A rush of psi energy entered me like a succubus, stealing my breath away as my flesh against her flesh completed some forbidden circuit and took out all of my mind’s defenses … the impenetrable walls, the minefields of pain, the razor-wire guilt that had held me prisoner for so long. My fears immolated, swept away like windborne sparks, like they were no more than delusions.
I kissed her then—and we were surrounded by aura, haloed in colors beyond naming. I closed my eyes, still seeing colors, letting my fingers find the smoothness of her skin, the cloud-drift of her hair, the fragile vessel of flesh and blood that somehow contained miracles. (Thank you …) I thought, (oh, God, thank you …) and then there was nothing coherent left in my mind.
Our helpless hands and hungry mouths got more intimate; chain reactions of sensation turned flesh to light and tendrils of psi energy to filaments of diamond. The collision of irresistible force and immovable object fused our half-lives into the singularity with two hearts and one mind that only psions knew and called a joining.
Molten music sang through the circuits of my brain, overflowed my synapses, downloading into my nervous system with a pleasure that was almost unbearable: I heard the sound of her hidden name (her true name, that could only be spoken mind-to-mind), catalyzed by my own (a name given to me with love, not on the streets), the true name that I’d thought would lie hidden inside me until I died.
I covered her mouth with mine, kissing her down to her soul, until I couldn’t separate the feel of her body against me from my own. I let my pleasure, wonder, hunger pour through the conduit into her mind. There would be no secrets between us now, not even the shadow of a lie … only the gravitational attraction of two bodies, heat, fusion.…
I pulled her down to the floor—not able to reach the bed, not wanting to—through a kiss that went on and on and was only an extension of what was already happening between us. Not wanting what was happening to us now to happen on that sterile slab of gel.
I dimmed the room lights with a word, giving us the freedom of the night and all the stars in its sky as I worked my way into her clothing, guided her uncertain hands in through my own. I felt the warm pressure of flesh against bared flesh, the hard weight of bone, as I eased myself down on top of her.
I felt her softness, my hardness searching for the place I needed to be; desperate to find my way inside before something happened—or nothing did, and proved that I’d be alone forever, lost between worlds.
Her body wouldn’t let me it.
Shock waves of panic/confusion/distress splintered strands of psi energy like glass—
She was a virgin. She’d never done this before. Never.
All her life, she’d waited for me.
(Miya.…) I lay still beside her for a long time, only touching her with my mind, filled with an overwhelming tenderness that made patience as sweet as pleasure. When she was ready I kissed her again, softening every motion, gentling every touch. More than ever now I wanted to make the joining of our bodies into something beautiful, an offering equal to what she had given to me.
I’d never been with a virgin before. I’d never been with anyone I’d mattered to for longer than it took them to tell me good-bye. But she’d chosen me.… This time was different from anything I knew. I wanted to make it everything that she’d imagined it would be. Everything that my own first time hadn’t been.
And I could, because I shared her mind, I knew what she wanted—exactly what she wanted. Exactly where to touch her, how to touch her, when to begin touching her again.… I carried her with me, higher and higher, until she reached a place she’d never been—and then let her fall into the electric depths of a joy so intense it almost broke my heart.
All I knew about a woman’s first time was what I’d heard on the streets: a fragile membrane rupturing, blood, pain. But this was different, as different from anything I’d ever known as she was, and the difference didn’t stop with the sharing of her mind. The only barrier between us was one of will, a conscious control of her body that told me I couldn’t have forced her if I wanted to.…
“Nasheirtah—” she gasped, and as she fell she opened like a flower, and I lost myself inside her.
I’d never imagined it could be like this. I hadn’t believed in my own innocence for half a lifetime, after half a lifetime in bed with strangers, using their bodies and letting them use mine. I’d lost even the memory of innocence so long ago I couldn’t count the years. But now she gave it back to me, in one sweet, endless moment.
