Molly kicked her clothes away and Kane shed his hipari, reaching back to push the revolver into the heap of olive drab material as he slid his trousers to the floor.
She sat on the edge of the bed, spine curved, breasts pointing downward, her nervousness aging her prematurely. Kane put one knee on the sheet next to her and pushed her gently by the shoulders until she lay on her back, arms extended behind her. He gripped her waist, just above the hips, where he could feel the primal power of her sexuality. Her legs opened to him and he could smell the heat and darkness of her, the scent turning sharp as she became aroused. He spread her labia with his thumbs and flicked his tongue into her cleft to get the taste of her.
Her hips moved slowly against the mattress. Her eyes were open, her teeth pinning her lower lip. Kane wondered what she saw.
He raised her knees until her heels sank into the bed, and then, left hand under her buttocks, he guided himself into her with the other.
His hands moved up her body, fingertips just brushing her fragrant skin, his weight shifting forward to rest on his left elbow and right palm. He held himself rigid, motionless, feeling the tension coiling in his spine. His breath began to come more quickly as the pleasure burned through his groin, across his hips, and down into the contractions of his toes.
Then, slowly, he began to move in and out of her, lowering himself until he could feel the mass of her breasts against his damaged ribs. Her hands tangled themselves in the sheet behind her head, clawing at it in rhythmic contractions. Her excitement built slowly, seemingly against her will, until her jaw and shoulders were tight with it.
A ringing split the silence.
Kane looked up, saw the bedside phone flashing red. Molly seemed oblivious, introverted, locked into a divergent, subjective reality.The sudden, convulsive pressure of her pubic ridge confused and disoriented him, then he realized she was approaching orgasm.
He touched the hard point of her left nipple and she rolled him over onto his back, both her hands on the bandages of his chest, rocking hard until her entire body shook. Kane held her hips and thrust against her, not letting her finish. His throat muscles went tight. He felt his eyes roll back in his head and his leg muscles spasm as he pumped his climax into her, and when it was done they lay without moving, her head and breasts resting on his chest, his hot fluid turning cool as it flowed back down his shaft and pooled on the sheet under him, the red light of the phone still flashing, silently now, at the far end of the bed.
They had reached the neutrality of afternoon.
Molly rolled onto her back.After a time she said,“When you find him, what happens then?”
“I don’t know,” Kane told her.“Does it matter to you? How much do you care what happens to him?”
“Once upon a time,” she said,“everything in the universe was in one great, huge ball of fire.All the bits and pieces were controlled by the same interactions. Everything was symmetrical.”
Kane turned on his side to look at her.
“Then things started to cool down,” she said.“The symmetry broke down. One by one the different interactions turned into different things. Gravity, strong, weak, electromagnetic forces. Particles formed atoms and molecules and stars and planets and people.At every step the symmetrical patterns had to break down to become more complex. But without that symmetry breaking, there could never have been any life or intelligence in the universe.”
“I don’t get it,” Kane said.“What are you saying?”
“Things break up. Marriages break up. But they were once together. Everything in the universe still has that memory of having been part of the same thing. Everything is still connected.”
“Like you and Curtis, is that it? Still connected?”
She didn’t answer him. She lay for another moment, totally relaxed, and then suddenly swung around to the end of the bed and snatched the telephone receiver. She keyed four digits, waited, then said,“Molly.”
Kane propped his head on one hand to watch her. She had eluded him somehow, despite the intensity of their physical coupling.
“Yes,” she said to the phone.“All right. I’ll be there.” She hung up, then stared at the floor, as if trying to focus her energies.
“Curtis?” Kane asked.
“No,” she said.“It’s the Russian ship.They’re coming in.”
She went to her closet and looked for something dignified to wear to meet the Russians.The best she could find was a sort of orange padded cape and trousers.
Her own calmness surprised her, even frightened her a little. She’d just been unfaithful, for the first time in 13 years of marriage, and it was like nothing had happened at all.
No, she thought. Something had happened. Nothing as melodramatic as the end of her marriage; that had been over for years in any real sense. Something had changed inside her, not a sudden rush of guilt or desolation, but instead a growing sense of her own strength and power.
It had come from Kane. She remembered something Verb had said to her months ago, one of her feeble attempts at humor, when she was talking about her new physics as “quantified destiny.” She made some joke about “destinons,” quantum particles of fate that bound people and events through the fourth dimension.
For Molly there was more truth in the idea than even Verb would admit; she knew that she and Kane had exchanged more than bodily fluids and neural release.
Kane frightened her. He was quirky, nervous, with the dark, flitting eyes of a bird and an aura of suppressed violence that seemed detached from his intellect. But it wasn’t fear that had opened her so completely to him, and now, as she felt his fingers close on her arm, she promised herself that she would not be physically intimidated by him.
“You’d better get dressed,” she said.
“You’ve known about this,” he said.“How long?”
“They launched within a couple of days of your ship.They weren’t firing messages off at us like you guys were, but we picked up some of their signals back to Moscow. Morgan must have known. Didn’t he say anything to you?”
Kane took his hand away.“No. Of course not.What did you get from their signals?”
“Nothing.What’s there to say? They’re here for the same reason you are. Obviously.” In saying it she had identified Kane as her enemy, or at least her rival, but Kane seemed to miss the implicit threat.
“Good,” Kane said.“If I can find out what the Russians want, then maybe I’ll know something.”
Is he joking? she wondered. She took her clothes into the bathroom, and when she came back Kane had dressed.
“What about Curtis?” Kane asked.“Is he going to be there?”
“There’s no telling. If he wants to know about it, then he knows.”
Kane said,“I don’t see the two of you together, somehow.”
Molly shrugged.“He’s changed.You want to see the landing?”
“Why not?”
“Walk with me.”
They masked and went outside. Kane looked even more predatory in his mask, Molly thought. It left nothing to focus on but those black, shark-like eyes.
“I don’t know,” she said.“Maybe he hasn’t changed, not really. It’s so easy to talk about power corrupting and all that. But which came first, the idealism, or the lust for power? I mean, maybe all the ideals were just a means to an end.”
“What kind of ideals are we talking about?”
“Nine years ago, when everything went wrong, Curtis saved this place.” She moved her hand and the circle took in the dome over their heads, the orange grove around them, two teenage girls leaning against one of the living modules, wires leading from their temples to a small metal box.“He did it just about singlehandedly.All anybody cared about was getting through from one day to the next, and it wasn’t enough. Then Curtis comes along and starts talking about twenty, thirty, fifty years ahead.