INCONSTANCY

                             By ROGER DEE

                        Illustrated by SUMMERS

             _The trouble with a Martian-Terran romance is
              that it has to buck things like tradition.
           Up on Mars, when they sing "If you were the only
               girl in the world," they really mean it._

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
                     Amazing Stories January 1962.
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]


His first day on Earth promised to be even worse than Mirrh Yahn y
Cona had feared when he left Yrml Orise y Yrl, his fiancee, to become
Mars' first interplanetary ambassador. The frenetic bustle of Denver
spaceport, his ominous spiriting away through screaming hordes of
spectators, left him bewildered and uneasy.

Alone in the first brief privacy of his Denver Heptagon apartment, he
ideographed a facsimile transmission to Yrml at once. "I long for you
already," he said. "And for the serenity of home. Earthpeople are as
barbarous and mercurial as their weather."

Babelous decades of taped newsreels and video serials should have
prepared him for that inconstancy, but the first-hand reality was
appalling. He would gladly have returned home at once, before planetary
conjunction's end cut him off for two interminable years, but for the
inevitable stumbling-block: Earth had sent an exchange of her own, and
Mirrh Yahn y Cona could not back down without disgracing his planet as
well as himself.

"Write often," he pleaded, in closing. "That I may take comfort in your
steadfast regard even in this simian hurlyburly."

The missive finished, he found time remaining before Ellis, of
Diplomatic, arrived to switch on the multisensory projection of his
last evening with Yrml. The projection had been cubed in a Privileged
Couples nook complete with real plants and hermetically sealed
fountain, and near its close the two of them had sung the traditional
Song of Parting from the ancient _Tchulkione Serafi_.

Ellis arrived all too soon, trailing an aura of Scotch, diplomatic
enthusiasm and geniality.

"No time to waste," Ellis said briskly. "Little enough of it before you
leave us, and you're going to see Earth from pole to pole. The three of
us begin this evening with a sample of Denver night life."

"Three?"

"Came early to brief you," Ellis said. "Found a guide for you. Can't
run about unescorted, you know."

He answered the door buzzer and admitted a young woman in evening
dress. Rushed from the spaceport in what amounted to cloak-and-dagger
secrecy, Mirrh Yahn y Cona had until now seen Earthwomen only on video
and at indistinguishable distance, and the sudden appearance of this
one in the flesh unnerved him completely.

       *       *       *       *       *

The girl was small and slender, well under Mirrh Yahn y Cona's athletic
six-foot height. She was warmly and roundly vital with a stunning
abundance of life at which the two-dimensional simulacra of recorded
soap-opera could only hint.

"Miss Leila Anderson," Ellis introduced her. "Member of Diplomatic, so
it's all in the family."

She took the hand that Mirrh Yahn y Cona raised as if to defend himself.

"I'm to see that you aren't bored to death here among strangers," she
said. "All work and no play isn't good for anyone. Especially," she
said to Ellis, "for one so handsome. I didn't dream he'd look so--"

"So Terran," Ellis finished before she could say _so human_. "And why
not? We're from the same original stock, separated ages before our
history begins. Martian annals run back for millennia, did you know?
Gold mine of information, settle problems our experts have puzzled over
for centuries."

"I am not truly representative of my people," Mirrh Yahn y Cona said
with some bitterness. "A special case, reared from birth for this
assignment."

The multisensory projector swung into the _Tchulkione Serafi's_ Song of
Parting. Mirrh Yahn y Cona's resonant baritone, operatically assertive
above Yrml's reedy soprano, filled the room. He shut off the machine
abruptly, feeling a sense of desecration that the tender scene had been
bared to alien eyes.

Still he felt a puzzling premonitory twinge of guilt when the
projection collapsed. Yrml had been infinitely desirable when the
sequence was cubed; why should she now seem so sallow and angular, so
suddenly and subtly distant?

"Remarkable voice," Ellis said. "You could make a fortune with it
here."

"It was lovely," Leila Anderson said. "Could I hear the rest of it some
time?"

"No." He realized his curtness and added, "It is the Song of Parting
for lovers. Very personal."

He found that he was still holding Leila's hand, and dropped it
hastily. Ellis, who had risen high in Diplomatic for good reasons,
stepped competently into the breach.

"Night duty calls," Ellis said. "Let's be off."

       *       *       *       *       *

A diplomatic limousine without insignia took them to a nightclub large
enough, and dim enough, to promise anonymity. On the way a quick summer
shower left the streets wet and glistening and turned the night into a
many-scented freshness that was sheer fantasy to one accustomed to the
sterile air of sealed underground ways.

The rain had ended when they left the car, but the brief moment
outside, under a vast openness of night sky empty except for dispersing
clouds and speeding white moon, struck Mirrh Yahn y Cona suddenly cold
with too-familiar panic.

They had found their table before anyone spoke.

"Agoraphobia?" Ellis said, in frowning concern. "I should think you'd
be conditioned against that, with all the time they've had to prepare
you."

Leila Anderson put an impulsive hand on the Martian's.

"I'm a touch claustrophobic, so I know how it must be." She shivered.
"To be buried under all those tons and tons of--"

"Immurement is security," Mirrh Yahn y Cona said. "The ultimate
stability."

"You'll get acclimatized," Ellis said. "It takes time."

