********
Elaine floated disconsolately into the bedroom, and flung herself down on the bed. She did this by rotating the hoverchair 90 degrees; the motion was so automatic by now that she might as well have had legs to propel her body.
She'd had the hoverchair so long, and never even thought of its limitations. But then, she'd rarely left Amaranth Station, and had never been down to a planet's surface since losing her ability to walk under her own power. This was the first time she'd ever been anywhere the chair didn't have a Helmann field to repel against.
The thought of spending the next two weeks having to crawl everywhere terrified and shamed her. The knowledge that she'd have to do it in front of Dusty raised the shame to paralyzing levels.
He already saw her as half a woman; now he'd have his theory proven, and she'd never even had a chance to show him what else she could be.
Lying on her back on the bed, she plucked at the silky fabric of her shirt, and saw the dark curves of her own breasts ripple beneath. She had to laugh at herself. How blatant, how desperate she must have seemed to him. The problem was that she didn't really know how to entice a man anymore. Ten years ago? No problem. Everything was easy then. Walking across a room was easy. Carrying a cup of coffee without spilling it all over yourself.
Then she'd found out what it was to look mortality in the eye. Found out what it was to watch your own body fall out of control. What it was to grow old.
I'm old, she thought. I'm thirty-five, and I'm old.
There had been a time in human history when thirty-five had been old. Hell, for most of human history, eighteen had been old. This rapidly advancing decrepitude, this rotting of her flesh, had been nothing new or unusual. It had been the natural human condition. Every day was just another step into death. Now Elaine found herself alone in a universe of people who, at age thirty-five, were enjoying the flush of youth, and could continue to look forward to it for thirty or forty years yet to come. Only, the universe seemed to have passed her by somehow.
In seventy years, give or take a few decades, the people in Elaine's graduating class, her friends, children of her parents' friends, would be growing old. They would be starting the final decline, eased by technology, and barring bad luck could look forward to an easy and painless death, maybe a hundred and fifty years after their birth.
In ten years, Elaine would be dead, and her death would be neither easy nor painless.
I wonder if that's what Dusty sees, when he looks at me. Mortality. The reminder that, no matter how far we've come as a race, we still must be born and we still must die.
God, I'm getting maudlin, and I haven't even been drinking yet. Much.
A drink sounded good. She'd already had one, waiting for Dusty to return. Maybe it was time for another. Elaine oriented herself vertically and drifted out of the bedroom nook into the main room of the little yacht. She ordered a virgin Scotch and water from the Keys' rather thinly equipped bar, and then, reluctantly, knowing Dusty was right, instructed the Keys to shut down its non-essential life support systems. Climate control, down. System recyc, down. They'd get air and water from outside. Non-essential lighting, down. Windows, down; they'd make do with the portholes in the observation dome if they wanted to see what little there was to see outside.
The only one she couldn't bring herself to disconnect was the gravity.
Elaine floated to the ladder to the observation deck and hovered herself up inside it. When Dusty wasn't around, she spent most of her time up here. It was big enough for one comfortable person, or two slightly cramped. It was also not equipped for someone who didn't carry their chair around with them. Dusty had carried a couple of cushions up from the main room, because he did like to look out at the stars now and again, but Elaine still fancied that this was the one place anywhere that had been made for people like her. A place the exact opposite of the real world. It was a place where normal people weren't entirely comfortable, but she was.
With the windowwalls off, and most of the lights, the room was illuminated only through its natural windows. It did not envelop Elaine with the usual feeling of floating in a sea of stars, but rather, with an enclosed, womblike sort of sensation. She liked it. Rain streaked and beaded on the portholes. She shifted her drink to her artificial hand and touched one window gently, expecting it to feel cold, instead surprised by the slick warmth.
The room was already getting noticeably warmer, as the ship no longer maintained its internal temperature. It's going to be really hot in here before too long, Elaine thought. It's going to be one heck of a couple of weeks.
She sipped at the drink and thought that no matter what anyone said about virgin Scotch mimicking the real thing, she could still tell the difference. She reached up into the sensitive hollow behind her ear and made a little adjustment. She wanted to be just a little bit drunk. Not very. Not yet.
"Elaine?" Dusty's voice came up to her from down below.
"Up here." What did he think, she'd gone outside? She waited a suitably long time (as if she'd come running when he called!), made another little adjustment, and then floated down, hoping to achieve a sort of featherdown-like drifting effect. Sinking is really more like it, she thought. Ungracefully sinking, at that.
********
She was gorgeous.
