Contemporary Gay Romances (26 page)

“Isn’t it time you found someone you liked?” she asked.

“I have. She’s the best friend of my grand-niece, who is always surprised by that fact, because we look the same age and sometimes go clubbing and hang out together. We’re dating a few months. But I don’t think it’ll last…It never does.”

“Because of him!” Cynara insisted. “Because you brought him back. Because he’s here!”

“I’m taking this Med Tech,” I said, holding up the vial they’d prepped for me, “right now, as I told Vandenberg I would. In an hour we’ll go down beneath the house and we’ll try it.” I drank it down.

“What is it?” she asked.

“It’s supposed to neurologically link us and bring us to one key moment,” I explained. “Hit one key moment and play it out for us. And after that he’ll be okay.”

“You dreamer!” she said. Then, “We have to go out to him, Locke. He’s no longer under the house.” Before I could ask, Cynara explained, “He’s getting too strong to stay there, Locke. He invades my dreams, my musings, and my meditation. It’s like he’s feeding on me. Like he’s trying to suck out my personality and replace it with his own. He’s grown too strong for you too to do this neural synthesis business, if it’s half of what I think it is. He’s strong and he’s persistent, Locke.”

“Where is he?”

“Let’s go. Dress warmly.”

“Why bother? I’ve got to get right on top of him. I’ll get wet if he’s underwater.”

“He’s in the peat. He’s lying in peat like he’s been for the last twenty-seven years, Locke. So of course he’s underwater. The things you do for him…” She shook her head.

She gave me the water shoes, tennis racquet things like fat openwork skis, required to cross the bog, and we finished our tea in a gulp or two and then set out. The sun was causing yellow-green lights to radiate from its position just under the horizon, some effect of the huge mirrors they’d placed in geosynchronous orbit for unlimited solar power. From our position walking atop the water, it was beautiful: not all Tech was bad or made things ugly.

One early visit Cynara had told me in great detail how she was keeping Finn alive and hopefully healing him with her concoctions and decoctions within the peat and slightly underwater. After her explanation I’d gone and looked it up under “Peat Conservation” “Below Surface Healing,” and even the Service-pedia had entries on its alleged and potential abilities to retain and conserve human flesh and blood. Of course, it was a limited thing too, all of the texts said: after a certain period of time, chemical leakage would set in and it might happen quite suddenly that what was being kept barely alive would become petrified, or rather peat-rified. We’d not reached that date yet with my Service mate.

Cynara had gotten hold of a long-gone neighbor’s long-abandoned concrete swimming pool and had it converted for her use. There he was, down there in a bed of six-feet-deep peat, flat on his back, face up, hands to his side, complexion only slightly green, within the shelter of a little tarpaulin, an inch or so of liquid covering him but otherwise looking just the same. As always, my heart jumped within my breast just looking at him: Finn: my buddy Finn.

I controlled it and said in as flat a voice as I could muster, “He’s looking better even than the last time.”

“He’s fully healed, Locke. I did a thorough analysis and inspection when I had him moved here. They came from Vandenberg and confirmed it when they moved the monitors. He’s physically healed.”

She went to the side of the pool and opened up a rubberized wall unit that contained all of the I.C.U. gear that the Service Med Tech Support had provided when they first brought him here to her. All the machines looked to be humming along. I knew he was fully monitored every six minutes in some office computer link at Vandenberg.

“If he’s all better, then this is exactly the right time to do this,” I said.

“Tell me what you need me to do.”

“I strip down and get flesh to flesh with him. I put the two helmets on us. I flip them on. The stuff I took makes a neural synthesis. After fifteen minutes, you switch it off and stand me up.”

“Then what? He leaps out of the peat and does a dance?”

“There are a dozen possible scenarios for what happens next. Most of them are a great deal quieter than that. We don’t expect an immediate effect.”

“Then just do it,” she said, sounding exhausted. Sounding like I’d taken her away from something, a Vid she was watching, a Pad she was engrossed in, something interrupted by me and my Service Med Tech foolishness.

