Blue felt the discomfort that had sprung up between them because of the subject. He could tell by the set of her shoulders and the tension in her face this was a sensitive issue for her. Strangely, he did feel better. He’d looked up HiCaste courting rituals and had felt his hopes to impress her and her family diminish.
If Kali were more traditional, he wouldn’t have had a chance as a suitor because of her standing in society. He’d be lucky if she even glanced at him.
“Thank you for telling me,” he said quietly.
“It’s not a secret.” She picked at the blanket, eyes downcast. “The nanosec you met my parents you’d of known.”
Feeling more awkward and out of place by the moment, she leaned back to put space between them. Her face locked into a pleasant non-expression she’d cultivated after withstanding years of difficult situations.
Blue’s legs tensed either side of hers. “Don’t do that.”
Kali judged the best way to disentangle totally. “Hmm?”
“Your happy face hides the sad. I’m being honest. You have to admit the chances of your parents seeing me and approving are unlikely. I didn’t mean to insult you, but I….” Blue thought hard so as not to isolate her even more. “People of my own Caste are wary of me. Can’t see your parents being any different if I were to....” He cleared his throat.
Kali’s eyes rounded because he flushed and looked away. He did that a lot when he needed to think, as if the sight of her disrupted him or something.
Was Blue hinting that he would ask her parents for permission to court her?
It was a HiCaste tradition her parents had never given Kali the slightest inclination she need abide by, but that is what it sounded like. If he’d been researching her Caste, there would have had been a Herculean section on the rituals and proper practices of dating.
Playing it cool on the outside, her heart back flipping on the inside, Kali nudged his leg with hers. “If you were to…?”
“I have little to offer right now, but I can change that. My life has been…. Until recently, I have felt a need to be less than what I am, less than what I’m capable. Can’t explain why, just know that I have the ability to be more.” He contemplated the middle distance. He shrugged, at a loss to his own behaviour. “I’ve felt as if I should hide who I am. My feelings have changed, and I’m trying to live to the fullest. You’re worth changing for. I’d like to ask your parents for the right to court you formally. That will make my intentions clear.”
Kali tried not to laugh at how uncomfortable he looked. He was trying to impress her. The LoCaste were fortunate that their customs were less rigid and structured than those in higher society. She’d always thought them lucky they could be so free in their relations outside specially designated rooms.
Didn’t Blue realise she had already committed a dozen ritual violations with him?
The answer was on the tip of her tongue, but she swallowed it. Kali tipped her head back and pointed at the cluster of stars. “Those stars right there are my favourite. The arrangement is the first letter of my name.”
Blue didn’t press her and accepted the change of topic. He leaned back on his hands and looked up. “Kali.” His eyes unfocused as smile played on his lips. “Goddess of destruction.”
She cringed. “My parents were trying to be clever. Kali, The Black One.” She rolled her eyes. “Have you ever seen a visual representation of that goddess? She is terrifying, marvellous, but terrifying. You have to give them points for relevancy.”
“There is such affection in your voice. You love your parents?”
“More than anything. You don’t?”
He was quiet.
She wrinkled her nose; worried she might have upset him.
“We don’t speak anymore.” He shook his head at her devastated look. “It’s standard.”
Kali firmly believed in healthy development being rooted in the love of family. She opened her mouth to disagree then she thought about it from his perspective. She shrugged, not wanting to offend him. He seemed at peace. There was no anguish in his voice when he spoke of his parents, no pained expression. The kind of relationship she had with her parents wasn’t for everybody.
They lay back on the blanket, and Kali pointed to her favourite constellations.
“Did you know that the cosmos is in a total state of flux?” she asked. “The reason everything exists is because the universe’s energy is constantly changing. Billions of billions of years into the future everything will reach sameness, and all energy will be one. The universe will stop moving, and cease existing. All that energy used up.” Wide eyed, she bit her lip. “Isn’t that fascinating and terrifying at the same time?”
Blue stared at her. This close to the OutRim there was no artificial light and starlight kissed her profile. “Why terrifying? You’ll have been dead a long time before that happens.”
“The idea everything will one day cease to be gives me chills.”
“And what about your Higher Power. How to you reconcile scientific fact with your faith?”
“I don’t see the two as mutually exclusive. I accept science explains what I see, feel, and touch around me, but that it will never explain what I feel in my heart.” Kali rubbed her chest. “There is a greater purpose to our lives, and I am more than some random act of chance. My being here was destined from that first spark in the hot big nothing.” She spared him a look, grinned. “And so was yours.”
“You think a great force preordains your life?” Blue was engaged, trying to understand her point of view. “That fate decides the outcome of your decisions.”
“I do believe that there is a certain path I will travel. Everything I’m describing can be explained scientifically in some way or another, right?”
She knew it could be, but wanted to hear him say it.
Blue thought about it, turning numerous hypotheses around in his mind, but finding no evidence to flatly contradict her. “Agreed.”
“So why be pedantic over what it’s called?”
Now he frowned, not liking how blasé she could be about fact over belief. “Because science is more than a mish mash of beliefs.”
