Contemporary Gay Romances

by Felice Picano

  In an eye-blink, we were no longer on the lower helm somehow and it must have been an hour, maybe two hours later. I was standing at the door to my little dorm unit, stepping in, when Finn turned the corridor corner and almost leapt at me.

  “What’s going on,” he asked, with an intensity I didn’t recall in him. No, this wasn’t the memory I wanted. It wasn’t even a memory I remembered. He put his face right up to mine.

  “Nothing, Finn. Why?”

  “The joke earlier. Come on, Locke. You know I like you best!” He shoved himself at me, grabbed my head, and began French kissing me.

  To say I was surprised was putting it mildly. Naturally all Service members have to scan high-positive for bisexuality, given the time periods involved and the limited potential relationships on-ship, not to mention how our time leaps made any solid relationships back on Earth nearly impossible. Even so I’d never had a hint, not a clue before that Finn and I… This just wasn’t the kind of friendship we’d actually had. What the hell was going on with this neural-synthesis doohickey?

  He pulled back and looked at me, one eye cocked. “What? You don’t want me anymore? You’ve got someone else?”

  “No way!” I tried. And so he pushed me into the unit, lips and tongue glued to mine, and flipped the lock behind us and in the dimness of the cabin the guy took me totally, like I was a twelve-year streetwalker.

  No. Worse: Like I was the love of his life.

  I wasn’t. Or at least I’d not been during our tour, or in real-time. So what was going on here? Finn was aggressive, assertive, and even though he was doing all the work and definitely ramping himself up to do all the work, still, when we climaxed, I was the one who felt drained, exhausted, and he was the one raring to go at it again, and I guess in that moment I recalled what Cynara had said, how she’d moved his body to a more distant spot because—how had she put it?—Finn was getting too strong for her: he was invading her dreams, her musings, even her meditation. Could that be what this was all about? Even so, what in hell was he doing?

  “Satisfied?” I asked in the so-called afterglow of what had been for me a totally unexpected near-rape experience by my best friend.

  “For the moment,” he said. “But we’re not done yet by any means,” he added, and that wolfish look I’d first seen in the dorm corridor returned briefly to him.

  “I’m ready for you any time, Finn,” I said, playing out the script.

  “I know Locke. I know. You’re my guy. Always were. Always will be. Loyal to the end. And beyond that.”

  “Beyond?” I thought, wait, this has to be the current Finn speaking, the peat guy, not the Finnster that I last knew twenty-eight years ago. But if so, and we are now consciously relating together in some kind of real-time, me and this peat-preserved near-corpse, how do I test this? How can I be sure?

  We were suddenly shifted again to another place, and now I was growing more certain this was Finn’s doing, Finn writing and controlling the scenario.

  We were in high orbit around another planet, not dim, ravaged Sedna, but one of Beta Centauri’s six gas-giants’ moons, Patroclus or Lakshmi, I couldn’t recall which. We were outside the ship in fully automated suits, me, Finn, the woman named Lea, and a cyber that we all called Bernstein-Idaho, because of the seal on the bottom of one of his huge metal and plastic feet read that—name and place of its manufacture.

  This was way after the delivery and after the R and R on Sedna. This happened when we were already into the second part of our tour, and what was going on then? Oh, right! Ship’s brain had found some kind of anomaly out here on the hull and one after another we’d come out after Bernstein-Idaho to see what the hell to do about it: first Lea, then me and Finn.

  Lea had just asked Bernstein-Idaho to check for the failure potential of this extremely minor part that we were all peering down at: some ion thingamajig that six people in the universe knew how to read. Bernstein-Idaho had done so and had come back with a reading of near zero for it to fail, and even then not for some months yet to come.

  Finn made a “What the hell? Lea?” gesture with his heavily wrapped arms, then said the actual words. Adding, “I’m outta here.” He turned, asking, “You coming, Locke?” I turned and we headed back in through the big hull-hatch. And now I recalled that incident and that nothing had happened then—nothing at all!

