He tried to get up but she held him down. He was stronger, but she had the skills. She felt him getting hard, probably from his fear reaction and the closeness of her body. "You must hate me," he finally sighed.
In answer she shifted, and impaled herself on his cock. He gasped as he felt her envelope him, taken completely by surprise. "Does this feel like hate, Lawrence?" she asked as she began humping. Then they said no more until the ancient rhythm had spent itself, in a surprisingly long and pleasant interlude. Lawrence in particular was overwhelmed by the feelings, since he had spent most of his life at a biological age of forty-seven and thus had hardly any memory of what adolescent hormone levels did to a person.
Afterward Caroline rolled off of him but lay close enough to touch as they recovered. Lawrence broke the silence. "Why did you do that?" he asked.
"Because it was the right thing to do."
"Why?"
She sat up. "Call it instinct. Look, we need to start a fire before it gets dark. Let's collect some kindling."
"How are we going to start a fire?"
She smiled. "Lawrence, I've been dropped naked into strange territory more times than I can count, and you would be amazed at how good I am at surviving. Or have you forgotten how your own little Task Challenge started?"
He sat up. "You mean you really think you can deal with this?"
Caroline laughed. "If I was alone, and if I was handcuffed, and if there were six or seven guys chasing me with night-vision scopes and rifles, then I might be a little worried. But really only if they had a helicopter too."
Lawrence found it almost discouraging to see how smoothly and effortlessly Caroline worked. She led him to a good source of fuel and set him to gathering what he could while she picked and prepared a campsite. She arranged the kindling and used her rock to sharpen a stick, which she set into a knot in one of the fuel logs and twirled rapidly between her hands. Friction gradually heated the stick, until the barest ember glowed at its tip; then she carefully fanned this and transferred it to the kindling, which was soon blazing. The whole process took less than an hour, but he doubted if he would be able to do it himself with all the time in the world.
"That was half-assed," Caroline confessed as they fed the fire. "You really need calluses to do that, but I'm not going to bother developing them. Once we kill something and get some sinew, I'll make a fire bow."
"Kill something?"
"A project for tomorrow. Meanwhile, there's plenty we can eat." With the fire well-started and plenty of sunlight remaining, they went gathering. Although a lot of the things Caroline pointed out were pretty unappetizing, Lawrence had to admit that she was right when she said damn near the entire forest was edible. Since as yet they had nothing to put their collections in, they tasted and ate as they walked, sampling dozens of different greens and nuts and berries and, in Caroline's case, not a few insects. She also pointed out some of the inedibles, so he'd be able to recognize them.
The night sky was so dazzling that Lawrence thought he might never go to sleep. He kept Caroline up for hours asking the names of constellations and stars, and how to read the important messages they held. In the night they heard wolves howling, and Caroline had to spend some time convincing Lawrence predators were unlikely to take an interest in them. Finally she simply took his mind off the problem by seducing him again, and after fucking they drifted off to sleep snuggled together on the grass beside their fire.
Days passed.
Because the weather was temperate Caroline gave clothing and shelter a low priority. They drifted away from ChipTec in search of water, which Caroline insisted they would need for a variety of purposes other than drinking. They found a stream on their third day, and then Caroline finally went hunting. Her skills in that regard were downright scary; she had spotted two rabbits and beaned them with that simplest of all weapons, a rock hurled with deadly accuracy. There were also fish in the stream, and Caroline had fashioned a spear to catch them. She had shown him the trick of weaving thread from the fibers of certain plants, and set him to work making fishing lines. She also used some of the thread to sew, using a needle made from a shard of bone.
Lawrence was disappointed to hear that loincloths would have to wait, though; it was more important to make pouches for holding and carrying things, particularly liquids. He was surprised to hear that water could be boiled over fire in such a rawhide bag. Caroline hadn't even gotten around to making a knife yet, and their situation had become pretty comfortable.
He had learned what kind of firewood to gather, several ways to catch fish, and how to gut and cook a small animal. Their next major project would be to kill a large animal such as a deer, not so much for the meat (though they would certainly preserve and eat it) as for the hide, from which they could make serviceable moccasins and cover a small lean-to. It had already rained on them once, not hard, and they had simply taken it as an opportunity to try the pleasant experiment of screwing in the rain. But eventually they would face a real storm, or at the very least winter would arrive, and Caroline was carefully getting them ready to face those challenges.
After only a week their activities had assumed a comfortable rhythm. Lawrence was content to let Caroline run the show, doing as he was told and learning what he could of her vast knowledge. She was recreating the entire surprisingly intricate technology of the stone age, one step at a time. It was surprising how many things one took for granted until one had to make them from scratch. The value of a needle and a few meters of thread, for example, had taken on a significance Lawrence would have found incomprehensible for most of his life.
Lawrence watched her work in the firelight, carefully shaping the tip of a fish spear into a barbed wooden hook. No matter what she did her hands moved with precision borne of long practice. Had she not been thrown with him into this empty world, he doubted if he would have lived more than a few days. But already she had taken him from the depths of despair to a kind of contentment he had never even realized was possible. She had shared with him her knowledge, her confidence, and her body, and in return he had only offered his tentative self-pity. But now he was learning a new emotion, one he could not honestly say he had ever experienced before. He was falling in love.
