David Brin - Earth

The lead Ra Boy stepped closer. “That a slur on my stamina, oh physical lover of fresh mud?”

Remi shrugged, it was too late to do anything but go with it. “Fresh mud or fecund fern, they’re all out of reach to one like you, whose only wet licks come from his own sweaty palm.”

More appreciative laughter from Roland and Crat hardly made up for the lead Ra Boy’s seething wrath, turning him several shades darker. I didn’t know I’d strike such a nerve with that one , Remi thought. Apparently this guy had a lousy sex life. Some victories aren’t worth the price .

“So you’re the manly man, Joe Settler?” Ra Boy sneered. “You must be Mister Testo. An Ag-back with a stacked stock, and whoremones for all Indiana.”

Here it comes . Remi foresaw no way to avoid exchanging Net codes with this character, which in turn would lead to a meeting in some dark place, with no neighborhood watch busybodies to interfere.

With a small part of his mind, Remi realized the encounter had built up momentum almost exactly along the positive feedback curve described in class by Professor Jameson… bluster and dare and counterbluff, reinforced by a desperate need to impress one’s own gang… all leading step by step to the inevitable showdown. It would be an interesting observation — if that knowledge had let Remi prevent anything, but it hadn’t. As it was, he wished he’d never even learned any of that shit.

He shrugged, accepting the Ra worshipper’s gambit. “Well, I’m already man-ugly enough, I don’t have to pray for more from a great big gasball in the sky. I admit, though, your prayers sure look like they’ve been—”

Remi realized, mid-insult, that both groups were turning toward a sound — a new set of interlopers had entered the hedge garden. He turned. Along the path at least a dozen figures in cowled white gowns approached, slim and graceful. Their pendants, unlike the Ra Boys’, were patterned in the womblike Orb of the Mother.

“NorA ChuGa,” one of the Ra Boys said in disgust. Still, Remi noticed the guys in both gangs stood up straighter, taking up masculine poses they must have thought subtle, rather than pretentious. Feminine laughter cut off as the newcomers suddenly noticed the male gathering ahead of them. But their rapid pace along the path scarcely tapered. The North American Church of Gaia hardly ever slowed for anybody.

“Good afternoon, gentlemen,” several girls in the front rank said, almost simultaneously. Even shaded by their cowls, Remi recognized several of them from the halls of Quayle High. “Can we interest you in donating to the Trillion Trees Campaign?” one of the dedicants asked, coming face to face with Remi. And he had to blink past a moment’s fluster — she was heartbreakingly beautiful.

In her palm she held out brightly colored leaflet chips for any of the boys who would take one. There was an outburst of derisive laughter from the other side of the trail. These were surely young, naive Gaians if they thought to hit up Ra Boys for reforestation money!

Settlers, on the other hand, weren’t as ideologically incompatible. More importantly, it struck Remi that this offered a possible out.

“Why yes, sisters!” he effused. “You can interest us. I was just saying to my Settler friends here that tree planting will have to be our very first priority when we get to Patagonia. Soon as it’s warmed up down there. Yup, planting trees…”

Crat was still exchanging glares with the craziest looking Ra Boy. Grabbing his arm, Remi helped Roland tow him amidst the gliding tide of white-garbed girls. All the way, Remi asked enthusiastic questions about current Gaian projects, ignoring the taunts and jeers that followed them from the harsh-faced young sun worshippers. The Ra Boys could say whatever they wanted. On the scale of coups in tribal warfare, scoring with girls beat winning an insult match, hands down. Not that actual scoring was likely here. Hardcore Gaian women tended to be hard to impress. This one, for example.

“… don’t you see that hardwood reforestation in Amazonia is far more important than planting conifers down in Tierra del Fuego or Antarctica? Those are new ecologies, still delicate and poorly understood. You Settlers are much too impatient. Why, by the time those new areas are well understood and ready for humans to move in, the main battle, to save the Earth , could be lost!”

“I see your point,” Remi agreed. Anxious to make good their getaway, he and Roland nodded attentively until the Ra Boys were out of sight. Then Remi kept on smiling and nodding because of the speaker’s heart-shaped face and beautiful complexion. Also, he liked what he could make out of her figure under the gown. At one point he made a show of depositing the trash from his pocket in a brown recycle bin, giving the impression that litter gathering was his routine habit, and winning a brief approving pause in her lecture.

When they passed a row of hooded cancer plague survivors in wheelchairs, he slipped some dollar coins into their donation cups, getting another smile in reward.

Encouraged, he wound up accepting a pile of chip brochures, until at last she began running low on breath as they passed near the superconducting rails of the cross-park rapi-trans line. Then came a really lucky moment. A newly arriving train spilled youngsters in school uniforms onto the path, shouting and dashing about. The cascade of children broke apart the tight-knit squadron of Gaians. Remi and the young woman of his dreams were caught in the whirling eddies and pushed to one side under one of the rapitrans pillars. They looked at each other, and shared laughter. Her smile seemed much warmer when she was off her planet-saving pitch.

But Remi knew it would only be a moment. In seconds, the others would reclaim her. So, as casually as he could, he told her he would like to see her personally and asked for her net code to arrange a date.

She, in turn, met his gaze with soulful brown eyes and asked him sweetly to show his vasectomy certificate.

“Honestly,” she said with apparent sincerity. “I just couldn’t be interested in a man so egotistical he insists, in a world of ten billion people, that his genes are desperately needed. If you haven’t done the right thing, can you point to some great accomplishment or virtue, to justify clinging to… ?”

Her words trailed off in perplexity, addressing his back as Remi seized his friends’ arms and rapidly departed.

“I’d show her somethin’ more important than genes!” Crat snarled when he heard the story. Roland was only slightly more forgiving. “Too damn much theory crammed into that pretty little head. Imagine, invading a guy’s privacy like that! Tell you one thing, that’s one bird who’d be happier, and a whole lot quieter as a farm wife.”

“Right!” Crat agreed. “Farm wife’s got what life’s about. There’s plenty room in Patagonia for lots of kids. Overpop’s just propa-crap—”

“Oh, shut up!” Remi snapped. His face still burned with shame, made worse by the fact that the girl obviously hadn’t even known what she was doing. “You think I care what a bleeding NorA ChuGa thinks? They only teach ’em how to be — what ?.”

Roland was holding his wristwatch in front of Remi’s face, tapping its tiny screen. Lights rippled and the machine sang a warning tone.

Remi blinked. They were being scanned again, and it wasn’t just someone’s True-Vu this time, but real eavesdropping. “Some tokomak’s got a big ear on us,” Roland reported irritably.

It was just one thing after another! Remi felt like a caged tiger. Hell, even tigers had more privacy nowadays, in the wildlife survival arks, than a young guy ever got here in Bloomington. The park used to be a place where you could get away, but not anymore !