She floated down from the observation dome like a belle in one of those Gaian epic holovids drifting down a spiral staircase into some ballroom, with a drink balanced in one graceful hand. Only the Gaian belle couldn't really drift; she would always be hampered by the jerky motion of setting one foot in front of the other. Elaine had no feet, so she could float as smoothly as dandelion seeds on the summer air.
Dandelion fluff ... for an instant he had a vivid mental image of the stuff, drifting in a golden sunset. Raymond's memory, or just some random scene from a holovid? He thrust the image away; he didn't want to think about Raymond, not ever, but especially not now. The lights in the main cabin were much dimmer than usual and Elaine's shirt billowed around her body in a way that made Dusty dizzy. Raymond could be allowed no part of this.
"I shut it off, as you can see," Elaine said.
"The lights?"
"Lights, climate control, everything. You'll notice the effects fairly soon, I assure you." Her head ducked slightly. "Everything but the gravity. I'd like to leave that on a bit longer, if you don't mind."
"I don't mind." He nodded at the drink in her hand. "That looks good. Have what you're having?"
Elaine laughed. "I don't think you'll want exactly what I'm having; there's no alcohol on board, remember? But help yourself to whatever I have."
Oh, well. One thing he'd been looking forward to about being planetside was getting drunk, now that he was no longer restricted to Elaine's non-alcoholic bar, but when in Rome ... He found that she had several good Anubian pseudobrews and had the computer make him up a beer. "You seem pretty relaxed for having a virgin drink there. Sure you're not holding back on me?"
"I never said I'm not getting drunk. I can't have alcohol, but I learned long ago ..." She smiled, almost shyly. "Show you a secret. Not even my doctors know this. I learned by accident." She tilted her head forward, the brown hair falling enticingly across her neck. It was hard to see in the dimly lit room, but Dusty caught a metallic glimmer in the soft hollow where her throat met her ear.
"I can make adjustments to the hormone content of my body, to compensate for my reduced endocrine count," Elaine said. "I figured out without too much experimentation that I can mimic the effects of getting drunk. Or high. As smashed as I want to be. No hangover, either, unless I want one."
Dusty grinned. "You are holding out! Good deal! So why bother drinking at all? I mean physically. Like the taste?"
She'd adjusted her chair into the low stationary hover that meant she was sitting down, so he sat too, and she drifted nearer. "Not exactly. Well, yes, I do enjoy having something to carry around. Most social drinkers do. But more than that, it's part of a deal that I made with myself shortly after I discovered that I can do this thing." She sipped from the glass. "Imagine it, Dusty -- an alcoholic high without the repercussions. No physical damage. No hangover. No guilt. How easy it must be to get into that high state and stay there forever." She spoke as if reflecting on someone else's problem. "I carry the drink around to remind me that it is alcohol, after all. And I take no more of the effect than I can drink. I think I overdid it a little just now, so I've actually finished this drink." She raised it quickly, drained it. "Now I can't drink again until I pour myself another."
"If you don't mind my saying," Dusty said, "that seems like ... I dunno. A cop-out. Rationalizing. Sorry, but it's true."
She gave him a long, inscrutable look. "To me, it seemed a very mature, rational decision."
"If you truly fear becoming addicted," Dusty said, "then why are you still drinking? That's the first thing that comes to mind, anyway."
"Well, what do you think? Do you blame me? Wouldn't you drink if you were me? Don't you think I'm doing well by limiting my intoxication?"
"I never said I wouldn't do the same," Dusty protested. "I mean, I doubt if I'd do as well. I'm more of a, what do you call it, an addictive personality."
"You were a memory junkie. I know." Elaine drifted across the room. "Want another drink while I'm up?"
"Sure." His beer was actually only about half-gone, but he thought that he'd be needing another pretty soon here, if the conversation kept going the way it was going. The drink might not have any alcohol, but it helped to have something in his hand.
"Same?"
"Sure."
She brought his drink along with her own. It felt so ... domestic. She handed it to him. He took it, felt the chill of the glass and the quick brush of her warm brown fingers. Was this what it might be, to have a wife?
"You phrased that wrong, by the way."
"What do you mean?" Elaine asked, sipping her Scotch.
"You said was. You mean is. I am."
"You are what?"
"A junkie."
Elaine fixed him with one of her cool stares. "You told me you haven't jacked up in years. Raymond said so too."
He almost choked on his drink.
"You've talked to Raymond?"
"Briefly." Elaine looked away. "He's ... not a very nice man, I guess I'd say."
A laugh caught in Dusty's throat, didn't quite make it out. "I'd say."
