LordPeter List
Literary Contest
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LordPeter List |
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The Senior reclined his chair. A serious young woman sat at his feet. A trio of two women and a man sat nearby. Another man sat, alone. He looked as if he had recently arrived at the colony. Two pubescent girls bounced around the room.
"Settle down, you impudent monkeys! Unless, of course, you don't want to hear The Tale of the Masked Dancers..."
"Of course..."
"...we do,..."
"Buddy Boy!" the red-haired twins chorused.
"Teena, you recording this?" the red-haired, big-nosed man asked. He looked over at his guest. "You'll have to excuse them, they're young."
"You betcha!"
"And energetic. Wanna see?"
"All right then. This is The Tale of the Masked Dancers. This happened, oh, back when I was in the navy--wet navy, not space navy, you see. We'd stopped off in England, so this must've been during one of the first World Wars, or maybe just before. We called them World Wars, even though only a handful of nations were involved--it didn't seem as if the world would survive these overdramatized border skirmishes. You know, I worked my way through college as a mercenary, with nothing more than the shirt on my back and a Gatling gun [Ed. Note: Gatling guns were obsolete by the time our Ancestor was of age to go to college.]."
"Get on with the story, Buddy Boy!"
"Hush up, Teena--unless you don't want to listen?"
"Aw shucks, boss...I'll be a good girl, I promise!"
"Okay. Here it is. The Tale of the Masked Dancers."
Once upon a time, there were actually male hetaeras--well, not actually hetaeras as they didn't provide sexual services for the women, but they did provide companionship, and we all know how satisfying that can be--remember Tamara, of course. I was in a seaside resort town, a seedy sort of Elysium on the skids. The hotel was called the Resplendent, but it was past its prime, like so many things on Earth these days. This was right before the Crazy Years.
I was sitting off in the corner, waiting for my contact. There were men and women twirling about the dance floor in a waltz. A waltz? Oh, that's an old-fashioned dance done in 3/4 time. I'm sure Teena has a recording of the "Blue Danube" in her permanents. If she doesn't, adorable Dora does. The first woman I saw was wearing a petunia colored gown with a bustle. A bustle? That was worn under the dress to make a woman's rear end more protuberant--odd, I know. But the Victorians had strange ideas about covering women up--why they even put skirts on their piano legs! They had no appreciation for a woman's natural pulchritude. But this was a long time ago, between the first two World Wars. The beginning of the end for the green hills of Earth, I'm afraid.
When I first laid eyes on the women in the ballroom, I wondered if Dora had set me down at the right coordinates. ("Boss, you doubted me?" "Only for a moment, Dorable.") Then I remembered that the girls of this time, however modern and independent they liked to look in daylight hours, had developed a taste for the clothing of an earlier time, if not for the discomfort. Instead of lacing themselves into corsets--barbarous things, you'd hate them--they just paid their dressmakers to make them look that way. The clothes and accompanying coyness were just masks they put on and took off at will.
I noticed another woman, watching. She, too, seemed to see through the dancers' ruse. I saw her murmuring to herself, in French. "Autre temps, autres moeurs," she said. She looked familiar, could she be my contact? She didn't seem to fit in, somehow. She was striking--dark hair and eyes, claret colored gown... I wondered how she was alone in a place such as this. Perhaps she had no need of masks for her man--all women had men, or wanted men, then, you see. They wanted to think they had a choice about it, but they didn't, not really. Not like you girls do nowadays. I saw her murmur to herself again: "Oh well, it's a game, and presumably they all know the rules."
I later heard that she went on to marry a lord--a lord? Well, that's an old Earth idea of nobility, not of intelligence or long life, but of who your great-great-great-grandmother happened to sleep with. Yet another reason why Earth went down the tubes...
Breaking the silence that signalled the end of the story, a statuesque blonde, who had been reclining in the arms of an overly-pretty young man and another blonde, said, "But the Masks, Senior! You told us they were Masked Dancers. Why were they wearing masks & what did they look like?"
"Haven't you figured it out? The masks looked just like the faces of the people who were wearing them, but everyone knew they were masks."
"Buddy Boy!"
"Yes?"
"Let's go bathe!"
The man looked over at his guest. "Bathing with the twins is squirmy, but fun. And extremely educational."
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