In the Deadlands Read online

John looked at him. “You?”

  “I know it may seem hard to believe, but it’s true. Of course, I will admit that my wife and I never allowed our situation to reach the point that you and your wife have, but I can tell you that we have never regretted it.”

  “Never…?” asked John.

  “Never,” said Wolfe, and he smiled proudly.

  Act Three

  After the installation men had left, John looked at his wife as if to say, “Now what?”

  Marsha avoided his gaze. It was almost as if she were having second thoughts herself. “I’ll get dinner,” she said, and left the room.

  Dinner was a silent meal, and they picked at it without relish. John had an irritating feeling of impatience, yet at the same time he dreaded the moment that was rushing down on both of them. Neither of them referred to the new machine waiting in the bedroom.

  Finally, he pushed his plate away and left the table. He tried to interest himself in the television, but it was all reruns except for the movie, and he had seen that at the local theater last year—with Marsha, he remembered abruptly. He switched off the set disgustedly and picked up a magazine instead, but it was one that he had already read. He would have put it down, but Marsha came into the room, so he feigned interest in an article he had already been bored with once.

  Marsha didn’t speak; instead she pulled out her mending and began sewing a torn sock. From time to time she gave a little exhalation of breath that was not quite a sigh.

  It was his place to say something, John knew, but at the same time he didn’t want to—it would be too much effort. He didn’t feel like working at being nice tonight. He could feel the silence lying between them like a fence—and on either side of it the tethered dogs of their tempers waited for the unwary comment.

  John dropped the magazine to the floor and stared at the opposite wall, the blank eye of the TV. He glanced over at Marsha, saw that she was already looking at him. He glanced away quickly, began rummaging through the rack for another magazine.

  “You know,” she said, “pretending that I’m not here won’t make me go away. If you don’t want to do it, just say so.”

  He dropped the magazine he was looking at, hesitated, then continued to rummage. “What’s your hurry?” he said.

  “You’re just as curious as I am,” she answered.

  “No, I’m not I really don’t think that it’s going to make that much difference. I only bought it for your sake.” Then, having sunk his barb, he returned his attention to the magazines.

  She bent to her mending again, biting her lips silently and thinking of all the things she wanted to say, but knew she shouldn’t. It wouldn’t take much to make him storm out of the house and not come back until after the bars closed.

  After a while, she bit off the end of the thread and said, “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” and immediately regretted having said it.

  But he didn’t take offense. He just said, “I’m not afraid,” and continued paging through an old copy of Life.

  She put her mending down. “Remember when we were first married…? How we used to stall all evening long—both pretending that that wasn’t the only thing on our minds…?”

  He grunted. She couldn’t tell whether it was a yes-grunt or a no-grunt.

  “Don’t you feel something like that now…?” she asked. “I mean, doesn’t it feel the same to you?”

  “No, it doesn’t,” he said, and there was a hardness in his voice that made her back off.

  She sighed and put her mending basket aside. She went into the kitchen and made coffee instead. She started to cry and had to blink back the tears. She thought that John hadn’t heard, but suddenly he was standing at the kitchen door. “Now what’s the matter?” he asked tiredly.

  “Nothing,” she snapped and took the cream out of the refrigerator and put it on the counter. “I burned myself, making you coffee.”

  “I don’t want any,” he said, then as an afterthought, “Thanks.”

  She put the cream back in the refrigerator and followed him into the living room. “Then what do you want? Do you want to go to bed?”

  John looked at her. Who was this woman who had suddenly become a part of his life? Where had she come from? Why was he so reluctant even to touch her? He shoved the thought out of his mind. “I’m tired,” he said.

  “No, you’re not,” she snapped. “You don’t want to. You always say you’re tired when you don’t want to.” She pointed toward the bedroom. “Well, that thing’s in there now, John—and it’s not going away either. Sooner or later, you’re going to have to see how it works. Why not tonight?”

