But the metal-faced dream had died when he'd slept with his Pollycrewwoman. Or she'd gotten Sheila's face and become Sheila Barr, because the metal girl didn't ever come back again. He could just see her sort of standing forlornly behind Sheila's shoulder, looking a little curious and a little like the expression he saw in mirrors…
So maybe his wire-woman had become him, in some strange way.
But he'd damned sure never told Sheila who he dreamed she was, and never admitted it to aunt Lydia, who was so firmly, devoutly, desperately attached to other people's sanity.
Marie might have said, on the other hand, Hell, at least she won't get pregnant, and probably wished his wire-woman good morning at the breakfast table and asked did she want tea.
That was the way Marie had dealt with his childish fancies, made fun of them and sometimes fallen in with them. She said they were all right, she'd introduce them to hers sometime, and that had scared him, because he didn't think he wanted to meet Marie's dreams, in this space or any other.
But sometimes—often—you felt a sexual dream coming when you were falling into jump. Psychs like aunt Lydia always said, Don't do it,—particularly if you aimed at being operational crew, because if you ever got into that habit, it happened too easily and you might not come back in time to handle operations… addictive, they said.
Nothing about the experiences was real, of course, except your own side of the experience, and that felt very real—when you were coming out of hyperspace, every representation the senses made, the brain had to find some symbol for, so things would always appear chaotic.
And it could be sex. It could be very good sex. Or, for no reason at all, it could become a very disturbing nightmare, out of symbols a brain started calling up from some closet of the half-awake mind. Though sex was the most common.
So of course if you were a stupid kid who'd heard from his peers about fantastic trips, you tried flying that way a couple times, getting yourself off by the time-tested methods until you scared hell out of yourself at least once, ended up on deep trank for maybe the next two trips, and learned to do math problems instead while you went null.
Didn't want to go into jump seeing the brig around him.
Didn't want to think about piracy and ships getting blown.
Didn't want to wonder about Marie. That was a deep, deep mental pit he didn't want to excavate on this trip. He tried equations, tried programming problems, and he kept losing them, kept finding fantastical bits of nonsense running through his head… childhood rhymes and Rodman's poetry, Tommy's a Corinthian, Tommy's a Corinthian, lock him up with iron bars, iron bars, iron bars, then throw away the keys…
London's bridge is falling down, so leave them alone and they'll come home, pretty maids, pretty maids all in a row…
Pack of holo sex cards turned up in his study cubicle. Aunt Pat found them. Marie said, So? What's new? But nobody believed he hadn't put them there.
He wasn't stupid. If he had them, he wouldn't have left them there, in the study cubicle, for Roberta R. to find, next session. Roberta cried and said he was a pervert.
Pervert, pervert, pervert, Roberta said to him when they met in the corridors, and somebody wrote it in ink on the cubicle desk, where he'd find it…
Incest, aunt Lydia informed him severely, isn't a nice word, Tommy. Do you understand incest?
He hadn't. He didn't. Aunt Lydia explained it.
Sex isn't a thing we think about on-ship, ever, ever, ever, Tommy, we don't tease our cousins that way. We don't think thoughts like that, now do we understand, Tommy?
He understood, all right: he went and bloodied Rodman's nose for what he understood, which settled one bit of business, and got him tagged as a bully, this time, but he still hadn't got it. He understood some of the pictures, when aunt Pat showed them to him and accused him of putting them there, but he'd been so stunned by the images that his guilty curiosity couldn't muster a defense… he couldn't quite identify some of the images as body parts until he was older, but he could still play back that memory like a tape in his head, and after that, just to figure it out, he told himself, he kept sneaking looks at books he wasn't supposed to have and tapes he wasn't supposed to see, trying to resolve what he'd only half-guessed, and getting feelings aunt Lydia said hewasn't supposed to have. It was what That Man had done with Marie. It was his beginnings. And the feelings became his, not That Man's, and he couldn't leave it alone, and couldn't stop thinking about it, until he wasdoing it in jump, and the nightmares and Marie's stories all tangled together.
He came out screaming and aunt Lydia said he'd better have deep trank next time. Marie said somebody'd better watch him and he couldn't come home like she'd planned, she had to be on duty. Kids went through that sometimes, Lydia said, meaning nightmares in jump. They got over it or you had to leave them on some station—he wasn't supposed to hear that part, and Marie got mad and said if he had a few less of Lydia's theories he'd be saner.
So he resolved to keep his mouth shut and not to have the nightmares again, because being left on station was the worst one… he only had Marie, and Marie wouldn't leave him, Marie had told aunt Lydia go to hell and keep her advice to herself. He'd been terribly proud of Marie, then, and told himself Marie did really want him, she just wasn't good at showing it. So he did calculations the way the seniors told him to, next time.
It didn't work, quite, but he kept his mouth shut about it.
He lived. You didn't die from dreams.
Ship was going up…You could feel it, a strange feeling, like everything was spreading wider and standing still when there wasn't any referent for still…
Think about Sheila, shewas his safety-valve when his mind started free-wheeling and the ship went strange, think about meeting Sheila… he could see her down the dockside at Mariner, silver-flash coveralls, small figure in the distance, near the huge gantries, the way he'd first seen her, his Pollyspacer, who never talked about him, never listened if he did, sometimes, slip. She told jokes, she made fun, she said she liked him, never would love him, forget that crap, that was too serious, and most of all she taught him to calm down, laugh a little, and let her do some of the instigating, that was what she said.
She was older, Sheila Barr was, and she'd told him once how she occasionally thought about having a kid, and kept changing her mind. She didn't want that commitment, but she wanted the immortality. He'd never thought about either. He'd been busy surviving his own childhood when he took up with Sheila Barr, hadn't been ready in the least for immortality, just desperately—a little vindication with the guys…
She won't look at you, Rodman had said.
But she did. She had. She waltzed him into a sleepover for fourteen straight days and darks and showed him things he'd never gotten out of tapes or holocards—he came back knowing things the cousins didn't, he quickly found that out, and set Rodman's nose mightily out of joint when the youngers listened to him as one who Knew.
So he got a reputation, such as it was. And proved he could still beat hell out of Rodman, one on one. But he still froze up, getting dates when Pollywasn't in port, which, God, he didn't want Rodman or anybody else to find out… he managed. Looks helped, he had that over Rodman, by some, and brains, but it didn't cover everything, and on some liberties he just hung out, disappeared a night or so, claiming he was missing Sheila, which was true, for different reasons.