Thank you for saying good night. I am happy to know that you want me to sleep soundly, without bad dreams.
Good night to you, as well.
Yes, good night.
Good night!
That's enough. You can stop saying good night now.
Thank you.
Floating World
One day Zeb woke up next to Wynette, the SecretBurgers meatslinger, and realized that she smelled like grilled patties and stale cooking oil. As he did himself, granted, but that was different, because it always is, says Zeb, when it's your own smell. But it's not what you want the object of your lust to smell like. This is a primate thing, it's basic, they've done the tests. Ask any of the MaddAddamite biogeeks here.
And the onions, don't forget them, and the gruesome red sauce in squeeze bottles the customers craved so much it most likely had crack in it. When things got energetic and there was a brawl, someone would always go for that red sauce and start squirting it around. Then it would get mixed in with the scalp-wound splatter blood and you couldn't tell whether someone was bleeding to death or had only been doused with red sauce.
The way that combo of smells would seep into their clothing and hair and even the skin pores was unavoidable, working where the two of them did. You couldn't wash off that stink even when there was shower water available, and it didn't blend too well with the cheap glop Wynette would rub on herself to neutralize it: Delilah, it was called, in lotion and cologne forms both, and it was heavy going, like wading through a sea of dying lilies, or a clutch of elderly church-wome
n of the kind that populated the Church of PetrOleum. Those two smells - the SecretBurgers, the Delilah - were okay if you were really hungry or really horny, or both. But not so sweet otherwise.
Fuck, Zeb thought, lying there newly awakened that morning and inhaling the dire potpourri. There's no future in this.
Or if there was a future, it was a negative one, because in addition to smelling funny Wynette was getting nosy. In the name of love and getting to know and understand the real, total him, she wanted to explore his deeper depths, figuratively speaking. She wanted his lid off. If she pried too hard - if she unwrapped one after another of his flimsy cover stories, which he hadn't constructed with enough care, he realized, and he vowed to do better next time he conned someone - if she did the unwrapping, there was nothing very convincing immediately underneath. And then if she kept going, she might make some guesses about where he'd come from and who he'd been originally, and then it would only be a matter of time before she weaselled on him so she could collect whatever greyland reward must be on offer, out there in the word-of-mouth rat networks of the pleeblands.
Zeb had no doubt that there was such a reward. There might even be some of his biometrics circulating, such as photos of his ears, and animated silhouettes of his walk, and his schooltime thumbprints. Wynette wasn't connected gangwise so far as he knew, and luckily she was too poor to own a PC or a tab. But there was cheap netstuff available on time-rental in cafes, and she might do some identity surfing if he pissed her off enough.
Already she was beginning to emerge from the initial sex-induced coma created by him through the magic of his first-contact-with-aliens puppy-on-speed gonadal enthusiasm. Young guys have no taste as such in sexual matters - no discrimination. They're like those penguins that shocked the Victorians, they'll bonk anything with a cavity, and Wynette had been the beneficiary in Zeb's case. Not to brag, but during their nightly tangles her eyes had rolled so far up into her head that she looked like the undead half the time, and the amplified rockband noises she made had caused thumping and banging both from the alcohol store on the ground floor and from whatever nestful of mournful wage slaves lived above them.
But now she was mistaking Zeb's animal energies for something more profound. She wanted post-hump chat. She wanted them to share their essences, on a spiritual level. She was starting to ask things like, were her breasts big enough, and did this colour of lime green look good on her, and why weren't they doing it twice a night the way they did at first? Questions that mantrapped you any way you answered. These nightly interrogation sessions were becoming wearisome. Maybe, Zeb concluded, his feelings for Wynette hadn't been true love after all.
"Don't look at me like that. I was really young. And don't forget, I'd been improperly socialized," says Zeb.
"Look at you like what?" says Toby. "It's darker than the inside of a goat. You can't see me."
"I can feel the glacial chill of your stone-cold gaze."
"I just feel sorry for her, that's all," says Toby.
"No, you don't. If I'd stayed with her, I wouldn't be here with you, right?"
"Okay. True enough. I withdraw the sorrow. But still."
He wasn't a complete shit about it. He left Wynette some cash and a note of undying adoration, with a P.S. saying that his life had been threatened because of a dirty deal - he didn't say what kind - and he couldn't bear the thought of putting her in peril because of him.
"You used that word?" says Toby. "Peril?"
"She liked romance," says Zeb. "Knights and stuff. She had some old paperbacks; they'd been in the room when she rented it. Falling apart."
"And you didn't want to play the knight?"
"Not for her," says Zeb. "For you" - he kisses the tips of her fingers - "swords at dawn, any time."
"I can't believe that," says Toby. "You've just told me what a liar you are!"
"At least I take the trouble to lie, for you," says Zeb. "Lying's more work than the bare-naked truth. Think of it as a courtship display. I'm aging badly, I've got wear and tear, I don't have a giant blue dong like our Craker friends out there, so I need to use my wits. What's left of them."
Zeb travelled hastily south on the Truck-A-Pillar route, coming to rest in the remnants of Santa Monica. The rising sea had swept away the beaches, and the once-upmarket hotels and condos were semi-flooded. Some of the streets had become canals, and nearby Venice was living up to its name. The district as a whole was known as the Floating World, and it really was floating most of the time, especially when the full moon brought a spring tide.