Catch the Lightning

by Catherine Asaro

  Althor spoke against my ear. “What’s wrong?”

  I blushed. “I’m okay.” Wrapping my arms around his torso, I ran my hands down his spine, from his neck to waist, exploring his muscles, his socket, his—

  His socket?

  Socket. He had a socket. At the base of his spine, just below his waist. I probed the circle with my fingertips. The opening was less than half an inch in diameter.

  Althor kissed my ear. “It’s for a psiphon plug.”

  I had an image of a gas station, attendant siphoning fuel into his body. It was too strange. Then, in the midst of my confused whirl of thoughts, Althor started trying to enter.

  “Wait.” Panicked, I forgot the socket. “Althor, wait. The thing.”

  “This?” He picked up the foil packet from the floor. “You must show me what to do. I have no data on this stored in my memory.”

  His memory? I was making love with a guy who thought he was a computer. I wondered if everyone’s first time was this strange. I still wonder that, actually. Not too many people lose their virginity to an Imperial Jagernaut.

  When I pushed his shoulders, he hesitated, confusion sparking around him like fireflies in the dusky night. Then he figured out what I wanted and sat up on his heels. I also sat up, too embarrassed to look at him. I took the packet and opened it. “Put this on.”

  “On?”

  I touched him. “There.”

  “Ah. I see.” He spoke softly. “You do it.”

  Somehow I managed it. It was nice. Sexy. We lay down again, embracing each other. Being with him didn’t feel anything like I had always imagined, though. In fact, it wouldn’t even work. Finally he. guided himself with his hand—and it hurt. I tensed and he slowed down, moving gently, in an easy rhythm. Although I was nervous, I liked that, the way he moved, steady and strong.

  The sparks created by his mood intensified, glitters of red, orange, gold, small fires darting against my thoughts. It was disorienting. Although I had always experienced the emotions of others through my senses, it had just been something that happened. Althor directed those sparks as if they were soldiers under his command.

  “Tina.” His voice Was husky against my ear. “Let me in.”

  Let him in? Hadn’t I already done that?

  His sparks intensified—

  10 path established. The words flashed in my mind. Upload commenced.

  I jerked, stifling a cry. He kissed me, soothing my reaction, and murmured in a language I didn’t understand.

  Download. The word flashed by. He had “let me in” as well, to experience his sensations as if they were mine. His peak swelled like a Baja wave during a storm, higher and fuller, until finally he jerked and pushed me down into the mattress with his hips, driving out my breath. The wave broke, hitting us both with the same force, and the sparks around us blended into a blur.

  After a while I became aware of the room again. Sparks were winking out one by one, fireflies leaving the beach after the wave receded. Althor lay breathing deeply, thoughts quiet, Baja drowsing in the moonlight.

  Eventually he said, “Am I too heavy?”

  “It’s fine, Thor.” I felt ultrasensitive then, like an instrument that had been tuned and then not played.

  “Thor?” He smiled drowsily. “No one ever said my name that way before.”

  “Thor was the god of thunder. He had a magic hammer and he threw thunderbolts at the Earth.”

  Althor rolled onto his side, fitting my curves into his angles. “I promise not to throw thunderbolts at you.”

  I smiled. “You just did.”

  “So do I become frog now?”

  “That’s okay. You can stay a prince.”

  He laughed. “You refresh me.”

  “I do? ¿Por qué?”

  “Most people fawn all over me.”

  I could see why. A lot about him still made no sense, though. I slid my hand around his waist, touching the hole in his spine. “It’s a psiphon socket,” he said. “It’s how I am installed in the Jag”

  “Installed?” You installed parts. Not people.

  “The socket connects to the biomech web in my body,” Althor said. “I have them in my neck, wrists, and ankles too. They link me into the Jag and, through its Evolving Intelligence brain, into the psibernet.”

  I had no idea how to respond. “Not many people can do that.”

  “This is why Jags pilots are so few.” He yawned. “You know.”

