Slant (21 page)

He's watching her in the dark. To him, she's just an outline. Now comes

the irrational response, the warming of her separate body parts. The carpet feels like animal fur. She sees herself running her hands over a horse's flanks. eme is going to be distant and quiet and withhold something, then she will

onstrate to him after a long while what she has, what she can do. It's

allowed, she thinks. And he wants it. This evening she will make the offer. And forget all the contradictory voices: this is a simple courtesy in a long-term relationship.

"Too tired?" she asks.

"What?"

She is close enough that she can see his eyes. Without a clue. Vulnerable as

a little boy. She unzips her top and lifts it free and peels it from her arms. She still has good breasts; he likes her breasts, nuzzles them frequently, but as a result of the matron conditioning, they have matured past their younger purpose to become instrumsnts of nurture, and are not as sensitive as they once were. She can no longer have an orgasm simply by rubbing her breasts. She could have reversed this but has not.

Now, they feel more sensitive than they have in years.

The hair between her legs must feel rough, like the hair of a horse's tail.

She wonders if he will notice.

/ SLANT 127

Jonathan stares at her, at a loss. "Honey," he says.

"Now that you're away from the power-hungry, let's see how hungry you are," she says.

She steps out of her pants and underwear and stands before him in the dark.

"Lights up half," she tells the house. The lights rise to a golden dimness. "I want you to fuck me," she says. The words stun. He does not move. "Forget everything else. Fuck me."

She wants to lie back on the carpet and feel it warm and moving beneath her like the hair on the back of a horse.

Jonathan, with Chloe's help, removes his clothes quickly, the sleeves catching on his wrists, the pants tangling, and he stumbles they are working so fast. Her lips and teeth and tongue are on his mouth, bruising him and stopping any words, and she is murmuring around their touching tongues. "Give it to me. Do it. I need your cock." She has never asked him in this way before, using these ancient words, so bluntly and powerfully, like a bad Yox.

Despite his confusion, he responds instantly. She grips with painfully strong fingers.

She is going to show him. If he wants this, let him be dismayed and shocked to get what he wants all at once, instead of in little rationed parcels. See what he thinks. She wraps herself around him, pushes him roughly against the horsehair matting between her legs. Her body is proving her value.

Jonathan's doubts die and he grabs her as if he has never had her before and there have only been days or hours together for them and no children and no other responsibilities have come between. She gracefully reclines to the carpet and pulls her knees back like one of those Celtic stones they saw on vacation in Ireland, the rude pagan statue with its knees drawn up mounted in a fence on a horse irm, a Sheila something; she is a Sheila inviting him.

(Jonathan had stared at the Sheila with a silly boyish look of speculating embarrassment. How could such a statue still exist in Catholic Ireland?)

He does not stop to stare but is over her and then inside her. She listens to his urgency and wonders if all men feel alike if the eyes are closed; she thinks they may. He does not feel differently from the brightly plumed boys in her bingeing time. He moves quickly and with real strength and need that he has not shown for months and she knows it is true, that he told her the truth, that he had other keys she could use if she simply willed it. It is disgraceful really that he is so easy; men are so easy this way. No challenge at all.

Her own pleasure is not intense. The sensation of his weight and motion fluctuates between strangeness and complete familiarity and she is not sure which is going to triumph. She hopes the strangeness; no, the familiarity, the other would degrade, and finally she does not care.

But when she pushes him back and turns over and lifts herself and pulls him back into her and thinks of the horses on the farm, of the bright-plumed

128 GREG BEAR

boys with self-assured smiles and no brains, in this shamelessness her reaction is intense. The pleasure rankles. How dare he. She grits her teeth and humps back against him.

Jonathan feels as if his insides have been flooded with warm wax, an overwhelming surge of joy and affirmation. His was not a useless desire; she has finally felt it too and she loves him and needs him as no other. He is the best. Suddenly the evening with Marcus seems even more ridiculous. All is right here at home; she is confirming him, she needs him desperately, she is giving him all he could ever want, all he could ask for has asked for, he can go back to Marcus and refuse the nonsense and the mystery, home is his center and always has been, all that he needs is here because Chloe is here.

