When they were in Eitel’s room Agila said, “First, I would please like to have some mint tea, yes? It is my addiction, you know. My aphrodisiac.”
Sizzling impatience seared Eitel’s soul. God only knew how long it might take room service to fetch a pot of tea at this hour, and at a million dollars a night he preferred not to waste even a minute. But there was no way to refuse. He could not allow himself to seem like some panting schoolboy.
“Of course,” he said.
After he had phoned, he walked around behind her as she stood by the window peering into the mists of the night. He put his lips to the nape of her neck and cupped his hands over her breasts. This is very crazy, he thought. I am not touching her real body. This is only some synthetic mock-up, a statue of flesh, a mere androidal shell.
No matter. No matter. He was able to resist her beauty, that illusion, that figment. That beauty, astonishing and unreal, was what had drawn him at first, but it was the dark secret alien underneath that ruled him now. That was what he hoped to reach: the alien, the star-woman, the unfathomable being from the black interstellar deeps. He would touch what no man of Earth had ever touched before.
He inhaled her fragrance until he felt himself swaying. She was making an odd purring sound that he hoped was one of pleasure.
There was a knock at the door. “The tea is here,” she said.
The waiter, a boy in native costume, sleepy, openly envious of Eitel for having a woman like Agila in his room, took forever to set up the glasses and pour the tea, an infinitely slow process of raising the pot, aiming, letting the thick tea trickle down through the air. But at last he left. Agila drank greedily, and beckoned to Eitel to have some also. He smiled and shook his head.
She said, “But you must. I love it so—you must share it. It is a ritual of love between us, eh?”
He did not choose to make an issue of it. A glass of mint tea more or less must not get in the way, not now.
“To us,” she said, and touched her glass to his.
He managed to drink a little. It was like pure liquid sugar. She had a second glass, and then, maddeningly, a third. He pretended to sip at his. Then at last she touched her hand to a clasp on her shoulder and her metal-mesh sheath fell away.
They had done their research properly, in the body-making labs of Centaurus. She was flawless, sheer fantasy, with heavy breasts that defied gravity, slender waist, hips that would drive a Moroccan camel-driver berserk, buttocks like pale hemispheres. They had given her a navel, pubic hair, erectile nipples, dimples here and there, the hint of blue veins in her thighs. Unreal, yes, Eitel thought, but magnificent.
“It is my fifth traveling body,” she said. “I have been Arcturan, Steropid, Denebian, Mizarian—and each time it has been hard, hard, hard! After the transfer is done, there is a long training period, and it is always very difficult. But one learns. A moment finally comes when the body feels natural and true. I will miss this one very much.”
“So will I,” Eitel said.
Quickly he undressed. She came to him, touched her lips lightly to his, grazed his chest with her nipples.
“And now you must give me a gift,” she said.
“What?”
“It is the custom before making love. An exchange of gifts.” She took from between her breasts the pendant she was wearing, a bit of bright crystal carved in disturbing alien swirls. “This is for you. And for me—”
Oh, God in heaven, he thought. No!
Her hand closed over the Olmec jade figurine that was still sitting on the dresser.
“This,” she said.
It sickened him. That little statuette was eighty thousand on the international antiquities market, maybe a million or two to the right E-T buyer. A gift? A love-token? He saw the gleam in her eye, and knew he was trapped. Refuse, and everything else might be lost. He dare not show any trace of pettiness. Yes. So be it. Let her have the damned thing. We are being romantic tonight. We are making grand gestures. We are not going to behave like a petit-bourgeois Swiss art peddler. If she confuse you, it can cost you, David had said. Eitel took a deep breath.
“My pleasure,” he said magnificently.
He was an experienced and expert lover; supreme beauty always inspired the best in him; and pride alone made him want to send her back to Centaurus with incandescent memories of the erotic arts of Earth. His performance that night—and performance was the only word he could apply to it—might well have been the finest of his life.
With the lips and tongue, first. Everywhere. With the fingers, slowly, patiently, searching for the little secret key places, the unexpected triggering-points. With the breath against the skin, and the fingernails, ever so lightly, and the eyelashes, and even the newly sprouting stubble of the cheek. These were all things that Eitel loved doing, not merely for the effects they produced in his bed-partners but because they were delightful in and of themselves; yet he had never done them with greater dedication and skill.
And now, he thought, perhaps she will show me some of her skills.
But she lay there like a wax doll. Occasionally she stirred, occasionally she moved her hips a little. When he went into her, he found her warm and moist—why had they built that capacity in, Eitel wondered?—but he felt no response from her, none at all.
He moved her this way, that, running through the gamut of positions as though he and she were making a training film for newlyweds. Now and then she smiled. Her eyes were always open: she was fascinated. Eitel felt anger rising. She was ever the tourist, even here in his bed. Getting some first-hand knowledge of the quaint sexual techniques of the primitive Earthmen.
Knowing he was being foolish, that he was compounding a foolishness, he drove his body with frantic intensity, rocking rhythmically above her, grimly pushing her on and on. Come on, he thought. Give me a little sigh, a moan, a wriggle. Anything. He wasn’t asking her to come. There was no reason why they should have built that capacity in, was there? The only thing he wanted now was to get some sort of acknowledgement of his existence from her, some quiver of assent.
He went on working at it, knowing he would not get it. But then, to his surprise, something actually seemed to be happening. Her face grew flushed, and her eyes narrowed and took on a new gleam, and her breath began to come in harsh little bursts, and her breasts heaved, and her nipples grew hard. All the signs, yes: Eitel had seen them so many times, and never more welcome than at this moment. He knew what to do. The unslackening rhythm now, the steady building of tension, carrying her onwards, steadily higher, leading her towards that magical moment of overload when the watchful conscious mind at last surrenders to the surging deeper forces. Yes. Yes. The valiant Earthman giving his all for the sake of transgalactic passion, laboring like a galley slave to show the star-woman what the communion of the sexes is all about.
She seemed almost there. Some panting now, even a little gasping. Eitel smiled in pleasant self-congratulation. Swiss precision, he thought: never underestimate it.