'They do this to enrich themselves, yes?'
'To enrich themselves at our Society's expense. Of course, these courtesans are punished when they're found out, but it still happens.'
'I do not know how Hanuman could have got money,' Danlo said.
'It doesn't really matter,' Tamara said. 'I'm afraid I would have had to disappoint him, money or not.'
'A woman as beautiful as you ... must make many contracts.'
'My Society has appointed me contracts the next fifteen nights.'
Danlo pulled his hands away from hers and carelessly ungloved himself. He stuck his gloves in his pants pocket. Then he reached out and gently grasped her hands, and he stripped off her tight silk gloves. Around the middle finger of her left hand, she wore a gold ring cast in the form of a snake biting its tail, but he scarcely noticed this.
He touched her long naked fingers, and the sudden shock of skin pressing hot skin delighted him. He looked at her, and he said, quite boldly, 'But you have made no contracts for tonight?'
'No,' she said, 'not for tonight.' She wove her fingers between his and smiled.
'I have never had ... any money,' Danlo said.
'Is that what you've thought to give me?'
'Money is just a symbol, yes?' Danlo said. 'It is meaningless as a gift. If I could give you anything ... it would be a pearl, to wear around your neck. Have you ever seen a pearl of the palpulve oysters? They are splendid and rare.'
'Oh, Danlo, you shouldn't promise what's impossible.'
'But what can I give you?'
In answer Tamara pulled his hands close to her body so that they brushed the lower part of her belly. 'You're so beautiful,' she said. 'I've never made a contract with a man just for the sake of beauty.'
He laughed, then, easily and gladly, as he sometimes did when he was overwhelmed with pure delight. His laughter, falling out in the middle of a room where tens of people were smoking psychedelic triya seeds and also laughing, might have gone unnoticed, but then Tamara was laughing too, and their obvious passion for each other attracted many stares. At that moment, however, Danlo had no care for anyone other than Tamara.
They locked eyes together, and it was as if they were the only truly alive people in the room, possibly in the universe. There came a sudden knowing of each other's minds and hearts: they both thought it was intensely funny that they could stand there in open sight of many others, touching hands and falling into love. This knowingness was intensely real, more real even than the musky smell of Tamara's perfume or his own acrid sweat. It drew him into a brilliant and wild future that he could see forming even as he looked into her lovely eyes.
'We should be alone together,' he said.
'I think that would be best,' she said. She stroked the palms of his hands and pulled at his fingers. 'I keep a house up near North Beach – we could go there.'
'That is too far. It would take too long to get there.'
She laughed and then said, 'But where else could we go?'
'I have heard that there are thirty sleeping chambers in this house,' he swept his arms out and smiled. 'This time of night, they cannot all be taken.'
'You propose we begin our contract, here? Now?'
'Yes, why not?'
'That would be rash,' she said. 'There's no way to make preparations.'
Danlo winced, inwardly, at the word 'preparations'. Many times since entering Borja, he had seduced the Order's young women; many times, the more adventurous akashics or holists or scryers or even other pilots had seduced him. And each time before their love play these lovely women had diligently made their preparations. Each of them had worn a pessary, artificial tissues that lined the vagina and protected against pregnancy and disease. How he loathed the gelid, alienating feel of these tissues! But civilized women feared contagion almost as much as death, and so they did what they could to quarantine their bodies and safeguard themselves. Indeed, many women and men renounced swiving altogether in favour of other forms of sex. Journeymen of all professions were supposed to satisfy themselves with masturbation or simulation. Although Danlo was quite aware of civilized customs, he disdained both these alternatives as shaida acts that could only lead him to false ecstasy. Both acts required the infusion of the brain with images – whether the false images of pure fantasy or the totally compelling images and sensa of a computer-generated surreality, it did not matter. Danlo craved real copulation as much as he craved life, and he sought such love play whenever he could.
'Let's be rash, then,' he said to Tamara.
'Are you so eager to be the father of a child?'
'Is that to be the result of our contract?'
