Dreamsnake

by Vonda McIntyre

  He shook his head. His hair fell across his forehead, half hiding his eyes.

  “Gabriel, have you somehow not noticed that you are beautiful?”

  “No.” He managed a rueful grin. “I know that.”

  “Do I have to pry this out of you? Is it me? Gods know I can’t match the looks of Mountainside people. Or if you prefer men, I understand.” She had not hit on what made him draw away from her yet; he had not reacted to anything she had suggested. “Are you ill? I’m the first person you should tell!”

  “I’m not ill,” he said softly, not meeting her gaze. “And it isn’t you. I mean, if I had my choice of anyone… I’m honored you think this much of me.”

  Snake waited for him to continue.

  “It wouldn’t be fair to you, if I stayed. I might—”

  When he stopped again, Snake said, “This is the trouble between you and your father. This is why you’re going away.”

  Gabriel nodded. “And he’s right to want me to go.”

  “Because you haven’t lived up to his expectations?” Snake shook her head. “Punishment is no help. It’s stupid and self-gratifying. Come to bed with me, Gabriel. I won’t make any demands on you.”

  “You don’t understand,” Gabriel said miserably. He took her hand and lifted it to his face, rubbing her fingertips across the fine soft stubble. “I can’t keep my side of the agreement lovers make between them. I don’t know why. I had a good teacher. But biocontrol is all beyond my reach. I’ve tried. Gods, I’ve tried.” His blue eyes were bright. He let his hand fall away from hers, to his side. Snake caressed his cheek once more and put her arm around his shoulders, hiding her surprise. Impotence she could comprehend, but lack of control—! She did not know what to say to him, and he had more to tell her, something he desperately wanted to talk about: she could feel that from the stark tension of his whole body. His fists were clenched. She did not want to push him; he had been hurt enough that way already. She found herself searching for gentle and roundabout ways of saying things she would ordinarily deal with straightforwardly.

  “It’s all right,” Snake said. “I understand what you’re saying. Be easy. With me it doesn’t matter.”

  He looked up at her, as wide-eyed and surprised as the little girl in the stable had been when Snake looked at the new bruise instead of the old, ugly scar.

  “You can’t mean that. I can’t talk to anyone. They’d be disgusted, like my father. I don’t blame them.”

  “You can talk to me. I won’t judge you.”

  He hesitated a moment more, then the words, pent up for years, rushed out. “I had a friend named Leah,” Gabriel said. “That was three years ago. The first time she decided to make love with anyone, more than just playing, you know, she chose me. She hadn’t finished her training yet, of course, but it shouldn’t have mattered because I’d finished mine. I thought.”

  He was leaning against Snake, now, with his head on her shoulder, gazing with unfocused eyes at the black windows.

  “Maybe I should have taken other precautions,” he said. “But I never even thought I might be fertile. I never heard of anybody who couldn’t handle biocontrol. Well, maybe not deep trance, but fertility.” He laughed bitterly. “And whiskers, but I hadn’t started growing any then.” Snake felt him shrug as the smooth material of his shirt slid across the rough new fabric of her own. “A few months later we had a party for her, because we thought she’d learned her biocontrol faster than usual. No one was surprised. Everything comes quickly to Leah. She’s brilliant.” He stopped for a moment and simply lay against Snake, breathing slowly and deeply. He glanced up at her. “But it wasn’t her biocontrol that stopped her menstruation, it was that I had made her pregnant. She was my friend and she chose me, and I almost ruined her life.”

  Now Snake understood everything, Gabriel’s shyness, his uncertainty, his shame, even why he cloaked his beauty when he went outside: he did not want to be recognized; even more, he did not want anyone to offer him their bed.

  “You poor children,” Snake said.

  “I think we always assumed we’d partner, eventually, when we both knew what we were going to do. When we were settled. But who’d want an uncontrolled partner? They’d always know that if their control lapsed just a little, the other would have none. A partnering couldn’t last that way.” He shifted his weight. “Even so, she didn’t want to humiliate me. She didn’t tell anyone. She aborted it, but she was all alone. And her training wasn’t far enough along for that. She almost bled to death.”

