The Strangers of Kindness by Terry Hickman

Surgeon could do it.”
    “No question.”
    She studied his face for a moment. “Theo, what are you going to do?”
    His eyes followed Joseph chasing Sissy around the pool. “I don’t know. Go to Vegas, go to work for a hotel or restaurant or something I guess.”
    “Is that what you really want to do?”
    “I don’t know what I want to do.” He stirred unhappily. “That’s a lie. I do know. I just don’t want to say it.”
    “Why?”
    He looked at her sadly. “Oh, I don’t want to say that either.”
    “Haven’t we been through enough together to talk honestly? I’d trust you with my life, Theo.”
    He tapped his fork in an awkward rhythm. “Well, you think you could use a farm hand on your place?”
    Her face brightened. “You’d come and work on my farm?”
    “Sure. You’re a pretty good boss.”
    She got serious. “You don’t have to do farm labor. They need teachers, too, and their rules are different. You have to pass a test—you could teach English, with your knowledge of books.”
    “You think so?” His expression changed. She saw hope germinate. “Teaching . . . I’d like that, I think. And—maybe it’d leave me some time to try writing.” He glanced outside at the kids in the pool. “Somebody should tell their story.” His eyes were fierce. “Somebody should tell it all, what the New U.S.A.is doing. Think I could do it?”
    “I know you could. You can’t waste yourself digging dirt. Besides, Theo . . . I don’t want to hire you.”
    “Oh.”
    “I want to marry you.”
    He boggled at her. “I thought you didn’t want to get married.”
    She appealed to the ceiling for help. “God, why did you give them such great eyelashes and such weak eyes! I didn’t want anybody else telling me who to marry! Men are like pumpkins,” she added, smiling sidelong. “I want to pick my own.” She doodled with her finger on the table. “So, what do you say?  

 
    The Wedding Present
     
    “. . . sank to the bottom of that awful green sea, my dears, the very bottom. All I saved were five nalshas , fortunately the best one among them,” the speaker concluded, retracting its siphon from the communal tea bowl with a sigh to gesture at the survivor. It was a little, fat, clear glass bowl with an iridescent green film limning its inner surface. The molecules of the film were patterned to resonate with its maker’s spirit.
    This Waiting Party for the tale-teller Pasha Sands, as it was known on Earth, enjoyed the most sanctified and spectacular hilltop on their home planet. High above them the leaves of the orange-fly trees pattered together with a music like chimes. The bald knob of hill crowned by the Attendance Pavilion looked over a vast valley of purple, red and orange vegetation, woven through with flights of arrow-birds, alive with the calls of myriad plants and animals.
    A path wound from the open-air, marble pavilion, down the hill and around a curve. Past their view, the path ended in a clump of blue fur trees. There nestled Geilsharah’s Temple where traditionally Geilsharah would receive the emppakka offering and pass judgment upon it.
    Each of Pasha’s three friends sensed the pleasure it felt at their loyalty, its distress at having no offering, and deeper still in its vibrations, a puzzling excitement and joy.
    The guest to the left swirled a tendril around in the bowl and waved a cynical eye-stalk at the tale-teller. “But you lost the emppakka offering.”
    Pasha Sands beamed at them, avoiding the somber interruption. “It took no time to adjust my buoyancy to the water,” it continued smugly, patting its bulbous middle with affection.
    “Yes, yes, we all know you keep yourself in shape—”
    “And surprisingly little time for the waves to wash me and my nalshas ashore. And you’ll never guess! The sea was lined with silicon!”
    “No.” Bald astonishment.
    “Silicon?” Suspicious. “What form?”
    “Granules. Acres and acres. A wide, lush, undulating ribbon,