Recognition (5 page)

I shrugged. “What should there be?”

“You have
crypta
,” Dominic said with
weary patience. “You don’t need the test to prove that. But the
test is essential to learn how strong your gift is, what specific
talents you may have, and most important, to prove to others that
you possess it.” He paused to see if I was following him. “And
then? You live in the commercial world of the Terrans. Surely you
see what comes next. You will be valuable, the owner of a scarce
commodity. The ‘Graven will not want to lose this commodity. There
will be talk of marriage for you, of breeding children—”

“Well, let them talk.” I shrugged again,
although I wasn’t as nonchalant as I pretended. Dominic’s
insistence was making me nervous;
and for no reason
, I
told myself. “It’s rude, insulting, but it’s just talk.” I fell
back on bravado, to hearten us both.

“Fine,” Dominic said, annoyed at my
performance. “You say no to marriage, no to being a brood mare.
Good.” His speech was reverting to its more direct, masculine
style. “What will you do instead? Come back here to that slavery I
saw you in yesterday?”

“Why not?” I asked, pleased by his word for
my rather undemanding job. “Or maybe there’s Eclipsian work I could
do. If I have this
crypta
, surely it’s useful for
something.”

“Yes,” he said, his voice icy with rage,
“there is the greatest use of all—the
crypta
cells in the
signal stations.” Again I had touched on an issue that affected him
too deeply for objectivity. His pupils contracted into pinholes as
his third eyelids, crystalline and transparent, slid slowly over
the irises, before acquiring their full shimmering silver opacity.
There was not a hint of reptilian milky-white. It was a beautiful,
unearthly effect; I felt its erotic power far more intensely, alone
with this man and our connection, than at yesterday’s public
meeting. But I knew instinctively that this particular
transformation meant danger, like a poisonous animal that
advertises its threat with bright color.

I held back the questions I so wanted to
ask—what the “signal stations” were, what the “cells” in them
consisted of—and waited for him to regain his composure. He had
shut off part of his mind from me, inadvertently demonstrating one
of his earlier remarks. Despite all our mental sympathy, he was
keeping this information, and his angry feelings engendered by his
thoughts about it, behind some kind of barrier that even our strong
communion could not breach.

Slowly his third eyelids retracted, the
pupils dilating slightly, the irises showing their natural pale
gray. “Only the most promising among us are chosen to work in the
stations,” Dominic said. “And they train from the time the gift
stabilizes, soon after puberty.” He stared blankly at the bathroom
door. “For those not chosen, the only use of
crypta
is
personal, and, of course, the obligation to produce more of it, in
the form of children.”

I fastened onto the one part of this speech
that was vulnerable to my criticism. “Well, that’s what I said
before. All I want is personal, practical information. I won’t be
trying to change the world or even change jobs. It’s just a one-day
test. Why can’t I take it, and worry about the rest of my life
tomorrow?”

“Perhaps that’s as good a solution as any.”
He was able to look at me again, shaking his head at my feminine
dismissal of his depressing logic.

I dared to study his face now that we had
arrived at our uneasy consensus. He looked, if possible, more
uncomfortable than on his arrival after climbing all those stairs.
His face was unevenly red, bright patches standing out on
cheekbones and forehead against the bloodless white of the rest of
his skin. Sweat ran from his hairline in rivulets and glistened in
the creases between wide mouth and jutting nose in his long, narrow
face.

“How can you live in this?” he demanded,
before I could inquire. The heat, that was barely tolerable to me
in my flimsy dress, was sickening to him in his uniform made of a
heavy cloth of woven animal hair. He stood up to unbutton the
tunic, took it off and opened the collar of his shirt.

I went to the kitchen to get him some water.
When I returned he had removed his shirt as well. He took the
bottle gratefully, gulped most of it in a couple of swallows, but
saved some to splash on his face and chest. He fanned himself with
his free hand, his sweaty torso radiating a subtle odor of clean,
masculine skin. A proud, dignified man with patrician manners, yet
he had not asked permission nor apologized. For him, with me, it
was as though we had been lovers for years.

