Year's Best Science Fiction 02 # 1985

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  He hesitated to send an answering signal, because he knew that he had found what he was looking for and he was aware of how much of a threat that was to the fabric of the life he had constructed for himself. He was 37 years old, stable, settled. He had a wife who tried her best to be wonderful for him, never knowing quite what it was that she lacked but seeking to compensate for it anyway, and two small, pleasing children, who had not inherited his abnormality, and a comfortable house in the hills east of San Francisco and a comfortable job as an analyst for one of the big brokerage houses. It was not the life he had imagined in his old romantic fantasies, but it was not a bad life, either, and it was his life, familiar and in its way rewarding; and he knew he was about to rip an irreparable hole in it. So he hesitated. And then he transmitted an image as vivid as the one he had received: a solitary white gull soaring in enormous sweeps over the broad blue breast of the Pacific.

  The reply came at once: the same gull, joined by a second one that swooped out of a cloudless sky and flew tirelessly at its side. He knew that if he responded to that, there could be no turning back; but that was all right. With uncharacteristic recklessness, he switched to the verbal mode.

  —OK. Who are you?

  —Laurel Hammett. I’m in Phoenix. I read you clearly. This is better than the telephone.

  —Cheaper, too. Chris Maitland. San Francisco.

  —That’s far enough away, I guess.

  He didn’t understand, then, what she meant by that. But he let the point pass.

  —You’re the first one I’ve found who sends images, Laurel.

  —I found one once, eight years ago, in Boston. But he was crazy. Most of us are crazy, Chris.

  —I’m not crazy.

  —Oh, I know! Oh, God, I know!

  So that was the beginning. He got very little work done that afternoon. He was supposed to be preparing a report on oil-royalty trusts, and after 15 minutes of zinging interchanges with her, he actually did beg off; she broke contact with a dazzling series of visuals, many of them cryptic, snowflakes and geometrical diagrams and fields of blazing red poppies. Depletion percentages and windfall-profits-tax recapture were impossible to deal with while those brilliant pictures burned in his mind. Although he had promised not to reach toward her again until tomorrow—judicious self-denial, she observed, is the fuel of love—he finally did sent out a flicker of abashed energy and drew from her a mingling of irritation and delight. For five minutes, they told each other it was best to go slow, to let it develop gradually, and again they vowed to keep mental silence until the next day. But when he was crossing the Bay Bridge a couple of hours later, heading for home, she tickled him suddenly with a quick flash of her presence and gave him a wondrous view of the Arizona sunset, harsh chocolate-brown hills under a purple-and-gold sky. That evening, he felt shamefully and transparently adulterous, as if he had come home flushed and rumpled, with lipstick on his shirt. He pretended to be edgy and wearied by some fictitious episode of office politics and helped himself to two drinks before dinner and was more than usually curious about the details of his wife’s day—the little suburban crises, the small challenges, the tiny triumphs. Jan was playful, amiable, almost kittenish. That told him she had not seen through him to the betrayal within, however blatant it seemed to him. She was no actress; there was nothing devious about her.

  The transformation of their marriage that had taken place that afternoon saddened him, yet not deeply, because it was an inevitable one. He and Jan were not really of the same species. He had loved her as well and as honestly as was possible for him, but what he had really wanted was someone of his kind, with whom he could join mind and soul as well as body, and it was only because he had not been able to find her that he had settled for Jan. And now he had found her. Where that would lead, and what it meant for Jan and him, he had no idea yet. Possibly he would be able to go on sharing with her the part of his life that they were able to share, while secretly he got from the other woman those things that Jan had never been able to give him; possibly. When they went to bed, he turned to her with abrupt, passionate ferocity, as he had not for a long time, but even so, he could not help wondering what Laurel was doing now, in her bed a thousand miles to the east, and with whom.

  During the morning commute, Laurel came to him with stunning images of desert landscapes, eroded geological strata, mysterious dark mesas, distant flame-colored sandstone walls. He sent her Pacific surf, cypresses bending to the wind, tide pools swarming with anemones and red starfish. Then, timidly, he sent her a kiss and had one from her in return; and then, as he was crossing the toll plaza of the bridge, she shifted to words.

