Bride 91

It was a standard six-month marriage contract. I signed it, and Landy signed it and we were man and wife, for the time being. The registrar clicked and chuttered and disgorged our license. My friends grinned and slapped me on the back and bellowed congratulations. Five of Landy’s sisters giggled and hummed and went through complete spectral changes. We were all very happy.

“Kiss the bride!” cried my friends and her sisters.

Landy slipped into my arms. It was a good fit; she was pliable and slender, and I engulfed her, and the petals of her ingestion-slot fluttered prettily as I pressed my lips against them. We held the pose for maybe half a minute. Give her credit: she didn’t flinch. On Landy’s world they don’t kiss, not with their mouths, at least, and I doubt that she enjoyed the experience much. But by the terms of our marriage contract we were following Terran mores. That has to be decided in advance, in these interworld marriages. And here we kiss the bride; so I kissed the bride. My pal Jim Owens got carried away and scooped up one of Landy’s sisters and kissed her. She gave him a shove in the chest that knocked him across the chapel. It wasn’t her wedding, after all.

The ceremony was over, and we had our cake and hallucinogens, and about midnight someone said, “We ought to give the honeymooners some privacy.”

So they all cleared out and Landy and I started our wedding night.

We waited until they were gone. Then we took the back exit from the chapel and got into a transport capsule for two, very snug, Landy’s sweet molasses fragrance pungent in my nostrils, her flexible limbs coiled against mine, and I nudged a stud and we went floating down Harriman Channel at three hundred kilometers an hour. The eddy currents weren’t bad, and we loved the ride. She kissed me again; she was learning our ways fast. In fifteen minutes we reached our programmed destination and the capsule took a quick left turn, squirted through an access sphincter, and fastened itself to the puckered skin of our hotel. The nose of the capsule produced the desired degree of irritation; the skin parted and we shot into the building. I opened the capsule and helped Landy out, inside our room. Her soft golden eyes were shimmering with merriment and joy. I slapped a privacy seal on the wall-filters.

“I love you,” she said in more-or-less English.

“I love you,” I told her in her own language.

She pouted at me. “This is a Terran marriage, remember?”

“So it is. So it is. Champagne and caviar?”

“Of course.”

I programmed for it, and the snack came rolling out of the storage unit, ice-cold and inviting. I popped the cork and sprinkled lemon juice on the caviar, and we dined. Fish eggs and overripe grape juice, nothing more, I reminded myself.

After that we activated the periscope stack and stared up through a hundred storys of hotel at the stars. There was a lover’s moon in the sky that night, and also one of the cartels had strung a row of beady jewels across about twenty degrees of arc, as though purely for our pleasure. We held hands and watched.

After that we dissolved our wedding clothes.

And after that we consummated our marriage.

You don’t think I’m going to tell you about that, do you? Some things are still sacred, even now. If you want to find out how to make love to a Suvornese, do as I did and marry one. But I’ll give you a few hints about what it’s like. Anatomically, it’s homologous to the process customary on Terra, so far as the relative roles of male and female go. That is, man gives, woman receives, in essence. But there are differences, pretty major ones, in position, texture, sensation, and response. Of course there are. Why marry an alien, otherwise?

I confess I was nervous, although this was my ninety-first wedding night. I had never married a Suvornese before. I hadn’t been to bed with one, either, and if you stop to reflect a little on Suvornese ethical practices you’ll see what a damn-fool suggestion that was. I had studied a Suvornese marriage manual, but as any adolescent on any world quickly realizes, translating words and tridim prints into passionate action is trickier than it seems, the first time.

Landy was very helpful, though. She knew no more about Terran males than I did about Suvornese females, of course, but she was eager to learn and eager to see that I did all the right things. So we managed excellently well. There’s a knack to it. Some men have it, some don’t. I do.

We made love a good deal that night, and in the morning we breakfasted on a sun-washed terrace overlooking a turquoise pool of dancing amoeboids, and later in the day we checked out and capsuled down to the spaceport to begin our wedding journey.

