by Spider
—it can’t be (it could be) it can’t be (it could be) there must be some other way (name one) it can’t be—
All at once I knew a way you could invade someone’s body without them noticing. By concealing the invader in another, larger invasion they were joyfully accepting.
By fucking them.
Literally or figuratively, by sperm in one set of mucous membranes or by saliva in another at the other end, what difference did it make? The pinhead-sized object need not be hard or metallic like a real pinhead, might have been soft and malleable, easily mistaken for a morsel of food politely ignored in a passionate kiss—or unnoticed altogether amid ten ccs of ejaculate.
It made no sense for Ben to have infected Kirra, or the other way around: they had died together.
But Robert had made love with both of them.
(And left for Earth the very next day. Without inviting me to accompany him.)
And I was the only living person who knew that…
—it can’t be, he couldn’t (he could) he wouldn’t (how the hell do you know) why would he, why would he, WHY WOULD HE DO SUCH A THING? (he’s Chinese, they hate Stardancers) He’s Chinese-American, not from China (who says so, and so what) no, I just can’t believe it (oh you can believe it, all right, you just don’t know for sure) I don’t want to believe it, I don’t want to know, it isn’t true (there’s only one good way to find out) it can’t be—
In my blind drifting, I contacted the studio wall. And screamed.
Perhaps—no, certainly—I should have gone right to Reb with what I had figured out. Or to Dorothy Gerstenfeld, or Phillipe Mgabi…or all three. I had an urgent need to share my terrible hypothesis with someone. For all I knew, I was carrying a bomb inside me.
But I did not go to Reb, or anyone else. In fact, I stayed there in my studio, fetal and moaning, until I had recovered sufficiently that I thought I could keep the sick horror out of my face—at least well enough to fool shipboard acquaintances.
Part of it might have been reticence to share a sexual secret of my friends, whose permission I could no longer seek. But I don’t think so. No sexual behaviour was scandalous in Top Step, and I did not think either Kirra or Ben would have considered it a secret.
No, what stopped me was simply that my theory was just that. A theory. I just could not make an accusation of such ghastly magnitude against a man I had loved, without the slightest shred of proof. The accusation alone would be so utterly damning—and how could a man possibly defend himself against such a charge if he were innocent? If I opened my mouth, and were wrong, and Robert were torn to pieces down on Earth by an angry mob of Stardancer-lovers…
But when I thought back, I realized that I could not recall any time Reb had expressed an opinion of Robert as a person—or of our relationship. And when we broke up, he’d said only that he was sorry I was sad. Had that hyperintuitive man sensed something about Robert that I had missed? I could not bring myself to ask him.
I had to know. For myself, for sure. And as soon as physically possible. No shilly-shallying around, like I’d been doing about Symbiosis; it was time to get off the dime and make a move, now. I might be carrying a second bomb, and who knew when it might go off?
It took me an hour or so to get my lines together and rehearse them until I could make them sound truthful. At first I wasn’t sure I could do it. But I’ve always been a trouper. When I had it right, I called Reb and told him I was quitting.
He wanted to talk about it, of course, but I cut it as short as I could. In essence I claimed that Kirra’s and Ben’s deaths had soured space for me; it was no longer a place I wanted to go. There was enough truth in it for me to sound plausible, I guess: he bought it, reluctantly. He sounded sad, but made no real effort to argue, simply making sure my mind was made up.
Half an hour later Dorothy Gerstenfeld called and told me that I had a reserved seat on the next ship to Earth, leaving in a little under twenty-four hours. I thanked her and switched off. She didn’t call back.
I spent the time wrestling with myself. What I hypothesized was grotesque, impossible. Logical, yes; theoretically and intuitively reasonable, yes, but simply not possible. Not my Robert! Inscrutable Oriental be damned, I just could not have known him so intimately and known him so little. Could I? What was the point of sabotaging my own Symbiosis, the only thing life had left to offer me, to chase down such a wild and ugly idea?
I had to, that was all.
