Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  At first her weight pulled them toward the ground, but then the impossible wind again began to blast them from underneath. It was warmer now, a warm raging wind as solid as tropic rapids. At three inches they began to rotate, but Rachel couldn’t see through the flying hair and grit whether Don was using a twister in his senseless battle with——what? What the hell was he fighting her off to do? And where was the patient in this hellish metaphor? Above her Don gave a long, low sound: not a moan or a cry but a drawn-out breathy keening of such yearning and hope that Rachel tightened her hold until skin and blood jammed under her fingernails, and then she understood.

  Don was the one dying. Dying not as a passive construct in somebody else’s metaphor, but as an active participant in his own, both initiator and victim. He wasn’t being tossed by the wind, he was riding it. Voluntarily mounting it higher and higher, back to the beginning, back where the wind blew from flowed to fell from the side of the cliff, slow and unstoppable as the fall of night. Night——night was there, mysterious and passionate and terrible enough to fill all those aches and yearnings that the glare of sunlight only exposed——

  “No, damn it!” she screamed into his bloody hair. “Not you! Not you!”

  Night. He was going to night, on top of the sky, above the wind. He was going to night, to the warmth and throbbing as the crimson blood rushed into her breasts, between her legs. Crimson flaring out like a nova spreading engulfing the longed-for, half-remembered temperature, blood-warm, salty dark——Throwing her head forward, Rachel closed her teeth on Don’s right shoulder. Blood filled her mouth, rushing in with outraged scream. The jerks of his body as he tried to rip free of her teeth tilted them crazily to the right, but not enough to flip over their locked bodies and leave her on top. The wind from beneath became stronger and louder; they were rising faster. Rachel spit out Don’s shoulder——he had stopped the keening——and screamed “Fight it, damn you! You told me to fight it!” There was no sign he heard. She tried to make the wind colder, harsher——hail, sleet, blowing sand——anything but this seductive warmth, cleaner by the moment, lifting them higher and higher. She succeeded in lowering the temperature a few degrees, but then the demented howling began to sound more regular, swelling and pulsing and mounting to a crescendo of power that was music and thunder and orgasm, that held her transfixed, no longer fighting.

  They were being blown upward and northward, at an angle, towards the night. The plain unfolded below them, tattered and unimportant. Ahead the sky throbbed black and crimson, never wholly one or the other but a passionate, relentless blending, flashing lightning——under her legs, clamped around Don’s, Rachel could feel the force of his erection. The wind sang past them, hot and alive. Rachel cried out, didn’t hear herself, and closed her eyes, smiling into the night as the night flowed into her, and then blackness came.

  The first thing she became aware of was her neck. It ached; the muscles were cramped and tense. Awareness of the rest of her body followed. There was no part of her that was not bruised and battered. Slowly, Rachel opened her eyes. At the same second, she realized that the wind had stopped and the air hung as still and heavy as she and Don were hanging.

  They were in the branches of a huge cottonwood. Other trees, unseen before in the dust of the twister, dotted the prairie. Don lay pressed against the cottonwood’s trunk, circled and pinned by Rachel’s arms. Next to the trunk her hands clung to two of the branches; it was her hands that had held them in the tree. Rachel tried to open her fingers. At first she could not, so desperately were they knotted around the solid wood. When she had forced open her scraped and cramped hands, Rachel spread them in front of her, shifted Don’s weight slightly so he would not fall out of the tree, and then stared at her spread hands. She turned them over and back, palms up and palms down. It was as though they belonged to someone else, as though she had never seen them before.

  Hands. Driving a nail, picking a bouquet, stirring the rice, painting a window frame. Holding on for dear life, even when the mind desired otherwise. For dear life.

  In front of her spread hands, Don moaned softly.

  The moth left the dahlias. It hovered over the beer can, flew to the deck, and settled on a fold of Rachel’s nightgown. She sat up, looking at her hands. The moth flew away, wings pale in the moonlight as any ghost.

  “Awake?”

