“Well. In that case.” Mary Ann swallowed and began to feel better. And at that moment, she saw Gygyo and Flureet exchange the barest hint of a smile. She stopped feeling better. Damn these people! Who did they think they were?
Flureet moved to the yellow square exit. “I’ll have to be going,” she said. “I just stopped in to say good-bye before my transformation. Wish me luck, Gygyo.”
“Your transformation? So soon? Well, all the best of course. It’s been good knowing you, Flureet.”
When the woman had left, Mary Ann looked at Gygyo’s reply concerned face and asked hesitantly: “What does she mean—’transformation?’ And she said it was a major transormation. I haven’t heard of that so far.”
The dark-haired young man studied the wall for a moment. “I’d better not,” he said at last, mostly to himself. “That’s one of the concepts you’d find upsetting, like our active food for instance. And speaking of food—I’m hungry. Hungry, do you hear? Hungry!”
A section of the wall shook violently as his voice rose. It protruded an arm of itself at him. A tray was balanced on the end of the arm. Still standing, Gygyo began to eat from the tray.
He didn’t offer Mary Ann any, which, as far as she was concerned, was just as well. She had seen at a glance that it was the purple spaghetti-like stuff of which he was so terribly fund.
Maybe it tasted good. Maybe it didn’t. She’d never know. She only knew that she could never bring herself to eat anything which squirmed upwards toward one’s mouth and wriggled about cozily once it was inside.
That was another thing about this world. The things these people ate!
Gygyo glanced up and saw her face. “I wish you’d try it just once, Mary Ann,” he said wistfully. “It would add a whole new dimension to food for you. In addition to flavor, texture and aroma, you’d experience motility. Think of it: food not just lying there limp and lifeless in your mouth, but food expressing eloquently its desire to be eaten. Even your friend, Winthrop, culinary esthete that he is, admitted to me the other day that Centaurian libalilil has it all over his favorite food symphonies in many ways. You see, they’re mildly telephatic and can adjust their flavor to the dietary wishes of the person consuming them. That way, you get—”
“Thank you, but please! It makes me absolutely and completely sick even to think of it.”
“All right.” He finished eating, nodded at the wall. The wall withdrew the arm and sucked the tray back into itself. “I give up. All I wanted was to have you sample the stuff before you left. Just a taste.”
“Speaking of leaving, that’s what I came to see you about. We’re having trouble.”
“Oh, Mary Ann! I was hoping you’d come to see me for myself alone,” he said with a disconsolate droop of his head.
She couldn’t tell whether he was being funny or serious; she got angry as the easiest way of handling the situation. “See here, Gygyo Rablin, you are the very last man on Earth —past, present, or future—that I ever want to see again. And you know why! Any man who—who says things to a girl like you said to m-me, and at s-such a time… ”
Against her will, and to her extreme annoyance, her voice broke. Tears burst from her eyelids and itched their way down her face. She set her lips determinedly and tried to shake them away.
Gygyo looked really uncomfortable now. He sat down on a corner of the desk which squirmed under him more erratically than ever.
“I am sorry, Mary Ann. Truly, terribly, sincerely sorry. I should never have made love to you in the first place. Even without our substantial temporal and cultural differences, I’m certain that you know, as well as I do, we have precious little in common. But I found you—well, enormously attractive, overpoweringly attractive. I found you exciting like no woman in my own time, or any woman that I’ve ever encountered in a visit to the future. I just couldn’t resist the attraction. The one thing I didn’t anticipate was the depressing effect your peculiar cosmetics would have upon me. The actual tactile sensations were extremely upsetting.”
“That’s not what you said. And the way you said it! You rubbed your finger on my face and lips, and you went: ‘Greasy! Greasy!’ ” Thoroughly in control of herself now, she mimicked him viciously.
Gygyo shrugged. “I said I’m sorry, and I meant it. But, Mary Ann, if you only know how that stuff feels to a highly educated tactile sense! That smeary red lipstick—and oh that finely-grated nonsense on your cheeks! There’s no excuse for me, that I’ll grant, but I’m just trying to make you understand why I erupted so stupidly.”
“I suppose you think I’d be a lot nicer if I shaved my head like some of these women—like that horrible Flureet!”
He smiled and shook his head. “No, Mary Ann, you couldn’t be like them, and they couldn’t be like you. There are entirely different concepts of womanhood and beauty involved. In your period, the greatest emphasis is on a kind of physical similarity, the use of various artificial props which will make the woman most nearly approach a universally- agreed upon ideal, and an ideal which consists of such items as redness of lips, smoothness of complexion and specific bodily shape. Whereas we place the accent on difference, but most particularly on emotional difference. The more emotions a woman can exhibit, and the more complex they are —the more striking is she considered. That’s the point of the shaved heads: to show suddenly appearing subtle wrinkles that might be missed if the area were covered with hair. And that’s why we call Woman’s bald head her frowning glory.”
Mary Ann’s shoulders slumped and she stared down at the floor which started to raise a section of itself questioningly hut sank back down again as it realized that nothing was required of it. “I don’t understand, and I guess I won’t ever understand. All I know is that I just can’t stay in the same world with you, Gygyo Rablin—the very thought of it makes me feel kind of all wrong and sick inside.”
“I understand,” he nodded seriously. “And whatever comfort it may be—you have the same effect on me. I’d never have done anything as supremely idiotic as going on a locked micro-hunt in an impure culture before I met you. But those exciting stories of your adventuresome friend Edgar Rapp finally crept under my skin. I found I had to prove myself a man, in your terms, Mary Ann, in your terms!”
“Edgar Rapp?” she raised her eyes and looked at him incredulously. “Adventuresome? Exciting? Edgar? The only time he ever gets close to sport is when he sits on his behind all night playing poker with the boys in the payroll department!”
Gygyo rose and ambled about the room aimlessly, shaking his head. “The way you say it, the casual, half-contemptuous way you say it! The constant psychic risks run, the inevitably recurring clashes of personality—subliminal and overt—as hand after hand is played, as hour after hour goes by, with not two, not three, but as many as five, six or even seven different and highly aggressive human beings involved—The bluffs, the raises, the outwitting, the fantastic contest of it! And to you these things are almost nothing, they’re no more than what you’d expect of a masculine man! I couldn’t face. it; in fact, there is not a man in my entire world who’d be able to stand up to fifteen minutes of such complex psychological punishment.”