“I agree. It’s educated faith. People choose to be literal and see God and the Cosmic Virgin as people like we are. As if they have taken on flesh and blood and have what we call rational thought.”
“You’re suggesting pure energy is the Higher Power. Yet you differentiate between a male and female power, and say your life has been set by fate.”
“God is matter, anything with mass.” She held up one hand. “The Cosmic Virgin is dark energy, everything else without mass. The black voids in-between.” She held up the other hand then pressed them together, interlocking her fingers. “Two sides of the same coin, creation and destruction. We’re talking about the same things, it just has different names, and admittedly the scientific names are fancier.”
“Existence began with the sudden expansion of energy. Not by an invisible power that made something from nothing.”
“I’m saying the singularity that sparked creation is the Higher Power. It doesn’t have to be one or the other, Blue.”
“Energy is not sentient.” He was exasperated. “You can’t say bundles of raw power floating around in their most primal are conscious and alive.”
Picking up the gauntlet he’d thrown, Kali raised her eyebrows. She rolled over and leant on her elbow. “Excuse me? Is it not universally agreed that what we are is energy moving so fast as to form particles, which form molecules, which form matter, and make us solid?”
He hesitated, on shaky ground. Blue knew he’d somehow walked into a trap of his own making. That had never happened before. “Correct.”
“Then how can you tell me energy is not sentient when you’re nothing but energy at your most basic.” Her point made, Kali sniffed and lay down. “Somehow we’ve managed to separate the idea of life and energy. We force the concept of existence into the corporeal, and struggle to make everything f
it into our perceived dimensions. The tiniest of subatomic particles move at speed beyond what we can see to make our world appear solid. That’s all. There is a stunning order to it, such beautiful refinement. I think of the Higher Power as wild energy, a harmonious balance of light and dark, pushing and pulling to keep the universe alive. That it’s everything, and everyone anywhere that has ever been, and will ever be. If that’s not divine then I don’t know what is.”
Blue was riveted. Hearing her talk infused him with warmth. She had a rational mind, but refused to think within the limitations logical thought could set. Acting on impulse, something Blue only did when it came to Kali, he poked her side. “You’re not going to let me win this argument.”
“I don’t expect to change your mind, so don’t be presumptuous and try to change mine. I could hear the moment you decided I was wrong in your tone.”
“Alright.”
She flushed at his amusement. “I warn you not to get me riled on something I care about.”
“No warning needed, I enjoy your thinking.” Blue paused. “And I like the sound of your voice.”
“Thanks,” she whispered. “People say they’d like to be smarter, but they don’t realise how alone it can make you feel. It’s like talking to myself sometimes.” She fisted her hands. Confessed, “I’m lonely.”
Rocked by the pain in her voice, Blue’s fingers crept along the blanket until he found that delicate fist, rigid and trembling. He curled his larger hand around her smaller one, and held on.
His fingers encountered something hard and rope-like.
“What’s this,” he asked, lifting her wrist so he could see.
“A bracelet I found on the street when I was a minor. I put it on and never took it off. I like it. It’s actually worth a ton of credits at auction, because it’s made from real leather. You know cows? They were pretty much wiped out during the forth war. They still have some in specialist habitats for mass breeding like they did in the twentieth, but they don’t do so well in the artificial atmosphere. My parents spend thousands of credits on imported steak twice a year on their birthdays.” It was a simple braid, blackened with age, and tied in a knot. “Here.” Kali sat up and undid the knot with her teeth. She tied it on him. “You have it.”
He blinked. “Why?”
“You know why.” She blushed, and lay back down. If he’d studied the traditions of her Caste as he claimed then he would know such a gift signalled her preference of him. “Think of me when you see it, and remember tonight.”
His face brightened. “You are considering my offer … my offer?”
At his delighted confusion, she laughed aloud. “Truth is, if you didn’t ask, I’d have broken tradition and asked you to consider me. A relationship is a two way thing.”
Blue caught her arm and wouldn’t let go. Wanting to give her something in return, he undid the tie around his wrist, put it on her, but still didn’t let go of her arm. Her skin felt smooth and he liked touching her. “Mine’s worthless,” he explained when she stared at it with a funny expression. “It’s just red and grey string. Like you, I’ve always had it. My mother gave it to me when I was a boy. I’ve never wanted to take it off.”
Kali considered the implications of this. He claimed not to need to parents yet he cherished a bracelet given to him from his mother.
She enjoyed the strength and character Blue continually surprised her with. Her gaze drifted to his lips, and she remembered the kiss she’d started, but he’d most certainly finished. She shivered at the memory as a flush of heat crept up her neck.
“Blue, do you know what a chastity belt is?”
“A device injected into a debutant to keep her pure. The nanobots inflict minor pain when mild sexual stimulation is achieved, and great pain when major sexual stimulation is achieved. The desired effect is to prevent coitus, and keep the debutants hymen in tact for her chosen groom.”
“That’s some, ah, seriously detailed information you have there. How do you know so much about them?”
“I know everything.”
Kali’s mind didn’t quite manage to swerve around that conversational grenade. “Everything? You need me to tell you that is impossible?”
