Ramona-Teresa stopped at their table, ignoring Radu, or, rather, glancing at him, dismissing him in the same instant, and speaking to Laenea. “They want you to go back.”
Laenea had almost forgotten the doctors and administrators, who could hardly take her departure as calmly as did the other pilots. “Did you tell them where I was?” She knew immediately that she had asked an unworthy question. “I’m sorry.”
“They always want to teach us that they’re in control. Sometimes it’s easiest to let them believe they are.”
“Thanks,” Laenea said, “but I’ve had enough tests and plastic tubes.” She felt very free, for whatever she did she would not be grounded: She was worth too much. No one would even censure her for irresponsibility, for everyone knew pilots were quite perfectly mad.
“Be careful using your credit key.”
“All right…” One was supposed to be able to keep one’s files private, but enough power and money could, without doubt, overcome the safeguards. Laenea wished she had not got out of the habit of carrying cash. “Ramona, do you have any cash? Can you lend me some?”
Now Ramona did look at Radu, critically. “It would be better if you stopped being so willful and came with me.”
Radu flushed. She was, all too obviously, not speaking to him.
“No, it wouldn’t.” Laenea’s tone was chill.
The dim blue light glinted silver from the gray in Ramona’s hair as she turned back to Laenea and reached into an inner pocket. She handed her a folded sheaf of bills. “You young ones never plan.” Ramona-Teresa hesitated, shook her head, and left.
Laenea shoved the money into her pants pocket, annoyed more because Ramona-Teresa had brought it, assuming she would need it, than because she had had to ask for it.
“She may be right,” Radu said slowly. “Pilots, and crew —”
She touched his hand again, rubbing its back, following the strong fine bones to his wrist. “She shouldn’t have been so snobbish. We’re none of her business.”
“She was… I never met anyone like her before. I felt as if I were in the presence of someone so different from me — so far beyond — that we couldn’t speak together.” He grinned, quick flash of strong white teeth behind his shaggy mustache, deep smile lines in his cheeks. “Even if she’d cared to.” With his free hand he stroked Laenea’s green velvet sleeve. She could feel the beat of his pulse, rapid and upset. As if he had closed an electrical circuit a pleasurable chill spread up Laenea’s arm.
“Radu, did you ever meet a pilot, or a crew member, who wasn’t different from anyone you had ever met before? I haven’t. We all start out that way. Transit didn’t change Ramona.”
He acquiesced with silence only, no more certain of the validity of her assurance than she was.
“For now it doesn’t make any difference anyway,” Laenea said.
The unhappiness slipped from Radu’s expression, the joy came back, but the uncertainty remained.
They finished their dinner quickly, in expectation, anticipation, paying insufficient attention to the excellent food. Though annoyed that she had to worry about the subject at all, Laenea considered available ways of preserving her freedom.
But the situation was hardly serious; evading the administrators as long as possible was a matter of pride and personal pleasure. “Fools… ” she muttered.
“They may have a special reason for wanting you to go back,” Radu said. Anticipation of the next month flowed through both their minds. “Some problem — some danger.”
“They’d’ve said so.”
“Then what do they want?”
“Ramona said it — they want to prove they control us.” She drank the last few drops of her brandy; Radu followed suit. They rose and walked together toward the foyer. “They want to keep me packed in foam like an expensive machine until I can take my ship.”
At the front of the restaurant, Laenea reached for Ramona-Teresa’s money.
Marc’s image glowed into existence.
“Your dinner’s my gift,” he said. “In celebration.”
She wondered if Ramona had told him of her problem. He could as easily know from his own sources, or the free meal might be an example of his frequent generosity. “I wonder how you ever make a profit, my friend,” she said, “but thank you.”
“I overcharge tourists,” Marc said, the artificial voice so smooth that it was impossible to know if he spoke cynically or sardonically or if he were simply joking.
“I don’t know where I’m going next,” Laenea told him, “but are you looking for anything?”
“Nothing in particular,” he said. “Pretty things…” Silver swirled across the air, like a miniature snowstorm falling from a cloudless sky.
“I know.”
The corridors dazzled Laenea after the dim restaurant; she wished for a gentle evening and moonlight. Between cold metal walls, she and Radu walked close together, warm, arms around each other. “Marc collects,” Laenea said. “We all bring him things.”
“‘Pretty things.’ ”
“Yes… I think he tries to bring the nicest bits of all the worlds inside with him. I think he creates his own reality.”
“One that has nothing to do with ours.”
“Exactly.”
“That’s what they’d do at the hospital,” Radu said. “Isolate you, and you disagree that that would be valuable.”
“Not for me. For Marc, perhaps.”
He nodded. “And… now?”
“Back to Kathell’s, for a while at least.” She reached up and rubbed the back of his neck. His hair tickled her hand. “The rule I disagreed with most was the one that forbade any sex while I was in training.”