“Happy?” I asked my bride.

“Very,” she said. “You’re my favorite husband already.”

“Were any of the others Terrans?”

“No, of course not.”

I smiled. A husband likes to know he’s been the first.

At the spaceport, Landy signed the manifest as Mrs. Paul Clay, which gave me great pleasure, and I signed beside her, and they scanned us and let us go aboard. The ship personnel beamed at us in delight. A handsome indigo-skinned girl showed us to our cabin and wished us a good trip so amiably that I tried to tip her. I caught her credit-counter as she passed me, and pushed the dial up a notch. She looked aghast and set it right back again. “Tipping’s forbidden, sir!”

“Sorry. I got carried away.”

“Your wife’s so lovely. Is she Honirangi?”

“Suvornese.”

“I hope you’re very happy together.”

We were alone again. I cuddled Landy up against me. Interworld marriages are all the rage nowadays, of course, but I hadn’t married Landy merely because it was a fad. I was genuinely attracted to her, and she to me. All over the galaxy people are contracting the weirdest marriages just to say that they’ve done it—marrying Sthenics, Gruulers, even Hhinamor. Really grotesque couplings. I don’t say that the prime purpose of a marriage is sex, or that you necessarily have to marry a member of a species with which a physical relationship is easy to maintain. But there ought to be some kind of warmth in a marriage. How can you feel real love for a Hhinamor wife who is actually seven pale blue reptiles permanently enclosed in an atmosphere? At least Landy was mammalian and humanoid. A Suvornese-Terran mating would of course be infertile, but I am a conventional sort of person at heart and try to avoid committing abominations; I am quite willing to leave the task of continuing the species to those whose job is reproduction, and you can be sure that even if our chromosomes were mutually congruent I would never have brought the disgusting subject up with Landy. Marriage is marriage, reproduction is reproduction, and what does one have to do with the other, anyway?

During the six subjective weeks of our journey, we amused ourselves in various ways aboard the ship. We made love a good deal, of course. We went gravity-swimming and played paddle-polo in the star lounge. We introduced ourselves to other newlywed couples, and to a newlywed super-couple consisting of three Banamons and a pair of Ghinoi.

And also Landy had her teeth transplanted, as a special surprise for me.

Suvornese have teeth, but they are not like Terran teeth, as why should they be? They are elegant little spiny needles mounted on rotating bases, which a Suvornese uses to impale his food while he rasps at it from the rear with his tongue. In terms of Suvornese needs they are quite functional, and in the context of her species Landy’s teeth were remarkably attractive, I thought. I didn’t want her to change them. But she must have picked up some subtle hint that I found her teeth anti-erotic, or something. Perhaps I was radiating an underlying dislike for that alien dental arrangement of hers even while I was telling myself on the conscious level that they were lovely. So she went to the ship’s surgeon and got herself a mouthful of Terran teeth.

I didn’t know where she went. She vanished after breakfast, telling me she had something important to attend to. All in ignorance, I donned gills and went for a swim while Landy surrendered her pretty teeth to the surgeon. He cleaned out the sockets and implanted a rooting layer of analogous gum-tissue. He chiseled new receptor sockets in this synthetic implant. He drill-tailored a set of donor teeth to fit, and slipped them into the periodontal membranes, and bonded them with a quick jab of homografting cement. The entire process took less than two hours. When Landy returned to me, the band of colorvariable skin across her forehead was way up toward the violet, indicating considerable emotional disturbance, and I felt a little edgy about it.

She smiled. She drew back the petals of her ingestion-slot. She showed me her new teeth.

“Landy! What the hell—!”

Before I could check myself, I was registering shock and dismay from every pore. And Landy registered dismay at my dismay. Her forehead shot clear past the visible spectrum, bathing me in a lot of ultra-violet that distressed me even though I couldn’t see it, and her petals drooped and her eyes glistened and her nostrils clamped together.