  This time, however, Finn got into the hatch and Lea shoved right past me, arguing with Finn, and she gestured for me to remain out and go inside on the second rotation along with the big cyber. Now they were already inside the lock and cycling, and I saw the internal doors open for them, when from out of my peripheral vision I saw something or other zing past me and strike me glancingly on the side of the shoulder before sailing off.

  I remember thinking what the hell, this never happened in real-time on this Beta C. mission! I felt myself shoved by the natural reaction of being hit, directly into the bulk of Bernstein-Idaho. The cyber lost balance for a second, then regained it, and it wrapped a big mechanical arm around me.

  It was at that moment that Finn, already inside the ship, even with his helmet screwed off but his suit still on, glanced out through the transparent lock window and saw me half-lifted off the hull, but not yet fully in Bernstein’s grip, and I could see on Finn’s face what I’d never in years ever seen there before as he went white with absolute panic.

  He turned and furiously began to open the lock, and two people had to knock his hands away from it, and meanwhile, I was floating up and off the hull of the ship, held from floating off completely only by Bernstein-Idaho, the cyber making the oddest noises I’d ever heard come out of it. So I turned a bit and checked from my now-weird angle, and I saw that half of Bernstein’s head was gone, taken off by whatever had ricocheted off me: probably the piece we’d all just agreed was perfectly safe.

  This meant the cyber still had functionality, a brain—in his chest, but that its main eyes and speech center were gone.

  It held me tightly, as, in a sort of continued slow-motion ballet, the others inside turned to watch us and their faces all paled or went taut.

  Finn spoke into my helmet first.

  “Don’t let go! I’m coming out to get you, Locke.” Then he said to someone inside, “How long can Bernstein hold on to both Locke and the ship hull?”

  “We’re trying to build a new communication link to Bernstein. No. Not yet,” I heard one reply.

  I spoke then and it came out all gargly and weird. I was trying to say I was okay. But clearly I was not. I’d been hit by flying debris and I was being held by a cyber that also had been hit and that had suffered worse damage than I had.

  “Stay where you are, Locke!” Finn said in a low tight voice. “Don’t move.”

  “Ship’s brain has something new connecting them now,” someone said and I saw and felt another cyber arm come up and imperfectly encircle me from the other end and hold me a bit tighter to prove it.

  “That’s a little better,” Lea was saying.

  “Why can’t I open the airlock?” Finn demanded. He had his headpiece screwed back on.

  I didn’t hear the answer but I already knew the answer: ship’s hull airlocks had all gone into a total automated lockdown as a result of flying debris damaging part of the ship—i.e. Bernstein-Idaho itself. They wouldn’t reopen again until there was an accredited all-clear.

  “Lea, get the goddamn all-clear!” Finn was already yelling.

  “I’m not that hurt,” I gargled and immediately regretted saying anything.

  “Where’s that all-clear?” Finn was repeating, his voice just this shade of hysteria.

  “In a minute. Finn! Ship’s got procedures.”

  “Screw procedures, Lea! Look at him!”

  “Wait! We’ve got a verbal from Bernstein.”

  I could hear it too.

  “Ship, this unit has slaved the punctured air tank to its own lower section, ensuring no more oxy loss, and a small supply from within the unit itself as backup. P
lease open the hatch.”

  That was when I realized my air supply had been compromised when I’d been struck. Great! Who was writing this script? None of this had happened before. None of it! We’d gone into the hatch together and we had de-helmeted and un-suited and that had been the full extent of it. Why was this happening?

  Worst thing was it felt so real!

  I tried saying something else, asking Finn something, then I went blank. Just blank. Then that time shift thing happened again and I was inside our ship, in an onboard i.c. unit, all but cocooned, and I could see Finn waiting outside the transparent wall and he kept peering at me and finally he saw some difference in me and he stopped talking to whoever it was, some Medic, and he charged in with the guy right after him, and he was at my bedside, at my head, blocking my view and saying, “Locke, Locke, Locke! Why do you do this to me? I thought I’d lost you for good, Locke! Then where in the fuck would I be, Locke? Huh?”

