He snorted again. “Want to bet the rest of the bottle?”
“I’ll bet a full bottle.” I placed one on the bar.
“Well-” I signaled my other bartender to handle the trade. We were at the far end, a single-stool space that I kept private by loading the bar top by it with jars of pickled eggs and other clutter. A few were at the other end watching the fights and somebody was playing the juke box-private as a bed where we were. “O.K.,” he began, “to start with, I’m a bastard.”
“I mean it,” he snapped. “My parents weren’t married.”
“Still no distinction,” I insisted. “Neither were mine.”
“When-” He stopped, gave me the first warm look I ever saw on him. “You mean that?”
“I do. A one-hundred-percent bastard. In fact,” I added, “No one in my family ever marries. All bastards.”
“Don’t try to top me-you’re married.” He pointed at my ring.
“Oh, that.” I showed it to him. “It just looks like a wedding ring; I wear it to keep women off.” That ring is an antique I bought in 1985 from a fellow operative-he had fetched it from pre-Christian Crete. “The Worm Ouroboros . . . the World Snake that eats its own tail, forever without end. A symbol of the Great Paradox.”
He barely glanced at it. “If you’re really a bastard, you know how it feels. When I was a little girl-”
“Wups!” I said. “Did I hear you correctly?”
“Who’s telling this story? When I was a little girl- Look, ever hear of Christine Jorgenson? Or Roberta Cowell?”
“Uh, sex change cases? You’re trying to tell me-”
“Don’t interrupt or swelp me, I won’t talk. I was a foundling, left at an orphanage in Cleveland in 1945 when I was a month old. When I was a little girl, I envied kids with parents. Then, when I learned about sex-and, believe me, Pop, you learn fast in an orphanage-”
“I know.”
“I made a solemn vow that any kid of mine would have both a pop and a mom. It kept me ‘pure,’ quite a feat in that vicinity-I had to learn to fight to manage it. Then I got older and realized I stood darned little chance of getting married-for the same reason I hadn’t been adopted.” He scowled. “I was horse-faced and buck-toothed, flat-chested and straight-haired.”
“You don’t look any worse than I do.”
“Who cares how a barkeep looks? Or a writer? But people wanting to adopt pick little blue-eyed golden-haired morons. Later on, the boys want bulging breasts, a cute face, and an Oh-you-wonderful-male manner.” He shrugged. “I couldn’t compete. So I decided to join the W.E.N.C.H.E.S.”
“Eh?”
“Women’s Emergency National Corps, Hospitality & Entertainment Section, what they now call ‘Space Angels’-Auxiliary Nursing Group, Extraterrestrial Legions.”
I knew both terms, once I had them chronized. Although we now use still a third name; it’s that elite military service corps: Women’s Hospitality Order Refortifying & Encouraging Spacemen. Vocabulary shift is the worst hurdle in time-jumps-did you know that “service station” once meant a dispensary for petroleum fractions? Once on an assignment in the Churchill Era a woman said to me, “Meet me at the service station next door”-which is not what it sounds; a “service station” (then) wouldn’t have a bed in it.
He went on: “It was when they first admitted you can’t send men into space for months and years and not relieve the tension. You remember how the wowsers screamed?-that improved my chances, volunteers were scarce. A gal had to be respectable, preferably virgin (they liked to train them from scratch), above average mentally, and stable emotionally. But most volunteers were old hookers, or neurotics who would crack up ten days off Earth. So I didn’t need looks; if they accepted me, they would fix my buck teeth, put a wave in my hair, teach me to walk and dance and how to listen to a man pleasingly, and everything else-plus training for the prime duties. They would even use plastic surgery if it would help-nothing too good for Our Boys.
“Best yet, they made sure you didn’t get pregnant during your enlistment-and you were almost certain to marry at the end of your hitch. Same way today, A.N.G.E.L.S. marry spacers-they talk the language.