Lightspeed: Year One

Why? I don’t know. There was something charming about the way he held himself. And I was curious—who wouldn’t be?—about the experience of someone made for sex, someone for whom sex was his entire rationale for existence. What would it have been like for him (it?) awakening to that?

The port platform straddled the Dundee cliffs, overlooking the Sea of Tranquility. He was there at that flickering curtain of energy and I remembered what it did to constructs—shorted them out, wiped them clean. He had his hand outstretched, and I’m the last to deny anyone their choices, but even so I shouted, “Hey.”

He turned, his hand dropping.

I caught up to him. I was in the cradle walker because I was being lazy that day. I could see him taking it in, the metal spidering my lower body, the bulge where my flesh ended, where legs might have been on someone else, the nubs of my left hand—two but as useful as three of your fingers, I swear.

I said, “Want to get a cup of tea and talk about it?”

So cliché, like something you might have seen in a cheap-D. But he said, “Okay,” and his voice sounded as sincere as a mechanical voice can.

The café was half-deserted, just a couple of kids drinking coffee near the main window. We were between main shifts, and I was late for my pick-up, but I thumbed a don’t-bother-me code, knowing I was one of the most reliable usually. They’d curse me but let it slide.

It’s weird, talking to a mechanical. Half the time your mind’s supplying all the little body movements, so you feel like you’re talking to a person. Then half the time you’ve got a self-conscious feeling, like you were talking to your toaster in front of your grandmother.

Maybe it was just as strange for him. There’s a lot of Gimps up here—lower gravity has its advantages, and in a lot of spaces, like my rig, the less you mass the better. Plus times are lean—less elective surgery. Here he was in the land of the unbeautiful, the people who didn’t care as much about their appearance. Strange, when he was beautiful in every single inch, every graceful, economical move.

We didn’t say a word about any of that.

I told him the best places to sightsee, and where he could take tours. I thought maybe he had some advantages—did he need to breathe, after all? Could he walk Outside just as he was?

The big casinos are worth seeing, particularly Atlantis and Spin City. I sketched out a map on my cell and shot it to him.

“Where do you like to go?” he said.

I’m not much for shopping, and I said so. I liked to take the mega-rail between Luna and the Cluster—cheap and you could stare out the window at the landscape.

“Let’s do that,” he said.

The Cluster used to be a fundamentalist-founded station that ended up selling its space to private concerns in order to fund itself. The remnants of the church were there. They ran the greenhouses that grew food for Luna, where most of the water got processed too. The stuff at the market there was always fresh and good and cheaper than in stores.

A jazz club had bought space, and a tiny government office matched its grander counterpart in Luna. And there was Xanadu, which was a co-op of five wealthy families. Along with a scattering of individuals who dealt in rare or hand-crafted goods.

There was always music there, and it had enough reputation for being dangerous that all but a few tourists steered clear.

His name was Star. He would be all right with me. I knew enough to keep him safe.

We ate berries and sat beside rippling water. He told me about Earth—never about the people, but the landscape. Trees, pines and sycamores and madrona, maples and honey locusts and cedar. He talked about cliffs that were bound with color: Yellows and reds and deep browns. Everything grew there, it seemed.

He talked about rain, about slow gray clouds and tearing nor’easters. Rain drumming on a tin roof versus its sound on slate. Fine spring mist and the hot rain that fell during drought, coin-sized and evaporating too quickly. Rain on sand, echoed by waves. Thunderheads, gathering themselves over the ocean. He had lived beside the sea for a few years, he said.

I wondered who he had lived with.

So much was unsaid. It was like a cloud in the room. We relaxed despite it.

He didn’t know where he was staying. He had no luggage. I approved of that. I stick to plas-wear and carry no souvenirs other than the rooms inside my head. Even my ship, where I spend more time than anywhere else, is unpersonalized. I liked it that way.

I was staying with Pippi. Star had money, or so he said, and asked where a clean hotel was. I steered him to Blizz, which caters to the Gate regulars, and went back to Pippi’s.

She was surprised to see me. I hadn’t felt like going out on a trip, I said, and offered to take her out to dinner.

All the time we were eating sweet potato fries and tempeh steaks, I tried to figure out how to tell her about Star.

I don’t know what kept me from just blurting it out. That was usually the level we communicated at. Straightforward and without pretense.