King of the Worlds (17 page)

“Did you see that magnificent tang?” she asked.

“I'm sorry?”

“That yellow tang down there. I've never seen one so big.”

“Oh, right. The tang. Magnificent.”

“You want to drink your champagne?” she asked.

“And what are you going to drink if I do?”

“I'm fine with my Hydropatch. It's still going strong.”

“You're sure you don't mind?”

“Not a bit.”

He swam over to the kayak and retrieved the bottle. Then he returned to her side and entered his pin into the little keypad. The cork popped. “Here's to us finally meeting,” he said, and he clinked the bottle against a sunbeam and took a swig. The Prosecco was refreshing, earthy and good. She raised an eyebrow at his (lack of) manners. “I forgot to bring glasses,” he explained.

“Ah.”

They gazed out at the turquoise sea, the ripples sequined here and there and for only as long as it took to notice.

“This is spectacular,” he said.

“Isn't it, though?”

“How did you get here anyway? I didn't see another kayak.”

“I swam. Cane and I do it at least a couple of times a week.”

“I had a hard enough time paddling.”

She was jauntily swinging her legs, like a kid. Erin would never be so cavalierly nude like this, at least not anymore, but Wendy had no shame. Nor should she have. She was lithe and shiny, with pink feet and muscular calves, a lovely little shock of pubic beard, breasts like pomegranates. Her hair fell down around her shoulders, shiny and straight, and her big eyes appeared almost to bioluminesce.

He sidled up closer and put an arm around her. She smiled. He kissed her. She threatened to envelop his whole head, but he fought her, did his best to swallow
her
head, and as the intensity increased, he left her mouth to devour her ears and neck, and then her breasts, ribs, abdomen…until she stopped him. “Whoa, Nellie. Is there any rush?”

Now this he had not expected. “You said it yourself. We've waited twenty years.”

“Then we could wait a little longer, couldn't we?” She slapped his palpitating boner.

His stomach sank.

“Why don't you take care of that while I go over there and do
the same?”

“It would seem like a waste…”

“But what a great way to get to know each other.”

“I came all this way…”

“Pretty much anyone can fuck,” she said, “but it takes real courage to get yourself off inside another's gaze, no? To make yourself vulnerable like that? That's the real penetration, I think. Don't worry, I'll start.”

And start she did. She backed off several yards and turned to face him. Then she put one foot up on a rock and spread her knees wide apart, made herself, in a word, open. She licked two of her fingers and put them down by her pussy in an upside-down V, fingers straddling her clit, with the web bit right on the money. She threw her head back and moaned, licked her lips, eyelids at half-mast, but the whole time she kept her gaze directly—and yes, penetratingly—on him. It was an unmistakable look, a look older than their species itself, a look that said,
Everything else about me is a pretense. Language and ideas and clothing and manners…all are window dressing for the one true thing, which is this:
Fuck me.

It took all he had not to go over there and violate her. Instead he stared back at her as she stared at him, trembling, just a few feet of oxygen-rich atmosphere separating them. The sun warmed his face and chest. Water lapped at the rocks beneath them. He said yes to all of it. Yes to the sea and mountains and sky. Yes to all those turtles and fish. Yes to skin and hair and fingers and eyes and God if there was one. Yes to vulnerability, to openness, to interpenetration. She quaked and moaned. He kind of did too. Yes.

Cane croaked. Wendy put him down on a rock and lay down beside Dylan with her head on his chest. Together they detumesced and fell asleep.

But when Dylan awoke, he found himself alone again. He sat up. He'd been asleep long enough that everything looked different now; the atmospheric kaleidoscope had turned. He got up, dressed, and went wandering the little island in search of her. On the beach side, he found some families picnicking, but Wendy was not among them, and for a moment he wondered if he hadn't imagined the whole unlikely adventure. It did have the blush of fantasy about it after all. Could it be that he was finally losing his mind? That this whole liaison had been a hallucination in keeping with his phantom tinnitus? But when he checked his omni, he discovered hard evidence of Wendy's existence easily enough. All of her messages were there, as well as a new one that read simply, “Aloha”—which a helpful sidebar
informed him meant not only “Hello” but also “Goodbye” and “I love you.” If her goal in departing with such minimalism was to furnish a negative space for his desire to pour into, then she was a genius. Or she was just fucking weird. In either case, he couldn't wait to see her again.

