Picnic on Nearside (23 page)

Cathay stood there and took it until she broke into tears again. I saw her differently this time, maybe a little more like Cathay was seeing her. I was sorry for her, but the tears failed to move me. I saw that she could devour us all if we didn’t harden ourselves to her. When it came right down to it, she was the one who had to pay for her carelessness. She was trying her best to get someone else to shoulder the blame, but Cathay wasn’t going to do it.

“I didn’t want to do this,” Cathay said. He looked back at us. “Trigger?”

Trigger stepped forward and folded her arms across her chest.

“Okay,” she said. “Listen, I didn’t get your name, and I don’t really want to know it. But whoever you are, you’re on my property, in my house. I’m ordering you to leave here, and I further enjoin you never to come back.”

“I won’t go,” she said, stubbornly, looking down at her feet. “I’m not leaving till he promises to help me.”

“My next step is to call the police,” Trigger reminded her.

“I’m not leaving.”

Trigger looked at Cathay and shrugged helplessly. I think they were both realizing that this particular life experience was getting a little too raw.

Cathay thought it over for a moment, eye to eye with the pregnant woman. Then he reached down and scooped up a handful of mud. He looked at it, hefting it experimentally, then threw it at her. It struck her on the left shoulder with a wet plop, and began to ooze down.

“Go,” he said. “Get out of here.”

“I’m not leaving,” she said.

He threw another handful. It hit her face, and she gasped and sputtered.

“Go,” he said, reaching for more mud. This time he hit her on the leg, but by now Trigger had joined him, and the woman was being pelted.

Before I quite knew what was happening, I was scooping mud from the ground and throwing it. Denver was, too. I was breathing hard, and I wasn’t sure why.

When she finally turned and fled from us, I noticed that my jaw muscles were tight as steel. It took me a long time to relax them, and when I did, my front teeth were sore.

*   *   *

There are two structures on Beatnik Bayou. One is an old, rotting bait shop and lunch counter called the Sugar Shack, complete with a rusty gas pump out front, a battered Grapette machine on the porch, and a sign advertising Rainbow Bread on the screen door. There’s a gray Dodge pickup sitting on concrete blocks to one side of the building, near a pile of rusted auto parts overgrown
with weeds. The truck has no wheels. Beside it is a Toyota sedan with no windows or engine. A dirt road runs in front of the shack, going down to the dock. In the other direction the road curves around a cypress tree laden with moss—

—and runs into the wall. A bit of a jolt. But though twelve acres is large for a privately owned disneyland, it’s not big enough to sustain the illusion of really being there. “There,” in this case, is supposed to be Louisiana in 1951, old style. Trigger is fascinated by the twentieth century, which she defines as 1903 to 1987.

But most of the time it works. You can seldom see the walls because trees are in the way. Anyhow, I soak up the atmosphere of the place not so much with my eyes but with my nose and ears and skin. Like the smell of rotting wood, the sound of a frog hitting the water or the hum of the compressor in the soft drink machine, the silver wiggle of a dozen minnows as I scoop them from the metal tanks in back of the shack, the feel of sun-heated wood as I sit on the pier fishing for alligator gar.

It takes a lot of power to operate the “sun,” so we get a lot of foggy days, and long nights. That helps the illusion, too. I would challenge anyone to go for a walk in the bayou night with the crickets chirping and the bullfrogs booming and not think they were back on Old Earth. Except for the Lunar gravity, of course.

Trigger inherited money. Even with that and a teacher’s salary, the bayou is an expensive place to maintain. It used to be a more conventional environment, but she discovered early that the swamp took less upkeep, and she likes the sleazy atmosphere, anyway. She put in the bait shop, bought the automotive mockups from artists, and got it listed with the Lunar Tourist Bureau as an authentic period reconstruction. They’d die if they knew the truth about the Toyota, but I certainly won’t tell them.

The only other structure is definitely not from Louisiana of any year. It’s a teepee sitting on a slight rise, just out of sight of the Sugar Shack. Cheyenne, I think. We spend most of our time there when we’re on the bayou.

