Sex after their union had been, in some ways, many times better than it had ever been before, since their shared consciousness could feel the physiological responses of both bodies, and each body was capable of instant reaction to the needs of the other. For more then a year after their transformation, they’d amused themselves doing it in every position their limber physiques could achieve. They still did, whenever I wasn’t available. I wasn’t the first to note that, directed at linked pairs, “go fuck yourself” was not an obscenity, but a reasonable suggestion. (They sometimes thanked those who flung those words in anger with a sweet appreciation that drove those hostile people crazy.) Still, sex with each other amounted to masturbation. They still had only one soul, which could get lonely, and that soul required an other, one capable of seeing them as a single person and not as a pair.
The first counterintuitive thing about being that other is that I never felt excluded, ever. I felt outnumbered from time to time, but it was a wry kind of irritation, identical to what I would have felt in the presence of anybody capable of out-thinking me. But there was no real sense of being the odd woman out in a crowd. They were just the other person, and the best kind of other person for any lasting relationship: the kind who was just a little bit more than I could handle.
The second counterintuitive thing about the Porrinyards had to do with their eagerness for me to undergo the procedure myself, and join them as a third.
I wanted that myself. It was impossible to be with them and not want what they had. But it was also impossible to want that without fearing what would come with it. Forget the reluctance people have just paying lip service to the commitment it takes to stay with another person forever. Imagine how much more difficult it is to take that step knowing that once you do, the person you’re committing to will no longer be the same person you care about now. Imagine that you won’t be yourself, either. Imagine that you’ll exist in the same skin, without any secrets of your own. Imagine looking back on the person you are now, and the person you love now, from the judgmental perspective of someone who isn’t really either one of you.
That was the future we faced. We wanted to link. We hoped we would, someday. But if we ever did, it would be the end of me and the end of the gestalt they were now. Andrea Cort and the Porrinyards would both be gone, replaced by a new entity who had a lot in common with us but who was, for all intents and purposes, someone else, someone who might not even like us. Someone we might not want to be.
Someone who, on top of everything else, would be alone again, and once again driven to find love. With the domestic circumstances even more complicated.
Was my resistance to becoming their Third the ultimate failure or the ultimate triumph of romantic love?
Answer: Yes.
And also: No.
Again, both answers were equally accurate.
For a full year now I hadn’t had the slightest idea what to do.
And some women think they have a dilemma because their men keep leaving the toilet seat up.
There’s another paradox, difficult for people outside our relationship to comprehend, something we took advantage of now: the convenience of multitasking.
The Porrinyards don’t always need to do everything in unison. One can sleep while the other eats. One can interrogate a suspect while the other pursues a different line of inquiry worlds away. One can play while the other works. They both get the benefit of every experience, real-time, but they don’t need to collaborate on every activity at every second to accomplish that. Two heads mean being able to concentrate on two things at one time, without compromising either.
To wit:
The Porrinyards had emerged from stasis so horny they could hardly bear it. They usually did. It may have had to do with the energy spike that always follows any space traveler’s release from bluegel, but they had lust to burn, and they had wanted nothing more since our arrival at Layabout but to get me someplace private and rip my clothes off.
The long delays since our arrival, from the sudden terror of the assassination attempt to the long hours of tedium in Pescziuwicz’s protective custody, had brought them all the way from simmer to boil.
I felt the same way. But we had work to do, background to acquire if we were to face our next meeting with the Bettelhines prepared, and very little time to accomplish that as well as scratch our mutual overwhelming itch.
But if even a single-skull can make love while distracted, imagine how much easier it is for somebody with that much more shared mindspace to play around with.
While we were soaping each other in the shower, which as advertised offered real water as warm as liquid fire and enough water pressure to strum our skin like stringed instruments; while Oscin’s tongue explored my lips and Skye’s nimble hands spread the euphorics on my ass; while I closed my eyes, lost track of which Porrinyard was doing what and forgot to care; while I wept for my own cowardice in not joining their link and moments later found my cheeks strain from smiling; while I gasped from her touch and threw my hands around his shoulders, there was no single moment when I caught either one of them absent. But each one of them was present, and concentrating on the act alone, only about sixty percent of the time. The remaining forty percent of the time, at least one of them was paused, that half of their shared consciousness tapping their shared hytex link for more background on some of the questions we’d been handed.
That protocol to absorb information at a hundred thousand words per second, shifting back and forth between Oscin and Skye, didn’t prevent either one of them from enjoying the our interlude, or from perceiving it sans interruption. Oscin could be knee-deep in the history of the K’cenhowten religious wars, giving it his full attention, and still feel every individual sensation Skye felt as I knelt before her. He wasn’t being short-changed at all, nor was she when his body was needed. As long as one was present, both were.
Is it better when neither one’s driving blind at any point? For them it is. Twice as much viewpoint to enjoy, at every moment. I like to tell them it’s better for me, too, but the truth is that I don’t often catch them at it. There have been times when only one of them was physically present, the other absent because of one errand or another, and I could have sworn that I felt the other there, not just in spirit but in physical form. I once made love to Oscin and felt Skye touching me, even though she was three thousand kilometers away at the time. And there was no point in asking them how I could feel her there, when their only response would be an amused, “Well, she was.” Of course she’d been. But from the point of a poor, broken single-skulclass="underline" What the hell?
On the other hand, I didn’t understand how starship propulsion worked either, and that hadn’t stopped me from zipping back and forth across civilized space for half my life. As long as we get where we want to go, who cares how it works?
When we were done, I rested my head on Oscin’s shoulders, allowing him to carry me to the bed while Skye dabbed my back with a towel large enough to sop up a continent. He placed me on the bed, accepted another kiss, and lay on his side facing me, while Skye spooned me, her skin still steaming from the shower.
We’d be days coming down from this glow.
I tried and failed to replace my exhausted grin with a look of determined concentration. “So what have you got?”
Skye massaged my shoulder blades. “The Khaajiir.”
The K’cenhowten were squat, neckless things with an affinity for shallow water and a phenotype that would have resembled the terrestrial turtle, if turtles walked on their hind legs and had shells covered with spikes. From appearance alone you would expect them to be warlike, and they did like to pick fights, though their definition of picking a fight was so leisurely that you could swallow their provocations for centuries on end before realizing that they wanted you to shoot back. They’d once owned over a thousand worlds, and still called what they had an empire, but the incursion of races with speed settings above interminable now limited them to less than two hundred, none of which anybody else wanted.