“You don’t like them?” she asked.

“I didn’t expect—you took me by surprise—”

“I did it for you!”

“But I liked your old teeth,” I protested.

“No. Not really. You were afraid of them. I know how a Terran kisses. You never kissed me like that. Now I have beautiful teeth. Kiss me, Paul.”

She trembled in my arms. I kissed her.

We were having our first emotional crisis. She had done this crazy thing with her teeth purely to please me, and I wasn’t pleased, and now she was upset. I did all the things I could to soothe her, short of telling her to go back and get her old teeth again. Somehow that would have made matters worse.

I had a hard time getting used to Landy with Terran choppers in her dainty little mouth. She had received a flawless set, of course, two gleaming ivory rows, but they looked incongruous in her ingestion slot, and I had to fight to keep from reacting negatively every time she opened her mouth. When a man buys an old Gothic cathedral, he doesn’t want an architect to trick it up with wiggling bioplast inserts around the spire. And when a man marries a Suvornese, he doesn’t want her to turn herself piecemeal into a Terran. Where would it end? Would Landy now decorate herself with a synthetic navel, and have her breasts shifted about, and get the surgeon to make a genital adjustment so that—

Well, she didn’t. She wore her Terran teeth for about ten shipboard days, and neither of us took any overt notice of them, and then very quietly she went back to the surgeon and had him give her a set of Suvornese dentals again. It was only money, I told myself. I didn’t make any reference to the switch, hoping to treat the episode as a temporary aberration that now was ended. Somehow I got the feeling that Landy still thought she ought to have Terran teeth. But we never discussed it, and I was happy to see her looking Suvornese again.

You see how it is, with marriage? Two people try to please one another, and they don’t always succeed, and sometimes they even hurt one another in the very attempt to please. That’s how it was with Landy and me. But we were mature enough to survive the great tooth crisis. If this had been, say, my tenth or eleventh marriage, it might have been a disaster. One learns how to avoid the pitfalls as one gains experience.

We mingled a good deal with our fellow passengers. If we needed lessons in how not to conduct a marriage, they were easily available. The cabin next to ours was occupied by another mixed couple, which was excuse enough for us to spend some time with them, but very quickly we realized that we didn’t relish their company. They were both playing for a bond forfeiture—a very ugly scene, let me tell you.

The woman was Terran—a big, voluptuous sort with orange hair and speckled eyeballs. Her name was Marje. Her new husband was a Lanamorian, a hulking ox of a humanoid with corrugated blue skin, four telescopic arms, and a tripod deal for legs. At first they seemed likable enough, both on the flighty side, interstellar tourists who had been everywhere and done everything and now were settling down for six months of bliss. But very shortly I noticed that they spoke sharply, even cruelly, to one another in front of strangers. They were out to wound.

You know how it is with the six-month marriage contract, don’t you? Each party posts a desertion bond. If the other fails to go the route, and walks out before the legal dissolution date, the bond is forfeited. Now, it’s not all that hard to stay married for six months, and the bondsmen rarely have to pay off; we are a mature civilization. Such early abuses of the system as conspiring to have one party desert, and then splitting the forfeiture later, have long since become extinct.

But Marje and her Lanamorian mate were both hard up for cash. Each was hot for the forfeiture, and each was working like a demon to outdo the other in obnoxiousness, hoping to break up the marriage fast. When I saw what was going on, I suggested to Landy that we look for friends elsewhere on the ship.

Which led to our second emotional crisis.

As part of their campaign of mutual repulsion, Marje and hubby decided to enliven their marriage with a spot of infidelity. I take a very old-fashioned view of the marriage vow, you understand. I regard myself as bound to love, honor, and obey for six months, with no fooling around on the side; if a man can’t stay monogamous through an entire marriage, he ought to get a spine implant. I assumed that Landy felt the same way. I was wrong.