"Look, he didn't ... we didn't ... if you're thinking..." She cleared her throat. "Anyway, you said you hadn't jacked up, and I believe you."
It was easy to forget how sheltered Elaine's life had been. In some ways she wasn't nearly as old as her chronological age suggested. Dusty decided not to worry about when or how she'd talked to Raymond. It was more disturbing than he wanted to admit, knowing that enough of Raymond still existed to hold a conversation that Dusty didn't remember. He liked to think that Ray was dead, but the image that sometimes came to mind was probably more accurate, imagining Raymond Alvarez chained to the wall of a dungeon deep in his mind, trapped in rat-infested darkness far from the light. If Ray ever came out far enough to hurt Elaine, Dusty swore that he'd kill him, even if it meant killing himself.
"Look, Elaine," he said. "I don't know if I can really explain this myself. You don't ever stop being a junkie. It just gets easier to deny yourself a fix. Just because you haven't done it lately doesn't mean you're not ... I mean, I still walk down the street and every piece of electronics I see reminds of the one I'll never ever again let anywhere near my head. I'm afraid to stick a music jack into my skull because one part of me is afraid it might do something I don't want, and the other part of me wants it to. Does that make sense?"
"I ... don't know," Elaine said.
Bingle squeezed his wrist gently. The little plant's touch relaxed him with its affectionate familiarity, pulling him back to the now. His eyes had gone to her, and so had Elaine's, following his look.
"Hey," Dusty said, wanting to break the tension. "I taught her a trick."
"I didn't know you could train krakens."
"Neither did I. Bingle's still young, and babies of any species are impressionable. Maybe it makes a difference."
"Oh dear," said Elaine. "You? Teaching the young?"
"Watch," Dusty said.
He set the unopened beer between his knees and steadied it with one hand.
"I don't know if I want to watch this," Elaine said.
Dusty grinned at her. "Bingle, Daddy's thirsty." He let the kraken slide from his wrist onto the top of the beer. The creature wound itself around the damp container and started to lever itself under the pullstrip. After a few hunches of the kraken's little body (or stem?), the strip ripped with a satisfying hiss.
"Good girl, Bingle. Good plant."
Elaine laughed. He looked up, surprised to hear that sound. She was watching the little plant raptly. Her dark eyes were alight with childlike delight, her lips parted. "Dusty, it moved!"
Dusty just barely stopped himself from the first three or five responses that came to mind. "Krakens do," he said instead.
"Well, I know they do. I just never saw anything like -- It's so cute!"
"Cute?" Dusty looked down at what resembled, to him, a bit of seaweed wriggling intently across his leg. It was headed for Elaine. He wondered how she'd respond to this, and soon found out: she laughed again and put her hand out, then pulled it back.
"Do you mind if I hold it?"
"Aw, hell no." She rested her hand on his thigh, palm up, and the kraken wiggled its way on in. Dusty could feel Elaine's warmth through his light slacks. Bingle crawled up over her fingers and she laughed again.
"It tickles!"
"You get used to it."
Elaine cupped the kraken delicately in both hands; Dusty was aware of a cooler spot upon his thigh, the absence of her body heat as her hand drew away. Bingle found its way to Elaine's wrist and settled itself in the accustomed spot. Elaine's eyes shone. "Where did you say you got it?"
"On a space station. They wouldn't allow pets, so I bought Bingle from a guy who swore up and down that plants were excluded from the regs. He was wrong. I found out later and got deported." The story came easier now; pieces of it were filtering back. He still couldn't remember where it had happened and hoped she didn't ask. "Some people buy souvenir T-shirts," he added with a shrug.
"It's cute." Reluctantly Elaine teased it free of her wrist and let it slide from her palm into Dusty's. Maybe her fingers lingered just a little longer against his than they really had to.
The Keys was definitely getting warmer. Elaine's white shift clung to her skin, and Dusty felt his own clothing doing the same.
"I think it's time," Elaine said suddenly.
"Huh?"
"Time to shut down the rest of it." Elaine tossed back her non-alcoholic drink. The quick movement of one hand to the base of her skull might have passed unnoticed, a mere adjustment to her hair, if he hadn't known what she was doing. No doubt she'd had plenty of practice at getting drunk without being noticed. She drifted to the room's little food nook, lifted the lid and deposited her glass, all very casually. Then she turned to look at him, and her dark eyes, in the dimly lit room, both melted and broke his heart.
"Would you do it?" she asked, in a voice barely above a whisper.
"Do it ...?"
