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.
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.