“Any future can be!” she replied, laughing at me. “If it were not so, if it were fixed, it would be a past. You say a foolish thing. How can a future be impossible? Do you hold the gods’ powers in your hands?”

“No. I do not. But I speak of things I cannot or will not do, Olikea.” Now that I had become determined to have this talk with her, what I had to say sounded colder and crueler than ever. But cruelest of all, I decided, would be to let her labor on under a delusion of a bright future with me. “Olikea, my father has discarded me from his household. I doubt I can ever return there as a respected son, and I will not return there as anything less. But even if I could, I could not take you with me. He would not accept you. Do you understand what I am saying?”

“I do not understand why you think I would wish to go there.” She was genuinely puzzled. “Or why I would allow you to take me there. Am I a sack that you would carry off with you?”

I perceived I had to be even blunter. “I can never marry you, Olikea. You can never stand beside me as my—” I searched for a Speck word and found I did not know one. I used the Gernian instead. “Wife. You can never be my wife.” She leaned up on top of me to look down into my face. “What is that? Wife?” I smiled sadly. “Wife is the woman who will live with me for the rest of my life. The woman who will share my home and fortunes. The woman who will have my children.”

“Oh, I will have my children,” she assured me calmly. She lay back beside me. “A daughter, it is hoped. But I do not like your home, out there in the bare lands. You may keep it. As for fortune, I have my own fortune, so I do not need yours. You may keep it.”

Her calm assurance that she would have my child unnerved me. “I don’t love you, Olikea,” I burst out. “You are beautiful and you are seductive and you are kind to me. But I do not think we truly know one another. I do not think we share anything beyond this passion for the moment.”

“I share food with you,” she pointed out reasonably. She stretched and then settled more comfortably beside me. “Food. Mating.” She sighed, pleased with herself. “If a woman gives these things to a man, then he is fortunate and he should not ask for more from her. Because,” she added in a tone between teasing and warning, “more than those things, he will not get. Though he may earn her displeasure by asking.”

The last was plainly a warning. I let the conversation die away. Her head was pillowed on my shoulder and her hair smelled sweet yet musky. I decided that there were great differences between our people, greater than I had imagined. There was still the one thing that I could not keep silent on.