Falling. He had once before felt something like this, but it had been a poisoned, narcissistic love, a love he had thought was for Prime Intellect but which had really been for his own sense of accomplishment. Lawrence had not fallen in love with Prime Intellect; he had guided himself gently and reliably into that state on the cushion of his own skill. Lawrence was falling in love with Caroline, though. She was temperamental, strong, unpredictable, and in many ways dangerous. He never knew from one moment to another what she would do. He had no control over her; was, in fact, at her mercy for his very survival. And yet he loved her, and this reckless out-of-control love was an entirely new thing to him.
Caroline caught his eyes and perhaps noticed the strange light there. "Penny for your thoughts?" she teased.
"You mean a copper penny?"
She laughed, a beautiful sound. "I guess not."
"I was just wondering if there's anything you aren't good at."
"I'm not much of a computer programmer," she laughed, then sighed when she saw his hurt expression. "I didn't mean it that way. I'm sorry."
"No, I guess I'll get over it."
"Actually there is something."
"What?"
"I've never tattooed myself."
Lawrence felt something cold seep through his system. "I thought all that was behind you."
She looked at him and saw what was in his eyes -- was it fear or concern? She put the spear aside and drew beside him. "Some of it is behind me. No more Death stunts. This can be a good life, Lawrence, and I want it to go on as long as possible. So don't worry about that.
"But I always had this fantasy. It went, if somehow Prime Intellect would disappear and everything would go back the way it was before, then I'd settle down and be like I was before
. I've been doing a lot of thinking, and I've realized I'm never going to be like I was before.
"I'm not a shy little grandma any more. I've become a daredevil. Getting tattooed hurts like hell and getting a big one takes damn near forever when you use primitive tools, but I've worn them for so long it doesn't feel right not to have any. When I look down at my body I feel like something is missing."
She paused, chasing another thought. "You know, we could probably settle right here and live long, comfortable, boring lives, but I've decided I don't want to do that. When we get our shit together, which won't take more than a couple of months, I intend to provision us and go somewhere. I've been thinking of Arkansas."
"Arkansas!"
"I can't go back to being the person I was, but I can go home."
"But that's got to be a thousand miles from here! We have no maps, there's a desert..."
"Exactly. It will be a wonderful challenge."
"A challenge? We could be killed!"
She shrugged. "Perhaps. Probably not. I'm very good at this sort of thing, Lawrence. But yes, there would be risk. It would be work. But that's the point; it would be something to do. I've been through this before, Lawrence. Without something to do, life will get stale. And I didn't go through all the shit I've gone through to be bored."
Caroline's intensity startled him. This was the Caroline he had known in Cyberspace, who had paddled around an entire planet simply to make a point. Lawrence could not find the words to argue with her, so he just said "I guess you have a point there."
She snuggled up to him. "I need parameters, Lawrence. I need to be channeled. I'm very happy right now, because there are no choices. The road leads in only one direction. I'm afraid that when we get to the choices, when the roads diverge, I'll lose this focus. And it's been so long...I don't want to lose it."
"You've lost me, Caroline. I don't understand what you're talking about."
"Don't worry about it." She kissed him, and they hugged tighter, and they spoke another language with their bodies as the fire crackled.
THE FALL + 2 YEARS
The Spring thaw had begun; soon it would be time to try crossing the first great natural barrier they would face, the Rocky Mountains.
They had migrated far north of Silicon Valley, perhaps as far as Oregon, in the hopes of avoiding other barriers like the Grand Canyon and the great southwestern desert. Their hope was to cross the mountains and set up camp for the winter in the eastern foothills, then move leisurely across the plains until they entered Arkansas through the Ozark Mountains. Since neither of them remembered much detailed real-world geography, all their plans were tentative.
Lawrence sat by the edge of Caroline's chosen campsite and watched her set up. He had long since learned to make a rudimentary camp, but Caroline preferred to do the work herself. Meanwhile, he went through his bone needles and bags of pigment, preparing to do for Caroline the one thing she had to depend on him for.
She had decided that her motif for this lifetime would be birds, and the first bird she would wear would be a phoenix. Its outline was nearly complete, a black tracing colored with soot collected from smoky fires. The fierce bird reached for the sky, its upturned beak just grazing her neck and its wingtips grazing her shoulders. In outline it resembled a bird of prey, but when Lawrence began to color it in he planned to use bright hues more remniscent of songbirds. The flames of its rebirth exploded from the base of her spine, dim outlines waiting for him to find a better grade of red pigment. The clays he had tried so far had not been bright enough in the small test lines he'd done.
Lawrence privately thought the tattooing was nuts, but he would never tell Caroline that; she could probably tell how he felt, anyway. In any case he took his work very seriously, because what he was doing would become a permanent part, not just of a person, but of Caroline. And while he thought she was crazy in many ways, he also loved her dearly. If she wanted tattoos, he would give her tattoos. And they would be perfect; he would accept nothing less.
