shower, her skin moist, teach her some real shooting.
Bang!
“Charioteers!”
Kael leapt from his bed, hot-footed it to the amenities. Theri stood affrighted against the farther wall, sombrero resting upside down in the open stillcell. The faintest mist of warm moisture drifted to the charged lining of the cell. Efficient Kael glanced at the readout panel, adjusted the field, reset the failsafes. He turned and stared at her.
“It’s almost impossible, what you just did,” he said mildly.
She stamped her foot. There were goosebumps on her skin. “Don’t start.”
“It’s not hard to understand how to operate it, little, really it isn’t. You must put a terrific lot of effort into not understanding, actually. Still, what I don’t understand is how you managed what you just did.”
“I mean it, don’t start. Piss off and let me wash myself in peace.”
“It’s quite an old invention, petal, though not as old as, say, the wheel. They designed it to conserve water, my dear Theri, because a lot of Newstralia is a dune planet. See, there’s this pulsed spherical forcefield that gulps in a lot of air and squeezes it very hard to wring the water out of it, which also heats the aforementioned liquid to the desired temperature. What you did, my bundle, was make the field expand instead of contract before it switched off, and all the air rushed very fast into the vacuum and made a big noise.”
“I can’t hear you, shithead,” she said from within the still-cell. “Anyway, that sounds like a lot of garbage to me. What happens when the field is contracting and a new lot of air is coming in, eh? answer me that. Why doesn’t that create a vacuum, smartarse? And what makes you assume it was my fault, there are five people in this house, all I did was turn it on, after all, so the statistical likelihood that I caused it to happen is one in five, hardly overwhelming odds as I think even you will be obliged to agree.”
“Ah, but you were the proximate agent, and this is not the first such occasion. Indeed, if we multiply the number of times such baffling technological failures have taken place in your immediate vicinity, I imagine we’d come closer to figures of, oh, say one in several millions, without straining our memories. And if you can’t follow the simple train of thought involved in my lucid description of the principle involved, there’s no doubt in my mind that an unprejudiced jury of your peers would take this as prima facie— Umph. What are you— Stop that at once, my girl, what would your parents—”
§
Theri and Kael at screw in the still-cell. A warm rain, the hidden pulsing field doing its job discreetly and well. Gentle Kael meek and mild holding back his loved one’s face. Purple horseshoes on Kael’s shoulders. I meant it to hurt, it’s not enough. Theri coming gently, with frustrated tenderness, in the exploding shower of a rented terrace on an alien world.
§
They strolled later down El Cheapo Street, favorite address of babies here on vacation, the spine of a fairly fetid slum still clinging to a distinctive identity from the most primitive years of the planet’s initial colonization.
It was a jumble of old stone and rusting iron, wrought and heaved into place by human and animal muscle-power. Warped lanes twisted to the waterfront, open balconies transformed into enclosed living space by sheets of buckling durobond.
A flamboyant ornithopter, vividly striped in applegreen and red, flapped low overhead, making for the more opulent surf beaches away from the harbor. Kael held Theri’s hand loosely.
Catsize and Ben emerged from a free-enterprise commissary, Ben carrying a box of food, foils and loaves and a stick of salami visible at the top. Catsize labored under a rather large crate of lettuce or some vegetable resembling it.
“What the hell do you take us for, a colony of rabbits?”
“Not at all, my good man, these are William’s rations.”
“Who?”
“William Wool, our fuzzy little foddle friend from last night’s woeful expedition, now at play in our garden.”
“But he’s meant to provide us with food. And what’s wrong with grass, anyway?”
“Not enough, and of an inferior quality.”
“Some foddle rustler you are.”
“No less than certain others. Good day to you both.”
§
The handouts of lettuce were devoured in seconds. Ben opened the door and summoned William Wool. The beast dashed at once across the newly desolate garden. Never entirely convincing as a garden, now it was a doleful sight: grass chewed to the quick, shrubs mere tattered remnants, bark frayed to kindling.
The foddle hurtled past Ben’s legs and stood in the kitchen babbling for milk. He removed its ribbon and tinkling bell—pilfered on its behalf by Catsize from the untenanted cage of some domestic or decorative bird—and outfitted William Wool to face the world. A heavy leather collar ferocious with studs replaced the ribbon, a length of almost invisible monomer providing the requisite contact between man and client.
Ben and William trailed up El Cheapo: a kick for the worrying dog, a hard stare for the clucking shopper. Human and foddle turned into the park.
Placing his back against an alien piece of flora, and his buttocks in contact with dirt and grass, Ben paid out the line. Ecstatically, William lifted his tail and poured forth a little steam of the celebrated stuff of legend. Ben wished a large amount of it on his faithless wife’s head. Whore.
From across the park an official was approaching officiously, park-keeper’s tricorn on his waxed hair, spiked stick of office in his hand, imperial guardian of public decorum.
Oh Anla, you bitch, what would I be if I’d never met you? She had made him what he was, she and that lunatic Catsize; Anla, with her ideas and visions, Catsize with his thousand personae and half-crazed fantasies.
Ben roused himself from melancholy to the task at hand. It had to be admitted that the uses of mindfuck was one of Catsize’s more valuable contributions to his entity.
“You can’t have animals in this park.”
“It only says dogs.”
“Most people don’t have, what is it, foddles.”
“That’s just the point, isn’t it?”
“What?”
“This is a foddle sanctuary. It says ‘No Dogs’ to protect the innocent littles and their defenseless shags.”
“You trying to be funny, mate?”
“It’s hardly a laughing matter.”
“Bloody right.” The park-keeper spied the small steaming pile and stared at it in outrage. “Anyhow, what are you doing with a foddle? They’re a protected fauna.”
This was more tricky; it was a point which had not occurred to Ben. “Precisely my point.”
“Well,
