Baby Is Three Read Online Free PDF Page A

time. I hadn’t figured out why, then. But she wouldn’t go Out and she wouldn’t go back to Earth—which in itself was all right; we had lots of room.
    Let me tell you something about modern women and therefore something about Flower—something you might not reason out unless you get as old and objective as I’ve somehow lived to become.
    Used to be, according to what I’ve read, that clothes ran a lot to what I might call indicative concealment. As long as clothes had the slightest excuse of functionalism, people in general and women in particular made a large fuss over something called innate modesty—which never did exist; it had to be learned. But as long as there was weather around to blame clothes on, the myth was accepted. People exposed what the world was indifferent to in order to whip up interest in the rest. “Modesty is not so simple a virtue as honesty,” one of the old bookssays. Clothes as weatherproofing got themselves all mixed up with clothes as ornament; fashions came and went and people followed them.
    But for the past three hundred years or so there hasn’t been any “weather” as such, for anyone, here or on Earth. Clothes for only aesthetic purposes became more and more the rule, until today it’s up to the individual to choose what he’s going to wear, if anything. An earring and a tattoo are quite as acceptable in public as forty meters of iridescent plastiweb and a two-meter coiffure.
    Now, most people today are healthy, well-selected, and good to look at. Women are still as vain as ever. A woman with a bodily defect, real or imagined, has one of two choices: She can cover the defect with something artfully placed to look as if that was just the best place for it, or she can leave the defect in the open, knowing that no one today is going to judge her completely in terms of the defect. Folks nowadays generally wait until they can find out what kind of human being you are.
    But a woman who has no particular defect generally changes her clothes with her mood. It might be a sash only this morning, but a trailing drape this afternoon. Tomorrow it might be a one-sided blouse and clinging trousers. You can take it as a very significant thing when such a woman
always
covers up. She’s keeping her natural warmth, as it were, under forced draft.
    I didn’t go into all this ancient history to impress you with my scholastics. I’m using it to illustrate a very important facet of Flower’s complex character. Because Flower was one of those forced-draft jobs. Except on the sun-field and in the swimming pools, where no one ever wears clothes, Flower always affected a tunic of some kind.
    The day Judson arrived, she wore a definitive example of what I mean. It was a single loose black garment with straight shoulders and no sleeves. On both sides, from a point a hand’s-breath below the armpit, down to the hipbone, it was slit open. It fastened snugly under her throat with one magne-clasp, but was also slit from there to the navel. It did not quite reach to mid-thigh, and the soft material carried a light biostatic electrical charge, so that it clung to and fell away from her body as she moved. So help me, she was a walking demand for the revival of the extinct profession of peeping Tom.
    This, then, was what horned in on my first few words with Judson. I should have known from the way she looked that she was planning something—something definitely for herself. I should have been doubly warned by the fact that she took the trouble to speak up just when she did—just when I told Jud he was a certifiable Outbounder if I ever saw one.
    So then and there I made my big mistake. “Flower,” I said, “this is Judson.”
    She used the second it took me to speak to suck in her lower lip, so that when she smiled slowly at Jud, the lip swelled visibly as if by blood pressure. “I
am
glad,” she all but whispered.
    And then she had the craft to turn the smile on me and walk away without another