Alien Terrain (10 page)

Jane had racked her brain to find a way to message someone
at the Body House, and there it was all of a sudden—a list of contacts in the
kitchen drawer. She’d been looking for a tea strainer and instead she’d found a
notepad: nearest doctor, nearest refuel, nearest public message center. The
latter, it turned out, was actually in Flowers, only three miles away. Assuming
the place still
existed,
Jane would go there in the
morning. If she could, she’d send a message out to Raj’s people. It would be
anonymous, untraceable. At least she hoped so. She doubted many of her
neighbors did much messaging and certainly not to places like the Body House.
If Earth First had found ways to keep track of the brothel’s feed, her sending
one from here would be a good-size clue.

She would still do it.

He was fine now. It was time for him to reunite with his
friends and his life. And she should get on with things too. While she still
could.

Jane took herself through what would happen. They’d come for
him and she’d walk with him to the door. A hug, a kiss, a wave from the top of the
stairs, and then he’d disappear. The image made her sad.
Real
sad.
Another sure sign it was time for him to go.

“What is it?”

Raj’s voice in the dark was a surprise. Jane blinked. Tears
spilled out of her eyes and puddled in her ears. How was he awake? She hadn’t
moved. She hadn’t made a sound. The darkness all around their bed was thick as
ever and the quiet absolute. Still, he’d caught her thinking taboo thoughts
like he could read her mind. He said he couldn’t, but…

“I miss you,” she admitted.

“You miss me?” He shifted toward her, sounding curious.
“Where have I gone?”

Jane sniffed and wiped her eyes. “Well, nowhere yet, but I
was thinking of you at the Body House.” She turned onto her side and looked at
him. “Tell me what it’s like there. Help me imagine the right things.” There
was a silence. Long enough for Jane to wonder if she’d crossed a line.

“All right,” he said obligingly. “What do you want to know?”

That was a good question. A better question would be what
she didn’t want to know. How well could she handle thinking of him as a working
prostitute? “Do you have your own room?” she asked. Logistics should be a safe
place to start.

“I have two rooms.” Raj settled on his back and Jane did
too, listening intently.
“A sitting room and bedroom.”

“No roommate, then.”

“No roommate,” he agreed. “There are common rooms for
socializing. We take our meals together, for example.”

“What does it look like? Your room, I mean.” This was good.
She felt a little better. “Is it personalized?
Generic?
Did you bring things from home? Do you mind my asking all of this?”

“Not at all.”
He pulled her close
to him, the way he always did now. She draped a hand over his chest, a leg over
his thigh. “I did bring some things from my planet. Ceremonial objects—sacred
books, statues. The rest of it is, as you say, generic. More modernized. Not
such an interesting homage to time gone by as what we live in now.”

“Right,” said Jane, looking around her.
An
homage
to time gone by. That was one way to put it, she supposed.
Another way would be a bunch of run-down shit holes, but maybe it was homey in
its way. It felt like home to her. She’d spent most of her life in the old
world. Long enough to know nostalgia wasn’t really a primary focus in the Opted
Zone. Just making do with what was left of life.

Her parents had been led here by idealized ambition. They’d
taken their one child to the pristine boonies so she could live away from the
techno-fantasy that was city life and reconnect with what was real: real food,
real books, real conversation with real people, face-to-face. They’d gathered
up like-minded thinkers, most of
whom
had also been
shipwrecked when all the universities had collapsed. Together they’d cofounded
Human, an institute of cooperative learning.

It was a collective college modeled on the image of the guru
on the hill. Her father traded master classes on romantic poets for washed
windows, while her mother taught ballet for bushels of organic kale. The good
days she’d remembered had been good. True believers had rushed to join them,
excited and grateful to be involved. Everyone had been so nice and earnest. It
had been a kind of paradise.

Gradually, however, the world’s outcasts had found their way
into the lawless zone and it had all gone wrong. Imperceptibly at first, the way
man-made disasters always get their start.