  —What do you do?

  —Securities analyst. I read reports and make forecasts.

  —Sounds terribly dull. Is it?

  —If it is, I don’t let myself notice. It’s OK work. What about you?

  —I’m a potter. I’m a very good one. You’d like my stuff.

  —Where can I see it?

  —There’s a gallery in Santa Fe. And one in Tucson. And, of course, Phoenix. But you mustn’t come to Phoenix.

  —Are you married?

  There was a pause.

  —Yes. But that isn’t why you mustn’t come here.

  —I’m married, too.

  —I thought you were. You feel like a married sort of man.

  —Oh? I do?

  —That isn’t an insult. You have a very stable vibe, do you know what I mean?

  —I think so. Do you have children?

  —No. Do you?

  —Two. Little girls. How long have you been married, Laurel?

  —Six years.

  —Nine.

  —We must be about the same age.

  —I’m thirty-seven.

  —I’m thirty-four.

  —Close enough. Do you want to know my sign?

  —Not really.

  She laughed and sent him a complex, awesome image: the entire wheel of the zodiac, which flowered into the shape of the Aztec calendar stone, which became the glowing rose window of a Gothic cathedral. An undercurrent of warmth and love and amusement rode with it. Then she was gone, leaving him on the bridge in a silence so sharp it rang like iron.

  He did not reach toward her but drove on into the city in a mellow haze, wondering what she looked like. Her mental “voice” sounded to him like that of a tall, clear-eyed, straight-backed woman with long brown hair, but he knew better than to put much faith in that; he had played the same game with people’s telephone voices and he had always been wrong. For all he knew, Laurel was squat and greasy. He doubted that; he saw no way that she could be ugly. But why, then, was she so determined not to have him come to Phoenix? Perhaps she was an invalid; perhaps she was painfully shy; perhaps she feared the intrusion of any sort of reality into their long-distance romance.

  At lunchtime, he tuned himself to her wave length and sent her an image of the first page of the report he had written last week on Exxon. She replied with a glimpse of a tall, olive-hued porcelain jar of a form both elegant and sturdy. Her work in exchange for his; he liked that. Everything was going to be perfect.

  A week later, he went out to Salt Lake City for a couple of days to do some field research on a mining company headquartered there. He took an early-morning flight, had lunch with three earnest young Mormon executives overflowing with joy at the bounty of God as manifested by the mineral wealth of the Overthrust Belt in Wyoming, spent the afternoon leafing through geologists’ survey sheets and had dinner alone at his hotel. Afterward, he put in his obligatory call to Jan, worked up his notes of the day’s conferences and watched TV for an hour, hoping it would make him drowsy. Maitland didn’t mind these business trips, but he slept badly when he slept alone, and any sort of time-zone change, even a trifling one like this, disrupted his internal clock. He was still wide-awake when he got into bed about 11.

  He thought of Laurel. He felt very near to her, out here in this spacious, mountain-ringed city with the wide, bland
streets. Probably Salt Lake City was not significantly closer to Phoenix than San Francisco was, but he regarded both Utah and Arizona as the true wild West, while his own suburban and manicured part of California, paradoxically, did not seem Western to him at all. Somewhere due south of here, just on the far side of all these cliffs and canyons, was the unknown woman he loved.

  As though on cue, she was in his mind:

  —Lonely?

  —You bet.

  —I’ve been thinking of you all day. Poor Chris, sitting around with those businessmen, talking all that depletion gibberish.

  —I’m a businessman, too.

  —You’re different. You’re a businessman outside and a freak inside.

  —Don’t say that.

  —It’s what we are, Chris. Face it. Flukes, anomalies, sports, changelings

  —Please stop, Laurel. Please.

  —I’m sorry.

  A silence. He thought she was gone, taking flight at his rebuke. But then:

  —Are you very lonely?

  —Very. Dull, empty city; dull, empty bed.

  —You’re in it.

  —But you aren’t.

  —Is that what you want? Right now?

  —I wish we could, Laurel.

  —Let’s try this.

