Deadly Relations: Bester Ascendant (18 page)

And yet when you reached to touch my mind, and I felt you-you weren’t angry, or ashamed. You were curious. You were just standing there, taking it all, and you were okay. That’s when I knew I would be okay, too.”

Now her grin became mischievous.

“And you were kind of cute. And I could tell that you thought I was beautiful.”

“I didn’t…”

“You still do. I see you looking at me. Why haven’t you done anything about it?”

“Because…”

Because what’s the point? What will it get me? Another chance to be hurt, another chance to be distracted. Excellence I can have, because it depends only on me. Happiness is an illusion, and for me not even that.

He didn’t say it, didn’t p-cast it.

It was the first time he had even thought it. Montoya’s presence brought back that year of joy and sorrow, and it felt like remembering madness. He had seemed so full of-something-back then. Something hot and alive, like - well, like Montoya herself. Her mind was like a furnace. And she was threatening to bring it all back, the madness, the weakness, the pain.

He noticed that they had entered the town.

“We had better get to work.” he said.

Chapter 11

“This is hopeless,” Nhan said.

“Nothing is hopeless,” Al replied, though he could not for a moment imagine in which direction hope might lie.

They knew, at least, where they were - Tuulu, a small town in the Altai Federation.

“We aren’t going to find him just walking up and down the street,” Vetsch said.

“No. I thought I might catch a scent of his signature, but…” He furrowed his brow. “This is like a game of cops and blips, right?”

“A game of what?” Montoya asked.

Al blinked.

“You never played Psi Cops and blips when you were little?”

But all three were looking at him in puzzlement. Laters, every one. They had no idea what he was talking about. He remembered the Grins, each heavy word they had impressed upon him.

The others were pretending you two were rogues. You were not. You imagined yourself a Psi Cop, chased by rogues. But it is deeper than that, Mr. Bester Whatever any of you were pretending, you are all members of the Corps.

Could it be that simple?

“In cops and blips there are multiple goals, usually arbitrary. In this case, though, the goal should have to make some sort of sense.

“We’ve already checked the train station, the bus station, the car sales and rental lots…”

“Right. So maybe the goal is arbitrary, after all.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Remember, this is a test, not a real hunt, or even a contest. Maybe-maybe it isn’t about catching the Blip, but about doing everything right.”

“But a Psi Cop’s job is to catch rogues.”

“Sure. But sometimes you fail. Then what? Then you put out the word, report what you know, and trust the rest of the Corps to help you out. Where is the one place we haven’t gone since we’ve been here?”

They looked at him blankly, and despite himself, he felt a smile crawl sluggishly across his face.

“The local Corps station.”

“Holy Moses,” Montoya said.

“Why didn’t we think of that earlier?”

“Because we were thinking of this as a contest. We thought we were competing with the Corps. Real Psi Cops don’t compete with the Corps-not even in training.” Montoya’s eyes were wide.

“I wouldn’t have thought of that.”

No, he thought to himself. None of the rest of you could. Only me, only someone who grew up in a cadre. And I should have thought of it much, much earlier. A huge grin spread across the Psi Cop’s already broad face.

“Well,” he said, in precise Anglic.

“Are you here to give up?”

“No, sir,” Al said.

“We are here to notify the local station chief that a Blip recently passed through here.”

“Catch me if you can,” the cop said.

“Congratulations.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Holy smokes, you were right!”

Montoya let out a war whoop and started dancing with Vetsch and Nhan. Al just stood there, feeling proud and stiff and somehow, despite it all, a little left out.

“Unfortunately,” the cop said, “for logistical reasons, it’ll be morning before we can get you a connection back to Geneva. I’ve got rooms for you about three blocks from here.”

“What’s the drinking age in this ‘grad?”

“Drinking age?”

The cop pretended blank-faced incomprehension, then shrugged his shoulders.

“Heh!” Montoya replied.

“To Alfie,” Montoya said, raising her shot glass high.

Al looked dubiously at the amber fluid in his own glass. But the toast was for him… He sputtered on it, nearly blew it back up through his nose, and they laughed at him, but it was good-natured laughter, and Montoya was pressing a crescent of lime into his fingers.