The smile lines appeared again, bracketing his mouth parallel to his drooping mustache, crinkling the skin around his eyes. “I understand entirely,” he said, “why you aren’t anxious to go back.”
o0o
Entering her room in Kathell’s suite, Laenea turned on the lights. Mirrors reflected the glow, bright niches among red plush and gold trim. She and Radu stood together on the silver surfaces, hands clasped, for a moment as hesitant as children. Then Laenea turned to Radu, and he to her; they ignored the actions of the mirror figures. Laenea’s hands on the sides of Radu’s face touched his scarred cheeks; she kissed him once, lightly, again, harder. His mustache was soft and bristly against her lips and her tongue. His hands tightened over her shoulder blades, and moved down. He held her gently. She slipped one hand between their bodies, beneath his jacket, stroking his bare skin, tracing the taut muscles of his back, his waist, his hip. His breathing quickened.
At the beginning nothing was different — but nothing was the same. The change was more important than motions, position, endearments; Laenea had experienced those in all their combinations, content with involvement for a few moments’ pleasure. That had always been satisfying and sufficient; she had never suspected the potential for evolution that depended on the partners. Leaning over Radu, with her hair curling down around their faces, looking into his smiling blue eyes, she felt close enough to him to absorb his thoughts and sense his soul. They caressed each other leisurely. Laenea’s nipples hardened, but instead of throbbing they tingled. Radu moved against her and her excitement heightened suddenly, irrationally, grasping her, shaking her. She gasped but could not force the breath back out. Radu kissed her shoulder, the base of her throat, stroked her stomach, drew his hand up her side, cupped her breasts.
“Radu —”
Her climax was sudden and violent, a wave contracting all through her as her single thrust pushed Radu’s hips down against the mattress. He was startled into a climax of his own as Laenea shuddered involuntarily, straining against him, clasping him to her, unable to catch his rhythm. But neither of them cared.
They lay together, panting and sweaty.
“Is that part of it?” His voice was unsteady.
“I guess so.” Her voice, too, showed the effects of surprise. “No wonder t
hey’re so quiet about it.”
“Does it — is your pleasure decreased?” He was ready to be angry for her.
“No, that isn’t it, it’s —” She started to say that the pleasure was tenfold greater, but remembered the start of their loveplay, before she had been made aware of just how many of her rhythms were rearranged. The beginning had nothing to do with the fact that she was a pilot. “It was fine.” A lame adjective. “Just unexpected. And you?”
He smiled. “As you say — unexpected. Surprising. A little… frightening.”
“Frightening?”
“All new experiences are a little frightening. Even the very enjoyable ones. Or maybe those most of all.”
Laenea laughed softly.
Chapter 3
Laenea and Radu dozed, wrapped in each other’s arms. Laenea’s hair curled around to touch the corner of Radu’s jaw, and her heel was hooked over his calf. She was content for the moment with silence, stillness, touch. The plague had not scarred his body.
In the aquaria, the fish flitted back and forth beneath dim lights, spreading blue shadows across the bed. Laenea breathed deeply, counting to make the breaths even. Breathing is a response, not a rhythm, a reaction to the build-up of carbon dioxide in blood and brain. Laenea’s breathing had to be altered only during transit itself. For now she used it as an artificial rhythm of concentration. Her heart raced with excitement and adrenaline, so she began to slow it, to relax. But something disturbed her control. Her blood pressure slid down slightly, then slid slowly up to a dangerous level. She could hear only the dull ringing in her ears. Perspiration formed on her forehead, in her armpits, along her spine. Her heart had never before failed to respond to conscious control.
Angry, startled, she pushed herself up, flinging back her hair. Radu raised his head, tightening his hand around the point of her shoulder. “What —?”
He might as well have been speaking underwater. Laenea lifted her hand to silence him.
One deep inhalation, hold; exhale, hold. She repeated the sequence, calming herself, relaxing the voluntary muscles. Her hand fell to the bed. She lay back. Repeat the sequence, and again. Again. In the hospital and since, her control over involuntary muscles had been quick and sure. She began to be afraid, and had to imagine the fear evaporating, dissipating. Finally the arterial muscles began to respond. They lengthened, loosened, expanded. Last, the pump answered her commands, as she recaptured and reproduced the indefinable states of self-control.
When she knew her blood pressure was no longer likely to crush her kidneys or mash her brain, she opened her eyes. Above her, Radu watched, deep lines of worry across his forehead. “Are you —” He was whispering.
She lifted her heavy hand and stroked his face, his eyebrows, his hair. “I don’t know what happened. I couldn’t get control for a minute. But I have it back now.” She drew his hand across her body, pulling him down beside her, and soon they fell asleep.
o0o
Later, Laenea took time to consider her situation. Returning to the hospital would be easiest; it was also the least attractive alternative. Remaining free, adjusting without interference to the changes, meeting the other pilots, showing Radu what was to be seen: Outwitting the administrators would be more fun. Kathell had done her a great favor, for without her apartment Laenea would have rented a hotel room. The records would somehow have been made available; a polite messenger would have appeared to ask her respectfully to come along. Should she overpower an innocent hireling and disappear laughing? More likely she would have shrugged and gone. Fights had never given her either excitement or pleasure. She knew what things she would not do, ever, though she did not know what she would do now. She pondered.
“Damn them,” she said.
