The doubled voice made a stutter in his mind, in the middle of which, between know and want to know, desire for knowledge bloomed and fountained and obliterated rage, to which, at the instant each question posed its interrogative tingle, the glove responded with a million tastes that, on no diet at all, he’d never known existed; he shook his head to get away from their overwhelming bitternesses and sournesses and saltinesses and sweetnesses and burnings.
She dropped his other hand, clean as the one in the glove now. ‘What is it?’
‘I think,’ he said, ‘in this world it is very important not to have a father if you want … to know anything.’
She gave him her most confused grimace. Then laughter broke through it (while his own mind began to catalogue reason after reason why his statement had been preposterous, meaningless, inaccurate, interesting, suggestive, insightful, right, wrong …); she said, ‘I think that’s very wise. Only I haven’t the faintest idea how that could have come into your head. I mean now, here. Nobody mentioned fathers to you. What are you talking about?’ But she was pleased. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘Please …’ slipping the plate off her hand. ‘Please, I want you to clean me now.’ She looked back and forth between his hands. ‘I guess you put it on the … Well, no. You decide.’
He took the plate and slipped it over his bare hand, recognizing and wondering at the approval that wrote itself from bottom to top of her face. (Moments later he realized her approval was because she most likely thought the gross currents in the plate might have interfered with the workings of the glove had he put it on the other hand; she had taken his choice as sign of the glove’s success.) He felt a small surge of pleasure at her response, even as the glove informed him by a series of angular pronouncements and diagrams, slapped blindly across his mind, that she was wrong: the glove contained enough stabilizing circuits and bracing units so that it would not have been bothered by the plate’s impedance at all. The pleasure was as unconnected as the still towering rage – yet he enjoyed it even if enjoyment meant as little as the rage did.
He reached for her shoulder with the humming plate, brushed her shoulder with his other hand – but nothing much to brush, which made her laugh. Anyway, she’d brushed every two or three passes.
‘You do that very well.’ She closed her eyes. ‘Almost as well as I do. And that’s nice.’
‘… good,’ he said. In her smile and closed eyes there had been a request (rather than a question) he could not read; and for years he had been someone who’d feared questions and answered requests.
‘You’re not the same rat I brought from the polar station!’ Suddenly she opened her eyes with a kind of delight. ‘You know that, don’t you?’
‘I’m the same,’ he said, and was confused because that wasn’t what she wanted, but what she wanted was not what he knew. He ran the plate’s edge beneath her left breast, then her right: she took a surprisingly large breath and closed her eyes again.
The strap was very tight around his hand.
The upper part bare and the bottom part in pants and sandals, her body was oddly interesting. There was a small scratch on her ribs, and he realized he was unused to seeing scars on women’s bodies. Certainly in the rat cage and in the city he’d seen injured women – but the women in the projected shows at the Muct were never scarred, so that the … stereoptical view (and that was suddenly a concept he understood well enough to make a metaphor out of it – and metaphor was another concept, a stereoptical concept …), which that gave him, blended to blur the real through the idealizations/flaws inherent in any representation.
All sensations, as well as the faintest memories associated with them, were given a word and three written versions of it, in syllabics, alphabetics, and ideographs, each of which dragged behind it connections, associations, resonances … He’d known about the ideograms and the alphabet; but he’d never known his written language included syllabics before.
The new condition was not so much an alternate voice loud enough to drown the voices of childhood as it was a web, a text weaving endlessly about him, erupting into and falling from consciousness, prompting memory and obliterating it, that was simply more interesting than the drumming voice asserting or denying ignorance or knowledge.
She said, ‘Remember, you’re cleaning a truly extraordinary bitch. I want you to do exactly what you’d do if a beautiful … female asked you to clean her – before you went to the Institute, I mean. Wait a minute –’ She reached down and unsnapped her pants, letting the flaps fall open, pushing them down her hips a little. ‘And you can, pretend I’m wearing my face,’ which was what, in that language, the wire masks were sometimes called: though he’d never known that before. (But the glove now told him.) ‘Myself, I can’t stand the things. So I don’t usually wear –’
The feeling was in his body; and perhaps he moved his body, in the course of moving the plate over her shoulder, to locate the feeling more clearly; discomfort was the word that joined it, followed by a correction: sexual discomfort.
