Chapter 14. Convalescent
Xandarga Space Elevator, Earth, c. 55,680,000 years ago
O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms
Alone and palely loitering?
John Keats—La Belle Dame Sans Merci
“Congratulations,” she said. Her hands were in the pockets of her white medical gown, now opened, revealing a smart cream blouse and gray wool skirt beneath. Glints of warmth in wise, green eyes, framed by high cheekbones in an olive-brown face. Soon-to-be-ex-Admiral Ruxhana Fengen Kraa quite forgot his racked breathing, the sweat of effort. The doctor walked towards him, clack of heels on parquet silenced by crimson pile as she approached. Ruxhana was transfixed, at once gripped by an urge to flee and a compulsion to stay, Just to see what happened next.
The same compulsion, in fact, that had gotten him into so much trouble just lately. Oh, well. What the hell.
“Xalomé?” She was now almost close enough to touch and he could sense the saffron of her heat. Panic seized him, a mixture of thwarted desire and bitter betrayal he thought long buried under thirty-eight years of hard fighting.
First, the long war against the Carpetbaggers in the Trifid Nebula, in which he lost an eye and gained field promotion.
Then, a long series of counter-insurgency operations of appalling viciousness against the Jumblies in the Greater Magellanic Cloud, where the Pax Terrestris had yet to take hold. This proxy war against Andromeda had cost both his legs, an arm, much of his skull and a third of his cerebral cortex.
And after that? Campaign followed campaign, with trips to Earth ever less frequent. He had only ever once descended from Clarke Orbit, and that was by the Panthalassic Elevator, not down to Xandarga Station. He'd stayed less than a day.
The doctor was standing before him. He relaxed his grip on the bar and turned unsteadily into her retrieving arms, encircled fully in her embrace. She looked up at him, her lips slightly parted.
“Xalomé? If that's who you want me to be, Admiral, then so I shall be.”
“But... how? Are you...?”
“Hush now, Admiral. You've exerted yourself quite enough for one session. Your new bones are knitting nicely, but such massive reconstruction takes time. What you need now is a shower and bed.” He could see the curve of Earth filling a panoramic port with blue against the stars. She followed his glance and turned back to him, reading his thought. “Tomorrow, as they say, is another day,” she said. “Now, do you think you can walk a little more?”
“I think so, Doctor, if you can steady me.”
With her help he made his way to the bathroom. He allowed her to remove his robe so that he could step into the shower cubicle. Suddenly shy, he never let her see anything more than his bare back. To have allowed her to glimpse him in front view would have been too much. His face would have been a study in bafflement and fear. What's more, he had an erection, uncomfortably taut. He looked down at his prong, rigid and sharply bladed at the end, as if it were an alien life form: like the rest of his new flesh, still pale with regenerative newness. He felt dizzy—the walls of the shower cubicle ballooned out to cushion him, and a seat rose from the floor to break his fall.
When it was sure that the patient was safe, the cubicle's AI withdrew the side-impact cushions and turned on the shower. A blast of hot nanofluidics stripped him of the sweat that had congealed around him like a shell. Steam rose. The hiss of the drops hitting the floor made him drowsy.
“Xalomé?”
“Shh. There, now. Time to get dry, I think.” The nanofluidics were replaced instantly by blasts of hot, fresh air, reminding Ruxhana of the bridge of the Sorceror. The memory immediately cost him his erection, but he now felt he could hardly stand unaided. The Doctor, businesslike, frowned in concern, dressed him in a new bathrobe, guided him from the bathroom and into his bed, covering him, monitoring his temperature, blood pressure and vital signs.
“No, I think you'll do,” was the last thing she said before he blacked out.
He awoke in the dark and for a moment had no idea where he was, or why. He tried to sit up, but the effort made him feel sick, so he eased himself gently down onto the mattress. But there was a hand on his chest, and a body next to his in the dark, and he remembered.
“Xalomé—”
“We've been through all that. Haven't we?”
“I—”
“In any case, you have more pressing concerns.” He felt the smoothness of a thigh laid against his, and a hand, gripping and releasing the hairs on his chest, making its way downwards, across his belly. He felt proud—stupidly so, he thought, given that he'd had no part in his rescue and reconstruction—that his new belly was more toned than his old one had been, and that his prong seemed heavier and more serrated. It began to rise under her touch.
“My job, Admiral, has been to make you better,” she said. “Think of me as all the King's Horses and all the King's Men, glueing dear old Humpty Dumpty back together again.”
“Humpty Dumpty. That's me, right?”
“Mmm-hmm.” Her fingers began to trace the razored ridges of his prong, feeling their way gingerly around the sharp, multiply bladed tip. “Only, unlike our ovoid friend of lore, you're only being stuck together so you can feel it all the harder, when they shove you off an even higher wall.”
