They were both nervous. John was thinking he had been presumptuous, inviting her up here so soon. He was not confident about his ability to provide a woman like Beth with what she wanted or needed. The house was in pretty bad shape and the Comnet link was still by old-fashioned optical fiber. Perhaps a little adversity was what they needed to bring them together, though. It would be "romantic"—or at least that was what he hoped.
Beth was also apprehensive. John was quiet and polite, and he reminded her of Angelo Reh . She had no desire to repeat that relationship. But he was also like her father Theder in some unknown way. Desperately, she wanted to make contact with somebody . . . almost anybody . . . "Oh, look!" she said.
"Fireweed!"
"Where?" said John, vaguely realizing she meant some kind of plant.
"There, around the porch. They're related to evening primroses, but I think they're much more attractive. If you look, they have cruciform stigmas." She pointed, and he found she meant the tall stalks of pink blooms growing in the area recently cleared to make the side yard. He wasn't sure whether the woman's penchant for identifying birds and flowers was a good thing or not. At times it could certainly be annoying.
Machine processes probed, manipulated, and the DR program retreated, allowing an overview. John and Beth smiled wistfully. They could see, in embryonic form, what the relationship might become. Here, before anything had really begun, their connection had predictive nuances that were easily discerned. . . . Still, they hadn't seen ... A matrix-input subunit of the program sensed they were ready and began reimmersion.
As they sat on the porch and talked, the long twilight of September had stretched on and on. The big satellites appeared before the stars. When night fell, it was darker than he was used to. A sweet, complex fragrance came from somewhere, and Beth was edging closer to him. Finally she reached out and took his hand.
Why had he brought her here? In the most obvious way, he was trying to set up a sexual encounter, and he'd not even decided if that was what he really wanted. He'd had only intermittent success at having sex with women whose motivations and wants were obscure to him. Even with his courtesan, bought and paid for, sex was awkward and uncomfortable, like participating in some game of skill for which he was ill prepared. In some senses, Pammy was even harder to tuck than most other women—when he looked deep into her eyes, seeking ... he didn't know what . . . he'd found only a sort of subtle coldness. It was hard to fully accept her behavior as an expression of the power of money. Beth admired the sensitive intelligence in this strange musician. She could tell he was more subtle than anyone she'd been with for a long time. He seemed . . . well . . . deep. His eyes, so dark in the golden evening, looked mysterious. She wanted to touch him, to pull him out of that enveloping shroud of "self" he wore like a mantle . . . but he recoiled when she took his hand. Is he gay? No. This setup must be as obvious to him as it is to me.
If only I could tell what she wants from me, John thought. A night of friction? The solution to the world? She'd sounded very independent, with her desires seemingly focused on saving humanity from, first, sickness and death, and then, itself. He laughed to himself. I don't know what she wants, and I don't know what I want either. How can I believe that the situation is more complex than it seems, when I don't have the slightest idea what's going on? Her skin feels so warm ... so pliable ... I could do worse than to be in her arms. . . . Deliberately, he took hold of her hand and drew her to a place beside him. Almost immediately his penis began to rise, an independent entity invading his space, and he looked at the glossy surface of her eyes, glitters in the darkening oval of her face. He wanted to relax, but his nerves were standing on end. He shivered slightly.
She kissed him. Already there were the familiar tingles and warmths in her lower torso, and she was disappointed not tofeel him molding his body to hers. She reached into his pants, past the modest constriction of a belt, and found him ready. Am I misreading his body language? Have I been? She said:
"Shall we go test that old mattress?"
Strike now! The DR program moved, grappling with the elusive surfaces of thought, and from the shifting memories drew forth his reactions.
Something in the taste of her mouth, in the fluid reaching of her tongue, touched a chord in him. They kissed more, deeper, and he could feel an urgency of passion pass between them, a quality he'd not known before. It clarified things. He could tell, or thought he could, that her motivations were simple and profound. She wanted to love him, whatever that meant. Suddenly things were overwhelmingly clear. Nothing in the world was more significant than satisfying her desires and, if the truth were known, his own. "Sure," he said.
After three days in space, watching Iris grow imperceptibly bigger, Brendan and Tem were firmly in the grip of boredom. They were beginning to feel much as they had during major portions of the 60vet expedition, and, here, there was no ice to go twirling on. Time seemed to flow like slowly crystallizing honey.
Krzakwa was wedged into the lower equipment bay, humming softly to himself as he unwrapped a low-eel snack. He closed the sandwich bin with a click and took a big, irregular bite out of the corner of his little meal. He wondered how long he could go without shitting. He stretched in a space that was barely larger than his own body and found himself wishing that he could move some of the equipment around. It was possible, of course, the stuff was only bolted down, but why bother? It was in a fairly efficient configuration, deliberately emulating an early Soviet spacecraft, and any changes they made would achieve nothing. He floated, bumping into things repeatedly. Zero g was still an appealing phenomenon, and he suddenly wished that he could access a significant volume of it. He could put on a spacesuit and go outside, of course, but that would be a major hindrance when it came to stuffing his face with food.
"Will you quit making so much fucking noise? I'm trying to sleep!" Tem grinned at him with greasy lips. He was tempted to start chewing with his mouth open, to start making a symphony of wonderful slobberings, but then bits of the sandwich would have escaped, making the effort hardly worth while. He marveled at his thoughts: Maybe being a deliberately annoying asshole is contagious! Sliding another bite between his teeth, he gazed around and wondered, for the thousandth time, why they'd made an opaque CM. Bubbleplastic could as easily be made transparent. . . . There was something to be said against verisimilitude, and old science fiction was probably as valid a model as antique technology. He remembered the stories about see-through spacecraft and started sinking into a pleasant reverie.
Sealock squirmed into a more comfortable position on his couch, tugging at the restraining straps and trying to get them back into their proper positions. Boredom could be less than terrible to a man with a memory. Though he'd kept relatively busy, there had been periods in his life when he'd had nothing to do and, worse, hadn't wanted to do anything. Those times had had to be dealt with, and habits had emerged from the telltale fog. Even without Comnet-reinforced cross-referencing, he was still able to link with the major scenes from his past. Long practice made it easy: he simply picked a distinctive memory, however trivial, and rolled forward from there, into more misted times, events leaping out of the past as if they'd never been forgotten. . . .
He'd talked to other people about it. They marveled, they agreed, they called him mad. . . . The ones who liked to remember just smiled and nodded, holding him off that private space that was all their own; the rest, the fanatical forgetters, stared at him coldly, or with derision, and sometimes told him that he was obsessed. The MCD people were sometimes accessible to him, or had been. It seemed as if only personalities that were nearly on his own level were willing to risk ... He stopped thinking, retreated from the onset of past-life, and squirmed to looked down on Krzakwa. Two years and I never thought to ...