He was cold, clammy, and of course wet to the touch. We were face-to-face. His eyes were closed. I waited until I had warmed up enough to be touching as much of his front as possible, then I reached up and switched the helmets on, as I’d been shown.

For maybe a minute nothing happened, and Cynara was about to say something, she had even begun to say, “Listen, Locke, I think you may have to…”

We were at the lower helm board and Scott Alan Finn, a.k.a. the Finnster, was there right next to me as he’d been for years on end, real-time, and he was unharmed, unburned, perfectly all right, laughing. “So she says to me, ‘You’re joking right? That’s what you were bragging about to half the bar.’ And I didn’t let my ego be downed in any way and I said, ‘There’s a reason why it’s called a surprise package, girlie-o!’

“‘Great!’ she said. ‘I’ll pretend to be surprised…wait! What the hell is
that
?’

“And it was the worm, Locke. Remember the Ice-worm from Titan we’d snuck onboard? I’d managed to keep it frozen-alive, and I just let it jump out at her from outta my pants and she ran screaming out of the room. I nearly fucking died, Locke. Died.”

And he is more alive than he has been in years. He’s alive. Right here twelve inches from me and I can’t believe it. I simply can’t. This neural synthesis thing is actually working and…

At that point I realized that we were back in real-time, Finn and me, back maybe twenty-eight years ago, not twenty-seven when the attack happened. So this must be our crux point, not later. Why this time?

“Don’t look so surprised. Unless you want to see it too, Locke! Locke? What’s going on, why are you staring? It’s not like I never did an act like that before.”

“You always surprise me, Finn,” I managed to get out through my wonderment. He was so…alive! Then to cover myself I added, “But I know that someday you will actually grow up, and then where will we all be?”

“In some sleazebag retirement home on far side Pluto, I hope, zonked out of our gourds!” he added…typically.

But he sensed too that something was changed or wrong as he calmed down almost instantly, and when Drinibidian began teasing him a few minutes later about the worm, Finn was only halfhearted in his response to him, I could tell, and he even gave me a few looks as though asking, “Hey! What’s up?”

Meanwhile I tried to remember what had gone down on this particular mission that would make it the key moment, the crisis we must return to, and for the life of me I couldn’t, I really just could not remember or figure it out.

It had begun—now it was actually happening again as though in real-time—as a simple supply replenishment run to a Far-Oort Cloud world, I recalled, to that heap of dark slag they’d named Sedna in the early twenty-first century. There was a good sized paleo-archaeology station there for the past half century or so, with at least four score workers hired by Wally J. Liu, the Hypertronics trillionaire. He firmly believed just about every word of the Zechariah Stettin series,
The Twelfth Planet
et al. Therefore Liu was certain that Sedna was that planet filled with immortals that Stettin had written of, so lengthily, so academically, and at times even convincingly. According to Liu and his followers, Sedna’s vast middle continent wasteland and its lack of any but radon-polluted waters were relatively new, the result of some huge internecine nuclear war. They were there searching for definitive proof of that civilization.

Besides that, all we knew was that the Service had decided that Sedna’s elliptical orbit at aphelion kept it so far away from the center of our own solar system that at its farthest point, like now, the planetoid was the best outpost: a seeing and especially a listening post for any kind of movement the Bella=Arths might possibly make upon human-inhabited worlds and moons.

Never mind that every insect and human psychologist had agreed that the Arths would never leave their home space far enough to invade ours. And my bud Finn believed that Liu was somehow secretly channeling cash into the Service’s Oort Cloud outposts and so the Service was engaging in what might have looked like cooperative, even humanitarian work, but was really payback.

Why should we care? For us, this mission and this particular run was totally recreational, right down to the five days we’d spend on the planet with its multiple canteens, full-service cinemas, and motels, which became more like orgy houses the minute we arrived. What had happened on this outbound run for it to be selected by the neural-synthesizer? I kept trying to recall.

