Zero-G

by William Shatner

  Lord could lead in war and command in peace. He flew with women who were in separate aircraft. But closely bodyguard a frightened woman and keep that goal and that goal alone front and center? That was terra incognita, undiscovered country.

  The universe is not supposed to respect your comfort zone, he reminded himself, rising from the bed as he weighed what to do next. Worse, Lord suspected that the universe, keen and wily, was just getting started.

  “I have a suggestion,” he said.

  Saranya looked over expectantly, though there was still something taut and guarded about her. For the previous minute or so she had been looking down, then around, twice resisting the urge to finger in to her IC. Being cut off from her work, from her colleagues, from anything familiar was obviously making things worse for the scientist.

  “Actually, I have a better suggestion,” he said.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “My first suggestion was going to be that I visit the cafeteria and pick up food,” he said. “The second suggestion—isn’t.”

  Her expression became wary. “I’m confused.”

  “It’s not what I think you think,” he assured her. “We’re apparently going to be working together, so unless you’re really hungry—”

  “No,” she said. “I’m not, at all.”

  “Good.” Lord smiled. “Then I want to play a little game, kind of an intellectual exercise.”

  She crossed her legs—innocently—and gave him her attention. Lord couldn’t decide which of those was more attractive.

  “I told you about old Isaiah and his spirit of adventure,” Lord said. “My entire family has that. Generations. My grandfather was a police officer in New York—Sam Lord, my namesake. My father flew helicopters around the city for tourists. Now . . . as a kid, I had no trouble going up with my dad, soaring over the rivers, circling the Statue of Liberty at an angle that made me feel like I was going to fall out. But my grandfather?” He laughed. “Saranya, I couldn’t sit in his squad car when he was off-duty, once every Saturday, sharing a pizza down by the Brooklyn Bridge, without feeling like I wanted to die.”

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Why indeed?” he repeated. “I was bored! I loved the old man, but, Jesus, he didn’t talk. Except about baseball, and I wasn’t a fan. And he turned the squawk box—the police radio—off so I couldn’t even hear what crimes were happening. Anyway, after a couple of years of this I finally told my father about it. I must’ve been—nine, ten, when I fessed up. I actually felt ashamed.”

  “To admit you had this problem?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “To say something that might hurt my grandfather.” Lord eased forward a little. “So: here’s the game part, where you learn and I learn. I want you to guess what my father said to me.”

  Saranya’s onyx eyes seemed to come alive. She nodded slightly as she considered the matter.

  “Uh-uh—don’t think too hard,” Lord urged. “Just say what comes into your head.”

  “All right,” she said. “He said, ‘Don’t be ashamed of how you feel.’ ”

  “Good, but that wasn’t it.”

  “ ‘Always tell the truth,’ ” she guessed. “A good lesson for a nine- or ten-year-old.”

  “True, but that wasn’t it either.”

  “ ‘Have a hot dog, maybe it’s the pizza that’s upsetting you.’ ”

  Lord chuckled, shook his head.

  “It had a radio, you said? He told you to turn it up, play music.”

  “Also a good idea but not the one.”

  Dr. May laughed. “Then I’m out of ideas.”

  “No you’re not.”

  “I am,” she insisted, losing the laugh as well as the moment. “I am. Please, tell me.”

  The scientist’s last statement was so quiet Lord thought the wind chimes might drown them out. Instead, they seemed to blend with the air that made the little bells sing.

  “What he told me—and I guess it was pretty sophisticated for a kid to try and process—what he said was, ‘Do what helps.’ ”

  The woman’s fair brow creased a little. “Do what helps,” she repeated.

  “That’s right. I mean, that didn’t seem to solve anything, did it?”

  She shook her head.

  “But the longer I thought about it,” Lord told her, “my father was right. Okay: how do you not be bored in a parked car with your grandfather? I suggested that we park where things were going on! Under the highway, in Central Park, at NYU, where I discovered that I really liked coeds . . . that changed my grandfather too. Turns out he was bored and didn’t want to tell me!”

  Lord stopped then, because something surprising happened. Tears had begun beading from the sides of Saranya’s eyes—like tiny blown bubbles in the lesser gravity. They still fell but they took their time, like a high-diver preparing to jump.

  Lord was off his bed when her face fell to her open hands and her shoulders started shaking. He crouched beside her, his left arm across her back.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  She just shook her head.

  “You can talk to me,” he assured her. “Whatever it is.”

  Then her hands were off her face and clinging to him, climbing across his arms and around him, like a drowning woman.

  “‘Do what helps,’ ” she repeated through tears. “I have to trust you.”

  “You can, Saranya.”

  Her damp eyes turned helplessly toward the chimes as if imploring them to keep her secret here.

  “Someone stole my work.” He heard her gasp, as if it were torn from her. “It was incomplete, but the heart of it . . . the soul of it was there. And they can’t control it, Sam. I think . . . I think they used it, caused—what happened.”

  The woman couldn’t go on but he understood what she meant. Lord held her until she stopped trembling. But even then she didn’t let go.

  “Who did it?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I truly do not.”

  “What do they want now?” Lord asked. “You?”