  “Yes——”

  “Rachel——”

  “Don’t.” She put her finger to his lips. He looked exhausted, white ridges sagging on either side of his mouth, but whole. Irrationally, she had half-expected to see the broken arm and bitten shoulder. But there was only the old scar on his chest, and the new lump on her forehead where the gun butt had come down.

  “It was a mugger,” she said. “Just another stupid, greedy mugger. You must look like an easy target. He gave you a concussion, and you went into severe shock.”

  “I know. Susan Ferrier told me.” His voice was flat, stretched like taut canvas over the pain underneath.

  “So now you get to be a medical-first. After all, nobody else has ever initiated his own metaphor to finish killing himself. You’ll be a celebrity, a real psychiatrist’s dream. ‘Metaphoric Death Wish Among the Metaphoric Healers: A Reverse Phenomenon.’ Still want me to see the Freud-fly?” Don didn’t answer. After a moment Rachel looked away and said, “I’m sorry. God, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.”

  “I had it coming,” Don said. “All these weeks——all these weeks I thought it was you. Mrs. Angstrom. Shapiro. I thought it was you. But you must have been picking it up all along from me, some crazy repressed fascination with death I didn’t even know I had——”

  “From you?” Rachel said. It was a new idea. But then she thought of the calm, ordinary dreams that brought her awake screaming, of the delicious blood-warm water, of the wind mounting upward under her. “No. No, I don’t think it was only you.”

  “What then?”

  “I think,” she said slowly, “I think it was both of us. There might have been something I was picking up from you, something you couldn’t express directly——control——but then I——it wasn’t all you. No.”

  Don reached up and fingered the bruise on his forehead. He deliberately pushed it, Rachel saw, hard enough to hurt, and she closed her eyes.

  “Don’t, Don. Don’t blame yourself.”

  “I could have killed us both. Only I didn’t even know you were going to be there, in the metaphor. How did you get in? I didn’t call you.”

  “Yes. You did. You must have, or the prairie metaphor wouldn’t have reached me . . . wait. I was asleep, I was dreaming. Your trance reached my dream.”

  Again Don put his hands to either side of his head. This time the touch was tentative, probing; in his gray eyes brimmed a strange light, fascinated and horrified. “I wanted to die. I wanted it. I constructed a metaphor to hurry towards it, not to stop it——”

  “I know,” Rachel said. “I know. But you also reached out to me, or your trance did. And you must have known, at some level, that I would stop you.”

  “Why did you? Why did you try to stop me? You tried to get there yourself, before——with Mrs. Angstrom. With Shapiro. Why stop me? Why didn’t you join me from the beginning?”

  “I don’t know,” Rachel said. “Why did you stop me before, and this time want to go on yourself?”

  There was a long silence. In the corridor footsteps passed. Somewhere a phone jangled softly. Don squeezed his eyes shut. “I’ll have to see a psychiatrist, if I’m going to work again. We both will.”

  “No!”

  “Rachel, I have to. If I don’t talk about it, if I let it go, it will grow; don’t you see? It will grow, and next time——”

  “Then not to me. Don’t talk about it to me.”

  “Ever?”

  “No.”

  “It would help you.”

  “No. It would help you, because for you the important thing is to get it out, bring out whatever——once you get it out
in the sunlight, you can take it apart and label all the parts and make each one just another tool. Then you won’t be in danger of giving in. But I don’t work that way. I can’t.”

  Don chewed on his lip. A long moment went by, and Rachel held her breath.

  “If you can’t,” he said finally, “then you can’t. But maybe if I can understand what I’m doing, how whatever need in me starts you changing the metaphor——if I can get my end under control——Rachel, I need to work with you. It has to be you, now. You’re the only one who would know what’s happening and would stop me if——”

  “Hush,” Rachel said. “Hush. We’ll stop each other.” Don groped for her hand. She held it, feeling the scrawny wrist bones and the blood in his pulse and the callus on the third finger where he held a pencil. Her fingernails dug into the bony knobs of his knuckles. She could feel there, in the veins and nerves and delicate bones of his hands, the question he hadn’t yet asked, and she waited.

  “The night in the metaphor,” he said, finally, “the Night. Death. Is it really as beautiful as I felt? As desirable?”

