Free Dreaming Jewels by Theodore Sturgeon

sorry.” Dutifully, she drank it, looking at him wide-eyed over the rim of the glass that was too big to be her glass.
    After that he let her go.
    The seasons passed and there were other changes. Zena very seldom read aloud any more. She heard music or played her guitar, or busied herself with costumes and continuities, quietly, while Horty sprawled on his bunk, one hand cupping his chin, the other flipping pages. His eyes moved perhaps four times to scan each page, and their turning was a rhythmic susurrus. The books were Zena’s choice, and now they were almost all quite beyond her. Horty swept the books of knowledge, breathed it in, stored it, filed it. She used to look at him, sometimes, in deep astonishment, amazed that he was Horty… he was Kiddo, a girl-child, who, in a few minutes would be on the bally-platform singing the “Yodelin’ Jive” with her. He was Kiddo, who giggled at Cajun Jack’s horseplay in the cook-tent and helped Lorelei with her brief equestrienne costumes. Yet, still giggling, or still chattering about bras and sequins, Kiddo was Horty, who would pick up a romantic novel with a bosomy dust-jacket, and immerse himself in the esoteric matter it concealed—texts disguised under the false covers—books on microbiology, genetics, cancer, dietetics, morphology, endocrinology. He never discussed what he read, never; apparently, evaluated it. He simply stored it—every page, every diagram, every word of every book she brought him. He helped her put the false covers on them, and he helped her secretly dispose of the books when he had read them—he never needed them for reference—and he never questioned her once about why he was doing it.
    Human affairs refuse to be simple… human goals refuse to be clear. Zena’s task was a dedication, yet her aims were speckled and splotched with surmise and ignorance, and the burden was heavy…
    The rain drove viciously against the trailer in one morning’s dark hours, and there was an October chill in the August air. The rain spattered and hissed like the churning turmoil she sensed so often in the Maneater’s mind. Around her was the carnival. It was around her memories too, for more years than she liked to count. The carnival was a world, a good world, but it exacted a bitter payment for giving her a place to belong. The very fact that she belonged meant a stream of goggling eyes and pointing fingers: You’re different. You’re different.
    Freak!
    She turned restlessly. Movies and love-songs, novels and plays… here was a woman—they called her dainty, too—who could cross a room in five strides instead of fifteen, who could envelop a doorknob in one small hand. She stepped up into trains instead of clambering like a little animal, and used restaurant forks without having to distort her mouth.
    And they were loved, these women. They were loved, and they had choice. Their problems of choice were subtle ones, easy ones—differences between men which were so insignificant they really couldn’t matter. They didn’t have to look at a man and think first, first of all before anything else, What will it mean to him that I’m a freak?
    She was little, little in so many ways. Little and stupid. The one thing she had been able to love, she had put into deadly jeopardy. She had done what she could, but there was no way of knowing if it was right.
    She began to cry, silently.
    Horty couldn’t have heard her, but he was there. He slid into bed beside her. She gasped, and for a moment could not release her breath from her pounding throat. Then she took his shoulders, turned him away from her. She pressed her breasts against his warm back, crossed her arms over his chest. She drew him close, close, until she heard breath hissing from his nostrils. They lay still, curled, nested together like two spoons.
    “Don’t move, Horty. Don’t say anything.”
    They were quiet for a long time.
    She wanted to talk. She wanted to tell him of her loneliness, her