Worlds

32. Diary of a Traveler (excerpts)

23 December. …the curry was pretty much like home, except for a side dish of vegetables, which didn’t seem spicy at all, at first, and then ignited a few minutes later. Quenched it with a lot of beer and bread. Have to watch that; up to 52 kg. yesterday.

Worked off a few grams dancing. We went with Jeff and Manny to a place called the Denatured Alco-Hall, a dance hall in East Kensington. It was a big round room, garishly lit, with tables and chairs jumbled around a wooden dance floor. They were doing the Mash, this month’s dance (fashions change more slowly here than in N.Y.). It’s done in a circle, with no bodily contact other than hand-holding, but a rather complicated step that looks like the Big Apple we saw in Entertainment. The music was a half-century off, though, Beatles.

I would have preferred that Jeff hold more than a hand—in fact, by the end of the evening I felt like a bunny bitch in heat. Must have been the curry.

He seemed more interested in Violet, anyway, maybe not because of the reputation Nevada women have. If he were Worlds I would have asked him straight out and politely dragged him back to the room, ask Violet to knock loud and wait. But not here.

Just as well. I don’t need yet another man complicating my life. (Why can’t groundhogs see that it doesn’t have to be complicated? Some of them can, I guess, but not Jeff. He’s serious about everything. Strong, cool. Maybe smoldering. Wonder if anything will happen between him and Violet)

Violet and I agreed this morning that it was a little cold to be sleeping in our skins, so we bought pajamas while we were wandering. Tonight she dressed with her back to me and slipped immediately under the covers. She’s obviously bothered by last night. We were both pretty drunk; maybe she thinks something happened and she doesn’t remember. Have to find some innocuous way to reassure her.

But god, I don’t want to sleep alone tonight. I’m sitting here alone in the john, writing and fighting back tears for no reason. I’m going to take another Klonexine.

24 December. What a wonderful place this is to be, on Christmas Eve. It snowed heavily all day, and if you squint a little you can be back in the nineteenth century, or the twelfth. Most of us went to Albert Hall, where a man portraying Dickens read a Christmas story. It was curiously moving, wistful. I would be glad to take religion if you could turn it off and on at will.

Jeff caught me completely off guard by giving me a present. It wasn’t very fancy, a realtime currency converter (I’d seen his and admired it), but it threw me into a real dither. He rescued me by saying he knew my line didn’t celebrate the holiday, and he didn’t expect anything in return, except maybe a holiday kiss.

It was a casual, cousinly kiss, but I think we were reading each other furiously.

He didn’t give anything to Violet

25 December. Stayed up late last night, watching the cube with the sound turned down to a whisper. The mid-night news confirmed that the New New referendum had been defeated soundly, and there was no word of reaction from the Lobbies. But Congress won’t be in session today.

Stonehenge was truly weird. I didn’t really follow all the astronomical explanations, about why they lined it up the way they did, but it’s marvelous that it was built at all, by prehistoric men. Some of the huge rocks were dragged from as far away as Wales.

We also saw the remnants of a Roman road, but it was not even 2,000 years old. Built yesterday.

Spent the afternoon in Bath, which was interesting. The town itself is beautiful, with an impressive cathedral and so forth, but the main attraction is the baths, both of them. They have the historic bath, that goes back to the eighth century B.C. (King Lear’s father supposedly took a cure there) and is made over into a museum, and the Disney bath outside of town, which is a reconstruction of the Roman facility, lead-lined hot and cold pools surrounded by elegant tilework and sculpture.

Nudism strikes me as un-British, but it’s part of the bath’s attraction. All very homey to me, of course, but some of our group found other things to do. Jeff and Manny joined me and Violet, and it was a nice lazy time. Jeff does look startlingly like Charlie, except in penile particulars (I’ve never been able to look at an elephant without thinking of Charlie). Both Jeff and Manny were circumcised, something I’d seen only among Devon’s World tourists. Manny is Jewish, but I wonder what Jeff’s reason is.

Violet is spectacularly endowed and she moves pretty well when men are watching. Jeff and Manny got into the water fast, obviously to immerse their salutes. Pity.

(I’d like to be a man for a day so I could figure out their odd behavior. Erection is just an attractive reflex, but it dominates them so. Maybe it drains the blood out of their brains.)

The others ran from the hot bath to splash into the cold one, but that’s a form of masochism I’ve never been able to understand. The dressing rooms were segregated; Violet and I sat under the hair dryers and discussed the two men. She likes Manny and I thought it was mutual. I told her I’d be glad to get lost for the evening, if she’d like to have the room, but look what happened.

