John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

Before coming back to Earth, Claire had been celibate for two years. It was as if being on Earth (mental image of an earth goddess) had opened a hillside spring of sexuality in her.

Her only significant Colony affair, more than two years earlier, with Mouli, a Persian life-support-systems stress analyst, had discouraged her hugely. Mouli had been relentlessly cerebral, except in bed—when he became mechanical. She’d had a ferocious crush on him, though, till she realized that despite all his earnest pretense of listening to her, and despite his serious conversation about Colony politics and futurological projection, Mouli didn’t give a damn about her, the real Claire Rimpler. The mental relationship was a sham; she was just pussy to him.

She knew she meant something to Torrence. And she seemed to have answered some deep need in Karakos (wondering with a vague unease, Was Karakos manipulating her, as Torrence implied? His emotional openness was almost too good to be true). But when you got involved with men, you became absurd. Unimportant things seemed significant; you became stupidly girlish. It was embarrassing. It was beneath her. Sexism was unfashionable with men like Dan Torrence—and Karakos. But somehow it was alive and well in them. As soon as you became involved with men, regardless of the best intentions of both sides, you became subsumed to them. Co-opted.

Still… the tension in her, the sense that she should be doing something to make up for abandoning her father, was maddening. And sex was an effective release from it.

She looked at Lila, the twilight’s gloom making her dark skin look, in profile, like a black velvet cutout. She was laying her reassembled gun aside, wiping oil off her hands. Carefully not looking at Claire.

“You never seem to get rattled, Lila,” Claire said on impulse. “You never seem to need to… to get drunk like the others sometimes do, or… I mean, even Steinfeld needs to get drunk about once a month. You never get drunk, never get involved with men. You don’t…” She shrugged. “How do you do it?”

“There’s something I do,” Lila said, looking uncomfortable.

Claire was embarrassed. Afraid the woman was about to confess that she was in love with someone, like Steinfeld; that she masturbated wildly and fantasized about him.

“This is what I do,” Lila said. She took a little brass pipe from a pocket on her fatigues, and a piece of tinfoil. “But only once a month—that’s all I allow myself. To, um, let go, no? I find it does not impair my efficiency the next day so much as, um, getting drunk.”

“What is it?” Claire asked.

Lila was opening the foil. Inside was a little brown lump of hardened mud. Or something that looked like it. Lila glanced at the door, as if to be sure that it was closed, and said softly, “It is hashish.”

“Oh!” She’d read about it. “It’s carcinogenic, isn’t it? Lung cancer.”

Lila smiled. “Perhaps this is so if you smoke it every day. Once a month it’s much less risky than breathing the air in a city. And I only allow it to myself once a month.” She broke a piece of the hash off, rolled it into a taffy lump, and pressed it onto the screen in the little brass pipe. She put the pipe in her mouth, gripped between her straight white teeth. She took a steel-gray New-Soviet cigarette lighter from her pocket and ran the flame over the hash, sucked on the pipe, making the tarry lump bubble and glow. The coal lit her face with a fan of soft red light. The blue-white smoke drifting up from the pipe was aromatic.

Claire was only a little short of amazed. Lila, a drug user!

Lila inhaled, held the smoke for a moment, then let it gush out and said, her eyes faintly sleepy now, “It’s a very mild hashish.” And she offered the pipe to Claire.

“Oh, um, no thanks.”

“A guerrilla has to know the world from every—how would you say—

from every window. From every direction. This will show you a new…”

“A new angle on things?” Claire smiled.

“You have been so tense. I’ve seen that. This will help.”

Claire found herself accepting the pipe. The guerrillas sometimes smiled at things Claire said, as if they thought her just a little ridiculous. As if she were a naif because she’d lived most of her life in the Colony. She didn’t want Lila to think of her that way.

But her stomach contracted with fear as she put the pipe in her mouth. Would she hallucinate? Would she think she’d turned into a sea gull and try to fly from the window and fall to her death?

She inhaled. “I don’t think it’s affecting me.”

Lila giggled. “You inhaled before it was lit. I have to light again. Put it in your mouth… yes, hold it still… good… now suck on it to inhale… good, inhale…”

Claire felt a hot sandpaper hand jab sharp fingers into her lungs, and she gagged, coughed, almost dropping the pipe. Lila was making a strange sound. Something like tee hee. Astonishing!

“Well, I am guessing you got some that time, Claire. Beautiful Claire. Now I will have some more…”

Lila took another puff. A long one. She didn’t cough.

Claire felt pleasantly distant from things, mentally. But physically she could feel the window seat’s cushions under her; the fabric of her robe under her hand; air currents sliding cool past her throat.

Her lungs still burned from the first hit of the hashish, but she found herself wanting another.

They traded the pipe back and forth twice more, Claire coughing both times but caring less with each lungful of the hot, dark fragrance.

“It smells like incense,” she said dreamily. “But a little more… a little edge to it…”

“It makes me sleepy,” Lila said, “but not like I want to really sleep. Just to lay down and dream but with my eyes open.”

“You mean… you hallucinate?”

“No, not that kind of dreaming. My mind goes wherever it wants.”

She walked to the bed with an odd combination of floaty grace and stoned dislocation. With a soft cry she sank onto it, began to undress.

Claire stared at her, thinking she should leave. Lila was going to sleep, or wanted privacy to lie there and dream. But it was so fascinating to watch her peel her clothes off. She’d never realized before what odd things clothes are, what peculiar, soft encrustations they were. And Lila was so slender, smooth; watching her limbs move was like watching the flow of a dark river at night; just enough moonlight on the river to make out the contours of currents and ripples.

“You’re so beautiful,” she blurted.

A flash of white teeth in the near darkness. “Come and talk to me, Claire.”

“I should… let you sleep, or…”

“I’m sad, Claire. I get sad when I smoke hash sometimes. Please don’t leave. Come and talk to me.” She was a woman-shaped pool of soft-edged shadow on the silvery silk bed. The bed didn’t look like a bed; it seemed like a sort of great soft cake, as if you could reach out and push your hand into it and scoop moist chunks of bedcake.

Claire stood, swayed with a momentary dizziness, then walked toward the bed. It took so long to get there.

But in a moment she was lying on the great rectangular cake beside Lila, lying on her back, her robe fallen open, feeling the cool air whisper over her skin, one of the currents warm as it cupped her left breast and drew on her nipple, stiffening it.

Oh: It was Lila’s mouth…

Claire stared at Lila’s dark head moving on her chest, her large, lustrous eyes looking up at her… felt a connection, a bolt of wet lightning between her breast and her vagina. The electric wetness emerging there so she could feel the lubricants cooling in the slit where they met the air.

There was a glass pane of resistance in her, telling her: This is perverse, this is a bad idea, shouldn’t get involved like this because Lila will get attached and I’m not gay (am I?), and anyway, Dan will freak out…