I didn’t know where she went. She vanished after breakfast, telling me she had something important to attend to. All in ignorance, I donned gills and went for a swim while Landy surrendered her pretty teeth to the surgeon. He cleaned out the sockets and implanted a rooting layer of analogous gum-tissue. He chiseled new receptor sockets in this synthetic implant. He drill-tailored a set of donor teeth to fit, and slipped them into the periodontal membranes, and bonded them with a quick jab of homografting cement. The entire process took less than two hours. When Landy returned to me, the band of colorvariable skin across her forehead was way up toward the violet, indicating considerable emotional disturbance, and I felt a little edgy about it.
She smiled. She drew back the petals of her ingestion-slot. She showed me her new teeth.
“Landy! What the hell—!”
Before I could check myself, I was registering shock and dismay from every pore. And Landy registered dismay at my dismay. Her forehead shot clear past the visible spectrum, bathing me in a lot of ultra-violet that distressed me even though I couldn’t see it, and her petals drooped and her eyes glistened and her nostrils clamped together.
“You don’t like them?” she asked.
“I didn’t expect—you took me by surprise—”
“I did it for you!”
“But I liked your old teeth,” I protested.
“No. Not really. You were afraid of them. I know how a Terran kisses. You never kissed me like that. Now I have beautiful teeth. Kiss me, Paul.”
She trembled in my arms. I kissed her.
We were having our first emotional crisis. She had done this crazy thing with her teeth purely to please me, and I wasn’t pleased, and now she was upset. I did all the things I could to soothe her, short of telling her to go back and get her old teeth again. Somehow that would have made matters worse.
I had a hard time getting used to Landy with Terran choppers in her dainty little mouth. She had received a flawless set, of course, two gleaming ivory rows, but they looked incongruous in her ingestion slot, and I had to fight to keep from reacting negatively every time she opened her mouth. When a man buys an old Gothic cathedral, he doesn’t want an architect to trick it up with wiggling bioplast inserts around the spire. And when a man marries a Suvornese, he doesn’t want her to turn herself piecemeal into a Terran. Where would it end? Would Landy now decorate herself with a synthetic navel, and have her breasts shifted about, and get the surgeon to make a genital adjustment so that—
Well, she didn’t. She wore her Terran teeth for about ten shipboard days, and neither of us took any overt notice of them, and then very quietly she went back to the surgeon and had him give her a set of Suvornese dentals again. It was only money, I told myself. I didn’t make any reference to the switch, hoping to treat the episode as a temporary aberration that now was ended. Somehow I got the feeling that Landy still thought she ought to have Terran teeth. But we never discussed it, and I was happy to see her looking Suvornese again.
You see how it is, with marriage? Two people try to please one another, and they don’t always succeed, and sometimes they even hurt one another in the very attempt to please. That’s how it was with Landy and me. But we were mature enough to survive the great tooth crisis. If this had been, say, my tenth or eleventh marriage, it might have been a disaster. One learns how to avoid the pitfalls as one gains experience.
We mingled a good deal with our fellow passengers. If we needed lessons in how not to conduct a marriage, they were easily available. The cabin next to ours was occupied by another mixed couple, which was excuse enough for us to spend some time with them, but very quickly we realized that we didn’t relish their company. They were both playing for a bond forfeiture—a very ugly scene, let me tell you.
The woman was Terran—a big, voluptuous sort with orange hair and speckled eyeballs. Her name was Marje. Her new husband was a Lanamorian, a hulking ox of a humanoid with corrugated blue skin, four telescopic arms, and a tripod deal for legs. At first they seemed likable enough, both on the flighty side, interstellar tourists who had been everywhere and done everything and now were settling down for six months of bliss. But very shortly I noticed that they spoke sharply, even cruelly, to one another in front of strangers. They were out to wound.
You know how it is with the six-month marriage contract, don’t you? Each party posts a desertion bond. If the other fails to go the route, and walks out before the legal dissolution date, the bond is forfeited. Now, it’s not all that hard to stay married for six months, and the bondsmen rarely have to pay off; we are a mature civilization. Such early abuses of the system as conspiring to have one party desert, and then splitting the forfeiture later, have long since become extinct.
But Marje and her Lanamorian mate were both hard up for cash. Each was hot for the forfeiture, and each was working like a demon to outdo the other in obnoxiousness, hoping to break up the marriage fast. When I saw what was going on, I suggested to Landy that we look for friends elsewhere on the ship.
Which led to our second emotional crisis.
As part of their campaign of mutual repulsion, Marje and hubby decided to enliven their marriage with a spot of infidelity. I take a very old-fashioned view of the marriage vow, you understand. I regard myself as bound to love, honor, and obey for six months, with no fooling around on the side; if a man can’t stay monogamous through an entire marriage, he ought to get a spine implant. I assumed that Landy felt the same way. I was wrong.
We were in the ship’s lounge, the four of us, getting high on direct jolts of fusel oils and stray esters, when Marje made a pass at me. She was not subtle. She deopaqued her clothes, waved yards of bosom in my face, and said, “There’s a nice wide bed in our cabin, sweetheart.”
“It isn’t bedtime,” I told her.
“It could be.”
“No.”
“Be a friend in need, Paulsie. This monster’s been crawling all over me for weeks. I want a Terran to love me.”
“The ship is full of available Terrans, Marje.”
“I want you.”
“I’m not available.”
“Cut it out! You mean to say you won’t do a fellow Terran a little favor?” She stood up, quivering, bare flesh erupting all over the place. In scabrously explicit terms she described her intimacies with the Lanamorian, and begged me to give her an hour of more conventional pleasure. I was steadfast. Perhaps, she suggested, I would tape a simulacrum and send that to her bed? No, not even that, I said.
At length Marje got angry with me for turning her down. I suppose she could be legitimately annoyed at my lack of chivalry, and if I hadn’t happened to be married at the moment I would gladly have obliged her, but as it was I couldn’t do a thing for her, and she was boiling. She dumped a drink in my face and stalked out of the lounge, and in a few moments the Lanamorian followed her.
I looked at Landy, whom I had carefully avoided during the whole embarrassing colloquy. Her forehead was sagging close to infra-red, which is to say, in effect, that she was almost in tears.
“You don’t love me,” she said.
“What?”
“If you loved me you’d have gone with her.”
“Is that some kind of Suvornese marriage custom?”
“Of course not,” she snuffled. “We’re married under Terran mores. It’s a Terran marriage custom.”
“What gives you the idea that—”
“Terran men are unfaithful to their wives. I know. I’ve read about it. Any husband who cares about his wife at all cheats on her now then. But you—”