I felt young again in a way that I’d never been young, whole and new, infinite with possibilities. And if I’d believed in angels she was one, and I’d become one with them. And if I’d believed in heaven it was here and now as we made love below the night, with only the moon watching, with nothing but stars everywhere, circling in the night … winking out slowly one by one as we drifted down again like dreamfall into our separate bodies.
“Nasheirtah…” she murmured again, and gave me one more long kiss as we closed our eyes, our minds and our bodies still joined inside the warm breathing darkness, safe, protected, no longer alone.…
* * *
I woke up alone, lying on the floor with the pattern of the carpet pressed into my cheek, like a wirehead sprawled in a gutter after a reality burnout.
(Alone.) I lay there without moving, stupefied with loss, not even certain for a few breaths where in the universal darkness I was. Only certain of one thing: (Alone. Alone.) I put my hands up to my head, holding my skull together as my mind drove itself against walls of silence, razor wire, and broken glass. It came away bleeding. (Miya—!)
Nothing. Nothing at all. Gone. Everything that had happened tonight, to me, between us, had only happened because of her. And she was gone.
I stumbled to my feet and called on the lights, searched the room with the only senses I had. “Miya!” I screamed with the only voice I had.
A bell chimed. A sexless face appeared in the air in front of me and informed me that screaming out loud in the middle of the night was a fineable offense.
I stood gaping at it, trying to decide whether it was male or female and whether it knew I was standing in front of it half naked. “Sorry.…” I fastened my pants, finally. I watched it disappear.
I let my hands drop and looked down at my body. My heart was still beating, marking off seconds of universal time as soullessly as a quartz clock. I ran my hands over my skin, breathing in the faint, lingering trace of her scent, proving to myself that it hadn’t been a dream.
Why—? I looked out at the night: still the same night sky, pin-holed with stars. It hadn’t been a dream. And it hadn’t been a lie. Then why? Why was she gone?
Because what we’d done was impossible. Here, now, in a place like Riverton, at a time like this.… Forbidden. Unforgivable. Insane. Impossible.
I stood there for a long time, barely breathing, until the night began to fade into dawn.
I pulled my clothes together and ordered the wall to opaque, before some security drone added indecent exposure to the list of sins-against-the-state I’d racked up since I’d arrived in this self-righteous hell. I watched the window granulate in, the wall forming across it like a layer of frost until nothing existed beyond the few square meters of space around me.
I turned away at last, moved step-by-step across the carpeted floor, registering the stability of the structure beneath my feet, as solid as the planet itself. Trying not to imagine that suddenly it all might disappear, because really there was nothing stable or immutable—not in this universe, not in my life.
I went to the wall unit that held everything I owned and opened it. It spewed out four drawers, three of them empty, one of them half full. I stared at the clothing that lay inside it, random heaps of dark colors. I pulled out a green-brown sweater: Deadeye’s sweater. I thought about Deadeye, the Ghost in the Machine, alone in his hidden room in a city called N’Yuk on a planet called Earth—no vid, no phone, no callers, wanting to keep it that way. Dead
eye in his rocking chair, knitting to keep himself sane—sweaters and scarves and blankets that he dumped in the street for total strangers to carry away. A freak, like me. I put on his sweater, warmed by it even though I wasn’t cold.
I picked through the dark formless pile until I found the box buried underneath it. I pulled the lid off. Inside was a single earring dangling a piece of green stone—a piece of junk I’d gotten from a jewelry vendor, playing tourist when the Floating University had done its session at the Monument.
I took the plain gold stud I’d been wearing to please a lot of people I didn’t give a damn about out of my ear and put on the beaded earring. I’d gotten the hole punched in my ear trying to convince myself that everything in my life had changed, that hanging jewelry on myself didn’t mean I was meat anymore for the kind of human animals who’d kill you over a piece of flash.…
I hadn’t bought myself anything else that mattered since then.