“Suck on this,” she said.

He did, and that made things better.

“Whew!” he managed.

He stared at their grinning faces. Sure it was illusion, sure it was temporary, but… He poured them all shots.

“To all of us,” he toasted.

This time it wasn’t nearly so hard to drink it down. Later, they lurched back to their rooms, singing. He would never remember exactly what. The air had become a honeyed syrup-it almost seemed he should be swimming through it and he was acutely aware of Montoya clinging to his arm. Aware of her fire, of it eating up his own limbs, perhaps attracted there by the heat of the tequila in his belly. At the rooms, there was a round of good nights, of jokes - all hazy - and then suddenly he was alone with Montoya, very near her opalescent eyes. She wore the same mischievous smile he had first seen on her.

“Right,” she said softly. “And why haven’t you asked me to kiss you again?”

“I… because I…”

He furrowed his brow.

“I don’t understand the question.”

“You’re a smart fellow, Alfred Bester, but in some ways you’re as dumb as a stick.”

“Look, this isn’t smart,” he tried to say, though it came out as “lukzisishmrt”. “Because we’re drunk…”

He stared at her suddenly.

“We are drunk, aren’t we?”

“Never been drunk before, hey?”

“Well… no. The Corps doesn’t…”

“Hush.”

And then she kissed him. It wasn’t like the first time; it was an explosion. It was as if all of the universal constants had just changed by a factor of two. From his classes in astrophysics, he knew what that meant: all the stars flying apart as fusion became impossible, whole galaxies disintegrating…

Of course, he didn’t care. He felt her lips, the taste of tequila and salt, and he felt her feeling his lips. He brought his hand up to press the cool satin of her hair and kissed back. He was, perhaps, overeager, and neither were in good control of their bodies. They overbalanced and thudded into the door, slid in a heap to the sidewalk.

Montoya laughed and kissed him some more. There was nothing even remotely playful about it anymore. He saw her, saw himself through her, and in that instant he wanted to really know her, everything about her, to make the illusion of the day before into a prophecy.

He wanted to learn the shape of her toes. The names of her childhood pets. Her hopes and dreams. How to unfasten her bra-She laughed as she unlocked the door, but she didn’t fool him. She was as nervous as he was - it was only that she was braver, brave and fierce and lovely in a way he could never be. But he wanted it, to hold it, to plunge into her heat.

“Vetsch… Nhan…”

“In the other room, Alfie,” she whispered.

“In the other room.”

Then she brushed the warm petals of her lips along his neck, and he stopped worrying about it. About anything.

Chapter 12

“Hey, champ!”

Elizabeth Montoya said, looking up from her books just as he came through the trees. She bounced up and into his arms, but when she darted her face forward to kiss him, her hair came between them. She laughed and pushed it out of the way, and her face materialized, right there. He seized the initiative and kissed her.

A year. A year and she hadn’t realized her mistake, let him find someone nicer, taller, better for her. He had expected it. From the first moment they came together in the motel in Tuulu, he had expected her to evaporate like every other happy thing in his life. He had stared at the beauty of her face in the dawn, and had mourned the passage of time and the pain-it would bring him when she finally awoke. Instead, when her eyes had opened, she had grimaced at her hangover, but kissed him anyway.

They ate breakfast together, and she used the pronoun “we” a lot. Any questions had somehow been asked and answered in the night. A year of fictive meetings, of time stolen. Each and every time he saw her, he feared it would be the last. But now…

“So what’s this big news?” she asked, leaning back so their bellies pressed together, but he could see her whole face, undistorted. He cleared his throat, suddenly feeling shy.

“We’re a match,” he said.

“I’m a match. You’re dry wood. Ya wanna get together?”

“No, I’m serious. I mean we’re a-ah-we’re a genetic match.”

“Al, you’re shaking.”

“Ah… yes, I guess I am.”

Her eyebrows steepled.

“Are you saying you had our genetic profiles run? To see whether we can have Corps-certified babies?”

“Yes.”

“Oh. Um. Can I ask why?”

“Well, because - well, I thought - look, I’m not trying to rush you, Liz. I know things might change, I know you might not want me by the time we finish our training. We’ll both be interning soon enough. But I love you, Elizabeth Montoya, and now we know.”