  Just like that, the neural-synthesis was over. I was back in the watery, peat-stinking-pool-like-a-double-grave again, wondering what the hell had just happened inside my mind and why.

  Cynara had switched the helmets off. Was it only fifteen minutes I’d been away? It felt like days, a week—and I was here almost wholly now and I was getting up and as a result the connection between my body and Finn’s body was like some kind of gluey warm soup, not just water, so when Cynara finally managed to get me standing up, our bodies snapped apart with a loud wet plop, like our bubble had been burst. She removed the helmets and dropped them into my Service kit.

  She wrapped a blanket around me, saying, “You went so deep. You went so deep, Locke. You never heard me shouting. You went too far. I warned you he was strong.”

  “What about him?” I asked as she tried to hustle me away. “What did his monitors read?”

  “I was looking at you, Locke. You trembled so badly the entire time. I was concerned. Thinking any second you might convulse. He’s grown so strong…”

  “Cyn! Take a breath! Finn?”

  “His monitors went nuts. I can print out a readout back at the house. C’mon, let’s go there!”

  We replaced the tarpaulin over Finn and she helped me water-glide back, weak as a baby as I was, as though I actually had undergone some life-threatening accident.

  After I’d showered and dressed in dry clothes I’d brought and had coffee and brandy, we sat a long while and she stared at me, appearing even older, and she asked: “What the hell happened, Locke? Where were you? Tell me!”

  I told her. And as I told her I myself slowly began piecing it together.

  When I was done, she said, “But why would you go through all that insanity if that wasn’t even a real moment between you? Why, Locke?”

  And I was able to answer her, “I think because in the neural-synthesis events that we shared, Finn saved my life.”

  “He saved your life from something you told me never really happened, Locke. From something he manufactured you to experience. What if he’d made you die out there?”

  “No. That wouldn’t have happened. It was different, Cyn. We were different. Not like we were before.”

  “How, Locke?” She was wringing her hands and I had to hold them still to make her stop. I was still putting it all together myself. So I repeated, “We were closer. He saved me, Cyn.” I added lamely, “Maybe that’s what he needed—to save me.”

  To care for me the way he did this time, and then to save me, I might have told her. But while I was trying to figure out how to say it, she got a comm.-call and wandered into another room to take it. I knew who was calling: it was the people at Vandenberg. They’d been monitoring Finn’s body there, had seen the spiking during the neural-synthesis, and were telling her what had happened.

  “They say Finn is periodically quiescent now. He seemed to come fully to life for the entire time you two were connected, but he’s on-and-off quiescent at the moment,” she reported.

  And just so I wouldn’t doubt it, “They say there’s no way they can completely revive him, Locke. Not unless you’re down there and attached to him all the time. They would never let that happen. Nor would I. Never! It would kill you. Or drive you mad.”

  So I commed Vandenberg myself and spoke to my contact there and she repeated Cynara’s words pretty verbatim. “We came really close,” she added. “I’m sorry, Locke.”

  Cynara didn’t trust me yet on my own, and so after another while and a brandy and only after she was certain I was ready, we got back into the little Spinner and she flew it the short hop over to the old Amtrak platform at Martinez.

  She waited with me the fifteen minutes or so before the monorail heading back to Stockton arrived, trying to revive our futile conversation. One comm. call came in then for her, again from Vandenberg. They’d lost contact with Finn’s electronics; it was more than an hour now since a readout. They asked Cynara to go check in on him on her way home to see if some wires had come loose between his body and the monitors.

  “Maybe it’s better this way, Locke,” Cynara said, I suppose trying to comfort me.

  I shrugged off her final attempt at a hug. “Cyn, believe me. It’s not over! Finn wants to live again. He knows he’s healthy. He knows what he wants.”

  “Don’t say that, Locke. You’re scaring me. I’m locking my doors!”

  I sent her home, and a few minutes later I boarded the single car train.