‘Yeah,’ he said, knowing as he said it that it would also not be what she wanted. So he changed it to, ‘Yes,’ a form of the word he hadn’t used since that day at the Institute.
She frowned at him. (She too must have thought it odd.) ‘Don’t tell me you got to the Institute before anybody ever got to you …?’ She touched his face. ‘The scars there, from the epithelial herpes – you must have had it rather badly. Frankly, though, you see so much of it these days, once the actual sores are healed, like yours, I find the pits and texture rather attractive.’ She paused again, dropped her hand. ‘How old were you when you went to the Institute? I know they don’t take you under fifteen …’
‘Nineteen.’ He lifted her arm as she had lifted his, to clean beneath.
‘Just how many sexual encounters did you have before you went to the Institute?’ She still frowned.
The rush of accurate memories, enhanced by verbal tags, produced a strain he hadn’t known since becoming a rat. ‘Fifty …’ The strain made him speak slowly, while the figure was corrected within the muscle of his tongue: ‘A hundred fifty …’ which was obliterated by more fragment memories, averages, extrapolations, approximations. ‘Maybe two hundred fifty. Maybe more.’
‘Well!’ She laughed. ‘You certainly outdo me! I doubt I’m that much younger than you, and I think of myself as quite a sophisticated woman – with a mere twenty-seven men behind me. I don’t have to worry about your knowing what to do with a bitch!’ But the frown battled through. ‘How many sexual encounters have you had since you went to the Institute?’
‘One …’ he said after a different rush of words, of concepts, memories of the little man in the tall mask, the tall man at the Muct, of approximations no less complicated than the others for all the difference. ‘Two, maybe. You’re – maybe – the third.’
‘Oh. Well, like I said, I want you to do whatever you would have done in any of those situations.’ She closed her eyes. ‘You can do what you want. Anything. Anything at all. How does that sound to you? No, don’t answer.’
He lifted her other arm, trying to understand, in the play of signs, memories, and facts that stuttered about the glove, what answer she might want. The silence that for years had hung about words uttered in his presence filled with ordered comprehension. Yet there was another silence, a cube bare of all inscription, outside the answer she’d made clear she did not need or want, that as clearly was wanted, was needed. Many people purchase slaves for sexual reasons, the man at the Institute had said. Recalling it now, however, was his new knowledge’s result, not its cause.
‘Do what you want,’ she repeated. ‘You’d better do it, too.’ She closed her eyes again. ‘Because, afterwards, I intend to do just what I want with you.’ She opened them, frowned.
He said: ‘I’m not …’ The word rocking his tongue in his jaw’s cradle was one he’d heard before but, like so many, had never tried to say. ‘… Not het – heterosexual.’ As though the glove responded
to his difficulty, a host of colloquial synonyms flicked up from his hand to beat about his head. ‘A front-face …’ He said that one, while the list continued: a quick-in-and-out, which was a term he’d actually used before he’d come to the Institute, but was not one he would ever have thought of using to one of them, even a bitch. So instead he said one further down the list: ‘… not a stiff-stuffer –’
‘Yes?’ she said, blinking. ‘Oh, shit … !’ She took the smallest step backward, small enough so that the glove said it was the swaying of a larger than usual breath coupled with the slightest movement of one heel, but – because he had not changed – he chose to read it as a stepping back. ‘Wouldn’t you know! My luck … No, you don’t have to say any more!’ Then she stepped six inches over sand towards him.
He swayed, moved his heel. But did not step back.
‘Look,’ she said. ‘Whatever you are, you still know what a dog would do!’ And ‘dog’ was a term he’d occasionally heard that some women used about men when the men were not there; but of course no women had ever used it to him. ‘You can do it …? Sure you can! Go on …’ Here, she grabbed her breasts and pressed them upwards, which he found both confusing and distracting – though moments later he remembered one of the projected stories at the Muct where a very bad woman had made something close to the same gesture.
