Contemporary Gay Romances (28 page)

“We’re directly mind-to-mind, no?” I asked.

“Yes. But it’s beyond that, Locke. The Delphs explained it, but it’s kind of beyond our way of understanding. Beyond our way of communicating what happens. This Tech derives from electro-chemicals that their savant-shamans discovered in their ocean hermitages. But as they developed it further, it went beyond even them. Their scientists grabbed it and perfected it.”

I didn’t understand and said so, and that was all right with Finn. The real question he said was, was I happy with what had happened when we were linked in the pool?

“You mean us together? Sure but… Well, you could have been gentler in the sack,” I said.

“Sorry. I was so excited to see you, to touch you! to see anyone! to have anyone in touching range and so close again!…What about the rest of it?” he insisted.

“The accident wasn’t a lot of fun.”

“You live. It works out okay…If I’m linked with you, what we’re doing can work, Locke. The question is can you go on with me totally, from that last point?”

I thought about it. We were face-to-face, inches apart, covered in tepid water, and I thought how comfortable it felt, touching my friend who I’d missed so long, now healed and not even green anymore, and how maybe
he
might have been what I’d been missing for so long, searching for, going back to the fen country for.

“I can go with you from that point, Finn.”

“Good. Then that will be our life, Locke.”

“But…how?”

“The helmets and what you drank work with my altered chemistry. It exploits all of our molecular energy to…solidify the change. That’s as much as I can explain without equations and formulas and shit like that.”

“Who’ll turn the helmets off?” I asked,

He smiled. “They won’t have to be turned off. Anyway, after a while the battery would be drained…You don’t get it, I see. But that’s all right. You’ll see eventually.”

“You mean we’ll live inside that altered past reality you created for us before?” I tried to understand.

“That
we
created!” he corrected
.

“
We
created,” I agreed.

“Yes, exactly. But it won’t also happen that they’ll find our bodies here in this tub. We won’t end up being some App-net headline.”

Now I really didn’t understand. “It won’t happen like that? Why not?”

He smiled. “You were always the smart one, Locke. But all I can say is that you’ll see.”

So I thought a little more and then said, “Fine, Finn. Any time!”

“I know Locke. I know. You’re my guy. To the end and beyond that.”

Without any fear at all, I switched on the helmets.

I was not there, chest-to-chest, facing him in the bath, but I was inside that last scene we had together, on the ship, on that mission to Beta C. and I was just inside the hull hatch, being carried into the internal air chamber by Finn, who had my air tube somehow shoved into a small breather and he was saying, “Any second. Any second. There we go!” We were inside the ship and they were ripping my helmet off and cutting my suit off me and I could see headless Bernstein-Idaho in the outer lock, being grappled by Lea to fit into the hatch. Next I was flat on my back on a levi-gurney with a mask over my mouth and we were charging down the corridor, the Med Tech guy and Finn and me, and then I was being shoved into a hyperbaric chamber and it was slammed shut. I faced the tiny window and there Finn was, on the other side, as they did a complete pressure readjustment, him saying things to me, his lips forming the words, “You’re not going anywhere, Locke. You’re not going anywhere!”

Then a buzzer went off and the chamber was opened and I was pulled out and he fell onto me, no hiding feelings anymore.

He slept next to me in i.c. that night, and when I got the go-ahead to leave the next day, he’d already requisitioned a double dorm unit for us and set up procedures for a public ship-union. I kept thinking, how can this be happening? How can twenty-seven years have just vanished? Am I totally electrochemically drugged?

It seemed to be actual. We were existing in real-time again, not living in sudden spurts and lapses, as in the beginning, but minute by minute, hour by hour. At last we completed our tour and we podded-up and took the Big Sleeper back to the Service H.Q. at Ganymede Station.

There we were checked out thoroughly, and debriefed. One night in our dorm unit, with bloated Jupiter filling the port windows, Finn told me that he had decided on no more dangerous tours for either of us. So it turned out just as the Delph and Human Techs had predicted. The accident, my near death, the crisis moment, had altered everything for us: for both of our lives.

