No Other Love (30 page)

Still holding her at the waist, he led her
toward it. The rest of the ship was black and grey, and the
conference room had grey walls, but during the refitting at
Capital, new furniture had been installed. The conference table was
ebony artificial wood, the chairs around it covered in darkest
maroon. To one side of the room were two armchairs and a couch, all
upholstered in dark maroon fabric. The couch was narrow for two
people to lie on it, but the bunks in their cabins were not much
wider.

Merin went to the nearest armchair and
paused, one hand at the neck of her treksuit.

“Let me.” Herne’s fingers brushed hers aside,
then slid along the pressure sensitive opening. The front of her
suit fell apart. He peeled it off her shoulders and down the length
of her body. Soon treksuit and boots were removed and she stood
before him in the thin, sleeveless undershirt and low-cut briefs
that were standard Jurisdiction Service issue. His fingertips
lightly touched her breasts, circling her nipples until they stood
up hard and obvious through the transparent fabric.

Merin caught her breath. She was trembling in
eager anticipation, but she was surprised at her own lack of fear.
She touched Herne’s treksuit.

“It’s my turn,” she said and opened it from
throat to crotch. He did not wait any longer for her. Within a few
seconds he had pulled off the suit, his boots, and his underwear.
He looked as he had in her dreams, a large-boned, hard-muscled man,
with thick ash-brown hair and grey eyes. His manhood stood out
stiff and proud from a cluster of brown curls.

Merin licked her dry lips and reached for the
chinstrap of her coif. Now that his body was revealed to her in all
its masculine glory, she could see how much he wanted her. It was
time for her also to show her most intimate secrets. She unfastened
the chinstrap, pulled off the coif, and dropped it onto the
armchair where he had laid her treksuit. With both hands she began
to remove the pins that held her tightly coiled hair. She bent to
lay the pins neatly on top of her coif, then straightened to find
him staring at her in awestruck wonder.

“I swear by all the stars that I have never
seen anyone or anything as beautiful as you,” he whispered.

With her eyes locked on his, she pulled off
her undershirt. She reached for her last remaining piece of
clothing, but he stopped her.

“My turn again,” he murmured. He slid his
hands around her hips, beneath the top edge of her briefs and over
her buttocks. Slowly, deliberately, he eased the flimsy
undergarment down along her legs to the floor, kneeling as he moved
lower. His face was against her thighs, his hands still caressing
her ankles and calves. He began to kiss her thighs while he stroked
upward with both hands. Merin cried out, her knees buckling. She
caught at his shoulders to keep herself from falling.

He must have heard the alarm in her voice,
for he stood at once and lifted her, carrying her to the couch. He
bent over her, looking deep into her eyes.

“You have always been so reluctant for close
physical contact,” he said. “Are you absolutely certain this is
what you want.?”

“Could you bear it if I said no?” she
responded, smiling at him. “I know I could not bear it if you were
to turn away from me at this moment.”

“What has changed you so radically in so
short a time?”

It would take too long to explain what had
just happened to her and she did not want to lose this precious
moment. She would tell him everything later, but now she answered
almost flippantly.

“Perhaps the solar flares have something to
do with it.” She laughed a little and saw him look startled, as
though she had never laughed before. But she had laughed, and he
had laughed back at her. Where? When? The faint trace of a lost
memory faded. She tried a more rational approach. “Perhaps the
change occurred when you rescued me from that awful shaft and
kissed me afterward. Perhaps I just didn’t recognize the change
until now.”

“You have never been with a man before.” It
was a statement, not a question.

“Oressians don’t –” She stopped, unsure how
much to say. She saw him frown and shake his head a little as if to
drive away an unwelcome thought.

“No, of course Oressians don’t,” he said.
“You did tell me that once. It may hurt a little when we first come
together. I’ll be as gentle as I can.”

“I’m not afraid.” Smiling, she raised both
hands to catch his face and pull it close enough for a kiss. She
met his mouth with her lips open.