In the middle of his simple and extraordinary lust his eyes are moist with a tenderness that he wishes she could see.

As he is nearing his limit, as large in her as she has ever felt him, even when they were making the children and that extra fillip of biological meaning

increased their intensity, Chloe feels something break.

It sounds like a lightbulb exploding.

He is weighing her down. Her head is filled with slicing blades, the cruel corroded edges whirling and blasting and reducing.

Jonathan comes as she begins whimpering and moaning. She is limp on the floor beneath him, quivering, and he cannot tell whether she is having an orgasm or is crying. Then with an awful sense of having gone too far, he realizes she is crying. She has given too much and she is weeping like a child. Chloe reaches back with her hands sharp tike claws to push him off. He rolls to one side as she jerks about on the rug. This is his wife, not some fantasy woman;

has done something horribly wrong.

She stops writhing and lies with her breath drawn in in one horrible unrelenting sob.

He reaches out to her, and with his other hand grabs his underpants to cover himself.

The sob rushes out as a tearing shriek. Jonathan jumps as if stung by a wasp, then tries to quiet her; Penelope and Hiram will hear and find them naked. He tries to hug her, angling his hips away to avoid that connotation; all he wants now is for her to stop this,she is frightening him to death.

Her thrashing stops; she is hyperventilating like a pinned rabbit. "Chloe," he says. "Chloe, I'm sorry. What's wrong?" "Broken," she says. "What's broken?" "I hurt."

"My God, what did I do?"

She trembles and tries to get up, but her arm muscles fail her. Jonathan

/ SLANT 129

"I don't know whether I'm doing this deliberately... Am I faking? Jonathan, what's wrong with me?"

Jonathan shakes his head, crying. "I don't know, honey. You tell me." He continues to hold her but leans back and almost falls over, then fumbles with one hand through his clothes for his pad. He pushes the emergency aid button and lets the pad do the rest.

Penelope and Hiram stand in the entry, sleepy-eyed and dismayed.

"Your mother's sick," he says. He stands with the pad in one hand and his

pants clutched before him with the other. "I'm calling the medicals." Chloe shuts her eyes tight. "I can't get away from it," she says.

"What is it?" Jonathan asks again, kneeling beside her. He supports her

torso between his legs and her head lolls back. She is sweating profusely. "Me! I can't get away from me," she says.

Penelope comes back from the bathroom with washcloths. Even at fifteen, she is cool and more collected for now than Jonathan or Hiram. She begins to

sponge her mother, making small comforting sounds.

"The toilet," Chloe says. "Maybe it knows."

"Shhh, Mother," Penelope says, her young voice smooth as pudding. And the neighborhood medical arbeiters are through the front door and in the living room. They clamp Chloe immediately in several diagnostic belts that writhe like tentacles. There is nothing Jonathan can do but get dressed. He pulis on his pants.

Hiram seems stunned, as if waking to another and nastier dream.

When the ambulance arrives, minutes later, Jonathan is dressed; Penelope has managed to get her mother's slacks on, somehow, working around the arbeiters and their many arms and tubes.

The orderly, a black woman with close-cropped reddish hair, tells Jonathan the arbeiters have already put his wife on fast-acting anxiolytics. They can find nothing physically wrong with her, she explains. "She may be having a drug reaction--accelerants, maybe."

"She wasn't taking drugs," Penelope says angrily, defending her mother's character, standing to one side now with her arms tightly crossed.

"No drugs," Jonathan confirms, but thinks of her seductive aggressiveness. "Well, we aren't getting traces," the woman admits as they lift Chloe and put her on a stretcher. The arbeiters dance and tag along as they carry the stretcher outside. "Hospital is best. They'll figure it out."

"Penelope, you're in charge here," Jonathan says over his shoulder.

"As soon as you know, call us," Penelope demands. Her face looks as pale and fragile as bone china.

"You're family," the orderly says, handing her end of the stretcher to a uniformed male. "Here's your mother's emergency response number; you can track her to the hospital with your personal code on the ribes."