We were in the ship’s lounge, the four of us, getting high on direct jolts of fusel oils and stray esters, when Marje made a pass at me. She was not subtle. She deopaqued her clothes, waved yards of bosom in my face, and said, “There’s a nice wide bed in our cabin, sweetheart.”

“It isn’t bedtime,” I told her.

“It could be.”

“No.”

“Be a friend in need, Paulsie. This monster’s been crawling all over me for weeks. I want a Terran to love me.”

“The ship is full of available Terrans, Marje.”

“I want you.”

“I’m not available.”

“Cut it out! You mean to say you won’t do a fellow Terran a little favor?” She stood up, quivering, bare flesh erupting all over the place. In scabrously explicit terms she described her intimacies with the Lanamorian, and begged me to give her an hour of more conventional pleasure. I was steadfast. Perhaps, she suggested, I would tape a simulacrum and send that to her bed? No, not even that, I said.

At length Marje got angry with me for turning her down. I suppose she could be legitimately annoyed at my lack of chivalry, and if I hadn’t happened to be married at the moment I would gladly have obliged her, but as it was I couldn’t do a thing for her, and she was boiling. She dumped a drink in my face and stalked out of the lounge, and in a few moments the Lanamorian followed her.

I looked at Landy, whom I had carefully avoided during the whole embarrassing colloquy. Her forehead was sagging close to infra-red, which is to say, in effect, that she was almost in tears.

“You don’t love me,” she said.

“What?”

“If you loved me you’d have gone with her.”

“Is that some kind of Suvornese marriage custom?”

“Of course not,” she snuffled. “We’re married under Terran mores. It’s a Terran marriage custom.”

“What gives you the idea that—”

“Terran men are unfaithful to their wives. I know. I’ve read about it. Any husband who cares about his wife at all cheats on her now then. But you—”

“You’ve got things mixed up,” I said.

“I don’t! I don’t!” And she neared tantrum stage. Gently I tried to tell her that she had been reading too many historical novels, that adultery was very much out of fashion, that by turning Marje down I was demonstrating the solidity of my love for my wife. Landy wouldn’t buy it. She got more and more confused and angry, huddling into herself and quivering in misery. I consoled her in all the ways I could imagine. Gradually she became tranquil again, but she stayed moody. I began to see that marrying an alien had its complexities.

Two days later, Marje’s husband made a pass at her.

I missed the preliminary phases. A swarm of energy globes had encountered the ship, and I was up at the view-wall with most of the other passengers, watching the graceful gyrations of these denizens of hyperspace. Landy was with me at first, but she had seen energy globes so often that they bored her, and so she told me she was going down to the scintillation tank for a while, as long as everyone was up here. I said I’d meet her there later. Eventually I did. There were about a dozen beings in the tank, making sparkling blue tracks through the radiant greenish-gold fluid. I stood by the edge, looking for Landy, but there was no one of her general physique below me.

And then I saw her. She was nude and dripping polychrome fluid, so she must have come from the tank only a few moments before. The hulking Lanamorian was beside her and clearly trying to molest her. He was pawing her in various ways, and Landy’s spectrum was showing obvious distress.

But I wasn’t needed.

Do you get from this tale an image of Landy as being frail, doll-like, something of porcelain? She was, you know. Scarcely forty kilograms of woman there, not a bone in her body as we understand bone—merely cartilage. And shy, sensitive, easily set aflutter by an unkind word or a misconstrued nuance. Altogether in need of husbandly protection at all times. Yes? No. Sharks, like Suvornese, have only gristle in place of bone, but forty kilograms of shark do not normally require aid in looking after themselves, and neither did Landy. Suvornese are agile, well coordinated, fast-moving, and stronger than they look, as Jim Owens found out at my wedding when he kissed Landy’s sister. The Lanamorian found it out, too. Between the time I spied him bothering Landy and the time I reached her side, she had dislocated three of his arms and flipped him on his massive back, where he lay flexing his tripod supports and groaning. Landy, looking sleek and pleased with herself, kissed me.

