Short Fiction Fritz Leiber (free e books to read .txt) 📖

as she stood there toeing his rough shadow in the sand, there was a complete naturalness about her, an absence of sharp edges, as if her personality had weathered without aging, just as the valley seemed to have taken another step toward eternity in the space of an instant.

She must have assumed something of the same gentleness in him, for her faint surprise faded and she asked him, as easily as if he were a friend of five years’ standing, “Tell now, do you think a woman can love just one man? All her life? And a man just one woman?”

Tom Dorset made a dazed sound.

His mind searched wildly.

“I do,” she said, looking at him as calmly as at a mountain. “I think a man and woman can be each other’s world, like Tristan and Isolde or Frederic and Catherine. Those old authors were wise. I don’t see why on earth a girl has to spread her love around, no matter how enriching the experiences may be.”

“You know, I agree with you,” Tom said, thinking he’d caught her idea⁠—it was impossible not to catch her casualness. “I think there’s something cheap about the way everybody’s supposed to run after sex these days.”

“I don’t mean that exactly. Tenderness is beautiful, but⁠—” She pouted. “A big family can be vastly crushing. I wanted to declare today a holiday, but they outvoted me. Jock said it didn’t chime with our mood cycles. But I was angry with them, so I put on my clothes⁠—”

“Put on⁠—?”

“To make it a holiday,” she explained bafflingly. “And I walked here for a tantrum.” She stepped out of Tom’s shadow and hopped back. “Ow, the sand’s getting hot,” she said, rubbing the grains from the pale and uncramped toes.

“You go barefoot a lot?” Tom guessed.

“No, mostly digitals,” she replied and took something shimmering from a pocket at her hip and drew it on her foot. It was a high-ankled, transparent moccasin with five separate toes. She zipped it shut with the speed of a card trick, then similarly gloved the other foot. Again the metal-edged slit down the front seemed to close itself.

“I’m behind on the fashions,” Tom said, curious. They were walking side by side now, the way she’d come and he’d been going. “How does that zipper work?”

“Magnetic. They’re on all my clothes. Very simple.” She parted her tunic to the waist, then let it zip together.

“Clever,” Tom remarked with a gulp. There seemed no limits to this girl’s naturalness.

“I see you’re a button man,” she said. “You actually believe it’s possible for a man and woman to love just each other?”

His chuckle was bitter. He was thinking of Elinore Murphy at Tosker-Brown and a bit about cold-faced Miss Tosker herself. “I sometimes wonder if it’s possible for anyone to love anyone.”

“You haven’t met the right girls,” she said.

“Girl,” he corrected.

She grinned at him. “You’ll make me think you really are a monogamist. What group do you come from?”

“Let’s not talk about that,” he requested. He was willing to forego knowing how she’d guessed he was from an art group, if he could be spared talking about the Vacation Fellowships and those nervous little cabins.

“My group’s very nice on the whole,” the girl said, “but at times they can be nefandously exasperating. Jock’s the worst, quietly guiding the rest of us like an analyst. How I loathe that man! But Larry’s almost as bad, with his shamefaced bumptiousness, as if we’d all sneaked off on a joyride to Venus. And there’s Jokichi at the opposite extreme, forever scared he won’t distribute his affection equally, dividing it up into mean little packets like candy for jealous children who would scream if they got one chewy less. And then there’s Sasha and Ernest⁠—”

“Who are you talking about?” Tom asked.

“My husbands.” She shook her head dolefully. “To find five more difficult men would be positively Martian.”

Tom’s mind backtracked frantically, searching all conversations at Tosker-Brown for gossip about cultists in the neighborhood. It found nothing and embarked on a wider search. There were the Mormons (was that the word that had sounded like Martian?) but it wasn’t the Mormon husbands who were plural. And then there was Oneida (weren’t husbands and wives both plural there?) but that was 19th century New England.

“Five husbands?” he repeated. She nodded. He went on, “Do you mean to say five men have got you alone somewhere up here?”

“To be sure not,” she replied. “There are my kwives.”

“Kwives?”

“Co-wives,” she said more slowly. “They can be fascinerously exasperating, too.”

Tom’s mind did some more searching. “And yet you believe in monogamy?”

She smiled. “Only when I’m having tantrums. It was civilized of you to agree with me.”

“But I actually do believe in monogamy,” he protested.

She gave his hand a little squeeze. “You are nice, but let’s rush now. I’ve finished my tantrum and I want you to meet my group. You can fresh yourself with us.”

As they hurried across the heated sands, Tom Dorset felt for the first time a twinge of uneasiness. There was something about this girl, more than her strange clothes and the odd words she used now and then, something almost⁠—though ghosts don’t wear digitals⁠—spectral.

They scrambled up a little rise, digging their footgear into the sand, until they stood on a long flat. And there, serpentining around two great clumps of rock, was a many-windowed adobe ranch house with a roof like fresh soot.

“Oh, they’ve put on their clothes,” his companion exclaimed with pleasure. “They’ve decided to make it a holiday after all.”

Tom spotted a beard in the group swarming out to meet them. Its cultish look gave him a momentary feeling of superiority, followed by an equally momentary apprehension⁠—the five husbands were certainly husky. Then both feelings were swallowed up in the swirl of introduction.

He told his own name, found that his companion’s was Lois Wolver, then smiling faces began to bob toward his, his hands were shaken, his cheeks were kissed, he was even spun around like blind man’s bluff, so that