As Robert himself had pointed out when he left, I could always come back again. I would see Robert, and question him closely, and look into his eyes as I did…and then I would apologize, and call Reb, and he would pull strings to let me come back up to Top Step and Graduate. One last quick visit to Earth, to lay two ghosts to rest, that was all.
I spent so much time convincing myself that I had to be mistaken that I gave no conscious thought at all to what I would do if it turned out that I was not mistaken.
I was surprised by how hard it was to leave my p-suit behind. I had been essentially living in it for nearly a month now, and it had become home. But it did not belong to me anymore. I rode to Earth wearing a cheap tourist suit just like the one I’d worn on the trip up, a hundred thousand years ago.
No one came to see me off. Not even Reb. I’d been half-expecting him, but was grateful to be spared the task of trying to maintain a lie before so intuitive a man. Four other students left on the same shuttle, for the same reason I had claimed, and there were a handful of other passengers, mostly staff members traveling to Earth on business.
The trip itself was utterly without incident, or at least none that forced itself into my attention. I could have had a simulated window-view on my seatback TV this time, but did not want one. Emotionally it was my trip up, run backwards. The closer I got to Earth the heavier I felt, in body and mind, the further my spirit sank, and I landed in a state of maximum confusion and upset, heart pounding wildly under the unaccustomed load.
To my great relief, the spaceplane did not land at the same spaceport from which I had left Earth. I didn’t think I could have borne seeing Queensland again, Kirra’s home, and thinking of her sweet smile blown into particles, expanding slowly to fill the universe. Instead we grounded outside Quito, Ecuador.
That was good in another way, too. Closer to San Francisco.
I felt like an elephant. Gone the dancer. My work had kept me in good shape, so I didn’t have as much trouble bearing my returned weight as some others have. But I still felt like an elephant. A pregnant elephant, pregnant with a son (they take several months longer to bake than girl elephants, I’ve read) and in my last month. Most disturbing to my dancer’s mind, my balance was no longer a matter of intuition. I had unlearned a lot of habits in two and a half months of zero gee. I had to keep reminding myself that it mattered whether I kept a perpendicular relationship to the wall called “floor” or not, and I tended to totter like an elderly drunken mammoth. Hair felt weird lying against the back of my neck and against my forehead. I kept letting go of things and then being startled when they raced away to one of the six walls. Everything had a cartoon, fun-house mirror look. The air smelled funny, and didn’t move enough; unconsciously I tended to keep moving my head around so I couldn’t smother in my exhalations. It seemed weird never to see anyone moving around below my feet or above my head, to be stuck to the surface of a planet, like a fly caught in the kind of flypaper my parents used to hang from the ceiling on Gambier Island when I was a child.
Customs was no problem, as I arrived with no possessions whatsoever, not so much as a pair of socks. Credit was only a thumbprint away. And getting outfitted with clothes and necessaries took only an hour in the spaceport Traveler’s Shop; it would have been half that but I insisted on styles that would not be out of place in San Francisco and that took more time and more money.
But going through Immigration, first Ecuadorian (horrid) and then U.S. (three times as bad) took up the next day and a half; I finally emerged into the smoggy
air of San Francisco with my nerves shot and my teeth aching from long clenching. I weighed a thousand kilos and felt a million years old and the air tasted like burnt flannel. I decided to get a hotel room and sleep for a week before taking further action. The driver of the cab I hailed was fascinated by an airplane passenger from Quito with no luggage of any kind. I ignored him.
When I checked in, I signed the register, and then tried to push the pen back to the clerk. It bounced high from the countertop, and he looked at me with a knowing air. “Just down, eh? We have waterbeds available for those guests who suffer from gravity fatigue.” I thanked him and accepted the service. As the bellhop was showing me into my room he made a discreet suggestion concerning other services he could arrange for guests, and I laughed in his face. A full month ago I had sworn never again to have sex in a gravity field, and I was in no mood to change my mind. That dreaded old friend, lower back pain, was already back in full force, for the first time in months.
