“His pain made him more vulnerable, yes, no doubt of it. But something else brought him over—something that Union offered, something he couldn’t get from wine or memory wipe. The same’s true of Kamenz, and the others. They had other outs, other ways to vote no on life. They passed them up. But they chose Union. You see what I’m getting at?”
I did, of course. My answer was no answer at all, and I realized it. But Valcarenghi was wrong too, in parts.
“Yes,” I said. “I guess we’ve still got some reading to do.” I smiled wanly. “One thing, though. Gustaffson hadn’t really beaten his pain, not ever. Lya was very clear on that. It was inside him all the time, tormenting him. He just never let it come out.”
“That’s victory, isn’t it?” Valcarenghi said. “If you bury your hurts so deep that no one can tell you have them?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. But … anyway, there was more. Gustaffson has the Slow Plague. He’s dying. He’s been dying for years.”
Valcarenghi’s expression flickered briefly. “That I didn’t know, but it just bolsters my point. I’ve read that some eighty percent of Slow Plague victims opt for euthanasia, if they happen to be on a planet where it’s legal. Gustaffson was a planetary administrator. He could have made it legal. If he passed up suicide for all those years, why choose it now?”
I didn’t have an answer for that. Lyanna hadn’t given me one, if she had one. I didn’t know where we could find one, either, unless …
“The caves,” I said suddenly. “The caves of Union. We’ve got to witness a Final Union. There must be something about it, something that accounts for the conversions. Give us a chance to find out what it is.”
Valcarenghi smiled. “All right,” he said. “I can arrange it. I expected it would come to that. It’s not pleasant, though, I’ll warn you. I’ve gone down myself, so I know what I’m talking about.”
“That’s OK,” I told him. “If you think reading Gustaffson was any fun, you should have seen Lya when she was through. She’s out now trying to walk it off.” That, I’d decided, must have been what was bothering her. “Final Union won’t be any worse than those memories of Nightmare, I’m sure.”
“Fine, then. I’ll set it up for tomorrow. I’m going with you, of course. I don’t want to take any chances on anything happening to you.”
I nodded. Valcarenghi rose. “Good enough,” he said. “Meanwhile, let’s think about more interesting things. You have any plans for dinner?”
We wound up eating at a mock-Shkeen restaurant run by humans, in the company of Gourlay and Laurie Blackburn. The talk was mostly social noises—sports, politics, art, old jokes, that sort of thing. I don’t think there was a mention of the Shkeen or the Greeshka all evening.
Afterwards, when I got back to our suite, I found Lyanna waiting for me. She was in bed, reading one of the handsome volumes from our library, a book of Old Earth poetry. She looked up when I entered.
“Hi,” I said. “How was your walk?”
“Long.” A smile creased her pale, small face, then faded. “But I had time to think. About this afternoon, and yesterday, and about the Joined. And us.”
“Us?”
“Robb, do you love me?” The question was delivered almost matter-of-factly, in a voice full of question. As if she didn’t know. As if she really didn’t know.
I sat down on the bed and took her hand and tried to smile. “Sure,” I said. “You know that, Lya.”
“I did. I do. You love me, Robb, really you do. As much as a human can love. But…” She stopped. She shook her head and closed her book and sighed. “But we’re still apart, Robb. We’re still apart.”
“What are you talking about?”
“This afternoon. I was so confused afterwards, and scared. I wasn’t sure why, but I’ve thought about it. When I was reading, Robb—I was in there, with the Joined, sharing them and their love. I really was. And I didn’t want to come out. I didn’t want to leave them, Robb. When I did, I felt so isolated, so cut off.”
“That’s your fault,” I said. “I tried to talk to you. You were too busy thinking.”
“Talking? What good is talking? It’s communication, I guess, but is it really? I used to think so, before they trained my Talent. After that, reading seemed to be the real communication, the real way to reach somebody else, somebody like you. But now I don’t know. The Joined—when they ring—they’re so together, Robb. All linked. Like us when we make love, almost. And they love each other, too. And they love us, so intensely. I felt—I don’t know. But Gustaffson loves me as much as you do. No. He loves me more.”