Any barriers that might have remained between
them disappeared in an instant. Herne’s passion engulfed her like a
raging flood, his hands and mouth and tongue driving her to near
madness. She felt as though her body remembered him, but that was
obviously impossible. Still, every touch, every caress, every kiss
evoked a familiar physical reaction. And she knew how to touch him
so as to give him the greatest possible pleasure. As her excitement
mounted she cried out shamelessly, begging him not to stop what he
was doing. She saw him poised above her, his face tense.

“Please,” she whispered, as earlier she had
begged him to kiss her. “Please, Herne.”

He pushed against her. Smiling into his eyes,
she pushed back, offering him all she had to give. Being gentle as
he had promised, he moved into her. There was no pain, there was
only a long, slow, beautifully sensuous slide until he filled her
completely. She sighed with pleasure. This was what she wanted and
needed. Herne made a slight movement that joined them even more
closely. Passion rose in her with great naturalness, as if she and
Herne had been together like this many times in the past.

That notion was nonsense, of course. It was
just the memory of his previous stolen kisses that had inflamed her
senses, making her want what he was doing now. She moaned when he
moved again. She saw him looking at her in amazement.

“I know you,” he whispered. “My body knows
yours.”

He withdrew from her completely, then drove
into her with fierce passion again and again, harder and harder.
Merin wrapped her arms and legs around him, crying out with
mounting desire at each vigorous thrust until finally they
shuddered together into a great, gasping climax that met the
unfulfilled need secretly waiting within her and released it into
quivering beauty.

Nor did he leave her at once, but held her
still, his mouth upon hers through a long and quieter resolution,
while their hearts gradually stopped racing and their breath
steadied. Passion completely spent at last, he gathered her
tenderly into his arms again.

“I once read,” he told her, wiping the tears
from her face, “that when a woman weeps at the climax of
lovemaking, it’s because her soul has been touched.”

If the woman has a soul.
She could not
speak for fear she would begin to cry in earnest and blurt out what
she knew she soon must tell him. She had made her peace with her
past, but she was not certain Herne would be able to accept it. She
caught his caressing hand and kissed it instead of using words to
describe her feelings.

“I love you,” he said. “With all my heart and
for all time, I love you.”

Still she said nothing but only held his hand
to her lips.

“I suppose an Oressian can’t say it.” He
sounded wistful.

“An Oressian.” She sighed, knowing she could
not put the revelation off much longer. “There is much I need to
tell you. When I do, you will turn from me in disgust.”

“There is nothing disgusting about you,” he
said with great firmness, “Didn’t you hear me, Merin? I love
you.”

She sat up, the sudden action almost pushing
him off the couch.

“We are neglecting our duties,” she said. “I
will dress and check the instruments.”

He was beside her, tearing the treksuit out
of her hand, tossing it back onto the chair.

“For a virgin who has just had her first
experience of lovemaking,” he said, “you are behaving with
remarkable coolness.”

“First?” Confused, she wrinkled her brow.
“Yes, it was my first experience. How could it be otherwise?”

“Then I guess Oressian women are made a
little differently from other women.”

“What do you mean?” She tensed, all too aware
of what she would tell him within the next hour.

“Only that it didn’t hurt you. In fact, it
was as if we had made love before.”

“I will dress now.” She wanted to delay the
painful subject, at least until she was decently covered again.
Then his rejection wouldn’t hurt so much.

“If you must, then just your underwear,” he
said. “It’s warm enough and with only the two of us on board, it
doesn’t matter what we wear. Besides, we may want to come back here
in a little while.”

“Not after you hear what I have to say.”
Nevertheless, she donned only her undershirt and briefs. Herne
pulled on his own briefs and they went out onto the bridge.

“There, you see, everything is as it should
be.” Herne flicked the switches, turning part of the instruments
back to manual control. “I’m hungry again. Will you make some food
for us, or shall I?”

“I cannot eat until I have told you the truth
about me. Please stop looking at me like that, and stop touching me
until I have said what I must.”

“Sorry, but I like to touch you. It seems
natural now that we have become lovers.”

