“I’ve never thought of myself as an artist.”
“You’re a damned good one, if a little inexperienced. But you were coming along very nicely.”
“Until I hit this place.”
Trent looked at the sky, the sea, and the sand. “Yes.” He sighed. “Right. This world is very problematical. It’s flat, magically speaking. No spark in the air. No vibes. Nothing.”
“Maybe it’s more subtle than we realize.”
“Very subtle. All worlds have magic.”
“Do they really?”
“Yes, to some extent. Some more than others. This one has it, make no mistake. But they must be keeping it in cookie jars.”
Sheila laughed, leaned over and kissed him.
“Hungry?” he asked.
“A little.”
“Tell you what. We’ll have lunch at our favorite restaurant —”
“The breadfruit tree.”
“Right, and afterward we’ll go for a stroll. It’s about time we circumnavigated this island, see what’s on the other side.”
“Maybe there’s a lagoon. Wouldn’t that be romantic?”
“Great for fishing. But this looks like a volcanic island. Lagoons usually happen in coral formations.”
“You know a lot about a lot of things.”
“Are you kidding? I’ve had a subscription toReader’s Digest for fifty years.”
Trent’s guess was right. Coming around the curving shore, they were greeted by the sight of a huge volcano rising from an island that lay just on the horizon. Ash-gray and forbidding, the cone topped off at two thousand feet, as nearly as Trent could estimate.
“Extinct, maybe?” Sheila asked.
“Dormant. I dunno. I can’t see any vegetation on that island. That worries me.”
“It looks dead.”
“Let’s hope it stays that way.”
Access inland was better here, grassy slopes rising gradually from the beach to an eroded peak in the center of the island. They even discovered a cave. It was full of bats and not fit for habitation.
But there was a lagoon, after all, rather a cove, a rock-rimmed pocket of calm water, good for swimming and, very likely, fishing, if some sort of tackle could be improvised.
“Or a net,” Trent mused.
“That’d be hard.”
“You braid vines, strips of sapling, make rope. Then you make a net. Hard? You bet, but South Sea islanders do it all the time.”
“Think I’d look good in a sarong, or maybe a grass skirt?”
“You look fine the way you are now, but we’ll be needing clothes sooner or later.”
“I was cold last night,” she said. “A little bit, until you covered me.”
“Only proper thing to do under the circumstances. We’ll have to find a source of fresh water, of course, but right now I don’t see any reason why we shouldn’t move to this side. Better food supply, shelter from the open sea, inland route, and other advantages, probably, that I haven’t noticed yet. We’ll put our house up on that knoll over there. Be a good observation point.”
She laughed. “You’ve got this all figured out, don’t you?”
He shrugged. “We must make do, somehow. We might be here for a spell.”
“I’m glad we’re together, Trent.”
He gathered her in and held her close.
“I’m extremely glad of that myself. Cold again?”
“No, just hold me. Tight.”
He did, then they lay down together on the soft bed of the beach.
Nineteen
Long Island
Chico’s was busy that night, the dance floor a scrummage of writhing humanity. Snowclaw couldn’t get over the noise in the place. It had taken some getting used to. He didn’t quite understand what all the thumping and screeching was about, though he knew it had something to do with music. And the dancing was completely incomprehensible. Snowy took it to be some complex courting ritual. But what did the flashing lights have to do with anything?
It didn’t matter. His job was to look after things. Check for proper dress; no jeans, no tennis shoes, no generally sloppy outfits. Chico’s had to be a “class act,” was Nunzio’s way of putting it. The other host, Dave, checked the little cards that the young ones held out that supposedly proved they were old enough to be admitted to these adult doings.
Snowy’s proper job was throwing the drunks out. That had only happened once since he started. A bartender refused to serve a customer who had glugged a little too much swill, and the customer got a little rowdy. (Interesting sidelight here: the bartender was actually worried that the guy might go out and wreck his metal wagon and get real ticked off at the bartender for giving the guy exactly what he was screaming for — more swill!) Snowclaw had followed directions to the letter. First he was polite, then firmly insistent. When that didn’t work, he picked the guy up, carried him out into the parking lot, and threw him in the dumpster.
That was pretty funny, Dave had told him, but basically it was overreacting.
Snowy didn’t know about that. The guy had been pretty nasty. Besides, all that happened was the little creep got his pride wounded. Snowy wouldn’t think of actually hurting any of these hairless humans. They were all so soft and squishy.
For all of that, though, they were feisty little devils. Like the guy he threw out, coming back with a policeman in tow, demanding that Snowy be arrested. The policeman heard Snowy’s story, then told the guy to forget it. Then the guy started giving the cop all kinds of grief, so the cop and his partner beat the compost out of the little twerp and threw him in their metal wagon, which he didn’t have to drive.
Feisty little devils.
Oh, he forgot the one incident where the female threw a glass of stuff into her mate’s face. Something about the female walking into the place and finding this guy cavorting with another female in a dark corner. She got upset at this behavior. Why, exactly, Snowy didn’t know. Apparently humans were supposed to keep to one mate at a time. But, then, what were all these females doing out on the floor making sexual movements with all these different males? He’d seen females doing it with male partner after male partner, and vice versa. Snowy didn’t understand, but he supposed there was some rationale behind it all. He didn’t expect it to make any sense, and in any event he didn’t care much.
The apartment above the joint was uncomfortable until Dave showed him a way to turn the heat off. Dave had done it, but had given Snowy a funny look.
“The heat really gets to me,” Snowy explained. “I come from a cold place.”
“Yeah, but it’s February, f’crissakes. Where you from, the North Pole?”
“Nope.”
“Where, then? Canada?”
“Uh … yeah, Canada.”
“A Canuck, huh? Glad to have you in the USA. C’mon, I’ll show you how to work the videotape. You like porno flicks? Nunzio distributes them.”
Now, these were interesting. He had always wondered about the mechanics of it. Basically the same, except that the male didn’t keep the eggs for a while, like back home. Well, actually, there weren’t any eggs to speak of. There was just sort of doing it, and that was it. Ordinarily he didn’t like to criticize, but the male’s equipment being exposed all the time like that — that was dumb, it seemed to him. And dangerous! Amazing. Funny, too, was the fact that there didn’t seem to be any particular time of year for this sort of stuff. Everybody just rutted away like crazy, no matter what the weather. At the drop of a snowshoe.
Different world, different ways of doing things. That was the way you had to look at it. It didn’t bear thinking about too much. Besides, he had other problems.
Like contacting Linda, somehow. He knew how to work a telephone now, but he didn’t have a number to call. As for begging help, he couldn’t very well ask too many questions, or he’d be thought mighty strange, if he wasn’t already. Somebody had told him, “Dial Information,” and had given him a number, but that was no help at all.