He broke off to peer through the gloom beyond the dance floor. "Good
Lord, there's Ryerson of the _Post_, camera and all. If he recognizes
me he'll know who Mirrh is and--"

"Yahn," Mirrh Yahn y Cona corrected automatically. "With us the second
name is impersonal. First is used only by loved ones."

"Yahn, then," Ellis said. "If Ryerson tumbles, he'll want pictures and
an interview. Yahn will be lionized before he's ready. Can't publicize
him until he knows the ropes."

"You'd better skip," Leila said. "If we all go, he'll spot us for sure."

"Right." Ellis shoved some money at Leila. "Call me at my office when
it's safe."

When Ellis had gone and their waiter had brought drinks, they faced
each other across the table, Yahn visibly on guard and Leila with the
beginning of speculation in her eyes.

"Maybe it's better like this, without protocol," she said. "Yahn, can
you--do you dance in our gravity?"

He was bitter again. "Remember my training. I am taller, stronger and
more freakishly agile than any Martian--including my fiancee--has been
for thousands of years."

Her clear look made him ashamed and he added, "With us the dance is an
art form only. Here the intent seems different."

"It is," Leila said almost grimly. "Finish your drink, Buster. You're
going to need it."

       *       *       *       *       *

He needed several before the evening was finished. The Terran dance in
its limited variations offered small challenge; Yahn mastered it with
an ease that delighted Leila and brought tacit envy from other couples.
The cocktails may have contributed to his own mixed reactions, lending
primitive tactility to Leila's pliant response.

Neither of them, when Ryerson of the _Post_ went away with his camera,
considered calling Ellis.

"I don't often enjoy my work so much," Leila said. "Let's not spoil the
evening with diplomacy, shall we?"

They left the Diplomatic vehicle for Ellis, rented an agency car and
drove through the charged serenity of the night into the mountains.
They talked the Moon down and the Sun up. Nothing took place that might
have shocked a reasonably tolerant duenna, but by dawn they had reached
the sort of understanding that comes spontaneously or not at all.

"The biologists who tailored me to Terrestrial standards," Yahn said,
"did their work too well. I find myself more Terran than Martian."

The immovable obstacle, of course, was Yahn's obligation to Yrml,
who would be waiting with enduring Martian patience for his return.
Leila went into that matter later with Ellis, not so much to enlist
his dubious sympathies as to clarify the bristly problem in her own
troubled mind.

"Martians use our broadcasts as a standard of judgment," Leila said.
"And you know where _that_ leads. The more prominent the people in
the newscasts, the higher the divorce rate. The more popular a video
serial, the greater its emotional shilly-shallying. To Martians we're
the last word in fickleness."

"I know," Ellis agreed. "Our cultural geometry was always triangular."

"Exactly. So how can Mirrh-Yahn break the news to his dry little
fiancee back home? We're accustomed to inconstancy and to incontinence.
We sing corny songs about girls who write jilting letters to their men
in service. Our opera flaunts Perkinses and Mesdames Butterfly, and
the fact that we enjoy them shocks the ascetic pants off the Martians.
Did you know that their population control quota demands a strictly
equal sex-ratio, so that there's never more than one boy for one girl
from the beginning? Mirrh-Yahn simply hasn't it in him to leave Yrml
dangling. He'd feel a renegade for the rest of his life."

"_Mirrh_-Yahn," Ellis noted. "Obviously he's willing enough, if you're
on a first-name footing."

"I can't call him Yahn any longer, like a stranger. Mirrh-Yahn is a
compromise."

Ellis rummaged in his desk and brought out a personnel folder. "Dossier
on J. Frederic Thomas, our young man on Mars. Maybe we can turn up an
angle through him."

The exchange ambassador's folder was neither interesting nor helpful.
J. Frederic Thomas stood revealed as a dwarfish scholastic type,
complete with massive glasses and receding hairline.

"He looks more Martian than Terran," Leila said. "Is that deliberate?"

"Mars sent us a man specially bred to fit into our culture, didn't
they? Simple job here to turn up a Martian type. Matter of fact, J.
F.'s reports show he fits in up there like a native."

"Check with him, then," Leila said. "Though I can't imagine what help
we can expect from a wizened little stick like that."

       *       *       *       *       *

Leila was wrong. J. Frederic Thomas--who quite predictably, being
paired off with the only unattached female on Mars as his cicerone,
had immediately found himself caught in the same thorny dilemma that
gouged his opposite number on Earth--was eager to help. The result of
Ellis' inquiry was a swift letter from Yrml Orise y Yrl to Mirrh Yahn
y Cona; a letter which Ellis turned over in duplicate, one in Martian
ideograph, the other a translation, to Leila.

It broke Yrml's engagement to Yahn for the excellent reasons that J.
Frederic Thomas was not only more Martian in physique and deportment,
but also possessed a fine reedy tenor which blended ever so better with
Yrml's soprano in the less poignant duets from the _Tchulkione Serafi_.

"The man never lived," Ellis pointed out, "Martian or Terran, no matter
how relieved he might be, whose ego wouldn't need attention after a
letter beginning _Dear Yahn_. Shall I let it go on through the mails,
or will you--"

Leila answered him on her way out. "Don't bother," she said.


                                THE END