“The fleet. My fleet,” He gripped a fistful of her hair, more forcefully than he'd meant to.
“Ow! Yes, the fleet. You probably haven't realized it yet—after all, you've been in no fit state—and I wasn't about to let you know any sooner, because the stress might have killed you. But the loss of the fleet will cost you your commission. At the very least.”
“And at the most?”
“I don't think you need worry about that yet. You've been in worse scrapes. After all, as I say, it's been my job to put you back together, and the process isn't yet complete. And, if I may say so, I've been quite pleased with some of the—um—additional refinements I've built into the New You.” She giggled and sat up. He saw her only in silhouette, but she still had a hand around his prong. “Improvements to—well, size, mainly. And stamina.”
“Improvements?”
“Sure. On a lonely job like this, a girl has got to find whatever fun she can. No—don't move. You can pay me later.”
“Pay you?”
“Not in the way you think. But I think I can help you out of this. But I'll want something in return.”
“Want...?”
“Perhaps I shouldn't have said anything. As I said, tomorrow is another day. And as I also said, the best thing you can do now is simply to lie back and think of Gondwanaland. Stay still, now.” She swung a leg over him, so that he felt the plush of her thighs gripping him high across his hips. With great care, holding her breath, she lowered herself onto him, and, having done so, let out a small cry of pain. She sat fully upright, maneuvering him still more deeply, and sighed.
“Oh, wow—I am good,” she said. “No—I told you, don't move.” Looking up at her silhouette in Earthlight, he could hardly help himself, his hands tracing the musked contours of her body. Her aura deepened as she moved until it blanketed them both, wings of a purple emperor, barred with crimson rays. She gripped his hips with her knees and lifted herself from him.
“Xalomé?”
“Hmm?” She looked up, green eyes gleaming in shadow, tapeta flashing, aura deepening in indigo waves.
“Am I...? Do you think?”
“Are you fit enough for the main event? Oh, yes, I think so. All part of the therapy. Doctor's orders.” And then she turned over, flaunting her hindquarters at him, thrusting them outwards so that her inflamed vulva emerged as a golden center of a coruscating turquoise mandala. He rolled over, feeling his new limbs creak, and, very delicately, rose to his knees, steadying himself behind her, on the milky backs of her thighs, fingers gripping the mane of hair running down the nape of her neck.
She whimpered. His prong
sparked in a flash of agony as he brushed it against her thighs, bending it at the root. He winced as the muscles in his new knees locked in cramp. She bent forward, burying her face in the bed, reaching back to reassure him and draw him in. A fleeting touch of fingertips on his shaft, and then he was within her, his prong transforming in ways never seen in the open air, in response to the histamines secreted by the folds of her flesh, the edges of his glans inflating into barbs of horn that locked him into her, and which raked her deeply as he moved, first uncertainly, and then with renewed reserves of power, so that with each surge she was pulled clear of the mattress and then driven further into its folds. When he spasmed, her aura darkened with terrifying suddenness to the null of space. She screamed then, a brutal yell of ecstasy and terror. Her aura winked out of existence before resuming, slowly, a skulking orange. She sighed and pulled herself away, releasing him. Tiny rivulets of blood, darker shadows in the darkness, flecked his prong and her inner thighs. She fell forwards onto the bed. He could not see her face.
He awoke on his back and found himself paralyzed. His eyes, now open, could not close, but the square, white luminous tiles of the ceiling were all he could see. The air was different, too. Ionized, like the sea. Entirely different from the fug of the stateroom, in which his last memory was the rankness of spent sex. As if on cue he heard her voice, and though he could not move to see her, he had a clear image of her once again in her doctor's gown and conservative clothes. Without knowing how, or feeling any sensation at all in his lips and tongue, he spoke.
“Why can't I move?”
“Because, Admiral, this really is going on inside your head. Like the stateroom. And the shower. And everything else. I felt I had to make a point, that's all.”
“So... you aren't really Xalomé, then? My Xalomé?”
“Not that again. Look, if you want me to be 'your Xalomé,’ whoever that is, then 'your Xalomé' I shall be. If you think it will help.”
“Will it?”
“Whatever.”
“But the real Xalomé...?”
“... has been married for thirty years to a rat-faced little corporal in the catering corps; lives in a low-to-middling suburb of a thrillingly dull stripway sprawl on an incredibly boring planet in the Shit-For-Brains Quadrant; has twelve mewling kits, and ten well-chewed dugs dangling down to her knees. Life for her is unending drudgery with no prospect of relief and it's only the diazepam that keeps her going. Frankly, she's let herself go. What opportunities wasted. What intelligence. What talent.”
Ruxhana choked. “You know this? You really know this?”
“Of course I don't. How could I? And in any case we're getting off the point. As far as you're concerned, in this reality, in this—continuum, if you like—I am Xalomé, your Xalomé, if you want me to be.”
