Free Across a Billion Years by Robert Silverberg

Tom,” she said. “It’s just that Leroy scared me. And when nobody helped out—”
    “Are you going to complain to Dr. Schein about him?”
    She shook her head. “Leroy won’t bother me again. There’s no sense making a scandal out of it.”
    I admire Jan’s attitude. I also may as well admit here that I admire Jan, too. So far in these letters I’ve been a little sketchy about that. Part of it is because I’ve only been slowly discovering how interesting a girl Jan really is, as well as being attractive in a physical way and all that. The other part is—well, forgive me, Lorie—I’ve always been uneasy about discussing my love life with you. Not because it embarrasses me to share such things with you, but because I’m afraid of hurting you.
    There. It’s out. Though maybe I’ll blot this from the cube before I give it to you.
    What I’m trying to say is that I don’t want to touch on certain aspects of life that are closed to you on account of your condition. Like love and marriage and such. It’s bad enough that I can lead an active physical life, going places and doing things, and you can’t. But the whole social and emotional thing—dating, falling in love, taking out a temporary or a permanent marriage—you’re cut off from that, and it makes me queasy to remind you of it by talking about my own adventures with girls, which are adequate and numerous enough, even if Mom thinks that at my age I ought to be more serious with somebody.
    Isn’t that great? How tactfully I explain to you why it is that I don’t want to tell you certain things—even going out of my way to say that I don’t like reminding you of matters which I proceed to remind you of. Swell. I will certainly blot this section of the cube as soon as I can figure out some more roundabout way of making it clear why I’m vague about such stuff.
    Do you know why I’m more interested in Jan than I was at the beginning of this expedition?
    No, wise one, it isn’t because I’m getting hard up after all these weeks. It’s because she told me last week that she’s part non-human. Her grandmother was a Brolagonian.
    Somehow that makes her more exotic. And more desirable than if she were an ordinary Swede. I’ve always been fascinated by the slightly unusual.
    Brolagonians are humanoid aliens, you know, with shiny gray skins and more toes and teeth than we have. They are one of about six or seven alien races in the galaxy that are able to mate successfully with Homo sapiens, owing to extremely close parallel evolution. It takes a lot of DNA manipulation and other genetic surgery to bring about a fertile mating, but it can be done, and it is done, despite the agitation of the League for Racial Purity and other reactionary groups.
    Jan comes from a long line of diplomats. Her grandfather was our ambassador to Brolagon about sixty years ago and fell in love with a local girl. They married and had four children, and one of them was Jan’s father. Who married a fellow Swede, but the Brolagonian genes are in the family for keeps.
    Jan showed me some of the signs of her mixed blood. I blush to say I hadn’t noticed any of them before.
    “I have dark eyes,” she said. “Instead of blue ones to go with the blonde hair. That isn’t all that strange, really. But this is.” She opened her sandals. She has six toes on each foot. Lovely toes, too. But six. “I also have forty teeth,” she went on. “You can count them, if you don’t believe me.”
    “I’ll take it on faith,” I said, as she gave me a dental yawn.
    “My internal organs are also a little different. I don’t have a large intestine. Take that on faith, too. The Brolagonian digestive process is different from yours. Also I have the Brolagonian birthmark, which is genetically dominant and is found on all Brolagonians and also all mixed-breeds. It’s a very pretty birthmark, sort of geometrical and an interesting color, and if I ever get into trouble on a