ons of LA's
freeway forests, but it made Art feel *wonderful*. He kept his comm switched
off, though the underfoot rumble of the subway had him reaching for it a hundred
times a day, convinced that he'd left it on in vibe-alert mode.

They took a milk-run train to Toronto, chuffing through sleepy upstate New York
towns, past lakes and rolling countryside in full summer glory. Art and Linda
drank ginger beer in the observation car, spiking it with rum from a flask that
Linda carried in a garter that she wore for the express purpose of being able to
reach naughtily up her little sundress and produce a bottle of body-temperature
liquor in a nickel-plated vessel whose shiny sides were dulled by the soft oil
of her thigh.

Canada Customs and Immigration separated them at the border, sending Art for a
full inspection -- a privilege of being a Canadian citizen and hence perennially
under suspicion of smuggling goods from the tax havens of the US into the
country -- and leaving Linda in their little Pullman cabin.

When Art popped free of the bureaucracy, his life thoroughly peered into, he
found Linda standing on the platform, leaning against a pillar, back arched, one
foot flat against the bricks, corresponding dimpled knee exposed to the restless
winds of the trainyard. From Art's point of view, she was a gleaming vision
skewered on a beam of late day sunlight that made her hair gleam like licorice.
Her long and lazy jaw caught and lost the sun as she talked animatedly down her
comm, and Art was struck with a sudden need to sneak up behind her and run his
tongue down the line that began with the knob of her mandible under her ear and
ran down to the tiny half-dimple in her chin, to skate it on the soft pouch of
flesh under her chin, to end with a tasting of her soft lips.

Thought became deed. He crept up on her, smelling her new-car hair products on
the breeze that wafted back from her, and was about to begin his tonguing when
she barked, "Fuck *off*! Stop calling me!" and closed her comm and stormed off
trainwards, leaving Art standing on the opposite side of the pillar with a
thoroughly wilted romantic urge.

More carefully, he followed her into the train, back to their little cabin, and
reached for the palm-pad to open the door when he heard her agitated comm voice.
"No, goddamnit, no. Not yet. Keep calling me and not *ever*, do you understand?"

Art opened the door. Linda was composed and neat and sweet in her plush s