Master of None (18 page)

He swallowed. “About what anybody knows. Or thinks they do. Slightly more than nothing. All Pilots are Vanar women.”

“And they live forever?”

“You told me that wasn’t true,” he pointed out.

“I also told you it was.” She set down the cup and slid around the table to sit beside him, her legs curled over his. Catching hold of the end of his sati, she pulled it, making him lean into her.

“I live inside the Worm, Nathan,” she said softly, her lips an inch from his. He could feel the heat of her breath against his cheek, the earthy scent of sweetened coffee. “My friends are all Pilots, exactly like me. We never meet the people on the ships we take from one place to the next. We don’t care about them, it’s the
going
we live for. When we must leave our nice, safe Pilotship, we come to Vanar where we were conceived, like salmon returning upstream to spawn.”

He realized what the silver-scaled fish in the huge pond were, and glanced in their direction. She smiled, one side of her mouth quirked up wryly. “Vanar is a place where people never ask us questions, because those answers they don’t already know, they’re too polite to pry. Where Pilots are treated like sacred lepers. Where we never have to answer, even to ourselves, Who are you?
What
are you?”

She slowly unwound the sati from around his shoulders, strong hands stroking his bare skin as she uncovered it.

“Consider the brutal nature of power.” She kissed his shoulder, her lips following the curve of his clavicle toward his throat. Her breath was humid against his skin, alternately warm and cool between the words. “When we were monkeys, power was at its most basic level. Big strong male monkey beats up and fucks little helpless female monkey. Being perverse creatures, female monkeys are attracted to the biggest, meanest monkey around. The monkey with the most power got the most sex and had the most progeny. Sex and power. Power and sex. They are the essentials of survival, they can’t be separated.”

His unclipped sati fell off his shoulders, and she pushed up his mati to comb her fingers through the fine hairs on his chest, following their descent down the hollow of his rib cage, stroking his stomach. His hands shook as he unfastened her plain brooch pinning the black cloth above her shoulder and pulled away the fabric, her puckered nipples charcoal black against translucently white skin.

“Then the monkeys learned to walk and talk and invented money. Now it was the monkey with the most money who had the most power. But still they were monkeys; it was still the big monkeys who controlled the money and the power. And the sex.” She pressed him gently down to the soft floor, kissing him as she pushed open his sati, her hands sweeping over his shoulders.

“Then along come the Worms,” he murmured, uncurling the length of fabric from her torso.

“Oh, yes,” she whispered into his ear, and he shivered as she bit the lobe gently, her tongue tracing a soft line around the shell. “Then came the Worms. Without them, we would all just be grubby clots of life infecting planets in isolation, waving obsolete greetings to each other, exiled across the vast distances. But with the Worms, there is trade. Flight is trade is money is power is sex. . . .”

She cupped him in her hand through the cloth of his sati, her palm squeezing the shaft while the tips of her fingers rolled his balls between them. He moaned softly as his head arched back, needles of pleasure spiraling through his legs.

“And only women can safely Pilot the great ships through the lair of the celestial Worm.” Her body pressed against him, her hands sliding up his ribs, over his arms. “All of a sudden, power didn’t depend on which monkey was the biggest and strongest or even the smartest any longer, did it?” She smiled, hitched herself up against his chest, and slid down against his cock, taking him inside her in one long, un-hurried thrust. She leaned down to kiss him.

Conversation ceased. This time, they made love slowly, kicking away their tangled sati, luxuriating in the freedom of the expanse of thick, deep carpet, hands and lips and sweat intermingled. They rolled like wrestlers, reveling in the space. And this time, she made noise. Glorious sounds growling in her throat. The pressure grew against his spine, seething along the nerve ends in his skin. She rode him expertly, balanced no matter how violently his hips rolled and plunged against her, his spine arching.

Then she threw back her head and moaned, a single long wail of rapture as contractions shuddered up the length of his penis.

He was breaking, falling, and he came and came and came.

His thoughts eventually reorganized back into an orderly state, an awareness he had been staring at the sky above him for a long time, stars shimmering against the blackness between the outline of the silver-filigreed girders. She lay curled against him, ivory on gold, one arm across his chest, one leg draped over his thighs. Her head tucked into his shoulder, tangled hair under his chin. He turned on his side to look down at her face.

