Jon was a little surprised to see that Karyn was naked, but it was just surprise; there wasn't any excitement arising from merely being around a nude girl, nothing erotic about it. "Hey, Karyn," he said. "Decided to wear fur today?"
Karyn laughed. "Yeah," she said. "It really does feel good. You should try it."
"I might do that sometime," Jon said. "Not right now, though; I don't want to lug my clothes around for the rest of the day. How's class been?"
"Pretty good," Karyn said. "P.E.'s a little different: less invented sports and more stalking-hunting activities. They brought in some prey for us; there's a little wildlife habitat where the football field used to be. I got to run down and kill a rabbit. It was a pretty neat feeling, really. You should've seen some of the other girls, though. Lots of tears and self-righteousness. Apparently there're still vegetarians even though we're carnivores. And since there are still vegetarians, there are of course the preachy, annoying vegetarians to give the rest a bad name."
Jon nodded. "I'm not too surprised," he said. "Not that much has changed. Speaking of which, I had history, and it looks like the basic outline of events is the same. We stayed in the hunter-gatherer stage for longer, obviously because it's so much easier in this form. But we made up lost time when we got to the Bronze Age. Oh, did you know, as late as the 60s there were still areas populated mostly by ferals?"
Karyn looked puzzled. "'Ferals?'" she asked.
"Well," Jon said, "you know how we were talking about being designed to be able to survive in the wild? That's what we were before there was civilization. No tools, no fire, nothing. Apparently there were and possibly still are people like that living in the less-explored areas of the world. Sounds like they form small immediate-family groups and might have some rudimentary language shared between members of a group, but that's as much civilization as they've got. Beyond that, it's all dog-eat-dog and free love."
"Sounds like a mixed blessing," Karyn laughed.
That was an interesting thing for her to say, Jon thought. He'd been friends with her since before either of them could remember, but she'd never expressed much interest in matters sexual, at least not to him. He'd have to remember to look up sexual norms in the encyclopedia and see if anything had changed.
Come to think of it, he thought, she really is pretty like this...she's got such a nice figure and a lovely face... He looked her over as she talked to him about something having to do with Sarah MacMillan and how she was still just as much of a jerk. The nakedness didn't arouse him as it would have before, but it afforded him a better view of her, and he wondered why he hadn't noticed how pretty she was before.
The bell rang, snapping him out of his reverie. They both turned to go to their next class, but Jon turned back around. "Karyn," he asked, "are you doing anything Friday night?"
