by Steve Perry
Juete smiled at him across the red bar and Khadaji reflexively smiled back. He watched her walk away and felt desire for her even as he felt disgusted with himself. Was he doing as so many others in the military had done? Was he thinking with his dick?
He shook his head and wiped at a spill on the bar. No. He loved the exotic woman, there was more to her than sex. She was intriguing, there was a depth to her, she was … exotic, in the truest sense of that word. But Pen—
Pen was gone. Khadaji had seen him off at the sling. Pen hadn’t seemed disturbed or sad at going. He had laughed, he had hugged Khadaji, he had told him not to worry. Things would be fine, in the end, he was destined for what he was destined for—who could say where the Disk would spin him?
As Pen waited for the boxcar to helix, he reached within the folds of his robe and came out with a small steel marble in his hand. He extended it to Khadaji.
“What’s this?” Khadaji said, as he took the marble.
“My compendia. The works of my career in tending pub.”
“I can’t take—”
“I have copies, Emile.”
“You’ve given me so much already.”
“Only what I could, little enough. Someday, when you are where you will be, I will smile and wish it were more.”
Khadaji felt a lance of guilt. “You don’t have to go, Pen.”
“I do, Emile, but there is one more thing I would like to do before I leave.” With that, Pen reached up within his hood and pulled the cross-scarf covering his face away. For the first time, Khadaji saw the features of the man who had lived with him for over a year. Slowly, Pen leaned forward; slowly, he pressed his lips against Khadaji’s lips, and kissed him. Then, the scarf was back. None of the few passengers waiting for the boxcar had seen Pen’s naked face, no one save Khadaji. His tears ran freely as Pen entered the boxcar and was slung out of Khadaji’s life.
Chapter Eleven
THE ROUTINE IN the pub settled into a comfortable rhythm. Once in a while, somebody would ask for some unusual drink or powder, even a radiant. Kamus would walk by and smile and pause to stroke the old sword hanging on the wall. He seemed pleased with Khadaji’s work. Pen was gone, but Khadaji still practiced the self-control forms, the dances of sumito, alone. It was as Pen had said, an opponent wasn’t needed if you could control your own actions precisely enough. And there was Juete. He had little time for anything else.
Juete was incredible. She could drain him as no other woman had ever drained him. Sometimes they made love until he could barely remember who he was, sunk into a satisfied stupor with a stupid grin locked into place.
He also learned about her in other ways. One morning, after a quiet lovemaking session, she lay on the bed, cradling his head in the crook of her arm, petting his face with her fingertips. “Such a sweet boy,” she said.
“Boy?”
She smiled down at him. “It’s all relative, lover. I might not be old enough to be your mother, but I certainly could be your big sister.”
“Only if I were incestuous,” he said.
“There are worse things. But I do have a few standard years on you.”
He’d suspected as much, but merely said, “So?”
She seemed to stare through the bedroom walls. The smell of sex hung in the air, fighting a losing battle with the stick of incense she’d thumbed into life earlier. Sandal wood, he thought. Or maybe some kind of musk. Finally, she said, “Older doesn’t necessarily mean wiser, Emile, but it does mean older. More… experienced. More adept at dealing with the galaxy, at… taking care of oneself.”
Her tone was disturbing, and he wanted to lighten the mood. “Well, I’m not exactly freshly minted, you know. I understand a few things.” He tried to laugh, but it fell flat.
She bent to kiss him, first on the forehead, then on his closed eyelids. She didn’t have to say it aloud; what he heard silently was, No, you don’t Understand, Emile.
During a lull late in his shift, Khadaji listened to old man Kamus finish one of his tales for a few of the regulars. Juete had left early, since things were slow and she said she was tired. When Kamus finished his story, and the small gathering began to break up, the old man turned to talk to his pubtender. “You seem to be working out okay,” he said. “You’ve been good for business.”
Khadaji was pleased, but said, “I’m just doing what you pay me for, Kamus.”
“Yeah, but you get along well with the customers, they like you, and now that you and Juete are living together, things have been a lot quieter during corpse-stealer’s shift.”
Khadaji didn’t understand. “Quieter?”
The old man drew himself a mug of splash and took a big swallow of the liquid. He leaned back against the bar. “Sure. You don’t understand about exotics, son, even though you’re pretty tight with one—They cause trouble among regular people.”
Khadaji felt himself stiffen; he tried to relax, using one of Pen’s mantras. The old man caught it, though.
“Don’t take it personal, son. Juete is a fine woman, but she can’t help being an exotic. It’s the same for all of them, men or women, old or young. They attract basic stock humans like shit does flies, something chemical, I think.”
Khadaji remembered Pen’s comment about pheromones. But that didn’t matter—
“Anyway, there are people who get real possessive. You know a lot of exotics work as prostitutes?”
Khadaji nodded. Juete had told him.
“A lot of them don’t want to, but it’s kind of what they were bred for, originally. Usually, you see an exotic, you see a collection of people clustered around ‘em, trying to figure a way to get some kind of piece of them.”
Khadaji said nothing, but he wondered what the old man was getting at.
