Picnic on Nearside (17 page)

Parameter was in the Upper Half to feed on the sunlight that was so much more powerful there than in the Rings. Equinox was in her extended configuration. The pair looked like a gauzy parabolic dish, two hundred meters across. The dish was transparent, with veins that made it look like a spider web. The illusion was heightened by the small figure spread-eagled in the center of it, like a fly. The fly was Parameter.

It was delicious to float there. She looked directly at the sun, which was bright even this far away and would have burned her eyes quickly if she had been really looking at it. But she saw only a projection. Equinox’s visual senses were not nearly as delicate as human eyes.

The front of her body was bathed in radiance. It was highly sensual, but in a new way. It was the mindless joy of a flower unfolding to the sun that Parameter experienced, not the hotter animal passions she was used to. Energy coursed through her body and out into the light-gathering sheets that Equinox had extended. Her mind was disconnected more completely than she would have believed possible. Her thoughts came hours apart, and were concerned with sluggish, vegetable pleasures. She saw herself as naked, exposed to the light and the wind, floating in the center of a silver circle of life. She could feel the wind on her body in this airless place and wondered vacantly how Equinox could be so utterly convincing in the webs of illusion she spun.

There was a sudden gust.

“Parameter. Wake up, my darling.”

“Hmmm?”

“There’s a storm coming up. We’ve got to furl the sails and head into port.”

Parameter felt other gusts as she swam through the warm waters back to alertness.

“How far are we from the Ring?”

“We’re all right. We can be there in ten minutes if I tack for a bit and then use a few seconds of thrust.”

In her extended configuration, Equinox was a moderately efficient solar sail. By controlling the angle she presented to the incoming sunlight she could slowly alter velocity. All Parameter had to do was push off above or below the Rings in a shallow arc. Equinox could bring them back into the Rings in a few days, using solar pressure. But the storm was a danger they had always to keep in mind.

It was the solar wind that Equinox felt, a cloud of particles thrust out from the sun by storms beneath the surface. Her radiation sensors had detected the first speed-of-light gusts of it, and the dangerous stuff would not be far behind.

Radiation was the chief danger of life in the Rings. The outer surface of a Symb was proof against much of the radiation the symbiotic pair would encounter in space. What got through was not enough to worry about, certainly never enough to cause sickness. But stray high-energy particles could cause mutations of the egg and sperm cells of the humans.

The intensity of the wind was increasing as they furled their sails and applied the gas thrusters.

“Did we get moving in time?” Parameter asked.

“There’s a good margin. But we can’t avoid getting a little hard stuff. Don’t worry about it.”

“What about children? If I want to have some later, couldn’t that be a problem?”

“Naturally. But you’ll never give birth to a mutation. I’ll be able to see any deviations in the first few weeks and abort it and not even have to tell you.”

“But you would tell me, wouldn’t you?”

“If you want me to. But it isn’t important. No more than the daily control I exert over any of your other bodily processes.”

“If you say so.”

“I say so. Don’t worry, I said. You just handle the motor control and leave the busy work to me. Things don’t seem quite real to me unless they’re on the molecular level.”

Parameter trusted Equinox utterly. So much so that when the really hard wind began buffeting them, she didn’t worry for a second. She spread her arms to it, embraced it. It was strange that the “wind” didn’t blow her around like a leaf. She would have liked that. All she really missed was her hair streaming around her shoulders. She no longer had any hair at all. It got in the way of the seal between the two of them.

As soon as she thought it, long black hair whipped out behind her, curling into her face and tickling her eyes. She could see it and feel it against her skin, but she couldn’t touch it. That didn’t surprise her, because it wasn’t there.

“Thank you,” she laughed. And then she laughed even harder as she looked down at herself. She was covered with hair; long, flowing hair that grew as she watched it.

They reentered the Ring, preceded by a twisting, imaginary train of hair a kilometer long.

*   *   *

Three days later she was still staring at the floating ball.

