Part 4 (1/2)

I don't want to talk about it.

I know you don't.

Talk about what? Karen said.

Candi shook her head. Thanks, I said, and she released my finger.

I backed out of the small room. Be..., Candi said, and didn't complete the sentence. Maybe that was the sentence.

She had seen how profoundly I hadn't wanted to wake up.

I called Amelia from the airport and said I'd be home in a few hours, and would explain later. It would be after midnight, but she said to come straight over to her place. That was a relief. Our relations.h.i.+p didn't have any restrictions, but I always hoped she slept alone, waiting, the ten days I was away.

Of course she knew something was seriously wrong. When I got off the plane, she was there, and had a cab waiting outside.

The machine's programming was stuck in a rush-hour pattern, so it took us twenty minutes to get home, via surface roads I never see except on bicycle. I was able to tell Amelia the basic story while we drove through the maze that avoided nonexistent traffic. When we got to the campus the guard looked at my uniform and waved us through, wonder of wonders.

I let her talk me into some reheated stir-fry. I wasn't really hungry, but knew she liked to feed me.

It's hard for me to visualize, she said, rummaging for bowls and chopsticks while the stuff warmed. Of course it is. I'm just talking. She stood behind me and ma.s.saged my neck. Tell me you're going to be all right.

I am all right.

Oh, bulls.h.i.+t. She dug in. You're stiff as a board. You're not halfway back from ... wherever that was.

She had nuked some sake. I poured a second cup. ”Maybe. I... they let me go back and jack with Candi and Karen in the cardiac recovery unit. Candi's in a pretty bad way.

”Afraid of getting her heart pulled?

That's more Karen's problem. Candi's going round and round about Ralph. She can't handle losing him.

She reached over me and poured herself a cup. Isn't she a grief counselor? Out of uniform.

Yeah, well, why does somebody take that up? She lost her father when she was twelve, an accident while she was in the car. That's never buried very deep. He's there in the background with every man she, she's close to.

Loves? Like you?

Not love. It's automatic. We've been through this.

She crossed the kitchen to stir the pot, her back to me. Maybe we should go through it again. Maybe every six months or so.

I almost blew up at her, but held back. We were both tired and rattled. It's not at all like Carolyn. You just have to trust me. Candi's more like a sister- Oh sure.

Not like my sister, okay. I hadn't heard from her in more than a year. I'm close to her, intimate, and I guess you could call it a kind of love. But it's not like you and me.

She nodded and measured the stuff into bowls. I'm sorry. You go through h.e.l.l there and get more h.e.l.l here.

h.e.l.l and stir-fry. I took the bowl. Time of the month?

She put her own bowl down a little hard. That's another G.o.dd.a.m.ned thing. Sharing their periods. That's more than 'intimate.' It's just plain strange.

Well, count your blessings. You've got a couple of years' peace. The women in a platoon synchronize periods pretty quickly, and the men are of course affected. It's a problem with the thirty-day rotation cycle: the first half of last year I came home every month crabby with PMS, proof that the brain is mightier than the gland.

What was he like, Ralph? You never said much about him.

It was only his third cycle, I said. Still a neo. Never saw any real combat.

Just enough to kill him.

Yeah. He was a nervous guy, maybe oversensitive. Two months ago, when we were parallel-jacked, Scoville's platoon was worse than usual, and he was bouncing around for days. We all had to hang on to him, keep him putting one foot in front of the other. Candi was best at that, of course.

She played with her food. So you didn't know all that intimate stuff about him.

Intimate, yeah, but not as deep as the others. He wet the bed until p.u.b.erty, had terrible childhood guilt over killing a turtle. Spent all his money on jacks.e.x with the jills that hang around Portobello. Never had real s.e.x until he was married, and didn't stay married long. Before he got jacked he used to m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.e compulsively to tapes of oral s.e.x. Is that intimate?

What was his favorite food?

Crab cakes. The way his mother made them.

Favorite book?

He didn't read much, not at all for pleasure. He liked Treasure Island in school. Wrote a report about Jim in eleventh grade and then recycled it in college.

He was likeable?

Nice enough guy. We never did anything social-I mean n.o.body did, with him. He'd get out of the cage and run to the bars, with a hard-on for the jills.

Candi didn't, none of the women wanted to ... help him out that way?

G.o.d, no. Why would you?

That's what I don't understand. Why wouldn't you? I mean, all the women knew he went off with these jills.

That's what he wanted to do. I don't think he was unhappy on that score. I pushed the bowl away and poured some sake. Besides, it's an invasion of privacy on a cosmic scale: when Carolyn and I were together, every time we went back to the platoon we had eight people who knew everything we had done, from both sides, as soon as we jacked. They knew how Carolyn felt about what I did, and vice versa, and all the feedback states that that kind of knowledge generates. You don't start that sort of thing casually.

She persisted. I still don't see why not. You're all used to everybody knowing everything. You know each other's insides, for Christ's sake! A little friendly s.e.x wouldn't be that earthshaking.

I knew my anger was unreasonable, that it didn't really come from her questions. Well, how would you like to have the whole Friday night gang in the bedroom with us? Feeling everything you felt?

She smiled. I wouldn't mind. Is that a difference between men and women or between you and me?

I think it's a difference between you and merely sane people. My smile might not have been totally convincing. It's actually not the physical sensations. The details vary, but men pretty much feel like men and women feel like women. Sharing that isn't a big deal after the initial novelty. It's how the rest of you feels that's personal. And embarra.s.sing.

She took our bowls to the sink. You wouldn't be able to tell that from the ads. Her voice dropped. ”'feel how it feels to her.'

Well, you know. People who pay to have a jack installed often do it out of s.e.xual curiosity. Or something deeper; they feel trapped in the wrong kind of body but don't want to do the swap-op. I shuddered. Understandably.

People do it all the time, she said, teasing, knowing how I felt. It's less dangerous than jacking, and reversible.

Oh, reversible. You get somebody else's d.i.c.k.