Her parents had explained away the lack of equitable trade.
A “testing of the waters” is what they’d called it. With no other repercussions
for theft and violence than a look of hurt surprise, however, things quickly
fell apart. At the end of the third year, the golden age of Human was over. The
school was overrun with bodyguards, watchmen, enforcers, and signs with fixed
fees TO BE PAID AT TIME OF SERVICE. Everything they’d disliked in the old world
came to find them, except for safety and convenience—that they never had.

In short, Human had been a big mistake.
Sad
according to her mother.
Understandable according to
her father.
Jane was the only member of the household who had taken
deep, unshakable offense at the disintegration of her parents’ dream.

“The world would not survive without mistakes.” That’s what
her father said to comfort her. “Mistakes are reason’s failure over hope,
passion, and love. Without them, we’d lose all of our poetry and art along with
our best love affairs and at least half the little babies.”

Jane tried to believe her father, but deep down she knew she
liked the safety of reason better than books, poetry, and art. Keats and
Pushkin and de Musset could all go to hell if it meant she could finally live
life certain she was in the right of things.

“And how does the job work?” She turned to Raj, ready to
hear about sex now. Next to Human’s rise and fall, how bad could a brothel be?

“Why not let me take you there?” Raj reached down for her hand.
“I’ll show you everything you want to know.”

Jane pulled both hands in to her chest and shook her head.
“I’m not the brothel type,” she said.

“What type are you? Where are you going?”

“North,” she said.

“Can you be more specific?”

“I have a friend in geo-region two. Before you ask, it’s
someone Rick would have no way of knowing. She was the daughter of one of my
old ladies years ago. A woman I took care of who died. We’ve been messaging
each other from Saint Mary’s. She has a restaurant that I can work at. That way
I can make money and stay off-grid for even longer. Maybe forever if I qualify
for a protective name change.”

“I could come there with you.”

What?
Her heart
was racing at the thought. What did he mean he’d come?
As her
protection?
Out of curiosity? No matter how she looked at it, it made no
sense, and so she said, “They’ll know that you’re a Bod.”

He said nothing to that. It was a true enough objection to a
strange idea. Even if there were a why, a reason he wanted them to go together,
it would be dangerous to be seen out together. Too much about him was startling
for the world not to notice.

Jane squinted in the darkness but could only see the shape
of him, beautiful and ominous like distant hillsides in the dark.

“I should let my brethren know that I survived. That’s only
right. Beyond that, I’m completely free. None of my belongings are so precious
that we’d have to go back to the Body House at all if you object.”

“I don’t object.” Jane reached her hand out, found his arm,
and followed it up to his chest, where she pressed her palm to what she thought
must be his heart. “I’m sure it’s a good place. I’m only slightly jealous of
those fifteen thousand women you were fucking in there.”

To her surprise, that made him laugh. A low rumbling started
midway down his torso and took on life until it thundered through him. Jane
waited while he rode it out. Eventually, Raj stretched himself and sighed,
luxuriating in the afterglow of his amusement.

“What’s so funny?”

“You,” he said, pulling his face back into place, “jealous
of a thousand women.”

“Fifteen thousand.
And how’s that
funny?”

He laughed again.
Enough
,
thought Jane. She sat up, looking down on him. “Tell me why that’s funny.”

“Because you’re so much bigger than all that. It’s like an
avalanche saying it’s jealous of the houses it’s just buried.
Or a tidal wave possessive of the world swimming inside it.”

“I don’t get it.”

“You have destroyed my past, dear Jane. All that’s left of
me is what you’ve made.”

She stared at him.

“Shall we go to geo-region two together?” he asked, patting
her good-naturedly.

“
Destroyed
isn’t a
nice word.”

“It’s wonderful,” he countered. “I never dreamed of such
delicious devastation.”

Jane let herself be pulled into his arms. He kissed her, and
she wanted him.

“How did I destroy you?” she made herself ask.

