But she had.
Mischa talked about morality and necessity and respectability.
But she saw how all that worked, and how they kept a careful shield up and how they didn’t look too long into mirrors, too deeply into their own eyes.
She did.
And maybe, she thought, in that deep dark behind her eyelids, maybe Bowe had been equally desperate. Maybe Bowe’d gone looking, too, that day on the docks, and maybe he’d let loose his demons and loosed hers and they’d always be bound… maybe it tied him and her in such a way they went on screwing each other in a non-biological sense, creative only when they were joined, locked in a reality that nobody else could see.
Sometimes she desperately needed to know Bowe was out there. Sometimes she wondered if he needed her in the same way.
And he took Tom to himself.
Why?
What did he want? What did he need? Of all his demons, which one was in the ascendant at that moment?
Or had Tom sought him out?
Don’t hurt the kid, she wished Bowe, in the way she sometimes talked to him in absentia… he was a far better conversationalist than the Family offered. He’s mine to kill, and I didn’t. Don’t you presume, you bastard. You haven’t paid for him. I did.
Hurt him and I’ll have your balls, you son of a bitch.
Until then, we can go on having these little talks. We can go on meeting in the dark.
Or I can turn up on your dockside. I can meet you at Pell, with my ship.
Or I can track you across the universe, solo. You’re my obsession. My life. My reason for living.
Thank God you exist. Otherwise I’d be stuck with Mischa, fighting on his scale. And I’d strangle for want of oxygen.
—iii—
DREAM OF A SPIRAL TO NOWHERE. Sometimes it had colors and sometimes not. Sometimes it had sound, like a humming machine, deep and powerful.
Sometimes it was the brig, but the walls and the bars came and went, tilted into polyhedrons and dimensional oddity.
Sometimes shadows passed very fast. He thought of nursery rhymes and the man that wasn’t there. He’d been that man, that boy, not there. Cousins had taught him that rhyme and now it wouldn’t leave his head. He’d gone to sleep with it, and with the shadows, that twisted and turned one into a shadow, a presence he felt more than saw, a breath of change in the air about him.
He wasn’t afraid, in this visitation—aroused, more than anything, but not acutely so, more a languid half-aware state, in which something brushed against him, made a dizzying slow incline in the surface under him, shadowed the air above him.
He dreamed a textureless voice, for a subjective long while. It told him in an idle, distracted way, about the War, about the hazards and the solitude of the fringes of the fighting, about space deeper and more silent than any merchanter would know—and qualities in hyperspace that proved it had events linked to Einsteinian space by the deformations of spacetime a star made. One could trade temporality for position and vector for event potential.
Meaning, the voice said out of empty air, and with a touch of wicked mirth, you do damn well hope you potentiate toward the next star. But there are places you don’t do that. You can feel them in the numbers, in the interface. That’s how we found them.
He’d the strangest notion someone had come to visit him, just to pass the tedious no-time, and sat pouring this strange conversation into his ear. He hadn’t the least notion who’d found ‘them’ or what ‘they’ were. He’d missed that part. But he found himself oddly safe and comfortable lying still and listening, feeling or dreaming, he wasn’t sure, but he wasn’t in danger.
Wasn’t in danger when the shadow leaned down and kissed him on the mouth, saying, Sweet boy, I’ve traveled more lightyears than you. I’m ever so old, if we should compare notes. Can you open your eyes? Can you look the dark in the face?
He didn’t see things clearly. He wasn’t sure what he saw.
“You have to get used to it,” the voice said, in its no-time, distorted way—like it was playing back a second or so out of synch with his heartbeat, but that didn’t make sense, it was just the way the brain heard it, or that was what the voice told him he was hearing, simultaneously, or first, he just couldn’t get hold of when things were happening to him, or how he’d ended up skin to skin with his visitor. Sequential memory was nowhere. It was a mental end-over-end tumble, out of control. Physical sensations cascaded out of order. He was out of breath and not getting air, then spinning faster and faster as his heart speeded up and the sensual and sensory traded places in rapid succession.
Was it sensuality traded for spatiality, vector for potential? He couldn’t remember the answer to his question, or why he’d asked it. He hadn’t any breath. He couldn’t get another. Then he found a way through the interface, came spinning through the dark into white space, and the sickening conviction of falling that came at system-drop.
Was out for a moment or two. Came back, gasping for a single breath, like a newborn.
“Don’t believe Christian,” someone said. “Nothing’s free.”
He was alone, then, couldn’t put reality with where he was or where he’d been, until the next pulse at the interface dropped his stomach through infinity and sent his heart and lungs struggling after the demands of his body.
Lying naked on his bunk, beneath the blankets. Clothes neatly folded on his feet…
Shit, he thought, in language he reserved for jump-drop. Marie’s language.
That’s a stupid thing to do. That’s just abysmally stupid. Why did I do that?
Must have done it. Tranked to the eyeballs and on autopilot. Way to break your neck.
Damn fishtank, this place… get up, get dressed, before the crew starts stirring, can’t trust this crew won’t go for any skin they can get, please and thank you or not…
Jump-dreams like he’d never had in his life. Sex the way it couldn’t be in real life. He’d real memories. He’d the jump-dream still more vivid, still felt the heat and the arousal of a second body, real as realspace, real as Einstein’s laws and Bok’s famous loophole.
Where had a comp-tech junior crewman gotten to dreaming about physics he’d never had make sense to him even in deep-tape?
Where had he come out of jump with understandings he hadn’t gotten, with numbers and Greek letters floating in the dark inside his brain?
The wobbles hit his stomach. Hard. He made a grab at the panel beside him, where he’d disposed the nutri-packs. They fell out onto the mattress. He took one in a shaking hand, seeing at the same time that the bruises around his wrist had healed, feeling the damn cable as it dragged across his body, underneath the blanket.
But he hadn’t a stitch on.
He stopped with the pull-tab in his fingers, lifted his head to see the rest of the cell, his heart pounding, helpless to feed the oxygen fast enough.
Couldn’t get his shirt off without the bracelet being off. But his clothes, including the shirt, were neatly folded, lying on the blanket on his feet.
Christian’s face, Christian holding him up… down the hall. Christian’s clothes… skintights, and a sensual feeling in clothes he wasn’t used to…