"Turn off the gravity. It's easy." She pointed to the console. "The computer will walk you through it."
Dusty couldn't explain his hesitation, even to himself. "Watch me screw up, and have us walking on the ceiling," he said finally.
Elaine choked on a laugh. "Please let me lie down before you do it," she said, and floated into the bedroom.
Was that a come-on ... or just Elaine being Elaine? Dusty wondered.
"I'm ready," Elaine called.
Dusty did the thing as she had asked. The lights flickered slightly, but he felt nothing, not even a pop in his ears. There was no sound from the bedroom.
He entered softly.
Elaine lay on the bed, on her back, her hands laid across her stomach. Her hair spread out in a broad dark corona about her head. The white shirt was unbuttoned halfway to her navel and its sheer folds fell across her breasts and exposed a chevron of darker chest. Below her crossed hands, the fabric dipped to the bed in white swaths. As accustomed as he was getting to the absence of her legs, Dusty still got an unpleasant chill every now and again. Such as now. Those times when he wanted to see her whole, when he almost expected it, and then was caught anew by the rude ending of her body just below her ribs.
He stepped across the hoverchair and sat carefully on the edge of the bed. Elaine turned her head as the bed bent with his weight, and her eyes flickered half-open. "I feel rather heavy," she said. "Pardon if I don't rise, sir."
"Pardoned," Dusty said. He placed a hand over hers. This time, she did not pull away. Her head turned a little more; her chest lifted slightly with the inhalation when she said:
"Just to avoid any possibility of misunderstanding, you did come in here to fuck me, correct?"
"Uh," said Dusty. "Technically correct, I suppose."
Elaine closed her eyes, as if a profound weight had lifted from her shoulders. He could not stop looking at the dark lashes brushing her cheeks. "Oh good," she said. "I'd hoped so."
She squeezed his hand; Dusty squeezed back, and then let his hand slip from hers, onto the loose fabric upon her stomach.
"Is this okay?"
"Yes," she said softly. "That's okay."
He ran his hand under her loose shirt. His fingertips, scarred by a lifetime of physical labor, seemed to become drunk upon her soft skin. He slid his hand up her belly until he could cup the curve of her breast. It filled his palm nicely. His thumb found the firm little kernel of her nipple, circled it, tickled it.
She laid her hand on his thigh and ran it up to the warm hollow at its base, wrapped her hand around the heat there.
"Elaine," said Dusty. Elaine -- her name was liquid and nice to roll around on his tongue.
"Dusty." She reached up, cupped the back of his neck and drew his head down. Her mouth was open, inviting. He reached a hesitant tongue, ran it around the edges of her lips. Hers rose to meet his. Warm, sensuous, inviting. She tasted as good as he'd thought she would.
"Be gentle, Dusty," Elaine whispered, letting him go. "I'm not sure if I know how to do this. I think I can figure it out, but I'll need some help along the way. Pretend I'm a virgin, if it helps."
"If you're a virgin, hon, I'm a Gaian monk."
Elaine started laughing. She laughed so hard she almost choked. There was a desperate edge to it. When she stopped laughing, she lay with her eyes closed. Dusty lay beside her, and went on rubbing her nipple with his thumb. Memories crowded close, of other girls, the touch of their hands, the smell of their skin. Most of the memories he knew weren't his. Some might have been. Images -- a single black hair curling against a white thigh, a butterfly painted on a fingernail, a rose tattoo bisected by the spaghetti strap of an evening gown. A hundred different pairs of women's eyes, some of men, some of children. He remembered a five-year-old girl having sex, and didn't know if he was the child in that memory, or her molester.
He focused himself on the now by concentrating on Elaine, her smell, her softness and warmth. Did she anchor herself now with his presence, he wondered, or in some other way that she had learned through the years?
"Elaine. I don't really know how to ask you this."
She opened her eyes. "You want to know if I can have sex."
"Well ... I'd wondered."
"You're about to find out."
"Elaine, I'm serious."
"So am I." She turned her face toward him. He could feel her breath on the side of his cheek when she spoke. Her hand still cradled his penis, as his did her breast. "This body ... this new body of mine, however long it lasts me ... it's equipped to have sex. Truly. I made sure of that. But I've never tried it out. I haven't had sex in a long time, Dusty. Not since I've looked ... like this. No one wants to touch me. Especially not on Amaranth Station. You have no idea how they hate me there, for my disease."
"I know that, but I still don't understand why."
"You wouldn't. Your homeworld is not the same as mine. Where I come from ..." She hesitated, and raised her right hand, wrist upturned. "Do you see?"
