Catch the Lightning (6 page)

The door opened a crack. “Tina? What are you doing up so late?” A chain rattled and the door opened, revealing a sleepy Bonita in her nightgown and a fuzzy pink sweater with pearly buttons. A black braid fell over her shoulder.

I didn’t know her that well. We said hello when we saw each other, but given the differences in our work schedules that wasn’t often. She had always seemed to like me, though.

I spoke awkwardly. “It’s—uh—I needed to ask…”

She took my arm and pulled me inside. “What’s the matter, honey?”

“Nothing. I’m fine. I need sort of a favor.”

“A favor?”

“Do you have— I mean, I guess Harry would have them…”

“Have what?” She yawned. “It’s late, Tina.”

I flushed. “A condom.”

“Oh.” She came wide awake. “Are you sure?”

“Well, it’s better than if I don’t have one.”

“That’s not what I meant.” She considered me. “Is it Jake? Don’t let him push—”

“It’s not Jake.” He had been my first and only boyfriend, and we had broken up months ago. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have woken you up.” I felt more foolish by the minute. I backed toward the door. “You go back to sleep. I won’t—”

“Wait.”

“Bonita laid her hand on my arm. “Stay here. I’ll be right back.”

She disappeared into the bedroom and reappeared with a box. She put it in my hands, folding my fingers around it. “Tina, think,” she said. “Before you rush into something.” Her expression reminded me of my mother. “Why don’t you stay here tonight? You can sleep on the couch.”

I shook my head. “Thanks, Nita. But no thanks.” I backed out the door. “
Muchas gracias
."Then I was out in the hall and running to my apartment. It was a relief when I heard her door close.

Althor was still sitting on the bed. His curiosity tickled my nose like pepper. When I sat next to him, he eased the box out of my clenched hand. He opened it and pulled out a small square of foil, turning it this way and that.

“What do we do with it?” he asked.

“When it’s—well, that’s the time. You know. With us and all. That’s when you do the thing.”

He laughed. “I must be slow tonight. I have no understanding of what you just said.”

My face burned. “I’ll show you. When it’s time.”

“All right.” He put the foil back in the box and set it on the floor near the head of the bed. As he turned to me, the tickle of his curiosity faded from my skin. He replaced it with a real tickle, the touch of his finger as he trailed it along my arm to my shoulder, then down my neckline.

Althor eased us down to lie on the bed. Holding me close, he worked at the laces on my uniform, pulled and pushed, ran his finger over the holes. But he couldn’t get the laces undone. Finally he made a frustrated noise. “Does it come with manual explaining how it works?”

I laughed, a soft shy sound. Pushing my hand between us, I unfastened the laces. After he pulled off the bodice, and the bustier under it, the cool air raised goose bumps on my breasts. Then it was warm again, as he hugged me. While he worked on my skirt, I fumbled with his vest, having no more luck than he had with my clothes. I found no hooks, snaps, buttons, ties, or anything. My hand just slid over the leather, or what I thought was leather. It was actually a synthetic material designed to insulate against cold and heat.

He pushed up on his elbow and ran his finger down the front of his vest, popping it open. I had no idea how he did it, but there it was. Or wasn’t. His chest was beautiful, muscles and smooth planes, with a dusting of gold hairs. Strange, though. The aureoles around his nipples glinted in the dim light, more like metal than the rest of his skin. I touched one, expecting it to be cold. But $ wasn’t. It just looked like metal.

Althor took off all my clothes except the stockings and garter belt. He kept playing with them, not so much as if he had never seen such clothes, but as if he never expected to meet a woman who actually wore them. To me, they were just the impractical blue lace stockings that came with the uniform. I didn’t realize that to him, they were lingerie in a style over three hundred years old.

Watching him undress almost made me forget how nervous I felt. He was gorgeous. His body was all muscles, wide at the shoulders and narrow at the hips. When he lay down again, I told myself I wasn’t embarrassed. In truth, I was so self-conscious I could hardly think.

Althor spoke against my ear. “What’s wrong?”

I blushed. “I’m okay.” Wrapping my arms around his torso, I ran my hands down his spine, from his neck to waist, exploring his muscles, his socket, his—

His socket?

