Across the Sea of Suns (36 page)

When it was over be found himself panting slightly and said, “Adequate,” as though he were experienced at this.

“And that’s all? Not very—”

“No, no, the entrée comes next.”

It started. The scene was an old-fashioned street at dusk. A man approached a woman waiting for a bus. The woman wore rather pretty clothes and a head ornament, three decades out of date, which shadowed her face. There was little conversation. Much was conveyed by the man’s swagger, the woman’s jutting hip, a sultry exchange of glances. In the wan traces of sunset their faces were shrouded and a streetlamp caught only suggestive nuances of their expressions, setting a tone of gathering erotic energy.

She responded to a tilt of his head and a murmured invitation. Robert enjoyed this sultry, casual courting, liked the feel of a slim, muscled body. The man had a fine-honed tension running through him, that tightness and pressure which ebbs with age.

They walked a short distance to his apartment. It was atmospheric and suited to the swarthy, intimidating manner of the man. He undressed first, revealing a barrel chest and bushy, black body hair. The arrangement of the lighting cast the woman in a mysterious way as she reclined. There was a hovering excitement in her manner.

The man looked in a full-length mirror nearby. This was to establish identification with the character, but seeing the face full on brought a sudden jolt of recognition to Robert. The hooded look of the man, that frayed lounge in the corner, a familiar French watercolor near the mirror—

The man began some foreplay between the woman’s legs and the humid feel of the bed came through to Robert as he struggled with memories.

My
. The thought from Susan, overriding the senso input, startled him. The man was having his effect.

Too raw for me
, he thought strongly, hoping to get through the rush of sensation that he could feel between them.
I’d like to break it off.

The man moved adroitly with practiced skill. Yes, Robert thought to himself, it was skill, technique. Mere technique. At the time he had thought it was a passion as full and new as the woman’s. He had not allowed for the fact that the barrel-chested man was six years older than she, and far more sophisticated.

No. I want to stay. Concentrate. It might help you
, she finished dryly.

I really think—

No. If you break off the thing stops, doesn’t it? And I want to go on.

Robert knew he could rip the connections away, end this now. He reached for the leads, seized one, and stopped. Something in him wanted this to happen. Old memories stirred.

The man embraced the languid woman and his hands moved expertly over her. The woman—a girl, really—rolled to the side at his command. Her movements had a fresh quality to them despite the artificial situation. To fix Helen’s role identification, she looked at herself in the mirror.

He felt Helen’s quick flash of surprise.

It’s—she’s—you!

Was me. Over thirty years ago.
The girl stroked the dark, muscular body and Robert caught the tremor of excitement that leaped in Manuel, the man.

But I—you never told me—all these—

I met you long after.

The face,
your
face—even with the age, and the changes, I can see it is you.

I changed as little as possible. Redistributed body weight, altered hormones—

All this time—

Yes.

You could have told me—

No. My, my change had to be complete. No looking back.

Then that’s why you couldn’t have children. And I thought—

Yes.

My God, I don’t think I can—

But the surge of emotion that came into her cut off the words. Robert felt the same tidal rhythm grasp him and did not fight against it. The heat and harsh cries of decades before seized them both. It went on for unendurably long moments bringing him to a fevered, shuttering, simulated climax.

In the silence afterward the images dwindled, the tingling sensations drained away. They were left, two people in the glossy chairs, the cables dangling from them.

They said nothing as Robert paid off the man and got into the taxi for the hotel.

“It’s revolting,” Helen said. “To learn this way …”

“The practice is common now.”

“Not among the people we know, not—” She stopped.

“I had to conceal it. I moved away afterward, to Chile, where no one knew I had the Change.”

“What, what was your name?”

“Susan.”

“I see,” she said stiffly.

What did she expect, he thought bitterly. That I changed Roberta to Robert, like some cheap joke?

“So you were the sort of woman who makes things like that senso.”

“For him, yes, I was.”

“He was repulsive.”

“He was hypnotic. I see that now.”

“He must have been, to make you do degrading things like—”

“Is it more degrading to do them, or to need their help?”

Her face tightened and he regretted saying it. She said bitterly, “
I’m
not the one who needs help, remember. And no wonder—you’re not really what everyone’s thought, are you?”

He ignored her tone. “I’ve done well enough. You had no complaints at the beginning, as I remember.”

She sat silently. The taxi whistled through dimly lit streets. “You’ve betrayed me.”

“It all happened long before I met you.”

“If I’d known you were so, so unbalanced as—”

“It was a decision I made. I had to.”

“For what? That man must have—”

“He—” Robert stopped himself. “I loved him.”

“What became of him, then?”

“He went away. Left me.”

“I’m not surprised. Any woman who would—” She shuddered, and conflicting emotions flickered across her face.

The taxi drew up to the hotel. Beggars came limping out of the shadows, calling. Robert brushed them away. The two walked to their room without a word. Their footsteps echoed hollowly in the old tile corridors. Inside, he took off his coat and noticed that his heart was pounding.

She turned to him decisively. “I want to, to know what it was like. Why you—”

He cut her off with, “The process was crude then. Manuel had left me. I thought then that he had fallen out of love with me, but looking back, feeling that tonight—”

“Yes?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he had just gotten tired of me.”

“But something made you …”

“Yes. It’s all gotten so distant now, I can’t he sure of what I felt. It’s as though there’s a fog between me and that senso.”

“You didn’t recognize it until …?”

“No, I didn’t. I went through two years of drugs, depression, therapy, tap-ins. I forgot so much. The strains on my body—”

“I still don’t—maybe that man, he was so oily, he must have done things to you, to make you want to change—”

Robert shook his head. He turned abruptly and went into the bathroom. He stayed there a long time, taking a shower and letting the hot water wash away the evening and turn his skin pink. He looked down at himself and thought of what the years had done to the muscles and skin. This body felt heavy, bulky, and oddly like a machine. He wondered what it would have been like if that dimly remembered girl had not …

When he returned to the bedroom the lights were out.