“What happened?” I asked.

“He made an obscene proposition.”

“You really ruined him, Landy.”

“He made me terribly angry,” she said, although she no longer looked or sounded very angry.

I said, “Wasn’t it just the other day that you were telling me I didn’t love you because I turned down Marje’s obscene proposition? You aren’t consistent, Landy. If you think that infidelity is essential to a Terran-mores marriage, you should have given in to him, yes?”

“Terran husbands are unfaithful. Terran wives must be chaste. It is known as the double standard.”

“The what?”

“The double standard,” she repeated, and she began to explain it to me. I listened for a while, then started to laugh at her sweetly innocent words.

“You’re cute,” I told her.

“You’re terrible. What kind of a woman do you think I am? How dare you encourage me to be unfaithful?”

“Landy, I—”

She didn’t listen. She stomped away, and we were having our third emotional crisis. Poor Landy was determined to run a Terran-mores marriage in what she considered the proper fashion, and she took bright cerise umbrage when I demurred. For the rest of the week she was cool to me, and even after we had made up, things never seemed quite the same as before. A gulf was widening between us—or rather, the gulf had been there all along, and it was becoming harder for us to pretend it didn’t exist.

After six weeks we landed.

Our destination was Thalia, the honeymoon planet. I had spent half a dozen earlier honeymoons there, but Landy had never seen it, so I had signed up for another visit. Thalia, you know, is a good-sized planet, about one and a half earths in mass, density, and gravitation, with a couple of colorful moons that might almost have been designed for lovers, since they’re visible day and night. The sky is light green, the vegetation runs heavily to a high-tannin orange-yellow, and the air is as bracing as nutmeg. The place is owned by a cartel that mines prealloyed metals on the dry northern continent, extracts power cores in the eastern lobe of what once was a tropical forest and is now a giant slab of laterite, and, on a half-sized continent in the western ocean, operates a giant resort for newlyweds. It’s more or less of a galactic dude ranch; the staff is largely Terran, the clientele comes from all over the cosmos. You can do wonders with an uninhabited habitable planet, if you grab it with the right kind of lease.

Landy and I were still on the chilly side when we left the starship and were catapulted in a grease-flask to our honeymoon cabin. But she warmed immediately to the charm of the environment. We had been placed in a floating monomolecular balloon, anchored a hundred meters above the main house. It was total isolation, as most honeymooners crave. (I know there are exceptions.)

We worked hard at enjoying our stay on Thalia.

We let ourselves be plugged into a pterodactyl kite that took us on a tour of the entire continent. We sipped radon cocktails at a get-together party. We munched algae steaks over a crackling fire. We swam. We hunted. We fished. We made love. We lolled under the friendly sun until my skin grew copper-colored and Landy’s turned the color of fine oxblood porcelain, strictly from Kang-hsi. We had a splendid time, despite the spreading network of tensions that were coming to underlie our relationship like an interweave of metallic filaments.

Until the bronco got loose, everything went well.

It wasn’t exactly a bronco. It was a Vesilian quadruped of vast size, blue with orange stripes, a thick murderous tail, a fierce set of teeth—two tons, more or less, of vicious wild animal. They kept it in a corral back of one of the proton wells, and from time to time members of the staff dressed up as cowpokes and staged impromptu rodeos for the guests. It was impossible to break the beast, and no one had stayed aboard it for more than about ten seconds. There had been fatalities, and at least one hand had been mashed so badly that he couldn’t be returned to life; they simply didn’t have enough tissue to put into the centrifuge.

Landy was fascinated by the animal. Don’t ask me why. She hauled me to the corral whenever an exhibition was announced, and stood in rapture while the cowpokes were whirled around. She was right beside the fence the day the beast threw a rider, kicked over the traces, ripped free of its handlers, and headed for the wide open spaces.