On the floater back to London, Violet whispered something to Manny, then Manny whispered something to Jeff, then Jeff whispered something to Violet, and I was starting to feel really excluded, then Jeff brought the whispering over to me. He said that Violet and Manny wanted to spend the night together, and would I mind taking the other bed in his room.

Well, it was time to strike, of course. I told him I would very much mind taking the other bed, but could be cajoled into his own. He laughed, relieved, and said something about making the floater speed up.

He was really remarkable. A totally different person in bed, very warm and passionate and unselfconscious. And he has recuperative powers like Charlie’s. We made love twice and went out for dinner, then came back and had each other for dessert. Then the goat poked me awake sometime after midnight (actually, that was a nice dreamy time; I don’t think either of us was completely awake—succubus and incubus). It was a merry Christmas (written 26 Dec.).

26 December. Jeff and I went to the Palace of Westminster to see Parliament in action. There was not too much action really, since most of the members were on vacation.

We watched a debate in the House of Lords from the “Strangers’ Gallery.” They were discussing a bill that the House of Commons had passed, regarding standards of analysis for the regulation of dairy products. One Lord denounced the bill very eloquently and bitterly. Another asked him how many dairy cattle he owned; he admitted it was something over two thousand head. For some reason I had this outrageous vision of two thousand cows loose in the park, in New New.

I have to admit I was a little repelled by the obvious accumulation of wealth and power in the House of Lords. It seemed to me to epitomize the philosophical gulf between Earth governments and the administration of New New. No one needs that kind of wealth. No one who loves power should be allowed to administer to the will of the people.

But at least it’s displayed openly here. The people who rule the United States do it behind the closed doors of boardrooms.

Jeff is a changed man. Well, not changed, really; it’s just that he wasn’t truly himself all last quarter. He was grinding hard at school and working overtime every week, to accumulate leave. Also, he had been in love with a woman, proposed marriage and was rejected, about a week before I first met him. When he kissed me Christmas Eve it was the first physical contact he’d had with a woman since August.

We had a long and earnest talk in a Westminster pub. I told him all about Daniel, and how I felt about sex and affection. It looks safe. Right now he also needs a friend rather than a lover.

We went back to the hotel and sealed our bargain. I asked him about the circumcision, and he said it was a line tradition. A man’s first son is circumcised; only first sons are eligible for membership in the elders’ council—if they stay in the line long enough to be an elder. I told him I wouldn’t stay in any line that chopped off a piece of my body when I was too young to have a say in the matter. He shrugged that off, and pointed out (speaking of barbarism) that at least he had never undergone voluntary mutilation, such as having his ears pierced.

I didn’t pursue the argument, since I’ve never had a foreskin that didn’t belong to someone else, and also didn’t mention what I thought about a line that only allowed men to be leaders, though I suppose he knows me well enough to know what I’d say about that.

There is the obvious problem, that I’m not going to write down. I’ll be careful.

(27 December-30 December: Stratford-on-Avon, Scotland, Wales, York and the Yorkshire Moors, Killarney, Limerick)

30 December…. that it’s easy to understand why John was so impressed by the Irish countryside. Even in mid-winter it’s beautiful; I’d love to see it in the spring.

We haven’t seen much of Dublin except for the zoo, which is unforgettable. The regular part of it is impressive, more variety than the Bronx one, with the animals in environments that resemble their native habitats. But it’s the O’Connor Laboratory exhibit that draws people from all over the world.

Research in genetic manipulation is legal in Ireland (though not on humans), and the O’Connor people have set up a display in the zoo to help finance their work. The ticket was fifty pounds, with student discount.

The ant is the thing that stays with me the most. It was the size of a dog, nearly a meter long. Swimming around mysteriously in a tank of pale blue fluid (it had to float, they explained, because its legs would not support its weight in gravity). There was a goat with two heads, with her two-headed kid. A hairless chimpanzee that looked like a grotesquely malformed old man. Dwarf bats like ugly little moths. There was a shrew that seemed normal but had been alive for fifteen years, ten times its normal life span…..

31 December. If London is the place to spend Christmas, there’s no place like Dublin for New Year’s Eve. Oops, I should have labeled that January 1st It’s 2:30 a.m., and I am trying to control my handwriting here, after ten or twelve pints of good Guinness and one glass of champagne, writing in a brightly lit hotel room with Mr. Jeffrey Hawkings slung sideways over the only bed, snoring like a dragon.

John never told me about writing your initials. You can take your finger and write your initials on the top of the foam on a glass of Guinness, and the letters just stay there all the while. While you drink it down. Real Guinness, that is to say, that you can only get here. Good thing I don’t live here, I’d weigh 100 kg. by now. Jeff was a little silly about all the stout I consumed. In America, heroic beer consumption is a male preserve. Ha! Who’s awake, Jeffrey? Score one for the slits.

