“Do it,” Groton muttered.
“Me?”
Groton nodded.
Ivo stood up, far more embarrassed than Afra appeared to be. He walked jerkily toward her. He raised one hand and stopped, overcome by uncertainty. Almost, he wished the drive would fail; anything to break this up.
“Pretend you’re a doctor,” Beatryx suggested sympathetically — but there was an overtone that hinted at hysteria. This must go, he thought, entirely against her grain.
And what of his own grain? Brad had called him prudish. Brad, again, had known.
“No!” Afra said in reply to Beatryx. “No impersonal examination. That’s pointless. Do whatever you have to do to know who I am.”
“I already have some idea.” Ivo was aware that he was now blushing visibly — a phenomenon that very seldom appeared in him, since his complexion was dark. Before he met Afra, he corrected himself. The suffusion of his features fed upon itself, summoning more blood; this, too. was feedback. He was embarrassed because he was embarrassed. Could Afra have any inkling how he felt about her?
“This is as hard for me as for you,” she said. “I don’t like acting like a whore. I just don’t see any other practical way. Here.” She caught his hand and jammed it against her midriff.
Ivo remained frozen, shocked as much by her words as her action. It had been, by his dubious reckoning, less than forty-eight hours since their first meeting, and hardly more than that since this entire adventure had dropped on him. His hand, half-closed, rested against her warm, smooth, gently-heaving abdomen.
“She is trying to preserve her identity,” Groton said helpfully. “But it isn’t an entirely physical thing. She requires an experience — emotional, sexual, spiritual — the words are hardly important.”
“Sexual?” The inane query was out before he could halt it.
“Not stimulation in the erotic sense,” Groton replied carefully. “It is possible to copulate without any genuine involvement, after all. Rather, a shared sensation. Your actions and reactions are an important part of it, for they deepen its relevance. When you interact with intimacy, you accomplish something meaningful. She does not exist alone; she needs an audience. Otherwise, like the unread book or the unheard symphony, she is unrealized. Move her, be moved by her; make an experience whose significance will not easily fade. React!”
Afra nodded quickly, and the motion sent a tremor through her flesh and his. “Yes, yes — I think you understand it better than I do,” she said, speaking to Groton.
“Merely your way of publishing for posterity,” he said. “I knew male and female weren’t that different.”
Surprised, she nodded again, and Ivo felt her diaphragm tighten. Still he stood there, unable to initiate this high-minded inspection, averting his eyes uncomfortably. His hand, so dark in contrast to her pale flesh, felt dead, encysted in plastic, immovable and incredibly clumsy.
“Ivo,” she said, “It’s my life, my self. I am afraid — I admit it, I announce it, I brag of it. I need this reassurance, and I think you will need it too, once we get into this, this cycle. So humor me, but do it. You don’t have to like it.”
“I’m afraid I would like it,” he blurted. There was something more fundamental than vanity involved. Ivo grasped that now, but it did not help him. He did not imagine security in handling, and he doubted Groton did, for all his explanations. Women, more than men, were made for such caresses. Publishing a book made sense; this—
“Where are you afraid to touch me?” Afra demanded, nervous and impatient. “The UN won’t hold off forever.” She grabbed at his hand again and lifted it in both of hers forcing his fingers to uncurl. “Here?” She plastered his right palm against her left breast.
He had been wrong about the insensitivity of that extremity. Hot/cold shocks ran up his arm and exploded in his consciousness, making him dizzy. React? How could he help it!
“Here?” she demanded again, and rubbed his fingers against the firm lower crease of her left buttock… Ivo snatched his hand away. His entire body was shaking. He felt ridiculous, yet excited.
“Praise God for naïveté,” Afra remarked, not unkindly. “I’m not making passes at you, Ivo. I just have to prove to you that I mean it. There can’t be any prudery for this. Now go ahead, please. There isn’t much time.”
She had accomplished her purpose. After the intimacy of the contacts she had forced upon him, hesitancy was ridiculous. He started at her head, running his fingers over her forehead, her cheeks, her nose, her closed eyelids, stroking her delicate lips, cupping her chin. There were two faint freckles on her neck near the right ear. He combed through her loose hair with splayed fingers, getting the texture of it, finding it more substantial than he had anticipated, more resilient. He circled her sleek white neck and pinched her earlobes gently between thumb and forefinger.
“Bite it, taste it,” she said quietly.
He brushed his lips to her ear. He knew her and loved her — guiltily.
He closed his eyes and ran his hands down one arm and then the other, feeling the smooth outlines of bone and flesh and sinew and skin, while she stood submissively. It was like a dream — more than a dream, for she was fair in every part and in every physical respect. The tonus of her moderate musculature was good; the curves and planes were without tactile blemish. Her fingers were slender and finely molded; the hollows around her collarbones perfectly sculptured. Only in her armpits was there roughness: the stubble of hair shaved clean a few days before, growing back already. This reminder that she was not an animated statue shook him again; he was handling her.
Her breasts were heavy but not as large as they had seemed by eye, nor did the nipples project so much — until he touched them. Internal texture of the breast was not consistent; pressure showed up the clumped masses of the mammary glands beneath. Men, he thought, had been so fascinated with this distinguishing mark of the female that they had identified the species through it: mammalian. Yet the feature typical of it — not the species, he remembered now, the class — the most typical feature was hair. The mammals were hairy-bodied. Even whales had some pubic hair…
Eyes still closed, he brought his errant mind back to business. To the sides the breasts faded into lightly covered ribs, that in turn dropped off into a much wider space above the hips than he had suspected. Her back was almost flat, mounded by the shoulder blades on either side, ridged by the backbone down the center. The ribs angled up in front to disappear somewhere near the solar plexus.
Her buttocks as his hands experienced them were astonishingly generous, the soft flesh overlapping onto hip and thigh. In front, the stomach and abdomen were rounded, projecting more than he expected, and the hips were so wide he had to open his eyes to verify his location.
Afra’s eyes were closed; she was not watching him or reacting to his increasingly personal explorations in any overt way. He did not know whether that pleased him or disturbed him.
Her hips and buttocks were normal, considering the sex and general health of the subject. He had been judging by his own anatomy, and his slowly traveling hands had magnified her dimensions unrealistically. He closed his eyes again, kneeled and continued.
He touched her pubic hair and passed over it lightly, finding no more reason to probe within it than he had to feel the insides of her ears, nose or mouth. Her legs were braced somewhat apart; he ran his hands down the insides of her thighs, up again and around to the projections of the glutei maximi behind. Then down over the large muscles of the legs, under greater tension than those of the arms or rear, and to the knees, far more esthetic than his own.