Bride 91
by Robert Silverberg
It was a standard six-month marriage contract. I signed it, and Landy signed it and we were man and wife, for the time being. The registrar clicked and chuttered and disgorged our license. My friends grinned and slapped me on the back and bellowed congratulations. Five of Landy’s sisters giggled and hummed and went through complete spectral changes. We were all very happy.
“Kiss the bride!” cried my friends and her sisters.
Landy slipped into my arms. It was a good fit; she was pliable and slender, and I engulfed her, and the petals of her ingestion-slot fluttered prettily as I pressed my lips against them. We held the pose for maybe half a minute. Give her credit: she didn’t flinch. On Landy’s world they don’t kiss, not with their mouths, at least, and I doubt that she enjoyed the experience much. But by the terms of our marriage contract we were following Terran mores. That has to be decided in advance, in these interworld marriages. And here we kiss the bride; so I kissed the bride. My pal Jim Owens got carried away and scooped up one of Landy’s sisters and kissed her. She gave him a shove in the chest that knocked him across the chapel. It wasn’t her wedding, after all.
The ceremony was over, and we had our cake and hallucinogens, and about midnight someone said, “We ought to give the honeymooners some privacy.”
So they all cleared out and Landy and I started our wedding night.
We waited until they were gone. Then we took the back exit from the chapel and got into a transport capsule for two, very snug, Landy’s sweet molasses fragrance pungent in my nostrils, her flexible limbs coiled against mine, and I nudged a stud and we went floating down Harriman Channel at three hundred kilometers an hour. The eddy currents weren’t bad, and we loved the ride. She kissed me again; she was learning our ways fast. In fifteen minutes we reached our programmed destination and the capsule took a quick left turn, squirted through an access sphincter, and fastened itself to the puckered skin of our hotel. The nose of the capsule produced the desired degree of irritation; the skin parted and we shot into the building. I opened the capsule and helped Landy out, inside our room. Her soft golden eyes were shimmering with merriment and joy. I slapped a privacy seal on the wall-filters.
“I love you,” she said in more-or-less English.
“I love you,” I told her in her own language.
She pouted at me. “This is a Terran marriage, remember?”
“So it is. So it is. Champagne and caviar?”
“Of course.”
I programmed for it, and the snack came rolling out of the storage unit, ice-cold and inviting. I popped the cork and sprinkled lemon juice on the caviar, and we dined. Fish eggs and overripe grape juice, nothing more, I reminded myself.
After that we activated the periscope stack and stared up through a hundred storys of hotel at the stars. There was a lover’s moon in the sky that night, and also one of the cartels had strung a row of beady jewels across about twenty degrees of arc, as though purely for our pleasure. We held hands and watched.
After that we dissolved our wedding clothes.
And after that we consummated our marriage.
You don’t think I’m going to tell you about that, do you? Some things are still sacred, even now. If you want to find out how to make love to a Suvornese, do as I did and marry one. But I’ll give you a few hints about what it’s like. Anatomically, it’s homologous to the process customary on Terra, so far as the relative roles of male and female go. That is, man gives, woman receives, in essence. But there are differences, pretty major ones, in position, texture, sensation, and response. Of course there are. Why marry an alien, otherwise?
I confess I was nervous, although this was my ninety-first wedding night. I had never married a Suvornese before. I hadn’t been to bed with one, either, and if you stop to reflect a little on Suvornese ethical practices you’ll see what a damn-fool suggestion that was. I had studied a Suvornese marriage manual, but as any adolescent on any world quickly realizes, translating words and tridim prints into passionate action is trickier than it seems, the first time.
Landy was very helpful, though. She knew no more about Terran males than I did about Suvornese females, of course, but she was eager to learn and eager to see that I did all the right things. So we managed excellently well. There’s a knack to it. Some men have it, some don’t. I do.
We made love a good deal that night, and in the morning we breakfasted on a sun-washed terrace overlooking a turquoise pool of dancing amoeboids, and later in the day we checked out and capsuled down to the spaceport to begin our wedding journey.
“Happy?” I asked my bride.
“Very,” she said. “You’re my favorite husband already.”
“Were any of the others Terrans?”
“No, of course not.”
I smiled. A husband likes to know he’s been the first.
At the spaceport, Landy signed the manifest as Mrs. Paul Clay, which gave me great pleasure, and I signed beside her, and they scanned us and let us go aboard. The ship personnel beamed at us in delight. A handsome indigo-skinned girl showed us to our cabin and wished us a good trip so amiably that I tried to tip her. I caught her credit-counter as she passed me, and pushed the dial up a notch. She looked aghast and set it right back again. “Tipping’s forbidden, sir!”
“Sorry. I got carried away.”
“Your wife’s so lovely. Is she Honirangi?”
“Suvornese.”
“I hope you’re very happy together.”
We were alone again. I cuddled Landy up against me. Interworld marriages are all the rage nowadays, of course, but I hadn’t married Landy merely because it was a fad. I was genuinely attracted to her, and she to me. All over the galaxy people are contracting the weirdest marriages just to say that they’ve done it—marrying Sthenics, Gruulers, even Hhinamor. Really grotesque couplings. I don’t say that the prime purpose of a marriage is sex, or that you necessarily have to marry a member of a species with which a physical relationship is easy to maintain. But there ought to be some kind of warmth in a marriage. How can you feel real love for a Hhinamor wife who is actually seven pale blue reptiles permanently enclosed in an atmosphere? At least Landy was mammalian and humanoid. A Suvornese-Terran mating would of course be infertile, but I am a conventional sort of person at heart and try to avoid committing abominations; I am quite willing to leave the task of continuing the species to those whose job is reproduction, and you can be sure that even if our chromosomes were mutually congruent I would never have brought the disgusting subject up with Landy. Marriage is marriage, reproduction is reproduction, and what does one have to do with the other, anyway?
During the six subjective weeks of our journey, we amused ourselves in various ways aboard the ship. We made love a good deal, of course. We went gravity-swimming and played paddle-polo in the star lounge. We introduced ourselves to other newlywed couples, and to a newlywed super-couple consisting of three Banamons and a pair of Ghinoi.
And also Landy had her teeth transplanted, as a special surprise for me.
Suvornese have teeth, but they are not like Terran teeth, as why should they be? They are elegant little spiny needles mounted on rotating bases, which a Suvornese uses to impale his food while he rasps at it from the rear with his tongue. In terms of Suvornese needs they are quite functional, and in the context of her species Landy’s teeth were remarkably attractive, I thought. I didn’t want her to change them. But she must have picked up some subtle hint that I found her teeth anti-erotic, or something. Perhaps I was radiating an underlying dislike for that alien dental arrangement of hers even while I was telling myself on the conscious level that they were lovely. So she went to the ship’s surgeon and got herself a mouthful of Terran teeth.