On the fifth day her hand twitched toward it.

“No. No. Equinox. Where are you?”

The Symb was in its dormant state. Only an infant Symb could exist without a human to feed and water it; once it had become attached to a human, it would die very quickly without one. But in dormancy, they could live for weeks at a low energy level. It only needed the touch of her hand to be triggered into action.

The hunger was eating its way through her body; she ignored it completely. It had become a fact of life, something she clutched to her to forget about the
real
hunger that was in her brain. She would never be forced to accept the Symb from hunger. It didn’t even enter the question.

On the ninth day her hand began moving. She watched it, crying for Equinox to stop the movement, to give her strength.

She touched it.

“I think it’s time we tried out the new uterus.”

“I think you’re right.”

“If that thing out there is a male, we’ll do it.”

Equinox had in her complex of capabilities the knack of producing a nodule within her body that could take a cloned cell and nurture it until it grew into a complete organ; any organ she wished. She had done that with one of Parameter’s cells. She removed it, cloned it, and let it grow into a new uterus. Parameter’s old one had run out of eggs long ago and was useless for procreation, but the new one was brimming with life.

She had operated on her mate, taking out the old one and putting in the new. It had been painless and quick; Parameter had not even felt it.

Now they were ready to have a seed planted in it.

“Male,” came the voice of the other figure. Before, Parameter would have answered by saying, “Solitude,” and he would have gone on his way.

Now she said, “Female.”

“Wilderness,” he introduced himself.

“Parameter.”

The mating ritual over, they fell silent as they drifted closer. She had computed it well, if a little fast. They hit and clung together with all their limbs. Slowly the Symbs melted into each other.

A sensation of pleasure came over Parameter.

“What is it?”

“What do you think? It’s heaven. Did you think that because we’re sexless, we wouldn’t get any pleasure out of conjugation?”

“I guess I hadn’t thought about it. It’s . . . different. Not bad at all. But nothing like an orgasm.”

“Stick around. We’re just getting started.”

There was a moment of insecurity as Equinox withdrew her connections, leaving only the one into her brain. She shuddered as an unfamiliar feeling passed over her, then realized she was holding her breath. She had to start respirating again. Her chest crackled as she brought long-unused muscles into play, but once the reflex was started she was able to forget about it and let her hindbrain handle the chore.

The inner surface started to phosphoresce, and she made out
a shadowy figure floating in front of her. The light got brighter until it reached the level of bright moonlight. She could see him now.

“Hello,” she said. He seemed surprised she wanted to talk, but grinned at her.

“Hello. You must be new.”

“How did you know?”

“It shows. You want to talk. You probably expect me to go through an elaborate ritual.” And with that he reached for her and pulled her toward him.

“Hold on there,” she said. “I’d like to know you a little better first.”

He sighed, but let her go. “I’m sorry. You don’t know yet. All right, what would you like to know about me?”

She looked him over. He was small, slightly smaller than her. He was completely hairless, as was she. There didn’t seem to be any way to guess his age; all the proper clues were missing. Growing out of the top of his head was a snaky umbilicus.

She discovered there was really little to ask him, but having made a point of it, she threw in a token question.

“How old are you?”

“Old enough. Fourteen.”

“All right, let’s do it your way.” She touched him and shifted in space to accommodate his entry.

To her pleasant surprise, it lasted longer than the thirty seconds she had expected. He was an accomplished lover; he seemed to know all the right moves. She was warming deliciously when she heard him in her head.

“
Now
you know,” he said, and her head was filled with his laughter.

Everything before that, good as it was, had been just a warm-up.

*   *   *

Parameter and the baby Symb howled with pain.

“I didn’t want you,” she cried, hurling waves of rejection at the child and at herself. “All I want is Equinox.”

That went on for an endless time. The stars burnt out around them. The galaxy turned like a whirligig. The universe contracted;
exploded; contracted again. Exploded. Contracted and gave it up as a waste of time. Time ended as all events came to an end.

