“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“What if our food makes him sick?”
“He’s never said anything about it being a problem.”
Joshua hesitated. “You know, you sound different.”
“Different how?”
“I’m not sure.” He paused. “Your English is better.”
I shrugged. “I practice all the time.”
“I guess that’s it.”
We left it at that. Neither of us had any way then to know what was actually happening to my brain.
… water cup. Beads of moisture cling to its outer surface, poised to slide down the smooth sides, surfaces swirling with clouds, blue, gray, white, swirling, swirling. A hollow cup, a woman riding a centaur with six legs, four to stand on, two that paw the air… Instead of a head, a spout where water pours out, cool and delicious, running in a glistening stream, clear, sparkling…
I opened my eyes and looked at the ceiling. The image of the cup stayed vivid in my mind instead of fading, as my dreams usually did. I wasn’t thirsty, but I kept seeing cool water pour out of that spout.
Early morning sunshine lightened the room. I had slept on the floor because the bed was too cramped. Joshua had given me a T-shirt to wear last night so I could wash my blood-soaked clothes in his sink. He was already gone, but he had put a blanket over me and left a note with his schedule for the day. I knew he had left to give us privacy; usually he studied all night and slept late. On the bed—
On the bed Althor lay staring at me. He didn’t say a word, but as soon as I saw him I knew what he wanted. I got up and went to the cabinets. A quick search turned up a battered cup made from clear orange plastic. I filled it with water and brought it over. He drank it in seconds. Then he lay down again and let out a long breath.
I sat next to him, cross-legged on the bed. “How do you feel?”
“Better.” He glanced around the room. “Where are your friends?”
“Studying. Joshua will be back this evening.”
Althor nodded and closed his eyes. We had taken off his clothes to let him sleep more comfortably, and the blanket covered him from the waist down, like a blue stretch of sky. Sunshine filtered through the curtains, drawing gleams from his skin. An old scar showed on his arm and another slashed across his chest. At the time, I had no idea how easy they were to remove. He never bothered because he didn’t care.
He looked beautiful to me, scars and all. Sexy too, still sleepy and warm in bed. Leaning over him, with my hands on either side of his shoulders, I kissed him.
His lids lifted, both inner and outer. Then he pushed me away.
I flushed. Had I broken a taboo I didn’t know about? Or maybe he just didn’t feel like being kissed. He had barely made it back from the edge of death and here I was coming on to him.
But then he said, “The soldier from Troy. We need it, yes?”
“You brought one?”
“Several.” He hinged his hand around my T-shirt and tugged at it until I raised my arms. After he pulled it off, I lowered my arms and stared at my hands in my lap, wearing nothing but my bracelet, self-conscious at being undressed in front of him in broad daylight.
He spoke softly. “You’re a Raylican goddess.” When I looked up, he smiled. “There is an ancient race, almost extinct. You look like their fire goddess.” He cupped his hand under my breast and spoke in his other language, the one he had used just before we reached Mario’s house, that sounded so familiar. “What language is that?” I asked.
“Iotic. It’s ancient. Few people speak it now.”
“How do you know it?”
“My grandmother descended from the Raylicans.” He drew me down on the bed, wrapping his arms around me. When I pressed against his side, he lifted the blanket and slid me on top of him. He felt warm and solid. I lifted my head to kiss him— And saw his face.
He was staring at the ceiling with his inner lids down, making his eyes into shields. It didn’t look like the face of a living man. I was making love to a machine.
I rolled off him and sat up fast, holding the blanket around my body. His head turned to me like a mechanized part swiveling on ball bearings. “We have not completed the call.” His voice was flat, a dry plain with tumbleweed blowing, across it. Reaching out, he curved his arm around my waist.
“No!” I pushed him away. “Don’t touch me.”
His arm returned to his side. “Why not?”
“Where is Althor?”
“I am Althor.”
“I mean the real Althor. The man.”
“I am not a man.”
I pulled the blanket tighter around my body. “You aren’t. But he is.”
“I am him.”
“Why do you sound different? You’re like a machine.”
“I am a machine.”
“Can’t you let Althor out again?”
“I am Althor. How do I make it clear? This is a mode, an incomplete representation of my emotive-mechanical interface.
What you call the ‘real’ Althor is another mode, one currently inoperative.” Flatly he said, “This is what I am. If you don’t want this part of me, don’t ask for anything else.”
Just like that. Take all of me or nothing. Perhaps it says something about my life then, that it was easier for me to deal with his killing Nug than with his being a machine. As much as his capacity for violence shook me, I understood it. This was too alien.
But I asked him to accept me as I was: a nobody. As far as I knew, he had no reason to see me otherwise. It seemed hypocritical to expect less from myself than I did from him.
I hesitated. “If we do this—would I be making love to your other mode too?”
“A mode is not a different personality.”
“So if I’m here with you, I’m with the Althor I know better?”
“Yes.”
I placed my hand against his chest. He felt human. I leaned over him and looked at his face, the shimmering pools of his eyes.. You can at least try, I told myself. If you can’t handle it, stop.
