Contemporary Gay Romances

by Felice Picano

  “I guess I was a little too subtle,” Cap admitted.

  Or a little too hetero, Roger wanted to say.

  Just then they heard someone shouting. It was the other bartender, holding up a phone, for Cap. Karina. It had to be Karina.

  “This was great!” Cap said, “Great!” He hugged Roger and then turned and headed to the bar.

  Roger remained where they’d stopped, watching the enormous sun drop into the burning red Pacific, guessing, without pain, or even wonder, that they’d probably never see each other again.

  It was later, as he was crossing under the high, globed streetlights on the Venice Beach sidewalk that, among the crowds of nighttime strollers and men and women skateboarding, biking, jogging in wild and weirdly wonderful outfits, one roller skater, a middle-aged guy dressed in a silver and gold outfit of short skirt and tight bodice with puffy sleeves, a crown of a cap and a battery-lighted, sparkling wand, passed him, gracefully angling in and out of pedestrians, and ever so lightly but distinctly tapped him on the shoulder with the wand.

  “Shaz-am!” called out the good fairy of the west. And was gone.

  In the Fen Country

  Going west beyond the Stockton, California, transport hub, all roads but rutted ones soon come to an end: what is still above water in the East-Bay has been completely Green for a century or more. There is a twice-a-day monorail that sweeps all the way along the increasingly ragged coastline, right over to the drowned remains of what used to be the city of Richmond, stopping at Berkeley Island. I know the route well, this being maybe the sixtieth and I hoped final visit to Cynara in the fen country around what had been the ancient container-port town of Martinez.

  I’d grown familiar over the decades with how subtly the landscape alters as you head west, first little encroachments of water like tiny fingers, with here a cottage, there a mound-house surrounded in reeds, then water on both sides, until at last where it is land it’s all threaded through with canals or drowned roads. Fields that once grazed cattle and horses are now marshes feeding waterfowl and dragonflies almost as large, while scarlet-throated sea eagles wheel overhead, screeching their dominion before settling to perch upon what remains of a column once belonging to a desalinization plant or upon the crumbling stanchion of a long-collapsed bay bridge.

  Cynara has lived here among the bogs and meres forever, or so the Finnster had always told me, and from our very first crisis in a Centauri Outer-Cloud (a potential showdown with the Bella=Arths) he’d turned to me, half-serious for once, his fingers still dancing almost too fast to see over the touch-board for weapons and maneuvering, and he’d said, “Anything happens to this beautiful bod, promise to take it back home, even if I look to be ninety-nine percent not-there, Locke. Take me back to Cynara in the fen country, east of San Fran, and she’ll take care of me. She’ll make sure I come back, good as new, as amazingly gorgeous as I am at this moment.”

  Nothing happened that time, of course, and nothing happened for most of the following year real-time while we patrolled and explored and guarded Earth’s stellar expansion and in general made pests of ourselves among the people actually doing the work and learning—mostly scientists.

  We were stationed during the first part of that tour a few light-years out, in the so-called “New Territories.” None of us expected that area to be anything other than a no-man’s-land neutral zone for decades to come between the two cultures, so naturally we’d all then been astonished to see Beta C’s system suddenly taken over by our own kind, leading to the eruption of the recent war.

  A foreshadowing of that conflict had happened, the one time during that tour that I’d chanced to be away from the Finnster, off-ship at Charon station, undergoing my officer-upgrade Nanos.

  My shipmates found themselves in a fracas and then quickly in a firefight with some trigger-happy Arth hauler that had wandered off course. The lower helm, where the Finnster and I always teamed up, had been badly hit and burned before a “diplomatic misunderstanding” was eventually sorted out between the Service and the hard-shells.

  I’d always assumed Cynara had been the Finnster’s childhood sweetheart or first university live-in girlfriend: possibly even the love of his life who hadn’t quite worked out for whatever reason—probably because he’d joined the Service. It’s difficult for us to sustain relationships with folks at home when we are away six, eight, ten Earth years at a go, aging only ten or twelve weeks at a go, while they age normally.

