Zuminski said, “Wonderful, to see something alive that can’t talk.”

She laughed, and he started with a grin—just a cockeyed lurch of the lips and raised eyebrows. She thought they would make slow love, maybe try out the lighter gravity a bit, do some stunts. He took his time, and she thought they would kiss and grin and joke, but as their clothes fell she came up like thunder, her need outpacing style. She put the tender moves away and got into the fever of it. So did he. Some wild moves, perspiring and heart thumping, a fast bonanza. Then long slow drifting, maybe the best part of all. It was outside of time, boundless as the ocean. The only way to get back to the Cambrian, warm salty waters, awash in time, endless. Nothing was separate, everything joined together. The ebb and flow of day and night were like the winking of a great eye. Making love was, among all humans had, the most profound form of nostalgia.

Since college days, it had always been a big turn-on for her to look over the shoulder of a lover into the foliage of a tree. They had started on a plot of grass, where others could not see them. As soon as the fever left them—though she knew they weren’t nearly done—they moved to a less obvious part of the long greenhouse, near the workbenches, shielded from view.

As they stood Zuminski took her in his arms and said, “You… you don’t have to return to Earth on the next Aldrin, do you?”

“I’ll have to ask my husband.”

He stopped dead still, mouth open. “You are—”

“No, just kidding. Assuming you’re not married either?”

“No, am not. You have strange way of bring up subject—”

“Come on, it was a joke!” She started laughing at him, throwing up her hands—and slipped on the wet floor. She started to get up from under a table, reached for the edge, glanced to the side—and stopped laughing.

Fraq’s filmed eyes stared out at her.

She jerked away, rolling on the slick floor. “Ack—ack—”

“What?” He knelt—and froze.

Rachel stared at the… body. Fraq? No, it looked like Fraq—but it wasn’t really, she saw. It was much smaller, the size of a large dog. But it looked exactly like a smaller Fraq lying on its side. Some of the plant feeder tubes snaked down and attached to the body at pale-yellow sockets.

“What… is it?” she managed.

“You said once, was big puzzle for Earthside biologists, how Fraq and Ythri reproduce. Not clear if birdy ones uses eggs or…” He raised his eyebrows. “Looks like, by budding.”

They went back to the habitat, filing in behind the others; the cleanup was done. Silently they made their way to Zuminski’s Guy Thing room, which Rachel thought of as the proper place for spittin’, cussin’, and scratchin’ in peace. Thinkin’, too, as she had learned in her Deep South days. They poured some Martian wine—incredibly, one of the horticulturists had made a decent one, a rosé—and sat.