Must watch the language. These Irish are wonderful friendly people but they expect ladies, lie-dees, to be sort of polite and nice. Maybe I shouldn’t have sung the one about the jolly tinker. Most of them knew it, though.

Girl, you are drunk. Will take a hangover pill and leave the bottle in easy reach. Push Jeff on the floor. No, just lie crossways over him. I could sleep on a fence.

2 January…. after the basic tour, Jeff went off to visit the headquarters of Interpol, the European equivalent of the FBI (combined with the CIB, I guess). Violet speaks some French, so I stuck with her.

Going from Dublin to Paris is almost as big a jolt as going from the Worlds to the Earth. Not even considering the language difference. Ireland is much like New New, as John had said, in its pace of life, the automatically expected friendliness and sharing. France, or at least Paris, seems even more tense and fast-moving than New York City. (I understand this quality is a modern one, of which old folks disapprove.)

One thing was like Dublin, though. Violet has a hypertrophied sense of the macabre: just as she had to drag us to St. Michan’s there, here we had to go to the Catacombs. It was good theatre; there’s no lighting in the underground tombs, and they give you a candle with your ticket. The bones of six million people, ugh. Death is such an insult…

French cooking is delicious but the restaurants are so expensive. As advised, well be snacking on bread, cheese, and wine in our rooms in the morning and evening, with just one meal out (if it were warmer we could take our bread, etc., out to one of the parks, which would be a homey touch-the parks are beautiful anyhow, in the snow).

The wine here isn’t as good as American, not at the prices we can afford, but the bread and cheese are mavelous. I guess a girl who grew up on good goat cheese couldn’t be expected to like the bland rubbery insult that passes for cheese in America. Here even the cow cheeses are good, and there are hundreds of different kinds. …

Jeff is totally romanced by the city, and I have to admit I wouldn’t mind staying longer myself. A month or two would be nice.

(I wish he wouldn’t let the romance go directly to his groin. He dragged me away from a perfectly good conversation tonight. Well, I could have said no. I like the attention. I like not having to be a therapist. It makes me feel like a girl again, with Charlie, all free and atavistic.

Is he still making up for lost time, I wonder? I swear he was born with an extra bone in his body, retractable.)

Picked up mail at AmEx. Several letters from John and Daniel and an incomprehensible poem from Benny. Not particularly good. No letter with it.

(3-4 January: Paris, Lyon, Nice)

5 January…. I can’t stop staring at the mountains. They loom on all sides, bigger than Paphos. Paphos would get lost in the snowdrifts between them.

The city itself is fascinating, though. The original Grenoble was completely destroyed in a “meltdown,” back in the fission days. They didn’t start rebuilding until twelve years ago, so the city is thoroughly modern, and preplanned down to the last centimeter. John would love it, all foam-steel and composites, graceful the way most Worlds architecture is. I think it’s the first time since we came to Europe that I’ve been out of sight of some big grey cathedral.

Sad monument to the east, though. A perfectly round lake of black glass, still slightly radioactive. Over a hundred thousand dead.

Jeff took Violet skiing this afternoon. I might have gone along to give it a try, but they said there was no real provision for beginners here, and I don’t want to finish seeing the world bound up in a body cast. The Klonexine wouldn’t make it any safer, either.

So I wandered around town until the cold got to me, then set up camp in this coffeehouse to write letters. Daniel, John, Benny, and even a note to Mother.

I didn’t mention Jeff to either John or Daniel. It was easy to talk to Daniel about Benny, since I knew he wouldn’t feel threatened. Jeff might arouse some primal groundhog instinct in him. As if I could fall in love with a mudball cop.

6 January. Last day in France, good to be back in Paris. It was a slightly cold day but no wind and lots of sun; too nice to stay indoors. Violet and Manny spent all day in the Louvre, but Jeff and I walked until dark, from Montmartre to the heliport and back down the Seine to the pension. Then rubbed each other’s feet for a while. His are big and ugly and mine are getting there.

(Seriously, all of this walking is changing my shape. My slacks are getting looser around the middle and tighter around the thighs. Will have to take care that it doesn’t turn to fat when I get back to 0.8 gee. Maybe give up handball for track.) (Back to 50 kg. tonight)

Jeff and I split the cost of a European-language translator. It’s a four-language box that has a large vocabulary but no grammar other than the sequence of words spoken, which can lead to accidental humor on both sides. But they’re in common enough use that nobody has trouble understanding them. We got it for less than half price, from an English tourist at the heliport; presumably, we’ll pass it on when we leave Europe.

We saw so much today. Better go find the map before I try to write it all down. …