The Life of the World to Come Read Online Free PDF Page A

like Mr. Bugleg of loathsome memory.
    Though they are, all of them, undeniably childish. Future Children indeed. My own dearest love has bought himself a pirate ship , if you please, and spends most of his time sailing around in the Caribbean and other ports of call on what we used to call the Spanish Main! And there he indulges his urge to be virile and bad, like pirates in every film he’s ever seen, and he’s become a smuggler! Mostly of things like wine and cheese, though they’re illegal enough in the twenty-fourth century.
    And yet I think in this he must come nearer to living a real life than the other mortals of his time, who (as far as I was ever able to tell) spend their lives hiding in their rooms, playing electronic games.
    Still, he has found a far less harmless and silly way to
rebel, hasn’t he, by going on a crusade against Dr. Zeus? Dangerous to think about.
    Anyway. Such lovely stories he told me, about Jamaica under the tropical stars, parrots and gold doubloons. How happy I was to think of him playing Errol Flynn among the shrouds and ratlines. This ship of his must really be something to see, a full-rigged sailing vessel utilizing twenty-fourth-century technology, sort of an enormous retro yacht. He has some kind of complex computer system running all the rigging apparatus, for there’s no crew at all apparently.
    It’s as though he were able to lose himself in Treasure Island , escaping from his unhappiness by making the wild sea and the pirates come to life for him—except that instead of his imagination, he’s used enormous sums of money and technology. What am I to make of such a brave new world?
    Who cares? It was enough for me to watch the way his face lit up when he described his adventures, watch his expressive face and gestures conveying his stories perfectly even in that thug’s idiom of his. The man should have gone on the stage, I always thought, and what a preacher he’d made!
    And he sang for me. He had been describing how his ex-wives had hated his singing, the repulsive harpies. I was overwhelmed with a sudden memory of Nicholas singing, making some Tudor bawdiness sublime with his dark tenor. So I begged him to sing something, and he obliged with old sea songs, blood-and-thunder ballads that somehow reduced me to a weepy mess.
    At last he reached up his hand and pulled me down beside him, and there I lay hearing his voice vibrate in his chest and throat. We were shortly embracing again, me scanning frantically to see if his brain was likely to explode this time. It was of course impossible that after three hours of rest and a glass of iced tea the man should be completely recovered from transcendence shock, but he was.
    He was twiddling experimentally with the fastenings of my coveralls, and I was wondering how his mail-suit unzipped, when something seemed to occur to him. He lifted his mouth from mine and looked down at me. “Er—”
    “What is it?” I said, desperate lest he should stop.
    “You’re a virgin, I guess, yeah?”
    Have I mentioned that the man is prone to scruples at the most inconvenient times?
    Of course I’m not a virgin, but I do have this sort of immortal self-repairing body, see, and in the three hundred and then three thousand years that had elapsed between our respective couplings, there had been more than ample time for a tiny unimportant membrane to grow back. Christ, I could have grown a leg back in that amount of time.
    “Yes,” I said. “It’s all right, though. Please.”
    But now he was self-conscious, and the gorgeous python that had materialized down one leg of his suit shrank a little. “Can I use your shower?”
    Mother of God! Had I mentioned he’s very clean in his personal habits as well? And me without a shower.
    I was stammering to explain about my pathetic tin washtub when we both realized it had been raining outside for some time, warm summer rain. I directed him out into my back garden and hurried to fetch him a clean