crossed, Slatecoat and me.’
The kelp mountain sighs heavily and smells of hum an, but he
doesn’t argue, just says something about ‘kid’.
‘Crossed in love’, croons Vera. ‘And now you’re afraid the two of you
are becoming a crossing for your wives.’
‘Not afraid,’ Blanchis murmurs. ‘Certain’. He slaps something fleshsounding, that isn’t me. I twist over in Slatecoat’s arms, and he goes on. ‘And if that happened when we both tried so hard to turn it back,
what would happen if we helped it along, consciously?’
‘But doesn’t it get weaker?’ Vera does not ask this lightly.
‘Don’t think so,’ says Slatecoat, carefully kissing my eyes so I can feel
every word. ‘Everything the contact offered us has to keep on changing . . . ’ I give in and close the eyes. ‘Maybe all wishes do that, but they don’t go away.’ Somebody’s head pushes inside my thighs and
starts some kissing there. ‘The changes sort of mock whoever did the
wishing. Mostly.’ A hand on my throat. I stroke somebody’s throat,
and feel for vibrations. I feel a quick swallowing; it’s Vera.
‘Don’t worry, Geisha,’ says the voice between my legs.
‘Let me alone’. T hat’s my voice, panicky. You’re supposed to be
young for this job, and not too calm. ‘I don’t understand what you say
unless I shut my eyes, and then I can’t tell you apart.’
‘There’s no apart,’ says another voice from another direction. My
fear and all our fears are highly tumescent. Fear isn’t, usually.
‘Slatecoat?’ I open my wet eyes on the lovely cold and see the washes
of scarlet and pale green through the coral of the filigree depths we’re
A fter the B eow ulf expedition
101
all in. I’m all in.
‘Peter Pan,’ I find I’m saying. ‘He m ust’ve made a similar deal.’ I
don’t see the connection, myself, but it feels obvious just the same. ‘I
was always pretty good to myself as a kid. Bet one of you wasn’t.’
‘They used to call me Kid . . . ’Blanchis trails off his voice and
takes another draw of kif. Then begins again. ‘Don’t like the word.
Didn’t then. Still don’t.’ Now how did I know he was sucking in the kif?
I can feel him sucking it in.
‘Why, Slatecoat?’ whispers Vera. ‘Why are you pressing your
shoulder-blades up against his?’ Then her mouth is on mine, hard and
open, and her tongue morses on mine, E X P E R IM E N T . Experiment?
‘An experiment,’ rumbles Slatecoat from down there, chiming
perfectly.
Vera shakes her hair like heavy honey between me and the coral
light. ‘And will you report the results to Spaceforce?’
‘No more than you will to Lawforce.’ But was that Slatecoat too, and
was his voice coming from where Blanchis had been? ‘Let any of the
Forces know, it’ll be isolation for all of us for life. Ganymede at best,
or the bio-boxes on Poseidon.’
Asteroid prospecting.’ Kid plunges into Vera suddenly in a sort of
tantrum of resentment and fear. The mattress ripples with innocent
enthusiasm.
‘Couldn’t happen,’ I m urm ur into Slatecoat’s armpit, sipping a little
neighbourly sweat. Then I realise: I can map the position of us all, not
just in the mind but the way I can my own. He’s dos-a-dos with Kid,
and Vera’s trying to roll Kid away onto her, and I’m curled against
Slatecoat’s throat and chest, waiting to see if she’ll succeed, and knowing somewhere that I ought to be heaving them apart as well, and feeling all Romeo-and-Juliet because I can’t bear to part. We can’t bear to part. How sad and noble. I’m dizzying to Kid’s hookahful of kif, I’m
grinding poignantly into Vera, I’m being ground into poignantly by
Kid —though that isn’t going to last long, for sure. And I’m Slatecoat,
pressing back and turning me round on his front and wondering
whether to say he’s sorry he got the poor little damn Geishas into this.
We’re all well into Kid’s orgasm, and it’s echoing through all of us
with fourfold tragic thunder, when one of us realises that the eager
mattress so tidal beneath us all is recording the whole thing, and
knows all. At first we retreat into our individual kleinbottle selves, but
we don’t think some of us get the ones we started from.
102
Norman Talbot
IV
The Rose Room, and, er, Filigree Room are my specialties. O r is it the
Bridal Suite and the Chameleon? I’m lost in my own backyard. I take
a long while just to unlock the JCN computerbank. And when I get
in, the cover-cancel devices don’t convince me for a moment.
However, they ought to hold that sardonic, single-minded O.C.C.
Aspinall and her attendant gnomes for a while. Grade 4 securicode
will relax them.
Then back to — I pick the Rose Room, but eventually find all my
gear in the Chameleon. What does the well-dressed me wear on a
body like this? Some useful gadgets and gear, but the dress just isn’t
right.
Then I go back to the JCN bank and put a HOLD CLASSIFIED on
an earlier, schizoid-encounter episode; that will keep O.C.C. Aspinall
with her pants on the chair and her face in the phone for quite a while.
I’m dizzy and I want a bath. But I pack. One of them has taken off
to get the other’s wife to fly out to the first one’s wife to bring them all
back here.