  He felt a sudden astounding intensifying of her mental signal, as if she had leaped the hundreds of miles and lay curled against him here. There was a sense of physical proximity, of warmth, even the light perfume of her skin, and into his mind swept an image so acutely clear that it eclipsed for him the drab realities of his room: the shore of a tropical ocean, fine pink sand, gentle pale-green water, a dense line of heavy-crowned palms.

  —Go on, Chris. Into the water.

  He waded into the calm wavelets until the delicate sandy bottom was far below his dangling feet and he floated effortlessly in an all-encompassing warmth, in an amniotic bath of placid, soothing fluid. Placid but not motionless, for he felt, as he drifted, tiny convulsive quivers about him, an electric oceanic caress, pulsations of the water against his bare skin, intimate, tender, searching. He began to tingle. As he moved farther out from shore, so far now that the land was gone and the world was all warm water to the horizon, the pressure of those rhythmic pulsations became more forceful, deeply pleasurable: The ocean was a giant hand lightly squeezing him. He trembled and made soft sighing sounds that grew steadily more vehement and closed his eyes and let ecstasy overwhelm him in the ocean’s benignly insistent grip. Then he grunted and his heart thumped and his body went rigid and then lax, and moments later he sat up, blinking, astonished, eerily tranquil.

  —I didn’t think anything like that was possible.

  —For us, anything’s possible. Even sex across seven hundred miles. I wasn’t sure it would work, but I guess it did, didn’t it? Did you like it?

  —Do you need an answer, Laurel?

  —I feel so happy.

  —How did you do it? What was the trick?

  —No trick. Just the usual trick, Chris, a little more intense than usual. I hated the idea that you were all alone, horny, unable to sleep.

  —It was absolutely marvelous.

  —And now we’re lovers. Even though we’ve never met.

  —No. Not altogether lovers, not yet. Let me try to do it to you, Laurel. It’s only fair.

  —Later, OK? Not now.

  —I want to.

  —It takes a lot of energy. You ought to get some sleep, and I can wait. Just lie there and glow and don’t worry about me. You can try it with me another time.

  —An hour? Two hours?

  —Whenever you want. But not now. Rest now. Enjoy. Good night, love.

  —Good night, Laurel.

  He was alone. He lay staring up into the darkness, stunned. He had been unfaithful to Jan three times before, not bad for nine years, and always the same innocuous pattern: a business trip far from home, a couple of solitary nights, then an official dinner with some woman executive, too many drinks, the usual half-serious banter turning serious, a blurry one-night stand, remorse in the morning and never any follow-up. Meaningless, fragmentary stuff. But this—this long-distance event with a woman he had never even seen—seemed infinitely more explosive. For he had the power and Jan did not and Laurel did; and Jan’s mind was closed to his and his to hers, and they could only stagger around blindly trying to find each other, while he and Laurel could unite at will in a communion whose richness was unknown to ordinary humans. He wondered if he could go on living with Jan at all now. He felt no less love for her than before, and powerful ties of affection and sharing held him to her; but yet—even so——

  In guilt and confusion, Maitland drifted off into sleep. It was still dark when he woke—3:13 A.M., said the clock on the dresser—and he felt different guilt, different confusion, for it was of Laurel now that he thought. He had taken pleasure from her, and then he had collapsed into postorgasmic stupor. Never mind that she had told him to do just that. He felt, and always had, a peculiarly puritanical obligation to give pleasure for pleasure, and unpaid debts were troublesome to him. Taking a deep breath, he sent strands of consciousness through the night toward the south, over the fire-hued mountains of central Utah, over the silent splendor of the Grand Canyon, down past the palm trees into torrid Phoenix, and touched Laurel’s warm, sleepy mind.

  —Hnhh.

  —It’s me. I want to, now.

  —A!! right. Yes.

