Baby Is Three (47 page)

“This man,” he prompted.

“Yes. Well, he was a young man, about—oh, I don’t know how old. Just right, anyway. And the newsdealer didn’t know who to give the paper to because he had only one left. We looked at each other, this fellow and I, and laughed out loud. The newsy heard my voice loudest, I guess, or was being chivalrous, and he handed the paper to me. The bus came along then and we got in, and the fellow, the young one, I mean, he was going to take a seat by himself but I said come on—help me read the paper—you helped me buy it.”

She paused while the one-eyed bartender brought the drinks.

“We never did look at the paper. We sort of … talked. I never met anyone I could talk to like that. Not even you, Muley, even now when I’m trying so. The things that came out … as if I’d known him all my—no,” she said, shaking her head violently, “not even like that. I don’t know. I can’t say. It was fine.”

“We crossed the bridge and the bus ran alongside the meadow, out there between the park and the fairgrounds. The grass was too green and the sky was too blue and there was something in me that just wanted to explode. But good, I mean, good. I said I was going to play hookey. I didn’t say I’d like to, or I felt like it. I said I was going to. And he said let’s, as if I’d asked him, and I didn’t question that, not one bit. I don’t know where he was going or what he was giving up, but we pulled the cord and the bus stopped and we got out and headed cross country.”

“What did you do all day?” Muhlenberg asked as she sipped.

“Chased rabbits. Ran. Lay in the sun. Fed ducks. Laughed a lot. Talked. Talked a
whole
lot.” Her eyes came back to the present, back to Muhlenberg. “Gosh, I don’t know, Muley. I tried to tell myself all about it after he left me. I couldn’t. Not so I’d believe it if I listened.”

“And all this wound up in a crummy telephone booth?”

She sobered instantly. “I was supposed to meet him here. I couldn’t just wait around home. I couldn’t stomach the first faint thought of the office. So I just came here.

“I sat down to wait. I don’t know why he asked me to meet him in a place like—what on earth is the matter with you?”

“Nothing,” choked Muhlenberg. “I was having an original thought called, ‘It’s a small world.’ ” He waved her forthcoming questions away. “Don’t let me interrupt. You first, then me. There’s something weird and wonderful going on here.”

“Where was I? Oh. Well, I sat here waiting and feeling happy, and gradually the feeling went away and the gloom began to seep in. Then I thought about you, and the murder in the park, and that fantastic business at your lab last night, and I began to get scared. I didn’t know what to do. I was going to run from here, and then I
had a reaction, and wondered if I was just scaring myself. Suppose he came and I wasn’t here? I couldn’t bear that. Then I got scared again and—wondered if he was part of the whole thing, the Siamese-twin murder and all. And I hated myself for even thinking such a thing. I went into a real hassle. At last I squared myself away and figured the only thing to do was to call you up. And you weren’t at the lab. And the coroner didn’t know where you’d gone and—oh-h-h,
Muley!”

“It meant that much?”

She nodded.

“Fickle bitch! Minutes after leaving your lover-boy—”

She put her hand over his mouth. “Watch what you say,” she said fiercely. “This was no gay escapade, Muley. It was like—like nothing I’ve ever heard of. He didn’t touch me, or act as if he wanted to. He didn’t have to; it wasn’t called for. The whole thing
was
the whole thing, and not a preliminary to anything else. It was—it was—oh,
damn
this language!”

Muhlenberg thought about the Prokofiev album standing upright by his amplifier. Damn it indeed, he thought. “What was his name?” he asked gently.

“His—” She snapped her head up, turned slowly to him. She whispered, “I never asked him.…” and her eyes went quite round.

“I thought not.” Why did I say that? he asked himself. I almost know.…

He said, suddenly, “Budgie, do you love him?”

Her face showed surprise. “I hadn’t thought about it. Maybe I don’t know what love is. I thought I knew. But it was less than this.” She frowned. “It was more than this, though, some ways.”

“Tell me something. When he left you, even after a day like that, did you feel … that you’d lost something?”

She thought about it. “Why … no. No, I didn’t. I was full up to here, and what he gave me he left with me. That’s the big difference. No love’s like that. Can you beat that? I didn’t
lose
anything!”

He nodded. “Neither did I,” he said.

“You
what?”

