'King weeps alone on Egypt's shore;

'Chosen People slaves no more!

'So kiss your lady and whisper in her ear;

'Then sit 'er down and get 'er a beer.' Intermission!"

Oh, we had fun! Dora learned to dance when she was a new grandmother-and was still dancing when she was a great-great-grandmother. Early years the parties were oftenest at our place because we had the biggest house and a compound large enough for a big party. Start dancing late afternoon, dance till you couldn't see your partner; then a potluck buffet supper to candlelight and moonlight, then sing a while, and bed down all over the place-all the rooms, the roof, shakedowns in the compound, some in wagons-and if anybody ever slept alone, I never heard about it. Nor any trouble worth mentioning if things got a little loose around the edges.

Next morning there was likely to be a double performance by the Mermaid Tavern Players, one comedy, one tragedy, then it would be time for those who lived farthest away to round up their kids, hitch up their mules, and roll, while those who lived closer helped clean up before doing the same thing.

Oh, I remember one spot of trouble: A man gave his wife a black eye over nothing much, whereupon six men nearest him tossed him out the gate and barred it. Made him so mad he hitched up and left...and headed back up the Great Gorge toward Hopeless Pass-a fact that wasn't noticed for a while, as his wife and baby moved in with her sister and her husband and their kids, and stayed on, a polygamy-though not the only one. No laws about marriage or sex-no laws about anything for many years-except that incurring the disapproval of your neighbors, such as by giving your wife a black eye, meant risking Coventry, about the worst thing that can happen to a pioneer short of being lynched.

But migrants tend to be both horny and easy about it. Superior intelligence always includes strong sexual drive, and the pioneers in Happy Valley had been through a double screening, first in a decision to leave Earth and then in deciding to tackle Hopeless Pass. So we had real survivors in Happy Valley, smart, cooperative, industrious, tolerant-willing to fight when necessary but not likely to fight over trivial matters. Sex is not trivial, but fighting over it is usually pretty silly. It's characteristic only of a man who isn't sure of his manhood, which didn't describe any of these men; they were sure of themselves, no need to prove it. No cowards, no thieves, no weaklings, no bullies-the rare exception didn't last long enough to count. Either dead like that first three, or ran away from us like that idiot who took a poke at his wife.

These rare purgings were always quick and informal. For many years the only law we had was the Golden Rule, unwritten but closely followed.

In such a community functionless taboos about sex couldn't last; they didn't tend to be brought into our valley in the first place. Oh, close inbreeding wasn't well thought of; these pioneers were not ignorant of genetics, nor of conception control. But the attitude was pragmatic; I don't think I ever heard anyone speak out against incest that was just a jolly romp with no outcome. But I recall one girl who married her half brother openly and had several children by him-I assume that they were his. There may have been gossip, but it did not get them ostracized. Any marriage pattern was treated as the private business of the partners in it, not something to be licensed by the community. I recall two young couples who decided to combine their farms, then built a house big enough by adding to the larger of their two houses and making the other into a barn. Nobody asked who slept with whom; it was taken for granted that it was then a four-cornered marriage, and no doubt had been one before they enlarged that house and pooled their goods. Nobody's business but theirs.

Among such people the plural of "spouse" is "spice." A pioneer community, poor in everything else, always makes its own recreations-with sex at the top of the list. We had no professional entertainers, no theaters (unless you count the amateur theatricals started by our kids), no cabarets, no diversions dependent on sophisticated electronics, no periodicals, few books. Certainly those meetings of the Happy Valley Dance Club continued as gentle orgies after it was too dark to dance and the younger children were bedded down for the night-how else? But it was all quite gentle; a couple could always go sleep in their own wagon and ignore the quiet luau elsewhere. No compulsion either way-shucks, they didn't even have to attend the dances.

But no one stayed away from those weekly dances if he or she could make it. It was particularly nice for young people; it gave them a chance to get acquainted and do their courting. Perhaps most first babies were conceived at our dances; there was opportunity. On the other hand, a girl did not have to get knocked up just through a romp if it didn't suit her. But a girl was likely to marry by fifteen, sixteen, and their bridegrooms weren't much older-late first marriage is a big-city custom, never found in a pioneer culture.

Dora and I? But, Minerva dear, I told you earlier.

(Omitted)

-started the freight schedule to the outside the year Gibbie was born and Zack was, oh, eighteen I think-I have to keep converting New Beginnings years into standard years. Anyhow he was taller than I was, not much short of two meters and massed maybe eighty kilos, and Andy was almost as big and strong. There was pressure on me not to wait as I knew Zack might get married any day-and I could not send a wagon over the pass just with Andy. Ivar was only nine-a big help around the farm but not big enough for this job.

But I could not find teamsters other than in my own family. There were only about a dozen families in the valley; they had not been there long, and did not as yet feel the press to buy things that I did.

I wanted three new wagons, not just because my three were wearing out but because Zack would need one when he married. So would Andy. And I might have to dower Helen with one, if and when. The same applied to plows and several sorts of metal farm equipment. Prosperous as we were, Happy Valley could not be entirely self-supporting without a metals industry-which is to say: not for many years. I had another long list of things to buy-

(Omitted)

-on a quarterly schedule. But the food that fifty-odd farms could ship out could not buy much at the other end in competition with farmers who did not have the expense of shipping by mule train over the Rampart and across the prairie; I still subsidized our link with civilization by writing drafts on John Magee to be debited against my partnership in the Andy J. and thereby brought things into the valley we would not otherwise have bad. Some I kept-Dora got in-house running water from that first trip our own boys made, just in time to keep my promise to her, as Zack got Hilda pregnant right after they got back, and their first baby, Ingrid Dora, and the completion of Dora's bathroom, arrived about together. Other things I sold to other farmers for labor. But the Buck strain of mules, strong, intelligent, and all of them capable of being taught to talk, eventually corrected our balance of trade, once those two wells were drilled on the prairie and I could count on running a string of mules to Separation Center without losing half of them. This meant medicines, books, and many other things for our valley.

(Omitted)

Lazarus Long did not intend to surprise his wife. But neither of them ever knocked on their own bedroom door. Finding it closed, he opened it gently against the possibility that she might be napping. Instead he found her standing at the window, mirror angled to the light, carefully plucking a long gray hair.