Woman On The Edge Of Time (9 page)

She felt then that sense of approach almost as if someone were standing behind her wanting to come through, that presence brushing her consciousness. The feeling was at once an
irritant and a relief. She wiped her nose on her sleeve, lacking anything else, and made a grimace of disgust at the sloppiness. How she hated to be dirty. She felt ugly, bloated with the drugs, skin deadened and flaking, lips dry and split, hair lank and dirty and bleared with feverish sweat. Her throat was sore and the back of her neck ached all the time.

Vanity before a hallucination? If she could so clearly imagine him, why couldn’t she imagine herself clean and beautiful? At least a proper hallucination would be some kind of company, so she let her eyes shut, leaned against the wall, and permitted the presence to fill her. For perhaps ten minutes she remained thus, head back and eyes tightly closed.

“Connie, at last! Fasure it’s been three weeks!”

“This is the first time I’ve been by myself since the first night.”

“Are we responsible for your being here?”

She did not immediately open her eyes. “No.”

“Fasure? You’re not just painting the bones?”

She briefly described the night of her commitment. When she opened her eyes she saw Luciente consulting the watch that whispered.

“It’s running hard for me to comprend,” Luciente said in his high excited voice. “Might as well be Yif. Your mem has a sweet friend who abuses per and who … sold your sister?”

“Her pimp, Geraldo. And she’s my niece, not my sister. Geraldo is a pig! He didn’t want her to have his baby.”

Luciente looked deeply embarrassed. Passing his hand over his mouth, he shifted from haunch to haunch, squatting before her. “Uh, I know you people ate a great deal of meat. But was it common to feed upon person? Or is this slavery, I thought wiped out by your time?”

The urge to cry was still burning her eyes. “Sometimes we have nothing to feed on but our pain and each other … . What’s that about meat?”

“How did this Geraldo sell per flesh then, and pigs too?”

“She hustles!” Seeing blank incomprehension, she snorted and said harshly, “Puta. Tart. Whore.”

Luciente began fiddling with the wrist gadget again till she reached out to stop him. Small bones he had, little heavier than hers. “Who do you talk to with that?”

“My kenner? It ties into an encyclopedia—a knowledge computer. Also into transport and storage. Can serve as locator-speaker.” Luciente’s face changed suddenly and he smiled. “Oh. Had to do with sex. Prostitution? I’ve read of this and seen a drama too about person who sold per body to feed per family!”

“I suppose nobody in your place sells it, huh? Like they say about Red China.”

“We don’t buy or sell anything.”

“But people do go to bed, I guess?” Connie sat up, holding herself across the breasts as she shook back her lank hair. “I suppose since you’re alive and got born, they must still do that little thing, when they aren’t too busy with their computers?”

“Two statements don’t follow.” Luciente gave her a broad smile. “Fasure we couple. Not for money, not for a living. For love, for pleasure, for relief, out of habit, out of curiosity and lust. Like you, no?”

Like sunshine in her cell, he looked so human squatting there she heard herself ask half coyly, “Do you like women?”

“All
women?” Luciente looked at her with that slight scowl of confusion. “Oh, for coupling? In truth, the most intense mating of my life was a woman named Diana—the fire that annealed me, as Jackrabbit says in a poem. But it was a binding, you know, we obsessed. Not good for growing. We clipped each other. But I love Diana still and sometimes we come together … . Mostly I’ve liked males.”

“I thought so.” Why should that make her feel gloomy? He had shown no signs of sexual interest, except for all that patting and hand holding. But shouldn’t a figment of her mind at least satisfy her? Perhaps being crazy was always built on self-hatred and she would, of course, see a queer.

“You’re lonely here, and I just let you down. Truly, I’m not rigid and I like you.” Luciente took her hands between his warm, dry, calloused palms. “What is this place? You seem to be locked in. I’ve seen holies about your prisons and concentration camps. Is this such a place?”

“No. I’d rather be in prison. Unless you’re on an indeterminate, at least you know when you’re getting out. They can keep me here till I go out with my feet in the air. It’s a loony bin—a mental hospital.”

Luciente consulted his wrist. “Oh, a madhouse! We have them.” He looked around. “But it seems … ugly. Bottoming.”

“Are yours so fancy?”