He saw a pale stippling on the dark skin of her forearm. Thought for a moment that it was some sort of outward sign of the disease he knew was rotting her body away. Like leprosy. But it was only scarring.
"From tests," Elaine said. "By the time a child of Amaranth Station reaches adulthood, he or she has been tested so many times ... you could hardly believe how many times. They could take samples from anywhere on the body, from far less conspicuous places. But they don't. Why? So you can look at another citizen's arms and know that she's been tested so much she's got to be clean. Genetically unmodified. Most Amaranthian families can trace their lineage back, uncontaminated, to the nineteenth century and even earlier. Including my own."
"Obviously yours was contaminated, as you say, at some point along the way." He winced. Way to be sympathetic, there, old boy.
She laid her hand down on her chest, next to his. "Everyone is, Dusty. I doubt if there's an individual alive who couldn't find multiple examples of reproductive genetic manipulation somewhere along his or her family tree. It was universal in the twenty-first century, widespread throughout the twenty-second. It wasn't enough to cure your own case of ... of whatever, of sickle cell anemia or cancer or myopia or whatnot. You had to fix it in your gonads, so every generation to come could reap the benefits. Reap the benefits unto the nth generation. Benefits like mine."
"They did a lot of good for us, I guess, those ancestors of ours. I can't even imagine how they dealt with some of the things they cured in us. Even little things. Can you imagine being born with crooked teeth? How would you eat?"
Elaine laughed, a short, harsh bark. "You know, I've thought about it sometimes, if I had it in my power to go back and stop them, or just talk to them, tell them what the consequences of their actions would be. They meant to do good. Hell, they did a lot of good. If I'd be willing to cause so many people to suffer from genetic diseases they eradicated ... just to spare myself this ... aw, damn it, Dusty, I didn't mean to go all maudlin on you. I'm not used to talking about this. On Amaranth, it's a vulgar topic. I don't know --have I offended you?"
"You're kidding, right? I don't offend so easy, kiddo."
"No, perhaps not." Elaine touched his face, the scars, the places where his nose had been broken through the years -- he knew it had happened, though he could not remember how. "I hope not. I hope you won't be ... disgusted by the rest of me. In some sense I am a virgin. The physical parts of me that gave of themselves have been long since gone. But during some of the reconstruction, I made sure they gave me the option of having sex. Just in case I ever found anyone who wanted to do it with me." She grinned briefly. "Not that my new, uh, parts haven't had a perfectly good workout, just between you, me and my hand. But I've never had anyone else in there, other than some of my doctors. Uh, I'm not saying this very well, am I?"
In perfect honesty, Dusty dreaded seeing what sort of technological solution her doctors might have devised, but he couldn't very well say that. He resumed rubbing her nipple. "Just show me."
She moved her hand to cover his. "A little down. A little bit this way." She slid his hand into the hollow between her breasts.
"It's -- here?"
"What better place? Actually -- down a bit -- Not there ...."
Under her right breast and slightly toward the middle, his fingers encountered a ridge in her skin, several inches long. He ran one finger back and forth over it, and her back arched.
"Oh yes," Elaine whispered. "There."
This is very odd, Dusty thought.
"I'm not going to -- hurt you? Touching you -- inside -- there? Your heart or liver or anything?"
"My heart's artificial. Most of my organs are. No, you won't hurt me, Dusty Winters."
Exploring with his fingers, guided now and then by hers, he found that the skin folded itself over to cover the slit in her chest, adhering like a sealstrip. He slid a finger under it, unsealing the flap, and folded it gently back. Elaine's lips parted and her breath stirred the small hairs of his ear, sending little shivers through him.
He slid two fingers into her. Hot, moist, enfolding his fingertips -- his body responded with a sudden, surging erection. She certainly felt like any other woman. He dug his fingers in deeper. Deeper, deeper -- his fingers twisting -- her body rising -- his fingers curled, he wanted to plunge his hand in as deep as it would go, all the way to the fucking elbow, digging, shredding, bloody ribbons of flesh under his fingernails --
He recoiled, jerking his hand back; it came loose with a soft sucking sound.
That had been Raymond.
No, Raymond, you can't have her. This isn't your body any more. It may have been once, but you forfeited all right to be in control here. You damned yourself, man; don't take me with you, and don't use my body to do it.
You're ME, you moron.
No, I'm not you, I'll never be you --
"Dusty --" She was looking at him, and he sensed tears somewhere far behind her wide, dark eyes. She probably thought it was her, that he'd recoiled in disgust or fear. He didn't know quite how to explain. He tried to grin.