Radu sat down facing her. The couches, of course, were both too low. Radu and Laenea looked at each other across their knees. They both wore caftans, whose colors clashed violently. Radu lay back on the cushions, chuckling. “You look much too undignified for anger.”
She leaned toward him and tickled a sensitive place she had discovered. “I’ll show you undignified —” He twisted away and batted at her hand, but missed, laughing helplessly. When Laenea relented, she was lying on top of him on the wide, soft couch. Radu unwound from a defensive crouch, watching her warily, laugh lines deep around his eyes and mouth.
“Peace,” she said, and held up her hands. He relaxed. Laenea picked up a fold of the material of her caftan and compared it with one of his. “Is anything more undignified than the two of us in colors no hallucination would have — and giggling as well?”
“Nothing at all.” He touched her hair, her face. “But what made you so angry?”
“The administrators — their red tape. Their infernal tests.” She laughed again, this time bitterly. “‘Undignified’ — some of those tests would win on that.”
“Aren’t they necessary? For your health?”
She told him about the hypnotics, the sedatives, the sleep, the time she had spent being obedient. “Their redundancies have redundancies. If I weren’t healthy I’d be out on the street wearing my old heart. I’d be nothing.”
“Never that.”
But she knew of people who had failed as pilots, who were reimplanted with their own saved hearts, and none of them had ever flown again, as pilots, as crew, as passengers.
“Nothing.”
He was shaken by her vehemence. “But you’re all right. You’re who you want to be and what you want to be.”
“I’m angry at inconvenience,” she admitted. “I want to be the one who shows earth to you. They want me to spend the next month shuttling from one testing machine to another. And I’ll have to, if they find me. My freedom’s limited.” She felt very strongly that she needed to spend the next month in the real world, neither hampered by experts who knew, truly, nothing, nor misdirected by controlled environments. She did not know how to explain the feeling; she thought it might be one of the things pilots tried to talk about during their hesitant, unsyncopated conversations with their insufficient vocabularies. “Yours isn’t, though, you know.”
“What do you mean?”
“Sometimes I come back to earth and never leave the port. It’s my home. It has everything I want or need. I can easily stay a month and never have to admit receiving a message I don’t want.” Her fingertips moved back and forth across the ridge of new tissue over her breastbone. Somehow it was a comfort, though the scar was a symbol of what had cut her off from her old friends. She needed new friends now, but she felt it would be stupid and unfair to ask Radu to spend his first trip to earth on an artificial island. “I have to stay here. But you don’t. Earth has a lot of sights worth seeing.”
He did not answer. Laenea raised her head to look at him. He was intent and disturbed.
“Would you be offended,” he said, “if I told you I am not very interested in historical sights?”
“Is that what you really want? To stay with me?”
“Yes. Very much.”
o0o
Laenea led Radu through the vast apartment to the lowest floor. There, flagstones surrounded a swimming pool formed of intricate mosaic that shimmered in the dim light. This was a grotto, more than a place for athletic events or children’s noisy beachball games.
Radu sighed; Laenea brushed her hand across the top of his shoulder, questioning.
“Someone spent a great deal of time and care here,” he said.
“That’s true.” Laenea had never thought of it as the work of someone’s hands, individual and painstaking, though of course it was exactly that. But the economic structure of her world was based on service, not production, and she had always taken the results for granted.
They took off their caftans and waded down the steps into body-warm water. It rose smooth and soothing around the persistent soreness of Laenea’s ribs.
“I’m going to soak for a while.” She lay back and floated, her hair drifting out, a strand occasionally curling back to brush h
er shoulder, the top of her spine. Radu’s voice rumbled through the water, incomprehensible, but she glanced over and saw him waving toward the dim end of the pool. He flopped down in the water and thrashed energetically away, retreating to a constant background noise. All sounds faded, gaining the same faraway quality, like audio slow motion. She urged the tension out of her body through her shoulders, down her outstretched arms, out the tips of spread fingers.
Radu finished his circumnavigation of the pool; he dove under her and the turbulence stroked her back. Laenea let her feet sink to the pool’s bottom. She stood up as Radu burst out of the water, a very amateur dolphin, laughing, hair dripping in his eyes. They waded toward each other through the chest-deep water, and embraced. Radu kissed Laenea’s throat just at the corner of her jaw. She threw her head back like a cat stretching to prolong the pleasure, moving her hands up and down his sides.
“We’re lucky to be here so early,” he said softly, “alone before anyone else comes.”
“I don’t think anyone else is staying at Kathell’s right now,” Laenea said. “We have the pool to ourselves all the time.”
“No one else at all lives here?”
“No, of course not. Kathell doesn’t even live here most of the time. She just has it kept ready for when she wants it.”
He said nothing, embarrassed by his error.
“Never mind,” Laenea said. “It’s a natural mistake to make.” But it was not, of course, on earth.
o0o
Laenea had visited enough new worlds to understand how Radu might be uncomfortable in the midst of the private possessions and personal services available on earth. What impressed him was expenditure of time, for time was the valuable commodity in his frame of reference. On Twilight everyone would have two or three necessary jobs, and none would consist of piecing together intricate mosaics. Everything was different on earth.
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