Her eyes were open, her dreamy gaze at nothing interrupted as she looked up at him.

“So why can’t men be Pilots?” he asked.

She laughed, and rolled onto her back, her neck resting on his arm. He placed his hand splay-fingered over her stomach. Amazed at how huge and ugly it seemed against her body, he studied his own hand as if it were the first time he had ever seen it: heavy corded ten-dons, the scuffed knuckles, green-blue veins under the network of minuscule creases. The downy hair on her belly was as white as her skin, making him think of a wild animal, caged and unpredictable.

“Always questions.” She sighed, a long inhale of satisfaction and soft exhale. “You don’t have the right chromosomes.”

She curled and rolled to her feet in a single fluid movement, padding naked toward the alcove. The spider machine watched passively as she opened a small cabinet and brought out two fragile glasses and a decanter of dark wine. Nathan sat up against cushions as she poured the drinks, her back toward him.

She was far from beautiful, he realized. Black hair snarled down her back, not quite covering her buttocks, their angular muscles cut into flat planes. Hips jutted out of her too-thin body, legs sinewy under unnaturally pale skin. Her knees were slightly knobby, and when she turned, a glass in each hand, he could make out each rib under tiny breasts, the slight gap between her thin legs.

She smiled as if she could hear his thoughts, and when she walked toward him, the unattractiveness vanished. She moved with consummate grace, total control, and when she knelt to hand him a glass, the ache of desire had already stirred again.

She sipped her wine, then leaned to kiss him, the wine’s chill and tartness against her lips. Settling back on her haunches, legs tucked under her, she said, “All Pilots are women, but not all women can be Pilots.”

“Why not?” he asked, sipping his own wine.

She grinned. “
They
don’t have the right chromosomes. Family connections are all-important to the Vanar, as you may have figured out by now. But Families don’t care too much about bloodlines. It’s money that runs in their veins, and controlling the money means making sure there are plenty of competent daughters to run the Families. A woman needs an heir, she adopts a daughter. She sleeps with a dozen men, who’s the father of the children? Who cares? They all are. Oh, they do keep track for medical reasons, but no one is too concerned with breeding. Eugenics and racial purity has always been a crock. A child is a throw of the dice, each and every time.”

She pushed her hair off her forehead with her fingers, her eyes looking beyond him. “Except for Pilots.” Her voice was bitter. “Our breeding is sacrosanct. We are so different it’s hard to remember I’m actually Vanar, too.” She focused on him and smiled. “The genetics are quite complicated, I don’t know if I could explain it to you.”

“I’m a botanist, Pratima,” he said wryly. “Even plants have DNA.” “Ah,” she said, as if startled by the idea of an educated man. “Well.” She considered for a moment. “Strictly speaking, Pilots have no fathers.”

He looked at her, puzzled.

“Sex cells are all haploid. Take a meiotic cell with only half the normal number of chromosomes, force it replicate, double its chromosomes, and grow yourself a baby from it. What have you got?”

“A baby with identical pairs of genes,” he said slowly.

“Exactly. Pilots need identical genes. Our equilibrium has to balance even down to the submolecular level. Even further, you have forty-six chromosomes. I have twenty-eight.”

He blinked, stunned. “What?”

“I’m still human, as human as you are. If you know anything about basic human genetics, you know that most of what is in our genomes is evolutionary junk. Very little of our genome is allocated to being human. Everything you have, I have too. And then some. A lot of specially designed recessive genes all carefully balanced and tailored for us to make long-term survival possible in a Worm have been inserted. All the rest—all the useless squatters, the vestiges of prehistoric genes, the DNA parasites cluttering up your genome—have been edited out of mine. We only need twenty-eight chromosomes for it all. But that’s the reason why all Pilots are female: all of our chromosomes are identical.” She stretched her bare legs out in front of her, avoiding his gaze.

“Are all Pilots identical?” he asked carefully, still struggling to absorb this. “Do they all look like you?”