“We are not!” She stopped, one hand over her
mouth. “Yes, we are. I want to go on being your lover until we grow
old and die. My body and yours, my heart and yours. My soul and
yours. But you may not think I have a soul. Oh, Herne, let me speak
before my heart breaks from the weight of this guilt I carry. I
have allowed you to imagine things about me that are not true. I
have deliberately allowed you to believe falsehoods.”

He sat down in the navigator’s chair and spun
the science officer’s chair around to face him.

“Sit here,” he ordered. “Say what you want,
and never believe I’ll stop loving you.”

She told him everything.

“So you are a clone,” he said quietly when
she was finished. Then, with a hint of anger, he asked, “How many
other Merins are there, back on Oressia?”

“We are not named, we are numbered. I chose
the name of Merin for myself when I was told I had to leave
Oressia. I had read it in a history book.”

“So on Oressia there is a society of
identical people, created to certain specifications, functioning
like living machinery.” His disgust showed in his face. “No wonder
the Jurisdiction forbids that kind of artificial reproduction.”

“If the Jurisdiction ever learned the truth
about Oressia,” she said sadly, “the planet would be destroyed with
no compunction whatsoever because we are considered, as you said,
identical, soulless, subhuman creatures.”

“Not long ago,” Herne said, “I think I would
have been unable to accept what you have just told me. But
something inside me has changed. I don’t know how or why it
happened. Perhaps the change occurred as I learned to love you.
Whatever the cause, I’m not the same man I used to be, and I know
you are not a soulless creature. If ever anyone had a soul, you
have.”

“You don’t know me well enough to say
that.”

“I do know you. You are a physically normal,
exceptionally beautiful, intelligent, warm-hearted woman, though
you try to disguise most of those qualities. You are courageous and
inventive in a crisis, you are tolerant of personal differences,
and a wonderful friend. I know you here.” Herne struck his chest.
“You spoke earlier of the two of us, body to body, heart to heart,
soul to soul. That’s true. You and I, together. I don’t care if
there are a thousand others back on Oressia who are just like you.
You are the Merin I love.”

“But there are not a thousand others,” she
exclaimed. “That is the greatest mystery of Oressia. We are alike
when we leave First Cubicles, but after that changes occur in each
of us that make us distinctive individuals by the time we are
twenty. It should not happen, but it does. No one knows why. There
are theories linking the differences to Oressian water, or to the
soil in which our food is grown. Others claim the changes occur
during the maturing process that takes place at age fifteen. The
mystery remains unsolved. All we know is that by the time we are
twenty, we are more like very similar brothers and sisters would be
on some other world than like identical clones.

“You can understand,” she went on, “why
Oressians are bound to strict secrecy about our way of life. But it
seemed right to me for you to know. I cannot swear you to silence,
I can only ask you not to reveal this truth to anyone who would
find me repulsive as a result of the knowledge. This is not
something I had control over, Herne, any more than you could
control the hair color you were born with or the shade of your
eyes.”

She fell silent. Herne was staring at his
hands, which he had clenched into fists. He did that sometimes,
when he was trying to control his anger, but she had not seen him
do it since – since when? He himself had admitted that something
important had changed him, had taken away his inner rage. But what?
And when? Had her story so revolted him that the rage was back?

“Have you ever killed anyone?” he asked
suddenly. “No, don’t bother to answer. It was a stupid question
after the tale you’ve just told me. You have been trained not to be
violent. I was fifteen when I left Sibirna. Before my fifteenth
birthday I had killed eight men. I had to, if I was to stay alive.
That’s the kind of place Sibirna is.”

“That’s horrible,” she whispered. He went on
talking, his eyes still on his clenched fists.

“The true horror was that no one, not even
the relatives of the dead, cared very much. That kind of violence
was just accepted as an everyday occurrence, because all Sibirnans
should be free to do whatever they want. To my mind, that way of
living, without any self-discipline, is as bad as growing children
in a laboratory. Both cultures degrade the human spirit, but I
think Sibirna is worse than Oressia.
Eight men.
All of them
attacked me first, but still, after that what right do I have to
call you a horror?”