Read Online Ardor on Aros by Andrew J. Offutt - Free Book Online Page B

catch as the sun awoke me.
    She looked like Elizabeth Taylor. Pre-Cleopatra, pre-Burton Taylor, when she was slenderer. I had not been able to place that face and body at once because: first, the circumstances: one doesn’t expect to wind up on a planet way the hello someplace or other and run into Elizabeth Taylor! (Don’t get excited: figure of speech. She WASN’T Taylor; she just looked like her. As it turned out later, when I saw her properly clothed and cosmeticized and coiffed, she looked exactly like that most unique sex symbol: the one who could act. second: her state of dishabille, just mentioned. third: she looked like our Liz years ago, not as she was when I left you, just after having seen THE SECRET CEREMONY and noticing that the two female stars in it could have profited by swapping twenty-five carefully-chosen pounds.
    Which, of course, reminded me that Kro Kodres had resembled—quite strongly—that beturbanned Indian I’d gone to school with, Ram Gupta.
    Maybe, I thought, this is one of those alternate Earths I’ve read about. Which could raise problems: what if I meet me? Oh—I guess he’s back on my Earth.
    Or maybe it’s what passes for heaven, and I died in that machine of Dr. Blakey’s. I hadn’t seen Ram Gupta for several months. Maybe Ram was in a car accident or something, and he’s dead too. (At which point I had an uncharitable thought: Serves ’im right! That’ll teach him to hang around America because it’s nicer, rather than take his education back home to Delhi where they need him! )
    There was a flaw in that one: if this was “Heaven,” how come he’d died here? And what about the Vardors, even if Liz Taylor HAD got killed or died just after my departure from Earth?
    I could think of several flaws in the alternate or parallel Earth theory, too, including the parrot Dr. Blakey had sent. How come his replacement hadn’t show up back “home,” if this was a swap deal? And if it wasn’t…if there was another Hank Ardor here, and another Pope Borgia…then weren’t we two objects occupying the same space at the same time? A paradox in Aristotle’s logical universe?
    Both were wild theories. Trouble is, now I know the truth, it is no less wild. It also contains paradoxes.
    But when I woke up that morning on the yellow desert I hadn’t the foggiest where I was, other than—someplace else.
    I lay there awhile, trying to assimilate it, toying with the two look-alikes I’d met. And reviewing Jadiriyah’s clothing or lack of same, which led me to Kro Kodres’, and the Vardors—who had worn standard desert garb. Which I now wore.
    Despite nature-addicts and -ists, clothing is important for more than cover and what some idiots call “morality.” Clothing is also decoration, adornment. The first clothing was probably nothing more. It was becoming so again when I left America, and would become even more so with environmental control—and assuming the country didn’t become totally Pastoreized. First there was the darkness of Puritanism, then the sickness of Victorianism, followed by a brief burst into the sunlight in the Twenties and Thirties. Then War Two, when clothing became revoltingly utilitarian and sensible; clothing qua clothing (if you call those broad-shouldered female styles sensible; trying to look like the men they were replacing in industry, I suppose). After that women’s apparel was designed by un-men (and some un-women, too!) who hated women, and certainly much of it wasn’t designed to decorate. The Sixties brought clothing-as-adornment, as natural to the TV Generation as rebellion and experiments with post and LSD and sex, because with TV you just can’t lie much to kids anymore.
    What Kro Kodres had worn depicted his culture, and an Earthly sociologist could have said a lot about Aros just from that clothing: garishly, barbarically bright, male plumage, designed for freedom of movement—a tunic without a sleeve on the sword arm; how clever for a