in silence the following morning, “You ever been married, Nick?”
The incongruity of the question startled him. Until a moment ago she had seemed to be a million miles away. His attempt to make love to her a second time at dawn had been met with indifference and she had been pure business, remote and cool, all during the job of breaking camp and getting on the road.
“No,” he said. “You?”
“Hasn’t been on my program,” she said. “But I thought everybody in Free Country got married. Nice normal people who settle down early and raise big families.” The elephant-camel swayed and bumped beneath them. They were following a wide dirt track festooned on both sides with glittering strands of what looked like clear jelly, hundreds of feet long, mounted on spiny black poles that seemed to be sprouting like saplings from the ground.
“I raised a big family,” he said. “My brothers and sisters. Dad got killed in a hunting accident when I was ten. Possibly got mixed up with a Spook animal that was on the wrong side of the line: nobody could quite figure it out. Then my mother came down with Blue Fever. I was fifteen then and five brothers and sisters to look after. Didn’t leave me a lot of time to think about finding a wife.”
“Blue Fever?”
“Don’t you know what that is? Infectious disease. Kills you in three days, no hope at all. Supposed to be something the Spooks brought.”
“We don’t have it over here,” she said. “Not that I ever heard.”
“Spooks brought it, I guess they must know how to cure it. We aren’t that lucky. Anyway, there were all these little kids to look after. Of course, they’re grown by now.”
“But you still look after them. Coming over here to try to track down your brother.”
“Somebody has to.”
“What if he doesn’t want to be tracked down, though?”
Demeris felt a tremor of alarm. He knew Tom was restless and troubled, but he didn’t think he was actually disturbed. “Have you any reason to think Tom would want to stay over here for good?”
“I didn’t say I did. But he might just prefer not to be found. A lot of boys come across and stay across, you know.”
“I didn’t know. Nobody I ever heard of did that. Why would someone from Free Country want to live on the Spook side?”
“For the excitement?” she suggested. “To run with the Spooks? To play their games? To hunt their animals? There’s all sorts of minglings going on these days.”
“Is that so,” he said uneasily. He stared at the back of her head. She was so damned odd, he thought, such a fucking mystery.
She said, sounding very far away, “I wonder about marrying.” Back to that again. “What it’s like, waking up next to the same person every day, day after day. Sharing your life, year after year. It sounds very beautiful. But also kind of strange. It isn’t easy for me to imagine what it might be like.”
“Don’t they have marriage in Spook City?”
“Not really. Not the way you people do.”
“Well, why don’t you try it and see? You don’t like it, there are ways to get out of it. Nobody I know thinks that being married is strange. Christ, I bet whatever the Spooks do is five hundred times as strange, and you probably think that it’s the most normal thing in the world.”
“Spooks don’t marry. They don’t even have sex, really. What I hear, it’s more like the way fishes do it, no direct contact at all.”
“That sounds terrifically appealing. I’d really love to try something like that. All I need is a cute Spook to try it with.”
He attempted to keep it light. But she glanced around at him.
“Still suspicious, Nick”
He let that go by. “Listen, you could always take a fling at getting married for a while, couldn’t you?” he said. “If you’re all that curious about finding out what it’s like.”
“Is that an offer, Nick?”
“No,” he said. “Hardly. Just a suggestion.”
***
AN HOUR AFTER THEY SET out that morning they passed a site where there was a peculiar purple depression about a hundred yards across at its thickest point. It was vaguely turtle-shaped, a long oval with four stubby projections at the corners and one at each end.
“What the devil is that?” Demeris asked. “A Spook graveyard?”
“It’s new,” she said. “I’ve never seen it before.”
Some vagrant curiosity impelled him. “Can we look?”
Jill halted the elephant-camel and they jumped down. The site might almost have been a lake, deep-hued and dense against the sandy earth, but there was nothing liquid about it: it was like a stain that ran several yards deep into the ground. Together they walked to the edge. Demeris saw something moving beneath the surface out near the middle, a kind of corkscrew effect, and was about to call it to her attention when abruptly the margin of the site started to quiver and a narrow rubbery arm rose up out of the purpleness and wrapped itself around her left leg. It started to pull her forward. She shrieked and made an odd hissing sound.
Demeris yanked his knife from the scabbard at his belt and sliced through the thing that had seized her. There was a momentary twanging sound and he felt a hot zing go up his arm to the shoulder. The energy of it ricocheted around inside his shirt collar; then it ceased and he staggered back. The part of the ropy arm that had been wrapped around Jill fell away; the rest writhed convulsively before them. He caught her by one wrist and pulled her back.
“It’s got to be some kind of trap for game,” he said. “Or for passing travelers stupid enough to go close. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
She was pale and shaky. “Thanks,” she said simply, as they ran toward the elephant-camel.
Not much of a show of gratitude, he thought.
But at least the incident told him something about her that he needed to know. A Spook trap wouldn’t have gone after one of their own, would it?
Would it?
***
AT MIDDAY THEY STOPPED FOR lunch in a cottonwood grove that the Spooks had redecorated with huge crystalline mushroom-shaped things. The elephant-camel munched on one and seemed to enjoy it, but Demeris and Jill left them alone. There was a brackish little stream running through the trees, and once again she stripped and cleaned herself. Bathing seemed very important to her and she had no self-consciousness about her nudity. He watched her with cool pleasure from the bank.
Once in a while, during the long hours of the ride, she would break the silence with a quirky sort of question: “What do people like to do at night in Free Country?” or “Are men closer friends with men than women are with women?” or “Have you ever wished you were someone else?” He gave the best answers he could. She was a strange, unpredictable kind of