I didn’t leave that waterbed for three days, and didn’t leave my room for a week.
If you want to know what that week was like, go to hell.
That’s a kind of pun, I guess. By going to hell, you could certainly simulate that week.
Because now it was time to confront that burning question: what if it turns out you’re right?
This had bearing on both strategy and tactics.
Suppose Robert were innocent. In that case, there was no problem. I could call him up, arrange to meet somewhere, watch his eyes very carefully while I outlined my suspicions, learn that I was wrong, and apologize if I decided I wanted to bother. In any case, my biggest problem would be coming up with a good exit line; I could be back in Top Step in a matter of days.
But suppose he were guilty? I call him up…and a little while later there is an unfortunate incident, a failed Stardancer candidate commits suicide in her hotel room in San Francisco; very sad but no next of kin to push it. Or perhaps, if there really is a little nanotechnological horror hidden somewhere in my body, the whole hotel vanishes in a large mysterious explosion.
No, wait. Just because I called him wouldn’t mean the jig was up. I might well have thought things over up in Top Step and decided to follow Robert back to Earth for love. A nuisance, if he really was a high-tech assassin who cared nothing for me, but not a serious one. In that case, meeting with me somewhere for a fast brushoff would be the simplest way to get me off his back. So he agrees to meet me in a restaurant, and then he finds out the jig is up…and maybe I suffer a sudden heart attack over lunch, fall face down into the salad.
Dammit, if he was a hatchetman, it was for a large and wealthy and well-organized conspiracy. Half-assed terrorist groups don’t have access to nanotechnological weapons; if they did they wouldn’t be half-assed terrorists. If Robert was guilty, he was hotter than the fire that killed Kirra. In that case he was probably not even at his nominal address in San Francisco, but hiding in Beijing or someplace even harder to crack. Just leaving a message on his answering machine might be enough to get me snuffed by Triad hitmen.
Of course, that kind of paranoia only made sense if I assumed he was guilty. But if I didn’t at least partly believe he was guilty, what was I doing here, fighting for breath and cursing the glue of gravity?
I had never thought along these kinds of lines in my life, had never known anyone who did except characters in holothrillers and spy novels. I had to work my plans out slowly, laboriously, all the while wanting desperately to believe I was making a fool of myself.
And I kept coming to a jerk at the end of the thought-chain.
If Robert is guilty, and if you work out some clever and safe scheme to get close enough to prove that to yourself—
—then what will you do?
Kill him?
Was I capable of it?
Was I physically capable, first? The part of me that remembered his physical speed, grace and coordination raised a few questions as to how a laywoman suffering from gee fatigue went about killing a trained assassin in a public restaurant…but was willing to concede in theory that it might be done, with the element of surprise, if I didn’t care about being arrested afterward, and if I struck the instant I was sure, without any hesitation at all.
That led to: was I psychologically and emotionally capable of murder? Of anyone, or of Robert? The part of me that liked to watch old Stallone movies wanted to think so. Yo—lover or no lover, he killed my friends, he dies, end of story. The part of me that had thought of him as my last forlorn chance at human love wanted to think so too. He used me as a wartime convenience; no man does that to me and lives. The part of me that was loyal to the Starmind wanted the deaths of so many Stardancers and the ruin of so much sacred Symbiote avenged. His action was an act of war; a sneak attack must be repaid.
But the part of me that thought of itself as an ethical person questioned my right to execute a sentence of death on another human being, however monstrous his crimes…and doubted I had the guts.
But what other option did I have? Denounce him to Stardancers Incorporated and the United Nations, betray him to Interpol, charge him before the High Court and the state courts of Queensland and California? With nothing but circumstantial evidence and lover’s intuition to support the charges? I couldn’t so much as nail him for breach of promise; the son of a bitch had never promised me anything.
Nagging additional minor thought: our brief four-way sexual liaison was not scandalous in Top Step, nor in many circles on Earth nowadays—but it might seem so to Kirra’s or Ben’s surviving kin.