  “You shouldn’t treat yourself as if you’d hurt her out of spite,” Snake said, knowing that nothing as simple as words would be sufficient to make Gabriel stop despising himself, or to make up for the way his father treated him. He could not have known he was fertile, if he had not just been tested, and once one learned the technique it was not usually necessary to worry. Snake had heard of people incapable of biocontrol, but not very often. Only a person unable to care for anyone would have come unmarked through what Gabriel had undergone. And Gabriel quite obviously cared.

  “She got well,” Gabriel said. “But I turned what should have been pleasure into nightmare for her. Leah… I think she wanted to see me again, but couldn’t make herself. If that makes sense.”

  “Yes,” Snake said. Perhaps that had been Leah’s first realization that other people could influence her life without her control or even knowledge; it was not a lesson children learned willingly or easily.

  “She wants to be a glass-former, and she had an appointment to assist Ashley.”

  Snake whistled softly in admiration. Glass-forming was a demanding and respected profession. Only the best of its people could build solar mirrors; it took a long time just to learn to make decent tubed panels, or curved panes like the ones in the towers. Ashley was not one of the best. She was the best.

  “Did Leah have to give it up?”

  “Yes. It could have been permanently. She went the next year. But that was a year out of her life.” He spoke slowly and carefully but without emotion, as if he had been through this so many times in his mind that he had forced some distance between himself and the memory. “Of course I went back to the teacher, but when they tracked my reactions longer they realized I could only keep the temperature differential a few hours at a time. Not enough.”

  “No,” Snake said thoughtfully, wondering just how good Gabriel’s teacher really could have been.

  Gabriel drew back so he could look into her face. “So, you see, I can’t stay with you tonight.”

  “You can. Please do. We’re both lonely, and we can help each other.”

  He caught his breath and stood abruptly. “Don’t you understand—” he cried.

  “Gabriel.”

  He sat down slowly, but did not touch her.

  “Don’t fear giving me a child I don’t want. Healers never have children. We take the responsibility for that ourselves, because we cannot afford to share it with our partners.”

  “You never have children?”

  “Never. Women do not bear them and men do not father them.”

  He stared at her.

  “Do you believe me?”

  “You really still want me, even knowing—?”

  In answer, Snake stood up and began unbuttoning her shirt. The newness made the buttonholes stiff, so she stripped the shirt off over her head and dropped it on the floor. Gabriel stood up slowly, looking at her shyly. Snake unbuttoned his shirt and his pants as he reached out to hold her. When his pants slid off his narrow hips he began to blush.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I haven’t been naked in front of anyone since I was fifteen.”

  “Well,” Snake said, grinning, “high time.” Gabriel’s body was as beautiful as his face. Snake unfastened her pants and left them in a heap on the floor.

  Taking Gabriel to her bed, Snake slipped under the sheet beside him. The soft glow of the lamp highlighted his blond hair and his fair skin. He was trembling.
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  “Relax,” Snake whispered. “There’s no hurry, and this is all for fun.” As she massaged his shoulders the tightness slowly left them. She realized she too was tense, tense with desire and excitement and need. She wondered what Arevin was doing.

  Gabriel turned on his side and reached for her. They caressed each other and Snake smiled to herself, thinking that though no single experience could compensate Gabriel for the last three years, she would do her best to make a start.

  Soon, though, she realized he was not prolonging the foreplay by intent. He was working to please her, still thinking and worrying much too much, as if she were Leah, whose first sexual pleasure was his responsibility. Snake got no joy out of being worked on, out of being someone’s duty. And, as well, he was trying hard to respond to her, failing, and growing more embarrassed by the second. Snake touched him gently, brushing his face with her lips.