  Come to think of it, he never had explained exactly what Cynara was to him. But I’d promised him to do it. Notwithstanding the fact that in all the years we were actual mates in the Service, he’d never once mentioned her in any other context, never mind attempted to visit her, or even gotten her some weird gift from an exotic planet-fall. Given how free the Finnster usually was with his “beautiful bod” in those days, I almost would have been surprised to think he would be, could be, faithful to any one person.

  I wasn’t alone in the little monorail single car train during this latest visit to Cynara in the fens. An older, mixed race, but prevalently Af-Am fellow was in the car. He was Service, or once-Service, given his bulk and stature even now, not to mention his evident UV eye-op, how he still cut his hair, how he glared at you, and especially how he held himself erect, even though he had to have begun way earlier than us. Older too. Maybe two hundred, two-fifty by now. A good-looking man, of course, but then we all were, all of us nearly perfect physical specimens of whatever type or mix of types we were. This being the Service’s unspoken motto, and I’d learned, also an actual requirement. “We want the best of the best in every possible way to represent us in front of some bug or fish or slime mold intelligence we encounter out there,” the first Head of the Service had written in her memoirs by way of explanation. But the real giveaway was how he had all but ignored me when I got off first, at the platform raised above the dilapidated ruins of the old Amtrak station. As I hopped into a waiting two-seater solar Spinner, I was tempted to throw him a salute, just for the hell of it.

  I always arrived at Cynara’s at sundown, and the long light would glitter up the waters so intensely I could barely make out the hovering ellipse of green house, gravi-raised above the fen.

  But there Cynara would be, on her wide bayfront deck, waving as I swept in for an air dock landing over the waters, one arm thrown up over her face to shield her eyes from the glare.

  “I wasn’t expecting you for another month,” she said by way of greeting. Her long red hair would be always be newly tinted; just for me, I was sure, always a slightly differing shade, and she seemed to age nearly as slowly as we in the Service did, not having the same treatments we were guaranteed for life, naturally, but I believe receiving a fifth of the amount of Nanos because of her care of Finn; and those probably fortified by some witchy concoctions she herself brewed up.

  “You look lovely as usual,” was my response. Then, “You didn’t read all of my comms.?” I opened my Service kit and removed the little mesh double-helmet that Service Medical Tech had prepped for this trip.

  “I read it,” she led me indoors out of the fen’s maritime-tang air and into a more earthy indoor musk, “I guess I thought it was a joke.”

  “No joke. They want me to try it, using this new Delphinid-derived technique for neural synthesis. They figure he’s sufficiently water-soluble by now that it might work.”

  During the prelude to the war, fleeing Arths had unwittingly led us to a Delphinid colony world. We’d known nothing of the Delphs. They were mammalian too, from out of the sea like us, and they hated the hard-shells. They had welcomed us and joined forces with us against the Arths.

  “And you? You don’t look very water-soluble to me,” she commented.

  “I’m supposed to take this!” I held up the vial they’d prepared—Delphinid and Human scientists together—“And wait an hour. Unless you think you two were closer and you’ll do it yourself.”

  She laughed, pushing the vial away, sat me down, and th
ere was tea at hand, one of her variations of Roibos and something off-world too. Even through the triple-pane-glass, I could hear the high scree-ing of the sea eagles performing their daring sunset acrobatics over the bay waters.

  “It hurts me, Locke, to see you torture yourself like this,” she said, sympathetically, and from this close up now I could see that she was heavily cosmetized and beneath it she had aged, was aging, even in the few months we’d been apart, and without the full Service-Nanos, she would continue to age quickly, far faster than myself, so that if I had to keep coming I would soon be a young man coming to visit an old woman.

  “It’s not torture!” I assured her. How could I explain?

  “I keep thinking, I’ll get a comm. from Locke and he’ll say, ‘I’ve found someone. A real keeper. And I’m not coming back, Cynara. Not now, not ever again.’ And then you show up early, like this, with something new, always new that they give you to try, you with your undying hope.”