That’s where we went after the episode with the pregnant woman. The floor is hard-packed clay and there’s a fire always burning in the center. There’s lots of pillows scattered around, and two big waterbeds.

We tried to talk about the incident. I think Denver was more
upset than the rest of us, but from the tense way Cathay sat while Trigger massaged his back I knew he was bothered, too. His voice was troubled.

I admitted I had been scared, but there was more to it than that, and I was far from ready to talk about it. Trigger and Cathay sensed it, and let it go for the time being. Trigger got the pipe and stuffed it with dexeplant leaves.

It’s a long-stemmed pipe. She got it lit, then leaned back with the stem in her teeth and the bowl held between her toes. She exhaled sweet, honey-colored smoke. As the day ended outside, she passed the pipe around. It tasted good, and calmed me wonderfully. It made it easy to fall asleep.

*   *   *

But I didn’t sleep. Not quite. Maybe I was too far into puberty for the drug in the plant to act as a tranquilizer anymore. Or maybe I was too emotionally stimulated. Denver fell asleep quickly enough.

Cathay and Trigger didn’t. They made love on the other side of the teepee, did it in such a slow, dreamy way that I knew the drug was affecting them. Though Cathay is in his forties and Trigger is over a hundred, both have the bodies of thirteen-year-olds, and the metabolism that goes with the territory.

They didn’t actually finish making love; they sort of tapered off, like we used to do before orgasms became a factor. I found that made me happy, lying on my side and watching them through slitted eyes.

They talked for a while. The harder I strained to hear them, the sleepier I got. Somewhere in there I lost the battle to stay awake.

*   *   *

I became aware of a warm body close to me. It was still dark, the only light coming from the embers of the fire.

“Sorry, Argus,” Cathay said. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“It’s okay. Put your arms around me?” He did, and I squirmed until my back fit snugly against him. For a long time I just enjoyed it. I didn’t think about anything, unless it was his warm breath on my neck, or his penis slowly hardening against my back. If you can call that thinking.

How many nights had we slept like this in the last seven years?
Too many to count. We knew each other every way possible. A year ago he had been female, and before that both of us had been. Now we were both male, and that was nice, too. One part of me thought it didn’t really matter which sex we were, but another part was wondering what it would be like to be female and know Cathay as a male. We hadn’t tried that yet.

The thought of it made me shiver with anticipation. It had been too long since I’d had a vagina. I wanted Cathay between my legs, like Trigger had had him a short while before.

“I love you,” I mumbled.

He kissed my ear. “I love you, too, silly. But how
much
do you love me?”

“What do you mean?”

I felt him shift around to prop his head up on one hand. His fingers unwound a tight curl in my hair.

“I mean, will you still love me when I’m no taller than your knee?”

I shook my head, suddenly feeling cold. “I don’t want to talk about that.”

“I know that very well,” he said. “But I can’t let you forget it. It’s not something that’ll go away.”

I turned onto my back and looked up at him. There was a faint smile on his face as he toyed with my lips and hair with his gentle fingertips, but his eyes were concerned. Cathay can’t hide much from me anymore.

“It has to happen,” he emphasized, showing no mercy. “For the reasons you heard me tell the woman. I’m committed to going back to age seven. There’s another child waiting for me. She’s a lot like you.”

“Don’t do it,” I said, feeling miserable. I felt a tear in the corner of my eye, and Cathay brushed it away.

I was thankful that he didn’t point out how unfair I was being. We both knew it; he accepted that, and went on as best he could.

“You remember our talk about sex? About two years ago, I think it was. Not too long after you first told me you love me.”

“I remember. I remember it all.”

He kissed me. “Still, I have to bring it up. Maybe it’ll help. You know we agreed that it didn’t matter what sex either of us
was. Then I pointed out that you’d be growing up, while I’d become a child again. That we’d grow further apart sexually.”

I nodded, knowing that if I spoke I’d start to sob.

“And we agreed that our love was deeper than that. That we didn’t need sex to make it work. It
can
work.”