“What’s all this got to do with genetics? Alfred Bester, I love you, too. And you damn well know I’m going to be with you when we finish our training. But I’ll be damned if I need the Corps’ permission to make babies with you, if that’s what I want.”

“I… Liz, I understand your feeling about it, but we have to be realistic, right? And anyway, this is perfect! There’s no way they can object now.”

She looked as if she was going to argue more with him, but then her face cleared, she shrugged, and she kissed him again. She drew back, comets dancing in her eyes.

“You do love me, don’t you? You wouldn’t have checked if you didn’t. I’m sorry, Al. I feel so close to you, sometimes I forget that we grew up in such different worlds. This means a lot to you.”

He nodded solemnly. She mussed his hair and then kissed him once more, a slow, languorous kiss that spoke more than words. The virtue of a kiss, he had learned, was just that. In and of itself, it was no large thing; flesh pressing together, a somehow always-unanticipated tickle.

But when he and Liz kissed, it was expression, an attempt to communicate the incommunicable. To show-with the care one took, with this or that slight inflection in the grammar of lip, cheek. tongue, chin-what lay in their hearts. For the first time he pitied-truly, deeply pitied-mundanes, who could never possibly know how powerful and deep a kiss could be, much less lovemaking.

No wonder they were mean. They were like he had been, without Liz. Unfinished, half-made things, angry because they understood they were missing something important, that other people had it - but never, never able to know it themselves.

“Let’s go somewhere,” she said, when they left. “Let’s celebrate.”

But he felt it, in the kiss. He could no longer pretend that it was his imagination. Finally, something had gone wrong. A year ago, that would have been enough for him. He would have cut his losses, as he had the loss of Cadre Prime, of Bey, of Emory and the rest. But he could no longer imagine life without Liz Montoya.

He couldn’t see his future without her eyes, her smile, her soul near his. She was covering it for his sake, but the genetic matching bothered her, and it bothered other things in her he had been trying to ignore. Still, this time, he couldn’t give up. He had to know what was coming between them. Because he had no doubt that she loved him. He could feel her affections like a fixed star. Couldn’t he? Or had he become that big a fool?

“A celebration it is,” he said softly.

He took her hand across the table and studied her candlelit face.

“I thought the news would make you happy.”

She smiled, but it seemed a little forced. There was a rhythm to their communication-at certain times, they would settle for words; at others, they would share all of themselves. The last was so powerful it couldn’t be borne continuously. The cycle was necessary, but sometimes it was frustrating not to know exactly what she was thinking. Yet he would never violate their trust; he would wait for the invitation. It was like lovemaking it had to happen by mutual consent and in mutual delight, or not at all.

“I was happy, Alfie. I am. It’s just that it bothers me that we had to check at all. That you felt we had to. This is us we’re talking about. It’s our lives. Why should anyone else even have a say?”

“It’s the way it is,” he said.

“And, our feelings aside, it’s the way it ought to be. I love you, Liz, and you are the most important person in the world to me. But the world is bigger than we are, and there are things more important than the two of us. I know it in my heart, and you do, too.”

“I know you believe that, Alfie. I can feel it. And I respect it because I love you. But there are some things I just can’t accept. This is one of them. I’m happy we can get married when we want to-and someday I do want to marry you, Alfred Bester, I do. You know I do. It just upsets me that it isn’t our choice.”

“It is now. So why are you still upset about it?” She shrugged.

“I guess I’m not. Maybe I can’t believe that we were so lucky. Maybe, deep down, I was so worried I still don’t believe it.”

“I know that feeling,” Al said. “I have it every time you look at me. Every time I touch your hand.”

“Careful, Alfie. You have to stay the sensible one, remember? You are my axis. Without you, I think I would fly off into space.”

“And without you, I would be a cold, dead planet. No life, no heat…”

“Let’s get out of here. I want to go for a walk.”

They paid their bill and left the restaurant. They had passes for the whole night-hard to get-and they tripped up and down the streets and lanes of Geneva. They decided to go on an impromptu tour of churches and bars - one church, one bar, one church, two bars.