• • •

Back at the teleport, Dylan read up on the latest in blood-based neuron-farming for the classroom. He wasn't all that interested really, but he had to tell Erin
something
.

“Hi,” he said when he walked in the door. He nearly said “Hi,
honey
,” but he dodged the cliché just in time—he wasn't really feeling the sweetness vibe anyway. Images of lithe, shiny Wendy were still swimming around his brainstem. Erin, by contrast, was looking rather frumpy in her skin-tight purple pants and plaid apron. She looked, in short, like a mom. He didn't know whether Wendy had any children or not, but she didn't
look
like she did. He was going to kiss Erin on the cheek out of habit, but then he remembered that habituation was the enemy. Was he an asshole? Yes, he most certainly was, but at least he wasn't kidding himself about it.

“Why don't you go say hello to your children?” she said. She didn't even bother to ask how the conference was.

“Where are they?”

“Junior's in his crib. He just fell asleep. I'm pretty sure his face changed again last night. Arthur and Tavi are in the playroom building space elevators out of Legos.”

He went to see the baby first. Dylan didn't see the change Erin was talking about—he wasn't as attuned to such things as she was—but the kid sure was cute, all small and curled up like some New Taiwanese glyph. He kissed the oversized head, which smelled, unmistakably, like baby head.

He quietly manifested the door and went down to the playroom to greet his other kids, who stopped what they were doing to shout “Daddy! Daddy!” and hug his legs; Tavi had apparently mastered those intermediate d's all of a sudden—a small victory, to be sure, though Dylan found himself choked up out of all proportion. It had
not
occurred to him to miss his kids during his trip, but in a revisionist-history sort of way, he apparently had. Despite developing tensions between him and these kids' mother, he felt really glad—not happy exactly, but glad—to call this family his own.

Still, in the days to follow, Dylan was plagued by a feeling that he was a sort of impostor in his own life, a changeling, because the fact was he had left the lion's share of his emotional life on that rock in Kailua Bay. It was as if Wendy Sorenson had stretched the limits of his experience and he could not easily let them contract again. Had the episode been merely a dream or a vision, he wouldn't have hesitated to call it a religious experience, irreligious though he believed himself to be. But it
had
really happened, and this made him wonder, in a terrified sort of way, if the right term wasn't perhaps “love.” He hardly knew anything about Wendy, of course—he realized this. Still, he went through the week feeling a kind of tragic exhilaration. He was like the husband in Chekhov's “The Lady with the Lapdog,” who, having finally fallen in love for real, understands that the hardest part has only just begun.

He thought about coming clean with Erin, confessing where he'd been and how he felt. It seemed like it might be the simplest course. Would she really believe that he had yet
another
conference to go to anyway? Yet even with all the distance between them these days, he didn't want to hurt her any more than he wanted to hurt himself.

He had an idea: what if he QT'd Wendy out here instead? He'd be more than happy to pay for it and there were comparably exotic places here where they could have their tryst. Ascension Forest would blow anyone's mind. She'd trusted him to be near her home; why shouldn't he trust her to be near his? Granted, she was a little eccentric, but he had no reason to think she posed any risk.

So he went to the bedroom and replied to her “Aloha” with an invitation. He laid the whole situation bare to her as he would not for Erin anytime soon, and herein, he realized, lay the essence of adultery: it wasn't so much about rutting bodies as asymmetrical access to information; it was the lying to, not the lying with.