  “Oh, God, Don. How do I know? The only other one who has seen it is you, and you were linked with me. How can I tell if it’s really that beautiful, or if it’s just that I——that we need it to be like that?”

  Don’s hand tightened on hers. Rachel gripped it hard, grateful for the blood and bone and flesh next to her palm. “We’ll stop each other,” Don said. “Rachel?”

  She nodded. Unsmiling, they looked at each other. Both were careful to keep their eyes focused, to stare straight ahead at the other’s face, to avert their heads from the parted yellow drapes fluttering at the sill, from what lay beyond the yellow drapes.

  Their two hands clasped desperately. For dear life. Outside the window, night came.

  BOROVSKY’S HOLLOW WOMAN

  Laura walked the Low Steel above the stars, searching for her man.

  It was 2.3 klicks across the skeletal terrain by the most direct route—the blue line on the diagram of the construction zone burned in the eye of Laura’s mind. No one but Mikhail Borovsky would take that particular route across the unfinished girders of the titan cylinder’s outermost level, and even he would not take it without her.

  One foot before the other, lift, swing, step. The pilot beam was solid monocrystal steel, I-section, one decimeter wide. One hundred meters to her left and right identical girders glittered in the always-changing light. They were the primary structural support of the latest, lowest level of George Eastman Nexus. Each girder was a single crystal of iron atoms, one hundred nineteen kilometers in circumference, and strong enough to rest an artificial world on. For a kilometer ahead and behind, it was Laura and her beam.

  A man in the saddle of a six-wheeled yoyo swung under the horizon far away antispinward and quickly approached her, soon passing to the rear and vanishing. Borovsky’s yoyo was a four-wheeler. The earth swung up behind her and made blue highlights creep across the dull-gray steel plates ten meters above her helmet. It slipped above the horizon and was gone again for another forty minutes.

  Laura adjusted the magnetism in her boot soles. Just enough to add a little friction, a little sureness. If she fell outward from the rotating structure into the starry darkness the steelworkers called the Pit, no one would fall after to her rescue. But she would not fall. Steel was her medium, just as it was Borovsky’s, and she loved it. Steel was sure and clean and true. It could be trusted, as Borovsky could be trusted when he wasn’t—

  No. She would not allow that thought to be completed.

  Where had they gone? Borovsky, in rubber underwear, off on a yoyo to fight a man twice his size, somewhere on a level swinging more than 1.6 g. Falling on your face could flatten your skull on E Minus Seven. Fighting could dock you a week’s pay. Ignoring a challenge could get you called a phobe. A coward. A. . . woman.

  Where?

  Step following step, body bent forward, using the artificial gravity to help carry her onward, Laura searched. She scanned the chatter on the CB and the bloody-murder band. Nothing spoke of a man in rubber hurt on E Minus Seven.

  Less than five hundred meters of open steel remained. Far ahead Laura saw something streak through the shadows toward the sucking stars. She followed desperately with her eyes and saw it catch the sun beyond the great cylinder’s shadow. Four-wheeled gantry, cable, saddle: It blazed brilliant yellow for a moment and was gone, falling forever.

  His yoyo, unridden, alone. Damn the Pit! Laura broke into a run, each boot hitting the beam safely though without thought, each magnet grabbing just so much. Raw dawn broke behind her and cast lurching shadows against the unfinished steel ahead. The sun was beneath her feet as she stepped from naked monocrystal onto gray steel plates.

  Above was the port from which the yoyo had fallen. She pulled herself up a ladder and stepped out onto E Minus Six. A little lighter, a little less deadly.

  No sign of fleeing men. Six was a big level, one hundred meters thick. Heavy chemical industry, she remembered.

  Before her a dozen huge steel tanks squatted against the floor like brooding hens. Each was ten meters high, with a ladder leading to a dogged circular hatch.

  She scanned the tanks. All were alike, save that one of the hatches had dog-handles twisted differently from the rest. In moments she was at the hatch, pushing the dogs aside.

  The tube was a simple pressure lock. Laura pulled herself in, dogged the outer hatch, and released the inner.