But for me, with him, it was not so simple. I
could not take my eyes from his slender, muscular arms and chest.
Despite the thatch of mane on his head, he was relatively hairless
for a man, with only a smattering of wiry strands around his small,
light-brown nipples. Slim and long-limbed, his shoulders ever so
slightly narrow in proportion to his towering height, he was not
perfect—merely outstanding. The muscles were like a sculptor’s
first chisel marks, sharply defined without an ounce of fat to
smooth them under the fine skin. Nobody looks like this on Terra.
The models are always beefy and overdeveloped; even ordinary people
aspire to the brawny ideal.

Dominic smiled down at me, accustomed to
admiration, accepting it as his due. He was commandant and senior
weapons instructor of the ‘Graven Military Academy, a master
swordsman, teaching the noble art to the sons of lords and gentry.
A thoroughbred and champion in perfect condition, his looks were
proof of his qualifications. He raised an eyebrow at my continued
silence, still waiting for an answer to his last question.

What had he asked?
I thought back.
Oh, yes—heat
. “The thermostat is down as low as it can go.
The thing that controls the heat,” I added at his puzzled look.

“Why don’t you open the window?” he asked,
grimacing at such lack of initiative.

Dominic has an aristocrat’s impatience with
compromise. When I showed him how the window was made on purpose
not to open, he drew his sword and began using the heavy handle to
smash the plastic pane. “You’ll set off the alarm,” I warned as I
grabbed his arm to make him stop.

Instantly we were in
communion
;
apparently any touch was all it took. Unlike last time I sensed a
reticence in him, a self-imposed mental barrier against complete
openness.
What is it?
I asked, surprised by the paradox of
selective totality.

He answered me honestly, as I had come to
expect.
I’ve never had such intense feelings for a
woman
.

Dominic is
vir
, a form of what on
Terra we used to call gay or queer, before we gave up trying to
categorize such elusive concepts. I had known this from the
beginning, as I had known his sex. It was as much a part of his
essence as his noble status and his telepathic ability, and, like
those defining qualities, I had given it no more thought nor seen
it as an obstacle. New as I was to communion, I could tell that,
although it brings a feeling of contentment like the aftermath of
lovemaking, the communion itself is not based on physical
attraction. It does not require sexual compatibility to form the
connection, nor does it necessarily create it. That I was female,
and small, and less than beautiful, should not matter.

That
was the problem. He saw how I
had been affected by his nakedness, knew he could not experience
the same thrill for my body…

Beloved
, he interrupted my growing
discomfiture.
What is this foolishness?
He deliberately
shifted the focus of the communion, scrutinizing my face and what
he could see of my body, in the kind of inspection that most men
give women automatically if surreptitiously, that Dominic usually
applies only to men.
Such delicate beauty, such sensitivity in
communion
, he declared after a breathless interval.
I
am
vir
, not dead from the neck down
. A sensual
inflection colored his thoughts, as it would deepen his voice.

He bent low from his great height to put his
arms around me as I reached up to clasp my hands around his neck.
My breasts pressed against his chest, the nipples stiffening
through the light material. Our communion expanded, magnified with
the increased physical contact. We had found the
other
,
the counterpart in communion, a communion of love. There could be
no “wrong” sex, no sense of unattractiveness or unsuitability—only
delight at the meeting.

We’re both new at this
, I concluded,
glad we had something in common besides the mysterious communion.
I’ve never felt anything this intense for anyone
, I
admitted to him.