  “I think so. I’m afraid so. I’m the only one who can fix what’s wrong. That’s why I had to get help.”

  “So you jumped on the nearest shuttle returning to Earth?”

  “It was leaving. I knew I needed help that the base commander couldn’t provide—she has her hands full just running the place. So I got on.”

  “Accommodating of them,” Lord said.

  She looked at him. “What do you mean?”

  “They would have had to put a seat back in the cargo bay,” Lord said. “Or are there fold-downs?”

  “Fold-downs and a pallet for extra cargo. Plus Captain Kodera is very considerate,” she said defensively.

  “I wasn’t being sarcastic, trust me,” Lord said. “I understand how it is. You look out for each other up there. It was the same way in the air force.”

  The woman nodded and continued to sob, but it wasn’t just fear; Lord could tell the difference. This was deeper, heaving, guilty.

  You didn’t kill those people, he wanted to assure her. You are trying to stop whoever did. But he wasn’t sure that would help. This was not a problem of the mind, of reason.

  And then she was hugging him, tightly, as though he were the only refuge in a sea of pain. He held her as well, comforting her with his strength. One of his hands was pressed gently in the small of her back and she allowed it, urged it to push her nearer. He did so, and the feeling of her warmth was absolute: her tears, her sobbing breaths, her body beneath the lunar jumpsuit.

  Her cheek was on his, but Lord did not press further. She was too vulnerable, then, and she needed to be able to trust him—anywhere, anytime. So he lay back with her and just held her.

  At that moment, the universe somehow seemed uncommonly fair and balanced.

  Furth
er down Radial Arm Six, Adsila Waters closed the door behind Ziv Levy with a kick of her heel. The light came on automatically and she waved it off. The glow of holoreps of the constellations Ursa Major and Ursa Minor illuminated the room, gleaming, ghostly shapes hanging just below the ceiling.

  “The Dippers,” he said.

  “The Bears,” she countered.

  Stepping over the small wool mat that her grandmother had hand-tufted, Adsila embraced the taller man, while her lips sought to discover what was organic flesh and what skin was manufactured.

  “I am not a freak,” she hissed. “Not the way you meant.”

  Ziv was too busy to answer. He was busy moving his powerful legs, arching his artificial spine to keep from falling over as he bore her to the center of the small room. But Adsila didn’t let him get to the bed, which they probably would have crushed. Raking her fingers in the front of his shirt and planting her feet on the sides of his pants, she tore back with her arms and shoved down with her legs and feet.

  Ziv’s tunic ripped wide and his pants bunched at his ankles. He was forced to stop.

  “Where do you keep it?” she demanded.

  “Avóy,” he cried, puzzled. “Where every man does—”

  “No, you rabbit, you deceiver,” she snarled, dragging her fingernails over both sets of ribs, hard. “Not that. I want the hollow. The smuggler’s cove. The fake organ where you stow contraband. Is it a kidney?”

  “No, they’re real.”

  “I’ve heard otherwise.”

  “From who?”

  “We have sources.” Her right hand moved down along his side to his back.

  “We? You’re on the job?” he said, reaching behind him with one hand to curl his fingers in her hair.

  “You’re a spy, I’m the law,” she said.

  “I’ve played that game,” he replied. “It requires handcuffs and a taser.”

  “This is not a game,” she said.

  “Everything is a game,” he assured her, “and we’re both playing. That’s why I knew it.”

  “Knew what?” she challenged breathlessly as her hands ranged along his chest to see how magnificent his Israeli sculptors had made him.

  “I knew that we were only for each other!” he said. “Even in passion, you work.”

  She bit his shoulder, hard. “Don’t you?”

  “Always,” he admitted.

  Adsila laughed loudly, almost maniacally into the synthetic flesh, her voice deadened by a clavicle made from polymers Ziv used to wear as armor. But where they coupled to human bone, vibrations caused his back to tingle, all the way to his coccyx. He gripped her tightly.

  “Tell me about the scientist from the moon,” he panted into her ear.

  “Sure,” Adsila replied hotly. “She rode up here with a disreputable escort, one who sent the shuttle from Earth a false code identifying them as the Empyrean ferry.” She bit a lobe to hold his ear in place. “Don’t bother lying. I checked.”

  “Why would I lie?” he asked, wincing. He pinched her chin to loosen her teeth. “It was legal.”

  Adsila pulled at the shredded tunic. “This isn’t an Edelweiss vest, Mr. Registered-in-Switzerland.”

  “Also legal,” he fired back.

  “Yes, but intent to coerce isn’t legal,” she said then sniffed deeply at his open mouth. “That’s not Zürcher Geschnetzeltes I smell on your breath.”

  “It’s a Haifa—”

  “Cocktail, yes, I know,” she said. “You use it to try and get people high.”

  “You get me high,” he cooed.

  “No detours,” Adsila shot back. “Or would you rather explain to the good cop? The one with hair on his chest?”

  It took a moment for him to catch up. “Don’t!” he protested loudly.

  “Give me a reason?” she replied.

  Ziv bit at her nose with teeth harder than titanium. Adsila’s head darted back at the neck, like an owl, but he was still holding her tightly around the torso. He followed her mouth with his lips and kissed her hard, only partly to shut her up.

