I put my hand on her shoulder, and she stopped like I’d hit her. She looked to see if anyone was near. Lightly, so lightly then, she raised her hand to mine.
I pulled my hand away. “That are what?”
“They could have found another way.” Both hands in her pockets now.
“They could have. Yes. Up beyond the ionosphere, baby, there’s too much radiation for those precious gonads to work right anywhere you might want to do something that would keep you there over twenty-four hours, like the moon, or Mars, or the satellites of Jupiter—”
“They could have made protective shields. They could have done more research into biological adjustment—”
“Population Explosion time,” I said. “No, they were hunting for any excuse to cut down kids back then—especially deformed ones.”
“Ah yes.” She nodded. “We’re still fighting our way up from the neo-puritan reaction to the sex freedom of the twentieth century.”
“It was a fine solution.” I grinned and put my hand over my crotch. “I’m happy with it.” And scratched. I’ve never known why that’s so much more obscene when a spacer does it.
“Stop it,” she snapped, moving away.
“What’s the matter?”
“Stop it,” she repeated. “Don’t do that! You’re a child.”
“But they choose us from children whose sexual responses are hopelessly retarded at puberty.”
“And your childish, violent substitutes for love? I suppose that’s one of the things that’s attractive. Yes, I know you’re a child.”
“Yeah? What about frelks?”
She thought awhile. “I think they are the sexually retarded ones they miss. Perhaps it was the right solution. You really don’t regret you have no sex?”
“We’ve got you,” I said.
“Yes.” She looked down. I glanced to see the expression she was hiding. It was a smile. “You have your glorious, soaring life—and you have us.” Her face came up. She glowed. “You spin in the sky, the world spins under you, and you step from land to land, while we…” She turned her head right, left, and her black hair curled and uncurled on the shoulder of her coat. “We have our dull, circled lives, bound in gravity, worshipping you!”
She looked back at me. “Perverted, yes? In love with a bunch of corpses in free fall!” She suddenly hunched her shoulders. “I don’t like having a free-fall-sexual-displacement complex.”
“That always sounded like too much to say.”
She looked away. “I don’t like being a frelk. Better?”
“I wouldn’t like it either. Be something else.”
“You don’t choose your perversions. You have no perversions at all. You’re free of the whole business. I love you for that, Spacer. My love starts with the fear of love. Isn’t that beautiful? A pervert substitutes something unattainable for ‘normal’ love: the homosexual, a mirror, the fetishist, a shoe or a watch or a girdle. Those with free-fall-sexual-dis—”
“Frelks.”
“Frelks substitute”—she looked at me sharply again—”loose, swinging meat.”
“That doesn’t offend me.”
“I wanted it to.”
“Why?”
“You don’t have desires. You wouldn’t understand.”
“Go on.”
“I want you because you can’t want me. That’s the pleasure. If someone really had a sexual reaction to… us, we’d be scared away. I wonder how many people there were before there were you, waiting for your creation. We’re necrophiles. I’m sure grave robbing has fallen off since you started going up. But you don’t understand…” She paused. “If you did, then I wouldn’t be scuffing leaves now and trying to think from whom I could borrow sixty lira.” She stepped over the knuckles of a root that had cracked the pavement. “And that, incidentally, is the going rate in Istanbul.”
I calculated. “Things still get cheaper as you go east.”
“You know,” and she let her raincoat fall open, “you’re different from the others. You at least want to know—”
I said, “If I spat on you for every time you’d said that to a spacer, you’d drown.”
“Go back to the moon, loose meat.” She closed her eyes. “Swing on up to Mars. There are satellites around Jupiter where you might do some good. Go up and come down in some other city.”
“Where do you live?”
“You want to come with me?”
“Give me something,” I said. “Give me something—it doesn’t have to be worth sixty lira. Give me something that you like, anything of yours that means something to you.”
“No!”
“Why not?”
“Because I—”
“—don’t want to give up part of that ego. None of you frelks do!”
“You really don’t understand I just don’t want to buy you?”
“You have nothing to buy me with.”
“You are a child,” she said. “I love you.”
We reached the gate of the park. She stopped, and we stood time enough for a breeze to rise and die in the grass. “I…” she offered tentatively, pointing without taking her hand from her coat pocket. “I live right down there.”
“All right,” I said. “Let’s go.”
A gas main had once exploded along this street, she explained to me, a gushing road of fire as far as the docks, overhot and over-quick. It had been put out within minutes, no building had fallen, but the charred facias glittered. “This is sort of an artist and student quarter.” We crossed the cobbles. “Yuri Pasha, number fourteen. In case you’re ever in Istanbul again.” Her door was covered with black scales, the gutter was thick with garbage.
“A lot of artists and professional people are frelks,” I said, trying to be inane.
“So are lots of other people.” She walked inside and held the door. “We’re just more flamboyant about it.”
On the landing there was a portrait of Ataturk. Her room was on the second floor. “Just a moment while I get my key—”
Marsscapes! Moonscapes! On her easel was a six-foot canvas showing the sunrise flaring on a crater’s rim! There were copies of the original Observer pictures of the moon pinned to the wall, and pictures of every smooth-faced general in the International Spacer Corps.
On one corner of her desk was a pile of those photo magazines about spacers that you can find in most kiosks all over the world: I’ve seriously heard people say they were printed for adventurous-minded high school children. They’ve never seen the Danish ones. She had a few of those too. There was a shelf of art books, art history texts. Above them were six feet of cheap paper-covered space operas: Sin on Space Station #12, Rocket Rake, Savage Orbit.
“Arrack?” she asked. “Ouzo, or pernod? You’ve got your choice. But I may pour them all from the same bottle.” She set out glasses on the desk, then opened a waist-high cabinet that turned out to be an icebox. She stood up with a tray of lovelies: fruit puddings, Turkish delight, braised meats.
“What’s this?”
“Dolmades. Grape leaves filled with rice and pignolias.”
“Say it again?”