The Man Who Never Missed (11 page)

He lifted her legs with his hands, pushing her knees back, raising her higher and wider. He stabbed deeper with his tongue. She began to move against his mouth, in that oldest of rhythms. She came hard, he could feel the pulse around his tongue, against his lips, and he grinned. He flicked his tongue back and forth a few more times.

She tangled her hands in his hair and pulled his face away. “Easy. Let me catch my breath before you do any more of that.”

“No problem,” he said.

She moved suddenly, sliding across the jet silk, turning and taking his penis into her mouth in a single, smooth motion. He felt her lips touch the base as she took the length of him into her throat. Damn! She moved, and he felt like a boy again, so hard he was afraid his organ would burst. All the learned techniques with all the partners over all the years meant nothing, his control was completely gone. When she found the base of his prostate with her finger and pressed, he felt as if a dam had burst within his groin. Oh, God!

When he stopped throbbing, she pulled away slowly, flicking the tip of his still-hard penis with her tongue.

She turned around to snuggle next to him.

“Now I know what an avalanche must feel like,” he said.

“It was pretty good, wasn’t it?” She smiled at him.

Khadaji propped himself up on one elbow. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, he was sure of that. And she seemed to exude sexual attraction, more now than before the shattering climax she’d just given him. He reached for her and hugged her to him, sliding into her as she rolled onto her back and clasped his buttocks with both hands. She was tight, but lubricated, and they fit together as if they had been custom-designed for each other. The dance became frantic, as they pounded each other faster and faster. “I—love—you,” he said, his voice keeping time with his thrusts. But the words were lost in the storm.

Pen was sitting quietly in the center of his bed, his eyes closed, when Khadaji came into the room. It was late, only a couple of hours before Khadaji’s shift was to begin and he was tired. Though hardly unhappy.

Pen said, “And…?”

There was no need to say more. They had developed a feel for each other’s mood, at times. “She is wonderful,” Khadaji said. “I love her.”

Pen nodded, but said nothing. There was a long pause.

“I can’t explain it,” Khadaji began. “She—”

“There is no need to explain. I understand. The time was approaching and now it is here.”

Somehow, that sounded ominous. “The time?”

“For me to continue upon my circuit. And you on yours.”

Khadaji was stunned. “What?”

Pen smiled. “You will want to be with your beloved. You have things to learn from her.”

“But—but—that doesn’t mean—”

“Ah, but it does,” Pen said, his voice soft. He unfolded his legs from the meditation knot and shifted to the edge of the bed, then stood. He faced Khadaji, still smiling. “You’ve learned what I can teach you. What you need now is new teachers, and time. Experience will fill in many of the gaps.”

Khadaji stared at the robed figure, still feeling shocked. Sure, he’d said in the beginning it was only temporary, but, this wasn’t right. It was Juete, she was the crux, that was why he was leaving. He thought about her, and about Pen, who had been father-brother-teacher since they’d met. In that moment, Khadaji knew, he knew that if he offered to forget her, Pen would stay. This was some kind of test. He thought again about Juete, about the day they had spent together, only leaving the bed long enough to pee or get a drink, about the passion he’d felt, he still felt for her. Was it any more than lust? Did he love her, as he’d said? Yes, he was sure he did. Could he give her up, to keep Pen? But if he was planning to leave anyway, it would be a wasted gesture to even offer, wouldn’t it? He remembered her hands and mouth, touching him. Pen was going anyhow, Juete was only making it happen a few days or weeks sooner. Khadaji told himself it wasn’t a rationalization on his part; but far back in his mind, a little voice laughed malevolently.

Juete smiled at him across the red bar and Khadaji reflexively smiled back. He watched her walk away and felt desire for her even as he felt disgusted with himself. Was he doing as so many others in the military had done? Was he thinking with his dick?

He shook his head and wiped at a spill on the bar. No. He loved the exotic woman, there was more to her than sex. She was intriguing, there was a depth to her, she was … exotic, in the truest sense of that word. But Pen—

Pen was gone. Khadaji had seen him off at the sling. Pen hadn’t seemed disturbed or sad at going. He had laughed, he had hugged Khadaji, he had told him not to worry. Things would be fine, in the end, he was destined for what he was destined for—who could say where the Disk would spin him?