Socket. He had a socket. At the base of his spine, just below his waist. I probed the circle with my fingertips. The opening was less than half an inch in diameter.

Althor kissed my ear. “It’s for a psiphon plug.”

I had an image of a gas station, attendant siphoning fuel into his body. It was too strange. Then, in the midst of my confused whirl of thoughts, Althor started trying to enter.

“Wait.” Panicked, I forgot the socket. “Althor, wait. The thing.”

“This?” He picked up the foil packet from the floor. “You must show me what to do. I have no data on this stored in my memory.”

His memory? I was making love with a guy who thought he was a computer. I wondered if everyone’s first time was this strange. I still wonder that, actually. Not too many people lose their virginity to an Imperial Jagernaut.

When I pushed his shoulders, he hesitated, confusion sparking around him like fireflies in the dusky night. Then he figured out what I wanted and sat up on his heels. I also sat up, too embarrassed to look at him. I took the packet and opened it. “Put this on.”

“On?”

I touched him. “There.”

“Ah. I see.” He spoke softly. “You do it.”

Somehow I managed it. It was nice. Sexy. We lay down again, embracing each other. Being with him didn’t feel anything like I had always imagined, though. In fact, it wouldn’t even work. Finally he. guided himself with his hand—and it hurt. I tensed and he slowed down, moving gently, in an easy rhythm. Although I was nervous, I liked that, the way he moved, steady and strong.

The sparks created by his mood intensified, glitters of red, orange, gold, small fires darting against my thoughts. It was disorienting. Although I had always experienced the emotions of others through my senses, it had just been something that happened. Althor directed those sparks as if they were soldiers under his command.

“Tina.” His voice Was husky against my ear. “Let me in.”

Let him in? Hadn’t I already done that?

His sparks intensified—

10 path established
. The words flashed in my mind.
Upload commenced
.

I jerked, stifling a cry. He kissed me, soothing my reaction, and murmured in a language I didn’t understand.

Download
. The word flashed by. He had “let me in” as well, to experience his sensations as if they were mine. His peak swelled like a Baja wave during a storm, higher and fuller, until finally he jerked and pushed me down into the mattress with his hips, driving out my breath. The wave broke, hitting us both with the same force, and the sparks around us blended into a blur.

After a while I became aware of the room again. Sparks were winking out one by one, fireflies leaving the beach after the wave receded. Althor lay breathing deeply, thoughts quiet, Baja drowsing in the moonlight.

Eventually he said, “Am I too heavy?”

“It’s fine, Thor.” I felt ultrasensitive then, like an instrument that had been tuned and then not played.

“Thor?” He smiled drowsily. “No one ever said my name that way before.”

“Thor was the god of thunder. He had a magic hammer and he threw thunderbolts at the Earth.”

Althor rolled onto his side, fitting my curves into his angles. “I promise not to throw thunderbolts at you.”

I smiled. “You just did.”

“So do I become frog now?”

“That’s okay. You can stay a prince.”

He laughed. “You refresh me.”

“I do?
¿Por qué?
”

“Most people fawn all over me.”

I could see why. A lot about him still made no sense, though. I slid my hand around his waist, touching the hole in his spine. “It’s a psiphon socket,” he said. “It’s how I am installed in the Jag”

“Installed?” You installed parts. Not people.

“The socket connects to the biomech web in my body,” Althor said. “I have them in my neck, wrists, and ankles too. They link me into the Jag and, through its Evolving Intelligence brain, into the psibernet.”

I had no idea how to respond. “Not many people can do that.”

“This is why Jags pilots are so few.” He yawned. “You know.”

“Know what?”

“Like you.” He closed his eyes. “Like me. Not many like us to study it…”

Study? I wasn’t sure what he meant. “I’m not in school now. But I’m saving for Cal State.”

Althor opened his eyes. “You are not in school?”

“Not now.”

“No neurotraining?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

He stared at me, wide awake now. “Who taught you to control your neural functions so well? Or to manipulate neural webs the way you did mine, on the street last night and here tonight?”

“No one taught me anything.”

“You teach yourself?”

“Yeah, I teach myself.” I thought he was about to do the “sweet, stupid Tina” bit I often heard back then. “What, is it such a big surprise I have a brain?”