"If it makes you feel any better, hon, you're not the only one who's got the virginal blues here."
"What do you mean?"
"I've had sex. I know I've had sex. But I don't know if I can quite remember how to do it."
"How can you forget that?"
Forgetting wasn't the right word. There was no word for it. He remembered having sex. To men, to women; as a man, as a woman. But he'd never done it. It was like dreaming about flying every night, living it out vicariously, and then finding yourself on top of a sixty-story building, staring down at the ground and trying to figure out how you'd done it all those other times.
Raymond knew. All the other voices in his head, the other voices less insistent than Raymond's, knew. And it was useless to ask them about it, because he couldn't talk to them, and no way in hell would he let any of them take control again, ever. Especially Raymond.
While he went through all possible ways to explain to her, and then started over again, Elaine propped herself up on her elbows, and laughed.
"This is kind of pathetic," she said. "Here we're two adults with sex lives going back twenty years, at least I know mine does, and we're pretending to be a couple of virgins."
"But in some sense we are," Dusty argued. "Your brain knows what it's like to have sex, but your body doesn't. My body's had sex, lots of it, but I've never been in the driver's seat until now."
"Driver's seat?"
"That's what Raymond calls it," Dusty said, and then saw the spooked look come into her eyes, and thought, Okay, man, way to go -- you've got a beautiful, willing woman on the bed, so try to seduce her by reminding her how crazy you are. Casanova, eat your heart out.
But he had to be honest.
"Elaine, I'm -- confused. You know that. Ever since I stopped jacking in, my brain's been like a giant unsorted mess of memories. Way too many for one lifetime. But it's not just memories, it's--" He didn't know how to explain. He rolled over and sat up so that he could look at her. Hard to talk lying on his back.
"I think I understand," Elaine said.
"No, I doubt it. It's not just memories, Elaine. I wish it was. I think I could deal with that, with just not knowing who I am. But every memory -- every memory you've got isn't just a memory, it's you, a little piece of you, like a snapshot of who you were when that memory happened. You know what I mean? A memory is not just a still picture like a picture in a magazine. It's all the emotions and smells and thoughts and everything that you had at that time. When you think back on, oh, I dunno, on some bully kicking dirt on you when you were twelve, you get mad all over again, don't you? When you think about vacationing with your parents when you were five, it's not just sun and sand, it's feeling, whatever, feeling safe and loved and all excited by new places and maybe kind of sick to your stomach because you know you got your first case of spacesickness on that trip."
He was talking faster now, afraid to look at her and see her beautiful eyes close down with fear or, worse, pity. He'd never talked about this to anyone. Never had anyone to talk to at all. Elaine was the first. He knew he was probably blowing it completely, but she'd been straight with him about her disease -- it wasn't fair not to be straight with her.
"Every memory in my head is a snapshot of somebody else, and they all think they're still alive. Actually most of 'em probably are alive, somewhere, but they've left their ghosts in my head. A shadow of themselves that doesn't know it's a shadow."
"Now, wait," Elaine said. He made himself look at her; her brow was furrowed in puzzlement. "I've bought a few memories from time to time. It seemed pretty harmless. I was always myself in all of them, and most I kept -- I know I've never been swimming on the Iridian coast, but I like to remember that I did. I'm not confused about whether I did it or not. And anyway, if you're saying what I think you're saying, then every memory in my head, including the legitimate ones, would be a separate person from me. A snapshot, as you put it, of an earlier me. They'd all be trying to assert their independence. And they're not. I know who I am."
"Exactly. That's the difference. You know who you are. Not just intellectually, but deep down, right down to the most basic level, your psyche knows it's in charge. I mean, there's never any doubt. But I don't have that. Do you see, Elaine? Somewhere through all those years of jacking up, I lost my sense of self. Actual coherent memories, memories that I know are mine, go back only a few years, and they're real spotty. I'm only sure I've been Dusty for about two years. I have ID, the databanks confirm my identity ... but I can't find any records of me, that is, Dusty Winters, any earlier than the last few years. I have a date of birth, but no birth records. At least none that I can find, and trust me, I've looked."
He could see that Elaine was thinking this one through. "I knew you had other personalities," she said at last. "I've talked to Raymond, and I know that there's a woman too, and a child. I guess I always assumed that you were, uh, the original."
"Nice to think so. But I'm pretty sure I'm not."
"So ... I think I already know the answer to this, but who is?"
"Raymond."
Elaine nodded slowly.