This was true. Cathay was close to all his former students. They were adults now, and came to see him often. It was just to be close, to talk and hug. Lately sex had entered it again, but they all understood that would be over soon.

“I don’t think I have that perspective,” I said, carefully. “They know in a few years you’ll mature again. I know it too, but it still feels like . . .”

“Like what?”

“Like you’re abandoning me. I’m sorry, that’s just how it feels.”

He sighed, and pulled me close to him. He hugged me fiercely for a while, and it felt so good.

“Listen,” he said, finally. “I guess there’s no avoiding this. I could tell you that you’ll get over it—you will—but it won’t do any good. I had this same problem with every child I’ve taught.”

“You did?” I hadn’t known that, and it made me feel a little better.

“I did. I don’t blame you for it. I feel it myself. I feel a pull to stay with you. But it wouldn’t work, Argus. I love my work, or I wouldn’t be doing it. There are hard times, like right now. But after a few months you’ll feel better.”

“Maybe I will.” I was far from sure of it, but it seemed important to agree with him and get the conversation ended.

“In the meantime,” he said, “we still have a few weeks together. I think we should make the most of them.” And he did, his hands roaming over my body. He did all the work, letting me relax and try to get myself straightened out.

So I folded my arms under my head and reclined, trying to think of nothing but the warm circle of his mouth.

But eventually I began to feel I should be doing something for him, and knew what was wrong. He thought he was giving me what I wanted by making love to me in the way we had done since we grew older together. But there was another way, and I realized
I didn’t so much want him to stay thirteen. What I really wanted was to go back with him, to be seven again.

I touched his head and he looked up, then we embraced again face to face. We began to move against each other as we had done since we first met, the mindless, innocent friction from a time when it had less to do with sex than with simply feeling good.

But the body is insistent, and can’t be fooled. Soon our movements were frantic, and then a feeling of wetness between us told me as surely as entropy that we could never go back.

*   *   *

On my way home the signs of change were all around me.

You grow a little, let out the arms and legs of your pressure suit until you finally have to get a new one. People stop thinking of you as a cute little kid and start talking about you being a fine young person. Always with that smile, like it’s a joke that you’re not supposed to get.

People treat you differently as you grow up. At first you hardly interact at all with adults, except your own mother and the mothers of your friends. You live in a kid’s world, and adults are hardly even obstacles because they get out of your way when you run down the corridors. You go all sorts of places for free; people want you around to make them happy because there are so few kids and just about everybody would like to have more than just the one. You hardly even notice the people smiling at you all the time.

But it’s not like that at all when you’re thirteen. Now there was the hesitation, just a fraction of a second before they gave me a child’s privileges. Not that I blamed anybody. I was nearly as tall as a lot of the adults I met.

But now I had begun to notice the adults, to watch them. Especially when they didn’t know they were being watched. I saw that a lot of them spent a lot of time frowning. Occasionally, I would see real pain on a face. Then he or she would look at me, and smile. I could see that wouldn’t be happening forever. Sooner or later I’d cross some invisible line, and the pain would stay in those faces, and I’d have to try to understand it. I’d be an adult, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to be.

It was because of this new preoccupation with faces that I noticed the woman sitting across from me on the Archimedes
train. I planned to be a writer, so I tended to see everything in terms of stories and characters. I watched her and tried to make a story about her.

She was attractive: physically mid-twenties, straight black hair and brownish skin, round face without elaborate surgery or startling features except her dark brown eyes. She wore a simple thigh-length robe of thin white material that flowed like water when she moved. She had one elbow on the back of her seat, absently chewing a knuckle as she looked out the window.

There didn’t seem to be a story in her face. She was in an unguarded moment, but I saw no pain, no big concerns or fears. It’s possible I just missed it. I was new at the game and I didn’t know much about what was important to adults. But I kept trying.

Then she turned to look at me, and she didn’t smile.

I mean, she smiled, but it didn’t say isn’t-he-cute. It was the sort of smile that made me wish I’d worn some clothes. Since I’d learned what erections are for, I no longer wished to have them in public places.