'Do you want it to be?' she asked. Danlo touched her long hair, then said, 'I had heard that courtesans have an awareness of their fertility. That they can control their own fertility, yes?'
'Some of us master these skills, that's true.'
'Then you must know if tonight... is a dangerous time for you.'
'Oh, it's dangerous,' she said. 'It's always dangerous, isn't it?'
'But how dangerous?'
'Shall I calculate the probabilities for you?' she asked. She smiled, and it was obvious this whole conversation amused her. 'There's only a very slight chance we'd conceive a child together tonight.'
'If we did,' he said, 'I could quit the Order and we could make a marriage contract together.'
At this, she laughed for a long time before saying, 'You shouldn't promise what you're not ready to do.'
'But I might want to marry you anyway – I promised myself this the instant I saw you.'
'You have a sweet tongue,' she said, 'but let's not speak of marriage right now.'
'Should we speak of love?'
'No, that would be even worse.'
'Then let's not speak at all,' he said. 'Let's be rash ... together.'
He touched her forehead, and his fingers knew an instant and intense thrill. He touched her eyes, her cheek, her long neck, and then the primal urge of life toward more life caught them both, as in a firestorm, and she said, 'All right.'
Hand in hand, they made their way from the room. They squeezed past many women: a harijan poet whose old, gnarly face he vaguely recognized; the fat wife of a merchant-prince; a thin toalache addict with her burnt-out but intelligent eyes. Danlo was so enraptured, he found something to love in each of them. All women were beautiful, he thought, and he told himself that he could make a marriage with almost anyone, if he were ever free to marry. He told himself this even as he walked through brilliant rooms full of brilliant people, deeper into Bardo's house. They passed into a great hall of high arches and long windows, and then up a flight of stairs into the north wing. Here the skylights were clear diamond panes and the walls glittering sweeps of organic stone. Guest rooms lined both sides of the corridor; the doors of each room – slabs of plain jewood polished with lemon wax – were closed. Danlo chose a door at random, glanced at Tamara, and then rapped his knuckles across the gleaming, resonant wood. The sound of his knocking seemed very loud and cracked out along the corridor. When there was no answer, he opened the door. He saw immediately that someone had used the room that night: the windows were open and in the fireplace the embers of a dying fire glowed and hissed. The room smelled of lemons and triya seeds and the essence of snow dahlia blowing in from Bardo's lawn, good smells that drew him quickly inside. He was smiling and laughing and pulling at Tamara's arm, and then he kicked the door closed, and there were other wonderful smells: that of woodsmoke and fresh new furs and the thickness of Tamara's hair. He liked everything about the room, although it was so dark at first that he could see little of it. There were the lovely diamond windows, of course, and clothes chests inlaid with rare woods. Low, lacquered tables were set out with pipes and little bowls of triya seeds, and with decanters of wine, and boxes of black toalache, and with half a dozen other drugs that might be snuffed or smoked or drunk. Near the fireplace was a huge futon covered with shagshay furs. He stood over this futon, looking for Tamara's eyes in the darkness. He was still holding her hand, and he pulled her closer so that he could see her face.
'Let's breathe together,' she said.
