Robert Silverberg: Snake and Ocean, Ocean and Snake

He did not reach toward her, but drove on into the city in a mellow haze, wondering what she looked like. Her mental “voice” sounded to him like that of a tall, clear-eyed, straight-backed woman with long, brown hair, but he knew better than to put much faith in that; he had played the same game with people’s telephone voices and he had always been wrong. For all he knew, Laurel was squat and greasy. He doubted that; he saw no way that she could be ugly. But why, then, was she so determined not to have him come to Phoenix? Perhaps she was an invalid; perhaps she was painfully shy; perhaps she feared the intrusion of any sort of reality into their long-distance romance.

At lunchtime he tuned himself to her wavelength and sent her an image of the first page of the report he had written last week on Exxon. She replied with a glimpse of a tall olive-hued porcelain jar, of a form both elegant and sturdy at once. Her work in exchange for his: he liked that. It meant they had the same sense of humor. Everything was going to be perfect.

A week later he went out to Salt Lake City for a couple of days to do some field research on a mining company headquartered there. He took an early-morning flight, had lunch with three earnest young Mormon executives overflowing with joy at the bounty of God as manifested by the mineral wealth of the Overthrust Belt in Wyoming, spent the afternoon leafing through geologists’ survey sheets, and had dinner alone at his hotel. Afterward he put in his obligatory call to Jan, worked up his notes of the day’s conferences, and watched TV for an hour, hoping it would make him drowsy. Maitland didn’t mind these business trips, but he slept badly when he slept alone, and any sort of time-zone change, even a trifling one like this, disrupted his internal clock. He was still wide awake when he got into bed about eleven.

He thought of Laurel. He felt very near to her, out here in this spacious mountain-ringed city with the wide bland streets. Probably Salt Lake City was not significantly closer to Phoenix than San Francisco was, but he regarded Utah and Arizona both as the true Wild West, while his own suburban and manicured part of California, paradoxically, did not seem western to him at all. Somewhere due south of here, just on the far side of all these cliffs and canyons, was the unknown woman he loved.

As though on cue, she was in his mind:

—Lonely?

—You bet.

—I’ve been thinking of you all day. Poor Chris: sitting around with those businessmen, talking all that depletion gibberish.

—I’m a businessman, too.

—You’re different, love. You’re a businessman outside and a freak inside.

—Don’t say that.

—It’s what we are, Chris. Face it. Flukes, anomalies, sports, changelings—

—Please stop, Laurel. Please.

—I’m sorry.

A silence. He thought she was gone, taking flight at his rebuke. But then:

—Are you very lonely?

—Very. Dull empty city, dull empty bed.

— You’re in it.

—But you aren’t.

—Is that what you want? Right now?

—I wish we could, Laurel.

—Let’s try this.

He felt a sudden astounding intensifying of her mental signal, as if she had leaped the hundreds of miles and lay curled against him here. There was a sense of physical proximity, of warmth, even the light perfume of her skin, and into his mind swept an image so acutely clear that it eclipsed for him the drab realities of his room: the shore of a tropical ocean, fine pink sand, gentle pale-green water, a dense line of heavy-crowned palms.

—Go on, Chris. Into the water.

He waded into the calm wavelets until the delicate sandy bottom was far below his dangling feet and he floated effortlessly in an all-encompassing warmth, in an amniotic bath of placid soothing fluid. Placid but not motionless, for he felt, as he drifted, tiny convulsive quivers about him, an electric oceanic caress, pulsations of the water against his bare skin, intimate, tender, searching. He began to tingle. As he moved farther out from shore, so far now that the land was gone and the world was all warm water to the horizon, the pressure of those rhythmic pulsations became more forceful, deeply pleasurable: the ocean was a giant hand lightly squeezing him. He trembled and made soft sighing sounds that grew steadily more vehement, and closed his eyes, and let ecstasy overwhelm him in the ocean’s benignly insistent grip. Then he grunted and his heart thumped and his body went rigid and then lax, and moments later he sat up, blinking, astonished, eerily tranquil.

—I didn’t think anything like that was possible.

—For us anything’s possible. Even sex across seven hundred miles. I wasn’t sure it would work, but I guess it did, didn’t it? Did you like it?

—Do you need an answer, Laurel?

—I feel so happy.

—How did you do it? What was the trick?

—No trick. Just the usual trick, Chris, a little more intense than usual. And a lot of love. I hated the idea that you were all alone, horny, unable to sleep.

—It was absolutely marvelous.

—And now we’re lovers. Even though we’ve never met.

—No. Not altogether lovers, not yet. Let me try to do it to you, Laurel. It’s only fair.

—Later, okay? Not now.

—I want to.

—It takes a lot of energy. You ought to get some sleep, and I can wait. Just lie there and glow and don’t worry about me. You can try it with me another time.

—An hour? Two hours?

—Whenever you want. But not now. Rest, now. Enjoy. Good night, love.

—Good night, Laurel.

He was alone. He lay staring up into the darkness, stunned. He had been unfaithful to Jan three times before, not bad for nine years, and always the same innocuous pattern: a business trip far from home, a couple of solitary nights, then an official dinner with some woman executive, too many drinks, the usual half-serious banter turning serious, a blurry one-night stand, remorse in the morning, and never any follow-up. Meaningless, fragmentary stuff. But this—this long-distance event with a woman he had never even seen—this seemed infinitely more explosive. For he had the power and Jan did not and Laurel did; and Jan’s mind was closed to his and his to hers, and they could only stagger around blindly trying to find one another, while he and Laurel could unite at will in a communion whose richness was unknown to ordinary humans. He wondered if he could go on living with Jan at all now. He felt no less love for her than before, and powerful ties of affection and sharing held him to her; but yet—even so—

In guilt and confusion Maitland drifted off into sleep. It was still dark when he woke—3:13 a.m., said the clock on the dresser—and he felt different guilt, different confusion, for it was of Laurel now that he thought. He had taken pleasure from her and then he had collapsed into postorgasmic stupor. Never mind that she had told him to do just that. He felt, and always had, a peculiarly puritanical obligation to give pleasure for pleasure, and unpaid debts were troublesome to him. Taking a deep breath, he sent strands of consciousness through the night toward the south, over the fire-hued mountains of central Utah, over the silent splendor of the Grand Canyon, down past the palm trees into torrid Phoenix, and touched Laurel’s warm sleepy mind.

—Hnhh.

—It’s me. I want to, now.

—All right. Yes.

The image she had chosen was a warm sea, the great mother, the all-encompassing womb. He, reaching unhesitatingly for a male equivalent, sent her a vision of himself coming forth on a hot dry summer day into a quiet landscape of grassy hills round as tawny breasts. Cradled in his arms he held the gleaming porcelain jar that she had showed him last week, and he bent, tipping it, pouring forth from it an enormous snake, long and powerful but not in any way frightening, that flowed like a dark rivulet across the land, seeking her, finding, gliding up across her thighs, her belly. Too obvious? Too coarsely phallic? He wavered for a moment, but only a moment, for he heard her moan and whimper, and she reached with her mind for the serpent as it seemed he was withdrawing it; he drove back his qualms and gave her all the energy at his command, seizing the initiative as he sensed her complete surrender. Her signal shivered and lost focus. Her breathing grew ragged and hoarse, and then into his mind came a quick surprising sound, a strange low growling, that terminated in a swift sharp gasp.