Through the Eye of Time Read Online Free

some wine. He smiled and said, ‘I wish you’d warned me. Finding your wife made up as a hag isn’t the best sort of homecoming.’
    â€˜I lost track of time. I’m sorry, Chris. And I didn’t expectyou for at least another hour.’ She smiled uncertainly. ‘I shouldn’t keep doing this, I know.’
    â€˜A harmless fantasy never hurt anybody.’
    Oria nodded. She wasn’t entirely certain that any fantasy was totally harmless. Later in the evening they listened to classical tribal music. Oria was restless and she became annoyed with Queghan because he didn’t respond to her attempts to make conversation. In a way she didn’t understand, this rather pleased her, though she still put on a show of irritation – the truth being that it pleased her when his mind drifted away in abstract speculation, excluding her and everything else; it was a trait which endeared him to her even as her feminine pride was snubbed. Had he always been attentive she wouldn’t have loved him so much.
    â€˜But I do,’ Queghan said, smiling faintly. ‘I do listen to you.’
    â€˜Perhaps if I took a lover you might be more considerate.’
    â€˜Which period did you have in mind? English Regency? Greek Bacchanalia? Maybe something modern, post-Colonization?’
    â€˜I didn’t mean a reconstruction,’ Oria said tartly. ‘I meant live-action experience. You remember – real life?’
    â€˜That’s the stuff between the scenes?’
    â€˜Why did I marry you?’ Oria said. ‘You come back from the nether world like a whale surfacing for a breath of air. Then down again into the deep.’
    â€˜You’ve never seen a whale.’
    â€˜My grannie told me all about them.’
    â€˜Your grannie never saw a whale. We don’t have whales. They forgot to bring the embryos. We have blowfish instead, the size of office blocks.’
    â€˜What have blowfish the size of office blocks to do with my taking a lover?’
    â€˜You could take a blowfish for a lover.’
    â€˜That’s an obscene suggestion, not to say physically awkward and cumbersome in bed.’
    â€˜Could be a lot of fun.’
    â€˜Who for?’
    â€˜The blowfish.’
    Oria leaned closer. The demarcation between green velvet and white breast was very evident. She said:
    â€˜Let’s try another ploy. Blowfish aren’t sexy.’
    â€˜They are to other blowfish.’
    Oria started giggling. ‘Stop it, Chris.’ She reached out and stroked his cheek.
    â€˜Which ploy is this?’ Queghan asked, giving her a sidelong look. But it had been too near the truth to be comfortable and Oria snatched her hand away. She was very beautiful, still desirable, and it was a pity they had to play at games to touch reality. It was necessary to simulate the correct responses.
    How long since a human being had responded spontaneously and involuntarily to stimuli? There had been an overkill of emotion and the human species had grown weary, like an actor forced to play a role until it became a mumbled ritual, empty of meaning, devoid of feeling.
    Now Oria had taken on her affronted virgin pose. She had offered herself and been rejected: the young and tender innocent spurned and cast aside. The trouble with the image was that she was thirty-nine years old and had a son of seventeen.
    Queghan said, ‘I’m too tired to play. Let’s go to bed.’
    She looked warily at him and said, ‘I’m tired as well.’
    â€˜Really tired?’
    â€˜Actually tired.’
    â€˜I think we’ve established that we’re both tired,’ and he smiled into her grey-green eyes. Behind those eyes there was a universe he knew nothing about. He supposed that in some ways it corresponded to his own, that there were certain points of similarity. But to know for sure he would have to enter her mind, and so far he had only succeeded in