  “Know what?”

  “Like you.” He closed his eyes. “Like me. Not many like us to study it…”

  Study? I wasn’t sure what he meant. “I’m not in school now. But I’m saving for Cal State.”

  Althor opened his eyes. “You are not in school?”

  “Not now.”

  “No neurotraining?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  He stared at me, wide awake now. “Who taught you to control your neural functions so well? Or to manipulate neural webs the way you did mine, on the street last night and here tonight?”

  “No one taught me anything.”

  “You teach yourself?”

  “Yeah, I teach myself.” I thought he was about to do the “sweet, stupid Tina” bit I often heard back then. “What, is it such a big surprise I have a brain?”

  “No,” Althor said. “Many Kyle operators have a high, intelligence, a consequence of the increased concentration of neural structures in their brain.”

  “Kyle what?”

  “You are a Kyle Affector and Effector.”

  “Oh. Yeah. How did I forget?”

  “Tina, I not make this up.”

  I didn’t know how to respond. I thought if I asked questions and it turned out to be an elaborate game, I would look foolish. Or he might be crazy. He didn’t sound crazy, though. He was too outwardly directed, too aware of other people and interested in them. He also had a sense of humor about himself. Nor would that have explained the sockets.

  I spoke carefully. “What did that mean, the ‘upload’ and ‘download’ bit?”

  “You saw that? In English?” When I nodded, he said, “My web must be translating for you.” He rubbed his fingers over the back of my neck. Then he turned over my hand so the inside of my wrist faced the ceiling. “Yet you have no biomech enhancements.”

  “I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

  “Gods.” He dropped my wrist. “It’s a crime.”

  “I didn’t do nothing wrong.” I made a frustrated noise. “Anything. I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “I mean it is a crime you go unnoticed because no one here sees what you are.”

  “I’m no different from anyone else.” Back then, I was afraid that if I admitted otherwise, I would spend my life alone, an emotional freak too sensitive to tolerate human contact.

  “It’s true,” Althor said. “You are a Kyle transmitter and receiver.”

  “A what?”

  He told me that Kyle operators have two microscopic brain organs, the Kyle Afferent Body and Kyle Efferent Body. The KAB and KEB. We also have paras in our cerebral cortex, specialized neural structures that humans without our genetic makeup lack. Unique receptor sites in the paras respond to a neurotransmitter called psiamine, which only Kyle operators produce.

  If you are a Kyle operator, then essentially your KAB picks up electrical signals from the brains of other people and relays the data to your paras. The paras interpret it for your mind. Your KEB increases the strength and density of the signals your own brain sends out. More exactly, the quantum distribution of your brain couples more strongly than normal with the distributions of other people’s brains.

  “Your KAB receives signals,” Althor said. “Your KEB transmits them.”

  “What’s in the signal?” I asked.

  “Whatever is in your mind. Most Kyle operators don’t have the sensitivity to decode data as complicated as human thought. Perhaps simple thought, if it’s intense, and sent by someone nearby.
But usually it is just emotion.”

  I hesitated. “Sometimes I see what people feel. Like a mist. Or sparkles. I hear it or smell it. Or taste it. Or feel it, not in my mind but with my skin.”

  “This is strange.”

  “Yeah. And everything you told me was normal.”

  He smiled. “I meant it’s unusual for Kyle organs to interact with sensory input. The neural pathways to your sensory centers must tangle with those to your paras. So the emotional input you upload triggers sensory responses.”

  Just like that, he made a strangeness that had bothered me my entire life understandable. “How can you think you know anything about me?”

  “You know how,” he said. “You feel it too. Why do you resist?” His voice gentled. “You are beautiful, like light. You shine, so lovely and bright and—and I don’t know the words. I am near you and I feel soothed. Healed. I had not known even that I am injured, yet now I am healed.”

  I squeezed his hand. “You’re okay, you know that?”

  “I didn’t do so much for you, though, did I?” He slid his hand between my legs. “I can still help. Just tell me what you like.”