"I wish I could know for certain." Suddenly all of the frustration erupted out of him. "I mean, hell! I have no idea who Dusty really is! Am I some construct of Raymond's, some alternate personality of his? Am I some memory that Raymond jacked in, and now I'm living the personality of some memory whore who long ago wiped himself -- or herself -- for a fix and has been living in technological duplication ever since? Am I an alias that Raymond used to escape the authorities somewhere? Am I the real personality of this body, who got submerged by Raymond long ago, and has only now emerged to take control again? Or is Raymond himself, his entire life, just someone else's memories? God, Elaine, I don't know!"
Elaine touched his arm.
"You're you," she said. "Right here, right now. As long as Raymond stays down in that place where you keep him --" Dusty started at her use of his own metaphor; had Raymond told her that? "-- I don't care who you were before. I care who you'll be five minutes from now, maybe ten. Is that good enough?"
He started to speak, but she touched his lips lightly with her finger. "Hush," she said. "I think I need to get undressed now, and when you see what you're about to make love to, then you may wish to go jerk off in the shower. I wouldn't be offended. Well, heck, I probably would, but it'll be your call." She looked him in the eyes. "You've stripped naked for me just now, Dusty Winters. My turn. I don't do this for just anyone. In fact, Dusty, you're the first."
She propped herself up on one arm and slipped the white shirt from her brown shoulders, shifting arms in mid-strip to loose the other sleeve so deftly that he knew this was how she did it, every night. Her breasts fell free and they were glorious, round, the nipples a dark spearpoint at each tip. The red slit below her right breast had a bead of moisture at its corner. Dusty's eyes traveled down the line of her belly to her navel -- he saw that she had one. Below that, her body, in a sense, ended. It wasn't gruesome or messy. It just disappeared in a web of microfine equipment, hugging the base of her body so closely that he hadn't seen much of it even through the fine shirt. Tubes, knobs, little baggies, all no doubt intimately involved with her bodily functions. No skin was showing, no unsightly ends of sagging organs, nothing like that. He was just thinking, Well, this isn't so bad, when she went on with the next part of it.
The fingers of her right hand touched her left shoulder in a deliberate fashion; touch here like this, touch there like that. He still didn't quite realize what she was doing until a fine crease appeared in her skin, running right around her shoulder and under her arm. It was dark, a color like decaying blood or cooked meat. She pressed something under her arm. A sickening pop! such as a breaking bone might make, and her left arm swung loose from the top. She wrapped her hand around it and twisted sharply; it rotated, so now it looked as if she'd been mangled in some kind of horrible industrial accident. But there was no blood, only the glimmer of microcircuitry. He could see how the microelectrodes had withdrawn both into the artificial arm and its socket, so there were no unsightly dangling cables. Another twist, another pop, and the arm came loose. Elaine laid it on the edge of the bed, on top of her white shift.
Seeing him watching all this, she smiled and said, "Well, God did me a favor this once: He didn't make me a lefty."
Then she reached up with her one remaining hand to her forehead.
Dusty saw what she was going to do right before she did it, and he found himself thinking, Oh, God, please not that, not her hair...
But yes, she touched her hairline, here, here and here, and slid her fingers right under the edges of her scalp. The waist-length, golden-brown glory he had so admired came away in her hand and she laid it down beside her arm. It looked like a dead animal sprawled on the bed.
"So," she said, and looked at him. Legless, one-armed, bald. "This is me. The real me."
Dusty reached out a hesitant hand. He cupped it gently around the nape of her neck, felt her neck muscles relaxing into his touch. He ran his hand up her scalp and made a surprising discovery.
"You're fuzzy!"
Elaine's eyes had half-closed like a petted cat's. Now they came open again, shining with a sort of relieved amusement. "That's an interesting compliment."
Dusty stumbled. "Well, I was expecting -- I dunno. Smooth. Slick. Like skin. You're sort of soft and peach-fuzzy."
"That's all the hair I can grow these days," Elaine said sadly. "About a millem or two of peach fuzz."
"It's soft," Dusty repeated. "I like it."
He used his gentle grip on her head to position her for a kiss, and this time her mouth was starting to become familiar upon his.
"Dusty," she said, when they separated. "Before we do this, before we go starting something that may become very serious for both of us, you have to understand ... I have to know you understand that I'm dying. I've told you that before, but you have to really understand it. I only have ten years, tops, more realistically five. You are making love to a dying woman."
He looked down at her, lovely and bald in the dim bedroom lights. "You're making love to a rapist and serial killer. A guy who tortured women to death. I need you to understand that."
"I understand," she said quietly.