“No,” Althor said. “Many Kyle operators have a high, intelligence, a consequence of the increased concentration of neural structures in their brain.”

“Kyle what?”

“You are a Kyle Affector and Effector.”

“Oh. Yeah. How did I forget?”

“Tina, I not make this up.”

I didn’t know how to respond. I thought if I asked questions and it turned out to be an elaborate game, I would look foolish. Or he might be crazy. He didn’t sound crazy, though. He was too outwardly directed, too aware of other people and interested in them. He also had a sense of humor about himself. Nor would that have explained the sockets.

I spoke carefully. “What did that mean, the ‘upload’ and ‘download’ bit?”

“You saw that? In English?” When I nodded, he said, “My web must be translating for you.” He rubbed his fingers over the back of my neck. Then he turned over my hand so the inside of my wrist faced the ceiling. “Yet you have no biomech enhancements.”

“I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

“Gods.” He dropped my wrist. “It’s a crime.”

“I didn’t do nothing wrong.” I made a frustrated noise. “Anything. I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“I mean it is a crime you go unnoticed because no one here sees what you are.”

“I’m no different from anyone else.” Back then, I was afraid that if I admitted otherwise, I would spend my life alone, an emotional freak too sensitive to tolerate human contact.

“It’s true,” Althor said. “You are a Kyle transmitter and receiver.”

“A what?”

He told me that Kyle operators have two microscopic brain organs, the Kyle Afferent Body and Kyle Efferent Body. The KAB and KEB. We also have paras in our cerebral cortex, specialized neural structures that humans without our genetic makeup lack. Unique receptor sites in the paras respond to a neurotransmitter called psiamine, which only Kyle operators produce.

If you are a Kyle operator, then essentially your KAB picks up electrical signals from the brains of other people and relays the data to your paras. The paras interpret it for your mind. Your KEB increases the strength and density of the signals your own brain sends out. More exactly, the quantum distribution of your brain couples more strongly than normal with the distributions of other people’s brains.

“Your KAB receives signals,” Althor said. “Your KEB transmits them.”

“What’s in the signal?” I asked.

“Whatever is in your mind. Most Kyle operators don’t have the sensitivity to decode data as complicated as human thought. Perhaps simple thought, if it’s intense, and sent by someone nearby. But usually it is just emotion.”

I hesitated. “Sometimes I see what people feel. Like a mist. Or sparkles. I hear it or smell it. Or taste it. Or feel it, not in my mind but with my skin.”

“This is strange.”

“Yeah. And everything you told me was normal.”

He smiled. “I meant it’s unusual for Kyle organs to interact with sensory input. The neural pathways to your sensory centers must tangle with those to your paras. So the emotional input you upload triggers sensory responses.”

Just like that, he made a strangeness that had bothered me my entire life understandable. “How can you think you know anything about me?”

“You know how,” he said. “You feel it too. Why do you resist?” His voice gentled. “You are beautiful, like light. You shine, so lovely and bright and—and I don’t know the words. I am near you and I feel soothed. Healed. I had not known even that I am injured, yet now I am healed.”

I squeezed his hand. “You’re okay, you know that?”

“I didn’t do so much for you, though, did I?” He slid his hand between my legs. “I can still help. Just tell me what you like.”

I couldn’t talk about it. “I’m fine. Really.”

“You’re so tense.” Althor brought his hand up to cup my cheek. “Do I—” He stopped. “What is that?”

“What is what?”

“Where I touched your face—it made a dark streak.” He looked at his fingers. “Is this your time?”

“My time for what?”

“Your menstrual cycle.”

Why did he ask so many embarrassing questions? “No.”

“Then why you bleed?”

“I’m bleeding.?”

His face paled. “Tina—you have done this before, haven’t you?” .

“Done what?”

“Been with a man.”

So. The Question. “No.” Before he could respond, I added, “But you don’t have to worry. I’ll be eighteen in five months. Honesdy. No one will send the cops after you.”

He stared at me. “You’re only seventeen years old?”

“Yes.”

“Earth years?”

“Yeah, Earth years.”

“Gods.” He flopped onto his back. “I ought to be crack-whipped.”

I smirked. “I will if you want. But I’ve never done that either.” Whatever a crackwhip was.