We would sit down, and think which way to walk, and pass our long love’s day. Thou by the Indian Ganges side should’st rubies find; I by the tide of Humber would complain.
“What did you like about me?”
“When?”
“When I first came to work for Solar.”
“What makes you think I liked you?”
“You took me to lunch.”
“It was your dedication.”
“To what, in particular?”
“To granting Vulcan its rightful place in the family of planets.”
“There isn’t any Vulcan.”
“That’s what I liked about you.”
“What’s this in the souvenir box, please?”
“It’s a porcelain doll’s face. I found it in a trash barrel in the Anglia Dome on Mars and fell madly in love with her.”
“And this?”
“Oh come now, Demi. You don’t really want to explore my entire past, do you?”
“No, but tell me, please. It’s so odd.”
“It’s a teardrop from the Gem Tower in the Burma Dome on Ganymede.”
“Gem Tower?”
“They pour synthetic jewels the same way they used to drop pellets in a shot tower centuries ago. They were pouring red ruby flux and this one didn’t drop spherical, so they gave it to me.”
“It’s so strange. It looks like there’s a flower inside it.”
“Yes, that’s a flaw. Would you like it?”
“No, thanks. I want more than flawed rubies from you.”
“She’s turning aggressive,” Winter told the living room. “Now that she’s nailed me, she’s showing her true colors.”
I would love you ten years before the Flood, and you should, if you please, refuse till the conversion of the Jews.
“And what did you like about me when you first met me at Solar?” he asked.
“Your beat.”
“My exhaustion?”
“Gracious no! Your rhythm.”
“That’s because I’m really a Black. We all got rhythm.”
“No you’re not. You’re not even a real Maori.” She touched his cheek with tender fingertips. “I know how you got these scars.”
He pulled his spectacle down.
“You do everything with some sort of beat,” she went on. “Like a rhythm section in a combo. When you walk, talk, joke…”
“What are you, some kind of music freak?”
“So I wanted to get into your tempo.”
As she replaced the ruby teardrop in the souvenir box, Winter stared. The evening light had caught her at an odd angle and suddenly she bore a flashing resemblance to the redheaded Rachel Straus of Solar Media with whom he’d once had a perplexing relationship.
My vegetable love should grow vaster than empires, and more slow.
He was beginning to feel uncomfortable with her; a new sensation for him. “This is a damned lymphatic start for anything,” he complained.
“Why? Isn’t it full of fun and games?”
“Who’s having fun?”
“Me.”
“Who’s playing games?”
“Me.”
“So where do I come in?”
“Just play it by ear.”
“The left or the right?”
“The middle. That’s where your soul dwells.”
“You’re the damnedest girl I’ve ever met.”
“I’ve been berated by better men than you, sir.”
“Like who?”
“Like the ones I refused.”
“You leave me in doubt.”
“Yes, that’s the only way to handle you.”
“Damn it, I’m outclassed,” he muttered.
An hundred years should go to praise thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze: two hundred to adore each breast: but thirty thousand to the rest; an age at least to every part, and the last age should show your heart.
“This is the last thing I expected from you,” she smiled.
“What last thing?”
“Your being shy.”
“Me? Shy!” He was indignant.
“Yes, and I like it. Your eyes are taking inventory, but the rest of you hasn’t made a move.”
“I deny that.”
“Tell me what you see.”
“A crazy kaleidoscope.”
“Maybe you’d better explain.”
“I—” He hesitated. “I can’t. I— You always look different.”
“How?”
“Well… Your hair. Sometimes it looks straight, sometimes wavy, sometimes fair, other times dark…”
“Oh, that’s a new dye called ‘Prisma.’ It responds to wavelengths. You ought to see what an A.P.B. broadcast does… turns me into the Northern Lights.”
“And your eyes. Sometimes they look dark and slitty, like my ex-wife’s; other times they open up into huge opals… like a girl from the Flemish Dome I once knew.”
“That’s just a trick,” she laughed. “All girls practice it. It’s supposed to stagger men like a bolt of lightning.” She pulled his spectacles off and put them on. “There. Feel safer now?”
“And— And the boozalum.” He was close to stammering. “When you first came to work for us I thought they were… they were cute little points. Now they’re—they’re—Have you been growing up while I was out on assignments?”
“Let’s see,” she said, and started to remove her blouse.
But at my back I always hear time’s winged chariot hurrying near: and yonder all before us lie deserts of vast eternity. Thy beauty shall no more be found; nor in thy marble vault, shall sound my echoing song: then worms shall try that long-preserved virginity, and your quaint honor turn to dust, and into ashes all my lust.
“Don’t,” he said. “Please don’t.”
“Why not? Still shy?”
“No, I—it’s not what I expected.”
“Of course not. The macho Maori. But I’m making the pass.” The blouse came off. “How long d’you expect a girl to wait? Until she’s in the grave?”
“Jigjeeze!” he exclaimed. “You look like a figurehead on the prow of a ship.”