As Pen waited for the boxcar to helix, he reached within the folds of his robe and came out with a small steel marble in his hand. He extended it to Khadaji.

“What’s this?” Khadaji said, as he took the marble.

“My compendia. The works of my career in tending pub.”

“I can’t take—”

“I have copies, Emile.”

“You’ve given me so much already.”

“Only what I could, little enough. Someday, when you are where you will be, I will smile and wish it were more.”

Khadaji felt a lance of guilt. “You don’t have to go, Pen.”

“I do, Emile, but there is one more thing I would like to do before I leave.” With that, Pen reached up within his hood and pulled the cross-scarf covering his face away. For the first time, Khadaji saw the features of the man who had lived with him for over a year. Slowly, Pen leaned forward; slowly, he pressed his lips against Khadaji’s lips, and kissed him. Then, the scarf was back. None of the few passengers waiting for the boxcar had seen Pen’s naked face, no one save Khadaji. His tears ran freely as Pen entered the boxcar and was slung out of Khadaji’s life.

Chapter Eleven

THE ROUTINE IN the pub settled into a comfortable rhythm. Once in a while, somebody would ask for some unusual drink or powder, even a radiant. Kamus would walk by and smile and pause to stroke the old sword hanging on the wall. He seemed pleased with Khadaji’s work. Pen was gone, but Khadaji still practiced the self-control forms, the dances of sumito, alone. It was as Pen had said, an opponent wasn’t needed if you could control your own actions precisely enough. And there was Juete. He had little time for anything else.

Juete was incredible. She could drain him as no other woman had ever drained him. Sometimes they made love until he could barely remember who he was, sunk into a satisfied stupor with a stupid grin locked into place.

He also learned about her in other ways. One morning, after a quiet lovemaking session, she lay on the bed, cradling his head in the crook of her arm, petting his face with her fingertips. “Such a sweet boy,” she said.

“Boy?”

She smiled down at him. “It’s all relative, lover. I might not be old enough to be your mother, but I certainly could be your big sister.”

“Only if I were incestuous,” he said.

“There are worse things. But I do have a few standard years on you.”

He’d suspected as much, but merely said, “So?”

She seemed to stare through the bedroom walls. The smell of sex hung in the air, fighting a losing battle with the stick of incense she’d thumbed into life earlier. Sandal wood, he thought. Or maybe some kind of musk. Finally, she said, “Older doesn’t necessarily mean wiser, Emile, but it does mean older. More… experienced. More adept at dealing with the galaxy, at… taking care of oneself.”

Her tone was disturbing, and he wanted to lighten the mood. “Well, I’m not exactly freshly minted, you know. I understand a few things.” He tried to laugh, but it fell flat.

She bent to kiss him, first on the forehead, then on his closed eyelids. She didn’t have to say it aloud; what he heard silently was, No, you don’t Understand, Emile.

During a lull late in his shift, Khadaji listened to old man Kamus finish one of his tales for a few of the regulars. Juete had left early, since things were slow and she said she was tired. When Kamus finished his story, and the small gathering began to break up, the old man turned to talk to his pubtender. “You seem to be working out okay,” he said. “You’ve been good for business.”

Khadaji was pleased, but said, “I’m just doing what you pay me for, Kamus.”

“Yeah, but you get along well with the customers, they like you, and now that you and Juete are living together, things have been a lot quieter during corpse-stealer’s shift.”

Khadaji didn’t understand. “Quieter?”

The old man drew himself a mug of splash and took a big swallow of the liquid. He leaned back against the bar. “Sure. You don’t understand about exotics, son, even though you’re pretty tight with one—They cause trouble among regular people.”

Khadaji felt himself stiffen; he tried to relax, using one of Pen’s mantras. The old man caught it, though.

“Don’t take it personal, son. Juete is a fine woman, but she can’t help being an exotic. It’s the same for all of them, men or women, old or young. They attract basic stock humans like shit does flies, something chemical, I think.”

Khadaji remembered Pen’s comment about pheromones. But that didn’t matter—

“Anyway, there are people who get real possessive. You know a lot of exotics work as prostitutes?”

Khadaji nodded. Juete had told him.

