She was dripping wet and cold as death, and their torsos touched from ankles to eyebrows. A wave of cold washed through him, and he couldn't seem to control it. It had been a long time, and he was surprised by the strength of his reaction.
One of the other kids said: "So-who's going over?"
Derik turned the volume up and Linda's voice blasted over the beach.
"We are! Joe and Cadzie and me, we're going in first."
Justin, not quite watching Jessica over Katya's shoulder, saw sudden shock instantly swallowed.
They'd spoken once, when an older friend was seven months pregnant, and Jessica had remembered this-
The adults around her were half a dozen fully pregnant women, her mother included. Jessica had been five or six, pretending to play, but listening. And the women must have been locked in a dominance game, detailing their prenatal discomfiture. Little Jessica had listened in awe and horror, stupefied by the realization that she would one day be slow, and fat, and vulnerable just like the big ones, the adults...
Funny she'd remembered at all. Maybe it had happened only in Jessica's imagination. It was a story she'd told Justin when she was twelve, when an older friend was pregnant. For an instant, now, Justin saw Linda as her sister did. Trapped.
The baby Cadzie was holding her prisoner. Before his birth she was already imprisoned, heavy and slow. Now she couldn't even attend a beach party. Now she was burdened by what Cadzie needed: milk, diapers, the cobalt blue blanket, the bassinet, the conversations that wouldn't happen because everyone wanted to talk about the baby instead: the distractions.
A cacophony of voices was rising. "I want to go." "Me too." "Hey, who's better at making a camp than me?"
"Room for a lot of us," Justin said. "We can take, what, twenty Scouts and fifteen Seconds. And the candidates, but they come back with Linda and Joe, but still, we could really do it up right. Set up primary base on the Mesa, and a secondary down at Heorot. Do a little... fishing."
Jessica got into the spirit of it instantly. "Take two of the skeeters and survey—"
"Get the initial surveys from orbit. Let Dad spot two or three likely areas—"
Aaron was into it now. "Listen-we only need three skeeters to move the blimp, but four is safer. We can set up crisscrossing fire zones for the one that touches down."
"Touches down?"
"Plants, soil samples, plant some seismic detectors, hell, we can do some serious work!"
Aaron swept Jessica up in his arms and smooched. When he set her down she gave him her very smokiest gaze, linked her arms around his neck, and drew him close for some very serious kissing, her hips rolling against him in a clear "all systems go" alert. Justin couldn't seem to look away. When they broke, she reached out and licked the underside of Aaron's upper lip. Onlookers might as well have been on Isenstine.
Aaron turned and leered at the rest of them. " ‘Scuse us," he said. His great, corded arms lined around her waist. He exhaled and lifted her onto his shoulders so that her belly button was inches from his nose.
Jessica giggled "Don't you dare bite-" and then uttered a shocked and somewhat dreamy "Oh!!?" as he began walking backward to his hut.
With a brief and bleary cheer, the rest of them returned to their party.
There was something in Justin that felt... out of place. He walked down to the water's edge and stood alone to watch the moonglade dancing in the surf. Aaron was brilliant, handsome, athletic. And wrong for Jessica. He was sure of that, utterly certain, but for no reason he knew. It was just wrong-somehow. Justin didn't much appreciate the thoughts and feelings nipping around the edges of his mind.
Katya came up behind him and slipped her arms around his waist.
"What're you thinking?"
North of them, two days across a warm gray sea, was the continent. He hoped it was far enough away. He wanted to be with Jessica, but if she and Aaron were going to be together... maybe it wouldn't be such a good idea for him to be there.
He could hardly tell Katya-
"What if," she said, her sharp little teeth gnawing at his ear, "I took you back to my hut, and made violent love to you?"
"I'd consider that a right friendly thing to do," he said. A file flashed through his mind, all of Katya's preferences and pungencies, all of the ways she moved and whispered, her small guidances and encouragements and the many happy little bits of erotic filigree she superimposed upon a very basic act.
He hadn't really made up his mind, but she'd gone a good distance toward making it up for him. She took his hand and led it along a row of wooden huts built back from the waterline. They were lashed together with rope and stilted against the seasonal rising of the tides.
The wood was a bamboo-like shoot transplanted from south of Isenstine a decade before. The south had less direct access to water-and therefore grendels hadn't razed it so thoroughly. The bamboo-like shoots were delicious for their first two years, and then hardened into something light and strong, almost ideal for building of houses or boats. The second-to-last house in the row was Katya's. She held the door open and beckoned him in.
Social interactions were an ongoing experiment on Avalon. Pregnancy was no issue: all children were welcome. Those who chose not to become pregnant could do so with near hundred-percent certainty, and if they missed, the fetuses could be removed to an artificial womb more safely and painlessly than any therapeutic abortion in the twentieth century. So Cassandra had told them; but it had never been tested. The social pressure to have children was high, and so far every girl who became pregnant had become a mother.
There was no venereal disease. Those life-forms had been left behind on Earth. The threats that had shaped human sexual mores for much longer than human history were missing on Avalon. In a very real sense, all Avalon was one family.
There in the shadowed confines of Katya's shack, she stripped off her clothes and stood, naked, challenging Justin with the cant of her hips. Her black hair fell softly to the tips of her shoulders. Her body was full, and ripe, and lovely.
Moonlight slanted in through the blinds, throwing bars across her as she walked to him. With many little kisses and whispered endearments, she began the process of seduction.
Jessica...
The thought flitted across his mind, then was gone. A sudden fierceness took him. He gathered her up in one arm and flung her back upon her bed, a pile of undulating artificial fur that purred as their weight sank upon it.
Distantly came the roar of the surf. Wave crests scattered the light of a single full moon, and bathed their bodies in pale light as they made love... or something like love... on that bed.
And as he threw his head back, panting as Katya's fingers kneaded his flesh, he stared mindlessly at the window. The moon was adrift. That was Nimue, the smaller, closer moon. You could tell time by Merlin; it crossed the sky every six days. Nimue moved too fast for telling time.
The moon looked back at him and it wasn't quite round. It wasn't the moon that Justin's distant ancestors bayed at, beating drums and singing songs, holding their newborn infants high to bathe in its light, for a thousand generations before the birth of civilization. Although it was the only sky he had ever seen...
It was alien to him.
There is a rhythm between human beings, as well. As steady and strong as a heartbeat is the rhythm that men and women find with one another.
And in a social service so willingly and pleasurably provided, in this brief mingling of flesh and fluids, this joining of warm moist membranes in the service of health and convenience...
There is a moment, near the peak of it all, when logic falls away, and breath grows sharp, when the eyes meet, and you can see through each other, through all the little social barriers...