"Juanita, yo te quiero."
It was such a perfect, intoxicating thing for him to say at that moment that she lost all sense of herself. She went way past the hurt and into frenzy. Maybe forty seconds of it, something like forty aeons in the hottest Tantric circle of Nirvana. Her yell of exultation was still ringing in her ears when he grabbed her hips hard enough to bruise and rammed into her from underneath and he came, he pulsed, deep inside of her.
She slid off him, exhausted and drenched with sweat. "My God."
"I didn't know it was going to feel like that." He seemed stunned.
"Yes," she said thoughtfully, "it was sort of quick."
"I couldn't help it," he said. "I didn't know it was going to feel so intense. It's like a completely different experience."
"Is it really, sweetheart? It's nice for you that way.
"Yes. Very." He kissed her.
She felt perfectly calm now. Everything was becoming very clear. That mean-tempered tight-stretched whine in her nerves was completely gone, turned to something like the mellow vibratory afterglow of gently plucked angelic harp strings, and everything was suddenly making a lot of solid good sense.
"Y'know, Jerry, I think maybe it's the latex that's at fault."
"What?"
"I think the condom is my health problem. That I'm allergic to the latex, or whatever they make condoms out of these days, and that's why I got all messed up in the first place."
"How could you suddenly develop an allergy like that, after a whole year?"
"Well," she said, "from repeated exposure."
He laughed.
"I do have allergies, you know. I mean, not like Alex does, but I have a couple of them. I think we should always have sex this way, from now on. It's sweet, it's good, it's perfect. Except that ... well, everything's all wet. But that's okay."
"Jane, if we always have sex like this, you're going to get pregnant."
"Holy mackerel! I never thought of that." The concept amazed her. She might get pregnant. She could conceive a child. Yes, that astounding event could actually take place; there was nothing left to stop it from happening. She felt like a fool for not considering pregnancy, but she simply hadn't; the long shadows of disease and disaster had over-whelmed that whole idea.
"Just like men and women used to be. Before birth control." Jerry laughed. "Maybe we should count our blessings. If these were the 1930s instead of the 2030s, you'd be a downtrodden faculty wife with five kids."
"Five kids in less than a year, Professor? You're some kinda guy." Jane yawned, sweetly and uncontrollably.
Sleep was near, and sleep was going to be so good.
"They've got those pills for taking care of that, though. Those month-after pills."
"Contragestives."
"Yeah, you just eat one pill and your period comes right back. No problem! Government-subsidized and everything." She hugged him. "I think we've got this beat, darling. We're going to be all right now. Everything will be all right. I feel so happy."
MOST OF THE Troupers were hard at work shuffling data. They were assembling some fairly major net-presentation, to impress some bigwig netfriend of Juanita's, who was due for a visit to camp.
None of the Troupers struck Alex as showing a particular dramatic flair for net-presentation work, with the possible exception of Juanita herself. But net-presentation was the kind of labor that could be distributed to a million little cut-rate mouse-potato desktoppers all over the planet, and knowing Juanita, it probably would be.
Carol Cooper, however, wasn't having any of that. Carol Cooper was doing some welding in the garage. "I don't like systems," she told Alex. "I'm very analog."
"Yes," said Alex, clearing his throat, "I recognized that about you the moment we met."
"So what's in that big plastic jug there?"
"You're very direct, I noticed that also."
Carol put a final searing touch to a length of bent chromed pipe and set it aside to cool. "You sure are a sneaky little flicker, for a guy your age. Not everybody would have thought to spot-weld a noose on the end of that smart rope." She took off her welding goggles and put on safety glasses.
"It's a smart lariat now. Lariats are useful. Comanches used to catch coyotes with lariats. From horseback, of course."
"Of course," Carol scoffed. "Did you know that Janey threw that gun you bought her right down the latrine?"
"Just as well, it was probably pretty dumb to trust her with a firearm in the first place."
"You oughta go more easy on Janey," Carol chided. She picked up a dented length of bumper from the dune buggy, and fit it methodically into a big bench vise. She was wearing her barometer watch, under her slashed-paper sleeve. On her right wrist, the opposite wrist from the Troupe cuff.
"She sure was noisy last night," Carol remarked, meditatively, as she tightened the vise. "Y'know, the first time I ever heard Janey cut loose like that, I thought we were under attack. And then I thought, Christ, she's doing some kind of sick-and-twisted status thing, like she wants everybody to know that Jerry's finally dam' her. But then after a couple weeks, I figured out, that's just the way Janey is. Janey just plain needs to yell. She's not okay unless she yells."
Carol picked up a big lead-headed mallet and gave the bumper a pair of hard corrective wallops. "But the weirdest p art is that we all got so used to it. For months we all thought it was mega-hilarious, but now we don't even make jokes about Janey's yelling. And then when she stopped yelling for a couple weeks there, we all started to get really worried. But last night, y'know, off she goes. And today, I feel okay again. I feel like maybe we're gonna ace this thing after all."
"People can get used to anything," Alex said.
"No, they don't, dude," Carol said sharply. "You only think that 'cause you're young." She shook her head. "How old do you think I am?"
"Thirty-five?" Alex said. He knew she was forty-two.
"No way, I'm almost forty. I had a kid once who could almost be your age now. Kid died, though."
"I'm sorry to hear that."
She swung the hammer. Bang. Wham. Clank clank dank. "Yeah, they say having a kid can keep your marriage alive, and it's really kinda true, because a kid gives you something to pay attention to, besides each other. But they never tell you that losing your kid can kill your marriage." Whack. Crunch. "Y'know, I was young and kind of stupid back then, and I used tofight with that guy a lot, but hell, I married him on purpose. We got along. And then our kid died. And we never got used to that. Not ever. It just murdered us. We couldn't stand the sight of each other, after that."
"What did your child die of?"
"Encephalitis."
"Really? My mom died of encephalitis."
"You're kidding. Which wave?"
"The epidemic of '25 was pretty bad in Houston."
"Oh, that was a late one, my little boy died in 2014. It was a State of Emergency thing."
Alex said nothing.
"Can you fetch me that big-ass vise grip over there?"
Alex pulled the coil of smart rope from his shoulder, put his gloved hand on it. The thin black rope slid out instantly across the bubblepak flooring, reared like a cobra, seized the end of the vise grip in its metal-collared noose, and lifted the tool into the air. It then swayed across the floor, the vise grip dangling gently from the noose, and hung the tool in midair, within her easy reach.
"Christ, you're getting good with that thing." Carol took the vise grip, with gingerly care. The rope whipped back to coil around Alex's shoulder.
"I've got something I need to tell you," Alex said.
She clamped the vise grip onto the bumper and put her back into twisting it. "I know that," she grunted. "And I'm waiting."