“No,” she said. “The Nine Families own and control the Worms connecting the systems, and each one has developed their own paradigm. Pilot lines are distinctly different. But within the Family, Pilots are more closely related than mere clones. The distinction between one generation and the next becomes blurred when everyone is a duplicate of each other. My mother is more than my twin sister. When we ride the Worm, to a certain extent, she becomes
me
. We are all one being.”

He was putting the pieces together. “You said you were on Vanar to get pregnant.”

“Yes.”

“Not mine.”

“Of course not.”

He stared at her in growing dismay. “Raemik.”

“Don’t judge me, Nathan,” she said softly. “You can’t condemn what you don’t understand.” Her small chin lifted as she twisted her head to glare at him, eyes as blank as a marble statue with her white irises against the corneas. “Raemik is not just my twin brother, he’s my son.”

“My God.” He felt the blood drain away from his face.

“Where did you imagine little baby Pilots came from?” she said sharply. “Did you think we’re assembled in some nice sterile laboratory, pour a few chemicals together and stir well? Would that be easier on your sense of propriety rather than dirty, disgusting incest?” She slithered away from him, a pink sheen washed on her cheekbones. “Clones age too quickly, their cells are already mature, too much risk of mutation even with genetic maintenance. My mother’s son gave me Raemik. He is my perfect match, his genetics are identical to mine, except for his one Y chromosome. Our daughter will be my exact twin, my
sister
.”

“And it’s that important?”

“Critical,” she said neutrally. “Pilotships are unforgiving creatures. I could try to describe the experience to you, Nathan, and I don’t mean to insult you by saying it would be like explaining the rainbow to the blind. Pilots aren’t merely navigators; the Worm isn’t a machine. We’re part of the living engine itself, we
become
the Worm. We’ve been designed and bred to ride that equilibrium. We live for nothing else. And if a Pilot loses her balance even for a moment, she doesn’t just fall down and skin her knee. She’s ripped apart, slowly, all the length of the Worm. Not two molecules are left sticking together.”

She shuddered and drank the last of her wine.

“I’d like some more,” he said, and got unsteadily to his feet. “Bring the bottle.”

He retrieved the decanter and walked back toward her. The panoramic lights of the city skyline surrounding him on every side, the openness of the pseuquartz windows, gave him the odd feeling of flying. He stumbled slightly, fighting an irrational fear he might fall and slide screaming off the edge of the circular room. He settled beside her, pouring out the wine with a shaking hand.

“Equilibrium is everything,” she said softly, and slid her arm around his waist, holding him gently against her.
“Everything.”

She was trembling.

XIV

T
HEY FELL ASLEEP, LIMBS TANGLED TOGETHER, BUT WHEN HE WOKE, HE
was curled up alone in a nest of floor cushions. He raised himself to peer blearily over the edge, squinting through puffy eyelids in the early-morning sunrise.

She stood naked on one foot in the center of the vast room, facing the sun over his shoulder. Her ashen skin seemed to glow in the light, accented by the black of her hair tumbling down her back. On tiptoes, her head back, she suspended one leg out at an angle, foot waist-high, her arms out, elbows crooked, palms up. He blinked at her as her head rolled forward. She opened her eyes to smile at him, then shut them again. For a few seconds, she wobbled slightly before she did a little hop.

She now stood with her entire weight balanced on the end of her left big toe. He goggled at her, unbelievingly, and crawled out of the heap of pillows, trailing his sati snagged around an ankle. He shook it off and walked around her, an arm length away.

She didn’t move, didn’t breath, not a muscle twitched as she held her impossible position. He leaned in toward her to study her face, and her lips moved. “Don’t touch me, please,” she said calmly, and froze again, motionless.

Wrapping his sati carelessly around his waist, he sat down and watched, amazed. After she had stayed in the same position for several minutes with not the slightest quiver of movement, he shook his head and got up in search of coffee. He opened a few cabinets at random, examining their contents.

“Good morning, Ilitu, you’re looking splendid today. Sleep well, did you?” He looked down at the spider machine, speaking in Hengeli, not expecting it to answer. “You wouldn’t know where the coffee is, by any chance?” To his surprise, the spider unfolded from its insert and strolled smoothly into the center of the alcove. Within a few moments, it had gathered the ingredients and equipment and began preparing coffee.