“Yo, Emile, slide me another stinger down here, would you?” Khadaji looked up and smiled at the short man sitting at the end of the bar. He built the drink, while Kamus kept talking.
“Normally, people around here know not to start trouble in the Dick.” He glanced at the sword on the wall. “I don’t much care for it and people know it. Even so, some nights I’ve had to have Mang toss guys—and women—with their tongues hanging out over Juete through the door. After you jumped the cuntmaster and his cur, word got out you were fast and dangerous. So people are even more careful than usual trying to get to Juete. In here, at least.”
Something about the way he said it made Khadaji’s gut freeze, as though someone had stuck him with a shard of dry ice. In here? What did he mean by that? And cuntmaster?
Kamus wandered off, to talk to a pair of old women who had just come into the pub, and Khadaji didn’t have a chance to ask about his comments. He wasn’t sure he would have asked even if the old boy had stuck around.
When he got to her cube, Juete was waiting for him. She stood naked in the doorway, and any doubts or fears he might have felt were erased by the sight of her dropping to her knees to untab the fastener of his pants, and by the feathery touch of her lips on his hard flesh.
People talked to him at the bar, as Pen said they would. He listened with half his attention as he worked, and the conversations tended to run together. A lot of what was said was supposed to be unique, and each person seemed to think it was, but it wasn’t long before he’d heard a lot of stories with common threads running through them.
“—me, said I couldn’t do the fucking work—can you believe that? So I told him, ‘Listen, tarpsucker, I been here twenty-two standard years, before you were finished fresher-training, and I know my fucking job better than you do! If you don’t like it, you take it to the steward,’ I said, ‘and fuck you’—”
“—younger and tighter, that’s all he wants! Buddha, I had the goddamn surgery like he wanted, I took the rejuve to the limit, I don’t look sixty, I look thirty-five, see how they still stand up? And I know the tricks, buddy, believe it, I can make a man howl like a dog, if I want, and shit, he’s off sticking it to some teenpuss young enough to be our grand
daughter! She can’t know anything! Why? I don’t understand men, they’re such assholes—”
“—failed the exam, flat, I sucked it, I’m cold meat in the eyes of parents and sibs and classics, I am raised, you bury? Sure, they give you a second blast, but you have to wait six months, and that’ll be during the Light—nobody will want to play stroke-the-grad in the sunshine—!”
Khadaji gave advice. He nodded a lot, made sympathetic murmurs, and so a lot of the customers thought he knew more than he did. But he was learning. The lot of man was made up of lots of individuals, and the stories rang true, if similar. Love, hate, lust, fear, the emotions were the same. And there was another emotion he found, too…
The man was a freight handler, off a freighter dropping heavy machinery on planet from out-system. He was big, well built and attractive. He sat at the bar, wearing a coverall spotted with dirt and machine lube, sniffing spirals of kick-dust and laughing. He was talking to a local next to him.
“—best I ever had. I’ve had ‘em on twelve worlds in four systems, but this pussy was talented! I never had an exotic before and they are everything they’re cracked up to be!” He laughed at his own pun, and shook his head. “She couldn’t get enough, she turned me every which way but loose. I wished I had a gallon of android, I would have wore myself down to a nub. And she didn’t charge me a demi-stad, either. The best I ever had and it was free! Shit, I might just jump ship and stay here—” he stopped talking and stared at someone in the pub. Then the freight handler nudged the local with one beefy hand and said, “Shit, there she is now!”
Khadaji turned, to see who had made the man so happy.
And found himself looking at Juete.
It had to be a mistake. Even as he thought it, he knew it wasn’t—Juete wasn’t somebody you could forget. Then he thought, it must have happened before they’d met; Juete’s past was her own, he couldn’t fault her for that—
The big man slid from the barstool, grinning. “It’s been two days, I’m ready for another round,” he said.
Two days. Khadaji felt that lance of dry ice again, only this time it ran from his bowels to his brain, turning him numb. He watched, detached, as the freight handler approached Juete. Two days ago, she had left early, had been gone for hours before he’d gone to meet her. But it couldn’t be.
The look Juete gave the man was not that of someone meeting a stranger. She smiled and said something—Khadaji was too far away to hear what—and the man smiled back at her. Khadaji turned away and stared at the wall, not seeing it.
It was an irrational feeling, he knew. Monofidelity was an archaic concept, one he’d never believed in before. People did not own each other in a civilized society; no one had the right to expect another to become any sort of chattel. Certainly he had enjoyed a liberal intercourse all his life, and there was no reason to expect Juete had done differently. Cuntmaster came to his mind, a word he had refused to speculate upon after Kamus had dropped it into their conversation a couple of days earlier. No, her past was her own, just as her present and future should also be. Khadaji knew that. Intellectually, he knew.
Why, then, did he feel like screaming? Was he like all the others who hung around the exotics? Possessive? Jealous?
“Not now!” That was Juete’s voice, pitched to carry.
Khadaji turned, to see the big freight handler holding onto the exotic’s arm, urging her in the direction of the front exit. She looked at Khadaji, her eyes pleading.