  He looked at her for a long moment, as if trying to remember the girl she had once been. Finally, “All right I’ll turn out the lights.…”

  She waited and they went into the bedroom together, without words. She started to help him out of his clothes, but he pushed her hands away and peeled off his shirt without letting her touch him. He undid his belt and let his pants drop to the floor.

  And then, suddenly, she was standing in front of him—he hadn’t even noticed when she’d shrugged out of her dress, but here she was, wearing only bra and panties. In the dim light she was only a silhouette and he had to rely on his memory to tell him what she looked like.

  She slid into his arms and they stood there for a moment, without effort, without moving.

  After a bit, she broke away and began looking for the stick-ons and the wrist bands. “The pause that depresses…” She smiled at him, but he did not smile back. Instead, he sat down on the edge of the bed to wait.

  She handed him the ankle and wrist bands and showed him how to attach the stick-ons. “Mr. Wolfe showed me how, but it’s also in the instruction book. Bend down, so I can do your forehead.” He did and she did.

  “My turn now,” she said. “Come on…”

  He stood there, looking at her, conscious of the plastic bands on his wrists and ankles and on his forehead and temples as well. But she didn’t laugh. “Aren’t you going to help me?” she demanded instead.

  He glanced around and found that she had stacked her bands neatly on the night stand. With a minimum of effort, he clipped them to her forearms. He did not resist when she kissed him affectionately on the ear, but neither did he react. Marsha caught at his hand and held it. “It’ll be good, John. I know.” For the first time in a year, she looked into his eyes. “Trust me.”

  He looked back at her, this strange woman who was his wife, and his first impulse was to snap, “I’m doing it, aren’t I?” But something in her glance held him back, and he just nodded instead.

  Being careful of the bands on their wrists and ankles, the paste-ons as well, they climbed into bed.

  For a while they lay side by side, she looking at him, he looking into the darkness. They listened to the sound of each other’s breathing in the dark. Finally, impatiently, she moved into his arms.

  “They say you should relax,” she whispered. “Let the machine do the guiding. But you do have to start it, John. You have to give the feedback and reaction systems something to start with…”

  She lifted her face up, wanting to be kissed. He kissed it. He let his hands move incuriously over her body, feeling how her once-trim form had begun to pile up layers, had begun to turn to fat; the once-smooth skin was beginning to go rough and there were wrinkles. But he let his hands roam across her anyway, without direction, not noticing how they had already begun to quest and probe.

  Marsha’s hands too were moving across his body, through the sparse hair on his chest, up and along his never-well-muscled arms, across the uneven pimple-stained skin of his back. Yet, he noticed, her hands seemed to be more gentle than they had seemed in the past, more sensitive, more knowing, and more active. She was beginning to caress parts of his chest and legs, places that seemed to be more alive than he remembered them.

  His hands too had taken on a life of their own—and yet, they were still his hands. He stroked, he fondled, he caressed with
a technique and a skill he had never noticed in himself. And Marsha was reacting, responding, giving with an enthusiasm he had never before seen in this woman who was his wife.

  Now he was moving and thrusting with a wholeness of being that had to be shared—it was too big for any one person—and he moved and thrust at her all the more willfully, trying to push his sharing all the deeper into her. Marsha too seemed to be arching, thrusting, giving—as if she too had something overwhelming to give.

  It was as if they were both doing the right thing at the right time and at the right place—and for one brief bright flash it reminded him of what it had been like when they had been young, and when nothing else had existed but each other and the bright surging world.

  They forgot the stick-ons, the bands, the guidance module on the dresser. Their external beings had disappeared and they immersed themselves in their lovemaking. It was a surging climbing wave, a bright crashing thing that built ever higher. Ever higher.

  And it was very good.

  He smiled at her. She smiled back, and they kissed. It wasn’t until the next morning they discovered the guidance module had not been turned on.

  AFTERWORD:

  All these years later, this story still bothers me.

  It’s not the simplicity of the tale; it’s the implications.

  What we want isn’t just sex, but the deeper connection it represents. We make the mistake of thinking that sex is the access instead of the expression.

  Yarst!