“Yes. They call me the China Clipper.”
“What are you, some kind of Virgins’ Lib militant?”
“Now why don’t we find out?” she laughed. “Come on, Rogue…”
She hauled him off the couch and pulled him toward the bedroom with one hand while with the other she tore open his clothes.
Let us roll all our strength and all our sweetness up into one ball, and tear our pleasures with rough strife through the iron gates of life. Thus, though we cannot make our Sun stand still, yet we will make him run.
And yet she did make the sun stand still in a timeless lovers’ limbo. In the darkness she seemed to be a hundred women with hundreds of hands, mouths, and loins. She was a Black with thick lips that engulfed him, and hard, high buttocks that clutched him. She was a Wasp virgin, supine, helpless, yet trembling with joy.
She was a succulent, crooning in his ear while her mouths drank arpeggios from his skin. She was an outworld animal emitting guttural grunts as he bestialized her. She became an inflated synthetic mannequin, squeaking and buzzing the sounds of a pinball machine. She was tough, tender, demanding, yielding, always unexpected.
And she inspired lurid fantasies in him. He was being whipped, crucified, drawn and quartered, branded with glowing irons. He thought he could see them together in impossible tangles reflected in magnifying mirrors. He panicked as he heard the front door being hammered while muffled voices shouted threats. His loins seemed to mount into a volcano of endless eruptions. Yet through all this he imagined he was carrying on a sparkling conversation with her over champagne and caviar as an erotic prelude to lounging before the fire to share love for the first time.
CHAPTER THREE
Energies
I am more and more convinced that man is a dangerous creature; and that power, whether vested in many or few, is ever grasp
ing.
—Abigail Adams
Winter eased out of the Japanese bed, walked softly into the living room and sat down on the couch with his feet up on the coffee table. He was thinking intently, sorting out the pattern. Demi came out a half hour later, supple, fair, and slitty-eyed again. She was wearing one of his shirts as an abbreviated nightgown. She squatted on the floor on the far side of the coffee table and looked up at him.
“I love you,” she whispered. “I love you, I love you, I love you.”
After a long pause he drew a shuddering breath. “You’re Titanian.” It was not a question.
She took a pause as long as his, then nodded. “Will it make any difference?”
“I don’t know. I— You’re the first I’ve ever met.”
“In bed?”
“Anywhere.”
“Are you sure?”
“N-no. I suppose I can’t be. Nobody can.”
“No.”
“Can you be sure?”
“You mean are there mysterious clues, like secret Masonic signals? No, but—”
“But what?”
“But we can spot each other if we happen to speak Titanian.”
“What does Titanian sound like? Have I ever heard it?”
“Maybe. This is tricky. You see, Titanians don’t communicate the way the rest of the Solar does.”
“No?”
“Not with sound or sight.”
“How then? ESP?”
“No, we speak chemical.”
“What?”
“Ours is a chemical language; scents and tastes and sensations on the skin or inside the body.”
“You’re zigging me on.”
“Not at all. It’s a highly sophisticated language of mixtures and intensity modulations.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“You can’t because it’s alien to you. Here, I’ll speak chemical. Ready to receive?”
“Go ahead.”
After a few moments of dead silence, Demi asked, “Well?”
“Nothing.”
“Smell anything? Taste anything? Feel anything?”
“Nothing.”
“Receive any output of any kind at all?”
“Only the conviction that this is a con scam which— No. Wait. I have to be honest. For a moment I thought I was seeing a sort of sunburst, like these scars on my cheeks.”
She beamed. “There! See? You were receiving me, only it’s so alien to you that your mind had to translate the input into familiar symbols.”
“You were actually telling me something that I translated into a visual sunburst?”
She nodded.
“What were you saying in chemical?”
“That you’re a crazy, mixed-up Maori macho, and I adore every part of you, including the scars.”
“You said all that?”
“And meant it, especially the scars. You’re so ashamed of them, poor dear…”
“Don’t feel sorry for me; I hate that,” he growled, then, “Do you Titanians walk around, broadcasting in chemical?”
“No.”
“Are there many of you here?”
“I don’t know and I don’t care. I only care about you… and you’re frightening me, Rogue.”
“I don’t mean to.”
“You’re so cold and analytic after… after you know what.”
“Forgive me.” He managed a smile. “I’m trying to sort it out.”
“I should never have told you.”
“You didn’t have to tell me; you showed me. The most extraordinary experience I ever— How do you come to be on Terra?”
“I was born here. I’m a changeling.”
“What? How?”
“My real mother was a close friend of the Jeroux family. She was their doctor. I can’t go into her history; it’d take ages.”
“All right.”
“I was a month old when their first baby died of crib-death. She substituted me for the body.”
“Why on earth?”
“Because she loved them and knew the shock of losing their first child would cripple them forever. I wasn’t her first… we shell them out rapid-fire like peas…”
“Your father was Terran?”