  I couldn’t talk about it. “I’m fine. Really.”

  “You’re so tense.” Althor brought his hand up to cup my cheek. “Do I—” He stopped. “What is that?”

  “What is what?”

  “Where I touched your face—it made a dark streak.” He looked at his fingers. “Is this your time?”

  “My time for what?”

  “Your menstrual cycle.”

  Why did he ask so many embarrassing questions? “No.”

  “Then why you bleed?”

  “I’m bleeding.?”

  His face paled. “Tina—you have done this before, haven’t you?” .

  “Done what?”

  “Been with a man.”

  So. The Question. “No.” Before he could respond, I added, “But you don’t have to worry. I’ll be eighteen in five months. Honesdy. No one will send the cops after you.”

  He stared at me. “You’re only seventeen years old?”

  “Yes.”

  “Earth years?”

  “Yeah, Earth years.”

  “Gods.” He flopped onto his back. “I ought to be crack-whipped.”

  I smirked. “I will if you want. But I’ve never done that either.” Whatever a crackwhip was.

  He blinked at me. “I hope not.”

  “Althor, it was nice tonight.”

  “It is not done by my people, that an adult take a child to bed.”

  “I’m not a child.”

  “Why you say nothing? I would never have done this had I known.”

  “That’s why I didn’t say anything.”

  “You sound older.” He shook his head. “When I saw that you had a young appearance, I thought you looked this way because you are small. It seemed charming that every now and then you sounded young. Now I find it is not you sounding young then, but remarkably mature the rest of the time.”

  I blinked. “Thanks.”

  He pulled me into his arms. “I’m sorry. Next time I will go slower.”

  Next time. Relief washed over me. So I hadn’t scared him off.

  After that we lay quiet. I drowsed next to him, listening to his breathing as it deepened into the rhythms of sleep.

  3

  The Bullet Man

  After my shower, I stood in front of the kitchen window, combing my hair. Water splattered out, cooling my skin and making dark spots on the glass. The sun had just risen and long shadows stretched across the vacant lot next door. The smog wasn’t bad yet; the day had a freshness to it, still new. Mounds of rubble cluttered the lot, which was strewn with boards the kids upstairs played with. An old Mustang rumbled by on the road, and a homely dog ran along the sidewalk barking at the dawn.

  Turning, I saw Althor sleeping on his back, one leg hanging over the bed so that his foot rested on the ground. The pillow covered his head, leaving his mouth and nose visible. I laughed, not only because he looked funny but also because it was wonderful to wake up with him here.

  I eased the strap of my blouse into place. It was my favorite outfit, worn especially for Althor, lacy, with patterns of roses and leaves. The skirt was rose hued, what Manuel had called “the color of a giggling white girl’s ass after you slapped it.” When I’d asked how he knew that about giggling white girls, and what was she giggling about with him anyway, and how come it was all right for him to do things that he would have threatened to put me in a convent for if I even thought them, he told me to go do my homework.

  The electricity was still off, so I made two mugs of hot chocolate on the Sterno plate and carried them to the bed. I pulled the pillow away from Althor’s head. “Wake up, sleepyhead.”

  He grunted and pulled the pillow back.

  I laughed, tugging it away again. “You have to wake up. I have an early shift today.”

  He made a noise of protest. His eyes opened, leaving behind a gold shimmer.

  “Hey,” I said. “Your eyes are doing that again.”

  “Hmmm?” As he sat up, the gold retracted, showing his real eyes. “I didn’t realize I had fallen asleep.”

  “You. konked out like a log.”

  “A log?” He peered at the mugs. “That smells good.”

  I gave him one. “Why does that gold cover your eyes?”

  “It’s an inner lid. I don’t really need it.” He cradled the mug in his hands. “The sun on a planet my ancestors colonized was too bright, so they engineered the extra lid to protect their eyes. It comes down when I’m asleep. Or if I feel threatened.”