“Open to the air and pleasant, fasure. I never stayed in one myself—”

“Big deal!” She pulled her hands free.

“But Jackrabbit has—just before we fixed each other, and we’ve been sweet friends three years. Bee and I have been lovers twelve now, isn’t that strange? Not to stale in so long. And Diana goes mad every couple of years. Has visions. Per earth quakes. Goes down. Emerges and sets to work again with harnessed passion … . But I have to say this—in truth you don’t seem mad to me. I know I’ve never gone down myself, I’m too … flatfooted … earthen somehow, so it’s beyond my experience. Bee tells me that I’m the least receptive person in our base, and person has to scream in my ear to get through … . I don’t mean to pry or make accusations, but are you truly mad?”

“Here they say if you think you aren’t sick, it’s a sign of sickness.”

“You’re sick?”

“Sick. Mad.”

“We do not use these words to mean the same thing.” Luciente tilted his head to one side. “Could it be you’re bluffing? Truly, I have never gone down, but I have been close to Diana when person was far inward, and … you seem too coherent. Perhaps you’re tired, unable to cope for a while? Sometimes, among us, this happens.”

“I don’t think there’s a thing wrong with me, aside from seeing you—that’s the best sign of being crazy I can think of.”

“No, I’m in touch with you, really.” Luciente scowled at the room. “This place bottoms me. Would you like to take a walk?”

“The door’s locked. Or do you have a key?”

“Not a walk here or now. I wish to invite you home with me for a short visit Say an hour?”

“You mean the way you come here?”

“Wouldn’t you like to see my village?”

“I’d like seeing anything but these four filthy walls, believe me. But could I get back?” She hooted with laughter. “Why
should I care? Better if I get stuck anyplace instead of rotting here!”

“Sadly, you can’t get stuck in my time. A lapse of attent would probably break our contact.” Luciente rose gracefully and extended his hand for her to grasp. “As I’ve remarked, the appearance is not a physical presence, but is … as if it were. Now we’ll see if this trick works. To confess, I haven’t a wispy guess if I can really pull you into my time. But the worst that can happen is that we open our eyes and are still in this drab room. Only fit for a storeroom for machinery!”

“You ought to try it twenty-four hours a day. It breaks you, finally.”

“Then why did you come here? It seems inadequate.”

“I didn’t walk, you can count on that. I was dragged screaming. My brother Luis committed me.”

“Our madhouses are places where people retreat when they want to go down into themselves—to collapse, carry on, see visions, hear voices of prophecy, bang on the walls, relive infancy—getting in touch with the buried self and the inner mind. We all lose parts of ourselves. We all make choices that go bad … . How can another person decide that it is time for me to disintegrate, to reintegrate myself?”

“Here you get put in if your family doesn’t want you around or other people don’t, and that’s about the long and short of it.” She finally stuck out her hand and let Luciente pull her to her feet.

“The first time is supposed to be the hardest, but frankly, we’re the first contacts to try. That’s the theory anyway, for what it weighs. Here comes the practice,
NINO.”

“Nino? Niño?”

“NINO
: Nonsense In, Nonsense Out—that’s the motto on every kenner. It means your theory is no better than your practice, or your body than your nutrition. Your encyclopedia only produces the information or misinformation fed it. So on.” Luciente gently drew her against him and held her in his arms so their foreheads touched. “You’re supposed to be a top catcher and I’m supposed to be a superstrong sender … . As people say, with theory and a nail, you’ve got a nail.”

Pressed reluctantly, nervously against Luciente, she felt the coarse fabric of his shirt and … breasts! She jumped back.

“You’re a woman! No, one of those sex-change operations.”

“If you hop around, we’ll never get it right … . Of course I’m female.” Luciente looked a little disgusted.

She stared at Luciente. Now she could begin to see him/her as a woman. Smooth hairless cheeks, shoulder-length thick black hair, and the same gentle Indian face. With a touch of sarcasm she said, “You’re well muscled for a woman.” In anger she turned on her heel and stalked a few paces away. A dyke, of course. That bar in Chicago where the Chicana dykes hung out shooting pool and cursing like men, passing comments on the women who walked by. Yet they had never given her that sense of menace a group of men would—after all, under the clothes they were only women too.