That put those people in my mind. So the first thing I did upon leaving that grim hotel room was to make two short side trips. Well, one short, to Sherman Oaks…and the other rather longer, to north Queensland; I decided I had to face that land again after all.
Before I left, I put the best detective agency I could find onto tracing and locating Robert, with specific warning that he might just be clever enough to spot someone checking him out, and dangerous enough to kill them. It didn’t faze them in the least. They didn’t bother asking why, just told me when and where I could go for a report—so that it need not be sent to me at any address—and how much it would cost. I was spending life savings like water, but I didn’t give a jaunting damn.
The visit to Ben’s father was too sad to recount. The old man was utterly shattered by this latest in a series of crushing disappointments; Ben had been his last surviving blood kin, and now he was alone in the world. I knew all too well how he felt. I told him what a good man his son had been, and something of what Ben had meant to me, and what I could of his last few months of life. It seemed to comfort Mr. Buckley some, but not enough. We were both crying when I left.
With a last-minute attack of the cutes, I had introduced myself to him as Glenn Christie. I’d even gotten cash before leaving San Francisco so I wouldn’t leave a digital credit trail, taken cabs so I wouldn’t have to use my credit to rent a car.
I couldn’t get to Australia that way, but I did take time to alter my appearance, by changing wardrobe, having my hair cut close to my skull and permed within an inch of its life, and darkening my complexion several shades. I paid cash for a standby seat, but had to give my right name; to compensate I made sure I was one of the last to board and sat in the wrong seat; on arrival I got in the wrong line at Customs & Immigration, with people from a different flight, and while I stood on line wedged my way into a voluble discussion in German despite knowing almost none of that language; mostly I nodded and listened alertly to whoever was speaking. Maybe it all helped; no one followed me from the airport. Or maybe I made a jerk of myself to no point—how could I tell?
Only by fucking up and being killed. I bought a minijeep from a used car lot in cash under a false name and headed north.
From Cairns International Airport to Yirlandji country is a long day’s drive, about 800 kilometers as the crow flies—and stoned are any crows who ever flew like that. The road up the coast, looking out toward the G
reat Barrier Reef, is exquisitely beautiful, one of the greatest scenic drives left on Earth—and consequently winds and bucks like a snake caught in an accordion. Driving on the left side of the road for the first time in decades, I did well to average 60 kph. Even ignoring the scenery and banging straight along it would have been a thirteen-hour drive. But it was winter in Queensland, which means, just cool enough to stand it, and that beach constantly beckoning from the right got irresistibly inviting, even to a monomaniacal apprentice secret agent. The water had “cooled” to a temperature Canadian surf will never reach, maybe 26°C, which meant, the nice Beach Club lifeguard explained to me, that the box jellyfish (or sea-wasps, the deadliest things afloat) had all gone away for the season. It was the most glorious swim I’d ever had in my life, and the buoyancy of the water was so near to and yet far from zero gee that I wept salty tears into the sea, and gave serious thought to seeing if I could swim the forty or fifty kilometers out to the Reef. Finally I literally crawled ashore like some primordial ancestor, and baked for an hour before trying to walk again.
I stopped for directions in the Aboriginal Reserve north of Cooktown, and again the next day at the one north of Coen, where I left the main road and struck west toward the Gulf of Carpentaria. In mid-afternoon I met an Aboriginal at a gas station, Thomas Tjarndai, who agreed to guide me to Yirlandji country. I followed his ancient yammering motorbike through an hour of bad road, then followed him on foot through the bush for another hour, wondering darkly whether Yirlandji ever ate whitefella tourists. My back had been aching for days now. At least the knee was not acting up. When we reached the Yirlandji encampment, Thomas brought me to an elder named Billy Huroo, no more than five hundred years old and sharp as a Chinese pawnbroker. I gave him my right name in spite of myself, and told him a little of why I had come. In the distance, a child sang. To my shock I recognized a passage from the Song of Top Step. My eyes stung. At dusk Billy Huroo led me to the campfire of the witch woman Yarra and left me there.