  Gaius Petronius lived in the time of Nero, the first century of the modern calendar.

  He wrote a peripatetic tale of gluttony, lust, and depravity called The Satyricon. Only 141 consecutive pieces of the work survive, but it is generally regarded as one of the first novels ever written. It is also deliciously pornographic.

  While many of the individuals in the work were actual people of the time, the major characters—Encolpius, Giton, and Ascyltos—are fictitious. Modern scholars regard The Satyricon as a cynical parody of Roman excess and hypocrisy—most notably the section describing the dinner at Trimalchio’s.

  One interpretation holds that Petronius was a member of Nero’s court and may have committed suicide when he fell out of favor with the Emperor and was due to be arrested. Federico Fellini included Petronius in his film version of The Satyricon.

  None of this ennobles the story that follows. The Satyricon of Petronius was a source for the names, the dinner at Trimalchio’s was a scene setting. I was more intrigued with the way that Robert Sheckley had invented his own comedic genre of science fiction.

  This was my first stumbling attempt at the same.

  The title of the story is a fannish expression of disgust, which I first heard at a poker game after a meeting of the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society—when the last card turned over was not the one the player desired.

  After discovering that he couldn’t consummate his marriage to one of the flame women of Alphard VI, even with asbestos pajamas, George N-Kolpus sadly had the alliance annulled and returned to GalacCentral, that huge terminus in space, where he once more took up his lonely vigil at one end of THE BOTTOM HALF OF INFINITY, BAR AND GRILL.

  Tri-Mach, the robot bartender, whirred smoothly up. “Why, it’s George N-Kolpus!” His eyestalks scanned the figure; comparison with the memory banks and recognition was almost immediate. “It’s great to have you back, George. The usual, I presume?”

  George nodded.

  Tri-Mach extended his eyestalks and carefully measured out the nine different liquors that were the components of a Sirian Slush. His six multijointed arms alternately strobed, stroked, stoked, swizzled, swirled, shook, scalded, and skreexled the mixture. “We didn’t expect you so soon,” whirred Tri-Mach. “We’d heard you’d gotten married again. I didn’t even get a chance to congratulate you this time. I’ll bet she was pretty. They always are. You have excellent taste, George.”

  George eyed the robot blearily. “You talk too much, Tri-Mach.”

  Tri-Mach stiffened his eyestalks indignantly. “I can’t help it. That’s the way I’m programmed. It’s my job, you know.”

  “I’m sorry, Tri-Mach. It’s just that I’m upset.”

  “I understand, George.” The robot accepted the human’s apology. “The marriage didn’t work out?”

  George sighed. “She was one of the flame women of Alphard VI. I should have known better....”

  Tri-Mach’s eyestalks drooped in sympathy. He lowered his voice two octaves. Also two decibels. “I’m so sorry to hear that. But you know what they say, those flame women are hot ones.”

  George sighed again. “That was the trouble.”

  Tri-Mach finished his strobing, stroking, stoking, swizzling, swirling, shaking, scalding, and skreexling, and placed the still smoking mixture in front of George. “Two credits please.”

  “Put it on my tab.”

  “It has been done.” Tri-Mach whirred thoughtfully, then: “Hmm, you have quite a long credit record with us, George.”

  “I didn’t ask for a credit report,” the human said acidly.

  “I could not help but observe when I plugged into your account. If you are not careful you could turn into an alcoholic. I note certain susceptibility to alcoholism in your medical index, and—”

  “Dammit! I came in here for a drink, not an analysis.”

  “—and there is also your compulsive matrimony, a Don Juan tendency; possibly Narcissism, which suggests a latent—”

  “Dammit! Will you shut up and let a man drink in peace! I came in here to forget, not to have some gabbling hunk of tin psychoanalyze me.”

  Tri-Mach stiffened. “I beg your pardon, George. I thought you might want to discuss your problem. It makes some of my customers feel better if they can talk about it. (And it’s chromalumin—not tin.)”