But he wasn’t listening. He was rising slowly, his eyes on the door.
The girl was there. She was dressed differently, she looked trim and balanced. Her face was the same, though, and her incredible eyes. She wore blue jeans, loafers, a heavy, rather loose sweater, and two soft-collar points gleamed against her neck and chin. Her hair hardly longer than his own, but beautiful, beautiful.…

He looked down, as he would have looked away from a great light. He saw his watch. It was eight o’clock. And he became aware of Budgie looking fixedly at the figure in the door, her face radiant. “Muley, come on. Come on, Muley. There he is!”

The girl in the doorway saw him then and smiled. She waved and pointed at the corner booth, the one with windows on two streets. Muhlenberg and Budgie went to her.

She sat down as they came to her. “Hello. Sit there. Both of you.”

Side by side they sat opposite her. Budgie stared in open admiration. Muhlenberg stared too, and something in the back of his mind began to grow, and grow, and—“No,” he said, incredulously.

“Yes,” she said, directly to him. “It’s true.” She looked at Budgie. “She doesn’t know yet, does she?”

Muhlenberg shook his head. “I hadn’t time to tell her.”

“Perhaps you shouldn’t,” said the girl.

Budgie turned excitedly to Muhlenberg. “You know him!”

Muhlenberg said, with difficulty, “I know … know—”

The girl laughed aloud. “You’re looking for a pronoun.”

Budgie said, “Muley, what’s he mean? Let me in on it.”

“An autopsy would have shown it, wouldn’t it?” he demanded.

The girl nodded. “Very readily. That was a close call.”

Budgie looked from one to the other. “Will somebody tell me what in blazes this is all about?”

Muhlenberg met the girl’s gaze. She nodded. He put an arm around Budgie. “Listen, girl reporter. Our—our friend here’s something … something new and different.”

“Not new,” said the girl. “We’ve been around for thousands of years.”

“Have you now!” He paused to digest that, while Budgie squirmed and protested, “But—but—but—”

“Shush, you,” said Muhlenberg, and squeezed her shoulders gently. “What you spent the afternoon with isn’t a man, Budgie, any more than what I spent most of the night with was a woman. Right?”

“Right,” the girl said.

“And the Siamese twins weren’t Siamese twins, but two of our friend’s kind who—who—”

“They were in syzygy.” An inexpressible sadness was in the smooth, almost contralto, all but tenor voice.

“In what?” asked Budgie.

Muhlenberg spelled it for her. “In some forms of life,” he started to explain, “well, the microscopic animal called paramecium’s a good example—reproduction is accomplished by fission. The creature elongates, and so does its nucleus. Then the nucleus breaks in two, and one half goes to each end of the animal. Then the rest of the animal breaks, and presto—two paramecia.”

“But you—he—”

“Shaddup,” he said. “I’m lecturing. The only trouble with reproduction by fission is that it affords no variation of strains. A single line of paramecium would continue to reproduce that way until, by the law of averages, its dominant traits would all be nonsurvival ones, and bang—no more paramecia. So they have another process to take care of that difficulty. One paramecium rests beside another, and gradually their contracting side walls begin to fuse. The nuclei gravitate toward that point. The side walls then break down, so that the nuclei then have access to one another. The nuclei flow together, mix and mingle, and after a time they separate and half goes into each animal. Then the side walls close the opening, break away from one another, and each animal goes its way.

“That is syzygy. It is in no sense a sexual process, because paramecia have no sex. It has no direct bearing on reproduction either—that can happen with or without syzygy.” He turned to their companion. “But I’d never heard of syzygy in the higher forms.”

The faintest of smiles. “It’s unique with us, on this planet anyway.”

“What’s the rest of it?” he demanded.

“Our reproduction? We’re parthenogenetic females.”

“Y-you’re a female?” breathed Budgie.

“A term of convenience,” said Muhlenberg. “Each individual has both kinds of sex organs. They’re self-fertilizing.”

“That’s a—a what do you call it?—a hermaphrodite,” said Budgie. “Excuse me,” she said in a small voice.

Muhlenberg and the girl laughed uproariously; and the magic of that creature was that the laughter couldn’t hurt. “It’s a very different thing,” said Muhlenberg. “Hermaphrodites are human. She—our friend there—isn’t.”

“You’re the humanest thing I ever met in my whole life,” said Budgie ardently.

