Across the Sea of Suns

by Gregory Benford

  “You’re not the first ever faced this, y’know.”

  “True.”

  “Think I’d like to see you try some of the therapy environments. We got some fresh ones on tightbeam from Earthside, just last year.”

  “Well,” Nigel said brightly, “that seems quite possible.”

  “Not just possible,” Ted said quietly, putting weight on each word. “You know I don’t like to do more than make suggestions, but the numerical sociometric people say this kind of thing can get out of hand.”

  “I scarcely think—”

  “I’ve cleared a spot for you.” Ted smiled broadly. “Can’t have our number one citizen waiting, huh?”

  Nigel made himself smile, too. “Quite so.”

  Ted clapped him on the back. “C’mon, have a drink.”

  “I should finish up—”

  “Forget it. You’ve already put in your hour.”

  Nigel smiled wryly. So Ted kept track of that, too. “Quite so.”

  Nigel allowed himself to be sealed into the sum-sense pod. He had tried to argue them out of the medical sensors and transducers, but the attendants cited his age as cause for taking precautions. Therapy sessions were confidential, he knew, so after thinking it over he decided the medical data would do him no harm. They merely wanted to ensure that he did not suffer over-stimulation.

  He felt himself floating, free of sensation. This would take only a few hours, and then he could be back working. He felt the splice-ins activate, tapping directly into the sensory zones of his cerebrum. He fell—faster, faster, into something far below—

  —Sitting. Sitting in a wicker chair. A sluggishness filled him. Added weight, a paunch at his middle, clothes tight. An itch on the right thigh. Gradually the room filled in, emerging from a fog.

  Glazed glass walls, tiles, a ceramic clatter as waiters removed plates from nearby tables. Pale yellow light. Garlic butter taste in his mouth. A slick, imitation-elegant tablecloth under his left palm. Background murmur of conversation. Humidity adding weight to each breath he took. A woman across the table, attractive, talking (he suddenly realized) to him—

  “We’re not doing anything,” Helen said.

  “We’ve seen a lot,” her husband murmured defensively.

  “The Berkeley ruins, the Monument of Bones, the arroyos,” she said. “Then we have dinner and go to bed. That’s all. And the bed part is no great attraction, is it?”

  “Just last night we went to Casa Sigma—”

  “If you weren’t with me you’d find some, you know, places.”

  Robert had to admit this was true. He pretended to concentrate on draining the last of his drink and studied her expression through slitted eyes. She had made her hair blue and rather longer than usual today and the soft moonlight gave it a lush cast. He did not like it very much. She had tuned her skin to a fashionable pallor for the evening, but here in sun-baked California it was unconvincing because one knew it had to be artificial. On the other hand, perhaps that was largely immaterial these days. The thin lines of irritation around her mouth set the tone of her whole expression. There seemed to be little she could do about that. An hour after a facial tuning they returned, as deep as before.

  “Before we came on this trip you said we would take a spice bath.”

  “Not here, Helen. It’s illegal. Wait until Japan.”

  “There must be, well, places here.”

  “Filthy ones, yes. The Americans would stare at us. Especially at you. They don’t take women to them here. The Americans are rigid. It’s comic, I know, but—”

  “You’re the rigid one.”

  He played his hole card. “Those spots are full of insects. The Americans don’t mind them.”

  She blinked. “If I was alone in as exotic a place as this you can be sure I’d go to all sorts of these spots.”

  “The motorbike dances …”

  She scoffed. “Clumsy. Those are for tourists.”

  He began to notice his anger. He had spent a good deal of money to bring her along on this business trip. He had left her behind so often before. Lately his conscience had begun to bother him about it. Decades before, their marriage had been the central fact in his life, a fulfillment. Those feelings had ebbed away. He had gotten caught up in the raw competitive world of men. And he had relished that sense of rasping conflict, of heady victories after strenuous effort.

  Still, he felt a duty to her. But traveling with a woman you don’t love was proving worse than living with her.

  He finished his drink and slammed the glass down on the marble tabletop. “My,” she said archly.

  He stood up. His chair scraped harshly and a waiter, startled, came quickly. Robert waved the man away. “All right,” he said loudly. “I’ll find something. Your kind of place.” He spat out the last word.

  Robert left the ornamented hotel and walked down Ashby. He was feeling warm from the meal or from the anger and he moved quickly. He did not noticed the thin man who came up alongside him and said in an oily way, “Something?”

  Robert stopped. “I’ve got my own woman,” was all he could immediately think to say.

  “An appetizer, then?”

  “What?”

  “A boy?”

  Strong, confusing emotions swept through him. He pushed the man aside and made a rough, incoherent noise.

  He walked away swiftly, his steps bringing a harsh slap from the damp paving stones. He went two blocks without seeing the neon jumble around him or noting the sleazy shops.

  Someone tapped him on the shoulder. He turned and saw the same gaunt man, this time standing at a safe distance. There was a look of bland, wise confidence on the man’s face.

  “Senso?” he asked.

  Robert paused and was surprised to find he had no anger left. The walking had leached it from him.

  “How much?”

  With the taxi and the thin man as guide it came to over a thousand yen. Robert knew the man had hiked the price over the usual street value, from the look on his face, but that did not matter. This would provide a simple way to stop Helen’s prattle about “places” and it might even be enjoyable. Better than the real thing had been for quite a long while, at least. He turned back to fetch Helen.

  The three of them took a route north into Richmond, over a slimy canal crusted with salt from the deadlands to the north. The taxi wheezed through twisting streets and stopped outside a sprawling bungalow with dim orange lights outside. “Perfectly ghastly,” Robert muttered to himself, but Helen did not reply.

  They went up creaking wooden stairs and beneath a punctured solar heating panel that had slid halfway off the roof. “Is this a commercial one?” Helen asked and reached for his arm.

  “Of course not,” he said stiffly, pulling away from her. “It’s illegal here.”

  They clumped across linoleum floors and through two empty rooms. The guide slipped a key into a door-plate and a wall swung free. This let them into a red-lit room with two glossy, molded chairs perched among a tangle of electronics. A bored-looking attendant stood up from a couch where he had been watching a 3-D. He helped the two of them into the chairs. The equipment looked reasonably new. It had the comfortable cerebral lead-ins Robert had seen in the European advertisements. His opinion of the place rose. Helen made a fuss about getting the attachments settled at her neck and wrists and then quieted down for the first run.

  The first was a warm-up, an erotic hors d’oeuvre. A middle-aged man met a younger woman in a restaurant. After a few perfunctory bits of social back-and-forth, they went to her apartment. The senso consisted of extensive foreplay and some fantasizing, though the graphic parts were convincing and strong. He felt the languid satin rub of the woman’s skin, the delicious pull of young muscles, the musky smell, a red lust building in the young man. Robert liked the piece overall, though the woman’s hairdo reminded him of someone he knew and that rather spoiled the associations for him. He guessed that their guide had picked this particular one because t
he man rather resembled himself, and using a younger woman would cater to the self-images of both parties. He smiled at the calculation.

  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.