  “How come you speak English better now?”

  “I do?” When I nodded, he said, “I don’t know. Maybe it took a while to adapt to this archaic form.”

  “Archaic?”

  He smiled. “To me, what we’re speaking is archaic English. Perhaps my language mods integrated better with my other systems while I slept.”

  I shifted my weight on the bed. “Don’t do that.”

  “Do what?”

  “Talk about yourself as if you’re a computer.”

  “I am a computer.” He took a swallow of chocolate. “With such an extensive biomech web, technically I’m not considered homo sapiens. Not human.”

  I thought of the previous night. “You feel like a man to me.” When his expression warmed, it made me wish we could spend the morning in bed. To distract my thoughts, I said, “What does biomech web mean?”

  He described the system he carried in his body. He had computer chips in his spinal cord, ones that worked on optics rather than electronics. Fiberoptic threads linked them to his sockets so he could jack into exterior systems like his ship. Other threads connected them to electrodes in his brain cells, letting the chips “talk” to his brain: send 1 and the neuron fired; send 0 and it didn’t. It worked in reverse, too, translating his thoughts into binary for his chips. Bioshells around the electrodes protected his neurons, and neurotrophic chemicals policed them, preventing and repairing damage.

  A hydraulic system with motors and joint supports, all made from high-pressure bioplastics, enhanced his skeletal and muscular systems. It gave him two to three times the speed and strength of a normal human. A microfusion reactor powered it and his metal-alloy skin helped dump excess heat. The reactor was only a few kilowatts, though; his body couldn’t take the strain of anything more powerful.

  “Sometimes, in combat mode, my natural brain does almost nothing,” Althor said. “Reflex libraries control my actions while my brain ‘watches.’” After a moment he added, “It can be unsettling.”

  “It sounds so strange,” I said.

  He smiled. Then he “moved.”

  All he did was touch my shoulder. But it happened so fast I almost dropped the tray. His motion was smooth, but unnatural, as if a puppeteer tugged his arm. He tapped my skin, then drew his arm back to his side, all in a fraction of a second."

  “Hey!” I g
rinned. “That’s cool. Do it again.”

  Zip! In and out, he touched my shoulder.

  I laughed. “Can all of you move that fast?”

  “Yes. But it strains my natural skeleton. What I have of a natural skeleton.” A cloud passed over his emotions. He shook his head. “I try not to overuse the enhanced modes. They’re mainly for hand-to-hand combat.”

  “You’re a gadget.” I let my gaze rove over his beautiful body. “I like gadgets.”

  Althor laughed. “I’m glad.”

  “But I don’t get it. Why not just put your brain in a machine, one that doesn’t mind a reactor with more power?”

  “Who wants to be a brain in a robot?” He grimaced. “Can you see me walking into a diplomatic reception as an armored machine?”

  I had to admit, it didn’t make for a reassuring image. “Won’t they wonder why you never showed up at that party?”

  “No one knew I had leave from my squad. It came through after the delegation left. I never did find out what held it up.” He swung his legs off the bed. “The Allied president gave the reception in honor of my mother’s visit to Earth”

  “The what president?”

  “Allied. The President of the Allied Worlds of Earth.”

  “There is no Allied Worlds of Earth. This is America.”

  Drily he said, “Not the one I was expecting.” He picked up his wrist guards from the floor. “Is there a world government here?”

  “The United Nations. But they aren’t really a government, not like in the FSA.”

  “FSA?” He fastened a guard around his wrist, attaching it to his socket. “What is that?”

  “Federated States of America.”

  “Federated? Not United?”

  “I never heard anyone call it that.”

  He scooped his pants off the floor, then stood up and pulled them on. “Is LAX operating here? I might be able to get more information there.”

  “Sure. We’ve got a lot of airports.”

  “I meant the Los Angeles Interstellar Spaceport.”

  I spread my hands. “Sorry. No spaceports.”

  “Has your Earth colonized Mars yet? The moon?”