Fire Time by Poul Anderson Page B

unpack the food she had brought, bread, butter, cheese, jam.
He is pleasant,
she thought.
Damn good-looking, too.
As she was plugging the coffee maker into her wheeler’s capacitor, he startled her: ‘I have not had a minute to say this before, Miss Conway, given your whirlwind procedure. But I know your brother Donald. He asked me to send his best greetings.’
    ‘Huh?’ She sprang from her hunkering position. ‘You do? How is he? Where’s he bound for? Why hasn’t he written?’
    ‘He was in excellent shape the last time I saw him,’ Dejerine replied. ‘We had spent quite a few hours talking, in the course of days. You see, when I was assigned here, I – you say? – I looked up whoever I could get from Ishtar, in hopes of a briefing. That happened to be Don.’ His smile was quite captivating, easy, warming the whole face, accompanied by a regard which was not a stare but an appreciation. ‘He told me considerable about you.’ He turned serious as quickly as she herself might. ‘Where is he posted? I know only that it is to the front. Please don’t worry too much about him. In every way, equipment, training, organization, we are far superior to the enemy. And as for the rest, he was busy and preoccupied; he admitted he hates to write letters, and so he entrusted me with his word. I did make him promise he would write soon.’
    Jill sighed. ‘Thanks a billion. That’s Don, for sure.’ She returned to the coffeepot. ‘Let’s save the details for later. Like this evening, if you don’t mind, we can land on my parents. My sister and her husband would want to hear too.’
    ‘As you wish,’ he said with a slight bow. He had the sensenot to try to help when he would obviously get in her way. Instead he admired their surroundings.
    The grove stood on a rolling plain. It was chiefly tall red-topped swordleaf, though domebud added splashes of bright yellow. The turf shaded by the trees was that low-growing, tough lia which humans called dromia. The spring issued from beneath a boulder spotted orange with clingwort, ran down in a rivulet, and soon vanished into the soil. Nevertheless it nourished a wide area, for many kinds of shrubs grew around the coppice. Further out, sward gave place to waist-high fallowblade and head-high plume, waves of dull gold across kilometers. The wind blew warm and dry, bearing scorchy odors, awakening a thousand rustlings above the faint gurgle of the water.
    ‘Do you know the names of all these plants?’ Dejerine asked.
    ‘The common breeds,’ Jill said. ‘I’m no botanist. However’ – she pointed around – ‘most of what you see is assorted kinds of lia. It’s as varied and important as grass is on Earth. Bushes– That little fellow yonder is bitterheart; the Ishtarians use it for seasoning and a tonic, and it seems to have medicinal properties for humans as well. But watch out for the scraggly thing, night thief. It’ll make an Ishtarian sick, and kill you or me if we eat it. There’s no firebloom around here – needs more moisture – but the thunderweed gets really spectacular in the rainy season, which we’re heading into; and then in spring, the pandarus.’
    ‘The what?’
    Jill giggled. ‘I forgot you wouldn’t know. That’n. It draws entomoids to pollinate it by duplicating their sex attractants, both sexes. Quite a spectacle.’
    For an instant she regretted her remark. Dejerine might take it as an invitation. He simply inquired, ‘Do you use translations of the native names?’
    ‘Seldom,’ she answered, relieved. She could fend off a pass, but–
Well, if there are going to be any, I prefer to initiate them.
Wryly:
Not that I’d win trophies, of whatever shape, in a contest for femme fatale of the year.
‘Most aren’t translatable – how would you say “rose” in Sehalan? – andwe aren’t geared to pronounce the originals properly. So we invent our own. Including “lia”, by the way. The first scientific work on the family was done by