The Girl With the Jade Green Eyes by John Boyd Page B

Space Needle Restaurant.”
    She dropped his hand. The vivacious, bantering girl had returned. “There’s nothing more to say, Breedlove. I know when your second pangs of love struck—while you were faking a snooze on the airplane.”
    “But you weren’t even looking at me.”
    “I saw your leg muscles tense up.”
    For her first night out on earth, Kyra chose a dress on which Matilda had penned a note, “For dinner and cocktails. Wear with pearl choker.” Burgundy-colored velvet underlaid an outer skirt of voile, which flared from her waist to slightly below her knees. Crimped and sitting snugly, the tight, high waist forced her wide-cleft breasts upward to swell above the low arc of her neckline. Around her neck three strands of pearls gleamed to match the highlights of her hair.
    He felt clumsy and earth-bound around her and drew comfort from the knowledge that her aura of femininity and lightness would have made the most epicene escort appear graceless. His self-consciousness left him, however, when they followed the headwaiter to a booth in the soaring restaurant. He became both anonymous and proud, for her entrance was a royal progress drawing all eyes from him.
    Her hair caught the attention of the diners, her eyes, luminous in the glow of the table lamps, held it; and her swaying walk drew the gazes after her. They were seated and he ordered martinis. The drinks came, he toasted her, and she lifted her glass in abstract acknowledgment of his salute. The panorama of city and harbor lights held her enthralled.
    She tasted the drink, then sipped it, and continued to gaze in wonderment at the lights. Her enchantment communicated itself to him, and he sat in silence, covertly watching her as she watched the slowly revolving landscape.
    “Weren’t there city lights on Kanab?”
    “None like yours. We lived in tribal communities which followed the springs and autumns from one hemisphere to the other, sowing in one and reaping in the other.”
    “You were migrant farmers, then?”
    “We didn’t plow or tend herds. The continents of Kanab were vast arboreal parks. We tended our forests and they fed us.”
    Distracted by the lights, she gave only partial attention to his questions, answering with no trace of the melancholy that memory sometimes stirred in her.
    “What did you fly in?”
    “Vehicles that could hover, as your helicopters. Entire families moved in them. But they were made in parts and easily assembled, so there was no need for great manufacturing centers… Oh, it was a joy to be soaring over the great forests, to settle and plant and prune. We ate only nuts and fruits. We became a race of vegetarians.”
    “You seem to enjoy the meat you’ve eaten here.”
    “In the early days we were meat eaters. It’s surprising how appetites hang on. Tonight I’d like a thick, juicy steak, rare.”
    “If you had no herds, where’d you get meat?”
    “From other tribes. In ancient times, when the planet grew too crowded and the forests could not support us all, we fought over territory. After we learned to fly and developed seasonal methods of birth control, we reverted to a vegetable diet.”
    “You mean the victors ate the vanquished in your tribal wars?”
    He knew the answer from his mother, but he wished to judge her attitude for himself. She answered easily, “Of course. Otherwise the flesh would have been wasted.”
    “That’s cannibalism.”
    “Don’t sound so shocked. If you have a name for it, you’ve done it. You’d make a terrific pot roast, Breedlove.”
    Her attention was focusing on him now. He called the waiter and ordered a Chateaubriand, rare.
    “What was this seasonal birth control?” he asked.
    “Our biological urges were controlled by the angle of our sun. When the planet’s tilt brought deep summer, our mating season began, so we tricked nature by flying to the winter hemisphere… Tell me, Breedlove, why is such a handsome man as you shy around women?”
    “I don’t