Dear Wendy,

First, let me tell you that I had the time of my life with you in Kailua and I cannot stop replaying the whole thing in my mind. I had no idea when I first contacted you that I was going to meet such a beautiful woman. I hope you won't take this the wrong way, but I don't even feel like you are an ordinary human at this point. You're like some siren or nymph, some creature out of my fantasies. Anyway, I want to come clean with you: I am married. I suspect you already know this as it's recorded on omni and you've obviously done your research. I want to be very clear about this: I love my wife and I do not wish to hurt her. That said, let me tell you that I have never felt so
alive
as I did with you the other day. Which brings me to the point of this message: I don't think I can come to Earth again anytime soon being as I have a family and a full-time job (I teach high school), but I wonder if you might be able to make the trip up to New Taiwan instead? That's where I've been living these past twenty years (I tell you all of this in strict confidence because, though it may be inadvisable for me to let my guard down so soon, I instinctively trust you). I don't know if you've ever been off Earth or not, but Quantum Travel has become quite comfortable and I'm happy to pay for your ticket. We have some very beautiful places here that I would love to take you to, though I probably shouldn't be gone for more than, say, three or four hours at a stretch. You understand the nature of my predicament, I think. Please get back to me soon and let me know if you can come. Otherwise, I'll contact you next time I think I can get away from this planet for a couple of days. In any case, Wendy, please know that I am thinking of you night and day.

Aloha,

Dylan Greenyears

Even the simple act of sending that message made Dylan feel giddy and filled with hope, like an autonomous agent of free will in a wonderful, mysterious universe where anything is possible, anything can happen. He felt, in other words, young.

She wrote back within a couple of minutes:

My Dylan,

I would
love
to come see you on New Taiwan, and you offend me by offering to pay. I make a killing in Green Smoothies, you know.

Shall we plan on Sunday then? Where shall we meet? What shall I wear?

Yours,

Wendy

P.S. I have toured Saturn and Mars, but I have yet to leave the Solar System. I was waiting for you to escort me, I guess.

Dylan squirmed with sheepish joy. And what a relief that she could pay. Despite his posturing, he'd worried about that part. He and Erin had shared a savings account since they'd married and skipped Earth. He had secreted some currency away in his sock drawer over the years for an existentially rainy day, but he probably couldn't even beam Wendy round-trip with that.

As for where they should meet, the teleport seemed opportune enough since it was roughly the midpoint between here and Ascension Forest.

Dear Wendy,

I will meet you at the teleport and then spirit you away to one of my favorite spots. Wear anything you like. Better yet, wear nothing!

Aloha,

Dylan

P.S. Okay, you had probably better wear
something
. The New Taiwanese aren't half as puritanical as Americans, but they're not exactly nudists either. My best advice as for what to wear is to check the weather forecast. Temperatures tend to be rather mercurial this time of year, though it never gets very cold.

As things fell out, Erin had to cart the kids to various lessons and appointments on Sunday, so Dylan was spared the need to devise an excuse. Alas, they had only one car between them, and the rolling road was too conspicuous. The transportation industry had been promising personal teleporters for years, but that hadn't happened yet, so Dylan did the only thing he could do, which was to draw on the funds in his sock drawer and hire a cab. He sprang for the best androcab he could afford and had the driver gun it through the Grind to the teleport.

“Who would you like me to be?” the driver asked. “If Omni can see them, I can be them.”

“Can you do James Cameron?”

“The film director?”

“That's the one.”

And just like that the android's frubber morphed into the exact likeness of the man who had once ruined Dylan's life. He looked a bit too old, though.

“Can you do an age regression of twenty years?”

“Sure thing.”

And now a subtler morphing occurred until the driver was shudderingly like the man who had directed
Titanic
. Dylan commanded him to slow down a bit in no uncertain terms—”Slow down, you maggoty lump of dogshit”—so that he might savor the prospect of his former vanquisher working as his own personal chauffeur. It's a strange thing, the fantasy life, but there could be little doubt that New Taiwan's carving out a space for it like this was a large part of why the crime rate stayed so low here.