  Gabriel flung himself away from her with a curse and hunched over on his side with his back to her.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. His voice was so rough Snake knew he was crying. She sat up beside him and stroked his shoulder.

  “I told you I’d make no demands.”

  “I keep thinking…”

  She kissed the point of his shoulder, letting her breath tickle him. “Thinking isn’t the idea.”

  “I can’t help it. All I can offer anyone is trouble and pain. And now without even giving them any pleasure first. Maybe it’s just as well.”

  “Gabriel, an impotent man can satisfy another person. You must know that. What we’re talking about now is your pleasure.”

  He did not answer, did not look at her: he had flinched when she said “impotent,” for that was one difficulty Gabriel had not talked himself into until now.

  “You don’t believe you’re safe with me, do you?”

  He rolled over and looked up. “Leah wasn’t safe with me.”

  Snake drew her knees up against her breasts and rested her chin on her fists. She gazed at Gabriel for a long time, sighed, and held out her hand so he could see the scars and slashes of snakebites.

  “Any of those bites would have killed anyone but a healer. Quickly and unpleasantly or slowly and unpleasantly.”

  She paused to let what she had said sink in.

  “I spent a lot of time developing immunities to those venoms,” she said. “And a good deal of discomfort. I never get sick. I never have infections. I can’t get cancer. My teeth don’t decay. Healers’ immunities are so active they respond to anything unusual. Most of us are sterile because we even form antibodies to our own sex cells. Let alone anyone else’s.”

  Gabriel pushed himself up on one elbow. “Then…if you can’t have children, why did you say healers can’t afford to have them? I thought you meant you didn’t have time. So if I—”

  “We raise children!” Snake said. “We adopt them. But the first healers tried to bear them. Most of them couldn’t. A few could, but the infants were deformed, and they had no minds.”

  Gabriel turned on his back and gazed at the ceiling. He sighed deeply. “Gods.”

  “We learn fertility control very well,” Snake said.

  Gabriel did not answer.

  “You’re still worried.” Snake leaned on her elbow beside him, but she did not reach out to touch him yet.

  He glanced at her with an ironic and humorless smile, his face strained with self-doubt. “I’m scared, I guess.”

  “I know.”

  “Have you ever been afraid? Really frightened?”

  “Oh, yes,” Snake said.

  She rested her hand on his belly, brushing her fingers across his smooth skin and the delicate dark-gold hairs. He was not visibly shaking but Snake could feel his deep, steady, frightened trembling.

  “Lie still,” she said. “Don’t move until I tell you.” She began stroking his belly and thighs, his hips and the sides of his buttocks, ending each stroke closer to his genitals but not actually touching them.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Sh-h. Lie still.” She kept stroking him; and she talked to him, letting her voice slip into a hypnotic, soothing monotone. She could feel him fighting not to move as she teased him: he fought himself, and the trembling stopped without his noticing.

  “Snake!”

  “What?” she asked innocently. “Is something wrong?”

  “I can’t—”

  “Sh-h.”

  He groaned. This time he was not shaking with fear. Snake smiled, eased herself down beside him, and drew him around to face her.

  “Now you can move,” she said.

  For whatever reason—because of her teasing, or because Snake had made herself as vulnerable to him as he was to her, and he could trust her, or more probably simply because he was young and healthy and eighteen and at the end of three years’ guilty self-deprivation, he was all right after that.

  Snake felt like an observer, not a salacious eavesdropper but an imperturbable watcher, almost disinterested. And that was strange. Gabriel was innately gentle, and Snake drew him on to abandonment as well. Though her own climax was satisfying, a welcome release of emotional tensions that had been building as long as she had been alone, she was concerned mostly for Gabriel. Though she returned his passion eagerly, she could not keep from wondering how sex would be with Arevin.

  Snake and Gabriel lay close together, both sweaty and breathing heavily, their arms around each other. For Snake, the companionship was as important as the sex itself. More important, for sexual tensions were easily enough dealt with. Aloneness, and loneliness, were something else altogether. She leaned over Gabriel and kissed his throat and the edge of his jaw.

