Collected: The Tales of Charles Dye by Charles Dye

Author:Charles Dye [Dye, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jerry eBooks
Published: 2020-02-21T21:00:00+00:00

Kathryn watched Melandra lying on one arm on the bed untwine a rose from among the soft shimmering silver waves of her hair. Someone had tagged her with the name Melandra because it sounded most like her own, which was unpronounceable. They were in the guest room which had been turned over to her, relaxing after the big evening. Kathryn’s intensive work training Melandra to speak English was completed and tonight’s banquet, three weeks after the arrival, had celebrated their achievement. Melandra now spoke well enough for the work of exchanging scientific information with top scientists in various fields to begin. The rapidity of their progress still left Kathryn amazed, even though she realized it was in part due to special recording and analyzing instruments carried in the spaceship.

She fought off a feeling of envy for the hundredth time that evening. Kathryn had known admiration and compliments—but no such wordless longing as she saw men struggling with as they watched the changing features of Melandra. She shook her head as she remembered—remembering, too, the dim resentment and hatred that had struggled with her affection for the alien and her clinically objective evaluation of the situation.

She liked Melandra. She could not help it, even when she wanted not to like her. Used to the smallness, the cold and reserved relations of most women of her society to each other, she could not help contrasting the frankness of Melandra to their hypocrisy.

With a sudden strong effort Kathryn pushed back the gnawing feelings of envy. Such feelings were unworthy of her. She leaned forward in her chair, continuing her conversation with Melandra. “But I still don’t understand why they sent a woman on such an important mission. Wouldn’t a man be stronger, have a better chance of survival?”

Melandra’s reply raised an inexplicable wave of uneasiness in her. “But I have mentioned there are fewer men than women on my planet. In fact, there are four or five women to every man. Any woman who has a . . . what you call a ‘husband’ . . . like I had for a while, is considered very lucky.”

“Four or five.” Kathryn was thoughtful. “I hadn’t realized there was that kind of discrepancy. Your whole society must be organized more differently than I had thought.” She contemplated Melandra’s beauty. “I don’t wonder you had a husband!”

The green eyes opened wide. “But I was lucky.”

Some vague alarm filtered through Kathryn’s mind and was thrust back impatiently. “How did it come about—this shortage of men, I mean?”

Melandra sighed, fingering the black nightgown Kathryn had made her a present of, “It was a . . . a piece of great stupidity. There was a . . . what you would call experiment . . . an installation all over the planet of a new lighting system using . . . well . . . I won’t go into it, a sort of nuclear radiation, only different from the type you are working with. They had tested it for

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