He did not find this offer comforting. It was not what he wanted that had mattered, but what she had wanted, and that he could never work out what her desires might have been.
For years—decades—he had wondered what had happened to Xalomé, even to the extent of querying naval records with the resources available only to a Fleet Admiral. Not even Special Ops could cloak its activities from him, had he chosen to examine them—which he had. There had been no record of her existence. None whatsoever.
Of course, he could have discovered anything and everything he wanted to learn about the career of his erstwhile barrack-mate Ko Handor Raelle. But some creatures were best left to fester beneath the stones whence they came. It was only a chance glance at a newsfeed a decade earlier that told him that ageing, minor-league Uqbar-rules contender Raelle had come third in a duel with a Khong called Azazazat Gwár. Ko's skull had been smashed in and flattened, his brains spurting all over the ring and into the baying, Antarctic crowd. An old score, finally settled.
“But I have something to tell you,” she said. “To ask you, really.”
“Me?”
“Yes. A task. A job.” She sounded slightly ashamed, he thought, as if this ‘job’ were something furtive, shady. For the first time he felt that he had the upper hand, for all that he could not move and had no idea about the reality he inhabited, nor how he might escape it.
“Oh, really? After this—betrayal? And double betrayal? You want me to help you?” The revelation that none of their lovemaking had been consensual, or even real, had hit hard. “Well, fuck you. If the Navy wants to rip my spine out, they're welcome. I no longer care.”
She saw her face hove into view over the horizon of his own. Her hair was disordered, her eyes red-rimmed. He could feel himself turn, power returning to his neck muscles. He looked straight into her face and spat. She wiped her face with her sleeve.
“I guess I deserved that,” she said. “For what it's worth, I'm sorry...”
“Sorry? For leading on a naïve country bumpkin? I'm sure it goes on all the time. Character-building. Think nothing of it—you whore.” He sat up and found himself in a theater gown on a gurney in a room that contained no other furniture. The walls and floor were clad in the same luminous, white tiles as the ceiling. He could see neither doors nor windows. The doctor—clothed, as he had suspected, in her sensible gown, blouse and skirt—came and sat down next to him.
“Where am I?”
Her voice returned to an even tone and temper. “When I said you were inside your own head, I wasn't being entirely truthful.”
“Oh, you do surprise me.”
“We're in what's called an 'Xspace'.”
“'Special Ops,’ I suppose?”
“Something like that. If you want.”
“Stop telling me what I want. It's what you wanted—what Xalomé wanted—that I wanted to know, but she threw it back at me, the bitch.” Silence. What felt, to him, like a guilty pause.
“Okay, Ruxie, truth time. I am not Xalomé. if indeed she ever existed. Or maybe I was. Once. Sort of.” She bit her lip, crumpled one fist into another. “It’s so very hard to explain.”
“Try me.”
“Oh, all right. I had hoped not to have to tell you all this, but it seems I’ve probably fucked it up, for everyone, as I usually do. I’m an exotic of a kind that I don’t think you know anything about, because we don’t have much to do with… well, with baryonic matter. Not that we don’t have feelings, though. Not that we don’t care. And we do care. I care. I wouldn’t have gone in for this whole charade if I hadn’t. Well, would I?
“And as it is truth time, I have another confession to make. I got you into this mess. It was me. All of it. The Slunj, the Discotex, the… well, the destruction of the fleet.”
“My… fleet? You?” He tried to swing his legs over the edge of the gurney, but a numbness had gripped his body. He could hardly catch his breath. “You… killed… more than six hundred million people, under my command? You?”
“I know, I know. I wish it didn’t have to happen that way, but I am sorry, and I can explain, if you’ll let me try…”
“Why should I even listen to this? Here I am, being held captive in some kinky VR dungeon by a crazed alien, and she wants sympathy? Oh, just wheel me before the Board of Enquiry right now. They’d love this. Incompetent. Delusional too. Can’t take the pressure. Hears voices, you know.”
“Look, Ruxie, I can’t take all the blame. It was you I wanted, not your crew. And, if I remember correctly, the Senior Under-Secretary for Colonial Defense did advise, very strongly, that just a couple of gunboats would have been enough. Didn’t she?”
“Yes, well, I suppose…”
“Didn’t she?”
“Yes, she did. But how did you… how could you have possibly…” Comprehension dawned. “You? You’re not…?” The Doctor stood, silent, arms crossed, waiting. “So, Doctor, whoever you are…”
“If you’d like a name you may call me ‘Merlin.’”
“All right. 'Merlin'. So, if you got me into this mess, you can get me out of it, right?”
“Right. And thank you. You won’t believe how important this is
to us—to me—to… well, everything…” She reached over and grasped his hands in hers.
“So, what’s this ‘job,’ then?”
She sat down on the edge of the bed, and began. “It’s complicated.”