I asked her point blank what her name was. “Mary,” she said tranquilly.
“Mary really is your name, then?” I had long since told her my right name, but we had agreed to go on using “Sam”.
“Certainly it’s my name, dear. I’ve been ‘Mary’ since you first called me that.”
“Oh. All right, your name is Mary. You are my beloved Mary. But what was your name before?”
Her eyes held an odd, hurt look, but she answered steadily, “I was once known as ‘Allucquere’.”
“‘Allucquere’,” I repeated, savoring it. “Allucquere. What a strange and beautiful name. Allucquere. It has a rolling majesty about it. My darling Allucquere.”
“My name is Mary, now.” And that was that. Somewhere, somewhen, I was becoming convinced, Mary had been hurt, badly hurt. But it seemed unlikely that I was ever going to know about it. She had been married before, I was fairly certain; perhaps that was it.
Presently I ceased to worry about it. She was what she was, now and forever, and I was content to bask in the warm light of her presence. “Age cannot wither her nor custom stale her infinite variety.”
I went on calling her “Mary” since she obviously preferred it and that was how I thought of her anyhow, but the name that she had once had kept running through my mind. Allucquere . . . Allucquere . . . I rolled it around my tongue and wondered how it was spelled.
Then suddenly I knew how it was spelled. My pesky packrat memory had turned up the right tab and now was pawing away at the shelves in the back of my mind where I keep the useless junk that I don’t think about for years on end and am helpless to get rid of. There had been a community, a colony that used an artificial language, even to given names—
The Whitmanites, that was it—the anarchist-pacifist cult that got kicked out of Canada, then failed to make a go of it in Little America. There was a book, written by their prophet. The Entropy of Joy—I had not read it but I had skimmed it once; it was full of pseudomathematical formulas for achieving happiness.
Everybody is for “happiness”, just as they are against “sin”, but the cult’s practices kept getting them in hot water. They had a curious and yet very ancient solution to their sexual problems, a solution which appeared to suit them but which produced explosive results when the Whitmanite culture touched any other pattern of behavior. Even Little America had not been far enough away for them; I had heard somewhere that the remnants had emigrated to Venus—in which case they must all be dead by now.
I put it out of my mind. If Mary were a Whitmanite, or had been reared that way, that was her business. I certainly was not going to let the cult’s philosophy cause us a crisis now or ever; marriage is not ownership and wives are not property.
If that were all there was to what Mary did not want me to know about her, then I simply would not know it. I had not been looking for virginity wrapped in a sealed package; I had been looking for Mary.
XXII
The next time I mentioned tempos pills, she did not argue but suggested that we hold it down to a minimum dose. It was a fair compromise—and we could always take more.
I prepared it as injections so that it would take hold faster. Ordinarily I watch a clock after I’ve taken tempus; when the second hand stops I know that I’m loaded. But my shack has no clocks and neither of us was wearing ringwatches. It was just sunrise and we had been awake all night, cuddled upon a big low half-moon couch in front of the fireplace.
We continued to lie there for a long time, feeling good and dreamy, and I was half considering the idea that the drug had not worked. Then I realized that the sun had stopped rising. I watched a bird fluttering past the view window. If I stared at him long enough, I could see his wings move.