  “I promised him. We both did.”

  “Isn’t it time you found someone you liked?” she asked.

  “I have. She’s the best friend of my grand-niece, who is always surprised by that fact, because we look the same age and sometimes go clubbing and hang out together. We’re dating a few months. But I don’t think it’ll last…It never does.”

  “Because of him!” Cynara insisted. “Because you brought him back. Because he’s here!”

  “I’m taking this Med Tech,” I said, holding up the vial they’d prepped for me, “right now, as I told Vandenberg I would. In an hour we’ll go down beneath the house and we’ll try it.” I drank it down.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “It’s supposed to neurologically link us and bring us to one key moment,” I explained. “Hit one key moment and play it out for us. And after that he’ll be okay.”

  “You dreamer!” she said. Then, “We have to go out to him, Locke. He’s no longer under the house.” Before I could ask, Cynara explained, “He’s getting too strong to stay there, Locke. He invades my dreams, my musings, and my meditation. It’s like he’s feeding on me. Like he’s trying to suck out my personality and replace it with his own. He’s grown too strong for you too to do this neural synthesis business, if it’s half of what I think it is. He’s strong and he’s persistent, Locke.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Let’s go. Dress warmly.”

  “Why bother? I’ve got to get right on top of him. I’ll get wet if he’s underwater.”

  “He’s in the peat. He’s lying in peat like he’s been for the last twenty-seven years, Locke. So of course he’s underwater. The things you do for him…” She shook her head.

  She gave me the water shoes, tennis racquet things like fat openwork skis, required to cross the bog, and we finished our tea in a gulp or two and then set out. The sun was causing yellow-green lights to radiate from its position just under the horizon, some effect of the huge mirrors they’d placed in geosynchronous orbit for unlimited solar power. From our position walking atop the water, it was beautiful: not all Tech was bad or made things ugly.

  One early visit Cynara had told me in great detail how she was keeping Finn alive and hopefully healing him with her concoctions and decoctions within the peat and slightly underwater. After her explanation I’d gone and looked it up under “Peat Conservation” “Below Surface Healing,” and even the Service-pedia had entries on its alleged and potential abilities to retain and conserve human flesh and blood. Of course, it was a limited thing too, all of the texts said: after a certain period of time, chemical leakage would set in and it might happen quite suddenly that what was being kept barely alive would become petrified, or rather peat-rified. We’d not reached that date yet with my Service mate.

  Cynara had gotten hold of a long-gone neighbor’s long-abandoned concrete swimming pool and had it converted for her use. There he was, down there in a bed of six-feet-deep peat, flat on his back, face up, hands to his side, complexion only slightly green, within the shelter of a little tarpaulin, an inch or so of liquid covering him but otherwise looking just the same. As always, my heart jumped within my breast just looking at him: Finn: my buddy Finn.

  I controlled it and said in as flat a voice as I could muster, “He’s looking better even than the last time.”

  “He’s fully healed, Locke. I did a thorough analysis and inspection when I had him moved here. They came from Vandenberg and confirmed it when they moved the monitors. He’s physically healed.”

  She went to the side of the pool and opened up a rubberized wall unit that contained all of the I.C.U. gear that the Service Med Tech Support had provided when they first brought him here to her. All the machines looked to be humming along. I knew he was fully monitored every six minutes in some office computer link at Vandenberg.

  “If he’s all better, then this is exactly the right time to do this,” I said.

  “Tell me what you need me to do.”

  “I strip down and get flesh to flesh with him. I put the two helmets on us. I flip them on. The stuff I took makes a neural synthesis. After fifteen minutes, you switch it off and stand me up.”

  “Then what? He leaps out of the peat and does a dance?”

  “There are a dozen possible scenarios for what happens next. Most of them are a great deal quieter than that. We don’t expect an immediate effect.”

  “Then just do it,” she said, sounding exhausted. Sounding like I’d taken her away from something, a Vid she was watching, a Pad she was engrossed in, something interrupted by me and my Service Med Tech foolishness.