The only other object in the box was something given to me by a woman named Argentyne before I’d left Earth: a mouth harp, she’d called it. A palm-sized rectangle of metal that made smoky, haunting music when you breathed through it. She’d said it was old: its flat, cool surfaces were marked with corrosion no matter how I rubbed them down. I didn’t know if it was my fault that it wouldn’t make all the sounds I wanted to hear or if the harp was just broken. I put my mouth against the gap-toothed grin along its edge. I listened to the sounds it made as my breath passed through the holes, sounds I hadn’t listened to in a long time.
That was all there was. There’d been other people in my life who’d meant more to me than Deadeye or Argentyne, but there was nothing here to prove I’d ever known them. I remembered their names, trying to picture their faces: Jule taMing. Ardan Siebeling. Elnear taMing.… It was getting hard to remember their faces, harder all the time. They had their own lives, all of them, lives I’d never really fit into.
I wondered whether any of them even thought about me anymore. I wondered what kind of a difference it would make to me, tonight, if I could feel them do it. I thought about Quicksilver, the terrorist who’d died inside my head and left me with nothing—a memento mori guaranteeing that I’d never forget him or what we’d meant to each other.
I stretched out on the bed and put the harp to my mouth, blew, listening to the music it made, never the right music. I tried to remember the kind of music Argentyne had made, as sense-blistering as a drug rush, the kind of music you didn’t ever hear in a place like this because it was too real. I tried to remember the light/music of her symb group playing, a violent eruption of sound, hallucinogenic visions, the overwhelming sensory input whiting out all conscious thought, dissolving your flesh and bones until finally all conscious thought disappeared.…
THIRTEEN
I STUMBLED OUT into the open space in front of the hotel a couple of hours later, expecting to find the rest of the team waiting for me. Still trying to shake loose the memory of where I’d been last night—Miya … her world, her body, her mind—I wondered what in hell I was going to say to Kissindre when I saw her, what she was going to say to me.
The plaza was empty.
I stood staring out across the empty square, up into the empty sky. When I looked down again, Janos Perrymeade was standing beside me.
“I sent them ahead,” he said, “I told Kissindre you weren’t coming.”
“Why?” I wondered for one brief, stomach-knotting minute if it was because she’d told him about what had happened between us.
“Because we know what you were doing last night.”
I froze. “How?” I said stupidly, asking the single most useless question I could have asked him. I had no clue to what he was thinking: last night hadn’t changed anything permanently. My psi was as dead, as useless, as ever.
“Your databand. Corporate Security has been monitoring your activities.” He sighed, looking at me with something that could have been disappointment or simply disbelief. “I managed to convince the Ruling Board that I should be the one to pick you up, instead of Borosage. I hope you have found out something that’s worth the Board’s attention.” He nodded over his shoulder. A mod was dropping on cue to pick us up. We got into it.
“We’re meeting the Board?” I repeated, not sure what the expression on my face was. All he knew was that I’d been to Freaktown. At least they couldn’t trace Miya through me; at least he hadn’t said anything about miscegenation or public fornication. I wiped my hands on the knees of my pants.
He nodded, shifting in his seat. He seemed to be too preoccupied to notice my own restlessness. “I—barely—managed to convince them that you are totally committed to helping Joby. I hope I’m right about that, or soon we’re both going to be sorry we ever met.”
I didn’t answer. I looked out the window, watching the dawn. Red and bronze limned the knife-edged silhouette of the city. The inevitability of morning pulled my perspective back into line. I thought about how far I’d come; how much of my life and the universe still lay waiting, beyond this moment and whatever gravity sink of fate was trying to drag me down. I looked back at Perrymeade, finally.
“Tell me I’m not wrong,” he said.
“Not about me,” I said softly. “I can’t speak for Tau.”
He gave me a long, hard look, and I couldn’t even guess what lay behind it.
