Nectar Hands me a Conundrum

Mighty oaks and silver birches and Californian redwoods cast their twining shadows from overhead as Four-Eyes and I passed quietly through the night-time botanical garden. From flowerbeds at our feet, springtime crocuses nestling alongside Christmas begonias threw colour and scent. The path wound its way by holographic simulacra of an English thatched cottage, Mount Rushmore, and the Taj Mahal.

"It's a little overdone," Four-Eyes concluded, "but you can't fault them for squeezing in as much as possible of what Earth was like."

This was high praise indeed from Four-Eyes, so I took a deep breath.

"Then there's something I've been meaning to ask you," I told her. "I've wanted to for a while now."

"Oh," murmured Four-Eyes, though she looked like she was starting to smile. "Here it comes."

"Yes," I blurted. "So, do you think I should bring Nectar here when I ask her out on a date?"

There was no response.

"I mean, will she like it?" I hinted, anxious.

"She'll love it," said Four-Eyes shortly. "That Lepidopteran insipidity will just shine out all the more in a faux-Earth environment."

Before we could continue our conversation, a creakily aggressive voice hailed us from the bushes. Oh no, not the park-keeper! But sure enough, that scowling skeletal relic of a man was already upon us, his peaked cap like something straight out of the costume museum. At school we all agreed he'd been tending these grounds since terrestrial soil first sprouted them.

"You young hoodlums better just mind I've got my eye on you!" pronounced the geriatric in his whipsaw voice. "Plucking my pansies for anachronistic adolescent courtship rituals! Gouging your initials on the last living larch! Prodding my potto with popsicle sticks!"

"We're not going to go anywhere near your flea-bitten old potto," retorted Four-Eyes.

Next second we were running for our lives, the park-keeper close behind and brandishing a cactus.

"Do I tell you often enough what a pleasure it is spending time with you?" I panted to Four-Eyes as we ran.

Lepidoptera was a big privileged planet, and I always seemed to catch my breath when I gazed on its big privileged daughter.

It was like Nectar that her exchange-student deal should have included a private suite. Honeysuckle-scented lamps suffused the dim boudoir while its occupant reclined on a stylish chaise-longue, one lock of tumbled tangerine hair falling over her prettily furrowed brow. There was so much of Nectar, wherever you looked, moonlike quivering orange-tinted thighs and undulating shoulders and six long-lashed downcast oculars of deepest black. Nothing was small about her, apart from her wings, and those slightly ludicrous butterfly stubs twitched pensively. She was reading, while popping grapes and chocolate truffles between her lips at a restless rate.

"Hey, Nectar," I greeted her brightly. "Just wondered, are you doing anything tonight?"

"Tonight and the night after and the night after that I shall be here, striving in vain to comprehend this dismay-inducing sentence!" she flung back tearfully.

It must be something for her Earth-history project, because that book was absolutely ancient. Paperbacks, they'd been called. Nectar had the money to spend on rare antiques, but she was the sort of student who struggled to see it was brains and not financial transactions that secured good grades. Luckily this was a problem unique to the era in which we lived.

I joined her on the couch and asked her to show me the part she didn't understand. It really was a puzzler too.

"...the chairman, and the minister who sat on his right hand."

"Chairman" at least I could help Nectar with, by steering her to the word "queen" which was her insectile people's nearest equivalent. As for the rest of it though, we were stumped.

"Why would the minister have done that?" I pondered aloud. "I mean, how would it have advanced the course of world politics?"

"And also, what of your human circulatory system?" agreed Nectar, distressed.

She had a point there. I wouldn't have much fancied the chairman's pins and needles, after a long parliamentary session. Oh! That jogged my memory of something from my own history project, which might help. I grabbed Nectar's notes and scrawled upon them "noblesse oblige."

"You should use that expression to explain how chairmen found it in themselves to endure the discomfort," I told her knowledgeably.

Six wondering black eyes gazed back at me in awe.

"But as for why they did it, and what it was like," I went on, then stopped.

The sweet-smelling censers were as nothing to close proximity with Nectar. I'd been reminding myself throughout she couldn't help that, because it wasn't perfume but pheromones. Nor however was it any help, when a possibility as yet unvoiced impended more conspicuously than any odorous cloud.

"There's no way we could ever find out," I declared.

And I did so firmly. Determined not to be the first to say it. Telling myself over and over that Nectar probably wasn't thinking the same thing I was.

A hush fell between us.

We both shifted silently on the cushions. They were lovely plush ones, but only the press of something else could supply the answers we craved.

I gulped hard.

"Unless, we were to try..." Nectar began.

"If we did," I cut across her at once, "then it would be me sitting on yours, Nectar. I'd have to insist on that. It's your project, after all."

Demurely she bowed her lustrous head, spiral-curly antennae bobbing. I tried not to notice how much it looked like they were beckoning me.

"Yet you are invested in this question too," Nectar peeped in a tiny voice. "Is it, then, that you find the prospect appalling?"

I'd tried so hard to be manful, from the moment she came out with the word "we." I couldn't have her forming those sorts of conclusions about what my designs might have been, for all that the dream of that soft weight crushing down on my finger-pads and palm wreaked chaos on my resolve. Nevertheless, as of her plangent query, I was unmanned.

"All I can say about that, Nectar," I heaved out, "is that if I'd been the chairman and you'd been the minister, I'd have looked forward to every single congress. And not because I'd be shaping the destiny of my homeworld and guiding it to the position it enjoys today as part of our illustrious intergalactic union, Nectar, but because I'd know you'd be there each time, to sit on my right hand."

My eyes by now were locked on her six. We were really going to do this.

"You are seated to the left of me," Nectar observed. "So I'll go first."

Hours later Nectar and I walked home together in a blissful daze. On the way we passed Four-Eyes.

"What's got the pair of you looking so happy?" she demanded.

"History coursework," I explained.