  He was cold, clammy, and of course wet to the touch. We were face-to-face. His eyes were closed. I waited until I had warmed up enough to be touching as much of his front as possible, then I reached up and switched the helmets on, as I’d been shown.

  For maybe a minute nothing happened, and Cynara was about to say something, she had even begun to say, “Listen, Locke, I think you may have to…”

  We were at the lower helm board and Scott Alan Finn, a.k.a. the Finnster, was there right next to me as he’d been for years on end, real-time, and he was unharmed, unburned, perfectly all right, laughing. “So she says to me, ‘You’re joking right? That’s what you were bragging about to half the bar.’ And I didn’t let my ego be downed in any way and I said, ‘There’s a reason why it’s called a surprise package, girlie-o!’

  “‘Great!’ she said. ‘I’ll pretend to be surprised…wait! What the hell is that?’

  “And it was the worm, Locke. Remember the Ice-worm from Titan we’d snuck onboard? I’d managed to keep it frozen-alive, and I just let it jump out at her from outta my pants and she ran screaming out of the room. I nearly fucking died, Locke. Died.”

  And he is more alive than he has been in years. He’s alive. Right here twelve inches from me and I can’t believe it. I simply can’t. This neural synthesis thing is actually working and…

  At that point I realized that we were back in real-time, Finn and me, back maybe twenty-eight years ago, not twenty-seven when the attack happened. So this must be our crux point, not later. Why this time?

  “Don’t look so surprised. Unless you want to see it too, Locke! Locke? What’s going on, why are you staring? It’s not like I never did an act like that before.”

  “You always surprise me, Finn,” I managed to get out through my wonderment. He was so…alive! Then to cover myself I added, “But I know that someday you will actually grow up, and then where will we all be?”

  “In some sleazebag retirement home on far side Pluto, I hope, zonked out of our gourds!” he added…typically.

  But he sensed too that something was changed or wrong as he calmed down almost instantly, and when Drinibidian began teasing him a few minutes later about the worm, Finn was only halfhearted in his response to him, I could tell, and he even gave me a few looks as though asking, “Hey! What’s up?”

  Meanwhile I tried to remember what had gone down on this particular mission that wou
ld make it the key moment, the crisis we must return to, and for the life of me I couldn’t, I really just could not remember or figure it out.

  It had begun—now it was actually happening again as though in real-time—as a simple supply replenishment run to a Far-Oort Cloud world, I recalled, to that heap of dark slag they’d named Sedna in the early twenty-first century. There was a good sized paleo-archaeology station there for the past half century or so, with at least four score workers hired by Wally J. Liu, the Hypertronics trillionaire. He firmly believed just about every word of the Zechariah Stettin series, The Twelfth Planet et al. Therefore Liu was certain that Sedna was that planet filled with immortals that Stettin had written of, so lengthily, so academically, and at times even convincingly. According to Liu and his followers, Sedna’s vast middle continent wasteland and its lack of any but radon-polluted waters were relatively new, the result of some huge internecine nuclear war. They were there searching for definitive proof of that civilization.

  Besides that, all we knew was that the Service had decided that Sedna’s elliptical orbit at aphelion kept it so far away from the center of our own solar system that at its farthest point, like now, the planetoid was the best outpost: a seeing and especially a listening post for any kind of movement the Bella=Arths might possibly make upon human-inhabited worlds and moons.

  Never mind that every insect and human psychologist had agreed that the Arths would never leave their home space far enough to invade ours. And my bud Finn believed that Liu was somehow secretly channeling cash into the Service’s Oort Cloud outposts and so the Service was engaging in what might have looked like cooperative, even humanitarian work, but was really payback.

  Why should we care? For us, this mission and this particular run was totally recreational, right down to the five days we’d spend on the planet with its multiple canteens, full-service cinemas, and motels, which became more like orgy houses the minute we arrived. What had happened on this outbound run for it to be selected by the neural-synthesizer? I kept trying to recall.