CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX – A DEPARTURE

Disgusted by Aurora's behaviour with Umbaga, Melvin goes off...

Aurora felt, in no way typical of her normal self, all of a dither.

Melvin had stormed out and she had no idea what he was going to do, but part of her had always seen him as a bit of a loose cannon and she knew that loose cannons are, at best, unpredictable. And she had just had the most enjoyable lustful physical session with Umbaga, who as a lover made Melvin look unnaturally sophisticated and controlled. But then, Umbaga was, as far as she could tell after an examination of Juju’s DNA, a Neanderthal man. He was of the same type as his woman �" she couldn’t use the word ‘wife’ because marriage between couples seemed to be unknown.

So she felt uncharacteristically all of a dither.

“Man mad?” asked Umbaga when he saw that she was standing mute and staring after the shrinking figure of Melvin as he stormed into the forest and onwards towards the distant clearing. She had been in two minds �" to follow him or to remain where she was and for no reason that made any sense she decided to stay where she was.

She turned towards him. “Man mad,” she agreed, and felt like adding that he had no cause to be mad because, although she and Melvin had enjoyed a physical relationship during their travels it had never been remotely loving. It had fulfilled a function admirable, but that was all.

To her, ‘making love’ was a misnomer. They’d had sex, more as a means of releasing the tensions that tended to build up particularly in Melvin after a period without it than as anything to do with love.

She had never loved Melvin, but she had learned to tolerate him and sometimes even like him.

She didn’t love Umbaga either, but that may well have been because she hardly knew him. As a figure, with physical characteristics that tended to be more sturdy and stolid than modern men, he was someone she was beginning to admire. But love? You only love people you know with a depth rather than with an intimacy, and she didn’t love Umbaga. She had never loved anyone in her life, not a man for the usual reason women love men, and remembered how she had once hoped she would develop feelings for Melvin but it hadn’t happened. And here was a primitive man, and she didn’t love him.

Not yet, she told herself with a shiver, because ‘yet’ implied something more than the negative.

“I like Umbaga,” she whispered to him.

And she did. She could still feel the sensation of him inside her, and she shivered again.

“Aurora cold?” he asked, reaching for a fur.

She shook her head. “Aurora not cold, like Umbaga,” she repeated. Then she turned to look at him, at his rugged, simple face, his bright manly eyes, his shaggy hair, his tatty beard, his all. “Aurora like Umbaga a lot,” she said.

She might have gone on to say a great deal more but the words stuck in her throat. She was experiencing something brand new, an emotion that shattered all her previous preconceptions when it came to her place in the Universe. Here was a primitive man, there could be absolutely no doubt about that, primitive, uneducated and, in fact, simple, and simple men, in her preconceptions, were way beneath her. She and her kind, she had always believed, had ascended a ladder, that had led over countless millennia, from a grubby jungle to the rarified air of Terra and the classically harmonious lives lived by most of the population.

There were wars, though, which didn’t help her beliefs overmuch.

And Umbaga was at the bottom of that ladder, his feet were set firmly in the jungle and she liked him. And he seemed at peace with everything except Old Man Tiger.

“Aurora not understand,” she sighed, and he looked at her quizzically.

His expression said that if Aurora didn’t understand, with her head nurtured by the dizzy heights, how could he begin to have any idea what she was thinking when his own feet were in a jungle mire?

“Melvin a silly man,” she sighed.

“Melvin not happy with Aurora, Umbaga games?” grinned Umbaga, and she could tell that he knew exactly what was going on in the mind of the man who had shared the last few years for her, living as they had in an unemotional tin can and dodging between the stars like … like gods.

“Melvin not like,” she conceded, and very deliberately she reached one arm towards the Neanderthal mad and took him by one hand. He looked at her, and smiled. With a slight sense of shock she realised that he knew what she was thinking,

“Melvin silly,” he said, and chuckled.

And, of course, that was the real truth. Melvin had been silly. His attitude had nothing to do with any feelings he had for Aurora because he didn’t have any, not real emotional feelings, she knew that what they’d shared had been boredom broken intermittently by bouts of very civilised sex. They’d had very little in common, not emotionally and not intellectually. Melvin had been a typical youngish Terran male, arrogant and self-assured, whilst she had been the one in charge, the one who made any decisions the computer on board the ship had felt too incompetent to make, and there had been precious few of those. Slowly he had mellowed, but he was still that loose cannon half the time.

But what had this got to do with Umbaga?

She’d seen the primitive man in tears, mourning his woman and child when death had claimed them, and her heart had tried to reach for him. Then somehow they’d managed to spend a night sleeping, just sleeping, together before next day accidentally and wonderfully finding themselves making love. And that’s what it had been: a discovery.

“Umbaga not silly,” she whispered.

He looked very hard at her, penetrating her emotions with his Neanderthal eyes.

And in that very moment, at that precise time, a roar like a thousand devils thundered through the forest world, trees bending hither and thither as if at its command, and Aurora knew what it was. She’d heard it before, lots of times like this and even more times from the inside of her hated tin can.

“Melvin going!” she cried at Umbaga.

He looked at her, quizzically, and cringed as the thunderous roar intensified. In all his life he’d heard nothing like it, and he covered both of his ears with two shaking hands.

Then slowly like a mighty bird of prey they saw, through the cave entrance, Aurora’s spacecraft rising into the skies, hovering for a few moments before shrieking to the big world beneath it and rising like a demon, then shrinking by the moment until, mercifully, it was out of sight above the clouds, and the roar and the vision were gone.

“Melvin gone!” she gasped.

© Peter Rogerson 11.11.16