down."
He couldn't believe it. He looked down at the top of her head, took a handful of thick dark braids, and tugged gently. "You are joking," he said again.
"I'm not," she said firmly. "Lie with me, Citizen, and we lie under the stars, out in the forests. Now answer me yes or no, please."
He thought of the miserable nights he'd already spent, shut up like a sardine in a synthowood can. He thought of what he might have missed had she not been a woman of such good sense and patience. And he gave her a fervent yes and followed her off into the sunset, full of a high good humor and ready for whatever might need doing.