Tau Riverton’s government center lay on the far side of the city, as distant from Freaktown as it was possible to be and still be a part of Riverton. I wondered whether that was just a coincidence. The complex sat like a split geode in a fold of the land, its angular silhouette diffracting unnatural rainbows.
A mutant spire rose from the plex’s glass heart; at its top was a transparent knob. The mod set us down on the knob’s blunt apex. No wind buffeted us as we got out; the whole space around the tower was protected by security fields.
Perrymeade led me to a spot a few meters away, ringed like a target. Something waiting there sucked us down through the illusion of a solid surface into whatever lay below.
We stepped out into a wide torus of carpeted meeting room, facing a transparent wall. Beyond the wall was a view of the iridescent complex below us, and in the distance the perfect symmetry of Riverton. The vips who met here would be reminded every time they looked out that this was Tau’s world. Right then, standing at the pinnacle of power and yet hanging precariously in midair, even I could imagine how it must feel to be the Head of Tau’s Board.…
I looked at the corporate vips already waiting in their ceremonial seats at a table below the window/wall.
Borosage was waiting with them. He looked as out of place as a pile of shit; as out of place as I suddenly felt. Sand was there too. His effortless imitation of a human being fit in better with the half-dozen Tau vips surrounding them. My eidetic memory identified Kensoe, the Head of the Tau Board, and a couple of others I’d met at the reception. I didn’t see Draco’s Lady Gyotis Binta.
I wondered if the Lady had already left the planet or if she just didn’t choose to be associated this closely with Tau’s problems. Keiretsu didn’t apply simply to the relationship between a combine and its individual citizens. The same invisible code of duty and obligation bound entire interstellar cartel “families” like Draco itself, with its hundreds of subsidiary combine states.
Its allegiance gave a vassal state like Tau access to the near-limitless support system of Draco’s entire net. But in return Draco expected absolute loyalty. If a situation like the one Tau was in now went critical, if their damage control failed and the FTA instituted sanctions, any heads that rolled weren’t going to belong to members of Draco’s Board. Tau would be the hand cut off to save the body.
And if Tau couldn’t, or wouldn’t, make the sacrifice willingly, then Draco would make it for them, whatever it took to keep Draco’s own perverted honor intact.
I glanced at Sand again. I wondered whether his being here was a good sign or a bad one.
We crossed the unnervingly open s
pace to the meeting area. I had the sense that there was no one else in the entire tower. We reached the table, and Perrymeade made the usual obeisances for himself and excuses for me to everyone there. I realized only then that half the people at the table weren’t actually here. The Board Members were only virtual, images; their realtime bodies were somewhere else. I’d have known that the minute I arrived if my psi had been functioning. I could barely be certain now as I took a seat beside one of them. There was a shimmer to him as he turned to look at me, his expression as wary as mine even though he was probably half a planet away. I’d heard that the visual effect was generally undetectable to human eyes.
A flower arrangement sat on the table near my arm. I thought it was only a decoration until I saw Sand pick a flower and eat it. The unreal occupant of the seat next to me drank from a squat glass that wasn’t in my reality.
“We are here, of course, to discuss the Hydran problem, and how Tau intends to deal with it,” Sand said, opening the meeting without being gentle about it. It surprised me to see that he took control instead of Kensoe, but maybe it shouldn’t have.
“Then what is he doing here?” the vip I remembered as Sithan demanded, gesturing at me.
“He’s involved with the Hydran terrorists,” Borosage said, his voice grating, “just like I said in my report to you.”
I swore under my breath.
Sand gave Borosage a look that cut him off. “Update your database, Ladies and Gentlemen of the Board. Cat is working for me. I took the initiative, since Tau needed a contact the terrorists would talk to. They seem … leery of your government agents and extremely hostile toward Corporate Security. And since District Administrator Borosage has no genuine leads in the kidnapping…” He let his insinuations finish speaking for themselves. “I believe last night Cat made real progress. Last night—?” he prompted, pinning me with his mirrored stare when I didn’t respond.