Her face was white as she said that, her eyes wide, lost, lonely. And me, I felt a sudden chill, like a cold wind blowing through my soul. I didn’t say anything. I only looked at her, and wet my lips. And bled.
She saw the hurt in my eyes, I guess. Or read it. Her hand pulled at mine, caressed it. “Oh, Robb. Please. I don’t mean to hurt you. It’s not you. It’s all of us. What do we have, compared to them?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Lya.” Half of me suddenly wanted to cry. The other half wanted to shout. I stifled both halves, and kept my voice steady. But inside I wasn’t steady, I wasn’t steady at all.
“Do you love me, Robb?” Again. Wondering.
“Yes!” Fiercely. A challenge.
“What does that mean?” she said.
“You know what it means,” I said. “Dammit, Lya, think! Remember all we’ve had, all we’ve shared together. That’s love, Lya. It is. We’re the lucky ones, remember? You said that yourself. The Normals have only a touch and a voice, then back to their darkness. They can barely find each other. They’re alone. Always. Groping. Trying, over and over, to climb out of their isolation booths, and failing, over and over. But not us, we found the way, we know each other as much as any human beings ever can. There’s nothing I wouldn’t tell you, or share with you. I’ve said that before, and you know it’s true, you can read it in me. That’s love, dammit. Isn’t it?”
“I don’t know,” she said, in a voice so sadly baffled. Soundlessly, without even a sob, she began to cry. And while the tears ran in lonely paths down her cheeks, she talked. “Maybe that’s love. I always thought it was. But now I don’t know. If what we have is love, what was it I felt this afternoon, what was it I touched and shared in? Oh, Robb. I love you too. You know that. I try to share with you. I want to share what I read, what it was like. But I can’t. We’re cut off. I can’t make you understand. I’m here and you’re there and we can touch and make love and talk, but we’re still apart. You see? You see? I’m alone. And this afternoon, I wasn’t.”
“You’re not alone, dammit,” I said suddenly. “I’m here,” I clutched her hand tightly. “Feel? Hear? You’re not alone!”
She shook her head, and the tears flowed on. “You don’t understand, see? And there’s no way I can make you. You said we know each other as much as any human beings ever can. You’re right. But how much can human beings know each other? Aren’t all of them cut off, really? Each alone in a big dark empty universe? We only trick ourselves when we think that someone else is there. In the end, in the cold lonely end, it’s only us, by ourselves, in the blackness. Are you there, Robb? How do I know? Will you die with me, Robb? Will we be together then? Are we together now? You say we’re luckier than the Normals. I’ve said it too. They have only a touch and voice, right? How many times have I quoted that? But what do we have? A touch and two voices, maybe. It’s not enough anymore. I’m scared. Suddenly I’m scared.”
She began to sob. Instinctively I reached out to her, wrapped her in my arms, stroked her. We lay back together, and she wept against my chest. I read her, briefly, and I read her pain, her sudden loneliness, her hunger, all aswirl in a darkening mindstorm of fear. And, though I touched her and caressed her and whispered—over and over—that it would be all right, that I was here, that she wasn’t alone, I knew that it would not be enough. Suddenly there was a gulf betwee
n us, a great dark yawning thing that grew and grew, and I didn’t know how to bridge it. And Lya, my Lya, was crying, and she needed me. And I needed her, but I couldn’t get to her.
Then I realized that I was crying too.
We held each other, in silent tears, for what must have been an hour. But finally the tears ran out. Lya clutched her body to me so tightly I could hardly breathe, and I held her just as tightly.
“Robb,” she whispered. “You said—you said we really know each other. All those times you’ve said it. And you say, sometimes, that I’m right for you, that I’m perfect.”
I nodded, wanting to believe. “Yes. You are.”