The time and effort required to create such a large design were simply amazing. They would make camp and spend hours with the needle, Caroline stoically enduring its jabs, and the result would be a few centimeters of black tracing or a tiny patch of color. But the ritual of marking her seemed to awaken a deep passion in Caroline, and evenings that began with the needle nearly always ended with their most intense sex.
"I'm ready," she announced. "Are you?"
He nodded. She had spread out a deer hide beside the fire; now she lay on her stomach so he could work on her back. Lawrence had begun to color in the phoenix's wing tips; he was working down her back symmetrically, so the incomplete design would be as attractive as possible. Although Caroline was silent while he worked, he could feel her flinch each time he jabbed her with the needle. Although they both invested the time, Caroline was the one who went through the pain.
And her reward, Lawrence mused, would be a design over which she had no control, whose appearance she was trusting totally to him, and which she would take with her to the grave. She might never even get to see it, unless some fortuitous circumstance arranged two mirror-like surfaces properly. Anyone could see their face reflected in a pool of water, but getting a look at your own back was a real challenge in a world without glass or metal.
"That's enough for tonight. I want to get a look at it in better light before I do any more." He put the needle in the pigment bag and put it with the others as Caroline turned over. Lawrence was a cautious tattooist, always conscious of the fact that he couldn't undo what he was doing. But there was nothing cautious about their fucking after the needles were put up.
Later still he pressed his ear to Caroline's belly, listening for the second heartbeat. He couldn't hear it yet, though Caroline assured him it was there. "Do you think the tattoo work is good for the baby?" he asked.
"You're not tattooing the baby," she said. "If it makes me feel joy, then why shouldn't it be good for her?"
"How do you know it's a her?"
Caroline laughed. "Before I was a dried-up old crone I had enough children to know what it feels like, Lawrence. It's a girl."
That settled it in Lawrence's mind: He'd seen enough of Caroline's knowledge to know that you never bet against her. But he was still a little surprised when the baby came, and it really was a girl. By that time they had crossed the mountains, and had taken temporary shelter in the mouth of a "cave" that was really the ruin of an old mine.
Caroline knelt by their fire and waited, so that gravity would help her baby come. As the birth unfolded, Lawrence felt for the first time how crushingly alone they were. If anything went wrong, there was very little he could do about it. He felt a brief panic, wondering what he would do if by some catastrophe she died in childbirth.
But nothing went wrong, the baby dropped into Lawrence's waiting hands after only a few hours of labor, and both she and Caroline emerged from the experience healthy. Lawrence figured that Caroline's general high state of health had a lot to do with that; she had not let her pregnancy slow them down until it was time to actually settle in for the birth itself.
As Caroline nursed and recovered, Lawrence explored the mine for a short distance, and found a small yellow pebble that amazingly turned out to be malleable. It was the first metal they had encountered. They speculated that perhaps this speck of gold had survived Prime Intellect's cleanup because it had been underground.
In any case, it was what inspired Caroline to name their baby girl Nugget.
THE FALL + 4 YEARS
The mountains had started as a low haze on the horizon, then gradually grown as they had moved on. Now they were within striking distance, and Lawrence remembered the adventure of crossing the Rockies, having to rappel down gorges with homemade rope and climb bare rock faces dozens of meters high with his bare hands. Doing the same thing with a toddler and a new baby would not be a pleasant undertaking.
But Caroline assured him that there would be no such problems. "Thos
e are the Ozarks," she said. "They're dark, but passable. I was born there, but I don't want to stop there. I want to go on to the Ouachitas."
The new baby, a boy, had been born during their approach to the northern Ozark range, across the long-fallow fields of what had once been Kansas and Missouri. Because they could see the mountains when he came, Caroline named him Ozark. Nugget was not yet old enough to walk, so they carried both babies on cradleboards, a trick Caroline had learned in her studies of actual Native Americans.
Her tattoo phoenix was complete, but Caroline had gone on to ask for a swallow on her thigh. Lawrence was convinced that she wouldn't stop until her body was completely covered, but it would take them many more years to accomplish that. Because the skin was more sensitive, it hurt more when he jabbed her now. At times she had to bite down on a piece of leather to keep from yelling.
But she always insisted that he keep working.
"Did it take this long for your friend in Cyberspace to tattoo you?" he asked as he worked.
"Fred used a knife. It's faster but less exact. And we didn't have to do anything else."
Rub, jab, jab. Rub, jab, jab. Wipe, test, fill in where it didn't take. Caroline nursed Nugget for awhile as he worked. Then she let the baby watch, becoming hypnotized by the repetitive activity and finally falling asleep.
"Don't you sometimes wish you had him here to do this instead of me?"
To his surprise Caroline laughed. "What a thought! If I'd woken up here and found Fred under that tree ... or Palmer ... you know what I'd have done?"
"No idea."
"I'd have killed them before they got the bright idea to kill me."
Lawrence looked up, startled.
"They weren't very nice people in real life, Lawrence. I was real close to Fred, but only because it was Cyberspace. There it was nothing but a sick game, and my friends were the people sick enough to make it interesting. But here ... it isn't a game. What I called love back there and what I call love here have nothing to do with one another."
The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect Page 17