I lay down and kissed his chest. He moved his hands along my back in measured, mechanized strokes. Then he said, “Resume.”
Resume? I didn’t have time to ask what it meant. Instead of brushing his lips over my face, he pushed open my mouth and kissed me straight on, too hard, as if he hadn’t calibrated the force. Then he rolled over on top of me, bringing us to the edge of the bed. He pulled the condom out of his clothes on the floor and sat up, straddling my hips with his knees while he examined the foil packet.
I couldn’t stop staring at him. It was mesmerizing, like seeing someone move by remote control. He' was, in a sense; his biochips were directing the hydraulics that controlled his motion. He was a machine, one sensuously beautiful, but still a machine.
“Althor?” I said.
He looked up. “Yes?”
“When you’re like this, will you still feel—you know. Making love?”
“Yes.” He opened the packet. '“There is no reason for my physical sensations to cease because my emotive-mechanical interface is degraded.”
I almost laughed. Of all the things I might have imagined about my first lover, I would never have come up with a machine that discussed emotive-mechanical interfaces while putting on a condom.
He rolled it on smooth and slow, latex on gold. I pushed up on my elbows, watching. Who could have guessed it could look so erotic? I cupped my hand' around his balls, wondering if he would feel the way he looked, like flexible gold. He didn’t. He felt human. Warm and alive.
This time when he lowered himself on me, it was suffocating, not so much because of his size, but because my mind created such strong metallic sensations out of this mode.
Althor pushed up on his elbows. “I am too heavy.” He said it as if it were a datum he added to memory storage.
I wondered how he knew. “Can you pick up my emotions in this mode?”
“Yes.” He kissed me, once, twice, again, and again
, sampling a data set. “I cannot make myself weigh less, however.”
“It’s okay. You don’t have to.”
He let himself down again, holding my arms so hard it hurt. I stiffened, and he loosened his grip. Although I didn’t realize it then, the damage to his web had caused him to assign incorrect values to data that specified how tightly he could safely hold someone my size. When his systems detected my tension, they recalibrated the numbers.
He rubbed his thumbs over my breasts, moved his hands to my waist, then lower, to my legs. I expected him to do what he wanted, fast and efficient, like a machine. But when he entered, it hurt less than before. I hadn’t realized that with biochips controlling his actions, he could calibrate to whatever level of gentleness or urgency he wanted. I began to relax, hugging him tight. His muscles flexed as he moved, his body going back and forth with an exact, unvarying frequency.
Upload, he thought. Metallic sensations flowed through my mind. He touched my cheek. Download?
“I don’t know how,” I said. Before it had just happened. I put my lips against his ear. “Kiss me more. The way you do it, good and hard, like you can’t get enough.”
And kiss me he did, sampling again, his tongue taking data to fill a new array. I felt how this mode interpreted pleasure, with a hard edge that gripped like a vise. Knowing a man wants you that intensely may be the greatest aphrodisiac ever to exist, far more effective than any chemically produced love potion.
Words flashed in my mind. Link opened.
That was when my sensory responses went into overdrive. My brain’s tendency to tangle empathic and sensory input strengthens with both the intensity and proximity of the people whose moods I experience. Althor flooded me with his metallic river. It closed around, blanketing my perceptions until I couldn’t sense anything else. Suffocating, I was suffocating—
Wait! My fingers dug into his back. It’s too much.
Carrier attenuated, he thought.
The sensations receded to a bearable level and he slowed down, moving with rigid control. Closing my eyes, I tried to feel only him, the living man. But he didn’t move like a man. He moved like a well-coordinated machine.
Waiting. The word entered my mind like a prompt.
Waiting? I thought.
Waiting, the prompt came again. He continued with his slow, measured strokes.
Waiting for what? I thought.
Suspend release. His tension built like pressure in an airlock, bowing out the doors.
What does suspend release mean? I asked.
He exhaled in a small explosion of air. Overriding, he thought. His movements surged, fast and hard again. I hung on, letting his river sweep me with it this time. He pushed his arm under my waist and lifted me off the bed, pressing us tightly together as we moved. His sweat dripped down and moisture slicked back and forth between our bodies. When his climax broke over us, his muscles spasmed and we both went rigid with the blunt intensity of it.
Gradually the river receded. His grip loosened and we sank back into the bed, he lying with his cheek against the top of my head. Eventually, when our breathing quieted, he slid off me and lay against my side. His body felt warm. Human. As long as I didn’t see his face, I could believe a man lay next to me rather than a machine.
“Return,” he said.
I opened my eyes. “What?”
He didn’t answer. He was fast asleep.
I closed my eyes and my mind wandered. Fragments of his earlier words drifted in my mind, words from an ancient tongue of his ancestors: Shibalank, Shibalan…
I opened my eyes. Sunlight still brightened the room, but it had lost its new-morning quality. Distant sounds of people talking came from outside. Glancing at the wall clock, I saw we had slept for several hours and still had a few more before Joshua was due back.