“No,” she said, choking out the word, forcing it into the air, fighting herself to say it. “It’s not so. I read you, yes. I can hear the words rattling around in your head as you fit a sentence together before saying it. And I listen to you scold yourself when you’ve done something stupid. And I see memories, some memories, and live through them with you. But it’s all on the surface, Robb, all on the top. Below it, there’s more, more of you. Drifting half-thoughts I don’t quite catch. Feelings I can’t put a name to. Passions you suppress, and memories even you don’t know you have. Sometimes I can get to that level. Sometimes. If I really fight, if I drain myself to exhaustion. But when I get there, I know—I know—that there’s another level below that. And more and more, on and on, down and down. I can’t reach them, Robb, though they’re part of you. I don’t know you, I can’t know you. You don’t even know yourself, see? And me, do you know me? No. Even less. You know what I tell you, and I tell you the truth, but maybe not all. And you read my feelings, my surface feelings—the pain of a stubbed toe, a quick flash of annoyance, the pleasure I get when you’re in me. Does that mean you know me? What of my levels, and levels? What about the things I don’t even know myself? Do you know them? How, Robb, how?”
She shook her head again, with that funny little gesture she had whenever she was confused. “And you say I’m perfect, and that you love me. I’m so right for you. But am I? Robb, I read your thoughts. I know when you want me to be sexy, so I’m sexy. I see what turns you on, so I do it. I know when you want me to be serious, and when you want me to joke. I know what kind of jokes to tell, too. Never the cutting kind, you don’t like that, to hurt or see people hurt. You laugh with people not at them, and I laugh with you, and love you for your tastes. I know when you want me to talk, and when to keep quiet. I know when you want me to be your proud tigress, your tawny telepath, and when you want a little girl to shelter in your arms. And I am those things, Robb, because you want me to be, because I love you, because I can feel the joy in your mind at every right thing that I do. I never set out to do it that way, but it happened. I didn’t mind, I don’t mind. Most of the time it wasn’t even conscious. You do the same thing, too. I read it in you. You can’t read as I do, so sometimes you guess wrong—you come on witty when I want silent understanding, or you act the strong man when I need a boy to mother. But you get it right sometimes, too. And you try, you always try.
“But is it really you? Is it really me? What if I wasn’t perfect, you see, if I was just myself, with all my faults and the things you don’t like out in the open? Would you love me then? I don’t know. But Gustaffson would, and Kamenz. I know that, Robb. I saw it. I know them. Their levels … vanished. I KNOW them, and if I went back I could share with them, more than with you. And they know me, the real me, all of me, I think. And they love me. You see? You see?”
Did I see? I don’t know. I was confused. Would I love Lya if she was “herself”? But what was “herself”? How was it different from the Lya I knew? I thought I loved Lya and would always love Lya—but what if the real Lya wasn’t like my Lya? What did I love? The strange abstract concept of a human being, or the flesh and voice and personality that I thought of as Lya? I didn’t know. I didn’t know who Lya was, or who I was, or what the hell it all meant. And I was scared. Maybe I couldn’t feel what she had felt that afternoon. But I knew what she was feeling then. I was alone, and I needed someone.
“Lya,” I called. “Lya, let’s try. We don’t have to give up. We can reach each other. There’s a way, our way. We’ve done it before. Come, Lya, come with me, come to me.”
As I spoke, I undressed her, and she responded and her hands joined mine. When we were nude, I began to stroke her, slowly, and she me. Our minds reached out to each other. Reached and probed as never before. I could feel her, inside my head, digging. Deeper and deeper. Down. And I opened myself to her, I surrendered, all the petty little secrets I had kept even from her, or tried to, now I yielded up to her, everything I could remember, my triumphs and shames, the good moments and the pain, the times I’d hurt someone, the times I’d been hurt, the long crying sessions by myself, the fears I wouldn’t admit, the prejudices I fought, the vanities I battled when the time struck, the silly boyish sins. All. Everything. I buried nothing. I hid nothing. I gave myself to her, to Lya, to my Lya. She had to know me.
