Bron paused with his fork in a piece of the tissuey crust that had chemisee’6. the boeuf. “I love you,” he said. “Throw up the theater. Join your life to mine. Become one with me. Be mine. Let me possess you wholly.”
“Mad, marvelous man—” Carefully, with chopsticks, she lifted a broccoli spear from the top tier of bubbling broth: the coals through the steam-boat’s grill-work glowed in her gauntlet—“not on your life.”
“Why not? I love you.” He put down his fork. “Isn’t that enough?”
Gingerly, she ate her broccoli.
“Is it,” he asked, leaning forward, “that I’m just not your type? I mean physically? You’re only turned on by dwarfish little creatures who can do backflips, is that it?”
“You’re very much my type,” she said. “That’s why I’m here. On the animal line—and I do think that’s to be appreciated—you’re really most spectacular. I think large, blond, Scandinavians are quite the most gorgeous things in the world.”
“But I’m still not a monkey who can swing through the trees by his tail, or who comes to places like this in his digging duds.” He’d realized he’d been offended by her remark only halfway through his own. “Or, for that matter, a long-haired young lady who sits around and tinkles folksongs.” He hoped the smile he put on now mitigated some of what, to his ears, sounded a bit harsh. “Alas, what can I do about these minor failings?”
Her smile was slightly reproving. “You have your own charm. And your numerous rough points ... But also charm.”
“Charm enough for you to come away with me forever?”
“Now it’s my turn to say, ‘Alas.’” She took the last of her broccoli between her teeth, drew the ivory sticks away. “No.”
He said: “You’ve never been in love, then. That’s it. Your heart is all stone. You’ve never had the heat of true passion melt it to life. Otherwise, you’d know I speak the truth and you’d surrender.”
“Damned if I do and damned if I don’t, huh?” She put down the chopsticks, picked up her fork, and cut at her beef. “Actually, I have been in love.”
“You mean with Windy and Charo?”
“No. With them I am merely happy—a state, by the way, I value very highly, ‘mere’ as it is.”
“Do you mean the lady you got refixated for, then?”
“No. Not even that. This was just a matter of the old, ordinary chemistry I was born with.” She ate another bite and, with foreknuckle, brushed away crumbs from her lower lip. “In fact, I think I’m going to tell you about it. I have, really, been in love. And what’s more, it was really and truly and dramatically unrequited. Yes, I am going to tell you. So just listen—I haven’t got it all rehearsed, now, so it’s going to come out very clumsily—who knows, even uglily. And I haven’t any idea if anything in it will mean anything to you. But I’m sure somewhere in it the right feeling, if not the right words, will be there. Like the Book of the Dead, or something: just read it once, and when you need it—when you can use it—you have to trust the necessary information will come back to you, if you just let it all flow through your ears even once. I used to teach—or rather, for the past few years because the company has been doing so well, we’ve been doing a sort of solstice seminar at Lux University. In theater. And I—”
The story was unclear. And clumsy. It had something to do with walking into her seminar room on the first evening, three years or five years ago, and seeing one student who was wearing only a fur vest and a knife—strapped to his foot; then there was something about a lot of drugs. He was either selling them or buying them ... Oh, yes, she had been struck practically inarticulate by him the moment she had walked into the room.
“Well, how did you teach the class then?’* Oh, she explained (in the middle of explaining something else), she was very good at that. (At what? but she was going on:) He and one of the other, older students, had asked her, after the class, to contribute a running credit draft to a beer fund. (They were making beer in someone’s back room.) Then, somehow, she was staying at his place. Then more drugs. And he was taking her, first with a group of friends who made candles, to hear a singer at an intimate club, then to visit a commune out in the ice—on his skimmer, which she sounded like she was more impressed with than she was with him, and then to see some friends of hers way away—the class had finished by now—and he was apparently the nephew of some famous naturalist and explorer Bron had actually heard of in connection with the Callisto ice-fields where there was an ice “forest” and the ice “beach” named after him; but this story had taken place on Iapetus, not Callisto—and “... when obviously it wasn’t going to work out, and I had spent two weeks—at least!—without being straight one minute, you’d think it was his religion]—really, it was like walking around with your skull all soft and your meninges stripped away and every impulse from every sensation in the Solar System detonating your entire brain—you understand, the sex had been absolutely great as far as / was concerned. But the physical thing just wasn’t him (he was one of your mystic types)—well, there was nothing for me to do but ... leave. Because I loved him absolutely more than anything else in the world. I slept the last night in the same room with him, on a blanket on the floor. Once I tried to rape him, I believe. He said fuck off. So I did, and later he said I could hold him if it would make me feel better, and I realized that I didn’t want that. So I said, thanks, no. Brunnhilde on her bed of flame could not have burned more than I! (He said I was too intense—!) I lay there, all night, on the floor beside him, completely alone with myself, waiting for a dawn I was perfectly sure would never come.
“And that morning, he hugged me; and then he took me to the shuttle. And he gave me a notebook—the cover was blue plastic with the most amazing designs running through. And I was so happy I almost died. And kept writing him letters till he wrote me back—you see, one of my friends had said: ‘You know, you’ve destroyed his life. He’s never met anyone like you before, who thought he was that important!’ And that was years ago. I just got a letter from him last week; he calls me one of the people he loves] You see ... ? If you really love someone, and it’s obvious that it’s impossible, you’ll do that. Even that. You see?” He had no idea what that was, either. While he listened, he found himself again remembering the occurrences back in the earthie cell. Whatever had that actually been about? Would the Spike have any suggestions? He longed to interrupt her monologue to ask. But Sam had said the subject was verboten ... a matter of life, death, and would bo so forever. Still, it made him feel rather romantic ... if he could just suppress the frustration. And somehow, she was back in what seemed like the middle of the story, explaining that, you see, he had been older than the other students, that she didn’t even like children as a rule, though one had to make an exception for Charo—who was nineteen—because Charo was, in many ways, exceptional. Then there was something about a lot of pictures taken on an ice-ledge, naked, in the skimmer with the Catherine of Cleves Book of Hours—who, he wondered, was Catherine of Cleves, and where did the ice-ledge get into the whole thing? Really, he was trying to follow. But during the last moments of her recounting, he’d noticed, just to her left, another group passing below, their majordomo leading them along on the paths and ramps toward their secluded table.