The glove had nothing to say.
So he did what she asked.
Surprisingly, it wasn’t hard, as long as he stayed relaxed; and staying relaxed in the face of most things had been assured him at the Institute years ago. To do it, he just had to think about the same kinds of things – indulge the same fantasizings, the glove offered him as paraphrase – he would have with a man her height. Still, his erection was something of a surprise to him. Moments before he came, she suddenly pushed him off, rolled him over the edge of the transport flooring (that’s where they were lying), and demanded he be still – though he wasn’t moving – while she unplugged the plate and hit him on the back with the end of the wire. What she wanted to do, it seemed to him, was not much different from what the man at the Muct had wanted done to him. Still, he did not find it pleasant. And it distracted him from all sexual thoughts, so that for a while he tried to stop thinking altogether.
With the glove, though, that was impossible.
She lay against him after a while, holding him tightly, which was uncomfortable because of the edge of the transport’s floor under his hip. When she got up, she was breathing hard. ‘You can get up too.’
So he did and turned to her. Some of his blood from the little nicks had smeared over her breasts and down her side. She moved uneasily, teeth now again clenched. ‘No…’ she said several times. ‘No, that wasn’t quite …’ And once, suddenly staring at him: ‘More than two hundred …? I’ve only had a chance to do this maybe three times in my life!’ She took a breath. ‘So you can’t blame me if I don’t get it right the first time, huh?’ After that she climbed back into the transport. He stood looking out through the force field at the sand, smeared over in long streaks now, messy with the sunset, till she called him inside and put down the wall.
He sat beside her, watching the instruments’ glow, green on her neck, under her chin, on the roofs of her eye sockets. Outside cloudy night rushed them, split by headlights, to slap to at the side windows.
He thought: She’s tired.
He said: ‘I’ll drive for you.’
She glanced at him. ‘You know how to drive this?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Is that the glove?’ She touched an auxiliary current knob as if to adjust it, but didn’t. ‘You’re not supposed to have any skills at all, they said at the station. Those were the only rats they’d sell.’
Through wired velvet, dry flesh between, with wide fingertips he felt his knuckles. ‘I can drive this kind,’ he said. ‘I learned before … before I came back.’ Then he said: ‘They didn’t know, though. They never checked … my records.’
‘Part of the Free-Informationists’ platform in the upcoming election is: “To be a slave is to be used inefficiently.”’ She grunted. ‘Inefficiency. That’s what they think is wrong with slavery.’ She pushed some pedal; some gear below engaged. ‘I wish they were more of a threat. But they haven’t got a chance. I mean …’ She paused, long enough for him to decide she’d stopped talking. Then she said: ‘I mean even me. I didn’t want you here to drive. I don’t need you for porter work. And if you hadn’t put on the glove, you probably never would have said that much about yourself and I’d never have thought of using you as a driver. I want you for one illegal, very selfish – and, now that I know the kind of pervert you happen to be, very inefficient, I suppose – reason …’ In the dark, she laughed. Green shook on the underside of a breast, a nipple, her collarbone, chin, lower lip, septum. She was like a city, entered at night, created of small green lights – which was a memory from age fourteen, when he’d been running away from some place or other again, a memory that had remained as the canyon he’d shot through had remained, but which he hadn’t been relaxed enough at the time to understand because the man driving (as she drove now) had been so much shorter than he was.
When he was fourteen.
She said, shocking him because now he had some comprehension of shock’s sexual nature: ‘I wish you were about two and a half heads shorter. They say all bitches ever think about is sex, you know …? “Think about; and never do.” Which is what everyone else says. Well, there is one other thing I want you for –’ The bits of light on her changed position hugely as she yawned. ‘One other thing,’ she repeated, ‘before I let you drive for me. Maybe this is just as inefficient. But since that damned glove works, I might as well.’ She made a gesture with her chin over her shoulder. ‘Back there I’ve got a carton of catalogue cubes from the Inter-Sector Broadcast Library.’ She laid two fingers on his gloved hand. ‘Thanks to that, you’re tuned into the compressed textual band. Do you know what that means?’