Dominic looked into me with those eyes that
were like piercing shafts of light, but now it was he who was
revealed. So many thoughts were swirling around in his mind, over
and under his direct consciousness, that he could easily have
shaded the truth, but he bared himself to me with the extravagance
of true communion. His was more an emotional queerness, a natural
gravitation to the masculine. Uncomplicated sex with a woman had
been required at times, once or twice desire had surprised him, but
love was not something he expected to find with her. And behind it,
a psychological wound, hurtful incidents from the past…

Terrans have strange beliefs and uncouth
standards of behavior
. He was unable to chase the doubts from
his mind. In the course of his service in the Guards he had
encountered Terrans who consider men like him to be criminals,
sinners.
What if she was like them
, he was thinking,
if she was holding back because of it? What if, growing up on
Terra, exceptional though she might be, she had imbibed these ideas
from birth? What if, to her, I am—

Yes, Dominic-Leandro
, I answered
him.
I mean, no
, I amended hastily. “
I love you
,”
I said, thought and spoken word together, plain and direct, a truth
that would escape from my lips or my mind, could not be contained
in his presence.

Dominic’s constraint evaporated at my
frankness. He kissed me, and a shudder of delight moved slowly down
my body, from the top of my head to the sensitive spot between my
legs, to the soles of my feet. As he held me tighter I could feel
his growing arousal and, for the first time in my life, my own
genuine response.

Full communion is already much like sexual
intimacy. When this mental stimulation is combined with the
ordinary physical acts of love, with kiss or caress, the result is
astonishing—joy and exhilaration, triumph and abandon like a kind
of omniscience, a revelation of something previously beyond the
scope of human experience. To know the other, his worst fears and
greatest pleasures, his thoughts and beliefs and motives, to be
revealed to him in the same way, my hidden self unfurling at a word
or a touch, open and receptive to his slightest wish—there could be
no turning away from this.

I returned his kiss with clumsy eagerness,
unused to wanting to, my head swimming, overwhelmed with so many
new emotions. I wanted this incredible feeling to go on forever,
until our minds and our bodies succumbed to the inevitable, became
one being, as they were obviously meant to be. And all the time
that we savored each other, through mouth and mind, tongue and
brain, his thoughts spoke of love. Desire, yes, and passion, but
more—that I was dear to him, necessary—

A noise reverberated in my head and I came to
the surface from our deep communion. The cracked window acted like
a prism as the rising sun, still low in the sky, broke through the
clouds, throwing a distorted rainbow of maroons and violets over
us. I blinked in the light as if waking from sleep, my third
eyelids descending with erotic languor, amazed to find myself
tingling with excitement, standing on my toes, stretching to kiss
this tall man who, even so, had to stoop to meet my lips—not that
it appeared to bother him. At dawn, the dead zone for me, a time
when, if I feel anything, it isn’t good. A line from an ancient
poem came into my mind:
When the dawn comes up like
thunder
…

Dominic skipped ahead, pulling the verses
from my memory.
Bloody lot she cared for idols when I kissed
her where she stood
, he said, matching his action to the
words.
That is lovely
, he declared when we parted to
breathe.

Yes
, I agreed.
Kipling
.

Is that what they call kissing on
Terra?
he said, laughing at his joke to show he had understood
my meaning. His laugh was not yesterday’s grating screech. It was
deep and warm, like his speaking voice, as he expressed his
happiness.

The intercom buzzed for the third time, in
angry bursts. The concierge’s voice came through, harassed and
irritable. The police were still in the lobby, she said.

Dominic and I let go of each other,
exchanging a guilty look. His guardsmen had been waiting all this
while. We were hot, not just from the overheated apartment, and
breathing heavily. “Come with me,” Dominic whispered. “Don’t go to
the Terrans, who value you so little.”

“But you’re the one who doesn’t want me to
take this test,” I said. My voice was low, husky with the passion
that still held us in its grip.
Perhaps I should just stay
here
, I thought.
Why expose myself to the unknown perils
of this ‘Graven Assembly?

And never explore your gift?
he
chided me.
Never find a place for yourself?
He touched his
sword hilt in a habitual confident gesture.
I will protect you.
You have only to decide and I will support your choice against all
challenge
. He had reversed himself, as I had almost done,
making my own argument to me, backing it up with his usual method
of defense.