As I moved, Althor’s outer lids opened. I propped myself up on my elbow. “Are you all right now?”
“I am discontinuing.” He sounded more like a machine than before.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“My functions are degrading.”
“You mean you can’t heal yourself anymore?”
“No.” His eyes closed. “Access denied.”
“What?”
He opened his eyes, this time both inner and outer lids. His face relaxed and his voice rumbled with a heavy accent, familiar and human. “Access denied. This means you ask a question I can’t answer.”
Relief swept over me. “You’re back.”
He smiled. “I never went away.”
“Does that bother you, that we made love while you were… him.”
“Him is me. So no, this doesn’t bother me.”
“Do you remember it all?
“Every second.” He grinned. “I can play it back as often as I want.”
I flushed. “You’re kidding.”
“Not at all.” More quietly he said, “My sorry if it unsettles. Usually my interface with humans isn’t so obvious.”
“Aren’t you human at all?”
He ran his hand along my side. “I feel what any man feels. The biomech web doesn’t take away my humanity. It adds to it.”
“Were you born this way? I mean with biomech.”
His emotions withdrew like a light switching off. “No.”
“Did I say something wrong?”
It was a moment before he answered. “I have—unpleasant memories associated with it.” In a more normal voice he said, “I wasn’t born with the web, but some of my modifications are at the germ level. The intent is that I pass them to my children.” He shrugged. “My doctors don’t know if it will work. I’m the first they’ve tried it on.”
I stared at him. “That’s horrible. How could they experiment on you?”
“Someone had to be first. I am a good test case.”
“No one has a right to make you a ‘test case.’”
“Doesn’t it occur to you that maybe I want this? That it fixes problems I don’t want passed to my children?”
Of course. His anemia. His hands. Other problems too, ones I didn’t know about then. “I didn’t realize.”
He exhaled. “I am maybe too sensitive about it. Or so Ragnar tells me.”
“You mean the admiral?”
“Yes. He was my doctor, a brilliant biomech surgeon, head of the team that built my web. When I was small, he helped me learn to use it.” Althor smiled. “He used to walk with me while I was learning to use my legs. We talked about so much.”
His description puzzled me. I touched the socket in his wrist. “I thought these linked you to your Jag.”
“They do.”
“Your military wires children to warships?”
Althor stiffened. “Of course not. Jagernauts get their biomech as adults, just before they receive their commission.”
It still didn’t make sense. But I could tell that if I pushed, it would alienate him. So instead I said, “What did you mean, that you were discontinuing?”
“My web—it’s part of the Jag’s computer. I am—how to say it? The Jag’s web, it comes apart. Because they tamper with it. If its web fails, mine might also. I keep flipping in and out of different modes, probably many more than you realize. The last was more obvious, but others have happened too. Both my web and the Jag did an automatic shutdown when we were cut off, but the tampering still affects me. It’s disorienting.”
It sounded much worse than disorienting. “Are you going to be all right?”
“I don’t know. I need my ship.”
“What did you mean earlier when you said we hadn’t ‘completed the call’?”
“The mod call,” he said. “You know what is a subroutine call in software?”
“We studied it some in school.”
“A mod call is more sophisticated, but the basic idea is the same.”
I gaped at him. “You mean, for you making love is a subroutine call?”
“Yes.”
“Althor, do you have any id
ea how kinky that sounds?”
“Kinky?” He smiled. “This means bent?”
“This means weird.”
“It is me, Tina. It will never change.” He spoke awkwardly. “But you never agreed to the link. My sorry for that. I think the Jag recognizes you as a node in its web now. It may even be augmenting your mind, expanding your knowledge base and vocabulary.”
An image of myself with a machine face jarred my thoughts. I stared at my hands. They looked human. They were human. If anything, being with Althor made me feel more human, not less.
He touched my breast, folding his hand around it. My body responded immediately, wanting him. But when he tried to pull me down, I resisted. I kept seeing him staring at the ceiling with half-open eyes, a computer having sex.
He spoke softly. “Am I really so repugnant to you?”
“Althor, no.” How could he be so empathic and yet also be a machine?
As we made love again, the memory of his machine eyes stayed in my mind. I wondered how long he would remain human.
6
Heather Rose
The only sound in Joshua’s room was the television murmuring in the background with a test of the Emergency Broadcast System. Althor sat on the edge of the bed, dressed again, bending and relaxing his arm, the one with the injured shoulder.
The grate of someone doing the combination lock sounded. As the door opened, I jumped up from my chair.
Joshua came in and smiled. “It’s just me.” He locked the door, then turned to watch Althor. I wasn’t surprised to see Joshua’s smile fade; it was one thing to have Althor passed out in his room, helpless; it was another to have him wide awake and restless.
“Where is your friend Daniel?” Althor asked.
“He’ll be here soon,” Joshua said. “He’s checking some things.”
“Checking what?” Althor asked.
“Yeager Test Cen—”
Althor stood up. “You contacted the base?”