The girl reached across the table and touched Budgie’s arm. Muhlenberg suspected that that was the very first physical contact either he or Budgie had yet received from the creature, and that it was a rare thing and a great compliment.

“Thank you,” the girl said softly. “Thank you very much for saying that.” She nodded to Muhlenberg. “Go on.”

“Technically—though I know of no case where it has actually been possible—hermaphrodites can have contact with either sex. But parthenogenetic females won’t, can’t, and wouldn’t. They don’t need to. Humans cross strains along with the reproductive process. Parthenogenesis separates the two acts completely.” He turned to the girl. “Tell me, how often do you reproduce?”

“As often as we wish to.”

“And syzygy?”

“As often as we must. Then—we must.”

“And that is—”

“It’s difficult. It’s like the paramecia’s, essentially, but it’s infinitely more complex. There’s cell meeting and interflow, but in tens and then dozens, hundreds, then thousands of millions of cells. The join begins here—” she put her hand at the approximate location of the human heart—“and extends. But you saw it in those whom I burned. You are one of the few human beings who ever have.”

“That isn’t what I saw,” he reminded her gently.

She nodded, and again there was that deep sadness. “That murder was such a stupid, incredible, unexpected thing!”

“Why were they in the park?” he asked, his voice thick with pity. “Why, out there, in the open, where some such human slugs could find them?”

“They took a chance, because it was important to them,” she said wearily. She looked up, and her eyes were luminous. “We love the outdoors. We love the earth, the feel and smell of it, what lives from it and in it. Especially then. It was such a deep thicket, such an isolated pocket. It was the merest accident that those—those men found them there. They couldn’t move. They were—well, medically you could call it unconscious. Actually, there—there never was a consciousness like the one which comes with syzygy.”

“Can you describe it?”

She shook her head slowly, and it was no violation of her complete frankness. “Do you know, you couldn’t describe sexuality to me so that I could understand it? I have no—no comparison, no analogies. It—” she looked from one to the other—“it amazes me. In some ways I envy it. I know it is a strife, which we avoid, for we are very gentle. But you have a capacity for enjoying strife, and all the pain, all the misery and poverty and cruelty which you suffer, is the cornerstone of everything you build. And you build more than anyone or anything in the known universe.”

Budgie was wide-eyed. “You envy
us. You?
”

She smiled. “Don’t you think the things you admire me for are rather commonplace among my own kind? It’s just that they’re rare in humans.”

Muhlenberg said slowly, “Just what is your relationship to humanity?”

“It’s symbiotic, of course.”

“Symbiotic? You live with us, and us with you, like the cellulose-digesting microbes in a termite? Like the yucca moth, which can eat only nectar from the yucca cactus, which can spread its pollen only through the yucca moth?”

She nodded. “It’s purely symbiotic. But it isn’t easy to explain. We live on that part of humans which makes them different from animals.”

“And in turn—”

“We cultivate it in humans.”

“I don’t understand that,” said Budgie flatly.

“Look into your legends. We’re mentioned often enough there. Who were the sexless angels? Who is the streamlined fat boy on your Valentine’s Day cards? Where does inspiration come from? Who knows three notes of a composer’s new symphony, and whistles the next phrase as he walks by the composer’s house? And—most important to you two—who really understands that part of love between humans which is not sexual—because we can understand no other kind? Read your history, and you’ll see where we’ve been. And in exchange we get the building—bridges, yes, and aircraft and soon, now, space-ships. But other kinds of building too. Songs and poetry and this new thing, this increasing sense of the oneness of all your species. And now it is fumbling toward a United Nations, and later it will grope for the stars; and where it builds, we thrive.”

“Can you name this thing you get from us—this thing that is the difference between men and the rest of the animals?”

“No. But call it a sense of achievement. Where you feel that most, you feed us most. And you feel it most when others of your kind enjoy what you build.”

“Why do you keep yourselves hidden?” Budgie suddenly asked. “Why?” She wrung her hands on the edge of the table. “You’re so beautiful!”

“We have to hide,” the other said gently. “You still kill anything that’s … different.”

Muhlenberg looked at that open, lovely face and felt a sickness, and he could have cried. He said, “Don’t you ever kill anything?” and then hung his head, because it sounded like a defense for the murdering part of humanity. Because it was.