"Do you think that means any less?" he said, and lowered himself to her.
Now she responded, all barriers gone. Her mouth was hot and hungry on his. He ran his hand down her chest, the breasts swelling into his palm, feeling for that warm slit that should have been between her legs, but seemed to belong where it was on this woman. He found it. He slid his fingers into it. Aware that she was undoing his pants with her one hand, helping him out of them, while he held her to him with a hand under the small of her back. She was astonishingly light, but then, shouldn't she be? without half a body weighing her down.
"Dusty..." she breathed.
He got out of the pants, out of his underwear, without ever breaking contact with her mouth. Now he was kissing her all over, all up and down her face and ears and fuzzy little head. Elaine was wrapping his hand around his penis, sliding up and down. Oh, she did know where to touch and how to touch. This woman had had lovers, perhaps many, in those long-ago days when she was the beautiful society girl on Amaranth Station.
Those lovers were long gone, and they'd lost what they deserved to lose.
He let his mouth and tongue go down her neck and licked her collarbone and the little hollow at the base of her throat. He had to shift his grip on her for the next part. He licked her nipples, mouthed them, bit them. Not hard enough to hurt, no, never again, never again. Elaine wriggled in his grasp.
Dusty's fingers were still buried in what he supposed he needed to start thinking of as her vagina -- slipping in, slipping out, slick with her juices. Now he let his tongue slip in to join them. Elaine cried out. Dusty almost did, as well. She tasted -- nearly right. Maybe not quite. But maybe he didn't even remember what women tasted like at all. Raymond wasn't into oral sex, at least not the mutually reciprocal sort. She was salty, and wet, and all female, and he tasted her deeply and well. His tongue found -- something, just under the lips of the opening. A little round, hard thing. Like a ball bearing. It rotated freely beneath his tongue. Not wholly organic, but by the way her body arced back when he discovered it, he knew immediately what he'd found, and thought, The woman thinks of everything, doesn't she?
Elaine, gasping, loosed him for a moment to grab his hair with her only hand. "Dammit, Dusty! Not so soon!"
He kissed her, let her taste herself on his tongue, and then got his mouth close enough to her ear to mutter, "So I get to fuck you now?"
She nodded, and then surprised him, again, with the muscular surge of her body climbing his -- he rolled over, receptive, and she was somehow straddling him, with her breasts? -- this idea of fucking the woman's chest definitely took some getting used to. She slid down upon him. She wasn't tight at all, at least she'd made the thing big enough, and then he discovered that, oh goodness, she had muscles in there. The closest analogy that came to his rather addled mind, if not the most romantic, was being milked. In a really good way.
Elaine nibbled and bit at his belly and navel, the only part of him she could reach in her current position. Her hand was still entwined in his damp hair. He had one hand cupped around the base of her fuzzy skull and his other hand pressed against the small of her back. He wanted to cup her buttocks but there were no buttocks to cup. Guess he'd have to learn not to be a butt man, one part of his brain thought absently. The rest of his brain was concerned with this astonishing twisting thing that she was doing with her entire body. Without legs to push, the woman was nevertheless riding him quite well. He could feel her little ball rolling against his penis with each stroke -- always wanted a woman with balls, he thought inanely -- and he could feel the sharp jolt that went through her body each time it rolled across him.
"Oh Dusty," she muttered into his belly, her head damp with sweat. "Dusty..."
That's my name, he thought. That's who I am. I love you, Elaine.
Her body arced back, and he felt himself swelling inside her, and his head rolled backward and fireworks burst inside his skull. Not one of the thousand memories of sex inside his head could give him this. This was now, it was here, it was happening, and he'd never felt this in his entire life. This is it; this is all.
Elaine fell forward onto his stomach. He cradled her head, very gently. She was breathing deeply and hugging him hard around the waist. He stayed inside her; that remarkable vagina of hers could hug him so that he was in no danger of falling out. He petted her fuzzy head until they both fell asleep.
The kraken woke him. It was squeezing his wrist so tightly that his hand was numb. He worked a finger under it and loosened it enough to give himself some relief.
Elaine felt his movement and woke up a bit. She shifted under his arm; her soft, sleepy weight moved a little closer.
"How long did you say we were going to be stuck here?" she murmured, and he could feel her lips brush his ear with each word she spoke, sending happy little shivers through him.
"Two weeks, I think."
"Oh, that's right." A moment's silence; all he could feel was her breathing brushing the tiny hairs on his cheek. Then she whispered, "That's not a very long time. Two weeks? Too bad it can't be longer."