‘No.’
She snorted. ‘What are the four largest geosectors on this world?’
‘Abned, Rhyon, Cogonak.’ He paused to question why she wanted to know. ‘And Emenog …?’
She answered: ‘That’s the sort of question any bright twelve-year-old in this world – with the right education – could answer. Though he probably wouldn’t have given them in ascending order of size, the way you did, but in the order they were established –’
‘But you asked which were the biggest –’
‘Which are the four smallest?’
‘Mesetin, Hebel-E, Tinert, and –’
‘– and Eudo is the smallest,’ she said, while he said:’
‘– Eudo.’
She said: ‘Everybody knows Eudo’s the smallest, of course – don’t ask me why, it’s just one of those facts – but I don’t think anybody but a professional geographer could tell you the other three. You see, in terms of data at hand, right now you’re on a par with the Skahadi Library itself –’ which, when her tongue lifted for the initial sibilant, he had never heard of before but which, by the time it fell from the final vowel, he knew had been founded in ’12 in Lower Cogonak, back when it had still been officially a part of Abned, before the Severance Decision of ’80 – which was when the Yellows had won their first major electoral victory. ‘You’re in touch,’ she explained, ‘at this point, with a good deal more information than I am. I certainly couldn’t have told you the four smallest. Anyway, I figured we’d put all that to some use. Like I said, the carton’s filled with catalogue cubes – about five hundred of them. They’re not there at random: they’re all texts I’ve wanted to read but never got around to. There’re more than a few in it I’ve discussed in great detail with various people, just as though I had read them. There’re a whole lot that I’ve read the first chapters of and have meant to read the rest for years. And there’re lots I read when I was much too young and have been intending to reread. Oh yes, and there’re about ten or fifteen I’ve read an
d reread a lot and just like a lot. Anyway. The instructions on the box your glove came in say that I – ordinary mortal that I am – can only absorb texts from the broadcast band at about one every ten minutes. But, as you may have figured out by now, I’m a lazy bitch. It says that if you’ve been through Radical Anxiety Termination, you can absorb them about one every point-thirty-two seconds; that’s without turning your mind into wet sand. You see, what I want to do is talk to somebody who’s read everything I should have read. I want to control such a man, make him lie down in the sand and lick my toes.’ She grinned in the dark. ‘The glove will give you the texts verbatim. On hot, hazy nights, I’ll let you recite choice passages to me so that I can pick and choose. I can always get them myself with the glove later. But I think this way is more useful, more interesting.’ She pushed another pedal. ‘Don’t you?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Go in the back,’ she said, ‘and read a few dozen books. Then come up here, and we’ll discuss literature while I decide where to drive us tonight.’ She pushed a switch on the dashboard. A pale ceiling plate behind them put hands of light on her shoulders.
‘I … I don’t read too good.’
She smiled. ‘Yes, you do. Now.’ In the dim cabin her lips were still underlit. ‘Besides, all you have to do is read the titles. The library broadcast takes care of imprinting the text on your mind. In half a second. Go on.’
He moved from beneath the bar and stood, slowly. The transport’s shaking was mostly in his knees. Turning, he walked to the back.
The carton was obviously the open octagonal one, stuck about with packing tape. Upside down against it, flap open on to the floor, the lizard-embossed bag leaned where she’d tossed it. He squatted, knees winging either side. With his gloved hand, he held the box’s ragged rim. With his naked one, he pushed down among the dice and pulled one loose. The cubes were not smaller than most people’s fingertips; but they were smaller than his. He turned the smoky die between his great crowns with their bitten nails and read: The Nu-7 Poems— the collected poems and poetic fragments that a mail-routing engineer, Vro Merivon, had stored over many years in the unused Nu-7 memory bin of her communications department computer, perhaps seventy years ago now. Their wit, their bright images of wind, cloud-forms, and various structural materials for highways, all used as metaphors for certain highly abstract mental processes, he learned about from the introduction. But the more than seven hundred poems themselves, ranging from a few lines to many, many pages, well … somehow, he realized as the cube fell back into his hard, dry palm, he had, suddenly, read them … !