Galaxy's Edge Magazine: Issue 2, May 2013 (32 page)

Moments. Those fleeting seconds when the sexual tension is highest, when you’re alone in a universe of two where nothing else can intrude.

Of course, then reality usually hits. After the Gather, I turned down two other offers of company and went back to my compound alone, with one last smile for Marshall. I left my outer door open, certain that Marshall would come to me that night, but he never did.

Chi-Wa was so involved in his own arousal and pleasure that I quickly realized that I was nothing more than another anonymous vessel for his glorious seed.

And Ochiba, the only one of them who was truly important to me…well, in another year she was dead.

Tonight, I was keeping reality away with a glass of
da
Joel’s pale ale, and trying to stop thinking that it was late and that I wished I’d just told Elio no. There was no one else in the common room; Che, Joel, and Derek had all grinned, made quick excuses, and left when I’d mentioned that I was staying up because Elio was coming over. I requested the room to play me Gabriela’s
Reflections on the Miccail
and leaned back in the chair as the first pulsing chords of the dobra sounded. The chair was one of
da
Jason’s creations, with a padded, luxurious curved back that seemed to wrap and enfold you—very womblike, very private: I’d never known Jason, who had died when I was very young, but his was my favorite listening chair. The family pet, a verrechat Derek had rescued from a spring flood five years before, came up and curled into my lap. I stroked the velvety, nearly transparent skin of the creature, and watched its heart pulse behind the glassy muscles and porcelain ribs. I shut my eyes and let the rising drone of the music carry me somewhere else. I barely heard the clock chiming NinthHour.

“I never thought Gabriela was much of a composer.”

“She’d have agreed with you,” I answered. “And I think you’re both wrong. She was a fine composer; the problem was that she just wasn’t much of a musician. You have to imagine what she was trying to play rather than what actually came out. Hello, Elio.”

I told the room to lower the music and pulled the chair back up. The verrechat glared at me in annoyance and went off in search of a more stable resting place. Elio gave me an uncertain smile. “You looked so comfortable, I almost didn’t want to interrupt.”

“Sorry. Music’s my meditation. I spend more time here than’s good for me.”

He nodded. I nodded back. Great conversationalists, both of us. I should have kept the music up. At least we could have both pretended to be listening to it. “Any change in Euzhan?” he asked at last, just as the silence was threatening to swallow us. I hurried into the opening, grateful.

“When I left, she was sleeping. Hui’s keeping her doped up right now. When I left, Dominic was still there, but Hui was trying to convince him that camping out in the clinic wasn’t going to help. I’m not sure he was making much progress.”

“Geeda Dominic can be pretty strong-willed.”

“Uh-huh. And water can be pretty wet.”

Elio grinned. The grin faded slowly, and he was just Elio again. We both looked at each other. “Umm,” he began.

If you’re going through with this, then do it,
I told myself. “Elio, let’s go to my room,” I said, trying to make it sound like something other than “And get this over with.” I was rewarded with a faint smile, so maybe Elio wasn’t as reluctant as I’d thought. I’d been planning to let him back out now, if that’s what he wanted, figuring that if this
was
simply a guilt fuck, we were both better off without it—for most women I knew, sex simply for the sake of sex was something you did the first year or two after menarche. By then, you’d gone through most of the available or interested males on Mictlan. In my case, that hadn’t been too many, not after the first time around. Since then, with one glorious and forbidden exception, the only regular liaison I’ve had has been with Hui’s speculum and some cold semen, once a month.

Even that hasn’t worked out.

All that was long ago
. Forget it. The voice wasn’t entirely convincing, but I held out my hand, and Elio took the invitation without hesitating. Tugging on my fingers, he pulled me toward him, and this time he kissed me. There was a hunger in the kiss this time, and I found parts of me awakening that I thought had been dead.

I suddenly wanted this to work, and that increased my nervousness. I wondered if he could tell how scared I was.

Elio either sensed that fright, or he’d learned a lot since the last time. In my admittedly noncomprehensive experience, men tended to go straight for the kill, shedding clothes on the way so they didn’t snag them on rampant erections. Maybe that was just youthful exuberance, but I’d spent many postcoital hours crying, believing that the quickness and remoteness was because they wanted to get the deed done as fast as possible. Because it was
me
. “Just doing my duty, ma’am. Have to make sure that we increase the population, after all. Nothing personal.”

Except that sex is always personal and always intimate, no matter what the reasons for it might be. In the midst, I might look up to see my partner’s eyes closed, a look almost of pain on his face as he thrust into me, and I knew he was gone, lost in imagined couplings with someone else.

Not
with
me. Never
with
me. Never together.

Elio pulled away. I breathed, watching him. He was still here. “This way,” I said, and led him off.

I’d done some quick housekeeping before he’d come, and the room actually looked halfway neat except for the mirror, as always draped in clothing. Through the folds I caught a reflection of someone who looked like me, her face twisted in uncertain lines.

When I closed the door and turned, Elio was closer to me than I expected, and I started, leaning back against the jamb. He touched my cheek, stroked my hair. As
his
hand cupped the back of my head, he pulled me into him, his arms going around me. Neither of us had said anything. I leaned my head against his shoulder. He continued to stroke my hair.

I wondered what he was thinking, and when I turned my head up to look, he kissed me again: gently, warmly, his lips slightly parted. This time the kiss was longer, more demanding, and I found myself opening my mouth to him, pulling his head down even further. His hands dropped from my shoulders; his fingers teased my nipples through my blouse, and they responded to his touch, ripening and making me shudder.