  “(Same difference.) Why should I talk about it? You’ve already plugged into my file. What is there that I can tell you that you don’t already know?”

  “Perhaps you could clarify some of the things that don’t go into the indices. For instance, your first extraterrestrial marriage—I fail to see what a human being would find interesting in an octopod female of Beta Lambda II.”

  “Of course, you wouldn’t understand,” said George. “You’re just a machine. You couldn’t understand what it is to love. Oh, my sweet little Myrinae—Myrinae translates out to something like ‘Lovely Tentacles, Graceful Suckers’; but that doesn’t even begin to do her justice. She was one of the most enthusiastic lovers this side of Betelgeuse—delightful! But, you’re only a machine. You couldn’t comprehend what it is to experience actual physical love.”

  “There are mechanical equivalents,” Tri-Mach noted.

  George shook his head, took a sip of his drink, his first. “It’s not the same, Tri-Mach. It’s just not the same.” He sighed in remembrance. “Those octopod women may not be much to look at, but get one of them into bed—well, there’s no describing it. When it comes to hanging on for the ride, there is no substitute for eight clinging tentacles. I still have sucker marks on my back....” George sighed again. “Boy, that female really knew how to do it.”

  “I still fail to understand,” said the machine, wiping at a spot on the plastoid surface of the bar. “If she was such a good lover, why did you eventually leave her? You said she was very good in bed.”

  “Bed is a misnomer. She was very good, but bed isn’t the right word. Those octopods don’t like beds—they prefer cold slime pools. I nearly ruined my health just because I wanted to sleep with my wife. I still get cold chills thinking about it.”

  “It sounds like you gave up too easy. Couldn’t you have worked out some arrangement?”

  “Oh, we tried. Let me tell you, we tried. Everything. I almost developed an addiction to the anti-chill drugs. And even that I might have lived with. No, what killed it was the fact that she kept trying to cuddle up to me in the middle of the night—and I kept drowning. After the third or fourth midnight resurrection,
I decided enough was enough.”

  Tri-Mach’s eyestalks drooped in sympathy; a neat touch that—he decided to add it to his repertoire of reactions. “A difference in ecologies, George. Even the smallest difference can be an insurmountable obstacle.”

  George nodded, took a sip of his drink, frowned thoughtfully. “Yeah, but that’s not the only reason an E.T. marriage breaks up. Hell, Pi Alpha Alpha has an atmosphere and ecology 93% analogous to Homeworld —but I’d never marry one of their women.”

  “Pi Alpha Alpha is a lovely planet. I understand that the mating flights of the winged wisps are lovely to see and even more thrilling to be a part of. And the Matriarchy encourages intermarriage. Off-worlders are eagerly welcomed, and if you can’t fly, they’ll even supply the grav-belt for the wedding night—”

  “Tri-Mach,” interrupted George wearily. “It’s obvious that you know little of human psychology.”

  “That’s why I am discussing this matter with you, George. I fail to understand why marriage with a winged wisp would be impractical. It is said to be a most soul-satisfying experience—”

  “Hmp,” said George. “A winged wisp is a most unfemale creature, with very unfemale sex organs. They lay their eggs inside the bodies of the males. When the egg hatches, the father carries the slug-child while it grows inside him. Oh yes, and while it grows it also devours the father’s innards. Until the father dies, that is; at which point the thing gorges itself, encapsulates, hibernates, and metamorphoses into a preadolescent. Sorry, that’s not for me, Tri-Mach. If I’m going to be a parent, I’d prefer to do it the more traditional way.”

  Tri-Mach nodded his eyestalks. “Yes, I understand. A conflict in sexual and parental drives, coupled with the basic survival instinct. Yes, yes, George, I understand now. Differences in inherent psychologies and cultural drives can prevent a marriage from succeeding.”

  “You’re trying to simplify everything, Tri-Mach,” George accused. “One can have exactly the same drives as one’s mate—and things still won’t work out. For instance, I was once married to one of the Gorgons of Golias. They call them that because their sensory tendrils grow in a fringe around the top of their heads.”