Mindswap

gotta play out the hand that's dealt to him, and I ain't about to stand here all night jawing about it. Just who are you, stranger?'

'I,' said the saddlebum, with a certain smugness, 'am he without whom your dialogue would be impossible. I am Necessity personified; without me, you would have had to remember the Theory of Metaphoric Deformation all by yourself, and I doubt that you are capable of it. You may cross my palm with silver.'

'That's for gipsies,' Marvin said scornfully.

'Sorry,' the saddlebum said, without the least show of embarrassment. 'Got a tailor-made?'

'Got the makings,' Marvin said, flipping him a sack of Bull Durham. He contemplated his new companion for a moment, then said, 'Waal, yore a mangy-looking critter, and it seems to me yore half jackass and half prairie dog. But I reckon I'm stuck with you no matter who you are.'

'Bravo,' the saddlebum said gravely. 'You conquer change of context with that same sureness with which an ape conquers a banana.'

'Reckon that's a tech highfalutin',' Marvin said equably. 'What's the next move, perfesser?'

'We shall proceed,' the saddlebum said, 'to yonder saloon of evil repute.'

'Yippee,' Marvin said, and strode lean-hipped through the batwinged saloon doors.

Within the saloon, a female attached herself to Marvin's arm. She looked up at him with a smile of vermilion bas-relief. Her unfocused eyes were pencilled in imitation of gaiety; her flaccid face was painted with the lying hieroglyphics of animation.

'C'mon upstairs with me, kid,' the grisly beldame cried. 'Lotsa fun, lotsa laughs!'

'It is droll to realize,' the saddlebum said, 'that Custom has decreed this lady's mask, proclaiming that those who sell pleasure must portray enjoyment. It is a hard demand, my friends, and not imposed upon any other occupation. For note: the fishwife is allowed to hate herring, the vegetable man may be allergic to turnips, and even the newspaper boy is permitted his illiteracy. Not even the blessed saints are required to enjoy their holy martyrdoms. Only the humble sellers of pleasure are required, like Tantalus, to be forever expectant of an untouchable feast.'

'Yer friend's a great little kidder, ain't he?' the termagant said. 'But I like you best, baby, 'cause you make me go all mush inside.'

From the virago's neck there hung a pendant upon which was strung in miniature a skull, a piano, an arrow, a baby's shoe, and a yellowed tooth.

'What are those?' Marvin asked.

'Symbols,' she said.

'Of what?'

'Come on upstairs, and I'll show you, sweety-ass.'

'And thus,' the saddlebum intoned, 'we perceive the true unmediated confrontation of the aroused feminine nature, 'gainst which our masculine fancies seem mere baby's toys.'

'C'mon!' the harpy cried, wriggling her gross body in a counterfeit of passion all the more frightening because it was real. 'Upstairs to bed!' she shouted, pressing against Marvin with a breast the size and consistency of an empty Mongolian saddlebag. 'I'll really show ya somepin!' she cried, entwining his thews with a heavy white leg, somewhat grimy and heavily varicosed. 'When ya git loved by me,' she howled, 'you'll damned well know you been loved!' And she ground lasciviously against him with her pudenda, which was as heavily armoured as the forehead of a Tyrannosaurus.

'Well, er, thank you so terribly much anyhow,' Marvin said, 'but I don't think just at the moment I-'

'You don't want no lovin'?' the woman asked incredulously.

'Well, actually, I can't really say that I do.'

The woman planted knobkerry fists on tom-tom hips and said, 'That I should live to see this day!' But then she softened, and said, 'Turn not away from Venus' sweet-perfumed home of pleasure! Thou must strive, sir, to overcome this most unseemly gesture of unmanliness. Come, my lord! The bugle sounds; it awaits thee now to mount and fiercely press thy charge!'

'Oh, I rather think not,' Marvin said, laughing hollowly.

She seized him by the throat with a hand the size and shape of a Chilean poncho. 'You'll do it now, you lousy cowardly inward-directed goddamn narcissist bastard, and you'll do it good and proper, or by Ares I'll snap your scrawny windpipe like a Michaelmas chicken!'

A tragedy seemed in the making, for the woman's passion rendered her incapable of a judicious modification of her demands, while Marvin's reputed great vaulting lance had shrunken to the size of a pea. (Thus blind nature, by defending him from one assault, tendered provocation for another.)

Lucidly the saddlebum, following the dictates of his wit if not his predilection, snatched a fan out of his gun belt, leaned forward simpering, and tapped the enraged woman on her rhinocerine upper arm.

'Don't you dare hurt him!' the saddlebum said, his voice a squeaky contralto.

Marvin, quick if not apt, rejoindered, 'Yes, tell her to stop pawing me! I mean to say it is simply too much, one cannot even stroll out of one's house in the evening without encountering some disgraceful incident-'

'Don't cry, for God's sake, don't cry!' the saddlebum said. 'You know I can't stand it when you cry!'

'I am not crying!' Marvin said, snuffling. 'It is just that she has ruined this shirt. Your present!'

'I'll get you another!' the saddlebum said. 'But I cannot abide another scene!'

The woman was staring at them slack-jawed, and Marvin was able to utilize her moment of inattention by taking a pry bar out of his tool kit, setting it under her swollen red fingers, and prying himself free of her grip. Seizing the dwindling moment of opportunity, Marvin and the saddlebum sprinted out the door, leaped around the comer, broadjumped across the street, and polevaulted to freedom.

Chapter 17

Once clear of the immediate danger, Marvin came abruptly to his senses. The scales of metaphoric deformation fell away for the moment, and he experienced a perceptual experiential remission. It was all too painfully apparent now, that the 'saddlebum' was actually a large parasite beetle of the species S Cthulu. There could be no mistake about this, since the Cthulu beetle is characterized by a secondary salivary duct located just below and slightly to the left of the suboesophegal ganglion.

These beetles feed upon borrowed emotions, their own having long ago atrophied. Typically, they lurk in dark and shadowy places, waiting for a careless Celsian to pass within range of their segmented maxilla. That is what happened to Marvin.

Realizing this, Marvin directed at the beetle an emotion of anger so powerful that the Cthulu, victim of its own hyperacute emotional receptors, fell over unconscious in the road. That done, Marvin readjusted his gold- bronze casing, stiffened his antennae, and continued down the road.

He came to a bridge that crossed a great flowing river of sand. Standing on the centre span, he gazed downwards into the black depths that rolled inexorably onwards to the mysterious sand sea. Half-hypnotized he gazed, the nose ring beating its quick tattoo of mortality three times faster than the beat of his hearts. And he thought:

Bridges are receptacles of opposed ideas. Their horizontal distance speaks to us of our transcendence; their vertical declivity reminds us unalterably of the imminence of failure, the sureness of death. We push outwards across obstacles, but the primordial fall is forever beneath our feet. We build, construct, fabricate; but death is the supreme architect, who shapes heights only that there may be depths.

O Celsians, throw your well-wrought bridges across a thousand rivers, and tie together the disparate contours of the planet; your mastery is for naught, for the land is still beneath you, still waiting, still patient. Celsians, you have a road to follow, but it leads assuredly to death. Celsians, despite your cunning, you have one lesson still to learn: the heart is fashioned to receive the spear, and all other effects are extraneous.

These were Marvin's thoughts as he stood on the bridge. And a great longing overcame him, a desire to