She kissed him then, touched his lips with hers. He had never kissed a woman before; the Alaloi do not practise this art, nor do most of the civilized peoples. He found the play of mouth against mouth and quick slipping tongues to be strange but very exciting. In truth, the unexpected pleasure of it shocked him and left him breathless. She pressed up close to him, and their bodies moulded together. Her silk pyjamas rubbed against his kamelaika. The friction of silk against wool rubbed off surface electrons from the molecules of either fabric and electrified their garments. When he unzipped her pyjamas and pulled them off her, crackles of blue and green electricity ran along the silken folds, then died into the room's darkness. There was some difficulty getting his kamelaika off, not because of the little shocks of static electricity that tickled his hands, but because it was very tight and his muscles were swollen with blood. At last, however, they were naked together, kissing and clutching each other with abandon. She ran her fingers along his membrum, and she gasped in surprise as she touched the hard little scars that had been cut there during his passage into manhood. They stood there for a long time as they stroked and rubbed against each other. Then she pulled him down atop her, and they sank into the furs covering the futon. They swived each other furiously, pushing and panting and sweating and moaning in delight. She was in her first youth, only a couple of years older than he, and she was as strong and wild as any animal. His hands were beneath her, and he felt the muscles bunching along her back and buttocks, her anus a hard ring of muscle coiled like a snake. Because she wore no pessary, the deep clutching of her vulva around him was direct and intense, a silky, heavenly slickness that drew him on and on. They moved together, in rhythm and rapture, and he couldn't tell where his body ended and hers began. It was as if the cells of his body loved the cells of hers, or rather, remembered them from some ecstatic union long ago and were at last returning home. She gasped and wrapped her hands around his back and pulled him deep into an exploding joy, deeper into the supreme risk of life. There was a moment of total surrender and dying to himself, as if he were only an atom of consciousness completing some universal plan. And then he suddenly cried out and shuddered, and there was true union, a true returning. They cried out together in their ecstasy, and he wanted to go on and on forever, but the pleasure of passion had grown into agony and he had to stop.
They lay there awhile, panting and joined to each other in exhaustion. Then the air streaming in the window chilled the sweat on their bodies and drove them beneath the furs. He asked her if she would like a fire, and she said 'yes', and so he got up and threw some logs on the glowing embers and poked about until the fireplace was full of crackling orange flames. Soon it was too hot for the furs, and they kicked them off. They held each other and lay naked before the fire. They talked about little things, such as the fine weather the City was enjoying and the excellence of the foods that Bardo served. And then their conversation grew more serious. Danlo told her of his reasons for coming to Neverness; he tried to explain why he had become friends with Hanuman li Tosh. But he was really better at listening than talking, and most of the time he gazed at Tamara and nodded his head attentively while she spoke of her stultified childhood as an astrier and her later initiation into the courtesan arts. As he discovered, she had a brilliant mind. In fact, she might have entered the Order and become a cetic or a remembrancer but her parents, as good astriers and Architects, had denied her a formal education. And so, while still quite young, she had left her home and applied to the Society of Courtesans. She had become an accomplished voluptuary; indeed, many said she was destined to become a diva. She had applied her mind and the intelligence of all her senses toward one end: the awakening of herself and others to a greater intensity of life. It soon became clear, from her manner and the way she looked at Danlo, that what she loved most about him was his wildness (or rashness) and his own burning love of life.
'You're still hot,' she said as she touched his face. She nibbed his chest, and then ran her fingers through the black hair of his belly and pubes until she touched the little white pearl of liquid beading up on the tip of his membrum. She touched the naked bulb, softly, and the many scars running along the shaft. She rested her head on his chest, staring down at him as she fingered the round, shiny, blue and red scars. 'It must have hurt to have had these affixed,' she said.
Danlo thought of the night he had lain on his back beneath the stars while Three-Fingered Soli cut him, and he said, 'Yes ... it hurt.'
'Do all the Alaloi decorate themselves this way?'
'Only the men.'
'How strange,' she said. 'Do they think it will stimulate the women and give them more pleasure?'
'No, that is not the reason.'
'Then why do they do it?'
Danlo stroked her hair and said, 'I do not mean to be secretive, but I ... cannot tell you. That is, I may not.' In truth, the twenty-ninth verse of the Song of Life told of the cutting of a man's membrum, and he was forbidden to reveal this knowledge to anyone. Although a part of him had long since cast off his childhood beliefs, a deeper part whispered for him to keep his silence.
'Do they think to desensitize themselves?' she asked.
'What do you mean?'
'I've known a few men, mostly wormrunners – they have themselves circumcized. The skin of the bulb then dries out, which lessens the intensity of sensation. Or so they think.'
Danlo clenched his jaws, then said, 'But why would anyone want to be cut ... for that reason?'
'Because they hope to prolong love play. To give the woman time to reach her ecstasy, too.'
'But such cutting does not prolong anything,' Danlo said. 'I have been cut, as you can see – all Alaloi men have. Everyone knows that men most often reach their ecstasy before women.'