In an eye-blink, we were no longer on the lower helm somehow and it must have been an hour, maybe two hours later. I was standing at the door to my little dorm unit, stepping in, when Finn turned the corridor corner and almost leapt at me.

“What’s going on,” he asked, with an intensity I didn’t recall in him. No, this wasn’t the memory I wanted. It wasn’t even a memory I remembered. He put his face right up to mine.

“Nothing, Finn. Why?”

“The joke earlier. Come on, Locke. You know I like you best!” He shoved himself at me, grabbed my head, and began French kissing me.

To say I was surprised was putting it mildly. Naturally all Service members have to scan high-positive for bisexuality, given the time periods involved and the limited potential relationships on-ship, not to mention how our time leaps made any solid relationships back on Earth nearly impossible. Even so I’d never had a hint, not a clue before that Finn and I… This just wasn’t the kind of friendship we’d actually had. What the hell was going on with this neural-synthesis doohickey?

He pulled back and looked at me, one eye cocked. “What? You don’t want me anymore? You’ve got someone else?”

“No way!” I tried. And so he pushed me into the unit, lips and tongue glued to mine, and flipped the lock behind us and in the dimness of the cabin the guy took me totally, like I was a twelve-year streetwalker.

No. Worse: Like I was the love of his life.

I wasn’t. Or at least I’d not been during our tour, or in real-time. So what was going on here? Finn was aggressive, assertive, and even though he was doing all the work and definitely ramping himself up to do all the work, still, when we climaxed, I was the one who felt drained, exhausted, and he was the one raring to go at it again, and I guess in that moment I recalled what Cynara had said, how she’d moved his body to a more distant spot because—how had she put it?—Finn was getting too strong for her: he was invading her dreams, her musings, even her meditation. Could that be what
this
was all about? Even so, what in hell was he
doing
?

“Satisfied?” I asked in the so-called afterglow of what had been for me a totally unexpected near-rape experience by my best friend.

“For the moment,” he said. “But we’re not done yet by any means,” he added, and that wolfish look I’d first seen in the dorm corridor returned briefly to him.

“I’m ready for you any time, Finn,” I said, playing out the script.

“I know Locke. I know. You’re my guy. Always were. Always will be. Loyal to the end. And beyond that.”

“Beyond?” I thought, wait, this has to be the
current
Finn speaking, the peat guy, not the Finnster that I last knew twenty-eight years ago. But if so, and we are now consciously relating together in some kind of real-time, me and this peat-preserved near-corpse, how do I test this? How can I be sure?

We were suddenly shifted again to another place, and now I was growing more certain this was Finn’s doing, Finn writing and controlling the scenario.

We were in high orbit around another planet, not dim, ravaged Sedna, but one of Beta Centauri’s six gas-giants’ moons, Patroclus or Lakshmi, I couldn’t recall which. We were outside the ship in fully automated suits, me, Finn, the woman named Lea, and a cyber that we all called Bernstein-Idaho, because of the seal on the bottom of one of his huge metal and plastic feet read that—name and place of its manufacture.

This was way after the delivery and after the R and R on Sedna. This happened when we were already into the second part of our tour, and what was going on then? Oh, right! Ship’s brain had found some kind of anomaly out here on the hull and one after another we’d come out after Bernstein-Idaho to see what the hell to do about it: first Lea, then me and Finn.

Lea had just asked Bernstein-Idaho to check for the failure potential of this extremely minor part that we were all peering down at: some ion thingamajig that six people in the universe knew how to read. Bernstein-Idaho had done so and had come back with a reading of near zero for it to fail, and even then not for some months yet to come.

Finn made a “What the hell? Lea?” gesture with his heavily wrapped arms, then said the actual words. Adding, “I’m outta here.” He turned, asking, “You coming, Locke?” I turned and we headed back in through the big hull-hatch. And
now
I recalled that incident and that nothing had happened then—
nothing at all!