And she came off the shelf, shawl sliding off her shoulders to the floor. It puddled silkenly around her feet and she stepped over it towards me.
Well, there’s Alain Marriott, honourable and strong in all his myriad experia incarnations; and then there’s reality. In reality, and whatever it costs, there are some things you don’t turn away from.
I met her halfway across the room. Merge Nine was already in the air, in the scent of her body and the water vapour on her breath. I drew in a deep breath and felt the chemical triggers go off like plucked strings in the pit of my stomach. My drink was gone, set aside somewhere, and the hand that had held it was moulded around one of Miriam Bancroft’s jutting breasts. She drew my head down with hands on either side and I found it there again, Merge Nine in the beads of sweat webbed in the soft down that ran in a line down her cleavage. I tugged at the seam of the leotard, untrapping the breasts pressed beneath it, tracing and finding one nipple with my mouth.
Above me I felt her mouth gasp open, and knew the empathin was working its way into my sleeve’s brain, tripping dormant telepath instincts and sending out feelers for the intense aura of arousal that this woman was generating. Knew as well that she would be beginning to taste the flesh of her own breast in my mouth. Once triggered, the empathin rush was like a volleyed tennis ball, building intensity with every rebound from one inflamed sensorium to the other, until the merge reached a climax just short of unbearable.
Miriam Bancroft was beginning to moan now, as we sank to the floor and I moved back and forth between her breasts, rubbing their springy resistance over my face. Her hands had turned hungry, grasping and digging softly with nails at my flanks and the swollen ache between my legs. We scrabbled feverishly at each other’s clothing, mouths trembling with the need to fill themselves, and when we had shed everything we wore the rug beneath us seemed to lay individual strands of heat on our skin. I settled over her and my stubble rasped faintly over the sprung smoothness of her belly, my mouth making wet Os on its path downward. Then there was the deep salt taste as my tongue tracked down the creases of her cunt, soaking up Merge Nine with her juices and coming back to press and flick at the tiny bud of her clitoris. Somewhere, at the other end of the world, my penis was pulsing in her hand. A mouth closed over the head, and sucked gently.
Blending, our climaxes built rapidly and with unerring concurrence, and the mixed signals of the Merge Nine union blurred until I could find no distinction between the excruciating tautness of the prick between her fingers and the pressure of my own tongue somewhere indistinct up beyond its feasible reach inside her. Her thighs clamped around my head. There was a grunting sound, but whose throat it came from I was no longer aware. Separateness melted away into mutual sensory overload, tension building layer after layer, peak after peak, and then suddenly she was laughing at the warm, salty splash over her face and fingers and I was clamped against her corkscrewing hips as her own simultaneous crest swept her away.
For a while there was trembling release, in which the slightest movement, the sliding of flesh against flesh brought sobbing spasms from us both. Then, gift of the long period my sleeve had been in the tank, the sweaty images of Anenome pressed against the glass of the bio-cabin, my penis twitched and began to tighten again. Miriam Bancroft nudged at it with her nose, ran the tip of her tongue along and around it, licking off the stickiness until it was smooth and taut against her cheek, then swung around and straddled me. Reaching back for balance and hold, she sank down, impaling herself on the shaft with a long, warm groan. She leaned over me, breasts swinging, and I craned and sucked hungrily at the elusive globes. My hands came up to grasp her thighs where they were spread on either side of my body.
And then the motion.
The second time took longer, and the empathin lent it an air that was more aesthetic than sexual. Taking her cue from the signals gusting out of my sensorium, Miriam Bancroft settled into a slow churning motion while I watched her taut belly and outthrust breasts with detached lust. For no reason I could discern, the Hendrix piped a slow, deep ragga beat in from the corners of the room, and a lighting effect patterned the ceiling above us with swirling blotches of red and purple. When the effect tilted and the swirling stars came to dapple our bodies, I felt my mind tilting with it and my perceptions slid sideways out of focus. There was only the grinding of Miriam Bancroft’s hips over me, and fragmented glimpses of her body and face wrapped in coloured light. When I came, it was a distant explosion that seemed to have more to do with the woman shuddering to a halt astride me than with my own sleeve.
Later, as we lay side by side, hands milking each other through further inconclusive peaks and troughs, she said, “What do you think of me?”
I looked down the length of my body to what her hand was doing, and cleared my throat.
“Is that a trick question?”
She laughed, the same throaty cough that I had warmed to in the chart room at Suntouch House.
“No. I want to know.”
“Do you care?” It was not said harshly, and somehow the Merge Nine leached it of its brutal overtones.
“You think that’s what it is to be a Meth?” The word sounded strange on her lips, as though she were not talking about herself. “You think we don’t care about anything young?”
“I don’t know,” I said truthfully. “It’s a point of view that I’ve heard. Living three hundred years is bound to change your perspectives.”
“Yes, it does.” Her breath caught slightly as my fingers slid inside her. “Yes, like that. But you don’t stop caring. You see it. All sliding past you. And all you want to do is grab on, hold on to something, to stop it all. Draining away.”
“Is that right?”
“Yes, it is. So what do you think of me?”
I leaned over her and looked at the young woman’s body she inhabited, the fine lines of her face and the old, old eyes. I was still stoned on the Merge Nine, and I couldn’t find a flaw anywhere in her. She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I gave up the struggle for objectivity and bowed my head to kiss her on one breast.
“Miriam Bancroft, you are a wonder to behold, and I would willingly trade my soul to possess you.”
She staved off a chuckle. “I’m serious. Do you like me?”
“What kind of a question—”
“I’m serious.” The words were grounded deeper than the empathin. I pulled in some control and looked her in the eyes.
“Yes,” I said simply. “I like you.”
Her voice lowered into her throat. “Do you like what we did?”
“Yes, I like what we did.”
“Do you want more?”
“Yes, I want more.”
She sat up to face me. The milking motions of her hand grew harder, more demanding. Her voice hardened to match. “Say it again.”
“I want more. Of you.”
She pushed me down with a hand flat on my chest and leaned over me. I was growing back to somewhere near a full erection. She started to time her strokes, slow and sharp.
“Out west,” she murmured, “about five hours away by cruiser, there’s an island. It’s mine. No one goes there, there’s a fifty-kilometre exclusion umbrella, satellite patrolled, but it’s beautiful. I’ve built a complex there, with a clone bank and a re-sleeving facility.” Her voice got that uneven edge in it again. “I sometimes decant the clones. Sleeve copies of myself. To play. Do you understand what I’m offering you?”
I made a noise. The image she had just planted, of being the focus for a pack of bodies like this one, all orchestrated by the same mind, tightened the last notches on my hard-on, and her hand slid up and down its full length as if machined there.