Michael Kube-McDowell - The Quiet Pools

To serve effectively in that role, the bungalow was, as it must necessarily be, a world apart. Her world, private and personal. Its thick soundproofed walls closed out the sound of the multi-gigawatt laser lifting the T-ships skyward. Its only windows, a broad expanse of sloping plex across the face of the overthrust second story, faced the jungle, as though denying that the entire Prainha compound existed.

But that was as close as Sasaki cared to get to what remained of the great Amazonian wildlands. Born in the first of the satlands nearly half a century ago, Sasaki had never learned how to live with or in large spaces. Even the bungalow was uncomfortably, embarrassingly spacious. She used only three rooms of the bungalow’s fourteen, and spent most of her time in just one, the second-floor greatroom behind the wall of plex.

Sasaki had filled the spaces she did claim with objects she loved, with as much beauty as could harmoniously coexist there. From the Sorayama original on the north wall, a chrome dolphin gracefully leaping from the sea, to the pastel rice-paper bunjinga by Gyokudo which filled the south, the greatroom was a living museum. The Imari porcelain, the bronze of the Galloping Horse of Kansu, the pre-Revolution Valenciennes lace—each image, each piece, vibrated with life. Each was one breath of the yearning, one thread in the weave. She touched them, and they touched her. And the touch helped make her whole.

So, too, did the touch of Lujisa, one of the few who were not only permitted but invited to enter the Director’s Residence. Sasaki had an ageless body, supple and sleek. But at the end of a sixteen-hour day filled with Jeremiah and the Homeworld, negotiations with Beijing to lease the Memphis hyperlibrary and with the astronauts’ union to avoid a threatened strike, and conferences on six of the six thousand suits pending against Allied Transcon, enough stress had penetrated through her meditative calm to knot muscles and snarl the flow of energies through her body.

Sasaki stood at the window, gazing out at the fading purple-red glow of what had been a disappointingly banal sunset, waiting. The colors in her Kanja silk robe were more vivid even in the waning light than the sky colors had been at their peak. A hint of the simple dish of shrimp and rice which she had prepared for herself still hung in the air.

When the housecom announced Lujisa’s arrival, Sasaki let the robe slip from her shoulders. Unselfconsciously nude, she crossed the room to the raised futon as Lujisa appeared at the top of the stairs. Sasaki offered no greeting, nor did Lujisa expect one. She followed Sasaki wordlessly to the tablelike bed; while the Director stretched full length, facedown on its unyielding surface, the masseuse opened her small bag and retrieved oil and a thick soft towel.

The massage began with Lujisa’s hands passing slowly over Sasaki’s body as though floating on a cushion of air, as though feeling for the shape of her body rather than the substance. Whatever Lujisa was touching, she learned from it. Her hands hovered, hesitated, probed.

“Heat here,” she said. “And here.”

“Yes,” Sasaki acknowledged.

Then, her hands slick with fragrant skin-warmed oil, Lujisa began her magic. She worked the muscles and the chakras at once, relaxing the former, clearing the latter, opening the channel from root to crown with a touch which shaped and molded the energy of Sasaki’s body as skillfully as it shaped her flesh and muscle.

Sasaki surrendered herself to the invasion, opening and releasing, until it seemed as though she, too, were floating on a cushion of air. The pain of shiatsu, Lujisa’s strong fingers knowingly savage on the soles of Sasaki’s feet, the palms and joints of her hands, was transmuted by that surrender into bliss and balm elsewhere in her body. She was clay, without will, with Lujisa as sculptor.

When it was over, Sasaki lay on her back, eyes closed, savoring the balance and clarity in her body, the world reduced to that space encompassed by self. It was in this state that Lujisa would leave her, quietly collecting her kit and absenting herself.

But this time, Sasaki called her back with a single word, half whispered.

“More.”

Lujisa turned and wordlessly returned to the table. This time the hands were gentle, though just as knowing. Oil-slick fingertips slipped between sweet-slick labia, found and caressed the swelling nub concealed within. Sasaki lay with eyes closed, legs together, her only response at first a slight quickening of her breath, the rise and fall of her boyish breasts.

Floating upward, mind still clear, body still calm, she allowed the warming wave to spread outward from her center, to rock all of her being to a single rhythm. She was egoless and empty. She was all and alive. Her legs parted, a wordless invitation. Her lips parted, a wordless exultation.

But Sasaki’s cries were measured, polite, bare hints of the soaring of her soul. Her pleasure was her own. She did not share it with Lujisa, did not invite her within. Though she craved the release, shame kept her inside herself, rejecting intimacy.

She told Lujisa only in the silent signs of her body’s own language, in tensed hands and flushed skin, in quicksilver wetness, of the spiraling energy within. Lujisa read the messages and answered in kind, her touch faster, firmer, more insistent. And at last Sasaki’s body arched, seized, gasping, grasping the white light at the top of the spiral. There was a long moment of unity, of focus, and then she was floating downward, tranquil, content.

Her eyes flicked open, and she found Lujisa’s face. “Thank you,” she said.

Lujisa showed a small smile, then quietly left her.

It was only what Sasaki needed, not all she wanted. She wanted more—more of laughter, more of love, more of self, more of silence. She wanted empty days in which to rediscover what she wanted. But there was no time. And there would be no time for such indulgences until the starship Memphis broke orbit and was on its way at last.

Friday found Christopher McCutcheon a reluctant traveler, Oregon-bound.

The New Orleans-Houston-San Antonio feeder loop of the tube was still a year from completion, so he was obliged to make the 200-mile-plus run to DFW in his skimmer. By the time he reached the transplex, it was after seven o’clock, late enough to escape the commuter bulge, though not enough to dispel the air of chaos.

But then, it was never really quiet at the Dallas-Fort Worth transplex. Not with the confluence of the third busiest airport in the world, the ninth busiest spaceport, a mainline station for the primary southern tube, the metroplex’s own double-line tramway, plus flyer and surface traffic to boot. DFW was a traveler’s rite of passage, a nightmare despite the load cycling and smart-guides. Locals avoided DFW whenever possible; survivors asserted blackly that its initials stood for “Don’t Forget to Write.”

Humor was a good weapon, patience a better one. Christopher ran into a ten-minute hang at the flyer storage stack, a twenty-minute backlog at the security checkpoint. On escaping those lines, he found that the slidewalk to the tube station was out of service, obliging him to walk the half-mile connecting corridor.

It was like running a gauntlet. Seven years in San Francisco had given Christopher a don’t-bother-I’m-not-buying look which discouraged most ordinary panhandlers and deadweight. But DFW’s parasites were bred for persistence. Discouraging look or not, Christopher was accosted four times—by a Mormon revivalist, by two canvassers for the Greens, and twice by joybirds working N Corridor’s bed-box hotel. The revivalist was the hardest to brush off; the whores were the most entertaining, offering to perform acts Christopher suspected were physically impossible in the confines of a sleep capsule.