“Happy womb fantasies,” he said.
She took his hand and held it grimly. Through the quicksilver lake came a spark of motivating power. Away they went, skimming on the unknown. Down what black tunnels, through what hidden gorges? The shell rocked in a maelstrom. Lona screamed, again, again, again.
“Are you afraid?” he asked.
“I don’t know. It moves so fast!”
“We can’t get hurt.”
It was like floating, like flying. Virtually no gravity, and no friction to impede their squirting motion as they slid hither and yon down the byways and cloacae of the ride. Secret petcocks opened, and scent filtered in.
“What do you smell?” she asked him.
“The desert. The smell of heat. And you?”
“The woods on a rainy day. Rotting leaves, Minner. How can that be?”
Maybe his senses don’t pick up things the way mine do, the way a human’s do. How can he smell the desert? That ripe, rich odor of mold and dampness! She could see red toadstools bursting from the ground. Small things with many legs scuttering and burrowing. A shining worm. And he: the desert?
The shell seemed to flip over, strike its supporting medium flat on, and right itself. The scent had changed by the time Lona noticed it again.
“Now it’s the Arcade at night,” she said. “Popcorn … sweat … laughter. What does laughter smell like, Minner? What does it seem like to you?”
“The fuel-room of a ship at core-changing time. Something was burning a few hours ago. Frying fat where the rods leaked. It hits you like a nail rammed up the nostril.”
“How can it be that we don’t smell the same things?”
“Olfactory psychovariation. We smell the things that our minds trigger for us. They aren’t giving us any particular scent, just the raw material. We shape the patterns.”
“I don’t understand, Minner.”
He was silent. More odors came: hospital-smell, moonlight-smell, steel-smell, snow-smell. She did not ask him about his own responses to this generalized stimulation. Once he gasped; once he winced and dug fingertips into her thigh.
The barrage of odors ceased.
Still the sleek shell slipped on, minute after minute. Now came sounds: tiny pinging bursts, great organ throbs, hammer blows, rhythmic scraping of rasp on rasp. They missed no sense here. The interior of the shell grew cool, and then warm again; the humidity varied in a complex cycle. Now the shell zigged, now it zagged. It whirled dizzyingly, a final frenzy of motion, and abruptly they were safe at harbor. His hand engulfed hers as he pulled her forth.
“Fun?” he asked unsmilingly.
“I’m not sure. Unusual, anyway.”
He bought her cotton candy. They passed a booth where one flipped little glass globes at golden targets on a moving screen. Hit the target three out of four, win a prize. Men with Earthside muscles struggled to cope with the low gravity and failed, while pouting girls stood by. Lona pointed at the prizes: subtle alien designs, abstract rippling forms executed in furry cloth. “Win me one, Minner!” she begged.
He paused and watched the men making their hapless looping tosses. Most far overshot the target; some, compensating, flipped feebly and saw their marbles droop slowly short of the goal. The crowd at the booth was closely packed as he moved among them, but the onlookers gave way for him, uneasily edging away. Lona noticed it and hoped he did not. Burris put down money and picked up his marbles. His first shot was off the mark by six inches.
“Nice try, buddy! Give him room! Here’s one who’s got the range!” The huckster behind the booth-front peered disbelievingly at Burris’s face. Lona reddened. Why do they have to stare? Does he look that strange?
He tossed again. Clang. Then: clang. Clang.
“Three in a row! Give the little lady her prize!”
Lona clutched something warm, furry, almost alive. They moved away from the booth, escaping a buzz of talk. Burris said, “There are things to respect about this hateful body, Lona.”
Some time later she put the prize down, and when she turned for it, it had disappeared. He offered to win her another, but she told him not to worry about it.
They did not enter the building of the flesh shows.
When they came to the freak house, Lona hesitated, wanting to go inside but uncertain about suggesting it. The hesitation was fatal. Three beer-blurred faces emerged, looked at Burris, guffawed.
“Hey! There’s one that escaped!”
Lona recognized the fiery blotches of fury on his cheeks. She steered him quickly away, but the wound had been made. How many weeks of self-repair undone in a moment?
The night pivoted around that point. Up till then he had been tolerant, faintly amused, only slightly bored. Now he became hostile. She saw his eye-shutters pull back to their full opening, and the cold glare of those revealed eyes would have eaten like acid into this playland if it could. He walked stiffly. He grudged every new moment here.
“I’m tired, Lona. I want to go to the room.”
“A little while longer.”
“We can come back tomorrow night.”
“But it’s still early, Minner!”
His lips did odd things. “Stay here by yourself, then.”
“No! I’m afraid! I mean—what fun would it be without you?”
“I’m not having fun.”
“You seemed to be … before.”
“That was before. This is now.” He plucked at her sleeve. “Lona—”
“No,” she said. “You aren’t taking me away so fast. There’s nothing to do in the room but sleep and have sex and look at the stars. This is Tivoli, Minner. Tivoli! I want to drink up every minute of it.”
He said something she could not make out, and they moved on to a new section of the park. But his restlessness mastered him. In a few minutes he was asking again that they go.
“Try to enjoy yourself, Minner.”
“This place is making me sick. The noise … the smell … the eyes.”
“No one’s looking at you.”
“Very funny! Did you hear what they said when—”
“They were drunk.” He was begging for sympathy, and for once she was tired of giving it to him. “Oh, I know, your feelings are hurt. Your feelings get hurt so easily. Well, for once stop feeling so sorry for yourself! I’m here to have a good time, and you’re not going to spoil it!”
“Viciousness!”
“No worse than selfishness!” she snapped at him.
Overhead the fireworks went off. A garish serpent with seven tails sprawled across the heavens.
“How much longer do you want to stay?” Steely now.
“I don’t know. Half an hour. An hour.”
“Fifteen minutes?”
“Let’s not bargain over it. We haven’t seen a tenth of what’s here yet.”
“There are other nights.”
“Back to that again. Minner, stop it! I don’t want to quarrel with you, but I’m not giving in. I’m just not giving in.”
He made a courtly bow, dipping lower than anyone with human skeletal structure could possibly have done. “At your service, milady.” The words were venomous, Lona chose to ignore the venom and took him onward down the cluttered path. It was the worst quarrel they had had so far. In past frictions they had been cool, snippy, sarcastic, withdrawn. But never had they stood nose to nose, barking at each other. They had even drawn a small audience: Punch and Judy hollering it up for the benefit of interested onlookers. What was happening? Why were they bickering? Why, she wondered, did it sometimes seem as though he hated her? Why did she feel at those times that it could be quite easy to hate him?
They should be giving each other support. That was how it had been at the beginning. A bond of shared sympathy had linked them, for they both had suffered. What had happened to that? So much bitterness had crept into things now. Accusations, recriminations, tensions.