  There were a half dozen teenagers at the end of the car as I got in and they all looked exhausted, arms and legs draped over each other as though they’d like to get sleep but wouldn’t yet. They ignored me when I got on and they went back to their listless cuddling and halfhearted smooching.

  Darkness had fallen, and there’s little in the way of artificial floating lights this far west, but the moon had risen early; it was scudding through a lightly clouded sky and reflectively lighting the surface waters below.

  I settled into some kind of inert, thoughtful trance in my seat, not caring when one of the kids somehow electronically shut down the interior lights of the car that we rode. Gloom was fine by me, I concluded.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about Finn, not the Finnster, the cut-up, the screw-up, but Scott Alan Finn, that other man newly revealed to me, who may have hidden so much, it now seemed—from me, even from himself. What if all that time he really had felt that strongly about me, and he had never been able to get it out in the open? Because why? Because it would dim his image? Change his image from the happy-go-lucky, care-nothing? And instead make him an ordinary guy? Not the wild and crazy Finnster?

  I found myself recounting that scene between the two of us in my dorm unit on-ship during our neural-synthesis. Whatever happened, it had felt so casual, so…inevitable. Was that entirely his doing? Or something complicit we’d fabricated once we were so close together again, neurally linked, face-to-face in the peat? Would I ever know?

  Suddenly one of the couples was standing up and pointing at my end of the car, two young women, and then all of them were standing and pointing.

  I stood and stepped into the aisle and then I saw what had freaked them. This was a standard mono-train. Each car has a little platform on each end containing the mag-levs and mag-links to any next car. Those windows are smallish and nearly square and thick. But clear enough to all of us, especially in the moonlight, was a head, a wet head and a shining wet torso, and when I approached the window, I knew it for Finn, hanging on to the outside of the car for dear life.

  I laughed. Sue me, but I laughed. Out of relief; out of disbelief. The Finnster was back. I didn’t know how or why. And when I did, Finn grinned, whipped by the wind at eighty mph as he was. I mouthed the words, “You’re crazy.” And he kept grinning.

  We stopped at the next stop of Antioch, and the kids charged out of the door and fled all the way down the platform, getting as far away as possible. I stuck my Service kit inside the door to keep it from closing and went to get Finn. He let go finally, and I got him inside the car and sat him d
own. He began shivering in the artificial chill, and I covered him with my jacket, and even found another bigger wrap one of the teens had abandoned in her haste to escape. That seemed to help. I moved us into the dimmest corner and I held him to warm him up. He seemed to go quiet. Maybe even sleep.

  I all but carried him out at Stockton Hub and managed him into my skimmer to get him home. I put it on automatic and didn’t warm it, not knowing what temperature he needed to be at.

  Once home, he woke up. “Locke!” he said, and it was the most wonderful thing anyone had ever said to me, my name, in his voice once again.

  “How long can this last?” I asked him, not unkindly. Then laughed again.

  He wasn’t offended. “Not long. We have. To go. Under. One more. Time. To finish. Now.”

  Following his instructions, I walked him into the bath area and stripped him down and then myself and got us side by side in my big tub there and let the water flow slowly. He controlled the temperature.

  I put the mesh helmets on us again, wondering if it would work without me taking another dose. He didn’t seem concerned. He relaxed in the water, becoming more himself. After a while, he was speaking in phrases and even short sentences again, although very quietly.

  What he told me somehow only half-surprised me. “Locke, I planned this. I’ve been linked a very long time into the base at Vandenberg and I’ve been able to move around inside the brains there using my mind and I’ve learned a great deal, including how to influence a few people and some things too. Service Med Tech has no real idea how this Delph Tech works…but I do.”

  “We’re directly mind-to-mind, no?” I asked.

  “Yes. But it’s beyond that, Locke. The Delphs explained it, but it’s kind of beyond our way of understanding. Beyond our way of communicating what happens. This Tech derives from electro-chemicals that their savant-shamans discovered in their ocean hermitages. But as they developed it further, it went beyond even them. Their scientists grabbed it and perfected it.”