The holoprojectors had created an underwater world. Tall green- black strands of kelp wavered in lazy currents. Tiny silver fish glittered among the fronds. The blue light fell through the kelp forest in streaming rays, illuminating the two who floated in the center of the transformed cabin.
Cleet’s long body was heavily muscled, as if Cleet spent much time in a tissue stimulator. The woman’s rich mouth bore a wide, fixed smile. She swam in Cleet’s embrace, accomodating his thrusts with swift graceful movements. He shuddered, and a stream of silvery bubbles came from her laughing mouth.
Bemer turned away from the port, somehow sickened, though he had seen nothing brutal or evil. He sat down in one comer and composed himself to wait.
When Cleet came for him, he was nodding with sleep. Cleet nudged Berner with his boot, and Berner shook his head.
He jumped to his feet. «Sorry,» Berner said.
Cleet’s mask bore a quirky expression, as if Cleet was somehow exasperated with Berner. «You found my performance boring?»
Berner hardly knew what to answer.
«Never mind,» Cleet said. He replaced the personaskeins in their stasis chamber. «To work.»
He led Bemer out into the cabin, where the woman lay motionless on the bed, looking up at the ceiling.
«You know what to do,» Cleet said. «She won’t require the med- unit tonight; just clean her up. Oh, and this time, see that she combs her hair. Perfume her, make her lips red. Take her to her room on the cargo deck; you’ll find what you need. Make her presentable. Then go to your own cubicle. I don’t want you underfoot.»
When Cleet was gone, Bemer unreeled the hose from the bulkhead.
When the water sheeted over her, the woman jerked and rolled away. «Stop for a moment,» she said in a muffled voice. «I feel like a prize hog, just out of the wallow. Were you a hog-washer in another life?»
Berner shut off the water. «Not that I remember,» he said apologetically.
She sat up, and rubbed her hands over her face. Her hands trembled. «Let me stand, at least.»
«Of course,» said Berner.
While he held the hose so that the water fell gently, she scrubbed at her body with the brush, until her pale skin was pink.
He watched in unwilling fascination as she dried herself in the warm air, her body moving slowly from one graceful pose to another.
«All right,» she said, finally. «Let’s go back.»
Her cabin was a dusty place, with a littered vanity in one corner and no other furnishings but a bed. The bed had a shallow woman-shaped cavity and a transparent cover. She sat down on the edge of the bed, seemingly at ease.
He found a pot of lip paint and a jeweled comb on the vanity.
He held out the comb uncertainly. She shook her head calmly. «Would you be so kind?» She turned away, back straight, head up.
He lifted the comb and drew it through her hair; it caught in a tangle. «Be careful,» she said. «Can you believe it, there was a time when I could sit on my hair. I kept it in a braid as thick as my arm and only let it loose for my lovers.»
He worried at the tangle, concentrating all his attention on that problem, so that he would not notice that he was touching a beautiful naked woman.
Gradually the tangle yielded to his efforts and her hair lay sleek and shining.
He stopped, feeling a powerful urge to continue. She turned back toward him and looked into his eyes with a frank curiosity.
«You were gentle,» she said. «But Cleet told me that you were a devotee of a cult that hates women.»
«No,» he said. «Not women. Only the act of coupling with them. Women cannot help what they are.» He felt a curious detachment, and his pronouncement seemed suddenly a bit foolish, a bit naive.
Her regard cooled. «What are they, do you think?»
«Gateways into life... but also gateways into death.» His words felt as thin as paper.
Suddenly she smiled, an odd quirk of the mouth, a bitter amusement. «Well, in my case you’re at least half-right. Bed me and Cleet will kill you.»
He didn’t know what to say, then. After a while he fetched the lip paint and the little fine-pointed brush that lay beside it. He offered them.
«Try your hand,» she said, and closing her eyes, she lifted her face.
His fingers steadied, as the brush traced the relaxed curve of her mouth, and he felt a rush of some almost unendurable emotion. It’s not lust, he thought. I’ve forgotten how to feel that, haven’t I?
«And perfume, he said,» she reminded Berner, when he was done. He had done a passable job with her lips; they glowed a velvety crimson. An odd memory jumped into his mind; he recalled that on some worlds, fashionable women painted their nipples.
He turned away and searched among the perfume vials that crowded the vanity until he found something he liked, a sweet flowery scent with an earthy subnote. He wet his finger with the perfume, touched the pulse at the base of her throat–then, after a moment, the soft fine skin between her breasts. He snatched his hand back, as though she might burn him.
«Sorry,» he said, feeling his face burn.
«I’m somewhat inured,» she said, laughing low–it wasn’t a sound with any humor in it. «You’d have to take far more brutal liberties before you’d earn my enmity.»
Abruptly she slumped; a great weariness filled her eyes. «Well, now I must sleep–and let the bed feed me–if I hope to recover my strength. It hurts more when I’m tired.»
«How can you be so matter-of-fact?» Berner felt a strong simple pity for her.
She shrugged and didn’t answer.
Finally, he sighed and stood. «Myself, I’m so afraid of Cleet that I can’t feel anything else.»
«Cleet knows how to control his possessions–that’s his great genius.» She lay down, lifted her legs into the bed’s recess.
«You must hate him,» he said, and was immediately embarassed, that he had made so foolishly obvious an observation.
«Hate?» she murmured. «Do I hate him? I don’t know... that would be like hating the typhoon that sinks your boat, the disease that steals your health. Like hating death or pain. A pointless exercise, don’t you think?» She shut her eyes.
He closed the bed’s cover and watched as tendrils crept forth from hidden recesses. Thick plastic worms full of nutrient fluid attached themselves to her wrists. Wires no thicker than silver hairs sank into her flesh in dozens of places. Her body began a subtle rippling movement, as the bed worked at maintaining her muscle tone. She smiled, her back arched slightly.
She moved as if in the embrace of a ghostly lover.
He turned and fled to his cubicle.
Cleet released him from his cubicle at irregular times, allowed him to eat, and then ordered him to fetch the woman.
More and more often Berner succumbed to the temptation to watch. He told himself it was the holoprojec- tion that so fascinated him; each time the chamber became a different world, lovely or terrible or incomprehensible.
Sometimes Candypop seemed to take an ambiguous pleasure in the act, face trembling between shame and desire, between smiling and crying. Sometimes she screamed continuously, her features rigid with fear and horror. Most often her expression was unreadable.
After her personaskein timed out, she often lost consciousness for a while. The most alien of Cleet’s creatures put her into a coma-like state, sometimes for hours.
Occasionally she emerged uniryured, but usually Berner would have to carry her to the med-unit to be treated for contusions, sprains, and minor fractures.
«How can you stand it?» he asked one morning as he helped her from the tray.
She shrugged. «What are my alternatives?»