When we finally broke apart again, his pale eyes searched mine with soft questions. I reached behind us and touched the wall plate, the lights gliding down into darkness as I did so. “I can’t see, Ana.”

“You don’t need to.”

“I’d like to look at you.”

“Elio…”

A pause. Silence, He waited.

Biting my lower lip, I touched the plate again, letting the lights rise to a golden dimness. I stepped deliberately away from him. Standing in front of my bed, I undid the buttons of my blouse, of my pants. I held the clothes to me, hugging myself, then took a breath and let them fall to the floor. I stood before Elio, defiantly naked. I shivered, though the room wasn’t cold.

I knew what he was seeing. I might keep my mirror covered, but I knew.

Under a wide-featured face, he saw a woman’s body, with small breasts and flared hips. Extending below the triangle of pubic hair, though, there was something wrong, something that didn’t belong: a hint of curved flesh.

An elongated, enlarged clitoris
, Hui had told my mother, who noticed it at birth: a paranoid, detailed examination of every newborn child is Mictlan’s birthright.
A slight to moderate hermaphrodism
.
I doubt that it’s anything to stop her from reaching her Naming. Everything else is female and normal. She may never notice.

Maybe Hui would have been right had everything stayed as it was when I was a child. I certainly paid no attention to my small deformity, nor did anyone else. I didn’t seem much different from the other little girls I saw. After menarche, though.…My periods from the beginning were so slight as to be nearly unnoticeable and the pale spottings weren’t at all like the dark menstrual flow of the other women. I also began to notice how sensitive I was there, how the oversized nub of flesh had begun to change, to swell until the growth protruded well past my labial folds, pushing them apart before ducking under the taut and distended clitoral hood.

Over the years, even after menarche, the change continued. The last time I glanced at a mirror, I thought I looked like an effeminate and not particularly pretty young man with his penis tucked between his legs, pretending to be a woman.

Elio’s gaze never drifted that low. I noticed, and tried to pretend that it didn’t matter. I wanted to believe that it didn’t matter. He took a step toward me. He cupped my breasts in his hands, his skin so pale against mine. I fumbled with his shirt, finally getting it open and sliding it down his shoulders. Elio was thin, though his waist rounded gently at the belt line.

His skin was very warm.

I pulled him into bed on top of me…and sometime later…later…

No, I’m sorry. I can’t say. I won’t say.

.

.

JOURNAL ENTRY: Gabriela Rusack

.

I was a slow learner when it came to the difference between love and sex. Oh, I knew that people could enjoy sex without being in love with the person they’re with at the moment. God knows I experienced that myself often enough…and often enough kicked myself in the morning for paying attention to whining hormones.

As I grew older, I slowly realized that the reverse was also a possibility—I could be in love with someone and
not
have sex with them, if that wasn’t in the cards. I needed friends more than I needed lovers, and I found that sex can actually destroy love.

Lacina was my college roommate, and my friend. At the time, I was still mainly heterosexual, though I’d already had my first tentative encounters with women. I think Lacina suspected that I was experimenting, but we never really talked about it. I dated guys and slept with some of them, just as she did, so if on rare occasions a girlfriend stayed overnight, she just shrugged and said nothing. One Friday night in my junior year, neither of us had a date. We were drinking cheap wine and watching erotic holos in our apartment, and the wine and the holos had made us both silly and horny. I remember putting my arm around Lacina, playfully, and how sweet her lips were when I finally leaned over to kiss her, and her breathy gasp when I touched her breasts.…We tumbled into my bed and I made love to her, and showed her how to make love to me. But the next morning, when the wine fumes had cleared.…

After that night, it was never the same between us. There was a wall inside Lacina that had never been there before, and she flinched if I’d come near her or touch her. I don’t know why she retreated. I don’t know what old guilt I’d tapped; afterward, it wasn’t a subject on which she’d allow discussion. She pretended that our night together had never happened. She pretended that things were the same as they had been, but they weren’t, and we both knew it. At the end of the semester, she moved out.

No, sex and love are basically independent of each other. Not that it matters for me, not anymore. My closest friends are dead, and those here on Mictlan that I thought were friends won’t talk to me at all anymore.

No more sex. No more love. I spend my remaining days with the only passion I have left, the only passion allowed me: the cold and dead Miccail.

Now if sex, love, and passion are intricate, varied, and dangerous for us, then the sexuality of the Miccail must have been positively labyrinthian. I can only imagine how convoluted their relationships were, with the midmale sex complicating things. I wonder
how
they loved, and I try to decipher the answer from the few clues left: the stelae, the crumbling ruins, the ancient artifacts. I wonder why this world saw fit to add another sex into the biological mix, but the past holds its secrets too well.

What frightens me is that I’m certain it’s important for us to know. The Miccail died only a thousand years ago. With all the artifacts, all the structures they left behind, none of them we’ve found are any younger than that. From what I’ve been able to determine, the collapse and decline of the Miccail began another thousand years before their extinction, possibly linked with the rapid disappearance of the midmales, all mention of whom vanish from the stelae at that point. One short millennium later—barely a breath in the life of the world and the Miccail’s own long history—and the Miccail were gone, every last one.

It’s almost as if Something didn’t like them.

And now
we’re
here, filling our lungs and our bodies with Mictlan-stuff. Yes, we sampled and tested Mictlan’s air, water and soil, let it flow through the assorted filters and gauges until the machines stamped the world with their cold imprimatur. The proportion of gases was within our body tolerances. We could taste the winds of this world and live. Our lungs would move, the oxygen would flow in our blood. But Mictlan is not Earth. The atmosphere of a world holds its own life, and life moves within it.