Flesh by Philip Jose Farmer

Author:Philip Jose Farmer
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2013-01-25T16:00:00+00:00

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Churchill did not sleep well that night. He could not rid himself of the ecstatic expression on Robin's face when she had said she hoped she would bear the Sunhero's child.

First, he cursed himself for not having guessed that she would have been among the one hundred virgins selected to make their debut during the rites. She was too beautiful, and her father was too prominent, for her to have been rejected.

Then he excused himself on the grounds that he really knew little of Deecee's culture. His own attitudes were too much those of his own time. He had treated her as if she were a girl of the early twenty-first century.

He cursed himself for having fallen in love with Robin. He was reacting more like a youth of twenty than a man of thirty-two - no, a man of eight hundred and thirty-two. A man who had traveled thousands of millions of miles and had made interstellar space his domain. Fallen for a girl of eighteen, who knew only a tiny section of Earth and a tiny section of time!

But Churchill was practical. A fact was a fact. And it was a fact that he wanted Robin Whitrow for his wife - or had, up to that moment last night when she had stunned him with her announcement.

For a while he hated Peter Stagg. He had always had a slight resentment against his captain, because Stagg was so tall and handsome and held a position which Churchill knew he was just as capable of holding. He liked and respected Stagg, but, being honest, he had admitted to himself that he was jealous.

It was almost unendurable to think that Stagg, as usual, had beaten him. Stagg was always first.

Almost unendurable.

As the night crept on, and Churchill rose from bed to smoke a cigar and pace back and forth, he forced himself to be frank with himself.

It was neither Stagg's fault nor Robin's that this had happened. And Robin certainly was not in love with Stagg. Stagg, poor devil, was doomed to a short but ecstatic life.

The immediate fact for Churchill to deal with was that he wanted to marry a woman who was going to bear another man's child. That neither she nor the father could be blamed was beside the point. What mattered was whether he wanted to marry Robin and to raise the child as his own.

Eventually, by lying still in bed and relaxing himself through yogoid techniques, he managed to go to sleep.

He woke about an hour after dawn and left his bedroom. A servant informed him that Whitrow had gone to his offices downtown and that Robin and her mother had left for the temple. The women should be back in two hours, if not sooner.

Churchill asked after Sarvant, but he had not as yet appeared.

Churchill ate breakfast with some of the children. They asked him to tell them a story about his trip to the stars. He described the incident on Wolf when the crew,

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