“Kill it!” people began to scream.

But no one was armed except the cowpokes, and they were in varying stages of disarray and destruction that left them incapable of doing anything useful. The quadruped cleared the corral in a nicely timed leap, paused to kick over a sapling, bounded a couple of dozen meters and halted, pawing the ground and wondering what to do next. It looked hungry. It looked mean.

Confronting it were some fifty young husbands who, if they wanted a chance to show their brides what great heroes they were, had the opportunity of a lifetime. They merely had to grab a sizzler from one of the fallen hands and drill the creature before it chewed up the whole hotel.

There were no candidates for heroism. All the husbands ran. Some of them grabbed their wives; most did not. I was planning to run, too, but I’ll say this in my favor: I intended to take care of Landy. I looked around for her, failed for a moment to find her, and then observed her in the vicinity of the snorting beast. She seized a rope dangling from its haunches and pulled herself up, planting herself behind its mane. The beast reared and stamped. Landy clung, looking like a child on that massive back. She slid forward. She touched her ingestion slot to the animal’s skin. I visualized dozens of tiny needles brushing across that impervious hide.

The animal neighed, more or less, relaxed, and meekly trotted back to the corral. Landy persuaded it to jump over the fence. A moment later the startled cowhands, those who were able to function, tethered the thing securely. Landy descended.

“When I was a child I rode such an animal every day,” she explained gravely to me. “I know how to handle them. They are less fierce than they look. And, oh, it was so good to be on one again!”

“Landy,” I said.

“You look angry.”

“Landy, that was a crazy thing to do. You could have been killed!”

“Oh, no, not a chance.” Her spectrum began to flicker toward the extremes, though. “There was no risk. It’s lucky I had my real teeth, though, or—”

I was close to collapse, a delayed reaction. “Don’t ever do a thing like that again, Landy.”

Softly she said, “Why are you so angry? Oh, yes, I know. Among Terrans, the wife does not do such things. It was the man’s role I played, yes? Forgive me? Forgive me?”

I forgave her. But it took three hours of steady talking to work out all the complex moral problems of the situation. We ended up by agreeing that if the same thing ever happened again, Landy would let me sooth the beast. Even if it killed me, I was going to be a proper Terran husband, and she a proper Terran bride.

It didn’t kill me. I lived through the honeymoon, and happily ever after. The six months elapsed, our posted bonds were redeemed, and our marriage was automatically terminated. Then, the instant we were single again, Landy turned to me and sweetly uttered the most shocking proposal I have ever heard a woman propose.

“Marry me again,” she said. “Right now!”

We do not do such things. Six-month liaisons are of their very nature transient, and when they end, they end. I loved Landy dearly, but I was shaken by what she had suggested. However, she explained what she had in mind, and I listened with growing sympathy, and in the end we went before the registrar and executed a new six-month contract.

But this time we agreed to abide by Suvornese and not Terran mores. So the two marriages aren’t really consecutive in spirit, though they are in elapsed time. And Suvornese marriage is very different from marriage Terran style.

How?

I’ll know more about that a few months from now. Landy and I leave for Suvorna tomorrow. I have had my teeth fixed to please her, and it’s quite strange walking around with a mouthful of tiny needles, but I imagine I’ll adapt. One has to put up with little inconveniences in the give-and-take of marriage. Landy’s five sisters are returning to their native world with us. Eleven more sisters are there already. Under Suvornese custom I’m married to all seventeen of them at once, regardless of any other affiliations they may have contracted. Suvornese find monogamy rather odd and even a little wicked, though Landy tolerated it for six months for my sake. Now it’s her turn; we’ll do things her way.

So Bride Ninety-one is also Bride Ninety-two for me, and there’ll be seventeen of her all at once, dainty, molasses-flavored, golden-eyed, and sleek. I’m in no position right now to predict what this marriage is going to be like.

But I think it’ll be worth the bother of wearing Suvornese teeth for a while, don’t you?