Needless to say, such a lifelong regimen has produced a breed of human with not much in common with the rest of us. Nothing but death will stop them, and death is meaningless if you're in my shoes, because if, for instance, Izzy had not completed his mission at the time of his death, someone else would be along soon to rectify the oversight. And if I managed to kill Charonese number two, there would be a number three, and a number four.
The population of Charon was about five million. I'd have to kill a few hundred a day just to break even.
As if. So far I'd killed one through luck and evaded another twice, again, mostly through luck. And if I killed Isambard...
What would number two be like? I didn't think they had sent their champion killer to snuff an actor.
THE DISCOVERY OF SEX
Part Four of a Series
by Hildy Johnson
They tried to warn him.
"It's not like anything you've experienced as a boy," they said.
"Come on, Doc," Sparky said. "I'm thirty years old. You think I haven't had sex?"
Well, of course he'd had sex. Or what passes for sex in one whose puberty has been arrested for many years. And I'm sure he enjoyed it. There was a joke going around school when I was young: Sparky is about to get into bed with one of his young fans. (We all assumed that young fan would someday be us.) He pulls down his trousers and the girl stares. "Who do you think you're going to satisfy with that little thing?" She laughs. And Sparky says, "Me."
They say size doesn't matter, and it's true, to a point. Sixteen inches would be nightmarish. Two inches... Are you in yet, darling? Sparky's measurement has never been a secret. One must assume he had a lot of charitable partners.
So that alone would be a big difference in his experience: being with a woman who wasn't faking anything.
But no matter how considerate we are in the sack, for most of us the primary urge is a rather selfish one, isn't it? Fess up. Is the experience a total loss if you get off, even if he or she didn't? Gee whiz, I'm sorry, hon, I'll do better next time, and... zzzzzzzzz.
The doctors told him what he'd been having were "dry" orgasms, sometimes called "infantile" erections. He felt like he was turned on, and he felt like he was coming, but he didn't know the half of it.
Puberty. A time of exciting and dreadful change. A time of confusion. A time of exploration. Most of us get about a year to adjust to it.
Sparky had about a week....
Ken Valentine leaped up, bounced once on the giant bed, and hit the floor running. He ran right up the wall, seeing himself as Donald O'Connor in Singin' in the Rain, only Donald O'Connor wasn't naked. Turned a back flip and landed running again. Jumped to the ceiling, shoved himself down to the floor, and began caroming off the walls like a demented kangaroo.
Back in the bed, a lump of sheets and comforters stirred. A hand emerged and cautiously peeled back enough covers to expose disheveled hair, a forehead, and two slightly bruised eyes. The eyes followed Ken's progress around the room. Then the rest of the face was exposed and Hildy Johnson sat up in the bed.
"You've got more energy than three litters of puppies," she said.
"I know, I know!" he shouted, and bounced some more.
They were in the penthouse suite of one of the better hotels in King City. It had been the nearest refuge when Ken began feeling the urge down in the lobby, while Hildy was making yet another attempt to interview him concerning the onset of puberty. Perhaps onslaught would be a better word, she thought. Or maybe attack.
Try blitzkrieg.
There was no law against going at it right there in the lobby, but that wasn't Hildy's style; she had been raised to believe public sex was uncouth. Besides, Kenneth was filthy rich, and she'd always wanted to stay in a room like this. She'd managed to restrain him long enough to reach the elevator. By then, there was a real danger he'd start humping the potted plants. Since this biological banzai, Sparky really needed to be kept on a leash.
The room had a spa big enough to bathe a herd of elephants. She'd pushed him into it and surrendered to the inevitable. The bed was fifteen feet on a side and they'd debauched every square foot. Sometimes it seemed more of a war game than lovemaking. Hildy saw her redoubts of pillow and blanket fall to his relentless assaults over and over again. Not that she was much of a fighter. But with such an aggressive partner, she got a kick out of resisting for a while, before allowing her positions to be invaded. She even had a few bruises, a first for her. But she gave as good as she got.
It was just about the best sex she'd ever had, but now she was in the mood for an armistice. She didn't think Ken was.
"Why didn't anyone ever tell me?" he shouted, for possibly the three hundredth time. He leaped into the bed, bounced over to Hildy, and yanked the blankets away from her. She was pale and nude and perfect, with patches of pinkness here and there. He crawled from her feet to her chest, making obeisance at various stations of the corpus, fondly remembering what this was for, what they'd done with that, what had happened here and here and here. He collapsed across her body, resting his head on her moist breasts.
"If I'd only known," he breathed in her ear. "I feel like I wasted fifteen years. Hell, I only have maybe three, four hundred years left! And there are billions of women in the system. Billions!"
"Maybe even a few dozen who don't want to fuck you," Hildy pointed out.
"Impossible! How could they possibly want to miss... this!"
"How indeed. Just plain cruelty, I'd think."
"Exactly! Exactly! Cruel to both of us! What possible reason could there be to not make love?"
"Hmmm. Soreness?"
He frowned. "You aren't sore, are you?"
"Honey, I... never mind. Aren't you?"
"A little," he admitted.
"Then why don't we call a time-out, and finish the interview?"
"Interview? Interview? Is that what you call this?" He kissed her lips, and her breasts.
"That's what it started out to be. Remember? This morning? The hotel lobby? We were going to have breakfast?"
"Breakfast?" He seemed to be having trouble with words longer than four letters. "Oh, yeah. Breakfast. God, am I ever hungry." He reached across her and punched a button on the headboard. "Send up a lot of breakfast," he said.
"Yes, sir. What would you like?" a female voice replied.
"A lot. A lot of everything. Make it real fast, and I'll tip triple. Including you, sweetheart, if you aren't a computer."
"I'm not a computer," said the voice, "and it will be real fast."
"Okay," said Sparky, turning back to Hildy. "What do you want to know?"
Hildy put a fingertip to her left temple and twisted. The pupil of her left eye began to glow a deep red, like a deer caught in headlights.
"Recording," she said, formally. Sitting there naked on the bed, she noticed an almost imperceptible change in his attitude. It was something performers, actors, fashion models did. The director yells "Action!" The spotlight hits the singer on the stage, the photographer lifts his camera, and the people turn on. Or switch to a different level of reality, Hildy thought. The shoulders move, the teeth get brighter somehow, the eyes twinkle. It was a little scary, but not half so much as the other end of the process, when the director yells "Cut!" The smile collapses. The charisma is stored, way back wherever people who have it, keep it. She had to cut through that before she'd get anything useful.