The two of them floated, howling at each other.

*   *   *

Wilderness drifted away against the swirling background of stars. He didn’t look back, and neither did Parameter. They knew each other too well to need good-byes. They might never meet again, but that didn’t matter either, because each carried all they needed of the other.

“In a life full of cheap thrills, I never had anything like that.”

Equinox seemed absorbed. She quietly acknowledged that it had, indeed, been superduper, but there was something else. There was a new knowledge.

“I’d like to try something,” she said.

“Shoot.”

Parameter’s body was suddenly caressed by a thousand tiny, wet tongues. They searched out every cranny, all at the same time. They were hot, at least a thousand billion degrees, but they didn’t burn; they soothed.

“Where were you keeping
that
?” Parameter quavered when it stopped. “And why did you stop?”

“I just learned it. I was watching while I was experiencing. I picked up a few tricks.”

“You’ve got
more
?”

“Sure. I didn’t want to start out with the intense ones until I saw how you liked that one. I thought it was very nice. You shuddered beautifully; the delta waves were fascinating.”

Parameter broke up with laughter. “Don’t give me that clinical stuff. You liked it so much you scared yourself.”

“That comes as close as you can come to describing my reaction. But I was serious about having things I think we’ll like even better. I can combine sensations in a novel way. Did you appreciate the subtle way the ‘heat’ blended into the sensation of feathers with an electric current through them?”

“It sounds hideous when you say it in words. But that was what it was, all right. Electric feathers. But pain had nothing to do with it.”

Equinox considered it. “I’m not sure about that. I was deep
into the pain-sensation center of you. But I was tickling it in a new way, the same way Wilderness tickled you. There is something I’m discovering. It has to do with the reality of pain.
All
you experience is more a function of your brain than of your nerve endings. Pain is no exception. What I do is connect the two centers—pain and pleasure—and route them through other sensorium pathways, resulting in . . .”

“Equinox.”

?????

“Make love to me.”

She was in the center of the sun, every atom of her body fusing in heat so hot it was icy. She swam to the surface, taking her time through the plastic waves of ionized gas, where she grew until she could hold the whole sputtering ball in her hand and rub it around her body. It flicked and fumed and smoked, gigantic prominences responding to her will, wreathing her in fire and smoke that bit and tickled. Flares snaked into her, reaming nerves with needle-sharp pins of gas that were soft as a kiss. She was swallowed whole by something pink that had no name, and slid down the slippery innards to splash in a pool of sweet-smelling sulfur.

It melted her; she melted it. Equinox was there; she picked her up and hurled her and herself in a wave of water, a gigantic wave that was gigatons of pent-up energy, rearing itself into a towering breaker a thousand kilometers high. She crashed on a beach of rubbery skin, which became a forest of snakes that squeezed her until the top of her head blew off and tiny flowers showered around her, all of them Equinox.

She was drawn back together from the far corners of the solar system and put into a form that called itself “Parameter” but would answer to anything at all. Then she was rising on a rocket that thrust deep into her vagina, into recesses that weren’t even there but felt like mirrors that showed her own face. She was a fusion warhead of sensation; primed to blow. Sparks whipped around her, and each was a kiss of electric feathers. She was reaching orbital velocity; solar escape velocity; the speed of light. She turned herself inside out and contained the universe. The speed of light was a crawl slower than any snail; she transcended it.

There was an explosion; an implosion. She drew away from
herself and fell into herself, and the fragments of her body drifted down to the beach, where she and Equinox gathered them and put them in a pile of quivering parts, each smaller than an atom.

It was a long job. They took their time.

“Next time,” Parameter suggested, “try to work in some elephants.”

*   *   *

Someone had invented a clock. It ticked.

Parameter woke up.

“Did you do that?”

No answer.

“Shut the damn thing off.”

The ticking stopped. She rolled over and went back to sleep. Around her, a trillion years passed.