I rolled off the porch.
“Is this a drag, or is this a drag!” Muse was shouting. “Come on! Let’s go!”
We managed to get back to Houston before dawn, somehow.
And went up.
And came down in Istanbuclass="underline"
That morning it rained in Istanbul.
At the commissary we drank our tea from pear-shaped glasses, looking out across the Bosphorus. The Princess Islands lay like trash heaps before the prickly city.
“Who knows their way in this town?” Kelly asked.
“Aren’t we going around together?” Muse demanded. “I thought we were going around together.”
“They held up my check at the purser’s office,” Kelly explained. “I’m flat broke. I think the purser’s got it in for me,” and shrugged. “Don’t want to, but I’m going to have to hunt up a rich frelk and come on friendly,” went back to the tea; then noticed how heavy the silence had become. “Aw, come on, now! You gape at me like that and I’ll bust every bone in that carefully-conditioned-from-puberty body of yours. Hey you!” meaning me. “Don’t give me that holier-than-thou gawk like you never went with no frelk!”
It was starting.
“I’m not gawking,” I said and got quietly mad.
The longing, the old longing.
Bo laughed to break tensions. “Say, last time I was in Istanbul—about a year before I joined up with this platoon—I remember we were coming out of Taksim Square down Istiqlal. Just past all the cheap movies we found a little passage lined with flowers. Ahead of us were two other spacers. It’s a market in there, and farther down they got fish, and then a courtyard with oranges and candy and sea urchins and cabbage. But flowers in front. Anyway, we noticed something funny about the spacers. It wasn’t their uniforms: they were perfect. The haircuts: fine. It wasn’t till we heard them talking—They were a man and woman dressed up like spacers, trying to pick up frelks! Imagine, queer for frelks!”
“Yeah,” Lou said. “I seen that before. There were a lot of them in Rio.”
“We beat hell out of them two,” Bo concluded. “We got them in a side street and went to town!”
Muse’s tea glass clicked on the counter. “From Taksim down Istiqlal till you get to the flowers? Now why didn’t you say that’s where the frelks were, huh?” A smile on Kelly’s face would have made that okay. There was no smile.
“Hell,” Lou said, “nobody ever had to tell me where to look. I go out in the street and frelks smell me coming. I can spot ’em halfway along Piccadilly. Don’t they have nothing but tea in this place? Where can you get a drink?”
Bo grinned. “Moslem country, remember? But down at the end of the Flower Passage there’re a lot of little bars with green doors and marble counters where you can get a liter of beer for about fifteen cents in lira. And there’re all these stands selling deep-fat-fried bugs and pig’s gut sandwiches—”
“You ever notice how frelks can put it away? I mean liquor, not… pig’s guts.”
And launched off into a lot of appeasing stories. We ended with the one about the frelk some spacer tried to roll who announced: “There are two things I go for. One is spacers; the other is a good fight…”
But they only allay. They cure nothing. Even Muse knew we would spend the day apart, now.
The rain had stopped, so we took the ferry up the Golden Horn. Kelly straight off asked for Taksim Square and Istiqlal and was directed to a dolmush, which we discovered was a taxicab, only it just goes one place and picks up lots and lots of people on the way. And it’s cheap.
Lou headed off over Ataturk Bridge to see the sights of New City. Bo decided to find out what the Dolma Boche really was; and when Muse discovered you could go to Asia for fifteen cents—one lira and fifty krush—well, Muse decided to go to Asia.
I turned through the confusion of traffic at the head of the bridge and up past the gray, dripping walls of Old City, beneath the trolley wires. There are times when yelling and helling won’t fill the lack. There are times when you must walk by yourself because it hurts so much to be alone.
I walked up a lot of little streets with wet donkeys and wet camels and women in veils; and down a lot of big streets with buses and trash baskets and men in business suits.
Some people stare at spacers; some people don’t. Some people stare or don’t stare in a way a spacer gets to recognize within a week after coming out of training school at sixteen. I was walking in the park when I caught her watching. She saw me see and looked away.
I ambled down the wet asphalt. She was standing under the arch of a small, empty mosque shell. As I passed she walked out into the courtyard among the cannons.
“Excuse me.”
I stopped.
“Do you know whether or not this is the shrine of St. Irene?” Her English was charmingly accented. “I’ve left my guidebook home.”
“Sorry. I’m a tourist too.”
“Oh.” She smiled. “I am Greek. I thought you might be Turkish because you are so dark.”
“American red Indian.” I nodded. Her turn to curtsy.
“I see. I have just started at the university here in Istanbul. Your uniform, it tells me that you are”—and in the pause, all speculations resolved—”a spacer.”
I was uncomfortable. “Yeah.” I put my hands in my pockets, moved my feet around on the soles of my boots, licked my third from the rear left molar—did all the things you do when you’re uncomfortable. You’re so exciting when you look like that, a frelk told me once. “Yeah, I am.” I said it too sharply, too loudly, and she jumped a little.
So now she knew I knew she knew I knew, and I wondered how we would play out the Proust bit.
“I’m Turkish,” she said. “I’m not Greek. I’m not just starting. I’m a graduate in art history here at the university. These little lies one makes for strangers to protect one’s ego…why? Sometimes I think my ego is very small.”
That’s one strategy.
“How far away do you live?” I asked. “And what’s the going rate in Turkish lira?” That’s another.
“I can’t pay you.” She pulled her raincoat around her hips. She was very pretty. “I would like to.” She shrugged and smiled. “But I am… a poor student. Not a rich one. If you want to turn around and walk away, there will be no hard feelings. I shall only be sad.”
I stayed on the path. I thought she’d suggest a price after a little while. She didn’t.
And that’s another.
I was asking myself, What do you want the damn money for anyway? when a breeze upset water from one of the park’s great cypresses.
“I think the whole business is unhappy.” She wiped drops from her face. There had been a break in her voice and for a moment I looked too closely at the water streaks. “I think it’s unhappy that they have to alter you to make you a spacer. If they hadn’t, then we… If spacers had never been, then we could not be… the way we are. Did you start out male or female?”
Another shower. I was looking at the ground and droplets went down my collar.
“Male,” I said. “It doesn’t matter.”
“How old are you? Twenty-three, twenty-four?”
“Twenty-three,” I lied. It’s reflex. I’m twenty-five, but the younger they think you are, the more they pay you. But I didn’t want her damn money—
“I guessed right then.” She nodded. “Most of us are experts on spacers. Do you find that? I suppose we have to be.” She looked at me with wide black eyes. At the end of the stare, she blinked rapidly. “You would have been a fine man. But now you are a spacer, building water-conservation units on Mars, programing mining computers on Ganymede, servicing communication relay towers on the moon. The alteration…” Frelks are the only people I’ve ever heard say “the alteration” with so much fascination and regret. “You’d think they’d have found some other solution. They could have found another way than neutering you, turning you into creatures not even androgynous; things that are—”