She was subdued, sitting on her blankets, re-created with the full memory of how easily he had destroyed her. She spoke very little, and even what she did say was offered in a tone of deference.
At night, in the back of the truck, as he sat drinking black wine, she danced for him, and she spoke lines from her old story which neither of them had forgotten. He would call out the start of a favourite speech to her and she would answer with the rest of it, grimacing and gesturing, prancing and posturing as seriously as if she were upon the boards before a full audience.
Later, he would give her some wine, and then they would bed down for the night. They rarely touched, and their existence together was chaste and very clean, as if neither of them was a human being but some plastic and metal construct that operated without perspiring or urinating, without a single thought of the flesh.
They drove more slowly now, for it had come even to Sebastian that they had no idea where they were going. The fear of aimlessness had come back to him briefly, but he shrugged it off. It might be much worse to actually arrive somewhere, for then plans would have to be made. As long as they could always be going but never getting someplace, he could allow himself to forget about the future and concentrate on the moment.
Sitting on her blankets in the cab, Bitty Belina would point out things that he would never have seen on his own: geese flying in a V formation, brown against a leaden sky; stretches of flat earth where the wind had turned the ever present snow to ice; the looming bulk of a distant glacier pushing down a canyon, catching the sun and glinting with a blue-green luminescence that grew brighter as they approached.
Only once did the idyll threaten to break, and then Belina saw it coming and managed to keep everything intact.
They had been drinking the last of the wine in the truck, more than usual, and she had already gone through the lines from her scene with the third unsuccessful suitor in her story. There were a great many double-entendres in the speeches, though Sebastian only laughed at them because she did, not aware there was some other shading of meaning. It had often occurred to her that it might be to her advantage to make advances to the brute, for she remembered his rage when he had found her with Alvon Rudi and she mistook that for jealousy. Now, as he laughed at her mischievous talk, she was certain it was worth a try to seduce him, as far as a puppet could seduce a grown human being. Lightheaded, daring, she approached him. As far as she could see, her sexuality was the strongest tool she had to force him to do what she wished, and if that did not work, there would be no way to have him bring the others back to life.
While he drank, she stepped out of her clothes and left them behind her, her ample body displayed in its minute flawlessness.
At rest, he did not see what she was doing, for the wine had smeared his vision with honey, and even what he did see took longer than usual to have any meaning for him.
His left hand lay at his side, his arm loose, his entire body relaxed, and it was into this hand that she stepped and seated herself, her smooth bottom warm against his palm. She lifted one of his fingers and touched it to her breasts.
And then he saw what she was doing.
Fortunately, her reactions had not been extensively affected by the wine, and she was aware of the fury that slowly rose in his face. She saw his thick lips draw back from his teeth as they had that night he had killed the merchant. She saw his eyes glaze and knew that he was not seeing her as a person, but was reliving some horror from his own past. His gaze extended down a corridor of years, not upon the firm thrust of her little breasts. She danced off his hands, scooping her clothes up as she ran. Behind a crate of foodstuffs, she dressed.