  The CHAI could feel his polymer muscles come alive, coiling and uncoiling over searing heat actuators. The parts of him that were still human jumped as microelectrodes blazed voltages into remnants of nerve.

  He felt more alive than when he had been entirely biological.

  Ziv’s fingers settled onto her hips, pinching and then slipping beneath the waistband of her stiffly pressed HooverComm issue slacks. She tried to launch herself away, to land on the white blanket of her own bed, but his right forefinger had already found the touchpoint that would part the fabric of her garment, releasing it.

  She let him have his way; that was why they were here. She kissed him back, sliding from mouth to cheek to chin and back, savoring the different tastes and textures of the natural and the artificial. Even his saliva was new to her—there was something distinctly biocidal in the taste, and she wondered if it might prove dangerous to her as well.

  While he probed with his right hand, his left hand grabbed her braided hair. He pulled hard and they thumped back toward the door, hitting it. Ziv attacked her tunic with his teeth. Pinned between her lover and the door, Adsila undid it—she only had one spare uniform—and then she submitted, her eyes burning only slightly less than the rest of her.

  Ziv showed the woman no quarter, nor did she ask for any. She accommodated his movements but nothing anyone had ever said or done could prepare her for this. She cried into his left ear and then, as he entered her, she cried louder into his right. The universe flashed in her brain. Her eyes snapped wide in surprise. The cannabis, the mushrooms—those only gave her foggy visions. This glimpse put her on the edge of eternity.

  And it was just beginning.

  Whether it was mental, physical, or both, Ziv fine-tuned everything from movement to physical stature as if he were instantly collating and analyzing her smallest reactions, and alternating his movements accordingly. He missed nothing: no twitch was not matched, no retreat was not seized upon, no thrust was not met. She lost sight of everything visual: there were too many other stimuli flooding her. Even his sweat seemed to participate, thrillingly colder than ether against her skin, volatile enough to quell the inhuman heat beneath his skin. He was emanating waves of sexual energy from his body. Adsila wondered, distantly, if something in his cybernetics had scrambled her Cloud interface.

  “IC . . . auroric rep,” she gasped impulsively.

  “You see . . . what?” Ziv managed to ask through his grunting.

  She didn’t answer, except to laugh. There they were, aurora-like representations of the energy waves sloshing before her eyes like an oily rainbow. The laugh became a shriek. Her hands gripped his arms spasmodically. Her thighs tightened against his hips. She didn’t know how many times she had climaxed but even they became secondary. Her desire was to hold on to that edge of eternity as though it were the event horizon of a black hole. She came nearer to the infinite now, so near she couldn’t howl because she could hardly breathe. She caught a glimpse of his eyes but even the blankness of his stare did not discourage her. For him this wasn’t sex—it was running a program, using his skills and tools to achieve a goal, but she didn’t care.

  And then another level of energy flashed through her, sent by him as though he were overheating. His arms, hands, and fingers were no longer embracing her. They were gripping her chakras, her body’s energy centers, in a purposeful and powerful way.

  She did not want to resist her own impulses. She felt the supernova coming, and so did he. She realized, too late, that this was a mistake.

  How many secrets had he collected this way? She heard herself cry out. How many women had told him everything they knew just to keep him from stopping?

  Her fingers gripped his arms again. Her thighs clamped onto his hips again. She gripped him to keep from losing h
erself, only this time it was completely different.

  She knew it . . . and he knew it.

  Adsila’s female nature fell into itself, collapsed, was lost somewhere inside. Her male side emerged and was greeted by a cry of shock and surprise from Ziv.

  He did not stop moving entirely . . . but a part of him did, unwillingly and unexpectedly. His eyes went large with shock as Adsila threw his back against the door and he went with him and Ziv seemed a fraction of the titan he had been just a moment before.

  Breathing heavily, cooling rapidly, the pan-gender peered into his face like a cougar eying a hare. A cruel smile twisted his mouth.

  “Cat got your tongue?” he asked.

  Ziv was a veteran of too many engagements—sexual and otherwise—to panic or even overreact. His breathing, then his muscles, relaxed. The man’s characteristic composure quickly overcame his surprise.

  “Did you do that on purpose?” he asked.

  “What do you think?”

  “I think it just—happened,” he replied. “You’re not . . . man enough to try and bargain with me.”

  “Am I not?” The owlish eyes narrowed. Adsila wasn’t insulted. Life was a constant process of learning and he had known many mentors. What he felt was something else. Adsila’s breathing picked up again—there was a new high now.

  The danger rising in the other man was immediate and radiant. “You are not,” he assured him.

  “Fine. I’m an eternal student,” Adsila said. “What kind of teacher are you?”

  In response, Ziv grinned. He reached between them and grabbed himself tightly with his fist. “I can just buy myself another one of these if I have to. And by the way—my perfluorocarbon blood will not wash out of your Cherokee rug.”

  The tension passed, the threat evaporated, and Adsila shifted. The flesh against Ziv became softer, rounder. But the Israeli did not back away. He pushed his hips forward, pinning Adsila hard against the door with groin and chest.