IN WHICH RALPH EXPLAINS THE
NATURE OF HIS RELATIONSHIP WITH LAURA
Now, in the normal
course of affairs it behooves a young fellow to remain discreet and
close-lipped about matters of an embarrass ingly personal nature.
But it’s also true to say that this story won’t make a lot of sense
without certain intimate understandings—a nod’s as good as a wink
to a deaf hedgehog and all that—and in any event, ever since the
minutiae of my personal affairs became part of the public gossip
circuit following the unfortunate affair involving the clankie
dominatrix, the cat burglar, and the alien hive mind, it would be
somewhat hypocritical of me to stand upon my privacy. So where a
more modest cove might hesitate, please allow me to step in it and,
at risk of offending your sensibilities, explain something about my
complex relationship with Laura.
I rather fancy that
life must have been much simpler back in the days of classical
Anglo-American civilization, when there were only two openly
acknowledged genders and people didn’t worry about whether their
intimate affairs were commutative, transitive, or reflexive. No
clankie/squishie, no U or non-U, nothing but the antique
butch/femme juxtaposition, and that was pretty much determined by
the shape of the external genitalia you were born with. Perverts
dashed well knew what they were, and life was simple. Modern life
is enough to drive a cove to drugs, in my opinion: but as a Butch U
Squishie of impeccable ancestry, I have the social option of
maintaining a mistress (not to mention the money), and that’s where
Laura comes in.
Laura is very clankie
and very frilly-femme with it, but with a squishy core and just
sufficiently non-U to make a casual relationship marginally
acceptable to polite society on the usual sub-rosa morganatic
basis. We met on a shooting weekend at one of the Pahl avi girls’
ranches on Luna, doing our bit for evolution by helping thin the
herd of rampaging feral bots during their annual migration across
the Sea of Tranquility. She was working her way around the solar
system on a cut-price non-U grand tour: laboring as a courtesy
masseuse in Japan and a topiarist on Ceres while saving up the
price of her next interplanetary jaunt. Her parental unit was
sending her a small allowance to help pay her way, I think, but she
was having to work as well to make ends meet, a frightfully non-U
thing for a cute little clankie princess to have to do. Our eyes
met over the open breech of her silver-chased Purdey over-and-under
EMP cannon, and as soon as I saw her delicately wired eyelashes and
the refractive sheen on her breasts, simultaneously naked and
deliciously inaccessible in the vacuum, I knew I had to have her.
“Why, I do declare I’m out of capacitors!” She fluttered at me, and
I bent over backward to offer her my heart, and the keys to the
guest room.
There is something
more than a little bit perverse about a squish who chases clankie
skirt: even, one might suppose, something of the invert about them;
but I can cope with sly looks in public, and our butch/femme
U/non-U-tuple is sufficiently orthodox to merely Outrage the Aunts,
rather than crossing the line and causing Offense. If she showed
more squish while being less non-U, I suppose it would be too
risqué to carry on in public—but I digress. I trust you can
sympathize with my confusion? What else is a healthy boy to do when
his lusts turn in a not-quite-respectable direction?
Of course, I was
younger and rather more foolish when I first clapped eyes on the
dame, and we’ve had our ups and downs since then. To be fair, she
was unaware of my unfortunate neurohormonal problems: and I wasn’t
entirely clear on the costs, both mechanical and emotional, of
maintaining a clankie doxie in the style to which she would expect
to become accustomed. Nor did I expect her to be so enthusiastic a
proponent of personality patches, or so prone to histrionic fits
and thermionic outrages. But we mostly seemed to bump along
alright—until that last predrop walkout and her failure to turn up
at the drop zone.