She touched his hand. “It’s not something to be afraid of, Jack. We are inside the engine of the end, you and me. It doesn’t heal us. All it does is change us. But maybe change will be enough.”
She placed her hands on his shoulders, gently pushed him down upon the mattress. He felt as though he were choking, this mass of unbearable knowledge being shoved at him—
“Hush,” murmured Nellie. She began tugging at her jeans, until she sat beside him, naked. “I’ll help you, let me show you.”
He shook his head.
But then Nellie touched a finger to his chin and rested her hand upon his knee. Her touch grounded him; that and her voice, wordless yet reassuring.
He had not been so near a woman since he was fifteen. Her body was small and compact, narrow-waisted and wide-hipped, her skin the color of amber. “Do you feel better?” she asked.
“No.” His voice caught as she moved closer to him. Her breasts were full, dark-tipped, the nipples almost indistinguishable from the cicatrices left by petra virus. Displaced wonder settled upon him: why had he never noticed how lovely petra’s scars were, the tiny furrows where disease had harrowed flesh, what might they engender?
He looked away. “Please—leave me—”
“I can’t hurt you, Jack.” Her face hung before his, her mouth parted in a smile. “You’re safe, here…”
She touched his breast, her head dipped and she took Jack’s cock in her hands.
“No. I’m immune, remember?” she whispered. And, of course, that was what the petra virus did, made you immune to the HIV virus while it infected you with another. “I’m not contagious, Jack. I can’t hurt you.”
He saw in her face nothing of desire, nothing he could recognize except a weird kind of joy. His fear fell back. Not gone, but quieted, amazed at this arousal as by everything else—what was he doing with a woman? With this woman? He raised his hand to touch her cheek. A moment later he felt her mouth around the head of his cock, and her tongue, constricting warmth as her fingers tightened around him. He was hard, but his desire was detached from everything he could see: the woman drawing momentarily away, so that he glimpsed her breasts, her narrow thighs. She smiled, but her hands never left his cock, and an instant later her head dipped once more, lips parted as she took him into her mouth.
His breathing quickened; he waited for his erection to fade but it didn’t. When he shut his eyes he saw her still, gold against the pulsing darkness. He could smell her, so different from Leonard or Eric or any of his lovers. Not the raw pollen scent of semen but musk and salt.
“I know,” she whispered. “But I wanted to see what happens…”
She knelt and took his hands, drew them to her waist and pressed them there. He felt her ribs. She made a soft urgent sound, and so he moved his hands lower, until they stroked the inside of her thighs, muscular as a boy’s, then slid between her legs to her cunt. Her pubis had been shaved; when she opened her legs her labia had the split sheen of an apricot. His finger found the soft node there and probed it, even as he leaned forward and nuzzled his face against her neck, pressed his open mouth against her. Tasting salt, a faint crystalline bitterness. He closed his eyes and saw Emma standing in his bedroom, mouth tight as she gazed at emerald granules adhering to a tongue depressor.
The viruses change us, but they also open us, so that things can get inside.
He drew back as Nellie moaned. She moved against him forcefully, reminding him that she was there—that’s how it works when it doesn’t kill us: we become gates—reminding him that her body was nothing like his, and that none of this was happening by accident.
“I—I don’t know if I can,” he murmured. “If we can…”
Though he was still hard, and when she took his hand and pressed it to her groin the skin there was soft and yielding.
“We can,” she whispered. “This way.”
She leaned back upon the mattress, guiding him until he lay beside her, his head facing the V formed by her outspread legs. He could see the scars upon her thighs, dark fissures that seemed to be strewn upon a landscape of stone not flesh. He let his hand trail across her leg, then moved forward to kiss her knee, let his mouth linger upon one of the cicatrices. His other hand stroked her inner thigh, soft and unblemished; she made a low sound and took him in her mouth. Not his favorite sexual conjunction: he had always found it too distracting, too difficult to concentrate on his own response.
But now the symmetry entranced him, distant pulse of pleasure as she sucked his cock, his own inexplicable delight as he explored the unknown landscape before him, caressing her legs, inching forward until his face was pressed against her pubis. He slid his tongue inside her, and she cried out; there was an intense explosion of warm liquid flooding his mouth. Some minutes later she came, the muscles in her thighs rippling and a slow coursing pulse in the skin beneath his mouth; was less certain of his own climax, which he sensed first as ruddy light, his lips prickling as at the taste of lemons; then suffused heat, a sigh as the woman drew her head back from his groin and awkwardly raised herself to kiss him. Her tongue small and hot and languid, the taste of his come in her mouth. He moved away, one hand still clasping hers. She stared at him, wide eyes belying her calm expression.
He blinked and took a deep breath. The room was still dark, the candles seemed not to have burned down at all; but perhaps Nellie had replaced them. She leaned against the wall of the sleeping alcove, her dark hair flat and damp against her skull. The cicatrices upon her breasts had opened. They glistened like the mouths of flowers, saturated with nectar; he could see silvery threads of moisture spilling down her abdomen.
“It’s always different,” she said. She lay one hand upon her breast, eyes shutting as though she were in pain. “But I wanted you to see—to know what it can be like.”
Why? he wanted to ask; but he was too tired. He closed his eyes and slept dreamlessly. When he woke the room was exactly as it had been before—candles burning, a close smell of flesh and unwashed hair—save that he noticed how terribly thin Nellie was. Before, the cicatrices had seemed like blossoms strewn upon her flesh. Now he could see her ribs thrusting out between them, and the smooth hollows of her cheeks.
“I am going to tell you something important,” she said. She dabbed a finger at the corner of one eye. When she withdrew her hand he saw a very faint virent flash. “Because you’ll be at the party tonight.”
Tonight? When he licked his lips they were cracked and desiccated; his tongue, too, felt hard and swollen as a parrot’s. Nellie moved her hand to touch him, and shook her head.
“I can’t go. I’m supposed to be there, but I won’t be. But you’ll be there—” She pointed at his hand. He looked down and saw the faintly glowing outline of a gryphon upon his palm. “And so will Blue Antelope. They’ve planned a terrorist strike against the SUNRA dirigibles.”
He croaked, “Blue Antelope?”
Nellie nodded. “They think the sky stations are interfering with God’s plan for humanity. Which is that we should die. Having poisoned His earth and destroyed His creatures, we all deserve to die. They’re going to destroy the Fouga fleet. Assisted cultural suicide. Without the sky stations in place, the atmosphere cannot be repaired. We’ll die, maybe everything will die, but then other forms of life will be ascendant. Blue Antelope doesn’t look upon it as a sin.”
“How do you know?” Jack’s voice was a ragged whisper.
“Because I was the one who provided them with fifty-seven sheets of collodion cotton soaked with nitroglycerin, all of which have been incorporated into the Fougas’ outer structure. That was after I got sick.”