“Are you positive you saw and heard correctly?” Paola interpreted.
Martin nodded. “No sham,” he said. “It was as real as anything else we saw. It was real.”
“But you were exhausted…” Cham said. “The others saw nothing.”
“It felt like super deceleration,” Ariel said. She put her hand on Martin’s shoulder, gripping it to keep from giving him a slight spin, and locked her foot under a brace. “I think Martin saw and heard what he’s described.”
Jennifer had kept silent since their return. Upside down to him, feet locked in ceiling grips, she folded her arms.
“Do we vote on it?” George Dempsey asked.
“No,” Martin said. “When we can noach again, we tell our story to Hans and Stonemaker.”
“We should go down again,” Paola said, and bit her lower lip, looking around the group like a frightened deer. “We should try to talk again with… Martin’s staircase gods, whatever they’re called, inside Sleep. It’s our duty.”
“What are you going to recommend?” Ariel asked.
“I don’t know,” Martin said. “I need to sleep, or I’m going to be sick.”
In his cabin, Martin slumbered in total darkness without dream or memory, a deathly bite of nothing. He awakened abruptly once, knew precisely where he was and what had happened, remembering all too easily—and closed his eyes again to return to nothing. He was not so exhausted now, however, and as he rotated within his net, pulling his arms in, he knew there was somebody else in the room with him.
For a moment he assumed it was that old companion of his sleeping existence, Theodore, but it was not. He smelled a living person, a woman.
“I didn’t mean to wake you,” Ariel said.
“I don’t think you did.”
“I was too tired to sleep. I came here. I’ve been listening to you breathing. It’s like… When you breathe, it’s like…”
He heard her neck bones quietly pop in the dark. She was shaking her head.
“Soothing,” she finished. “Can I be in your net with you?”
“I’m still tired.”
“I need to sleep, too,” she said.
“All right.” He opened the net and she pushed in beside him, an elbow in his ribs, her buttocks against his knees, and then they were parallel in the net and he could smell her more strongly. The sweet musty scent of her hair. He had never thought of Ariel as physically pleasant, but he found her so now. She did not move or speak. Finally her breathing smoothed and he listened to her sleeping. It was soothing, simple and basic and human, what someone might have experienced lying in bed next to a woman thousands of years ago, or nearly so: the hug of Earth subtracted.
She wore shorts and top of loose terry. He wore nothing. She had not come into his room to make love, but he knew she would not stop him if he chose to begin making love. The inevitability intrigued him.
He thought of the spiral of plasma and dancing lights, Silken Parts breaking down under the experience of meeting the staircase god.
Bishop vultures, babar, sharks, staircase god.
He lightly touched the stretch of her shorts, withdrew his finger. She still slept.
Reaching down, he touched the flesh between her thighs, centimeters below her pubis, not sexually aroused, simply touching, familiarizing. He did not even think about her consent. He was far from convention and the courtesy of human courtship; he had spoken with a staircase god, and drunk water from the fountain of Sleep.
If there had been something in that water, and if he was now a haven for microscopic listeners and watchers, they could not judge his indiscretion, touching while she slept this woman he had once disliked intensely. No staircase god or bishop vulture, no babar would understand.
Martin could not begin to recall all the races he had been shown, the immense fecundity of the Killers’ creation.
“What are you doing?” Ariel asked. He pulled his hand away and pretended to be asleep. “It’s okay.”
He still pretended to sleep.
She shivered slightly. “You’re not asleep,” she said.
“No.”
“May I touch you?”
“Yes.”
She rotated beside him and faced him, then wrapped both arms around him without pressure and touched his back with fingertips, small of back, ribs, where ribs meet spine from each side, fingers gently prodding. “It’s okay,” she said, voice sleepy. “We feel good.”
“Your legs feel nice,” he said.
“Not asleep,” she chided.
“You have pretty legs,” he said.
“They’re not fat,” she said.
“They’re strong,” he said.
“It’s okay for you to think I’m not pretty.”
“I don’t think you’re not pretty.”
“It’s okay.”
“You smell good.”
She hugged him tighter. It was not cold, but both began to shiver, exhaustion compounding excitement. He felt her removing her shorts and then she was on him.
“Ah God,” he said. Simple.
She had wrapped her toes in the net left and right of him, and he held himself with fingers and one set of toes above and below her.
She moved strongly and put pressure on him and the result was quick and not particularly intense. She held him then and moved back and forth but did not find herself as Theresa might have. He sensed her weary frustration and even a little anger, angry Ariel, resentful of his ease and her difficulty. But he did not want to put his mouth to her, still reserving that for the memories of Theresa and William.
He put his hand between her legs and she held his wrist and moved his hand and herself, and it was not his doing really when she shuddered in quiet but for a small squeak.
Nothing in the way of finesse, there hadn’t even been the voluptuousness of impersonally slicking Paola. But it was enough.
He felt her relax into floating sleep, and willed blanket nothing over himself again. If we all die now and nothing is accomplished, I can at least say
I have met
staircase god
and babar
Pretense seemed useless now. The mom and snake mother emerged from the fabric of Trojan Horse, and now all gathered on the bridge to decide what could be done next.
“If they know, they know,” Martin said. “We can’t convince them otherwise.”
Cham looked around the cabin with a stern, wild face. “Why haven’t they blown us to quarks?”
The Brothers curled together in a ten-strand super-braid that filled one side of the room, an imposing knot of knots. Eye on Sky’s head swung closest to the sphere of humans, but so far the Brothers had said nothing.
“They could go a lot finer than quarks,” Jennifer said. “They could grind us to metrons.”
“Whatever those are,” Ariel said.
“I just made them up,” Jennifer said.
Martin could sense the fraying fabric and he extended straight as a board and stretched his arms, in this way imposing on the whole group, most of whom had lotused or curled in the cabin.
“They haven’t destroyed us because they don’t know where our other ships are. And we won’t tell them. We won’t even talk about it.”
“The possibility of invisible spies,” Cham said.
“Right.”
“You drank water …” Donna accused.
“We all breathed the air,” Ariel said with a touch of scorn. “We knew that would be a problem…”
“So what can we talk about?” George Dempsey asked.
“That’s what we’re going to establish,” Martin said. “When we’re in the noach chamber, nothing can transmit out…”
“But the… little spies, whatever, could store up a message and send it after we’re out of the chamber,” Jennifer said.