“By being
who
and what you are.”

“Raj”—Jane struggled back upright—“could you make sense? I
don’t know what you’re saying.”

“Just don’t be jealous,” he said, beating down another
laughing fit.

Fine.
Jane lay down on her back.
Somewhere deep inside she did understand. The past for both of them was much
too far away to matter. “I’m not really jealous,” she admitted. “And I really
do want you to tell me all about the sex.”

“All you had to do was say so,” Raj said reasonably. “Where
shall I begin?”

“At the extremes.”
Jane gave in to
her enthusiasm for the subject.
“The really freaky stuff.
Start with that and work your way toward the mildly bizarre.”

“Extreme,” said Raj, folding his arms behind his head.

“What’s the weirdest thing somebody’s asked you for?” she
prodded. “The strangest thing you’ve ever done?”

RAJ HAD THE answer in an instant. “This,” he said. “What you
and I are doing now is the strangest thing I’ve ever done by far.” Jane raised
herself on her hands. Something made him think she’d turn the light on.
Happily, she changed her mind. He liked the inky black that enclosed all their
conversations. He was getting used to it. Dependent on it, some might say.
“The shared meals, the shared bed, the shared confidences.
On my planet this counts as extreme perversion,” he explained.

“You’ve never played house before?”

“I’ve never shared my bed with any woman. Or my breakfast,
come to that. I’ve never let one save my life or nurse me back to health.”

“So you think warming my cold toes and sharing secrets in
the dark is kinky?”

“God yes.”
He grabbed her, pulled
her down beside him,
slid
his body over hers.
“Kinky and beyond.”

As an incredibly arousing violation of the man he thought he
was, he’d have to say it qualified. He was certain that he loved her. He was
puzzled and intrigued. The incongruity of his emotions caused a tiny tickle in
his mind that only went away when he was fucking her. He told himself again
Jane was his future. All he’d ever want was more of the rapturous same.

Coupling on Backus was a rare event. The details of those
who indulged were cloaked in secrecy. Beyond a certain idle curiosity, he’d
never had the faintest notion of engaging in the practice. For one thing, it
was for the very young or very old, definitely not for temple lovers. But now,
despite his past, he saw it as his destiny. The transformation was a little
scary. Unaccustomed fear made him want sex like never before. It also helped
him see with crystal clarity why couples on his planet were protective of their
state. There was
a vulnerability
in his relationship
that he’d describe as embryonic.
Precious, unfolding, to be
protected at all costs.

“What do you consider kinky?”

“Orgies.”
Jane made it sound
obvious and that amused him.
“Toys, bondage, spanking.
Chocolate sauce and rubber gloves, that sort of thing.”

Raj nodded thoughtfully and moved a stray curl off her face.
“I’ve done all of those things many times.”

“You’ve done spanking?”

“Many times.
All forms of
discipline, in fact.”

“Do you like it?”

“I’ve shown you what I like.”

Her eyes closed. He felt the memory stir her. For his part,
he was hard as stone and in a pressing mood to fuck.

“What else is there?” she asked.

“Many, many things.”
He’d show her.
All of it in time.

“What’s fun? What’s the most thrilling? What do you like?”

“You already gave me that.”

“Oh yeah.”
Jane shook her head
impatiently. “You like licking my pussy till my heart beats in my cunt and you
can fuck me till I faint. I know. I keep forgetting. So what would I like
then?”

“I don’t know,” said Raj, although he did.
“A hard cock up your ass, perhaps.”

Jane pulled away from him and sputtered something like an
answer. Then she melted back against him, her heart pounding in a way the
purest novice at the Temple would have no trouble perceiving.

“Do you like that?” she asked.

“Oh yes.”

Her forehead pressed against her chest. And they were
halfway there already.

“I won’t ask you if it hurts because you’ll just say no.”

“That’s right,” he said. “I’d tell you that it doesn’t hurt,
and then I’d prove it to you.”