And so too she yielded. Her mind was a forest through which I roamed, hunting down wisps of emotion, the fear and the need and the love at the top, the fainter things beneath, the half-formed whims and passions still deeper into the woods. I don’t have Lya’s Talent, I read only feelings, never thoughts. But I read thoughts then, for the first and only time, thoughts she threw at me because I’d never seen them before. I couldn’t read much, but some I got.
And as her mind opened to mine, so did her body. I entered her, and we moved together, bodies one, minds entwined, as close as human beings can join. I felt pleasure washing over me in great glorious waves, my pleasure, her pleasure, both together building on each other, and I rode the crest for an eternity as it approached a far distant shore. And finally as it smashed into that beach, we came together, and for a second—for a tiny, fleeting second—I could not tell which orgasm was mine, and which was hers.
But then it passed. We lay, bodies locked together, on the bed. In the starlight. But it was not a bed. It was the beach, the flat black beach, and there were no stars above. A thought touched me, a vagrant thought that was not mine. Lya’s thought. We were on a plain, she was thinking, and I saw that she was right. The waters that had carried us here were gone, receded. There was only a vast flat blackness stretching away in all directions, with dim ominous shapes moving on either horizon. We are here as on a darkling plain, Lya thought. And suddenly I knew what those shapes were, and what poem she had been reading.
We slept.
* * *
I woke, alone.
The room was dark. Lya lay on the other side of the bed, curled up, still asleep. It was late, near dawn I thought. But I wasn’t sure. I was restless.
I got up and dressed in silence. I needed to walk somewhere, to think, to work things out. Where, though?
There was a key in my pocket. I touched it when I pulled on my tunic, and remembered. Valcarenghi’s office. It would be locked and deserted at this time of night. And the view might help me think.
I left, found the tubes, and shot up, up, up to the apex of the Tower, the top of man’s steel challenge to the Shkeen. The office was unlit, the furniture dark shapes in the shadows. There was only the starlight. Shkea is closer to the galactic center than Old Earth, or Baldur. The stars are a fiery canopy across the night sky. Some of them are very close, and they burn like red and blue-white fires in the awesome blackness above. In Valcarenghi’s office, all the walls are glass, I went to one, and looked out. I wasn’t thinking. Just feeling. And I felt cold and lost and little.
Then there was a soft voice behind me saying hello. I barely heard it.
I turned away from the window, but other stars leaped at me from the far walls. Laurie Blackburn sat in one of the low chairs, concealed by the darkness.
“Hello,” I said. “I didn’t mean to intrude. I thought no one would be here.”
She smiled. A radiant smile in a radiant face, but there was no humor in it. Her hair fell in sweeping aub
urn waves past her shoulders, and she was dressed in something long and gauzy. I could see her gentle curves through its folds, and she made no effort to hide herself.
“I come up here a lot,” she said. “At night, usually. When Dino’s asleep. It’s a good place to think.”
“Yes,” I said, smiling. “My thoughts, too.”
“The stars are pretty, aren’t they?”
“Yes.”
“I think so. I—” Hesitation. Then she rose and came to me. “Do you love Lya?” she said.
A hammer of a question. Timed terribly. But I handled it well, I think. My mind was still on my talk with Lya. “Yes,” I said. “Very much. Why?”
She was standing close to me, looking at my face, and past me, out to the stars. “I don’t know. I wonder about love, sometimes. I love Dino, you know. He came here two months ago, so we haven’t known each other long. But I love him already. I’ve never known anybody like him. He’s kind, and considerate, and he does everything well. I’ve never seen him fail at anything he tried. Yet he doesn’t seem driven, like some men. He wins so easily. He believes in himself a lot, and that’s attractive. He’s given me anything I could ask for, everything.”
I read her, caught her love and worry, and guessed. “Except himself,” I said.
She looked at me, startled. Then she smiled. “I forgot. You’re a Talent. Of course you know. You’re right. I don’t know what I worry about, but I do worry. Dino is so perfect, you know. I’ve told him—well, everything. All about me and my life. And he listens and understands. He’s always receptive, he’s there when I need him. But—”
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