Daintily, she raised first her left arm, then her right, and sniffed. Okay there, but she gave it a burst of deodorant for luck.
Those little armpit glands were the only ones in the human body designed to produce smell, although a number of other glands and juices and secretions emitted it incidentally. The Japanese and some of the Chinese did not have that special gland; or if they did it was considered a pathological condition.
Strange; she must ask Mihaly about it — he should know; his mistress was reputed to be Japanese or Chinese.
As she let her thoughts ramble and applied powder, she watched the flush fade from her cheeks.
Perhaps it had been caused not by emotion but by the meat-of-animal she ad consumed. She inspected the little white teeth arranged behind her red lips, liking the savagery of her smile.
“Grr, you little carnivore!” she whispered. She treated herself to a suspicion of perfume, an exclusive perfume that contained ambergris which (she hastily censored the image) is the undigested remnant of squid and octopus found in the intestines of the spermaceti whale. She touched up her hair, clipped on her street mask, and whisked superbly out to greet Pasztor.
He had already clipped his mask on. Together, they went down into the street.
War had not improved the city. Whereas other cities in other nations had long ago banished — or at least brought in legislation to deal with — various metropolitan abuses, London suffered under a multiplication of them.
Ash and rubbish bins stood all along the pavement, while the gutters were full of litter. The shortage of unskilled labor was crippling the city. This shortage had caused some streets to be closed to traffic, for their surfaces had become impassable, and there was nobody to repair them. Many people saw little to regret in this, for to pedestrians any relief from the heaving hooting traffic was welcome. As Mihaly walked along with Mrs. War-boon, he sardonically said thanks for such gifts to civilization as their street masks, which alone guaranteed that they did not fall swooning from the waste gases pouring out of the cars snorting at their elbows.
Gigantic hoardings, covering a site where an office block had burnt down before a fire engine could crawl four blocks to save it. announced that Holidays At Home were Fun, as well as being in the national interest; that Death could be turned to Financial Account by bequeathing one’s body to Burgess’s Body Chemicals; and that Gonorrhea was Out of Control, with a graph to prove it, by courtesy of the World Gonorrhea Year. There was also a smaller poster issued by minigag, the Ministry of Gastronomy and Agriculture, proclaiming that animal foods caused premature ageing and that man-made foods contained no toxics; the point was rammed deftly home by two pictures, one of an old man having a heart attack, one of a young girl having a synthash.
Mercifully, most of this townscape was wrapped in a decent obscurity, since power cuts imposed semi-blackouts on the capital’s gaiety every night.
“Walking here, I can hardly think of walking on a different planet,” Mrs. Warhoon said.
“You certainly don’t get much sight of the universe here,” Pasztor said, speaking above the snarl of engines.
“In another two or three centuries, mankind will have a different outlook on life and the rules by which he lives. He will have digested the universe into his art, architecture, customs, everything. As yet we’re adolescents. The city’s our savage playground.” She gestured at a shop window exhibiting one enormous motor bike, shaped like a system-ship and glittering like El Dorado. “It’s a place where we undergo perpetual initiation rites, ordeals by fire, crowds, and gas. We aren’t mature enough to deal with your ETA’s.”
With a shock. Mihaly thought, “My God, she’s tight! We drank real wine and she’s probably used to synthwine….” She went on talking, even when he clutched her arm so that she would not trip over the old newspapers blowing about their feet “We started wrongly with those creatures, Mihaly, by making them adhere to our rules instead of studying theirs. Perhaps the Gansas will find more of them and we will have another chance to make contact, on their terms.”
“As yet we don’t know what their terms are. Should we respect their inclination to live in their own waste pro-ducts? We could let them accumulate this — er, matter, as they seem disposed to do. You know I suggested that. But it is — well, it’s malodorous, and poor old Bodley and his staff have to work in there with them….”
He was glad to get her to the theatre.
The play was a jolly send-up of the Cold War era. a non-musical version of West Side Story, played in quaint pre-World War III costume. Both Pasztor and Mrs. War-boon enjoyed it; but her mind kept drifting back to the prospect of making vacuum with the Gansas, so that in the interval Pasztor threw himself into the free-for-all struggle round the theatre bar rather than let her start another discussion. As they came out of the theatre at the end of the play, she insisted she must go home, and he competed with evening dresses and uniforms to cram into one of the sinkers that rose to connect with the district shuttle. It had rained during their incarceration, clearing the city air somewhat Drops of oily water splashed on them from the overhead rail; still Mrs. Warhoon stuck bravely to her subject “Do you remember Wittgenbacher’s saying that our intelligence might merely be an instinct for space?”
“I have thought about it,” he said, elbowing forward.
“Do you think I’ll be following my instinct if I join the Gansas?”
He looked at her, tall and still fairly slender, her eyes attractive over her mask.
“What’s wrong with you this evening. Hilary? What do you want me to say to you?”
“You could tell me for instance whether I am going into deep space to integrate myself — to become matured away from my womb world and all that sort of thing — or whether I am doing it to flee from an unsatisfactory marriage I would be better employed mending.”
A man in astrogator’s uniform wedged behind her looked at her in sudden interest as he caught part of this remark.
“I don’t know you well enough to answer that,” Mihaly said.
“Nobody does.” She spoke the words dismissively, smiling, for he had finally got her to the doors of the sinker. She touched his fingers and passed in. Pasztor had to fight not to be carried in as well.
The doors closed, the pellet was sucked up its tube. He watched its lights rise up to the level of the monobus rail. A globule of water splashed into his left eye. He turned and made his way home through emptying streets.
Back in his flat over the Exozoo, he walked about aimlessly, thinking. Clearing the remains of their meal away, he swept cutlery and dishes from the dining-table into the disposer, watching soft flame rise as they disintegrated. Then he resumed his pacing.
Hilary had a grain of truth among her chaff, though earlier in the evening he had mentally labeled it sickness. Wasn’t truth a sickness man spent a lifetime seeking, just as a dog seeks the coarse grass that makes it vomit? What was that epigram that he had trotted forth too often, about civilization being the distance man placed between himself and his excreta? But it was nearer the truth to say that civilization was the distance man had placed between him-self and everything else, for cradled deep in the concept of culture was the need for privacy. Once away from the hurly-burly of camp fires, man invented rooms, barriers, behind which he developed his most characteristic practices. Meditation arose from mere abstraction, the individual arts arose from folk crafts, love arose from sex. the concept of the individual arose from the tribe.
But were the barriers valuable when one faced another culture? And again, mightn’t one of the difficulties with coming to grips with ETA’s be that you hardly realized how strong a hold the mores of your own culture had on you?