He went to the bed slowly, uncertain, and heard the crisp rustle of sheets.

“Come here,” she said.

She reached for him. “You … you have been a good man to me.” A tentative touch. “I suppose I can’t … blame you for a past you had … erased, even before we …”

He kissed her. She murmured, “You were weaker then, you know. I thought it was just being young, inexperienced. But you got strong, in the years afterward. I was surprised, I remember.”

He saw where she was headed and said, “Because of you.”

And it was true. She was starting to realize that it was she, and the glorious first years of their marriage, that had made him truly into a man. And this realization was pulling her free of her confused swirl of emotions.

She tried the things she had done so many times before. To his surprise there was some response. The deep feelings of the senso had perhaps reached into him and found some reservoir.

A moist heat grew rapidly in her and he went along, making the old moves he knew would do the job. She quickened further. Some part of him kept up a lukewarm interest, enough to make the performance convincing. She gasped, and gasped again. Something in tonight had made her swirl of emotions condense into this act, some titillation had come out of the senso and the shock. Now she responded to him as if he were some exotic thing.

Robert suddenly remembered Manuel.
God, I hope he’s dead now.
It would be better if the possibility of him was gone from life forever. The therapy had smothered and blotted out Manuel. The therapists had been very sure that was for the best.

Helen moved energetically under him, trying to provoke a passion he could no longer feel.
Christ,
he thought. He felt a new empathy for her, for what help she would find in this.

Suddenly he sensed himself above the tangled bodies that labored in the bed. He saw the passion from a high but not disparaging perspective, a double vision of himself. It was like the multiple layers of sensation one had in the senso, the sense of being several people at once. But stranger, and deeper.

He saw that the simple event of coupling was surrounded with an aura, a different halo of associations for each sex. An act of essential self-definition. It truly was difficult to express how profound the difference was.

A surge came in him and he thought again of Manuel. That bright, trusting girl back there—she had wanted Manuel so badly. And when he left, the only way to hold on to him was to try, in a strange way, to flee from herself, and become what she wanted to hold.

Helen groaned and clutched at him, as if for shelter in this private storm, and gave an abrupt, piercing cry. He stroked her and wept and for the first time in many years he saw truly again, in Helen and in that girl of long ago, the other side of a wide mute river he could never cross again.

FOUR

Nigel shivered. The drama had been intense, close, more intimate than anything artificial he had ever experienced. They had obviously selected a drama tuned to his age, his sex—and then pulled the rug from under him, jolted his expectations.

He wasn’t that rather tired, dulled man, and yet, yet—there was something … Even the man’s dialogue was slightly British, like one who had lived abroad for decades, just as Nigel had. Yes, it was a damned finely tuned bit of business. And not at all amusing.

But amusement was not the aim. With a blurring sense of movement everything shifted, melted, reformed—

And he was the gaunt little man, spotting his mark on the dingy Berkeley street. Nigel felt himself swept along as he approached the heavyset, distracted figure and said, “Something?”

From there the drama proceeded as before, giving Nigel a rather distant view of the events, letting emotions seep away—

Another swirling, blurred transition. Nigel became Helen.

“We’re not
doing
anything,” he said, and felt the rising waspish irritation. He knew what was coming and yet the emotions that came through from the fictional Helen moved him. Events carried him forward. Robert simmered in his tight-faced anger, the senso started, Helen’s shock lanced through him—

And he saw that it was like his own, with Carlos. But worse. It hit deeply. There was betrayal with it, a hollow feeling of the ground opening under Helen. She had struggled to see her own past clearly. Everything she had felt, each day, now meant something different. This taciturn stranger next to her in the slick chair knew everything about her but had been hiding himself—
herself
—every day of their lives. Helen had stroked him, receive him into herself, accepted and savored his male-ness, all without a thought—

Helen struggled bleakly, trying to find a hold. She would have to begin again, learn to accept Robert as something both more and less than she had ever thought, make herself—

Nigel tore himself away from the churn of emotions. He thumbed
ESCAPE
and the tangled world dropped away.

They peeled the pod back and crisp light flooded in. He wriggled out. The attendants smiled professionally. He ignored their warm, well-modulated voices, their polite questions. He wrapped himself snugly in a blue terry-cloth robe and started toward the dressing room.

“Wait! Your consultation—”

“Not having any.”

“It’s part of the—”

“Not mandatory, is it?”

“No, but we—”

“Thought so. I don’t have to talk to you sods and I frigging well don’t intend to.”

“It will go on the record,” the woman said as a warning.

“Dear me. Pity.”

“Isn’t it a little obvious to be so hostile to analysis?”

Nigel hesitated, knowing he should be civil to this person, even if he was shaken. He teetered on the brink, feeling the weight of her expectations, how the society of the ship would evaluate this, and in the long gliding moment felt a sureness come into himself that had been there before, but that he had lost years before. “Fuck off,” he said precisely.

“How did it go?” Nikka asked.

He lay back, letting their jury-rigged machine minister to him. It burbled and sucked and the pumps rattled, but it worked. He had actually come to feel a certain affection for the damned thing. “Hated it.”

She sighed. “That will not put you further into the good graces of—”

“I know, I know.”

“You saw the maps of that moon? Craters everywhere. They’re calling it Pocks. No official name yet.”

“Appropriate. Think you can wangle some surface duty?”

“What surface duty?” She sat up. “The net hasn’t even discussed—”

“I found a system interface into the engine section. They’re lower than they thought on plain old deuterium inventory. Before we ignite the drive again, they’ll need to store up some.”