cost, this one is mine. Now, introduce me to the creator.”
Gaddis brought Serrapane and Lazorg together. The woman loomed nearly as tall as Lazorg. She offered her hand, and he took it. But Crutchsump was unable to overhear whatever words they exchanged, since an immense hubbub arose, as all the other collectors besieged Gaddis with bids for the remaining ideations of the Standard Series Six.
Long after midnight, the shay discharged Lazorg and Crutchsump outside their cellar apartment, which looked at once both homey and more dismal than ever, after the splendors of Passacantado. With the shay sounding a hoofbeat retreat, the whole night assumed a phantasmal semblance in Crutchsump’s tired brains. Were it not for the fancy clothes she wore, she could have mistaken this moment for the end of a long commonplace workday of luring volvox to their doom.
Maintaining the pleasant tired silence shared during their trip back, the two descended the stairs somewhat wobblily and entered the small quarters. The dividing curtain remained in its daytime configuration, bunched against the wall, secured with a makeshift cord.
Pirkle, registering their return, readjusted himself drowsily upon Lazorg’s bed, then went back to sleep.
Lazorg swept his arm in a grandiose gesture to encompass the whole space.
“Take a good look around you, Crutchsump. Fix this dingy place in your memory. Oh, not that it hasn’t served us well enough. But in a short while, you and I will be ensconced in much grander quarters!”
“What—? But how—?”
Lazorg began unbuttoning his jacket. “Serrapane has commissioned an extensive series of sculptures from me—so long as they’re all as unique as the one she bought tonight! Even Arbogast finally had to concede the rightness of my gamble. We’re rich, Crutchsump! Rich, even with Gaddis’s outrageous agent fees! And this is just the start!”
“I don’t—I don’t know what to think. …”
Lazorg threw his jacket atop Pirkle, who didn’t even stir. He hugged Crutchsump to his chest.
“Don’t think! Just be glad!”
“Oh, I am! I am!”
Lazorg released her, and moved to the curtain, speaking as he fussed with its fastenings. “Well, it’s been a long day. Time for rest.”
All the while, Crutchsump, obeying impulses she could not have put into words, was mirroring Lazorg’s actions with the curtain fastenings by undoing the knotted string of her caul. Her breath came fast and seemed to burn her throat.
She had her caul fully off when Lazorg turned, pulling the curtain after himself, the pouch for her introciptor having inverted like a sock during the hasty removal.
He stopped dead. She eyed him boldly, face-naked before him at last, feeling the rings of muscles banding her introciptor clenching and releasing, clenching and releasing. The long organ throbbed and juddered. The delicate palps surrounding the opening at the end flexed and spread wider, assuming the female configuration that invited entrance, not the cone-like formation of a male that preceded penetration.
Lazorg did not utter a word. But he dropped the curtain and came to her. He removed his own caul, and Crutchsump discovered that his uncanny features no longer inspired the unease they had upon that long-ago day, but only affection.
“Oh, Lazorg, I know you’re crippled, and that we can never mate! I hope seeing me this way isn’t too painful. But despite that sadness, I want to be all yours! And this is how I can show it!”
Very gently and tentatively, Lazorg reached up to Crutchsump’s face to grip her generative organ. He squeezed it, ran his curled hand up and down its length. The familiar foreplay evoked a moan from her.
“It’s—it’s beautiful. So soft and warm and velvety—but strong. And these little fingers at the tip—like what I saw once on a star-nosed mole—”
Crutchsump’s introciptor dripped clear liquid on Lazorg’s palm. Inquiringly, he put a finger inside. The outer palps
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