  The image she had chosen was a warm sea, the great mother, the all-encompassing womb. He, reaching unhesitatingly for a male equivalent, sent her a vision of himself coming forth on a hot, dry summer day into a quiet landscape of grassy hills as round as tawny breasts. Cradled in his arms he held her gleaming porcelain jar, the one she had shown him. He bent, tipping it, pouring forth from it an enormous snake, long and powerful but not in any way frightening, that flowed like a dark rivulet across the land, seeking her, finding, gliding up across her thighs, her belly. Too obvious? Too coarsely phallic? He wavered for a moment but only a moment, for he heard her moan and whimper, and she reached with her mind for the serpent as it seemed he was withdrawing it; he drove back his qualms and gave her all the energy at his command, seizing the initiative as he sensed her complete surrender. Her signal shivered and lost focus. Her breathing grew ragged and hoarse, and then into his mind came a quick, surprising sound, a strange, low growling that terminated in a swift, sharp gasp.

  —Oh, love. Oh. Oh. Thank you.

  —It wasn’t scary?

  —Scare me like that as often as you want, Chris.

  He smiled across the darkness of the miles. All was well. A fair exchange: symbol for symbol, metaphor for metaphor, delight for delight.

  —Sleep well, Laurel.

  —You too, love. Mmm.

  This time, Jan knew that something had happened while he was away. He saw it on her face, which meant that she saw it on his; but she voiced no suspicions, and when they made love the first night of his return, it was as good as ever. Was it possible, he wondered, to be bigamous, to take part with Laurel in a literally superhuman oneness while remaining Jan’s devoted husband and companion? He would, at any rate, try. Laurel had shared his soul as no one ever had and Jan never could, yet she was a phantom, faceless, remote, scarcely real; and Jan, cut off from him as most humans are from all others, nevertheless was his wife, his partner, his bedmate, the mother of his children. He would try.

  So he took the office gossip home to her as always and went out with her twice a week to the restaurants they loved and sat beside her at night watching cassettes of operas and movies and Shakespeare, and on weekends they did their weekend things, boating on the bay and tennis and picnics in the park and dinner with their friends, and everything was fine. Everything was very fine. And yet he managed to do the other thing, too, as often as he could. Just as he had successfully hidden from Jan the enigmatic secret mechanism within his mind that he did not dare reveal to anyone not of his sort, so, too, now did he hide the sec
ond marriage, rich and strange, that that mechanism had brought him.

  His lovemaking with Laurel had to be furtive, of course, a thing of stolen moments. She could hardly draw him into that warm, voluptuous ocean while he lay beside Jan. But there were the business trips—he was careful not to increase their frequency, which would have been suspicious, but she came to him every night while he was away—and there was the occasional Saturday afternoon when he lay drowsing in the sun of the garden and found that whispering transparent surf beckoning to him, and once she enlivened a lunchtime for him on a working day. He roused the snake within his soul as often as he dared; and nearly always she accepted it, though there were times when she told him no, not now, the moment was wrong. They had elaborate signals to indicate a clear coast. And for the ordinary conversation of the day, there were no limits; they popped into each other’s consciousness a thousand times a day, quick, flickering interchanges, a joke, a bit of news, a job triumphantly accomplished, an image of beauty too potent to withhold. As he was crossing the bridge, entering his office, reaching for the telephone, unfolding a napkin—suddenly, there she was, often for the briefest flare of contact, a tag touch and gone. He loved that. He loved her. It was a marriage.

  He snooped in Mountain Bell directories at the library and found her telephone number, which he hardly needed, and her address, which at least confirmed that she really did exist in tangible, actual Phoenix. He manufactured a trip to Albuquerque to appraise the earnings prospects of a small electronics company and slipped off up the freeway to Santa Fe to visit the gallery that showed her pottery: eight or ten superb pieces, sleek, wondrously skilled. He bought one of the smaller ones. “You don’t have any information about the artist, do you?” he asked the proprietor, trying to be casual, heart pounding, hoping to be shown a photograph.

  The proprietor thought there might be a press release in the files and rummaged for it. “She lives down Phoenix way,” she said. “Comes up here once or twice a year with her new work. I think it’s museum quality, don’t you?” But she could not find the press release. When Laurel flashed into his mind that night back in Albuquerque, he did not tell her he owned one of her jars or that he had been researching her. But he wondered desperately what she looked like. He played with the idea of visiting Phoenix and somehow getting to meet her without telling her who he was. So long as he kept his mind sheathed, she would never know, he thought. But it seemed sneaky and treacherous; and it might be dangerous, too. She had told him often enough not to come to her city.