She stopped feeling with her head. She just let her skin take over, let the muscles deep in her gut go to work with the thrust, thrust. .. thrust that became the geometric center of her universe. She rode wave after wave of the heat that flooded her. She closed her eyes and... absorbed.
After a time she could not count, Jory's hips stopped pumping. The arch of his pelvis stopped thudding into hers. His shoulders sagged, and the skin of his abdomen relaxed slickly against hers. He was not heavy at all, more like a child who had crept into her arms for a motherly cuddle.
They hung like that, suspended from her shoulders and neck wedged up against the wall, supported by her hips where they jammed into the beds thin mattress. His breathing eased to a gentle, damp puff against her skin. After a few moments, he lifted his head and began to nuzzle her slackened breasts again.
"Hey! No more," she protested, but her voice came out a whisper.
"Didn't you like it?"
"Of course I did. But once is enough."
"Once is never enough," he murmured. His lips began to snail-walk toward her right nipple.
"I mean it." She struggled up on one elbow, rolling him gently off on his side.
Jory curled into a loose fetal position. His hand casually passed down between his legs and . . . Demeter stared. His glans and testicles had disappeared. His lower belly was as smooth as a girls. She could see daylight through his crotch. He had not simply pushed his male equipment back between his legs. It had completely disappeared.
"How did you do that?"
"Do what?" He roused, seeming perplexed.
"That thing with your cock and..."
"Oh, that!" He laughed. "One of the advantages of being a Creole. We can put the jewels out of harm's way." He slid a finger down there, and she heard a sound like parting Velcro. A tip of pink skin peeked out of a slit that was placed far too low on his body for a fly. It looked disturbingly like a vagina's lips.
"Airtight seal, too," he commented idly.
Demeter fought off a wave of otherness that threatened to change him from a simple, carefree young male to something alien and lizardlike.
"Why did you put a—a shirt, is it?—over the computer terminal?" he asked suddenly.
"I don't like anybody watching when I... do it. That kind of breaks the mood for me."
"Who would be watching?"
'Well, the computer link was on, wasn't it? It's on all the time."
"So? Who would be watching?" he insisted.
"The grid. The machines."
"Yeah, but no body is watching. They're computers, Demeter. Don't you have them in Texas?"
"Not in our bedrooms. And we can turn them off if we want."
Jory chuckled. "Maybe you think you turn them off ... Anyway, they don't care about things like that."
"How do you know they don't?"
"They don't have any reason to. Why would they?"
"I don't know what reasons a computer might have. Neither do you," she added.
"All right," he agreed. "So, next time, I'll tell them to blank the optics in this room."
"You're taking a lot for granted, aren't you?" Demeter was thinking about his casual use of "next time," but decided not to make an issue of it. After all, the sex really had been good. "I mean, you're dealing with an intelligent system," she pointed out.
"That's still to be proven."
"Okay then, a 'self-programming system that exhibits a high degree of volition.' Either way, could you trust it to do what you told it? And how could you prove it had obeyed you? I mean, it might just switch off the ready light and go on watching."
"Well, you wouldn't know, I guess." He had a thoughtful look, which seemed strange on him. "But, again, what difference does it make? The grid won't go whispering to your friends about it. You'll never know the difference."
"I'll know."
He sighed. "You're a complicated person, Demeter. More complicated than anybody else I know."
"We're like that, we—" She paused. Coghlan had been about to say "we humans," which would have been a direct insult. That sense of other overwhelmed her again. "—Earth people," she finished lamely.
"Must be your culture," he said. "Older and more, um ... devious."
Demeter let the word slide.
"Say, that reminds me." Jory brightened. "Do you want to go back to the Valles tomorrow? If so, we'd better get another reservation in. The men who were using those proxies will probably be wanting them again. They're supposed to be traveling—I mean, in the flesh this time—but the grid shows them due back in Tharsis Montes tomorrow."
"Oh, Jory! I can't! I've got a date—an appointment with your friend Lole. We're going out to hunt some water. ... But who are they, these people?" Demeter asked casually. Beneath her surface composure, her senses were coming alert. She remembered those strange pebbles she had found in the Valles geologic formation when she first wired into the touring machine.
"It's a Mr. Suk, up here from United Korea. He took a proxy for himself and one for his servant, too.... Very big of him."
Coghlan's flesh went suddenly cold. She could feel little nervous bumps rise along the skin of her arms.
"You mean 'Sun,'" she corrected him without any particular emphasis. "The man's name is Sun." "Oh. You know him?"
"No, no. But, like most New Asians, the Koreans put the family name first. That's all."
"I didn't know that," Jory said. "Kinda neat. . . Mister Sun. Lucky ol' Sun."
In a moment, the boy was asleep.
Chapter 6
Shadows on the Horizon
Unlike the inflated plastic domes that Demeter Coghlan had walked through on her last visit to the colony's surface structures, the lock complex was a solid building. It was erected out of composite panels that keyed into I-beam frames with lattice buttressing from the outside. The raised floor felt solid underfoot. The walls looked as if they would even stand up under a pressure loss.
Demeter was not feeling particularly good about herself this morning. Her tryst with Jory the afternoon before—and she had not asked him to stay the night— had left a surprisingly sour taste in her mouth. Sure, she liked sex. It was one of the great pastimes, especially good for making new friends and influencing people. But not with children. Not even with muscular man-boys like the Creole. What the two of them had shared, struggled through . . . endured . . . had not been love. It was not even good, healthy sex. More like a fumbling rape that had gone uncontested.
It was not clear to Demeter which of them was the rapist. The trouble with playing among the chronologically challenged, like Jory, was all that groping, grasping, hurry-hurry-or-I'll-wet-my-pants stuff. Aside from being over too soon for Demeter's taste, it lacked the necessary control and self-discipline that kept the . . . encounter from becoming demanding and potentially turning violent. Grasping could too easily become hitting if she didn't rise fast enough.
Demeter liked a firm hand with her sex—not a whip hand.
Still, at the defining moment, she herself had been eager enough. Demeter supposed it was because both of them had been taking neural induction from that tunnel-boring machine. All those concrete sensations pouring into nervous systems that were not quite ready for them. The operators who guided those machines must be either eunuchs or brain cases. Or maybe both.