Borders of Infinity

'Very funny,' she said coldly, making Miles wonder for a wild moment if she'd been equipped with the telepathy gene complex—no, she pre-dated that—'but I'm not even human. Or hadn't you heard?'

Miles shrugged carefully. 'Human is as human does.' He forced himself to reach out and touch her damp cheek. 'Animals don't weep, Nine.'

She jerked, as from an electric shock. 'Animals don't lie. Humans do. All the time.'

'Not all the time.' He hoped the light was too dim for her to see the flush in his face. She was watching his face intently.

'Prove it.' She tilted her head as she sat cross-legged. Her pale gold eyes were suddenly burning, speculative.

'Uh . . . sure. How?'

'Take off your clothes.'

'. . . what?'

'Take off your clothes, and lie down with me as humans do. Men and women.' Her hand reached out to touch his throat.

The pressing claws made little wells in his flesh. 'Blrp?' choked Miles. His eyes felt wide as saucers. A little more pressure, and those wells would spring forth red fountains. I am about to die. . . .

She stared into his face with a strange, frightening, bottomless hunger. Then abruptly, she released him. He sprang up and cracked his head on the low ceiling, and dropped back down, the stars in his eyes unrelated to love at first sight.

Her lips wrinkled back on a fanged groan of despair. 'Ugly,' she wailed. Her clawed nails raked across her cheeks leaving red furrows. 'Too ugly . . . animal . . . you don't think I'm human—' She seemed to swell with some destructive resolve.

'No, no, no!' gibbered Miles, lurching to his knees and grabbing her hands and pulling them down. 'It's not that. It's just, uh—how old are you, anyway?'

'Sixteen.'

Sixteen. God. He remembered sixteen. Sex-obsessed and dying inside every minute. A horrible age to be trapped in a twisted, fragile, abnormal body. God only knew how he had survived his own self-hatred then. No—he remembered how. He'd been saved by one who loved him. 'Aren't you a little young for this?' he tried hopefully.

'How old were you?'

'Fifteen,' he admitted, before thinking to lie. 'But … it was traumatic. Didn't work out at all in the long run.'

Her claws turned toward her face again.

'Don't do that!' he cried, hanging on. It reminded him entirely too much of the episode of Sergeant Bothari and the knife. The Sergeant had taken Miles's knife away from him by superior force. Not an option open to Miles here. 'Will you calm down?' he yelled at her.

She hesitated.

'It's just that, uh, an officer and gentleman doesn't just fling himself onto his lady on the bare ground. One . . . one sits down. Gets comfortable. Has a little conversation, drinks a little wine, plays a little music . . . slows down. You're hardly warm yet. Here, sit over here where it's warmest.' He positioned her nearer the broken duct, got up on his knees behind her, tried rubbing her neck and shoulders. Her muscles were tense, they felt like rocks under his thumbs. Any attempt on his part to strangle her would clearly be futile.

I can't believe this. Trapped in Ryoval's basement with a sex-starved teenage werewolf. There was nothing about this in any of my Imperial training manuals. . . . He remembered his mission, which was to get her left calf muscle back to the Ariel alive. Dr. Canaba, if I survive you and I are going to have a little talk about this. . . .

Her voice was muffled with grief and the odd shape of her mouth. 'You think I'm too tall.'

'Not at all.' He was getting hold of himself a bit, he could lie faster. 'I adore tall women, ask anyone who knows me. Besides, I made the happy discovery some time back that height difference only matters when we're standing up. When we're lying down it's, ah, less of a problem. …' A rapid mental review of everything he'd ever learned by trial and error, mostly error, about women was streaming uninvited through his mind. It was harrowing. What did women want?

He shifted around and took her hand, earnestly. She stared back equally earnestly, waiting for . . . instruction. At this point the realization came over Miles that he was facing his first virgin. He smiled at her in total paralysis for several seconds. 'Nine . . . you've never done this before, have you?'

'I've seen vids.' She frowned introspectively. 'They usually start with kisses, but …' a vague gesture toward her misshapen mouth, 'maybe you don't want to.'

Miles tried not to think about the late rat. She'd been systematically starved, after all. 'Vids can be very misleading. For women– especially the first time—it takes practice to learn your own body responses, woman friends have told me. I'm afraid I might hurt you.' And then you'll disembowel me.

She gazed into his eyes. 'That's all right. I have a very high pain threshold.'

But I don't.

This was mad. She was mad. He was mad. Yet he could feel a creeping fascination for the—proposition—rising from his belly to his brain like a fey fog. No doubt about it, she was the tallest female thing he was ever likely to meet. More than one woman of his acquaintance had accused him of wanting to go mountain-climbing. He could get that out of his system once for all. . . .

Damn, I do believe she'd clean up good. She was not without a certain . . . charm was not the word—whatever beauty there was to be found in the strong, the swift, the leanly athletic, the functioning form. Once you got used to the scale of it. She radiated a smooth heat he could feel from here—animal magnetism? the suppressed observer in the back of his brain supplied. Power? Whatever else it was, it would certainly be astonishing.

One of his mother's favorite aphorisms drifted through his head. Anything worth doing, she always said, is worth doing well.

Dizzy as a drunkard, he abandoned the crutch of logic for the wings of inspiration. 'Well then, doctor,' he heard himself muttering insanely, 'let us experiment.'

Kissing a woman with fangs was indeed a novel sensation. Being, kissed back—she was clearly a fast learner—was even more novel. Her arms circled him ecstatically, and from that point on he lost control of the situation, somehow. Though some time later, coming up for air, he did look up to ask, 'Nine, have you ever heard of the black widow spider?'

'No . . . what is it?'

'Never mind,' he said airily.

It was all very awkward and clumsy, but sincere, and when he was done the water in her eyes was from joy, not pain. She seemed enormously (how else?) pleased with him. He was so unstrung he actually fell asleep for a few minutes, pillowed on her body.

He woke up laughing.

'You really do have the most elegant cheekbones,' he told her, tracing their line with one finger. She leaned into his touch, cuddled up equally to him and the heat pipe. 'There's a woman on my ship who wears her hair in a sort of woven braid in the back—it would look just great on you. Maybe she could teach you how.'

She pulled a wad of her hair forward and looked cross-eyed at it, as if trying to see past the coarse tangles and filth. She touched his face in turn. 'You are very handsome, Admiral.'

'Huh? Me?' He ran a hand over the night's beard stubble, sharp features, the old pain lines . . . she must be blinded by my putative rank, eh?

'Your face is very . . . alive. And your eyes see what they're looking at.'