“I’m not unusually strong.” Luciente’s face was screwed up with confusion. She still held out her hands to draw Connie to her. “About middling. We do more physical work than most people did in your time, I believe. It’s healthier, and of course you lugs were burning up all those fossil fuels … . You seem surprised that I am female?”

Feeling like a fool, Connie did not choose to reply. Instead she paced to the locked door with its peephole and then to the radiator. Luciente spoke, she moved with that air of brisk unself-conscious authority Connie associated with men. Luciente sat down, taking up more space than women ever did. She squatted, she sprawled, she strolled, never thinking about how her body was displayed. It was hard to pace with dignity in the tiny space between the stained mattress and the wall. Connie no longer felt in the least afraid of Luciente.

“Please, Connie.” Luciente came over and cautiously put an arm around her shoulders. “I don’t understand what’s wrong. Let’s give it a try. We didn’t even carry out our experiment. Do you really want to stay here all day? It doesn’t bottom you?”

“To the bone.” She stood awkwardly and let Luciente pull her close and lean their foreheads together. Hardly ever did she embrace another woman along the full length of their bodies, and it was hard to ease her mind. She could feel Luciente concentrating, she could feel that cone of energy bearing down on her. It reminded her of the old intensity of a man wanting … something—her body, her time, her comfort—that bearing down that wanted to grab her and push her
under. But she was weary and beaten and she let herself yield. What had she to lose?

Although she could sense in Luciente a bridled impatience, the woman held her gently. A harnessed energy to be doing drove this plant geneticist with breasts like a fertility goddess under the coarse fabric of a red work shirt. A woman who liked her: she felt that too. A rough ignorant goodwill caressed her.

Then she smelled salt in the air, a marsh tang. A breeze ruffled the loose rag of dress, chilling her calves. Under her feet she felt stone. A gull mewed, joined by another somewhere above her. Luciente relaxed her grip. “Home free. Will you stand there all day with your eyelids bolted down? Look!”

Rocket ships, skyscrapers into the stratosphere, an underground mole world miles deep, glass domes over everything? She was reluctant to see this world. Voices far, near, laughter, birds, a lot of birds, somewhere a dog barked. Was that—yes, a rooster crowing at midday. That pried her eyes open. A
rooster?
Fearfully she stared into Luciente’s face, broken open in a grin of triumph. “Where are we?”

“You might try looking around! This is where I live.” Luciente took her by the arm and swung around to her side. “This is our village. Roughly six hundred of us.”

She looked slowly around. She saw … a river, little no-account buildings, strange structures like long-legged birds with sails that turned in the wind, a few large terracotta and yellow buildings and one blue dome, irregular buildings, none bigger than a supermarket of her day, an ordinary supermarket in any shopping plaza. The bird objects were the tallest things around and they were scarcely higher than some of the pine trees she could see. A few lumpy free-form structures overrun with green vines. No skyscrapers, no spaceports, no traffic jam in the sky. “You sure we went in the right direction? Into the future?”

“This is my time, yes! Fasure, look how pretty it is!”

“You live in a village, you said. Way out in the sticks. Like if we went to a city, it’d be … more modern?”

“We don’t have
big
cities—they didn’t work. You seem disappointed, Connie?”

“It’s not like I imagined.” Most buildings were small and randomly scattered among trees and shrubbery and gardens,
put together of scavenged old wood, old bricks and stones and cement blocks. Many were wildly decorated and overgrown with vines. She saw bicycles and people on foot. Clothes were hanging on lines near a long building—shirts flapping on wash lines! In the distance beyond a blue dome cows were grazing, ordinary black-and-white and brown-and-white cows chewing ordinary grass past a stone fence. Intensive plots of vegetables began between the huts and stretched into the distance. On a raised bed nearby a dark-skinned old man was puttering around what looked like spinach plants.

“Got through, uh?” he said to Luciente.

Luciente asked, “Can you see the person from the past?”

“Sure. Had my vision readjusted last month.”

“Zo!” Luciente turned, hopping with excitement. “Good we were cautious in your time. I may be visible there too—that could bring danger!”

“Why isn’t it dangerous for me to be seen here?”

“Everybody knows why you’re here.”

“Everybody except me.” The roofs of the huts—that’s all she could call them—were strange. “What’s on top? Some kind of skylights?”