“My memory is eidetic. I absorb knowledge at an accelerated rate and anything you ask I generally have enough secondary or indirect knowledge of similar or closely related information that I can make an educated guess with tremendous accuracy.”
“So not everything,” she argued, her mind turning over like a stalled FloVe. “Could I ask you anything and you’d have an answer?”
“Ask.”
“Even–”
He grinned. “Ask.”
Kali rocked on her knees, tapping her lip in sets of three. “Do you know why they had such a hard time terraforming Neptune when Mars was so easy?”
“They never did. Neptunites are born on Karas, a fully self-contained floating space station that allows the inhabitants to feel like they are living on the planets icy water surface. Most do not know this unless they meet a Neptunite, or move to the planet itself. Considering the low birth rate, and lack of emigration applications it is the most undesirable of settlements, and will likely be defunct before the century turns.”
Kali’s eyes swivelled as she grappled for something else to throw at him. “What’s the Jovian orbital inclination?”
“One point three zero five to elliptic.”
“I might just believe you.” Setting that aside, she got back to what started the conversation. Her smile died. “I don’t have one.”
“Most people don’t.”
“Maybe that’s the case in your Caste, but it’s pretty much standard in the world I live in.”
“Never knew that.”
At the staggered look on his face, Kali knew she’d made a serious error. Nobody would be that shocked. “We’re talking about chastity belts again, Blue, not eidetic memory.”
He blinked. “Why? We determined its function.”
Kali kind of nodded agreement and rubbed her temple, looking away from him to catch her breath and figure out where she went wrong with this seduction attempt. She just wanted a kiss. It was proving more complicated than explaining how the human mind experienced difficulty visualizing elevated dimensions as proposed in super symmetric string theory because they only move in three spatial dimensions, like she did for her finals thesis.
She counted to thirty, and Blue kept looking at the stars, making no move towards her.
Kali twiddled her thumbs and wondered if she wasn’t being plain enough. “I only have one encounter logged on my BeepMe profile,” she blurted. “In case you hadn’t looked.”
Blue studied her, trying to reason what Kali was thinking to bring her to voice these seemingly disconnected statements. “I saw. Me too.”
“Oh.” She wiggled around. “Um, stellar.”
Kali still wasn’t quite sure what she was doing wrong. She didn’t know how to suggest they kiss without being subtler than she had been. Maybe that was the problem; she had instigated the kiss they shared. She could just kiss him again, but what if he began to think she was easy, or too forward?
Giving up, Kali rolled into Blue. She cupped his face, and placed her lips on his. It was supposed to be a gentle touch, a playful caress that would tell her if she was becoming even more attracted to his body as much as she was his mind.
The moment Kali touched her mouth to Blue’s she got lost.
She pressed harder, and slid onto his lap. Her knees hit the ground either side of his hips, and her front moulded to his chest. She gasped when the tip of her tongue swept over the seam of his lips and tasted him. His scent was lovely. Crisp, and comforting, like spring. It was a smell so unlike the manufactured, sickly sweet fragrances HiCaste males were drenched in. She felt his strength beneath her, and that his body was merely a vessel for his brilliant mind turned her on like nothing before.
She wiggled closer and her nose nudged at the frame of his opticals. She pull
ed away, whipped them off, and dumped them on the blanket.
The dramatic azure of his eyes was stunning. They made everything else recede into darkness.
They stared at each other, breathing hard.
Blue grabbed her head and dragged her back to him. His entire body exploded into life, and he wrapped his arms around her to return the kiss. His heart raced and his muscles locked. Delicate citrus notes seeped from her warm skin. Her body was fragile, but she had the will of a warrior, and the mind of a scholar. Years of dreaming about her hadn’t prepared him for the sparkling reality. Blue had met no one like her; bright and accepting while remaining principled. Prepared to fight for what she believed in yet equally ready to accept the views of others.
His hands travelled down her sides and he rolled them, pinning her under him. He found her hands, linking their fingers.
Kali’s tongue touched his then stroked his fang.
No fear; acceptance.
Reeling, Blue’s mental barriers dropped and their energies surged and entwined.
With her eyes closed, clear as day, Kali saw a ball of flame tearing past balls of bright green in a vast light-speckled darkness. It was a meteor. White-hot it moved so fast.
Ripples of awareness tore through her. She winced at the acutance her senses were driven to. Pleasure that hurt. She felt everything around her, as if her senses became sonar, picking up waves that were bounced back to her.
Kali pushed Blue flat by the shoulders and crawled over him. Slipping a hand under the hem of his top to his lower stomach she thrilled when his abdomen tensed under her palm, the ridges of his abdominals rock-solid.
Minute vibrations shook between them, from inside them. A force burst from their joined bodies like a shockwave, bending the grass, and blowing the smaller debris embedded in the earth as if pushed by the wind.
Blue was on fire, his mind in a whirl. Everything he’d thought he’d known imploded as his cells fired and came alive. He felt complete. This was what he’d been missing, the final connection to life he’d been seeking.
Something unknown roused.
It locked onto them, and honed in on their position. It drew nearer, using their mental signatures as a homing beacon.
Chaos Theory Cosmic Lovely Page 9
