after you have met with this possible friend, please let me
know. My name is Whort and I’m the majordomo here.”
“Maybe later,” Jon-Tom assured him as he started up
the carved stairway.
He had no intention of taking the doormouse up on his
24
Alan Dean Foster
THE DAY OF THE DISSONANCE
25
offer. Not that he had anything against the house brand of
entertainment. His long separation from Talea plagued him
physically as well as mentally, but this wasn’t the place to
indulge in any lingering fancies of the flesh. It looked
fancy and clean, but you never could tell where you might
pick up an interesting strain of VD, and not only the
human varieties. In the absence of modern medicine he
didn’t want to have to count on curing a good dose of the
clap with a song or two.
So he restrained his libido as he mounted the second-
floor landing and hunted for the right door. He was
interrupted in his search by a sight that reminded him this
was a real place and not a drug-induced excursion into a
dreamland zoo.
A couple of creatures had passed him, and he’d paid
them no mind. Coming down the hall toward him now was
an exceptionally proportioned young woman in her early
twenties- She was barely five feet tall and wore only a
filmy peach-colored peignoir. The small pipe she smoked
did little to blur the image of prancing, bouncing femininity.
“Well, what are you staring at, tall-skinny-and-hand-
some?”
It occurred to Jon-Tom this was not intended as a
rhetorical question, and he mumbled a reply that got all
caught up in his tongue and teeth. Somehow he managed