Nest of Worlds by Marek S. Huberath Page A

has great legs, as you told me, then why doesn’t she wear black tights like other girls?”
    “He told you I have great legs?” asked Ra Mahleiné.
    “I might have said something like that,” Gavein confessed.
    Ra Mahleiné hmphed. “A few times I put on things like that. It was back in Lavath. And he told me that was the reason he had been avoiding me. The bastard didn’t want to marry me because of the tights. He wanted me all to himself.”
    “I’m not just talking about legs,” said Zef. “Why don’t you do your hair in thirty-six braids, and why doesn’t he have a comb like mine?”
    “I could shave my head on the sides, all right,” said Gavein. “But where your comb is, that’s where I’m thinnest. There wouldn’t be a lot to look at.”
    “My hair falls out too, but with a little egg white or sugar it stands up fine and looks like I have more.”
    “And I’d hate for my wife to tie her hair up into a hundred knots. It’s soft, wonderful hair.”
    “You complain it tickles your nose,” said Ra Mahleiné.
    “In braids it would be worse. A braid is stiff, it can put an eye out.”
    “You both dress like mice,” said Zef. “And then some dimwit broad gives you a hard time. People like that judge others by their clothes.”
    “In Lavath, people dress plainly. Protective coloration.”
    Zef sighed. “Maybe you’re right. That’s a style too, I suppose.” He got up from the armchair to stick something to the door. “I have to do this, with the gum, for my mother. When she sees it, she’ll feel that the world has returned to normal and that maybe you are no longer the finger of doom.”
    He sat again and sighed.
    “You were going to say something else, before,” Gavein said.
    “Yes. It’s little Laila. They called from the hospital today.”
    “More bad news?” Gavein didn’t believe in Edda’s theory, of course, but all this trouble on the heels of trouble did seem to go beyond coincidence.
    “Depends on how you look at it. When she was examined, they found she was pregnant.”
    “But she’s . . . twelve at most,” Ra Mahleiné exclaimed, looking up with surprise.
    “What are you talking about? She’s sixteen, just small.”
    “And?”
    “Isn’t it obvious?”
    “The father . . .”
    “The father is me. I was the first on the scene. Earthworm tried his luck, but tried elsewhere after he got a knuckle sandwich for his efforts, and radio earphones as a consolation prize. Beanpole tried too, but with no success, so he didn’t cost me anything.”
    “She’s that much of a charmer? She seems so . . . nondescript,” blurted Gavein.
    “But mysterious, wrapped in all those white rags. She has to sit all the time, because everything hurts when she lies down.”
    “You can’t even see if she’s pretty,” Gavein protested.
    “She’s pretty. And she’ll be pretty on the top half, too, after they stick the skin back on. You can’t see it now.”
    Ra Mahleiné sniffed her disapproval. She didn’t speak, not wanting to lose count, so it wasn’t clear whether it was Zef’s notion of feminine beauty she disapproved of or his way of expressing it.
    “What will become of you two?”
    “What has to. I’ll get her written into my passport as my wife, though she’s white. Just as you did with Magdalena. You impressed the hell out of me: a black man with a white woman, unheard of in Davabel. A red man with a white woman, that’s not as biff, but it’s something, don’t you think?”
    “Definitely.”
    “But isn’t she too young to be married?” asked Ra Mahleiné.
    “A white woman is never too young.”
    Ra Mahleiné guffawed at that.
    “In Davabel, I meant,” said Zef, embarrassed. “I’ll tell old Mass that the girl’s moving in with me. He’ll be glad, because he hardly has room as it is. And my mother pays no attention to classifications.”
    “I have a problem too,” said Gavein after a pause.
    “Sexual counseling is on 5667 Avenue, a twenty-minute