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it was not erotic:
Do this so my husband can kill you.
And then, anxiously:
He wants to fight you. He has to. This is a woman's role. Please!
As he had with the baby, so he did with her: the thought is not in the
other person but between the two of us, but in her, but also between us&
She forgot what she had been doing. Back in her sarong, she had the idea
again; she looked sidelong at him and picked up the baby. She put the
baby down.
"Male children are best," she said. "Don't you agree?"
"Here comes your husband," said Jai Vedh, perched on the spouting
whale and on the edge of unmanly hysteria. Ivat, coming in (very pale)
said sharply, "What are you laughing at, Landru?" The husband (who
affects not to know it, thought Jai, but he does, he does) nodded curtly.
"Time for privacy," he said. Now you copulate!
"What do you do now?" said Jai aloud, the polite guest fulfilling an
obligation.
"After visiting times," said the husband, "we eat and work on the
interior of the house. I do the heavy work. A woman must bear her part,
though. Copulation is for " and he stopped. Jai put his hand over his own
mouth in amazement. Was that me? The man frowned in vexation.
"Visiting time is over," he announced, and to Ivat: "Work on your aim."
"Tell me," said Jai, putting his whole mind into it, "if you didn't work
on the interior of the house today, would it matter, particularly?"
"I mean," said Jai, with Ivat trying to shush him, " and just to be
obliging, I'll try to make it clear that if you didn't work on the house
today, you could, of course, work on it tomorrow. Or the day after. Your
schedule isn't necessary. And with the climate as it is now, so near the
inner city, there's no natural reason to try to match the seasons, so what
does it matter what the house looks like? A professional could do it for you
in half an hour. As you've said, you don't please your friends "
"Shut up, Landru!" hissed Ivat.
" and you certainly don't please yourselves. So just who are you
pleasing? The man in the moon? It seems to me "
The man picked up his rifle.
said Jai, giddy with success and neatly flipping the man's mind away
from his hands, "that the walls are automatically set to clean up after you,
so you can't make the place uninhabitable, can you? So why practice
cleaning, either? And why cooking? It's entirely a timekiller. Your
schedule " (the woman was in a panic) "which, as you admit," he went
on, "is an entirely artificial creation " and here Ivat, who was not
laughing, pulled him through the labyrinth of doors, swearing in a
cracked, adolescent voice, and jumped up and down in a rage on the path
outside while Jai Vedh roared. There were tears in the boy's eyes.
"Oh!" screamed Ivat. "You! You.& You!"
Jai caught him by the throat.
"I will turn your mind inside out," he whispered. "I will tear you in
pieces. Your friends are fakes, my boy, and I am twenty times as powerful!
Twenty times to the twenty-thousandth power!"
Ivat gurgled with rage.
"You have found in me," said Jai with low cunning, "a guru of the very
highest order who will make your elephant guns and your arrows look like
child's play. Bless your luck!"
"Shit!" cried Ivat furiously.
"Bless it!" shouted Jai, laughing again. "Bless it and praise it till the end
of your life! I will love you and teach you to be a dragon and a tiger, what
do you say? I will make you a man, a man, a happy man who can laugh in
anyone's face and break every weapon and every schedule and every rule
on this wide earth! Man, you will love your way to Heaven! Now we're
going somewhere."
"Yah!" said Ivat, but he was tempted.
"We are going," said Jai, breathing deep, casting around, pointing,
"over there. Come along or I'll make you come along.''
"No, I won't," said Ivat, clearly intrigued.
"Yes, you will," said Jai.
They took the elevator down to the underground and transferred,
linking arms to show the underground that they were together. The walls
came down fast on either side of them as they sat face to face and the door
slid shut behind them; they were in a little room. Jai felt tremors in the
rock as they were fed to the main vacuum line, and the sudden shock of
the air fleeing away. There were ninety-seven people in the entire module.
Ivat squirmed, trying to fit his bow between his knees.
"Say," said Ivat timidly, "what would you do with a murderer, Landru?
What would you do with a murderer? Do you know?" The module was
drawn under the sea.
"Don't know," said Jai. Be quiet. God, am I horny. That ice-cold
woman
"You would distract him," said Ivat. "That's what you would do.
Murderers have no persistence. Statistics show that 98 per cent of
murderers are psychotic, so if you distract them, they lose the impulse.
Where are we going?"
Jai gave the coordinates. The sea fled away; the rock screamed.
"Hm," said Ivat. "That means our traveling time is thirty-two minutes,
forty-eight seconds. Did you know that? When we reach the next station
we transfer and take the elevators up and then we walk oh-point-seven
miles. We could take a hovercar but there are never hovercars available
because everybody wants to take a hovercar, even in the middle of the
night. There are a lots of lights at night to encourage photosynthesis, but [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]