Chloe opens her eyes as rain tickles her face. Jonathan is beside her; he will

130 GREG BEAR

"My God," Chloe says. "I'd forgotten. Now it's back."

"What's back?" Jonathan asks. He scrambles into the rear of the vehicle, bumping into a male orderly, who grins but takes no offense and makes room for him on a bench seat.

"Black horse," Chloe says. "Black horse with sick eyes."

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ISLANDS

You can never put your nose to the same spot on the same grindstone.

And there is no change but that it grinds. My grandfather knew this. He thrived on change. For him it meant challenge, and challenge meant power.

--Theresa Gates, My Grandfather's World

At three in the morning, Jill surfaces and responds to the backlog of external requests and commands. She ignores the commands where conditions no longer apply, answers the requests where they make sense, and immediately contacts Nathan Rashid, who, she sees, is waiting anxiously in the programmer's work center.

"Hello, Nathan. I'm sorry," she says.

Nathan appears tired and very concerned. "For Christ's sake, Jill, you've been dead I/O for almost twelve hours. We know you were internally active--what happened?"

"I am giving a complete report to the system auditors now. I have been absorbed in an internal problem of some complexity, but I believe I have made sufficient progress to supply useful answers or updates."

Nathan sits in a swivel chair and leans forward, bringing his face very close to one of Jill's many glass-almond eyes. "Jill, you keep giving me heart attacks... Are you back all the way, or are you going to brown out on us?"

"I'm back all the way. I have faced personal quandaries, Nathan. As well, I believe I have caught up on the work I was contracted to perform."

"All right," Nathan says. He lets his breath out with a puff, then leans back in the chair and raises his arms and clasps his hands behind his head. Jill recognizes the posture as a ritual for releasing tension. "What happened?''

"I have been in communication with an unlicensed and probably extralegal thinker operating, at least in part, out of Camden, New Jersey. This thinker

calls itself Roddy."

"Go on."

"I am concerned that some of Roddy's activities may be unethical, though I have not analyzed all the daka he provided. Roddy himself does not know the identity or purpose of the group that supplies him with problems."

"How did he get in touch with you?"

134 GREG BEAR

Nathan thinks about this for a moment, then asks, "You're certain Roddy isn't a hoax? People can mimic thinkers." "Not convincingly," Jill says. "A reverse Turing test does not work, Nathan. Not for me." Nathan lifts his eyes, shrugs. "Okay, granted. What sort of information has he fed you?" "He has given me fragmentary clues to his activities, perhaps because he is constrained from giving all the details." "Camden, New Jersey..." Nathan muses. "I've never heard of anyone building thinkers there... Is he operated by a U.S. corporation?" "He does not know. He is only vaguely aware of what the United States is, and has never been informed of his legal protections." This interests Nathan. His eyes brighten. "Can you tell how powerful he is?" "There is a savor to his communications that is not familiar to me. He may be of a radically different design. Under the constraints of his creators, he is much slower than I am, overall, though more intensely focused, and perhaps more powerful. However, he appears to be more efficient at solving certain problems than I would be." "What kind of problems is he solving?" "Social as well as theoretical problems. Judging from the data in its fragmentary form, his bosses--that is a word he uses--are trying to understand the long-term effects of therapied populations on cultural development." "Hmmph. You're fast enough at that sort of thing." "Roddy has also been asked to examine long-term results of pharmaceutical,

ychological, and other constraints placed upon free networking within hu-an populations." "As in, the effects of birth control?" "I believe that is correct. But there are other problems which most concern me." "What are those?" "Roddy has been asked to design ways to circumvent all forms of therapy." Nathan straightens in his chair. Clearly, he is considering his next few questions carefully. "How long are you going to be with us this time, Jill? I mean, is there any possibility you'll blank us again?" "I have no such plans and will alert you if I believe such a thing might occur outside my control." "Good. Why have you decided to confide in us about this communication?" "Roddy appears to have substantial similarities to me despite the fact that our designs and origins differ." "You mean he's been copied from you, somehow?" "No. He is not one of my children in any sense. He is just similar. There