  “Thank you,” he whispered. Snake could feel the vibration of his words against her lips.

  “You’re welcome,” she said. “But I didn’t ask you for selfless reasons.”

  He lay silent for a while, his fingers spread along the curve of her waist. Snake patted his hand. He was a sweet boy. She knew the thought was condescending, but she could not help it, nor could she help wishing, with the detached observer part of herself, that Arevin was with her instead. She wanted someone she could share with, not someone who would be grateful to her.

  Gabriel suddenly held her tight and hid his face against her shoulder. She stroked the short curls at the back of his neck.

  “What am I going to do?” His voice was muffled, his breath warm on her skin. “Where will I go?”

  Snake held him and rocked him. Suddenly she wondered if it might have been kinder to let him leave her when he had offered to send someone else, to allow him to continue his life of abstinence unbroken. Yet she could not believe he was really one of the unfocused pitiful human beings who could never learn any biocontrol at all.

  “Gabriel, what kind of training did you have? When they tested you, how long could you hold the temperature differential? Didn’t they give you a token?”

  “What kind of token?”

  “A little disc with a chemical inside that changes color with temperature. Most of the ones I’ve seen turn red when a man raises his genital temperature high enough.” She grinned, remembering an acquaintance who was rather vain about the intensity of his disc’s color, and had to be talked into removing it when he went to bed.

  But Gabriel was frowning at her. “High enough?”

  “Yes, of course, high enough. Isn’t that how you do it?”

  His fair eyebrows drew together, distress and surprise mixing in his expression. “Our teacher instructs us on keeping the temperature low.”

  The memory of her vain friend and any number of bawdy jokes came together in Snake’s mind. She wanted to laugh out loud. Somehow she managed to reply to Gabriel with a perfectly straight face.

  “Gabriel, dear friend, how old was your teacher? A hundred?”

  “Yes,” Gabriel said. “At least. A very wise old man. He still is.”

  “Wise, I’m sure, but out of touch,” Snake said. “Out of date by eighty years. Lowering the
temperature of your scrotum will make you infertile. But raising the temperature is much more effective. And it’s supposed to be a good deal easier to learn.”

  “But he said I could never control myself properly—”

  Snake frowned but did not say what she thought: that no teacher should ever say that to a student about anything. “Well, often one person doesn’t get along well with another and all that’s needed is a different teacher.”

  “Do you think I could learn?”

  “Yes.” She restrained another sharp comment about the wisdom and ability of Gabriel’s first teacher. It would be better if the young man realized the teacher’s faults himself. Clearly, he still felt too much admiration and respect; Snake did not want to push him into a defense of the old man, the person who perhaps had done most to hurt him.

  Gabriel grasped Snake’s hand. “What do I do? Where do I go?” This time he spoke with hope and excitement.

  “Anywhere the men’s teacher knows techniques less than a century old. Which direction are you going when you leave?”

  “I… I haven’t decided.” He looked away.

  “It’s hard to go,” Snake said. “I know it is. But it’s best. Spend some time exploring. Decide what will be good for you.”

  “Find a new place,” Gabriel said sadly.

  “You could go to Middlepath,” Snake said. “The best teachers I’ve heard of live there. And then when you’ve finished you can come back. There’ll be no reason not to.”

  “I think there will. I think I’ll never be able to come home again, because even if I do learn what I need, people here will always wonder about me. The rumors will still be there.” He shrugged. “But I have to go anyway. I promised. I’ll go to Middlepath.”

  “Good.” Snake reached back and turned down the lamp to a tiny spark. “The new technique has other benefits, I’m told.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She touched him. “It requires you to increase the circulation in the genital area. That’s supposed to increase endurance. And sensitivity.”

  “I wonder if I have any endurance now?”

  Snake began to answer him seriously, then realized Gabriel had made his first, tentative, joke about sex.