“No. We’re fertile only with Titanians. Seems like our eggs don’t love your sperms, or maybe vice versa. Anyway, she thought it would advantage me to be raised as a Terran in a fine family. She could always keep a Titanian eye on me, which she did. The end.”
“Then you people can love.”
“You ought to know, Rogue.”
“But I don’t know.” He waved a helpless hand. “All that talk about Prisma hair dye and practicing eye-bits and— That was Titanian camouflage, wasn’t it?”
“Yes. I try to be what you want, but my love isn’t camouflage.”
“And you can change yourself?”
“Yes.”
“But what are you really like?”
“What do you think Titanians are really like?”
“Damn if I know.” His glance to her was perplexed. “I suppose like—like a ball of burning energy or maybe a kind of plastic amoeba or maybe a bolt of lightning, eh?”
She burst out laughing. “No wonder you’re worried. Who’d want to be kissed by a thousand volts? Tell me what you’re really like.”
“You can see for yourself, and you can believe what you see.”
“Au contraire, m’sieur,” she smiled. “I won’t see what you’re really like until you’re dead.”
“That’s preposterous, Demi.”
“Not at all.” She became grave. “What’s the real you, the you that I love? Your genius for patterns? Your brilliance as a synergic inquisitor? Your wit? Your charm? Your sophistication? No. The reality of you lies in what you do with all your marvelous qualities… everything you contribute and leave behind you, and we won’t know that until you’re dead and gone.”
“I suppose you’re right,” he admitted.
“And it’s the same with us. Yes, I can adapt and change to fit occasions or suit people, but not any situation or any person. The real me is what I chose to do. And when I die I’ll look like what my deep inside has always chosen. That’ll be the real me.”
“Aren’t you going mystic?”
“Not at all.” She tapped the coffee table, much in the manner of a schoolmarm illustrating a lecture. The table was a magnificent cross section cut from a tulip tree on Saturn VI. “Look at these rings. Each shows a change, an adaptation, yes?”
He nodded.
“But it’s still a tulip tree, yes?”
“Yes.”
“It started as a tender bud which could have grown into anything, but the Cosmic Spirit said to it, ‘You are a tulip tree. Change and adapt as you must, but you will live and die a tulip tree.’ Well, with us it’s the same thing. We change and adapt, but always within the limits of what we really are deep inside.”
All Winter could do was shake his head in bewilderment.
“We’re polymorphs, yes,” she continued, “but we live, adapt, fight to survive, fall in love—”
“And play fun love-games with us,” he broke in.
“And why not? Isn’t love fun?” She glared at him. “What the hell’s the matter with you, Winter? D’you think love should be deep, dark, gloomy, despairing, like one of those old Russian plays? I didn’t think you were that juvenile.”
After a startled moment he began to shake with laughter at her outburst. “Damn you, Demi! You’ve adapted again. But how in God’s name did you know I needed a mentor?”
She laughed with him. “I don’t know, darling. Maybe with my left eye. Half the time I’m only sensing what’s needed. After all, I’m only demi-human, and this is the first time I’ve ever been in love, so I’m not accountable.”
“Never, never change,” he smiled. Then, “But what the hell am I saying?”
“That I should only change for you.” She took his hand. “Come on, Starstud.”
&nb
sp; This time they returned to the living room together. This time she sat on the couch with her feet up. She hadn’t bothered with the makeshift nightgown, and now she looked like a schoolgirl athlete. “Captain of the field hockey team,” Winter thought as he cross-legged on the floor across from her and admired her. She patted the cushions.
“Come sit close, darling.”
“Not now. That couch talks too damn much.”
“Talks too much?”
He nodded.
“You can’t be serious, Rogue.”
“Sure I am. Everything talks to me, but right now I just want to listen to you.”
“Everything?”
“Uh-huh. Furniture, pictures, machines, plants, flowers… you name it, I hear it, when I bother to listen.”
“What does the couch sound like?”
“Like… Mostly like a slow-motion walrus with a mouth full of cotton. Bloo—foo—goo—moo—noo— You have to be patient and listen long.”
“And flowers?”
“You’d think they were skittish like giggly girls, but they’re not. They’re sinuous and sultry like commercials for perfumes named C’est la Séductrice.”
“You’re on speaking terms with the whole universe,” she laughed. “I think that’s why I fell for you.” She looked down at him. “Does anything say, ‘I love you’?”
“They don’t think in those terms. Egomaniacs, all of them.”
“I do. I. Love. You.”
His glance returned her look. “I can do better than that. I trust you.”
“Why is that better?”
“Because now I can confide in you. I’ve got some thinking to do with you.”
“You’re always thinking.”
“It’s my one vice. Listen, love, something happened to me… something bad.”
“Tonight?”
“On Venucci. Now you’re not to repeat what I’m going to tell you to anyone. I know I can count on you for that, but you’re just a kid from Virginia, even though you’re Titanian, and you may be swindled into revealing something.”
“I’ll never reveal anything.” Suddenly the captain of the field hockey team began to resemble Morgan le Fay.
THE DECEIVERS Page 4