He didn’t remember the move, but he was suddenly on the outside of the bar, heading for them. His mind was filled with murder. He would chop the freight handler into bloody slabs—
Kamus moved to block his path. “Easy, son. Mang’s got it.”
Khadaji faltered for a step. He was about to tell the old man to get the hell out of his way, but he saw the bouncer holding the freight handler’s arm as he had held Juete’s, walking him toward the exit.
Khadaji’s rage bubbled, heading toward a full boil. No. He didn’t want Mang to walk the man out! He wanted to handle it himself. She was his woman! He wanted to—to—
To what, Khadaji? said the little voice that lived deep in his mind. To kill him? Like you did the fanatics on Maro? Is that the mark of a civilized society? When you grow angry, solve the problem with death?
He stopped breathing for a moment with the shock of what he had been about to do. The old man stood his ground, watching, and Khadaji’s hatred and anger left him in a rush as he exhaled. There was something very wrong with what he’d been about to do, something which was linked to the way the Confed squatted upon the worlds and systems of the galaxy. It was important, but he couldn’t quite grasp it, it eluded him.
“You okay, son?”
He wasn’t, but Khadaji nodded.
Juete walked to where the two men stood. Kamus looked at the two of them for a moment, then left.
“He was your lover,” Khadaji said. The anger was gone, but the gut-twist of jealousy was still there.
“Yes. Briefly.”
“Two days ago. When you left work early.”
“Yes.”
“There have been others since we—”
“Yes.”
Khadaji turned his head and looked away from her. Behind the bar, Kamus was mixing some chem, doing Khadaji’s job. What customers there were paid no attention to the couple standing and talking.
“It bothers you,” she said. “That’s why I didn’t tell you.”
“But—why? Aren’t I enough for you?”
He did not expect the answer she gave. “No. You aren’t.”
It hurt, to hear that. He wanted to hit her, but instead, he clenched his hands into fists. He felt the nails cut into his palms. There was a wrongness here—
“It isn’t your fault,” she said, her voice soft. “It’s the way we are. What attracts you to me works both ways, Emile. My drives are more intense than yours—or any normal human’s. I must have that energy, it’s built into me the same way as the color of my hair and eyes are built in.”
Khadaji did not speak, he only stared at her.
“I like it, Emile. Sex. The entire process, meeting someone new, the discovery, the consummation, the afterglow.”
“But I love you,” he said. It sounded like a whine, even as he said it.
“I know. And I love you. But my needs have nothing to do with that.”
Again, he was unable to say anything.
“You don’t understand. It’s always that way with normals.” She touched his arm. “Do you know what the leading cause of death is among normal people? Most diseases are curable now, so old age and accidents are the ways ordinary people mostly die. But among exotics, the chief cause of death is murder.”
“Murder?”
She nodded. “Yes. Mostly by non-exotics. We are slain by jealous lovers, by cunt- or dickmasters who sell us, by the envious who wish they could be like us. Three of five exotics who die are killed—sometimes we kill each other.”
“I—I—didn’t realize—”
“Of course not. Because of what we are, of what we do, we become targets of those around us.”
“But—couldn’t you… tone it down? There must be drugs or therapy which could—”
“—stop our sexual drives? Yes, there are. But would you choose such an option? And even if you did, you might find it was no real cure. We are still desired. As you desire me now, despite all I have said.”
Khadaji felt guilty. He did want her, he had an erection, he was ready.
She continued. “I could take combinations of hormones and pheromone suppressants and other chems, and become a kind of normal. I could dye my skin and hair, wear colored lenses and look and act normal. If I wanted to.
“If I wanted to. But I don’t want to. I like being attractive, I enjoy bedding lovers, men and women, it’s what I am. If you love me, you will have to learn to accept it.”
A thought loomed, then, something Khadaji didn’t want to consider. But once alive, the
thing would not die. “Did you have me become your lover because I could protect you from people like the freight handler? Or the cuntmaster?” “You saved my life,” she said. “I wanted to be grateful in the best way I knew how. And, later, I wanted to continue, because you are a good lover. But—certainly I considered your physical abilities an asset.”
He felt dull. Blind, deaf and stupid, that’s you, isn’t it, Khadaji?
“I am sorry if I have hurt you, Emile. I do think you are a lovely boy.”
“I’m a man, not a boy!”
“Then act as a man. Consider what we exchange and decide if it is enough. I told you before I have learned to look out for myself. You must understand this.” She allowed her hand to drop and touch the front of his pants lightly.
He felt his already stiff penis jump as she moved her hand away. He wanted to turn and walk away from her, he felt betrayed, he wanted to tell her he would not play her game. But he did not.
When Juete left work, Khadaji followed her.
Their lovemaking had never been so intense, so good.
Afterward, when she was asleep, he cried softly. What was he going to do? He had thought she was to be his, eternally, that she loved him as he did her. Could he learn to live with her lovers, with the things which drove her so differently than he was driven? He thought that he could. It would still be better than any relationship he had ever had, but it would not be what he first thought it would be.
He had been naïve, he understood now. Something Pen had said came back to him. He needed other teachers. Well. He had learned something. About himself. From her.