  With a rising rush there was sound all around her. She pushed the inner hatch wide and found her man.

  Mikhail Borovsky lay naked in a heap, blood leaking from his mouth. Laura cried out, and for an awful moment she lay immobile in the tube until she heard a rattling breath. She slid to his side and squeezed his wrist until her gauntlet felt his pulse. Drugs—he needed drugs to stir his system out of shock.

  His rubber suit lay on the floor. Laura kicked it scornfully aside, reached to her throat, and undid its latch. Quickly she eased her helmet back. She pulled her ventral zipper down, flipping the hooks aside with her fingers as they went. Eagerly she spread her ventral plates apart, pulled her pelvic plate forward, then pulled the zippers down each of her legs almost to each knee.

  She lay on her back beside him, plates gaping, helmet folded under. The eyes in her wrists and in the toes of her boots helped her lift Borovsky above her. Gently she eased his legs down into her legs and let the slow peristalsis of her inner layers draw his feet into her feet. Her ventral plates stretched wide to clear his hips. She placed the Texas catheter over his penis and pulled her pelvic plate back into position.

  Wriggling slightly, she guided his arms down into her arms, where her inner layers did the final positioning.

  Each finger was drawn into place and continuously massaged. Laura zipped and hooked her ventral plates and finally eased her helmet over his head.

  For a Rabinowicz Manplifer Mark IX space suit, walking steel empty was too lonely to bear. Without her man inside her Laura felt herself a hollow mockery, less than even a woman, not worthy of the soul Borovsky had paid so much for. Never again, she said to unconscious ears. Never again. Stay inside me. You are mine.

  Slowly she stood, whole again. Up from his toes the hydraulic rings pressed in smooth waves, helping his blood back toward his head and heart. A tiny needle jabbed into his buttocks, sending a careful measure of stimulant into his bloodstream.

  This was no place to be caught by a boss. Laura moved slowly as she climbed from the tank. It had been some time since she had carried his dead weight asleep, and never unconscious. She gave the tom rubber underwear to the Pit with a vengeful flick of her hand.

  They went home the long way, going up through Six to Five and walking slowly. Halfway there he came around.

  “Laura,” he whispered.

  “I love you,” she said, without breaking her stride.

  “He had a metal bar shoved up his ass,” he said, and coughed. “Crapped it out on the floor, grab
bed it, and that was that. I’m gonna kill the fugger. You watch me.”

  “I love you,” she said again, hoping against knowledge that the words would soothe the murderous rage she feared might get him killed.

  A world without Borovsky—

  “Love you too,” he mumbled, only half-conscious. “I’m gonna kill him.”

  By morning the bruises showed up. Borovsky swore at his image in the mirror. The left half of his face was swollen grotesquely. Ugly purple blotches covered most of his cheek and curved up nearly to surround his left eye. All across his body were bruises and scrapes from hitting the iron going down. He pressed a bruise with one finger and jerked the finger away from the fiery pain.

  Laura watched, unmoving. The tiny, cylindrical pod with its watercot, its kitchen, its shower, and squat toilet was very silent. If Borovsky fought again, if he insisted on fighting again today—

  Panic appeared in her crystalline, layered machine mind, seeping outward from the F layer at the core. Layers A through E were standard Manplifier equipment: sensory, motor, communications, memory, and intellect. Borovsky had paid three years’ wages for the F layer that Laura so cherished: unique, personal, precious—her soul. The E layer, shared by any machine that could speak and reason, could have stopped the panic, but it did not. Instead, when Laura could no longer stand the way he stood gripping the edge of the sink in furious silence, she spoke.

  “You didn’t have to go fight him.”

  He spat into the sink. “He called me a phobe. Maybe once I can take it. Maybe twice. Some people have to make noise. But he made me answer him. So I answered.” He probed a bruise on his thigh, wincing. “What do we got for bruises?”

  Laura turned and searched a small cabinet beside the bed. “Hemoverithol.”

  “Let’s have it.”

  Laura pressed an autoampul against his thigh and squeezed.