That’s when I told Finn of the past that I’d already experienced, and that now would never happen—him nearly dying in that flaming lower helm almost a year to come in the future. I also told him what I knew of the future decades too, including the Service’s upcoming, long, eventually successful war against the Bella=Arths.

So we agreed that we would only half retire, remaining in the Service (remaining on full Nanos for decades more): teaching and training personnel; quietly but surely instilling fighting skills and attitudes in our young charges.

They would end up needing both, as it had been a century or more since any human had experienced war. But we two wouldn’t stray from our solar system, not for a very long time. Meanwhile Finn wanted me to go meet his family and get what he termed “legally hitched” on Earth and spend real-time weeks of R and R after.

I told him yes, but that I’d need one day for some unfinished business; I’d join him later: I had somewhere to go to first. He never even asked where I was off to once we landed at the Stockton Hub—just hugged me good-bye.

I noticed once again how subtly the landscape alters as you head west toward Martinez, first little encroachments like tiny fingers of water, with here a cottage, there a mound-house in a field of reeds. Then it’s all water, all around you in one form or another: nothing solid at all.

I got off at the platform built over the dilapidated ancient surface-train station. And there was a two-seat solar Spinner waiting for me. I knew my way, of course, and I was soon hovering over the familiar house in the marshes. I alit at the house’s air-dock and a redheaded woman came to meet me, and she drew me indoors.

Cynara sat me down and offered me tea as I knew she would and she looked as young as she’d been when we first delivered Finn’s body.

She knew nothing of who I was, or why I was there, or of what we’d experienced together for decades. She only just remembered Scott Alan Finn: a foolish, handsome boy she’d met long ago. She had no idea why he would have mentioned her name to me. I gently probed and probed and finally she said: “Come to think of it, one night, we talked for hours, after some concert event or other. I might have spoken of peat preservation or peat burial, I don’t recall.”

What she did recall was what a girlfriend who had dated him a bit and known him since they were children together had said about Finn because it had turned Cynara off him: “His greatest asset is his persistence. He always gets what he sets out for.” She asked me, “Is that true?”

“He got me.”

I repeated all that to Finn a few nights later, at his folks’ house, on our wedding night, floating over Crater Lake: another of the “benefits” we in the Service receive. It was cold and cloudless out of doors, and looking into the black waters of that deepest natural lake in the country, we saw the sky reflected: an ocean of stars.

Finn didn’t remember Cynara very well either. “It was always you, Locke,” he told me. “Knew it the minute I met you. It just took me a while to realize it!”

We’ll settle eventually at Crater Lake, me and Finn. If we manage to live out our Service we’ll retire to that lake field of stars and probably, for a change of scenery, to one of those artificial isles west of Maui. We can afford both on our substantial pensions.

Or maybe not. Maybe we’ll end our days in a levitating wooden cottage, ten feet above the snipe and fowl and those sea eagle–haunted marshes, beyond all polluting transportation or Tech-industry, in what’s left above ground of the Bay Area’s green and isolated fen country.

Felice Picano is the author of over twenty books, including the literary memoirs
Ambidextrous
,
Men Who Loved Me
, and
A House on the Ocean, a House on the Bay
as well as the best-selling novels
Like People in History
,
Looking Glass Lives
,
The Lure
, and
Eyes
. He is the founder of Sea Horse Press, one of the first gay publishing houses, which later merged with two other publishing houses to become the Gay Presses of New York. With Andrew Holleran, Robert Ferro, Edmund White, and George Whitmore, he founded the Violet Quill Club to promote and increase the visibility of gay authors and their works. He has edited and written for
The Advocate
,
Blueboy
,
Mandate
,
GaysWeek
, and
Christopher Street,
and has been a culture reviewer for
The Los Angeles Examiner
,
San Francisco Examiner
,
New York Native
,
Harvard Lesbian & Gay Review
, and the
Lambda Book Report
. He has won the Ferro-Grumley Award for best gay novel (
Like People in History
) and the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award for short story. He was a finalist for the Ernest Hemingway Award and has been nominated for five Lambda Literary Awards and two American Library Association Awards. He was recently named a Lambda Literary Foundation Pioneer and one of OUT’s GLBT People of the Year. A native of New York, Felice Picano now lives in Los Angeles.

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