“A lot of them don’t want to, but it’s kind of what they were bred for, originally. Usually, you see an exotic, you see a collection of people clustered around ‘em, trying to figure a way to get some kind of piece of them.”

Khadaji said nothing, but he wondered what the old man was getting at.

“Yo, Emile, slide me another stinger down here, would you?” Khadaji looked up and smiled at the short man sitting at the end of the bar. He built the drink, while Kamus kept talking.

“Normally, people around here know not to start trouble in the Dick.” He glanced at the sword on the wall. “I don’t much care for it and people know it. Even so, some nights I’ve had to have Mang toss guys—and women—with their tongues hanging out over Juete through the door. After you jumped the cuntmaster and his cur, word got out you were fast and dangerous. So people are even more careful than usual trying to get to Juete. In here, at least.”

Something about the way he said it made Khadaji’s gut freeze, as though someone had stuck him with a shard of dry ice. In here? What did he mean by that? And cuntmaster?

Kamus wandered off, to talk to a pair of old women who had just come into the pub, and Khadaji didn’t have a chance to ask about his comments. He wasn’t sure he would have asked even if the old boy had stuck around.

When he got to her cube, Juete was waiting for him. She stood naked in the doorway, and any doubts or fears he might have felt were erased by the sight of her dropping to her knees to untab the fastener of his pants, and by the feathery touch of her lips on his hard flesh.

People talked to him at the bar, as Pen said they would. He listened with half his attention as he worked, and the conversations tended to run together. A lot of what was said was supposed to be unique, and each person seemed to think it was, but it wasn’t long before he’d heard a lot of stories with common threads running through them.

“—me, said I couldn’t do the fucking work—can you believe that? So I told him, ‘Listen, tarpsucker, I been here twenty-two standard years, before you were finished fresher-training, and I know my fucking job better than you do! If you don’t like it, you take it to the steward,’ I said, ‘and fuck you’—”

“—younger and tighter, that’s all he wants! Buddha, I had the goddamn surgery like he wanted, I took the rejuve to the limit, I don’t look sixty, I look thirty-five, see how they still stand up? And I know the tricks, buddy, believe it, I can make a man howl like a dog, if I want, and shit, he’s off sticking it to some teenpuss young enough to be our granddaughter! She can’t know anything! Why? I don’t understand men, they’re such assholes—”

“—failed the exam, flat, I sucked it, I’m cold meat in the eyes of parents and sibs and classics, I am raised, you bury? Sure, they give you a second blast, but you have to wait six months, and that’ll be during the Light—nobody will want to play stroke-the-grad in the sunshine—!”

Khadaji gave advice. He nodded a lot, made sympathetic murmurs, and so a lot of the customers thought he knew more than he did. But he was learning. The lot of man was made up of lots of individuals, and the stories rang true, if similar. Love, hate, lust, fear, the emotions were the same. And there was another emotion he found, too…

The man was a freight handler, off a freighter dropping heavy machinery on planet from out-system. He was big, well built and attractive. He sat at the bar, wearing a coverall spotted with dirt and machine lube, sniffing spirals of kick-dust and laughing. He was talking to a local next to him.

“—best I ever had. I’ve had ‘em on twelve worlds in four systems, but this pussy was talented! I never had an exotic before and they are everything they’re cracked up to be!” He laughed at his own pun, and shook his head. “She couldn’t get enough, she turned me every which way but loose. I wished I had a gallon of android, I would have wore myself down to a nub. And she didn’t charge me a demi-stad, either. The best I ever had and it was free! Shit, I might just jump ship and stay here—” he stopped talking and stared at someone in the pub. Then the freight handler nudged the local with one beefy hand and said, “Shit, there she is now!”

Khadaji turned, to see who had made the man so happy.

And found himself looking at Juete.

It had to be a mistake. Even as he thought it, he knew it wasn’t—Juete wasn’t somebody you could forget. Then he thought, it must have happened before they’d met; Juete’s past was her own, he couldn’t fault her for that—

The big man slid from the barstool, grinning. “It’s been two days, I’m ready for another round,” he said.

Two days. Khadaji felt that lance of dry ice again, only this time it ran from his bowels to his brain, turning him numb. He watched, detached, as the freight handler approached Juete. Two days ago, she had left early, had been gone for hours before he’d gone to meet her. But it couldn’t be.