Robert Silverberg: Snake and Ocean, Ocean and Snake

She was no longer so coy about her life outside their relationship. Maitland knew now that her husband was an artist from Chicago, not very successful, a little envious of her career. She showed him some of his work, unremarkable abstract-expressionist stuff. Maitland was jealous of the fact that this man—Tim, his name was—shared her bed and enjoyed her proximity, but he realized that he had no jealousy of the marriage itself. It was all right that she was married. Maitland had no wish to live with her. He wanted to go on living with Jan, to play tennis with her and go to restaurants with her and even to make love with her; what he wanted from Laurel was just what he was getting from her, that cool amused intelligent voice in his mind, and now and then the strange ecstasy that her playful spirit was able to kindle in his loins across such great distances. That much was true. Yet also he wanted to be her lover in the old blatant obvious coarse messy way, at least once, once at least. Because he knew it was a perilous subject, he stayed away from it as long as he could, but at last it broke into the open one night in Seattle, late, after the snake had returned to its jar and the lapping waves had retreated and he lay sweaty and alone in his hotel-room bed.

—When are we finally going to meet?

—Please, Chris.

—I think it’s time to discuss it. You told me a couple of times, early on, that I must never come to Phoenix. Okay. But couldn’t we get together somewhere else? Tucson, San Diego, the Grand Canyon?

—It isn’t the place that matters.

—What is it, then?

—Being close. Being too close.

—I don’t understand. We’re so close already!

—I mean physically close, Not emotionally, not even sexually. I just mean that if we came within close range of each other we’d do bad things to each other.

—That’s crazy, Laurel.

—Have you ever been close to another telepath? As close as ten feet, say?

—I don’t think so.

—You’d know it if you had. When you and I talk, long distance, it’s just talking on the phone, right, plus pictures? We tell each other only what we it to tell each other, and nothing else gets through. It’s not like that close up.

—Oh?

—There’s a kind of radiation, an aura. We broadcast all sorts of stuff automatically. All that foul stinking nasty cesspool stuff that’s at the bottom of everybody’s mind, the crazy prehistoric garbage that’s in us. It comes swarming out like a shriek.

—How do you know that?

—I’ve experienced it.

—Oh. Boston, years ago?

—Yes. Yes. I told you, I did this once before.

—But he was crazy, you said.

—In a way. But the craziness isn’t what brought the other stuff up. I felt it another time, too, and she wasn’t crazy. Its unavoidable.

—I want to see you.

—Don’t you think I want to see you, too, Chris? You think I think snake and ocean’s really good enough? But we can’t risk it. Suppose we met, and the garbage got out, and we hated each other ever afterward?

—We could control it.

—Maybe. Maybe not.

—Or else we could make allowances for it. Bring ourselves to understand that this stuff, whatever it is that you say is there, is normal, just the gunk of the mind, nothing personal, nothing that we ought to take seriously.

—I’m scared. Let’s not try.

He let the issue drop. When it came up again, four months later, it was Laurel who revived it. She had been thinking about his idea of controlling the sinister emanation, throttling it back, shielding one another. Possibly it could be done. The temptation to meet him in the flesh, she said, was overwhelming. Perhaps they could get together and suppress all telepathic contact, meet just like ordinary humans having a little illicit rendezvous, keep their minds rigidly walled off, and that way at last consummate the intimacy that had joined their to souls for a year and a half.

—I’d love to, Laurel.

—But promise me this. Swear it to me. When we do get together, if we can’t hold back the bad stuff, if we feel it coming out, that we go away from each other instantly. That we don’t negotiate, we don’t try to work it out, we don’t look for angles—we just split, fast, if either of us says we have to. Swear?

—I swear.

He flew to Denver and spent a fidgety hour and a half having cocktails in the lounge at the Brown Palace. Her flight from Phoenix was supposed to have landed only half an hour after his, and he wondered if she had backed out at the last minute. He got up to call the airport when he saw her come in, unmistakably her, taller than he expected, a big handsome woman in black jeans and a sheepskin wrap. There were flecks of melting snow in her hair.

He sensed an aura.

It wasn’t loathsome, it wasn’t hideous, but it was there, a kind of dull whining grinding thing as of improperly oiled machinery in use three blocks away. Even as he detected it, he felt it diminish until it was barely perceptible. He struggled to rein in whatever output he might be giving off himself.

She saw him and came straight toward him, smiling nervously, cheeks rigid, eyes worried.

“Chris.”

He took her hand in his. “You’re cold, Laurel.”

“It’s snowing. That’s why I’m late. I haven’t seen snow in years.”

“Can I get you a drink?”

“No. Yes. Yes, please. Scotch on the rocks.”

“Are you picking up anything bad?”

“No,” she said. “Not really. There was just a little twinge, when I walked in—a kind of squeak in my mind.”

“I felt it, too. But then it faded.”

“I’m fighting to keep it damped down. I want this to work.”

“So do I. We mustn’t use the power at all today.”

“We don’t need to. The old snake can have the day off. Are you scared?”

“A little.”

“Me, too.” She gulped her drink. “Oh, Chris.”

“Is it hard work, keeping the power damped down?”

“Yes. It really is.”

“For me, too. But we have to.”

“Yes,” she said. “Do you have a room yet?”

He nodded.

“Let’s go upstairs, then.”

Like any unfaithful husband having his first rendezvous with a new lover he walked stiffly and somberly through the lobby, convinced that everyone was staring at them. That was ridiculous, he knew. They were more truly married, in their way, than anybody else in Denver. But yet—but yet—

They were silent in the elevator. As they approached their floor the aura of her burst forth again, briefly, a fast sour vibration in his bones, and then it was gone altogether, shut off as though by a switch. He worked at holding his down, too. She smiled at him. He winked. “To the left,” he said. They went into the room. Heavy snowflakes splashed against the window; the wide bed was turned down. She was trembling. “Come on,” he said. “I love you. You know that. Everything’s all right.”

They kissed and undressed. Her body was lean, athletic, with small high breasts, a flat belly, a dark appendectomy scar. He drew her toward the bed. It seemed strange, almost perverse, to be doing things in this antiquated fleshly way, no snake, no ocean, no meeting of minds. He was afraid for a moment that in the excitement of their coupling they would lose control of their mental barriers and let their inner selves come flooding out, fierce, intense, a contact too powerful to handle at such short range. But there was no loss of control. He kept the power locked behind the walls of his skull; she did the same; there were only the tiniest leakages of current. But there was no excitement, either, in their lovemaking.

He ran his hands over her breasts and trapped her nipples between his fingers, and gently parted her thighs with his knee, and pressed himself against her as though he had not been with a woman in a year, but the excitement seemed to be all in his head, not in his nerve endings. Even when she ran her lips down his chest and belly and teased him for a moment and then took him fiercely and suddenly in her mouth, it was the idea that they were finally doing this, rather than what they were actually doing, that resonated with him. They sighed a little and moaned a little and finally he slipped into her, admiring the tightness of her and the rhythms of her hips and all that, but nevertheless it was as though this had happened between them a thousand times before: he moved, she moved, they did all the standard things and traveled along to the standard result. Not enough was real between them, that was the trouble. He knew her better than he had ever known anyone, and yet in some ways he knew her not at all, and that was what had spoiled things. That, and holding so much in check. He wished he could look into her mind now. But that was forbidden, and probably unwise, too; he guessed that she was annoyed with him for having insisted on this foolish and foredoomed meeting, that she held him responsible for having spoiled things between them, and he did not want to see those thoughts in her mind.