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He pulled out, blowing like a walrus. Swan was laughing at him and shaking her head like a dog. “How’s that for music!” she shouted. Then Wahram’s coracle scraped the shallows on the other side and he jumped out, but tripped and fell. He was just able to grab the little raft as he splashed and clambered to his feet, then sloshed up to dry land. Not elegant at all, but he was still alive, and his bodysuit kept him dry and warm-now that was the technological sublime. And they were on the far shore.

S wan found a high point above the river and pitched their tent just before dark. The tent was a single big shell, transparent and bouncy on transparent tent poles. Their rafts would serve as their beds. They sat outside the door of the tent and Swan cooked them first a soup made from powder, then pasta with a pesto and Gorgonzola sauce. Finally chocolates for dessert, and a little flask of cognac.

It was still twilight when they were done, though the sun had set an hour before. The tent flapped in the wind, and the immense sluicing of the river over its rocks rumbled up out of the ground and filled the air. They had been going for eighteen hours straight, and when Swan said, “Time for bed,” Wahram nodded and yawned. The sleeping bags she pulled from their backpacks were also aerogels and resembled the mattress rafts, as well as their tent material, and for that matter the bubbles they had drifted down in-all aerogels, hard to see, light, squishy, warm. “But we’ll still be cold unless we sleep together,” Swan said, crawling into his bag beside him and pulling both bags over them.

“Ah yes,” Wahram said. “I’m sure.”

In the semidarkness he could afford a smile. She kissed him, though, and caught him in the act.

“What,” she said.

“Nothing.”

She rolled onto him, and their combined weight caused his back to touch the ground under his mattress. It was a chill touch and he had to mention it. “We may have to stay side to side.”

“Hell no,” Swan said, and squiggled out of the bag. “Here, get up a second, let’s put my bag under the mattress. That should do it.”

It did. By then they were cold. She got the top of his bag over them properly and climbed onto him, shivering; and after a tight hug she shifted around and started kissing him again. Her mouth was warm. She was a good kisser, passionate and playful. Her penis, so much littler than his, was nevertheless poking his belly, feeling something like a belt buckle gone awry. He too was fully aroused, and getting happier by the second.

Now it was said that their particular combination of genders was the perfect match, a complete experience, “the double lock and key,” all possible pleasures at once; but Wahram had always found it rather complicated. As with most wombmen, his little vagina was located far enough down in his pubic hair that his own erection blocked access to it; the best way to engage there once he was aroused was for the one with the big vagina to slide down onto the big penis most of the way, then lean out but also back in, in a somewhat acrobatic move for both partners. Then with luck the little join could be made, and the double lock and key accomplished, after which the usual movements would work perfectly well, and some fancier back-and-forths also.

Swan turned out to be perfectly adept at the join, and after that she laughed and kissed him again. They warmed up pretty fast.

Kim Stanley Robinson

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Lists (14)

A round mound made of big irregular boulders, interleaved together small and large to make an almost smooth cone at Mercury’s north pole

Flat rocks laid in circles, one layer on the next, each layer bigger for a few layers, then the same for two or three, then smaller, slowly, up to a rounded point, so that it looked like a big pinecone of rock

One big boulder topped by gold, melting in the brightside crossing onto the rubble plain below it

Another boulder, encased in stainless steel, not melting

Another, rubbed with cinnarbar

Patterned gaps in the ground filled with liquid copper

Shards attached to a knobby headland so that it looked like a cactus

Silhouettes in silver, left on the ground through the brightside

Sand castles turned to glass by the brightside crossing

Twenty rocks on a rubble plain painted white and put back in place

A chest-high oval ring of drywall using flat stones, with fat rounded capstones on top, and a single gap for a door into the center A rock shaped like South America, balanced on its Tierra del Fuego Stainless steel wire snarled in broken orbits around a boulder Almost cubical rocks in a single stack twenty rocks high Elliptically rounded rocks stacked four and five high Ten thousand pebbles arranged together on their ends in the shape of a whirlpool Cliff sides carved to mirror smoothness and then etched by the Sanskrit lettering for Om Mani Padme Hum Rock pile compass roses, Medicine Wheels, stone circles, henges, inuksuk A conical hut like the end of a spaceship sticking up out of the plain

Inside the terraria, the possibilities blossomed: