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  “You have made me curious to read Milton. His poetry remains relevant to this day. Perhaps you are right about our longing for Eden: ‘These lull’d by Nightingale embracing slept, and on their naked limbs the flow’ry roof show’r’d roses, which the morn repair’d’.”

  Following her lead, he’d signed “Virtually yours, Vincent.”

  Three weeks later they were still sharing personal philosophies and always found an opportunity to quote Milton.

  “Now, that’s more like it!” Fanny’s strident voice cut into her silent rapture. Katherine jumped in her seat, swept the screen clear and looked up, face burning in anticipation of finding Fanny looking over her shoulder. But Fanny was gazing at a man striding toward them. Katherine sighed and felt a surge of pleasure. Jake. She’d met him just over two weeks ago, when Vincent had assigned them a joint task.

  “Now there’s a specimen.” Fanny said. “What a perfect body and face. Bet he’s a great lay.”

  Katherine blushed. She appraised Jake’s showman’s eyes, firm jaw that easily supported the loose smile he always wore, and a seamless brow partially hidden beneath thick curls of chestnut hair. Yes, he was a knock out. And exciting.

  “You’re a lucky girl.” Fanny sighed.

  “Yeah,” Katherine said, sensing her own hesitation. “Lucky.” Although they’d been physically intimate many times already, she still didn’t know Jake. His charm and humor masked a reserve of quiet depth—or nothing? Could he sustain a loving relationship with her or was Jake just lustfully infatuated with her?

  “He’s a carrier, isn’t he?”

  Katherine nodded. “Carries a piece of the V-net inside him.”

  “That’s why he’s so swift and enlightened.”

  Katherine nodded. She didn’t consider Jake exactly enlightened. Swift, perhaps. He’d managed to get her in a prone position the first day they met and every day after that.

  “You’re so lucky, Katherine. You’ve got it all.”

  Katherine swallowed. She’d been considering breaking it off. Jake seemed more interested in using his mouth for kissing than for talking. After two weeks of wonderful sex, she began to long for the serenity that came with sharing an ordinary life with another person. She and Jake didn’t seem to have much in common. They’d never conversed like she and Vincent had on the V-screen. Jake was a bored realist. And he took no interest in poetry.

  She resolved to break it off, before he dumped her for another lustful jaunt.

  “Hi, girls.” Jake tussled Fanny’s mop then glided to Katherine like a panther. Gathering her long hair back with both hands, he bent to kiss her on the neck. Her decision blurred at his seductive touch. Jake seized her hands and coaxed her up from her seat. “Come.” He grinned like a boy hiding a lizard in his pocket. “I have something to tell you.” He led her away from the workstations toward the lounge.

  “What is it, Jake?” Her eyes darted around her and she looked annoyed at him. “People are watching.”

  “I can’t tell you here. Tonight. Meet me at Samson Square, Level Two, at twenty-three hundred. That’s when my evening shift ends. Promise?”

  “Okay.” She looked down, wondering how she was going to break the news to him.

  “You’re not like the other girls,” he said, pulling her toward him. “You’re exciting and unpredictable…I like that, Katherine. Marry me.”

  Her throat swelled. Was that his news? She had come to tell him she didn’t love him, that she was in love with another man. A poet.

  “I need to tell you something, Jake.”

  “Later, later,” he whispered in her hair, pulling her into an alcove of an abandoned shop. “First my conversation.” He caressed her ear with his lips and played them over her neck and face. It sent a shiver through her. She closed her eyes and thought of Vincent: ‘with thee conversing I forget all time’. She let him maneuver her to a dark corner. He kissed her eyelids, her cheeks, her hair. Perhaps she’d been too harsh. He wanted to marry her, after all, to share an ordinary life together.

  She helped him shrug out of his clothes and smelled his longing. She let him undress her, pull her down on top of him, taste the hollow of her shoulder, her breasts, her nipples. She imagined Vincent’s trembling hands, his tender glance. His fingers exploring, diving into her dark longing for him. She shuddered, surrendering to her passion. ‘Flesh of flesh, bone of my bone thy art’. Later, she thought. Then thought no longer.

  Something nudged Vincent awake. “Katherine is with her lover,” said Mildred, peering down at him.

  Vincent roused himself, wiped the sleep from his eyes and croaked, “Library, connect with SenTech sensor, subject carrier Jake. On screen.” Katherine’s face appeared on the huge screen on the far wall. She looked straight at him with longing. Her lips parted as she drew closer. Vincent flung off the covers and sat up, naked, ignoring his misshapen leopard-body. He snatched the V-set from the nightstand and pulled it over his head, letting the translucent screen cover his face. “Library, activate SenTech virtual program. Save this scenario as Katherine Seventeen. Remember to voice-over ‘Jake’ with ‘Vincent’.”

  The room disappeared, replaced by a dark corridor. He lay on the cold surface of the grimy floor. Her warm body slid over him and he smelled the sweet spice of her desire. Perhaps he could find Eden on Earth after all! He felt himself firm and whispered, “‘Part of my soul I seek thee, Katherine, and claim my other half’.”

  She drew back and peered at him with wide eyes. Then she tilted her head, gave him a searching look, and leaned forward. He felt her breath on him. “Vincent?”

  His heart soared. “‘How can I live without thee, how forgo thy sweet converse and love so dearly join’d, to live again in these wild woods forlorn’?”

  She stared at him in astonishment, then broke into a wonderful smile and kissed him. She whispered into his hair, “‘With that thy gentle hand seiz’d mine, Vincent, I yielded, and from that time see how beauty is excell’d by manly grace and wisdom, which alone is truly fair’.”

  Frantic for her, he clasped her and thrust into her moist haven. She gasped. “Oh, Vincent! Vincent!”

  His spirit soared like a falcon to her tender loving. When it was over she leaned her cheek against his and murmured, “I love you, Vincent.” He closed his eyes. If this were only true, he thought. It felt so real. When he opened his eyes she was staring at him with intense wonder. “You’re crying…”

  Vincent wrenched off the V-set and blinked the tears from his eyes. The room returned. He was back on his bed. The screen was dark and she was gone. Vincent glanced down at himself, covered in his own semen. He let his eyes flutter shut and clung to her sweet words of love, ignoring what he knew—that her uttering of his name was the computer’s doing—and imagined the sweet perfume of her love mingled in his own.

  Then he bowed his head and stared at his shriveled hands. They looked like withered twigs, infested with parasites. His body a hideous monstrosity. It was obvious that she loved Jake. How could he ever think she loved him?

  He swallowed down his emotion and stumbled to his feet. Clearing his throat, he said, “Please clean up the bed, Mildred. I’ll be in the shower.”

  “Do you wish to save this scenario?” he heard its tinny voice behind him.

  “Yes, yes,” he growled. This was the only way he could have her. “Tell the library to flag this one with four stars.”

  Vincent caught his own reflection in the hall mirror and stopped. The stretched skin of his face glistened like plastic that had been meddled with, its integrity destroyed. He pulled at the single tuft of hair on his mottled head and, feeling the pain, stared into his own narrowed eyes in challenge.

  The crying, the poetry, were surely his feelings and thoughts, not Jake’s? Yet Jake had expressed them to Katherine. Up to now Vincent had been convinced that SenTech provided strictly a one-way conduit from carrier to Overseer. SenTech was designed to help Vincent sense everything that occurred to his carrier, but only
as an active spectator. What just happened with Katherine implied that Jake had acted on a subliminal message from Vincent. That he, Vincent, had initiated action. He blinked at the realization and saw his eyes widen with excitement, then guilt and dread.

  What have I started?

  Katherine lay upon Jake, her cheek pressed against his furry chest. She gently stroked his hair. “You were so sweet to quote Milton,” she said. “I had no idea you’d taken an interest.”

  Jake brushed his eyes with his hand and looked baffled. “I’m not sure why—how. It just came out of my mouth. I’ve never read Milton. You’re the one who reads that stuff.”

  Her lips curled in sudden amusement. She liked seeing him vulnerable. “Perhaps a poetic muse has invaded your mind,” she teased and ran her fingers through his curls. He’d shown that beneath his reserve there lay a depth she’d never suspected.

  He thought for a moment. “Maybe I should start reading it.”

  She buried her nose in his hair, inhaling his musky smell. “And, the crying—”

  He drew back, embarrassed, and shot her a dark look. “Why did you call me Vincent? Who’s Vincent?”

  “Did I?” Katherine swallowed. When they’d made love, she’d lost herself in his eyes, imagined for a brief moment that he really was Vincent. Spirit and flesh mingled into one whole. She bowed her head. “He’s only a character in a virtual game I was playing,” she said casually. Vincent could never be really hers. Uncomfortable with her outer beauty, he’d irrevocably isolated his physical self from her. Didn’t want her. She’d been sharing “love-notes” with a phantom. But Jake was physically here with her. She could touch him. Could feel his warm breath upon her face.

  And he loved her. She knew that now: no man had ever wept for her before. He’d even quoted poetry to her. She decided against breaking it off. Maybe there was a little of Vincent even in Jake.

  Copyright © 2014 by Nina Munteanu. All Rights Reserved.

  Artwork Copyright © 2014 by Duncan Long. All Rights Reserved.

  Virtually Yours has previously appeared in:

  • Issue 15 (December) Hadrosaur Tales

  • Neo-Opsis Science Fiction Magazine (Issue 3, Spring 2004)

  • translated into Polish and reprinted in January 2006 issue of Nowa Fantastika (Poland)

  • translated into Hebrew and reprinted in Bli-Panika in 2006 (Israel)

  • selected for and published in the Best of Neo-Opsis Science Fiction Magazine Anthology (Bundoran Press, 2006)

  Tool Dresser’s Law

  by Jack Clemons

  Wildcatter dropped onto Hawking a month ahead of perihelion. We slammed in after losing a brutal tug of war with the singularity that started when we closed to 60 klicks. I was in the cockpit running a spectrometry survey through the assayer ay-eye during our final approach. I’ve flown a lot of A.U.’s with McRae; he’s a damn fine pilot. I looked up from the display when I heard him curse. “Geezus!” he hissed. His face was rigid.

  “What is it, Curt?” I heard panic in his voice and it made me edgy.

  “We’re dropping down one heluva’ g-cliff,” he said. “This baby could suck the numbers off a coin!”

  I twisted around in my seat to glance at the forward screen. Hawking didn’t look very formidable, just another hunk of grey-brown rock. I turned back to look at McRae.

  “We in any trouble?” I asked.

  No answer.

  “Curt…?”

  No answer. He was staring holes in the readout panel; he’d completely dismissed me.

  I don’t think he took three breaths in the entire fifteen minutes it took him to keep from auguring in. I remember his face checker-boarded with colored light from the crazy flickering panel of displays. His hand was gripping the stick so tightly that his fingers were bone white from knuckles to nails. We collided, hard, and Hawking swiped once at us and missed. We bounced about 100 meters before the landing struts slapped the dustless rock again—and this time dug in.

  McRae later liked to brag that he’d had it under control all the way. But I was there. McRae blew it. He’d underestimated the muscle of that sucker, and I guess the rest of us can be glad he was a better pilot than judge of character.

  Not to say that Hawking was easy to judge. Nothing with axes that short should have packed that many gees. We had all read the reports filed by IGA several months earlier, just after the singularity was discovered wandering through solar system real estate. Star occultations, apparent albedo, etc., etc., all put Hawking at about the size of Cuba. Large for an asteroid (which is what it looked like) but tiny by planetary standards.

  Then the early reports came in from the Chinese fly-by and the Korean drone lander, followed by extensive data supplied by the Japanese survey party made while Hawking was out beyond the Belt. All of them confirmed the same finding—this baby was not what it seemed to be.

  Hawking had played a mean game of billiards with Sol’s family jewels as it screamed sunward. The goddam planets rocked when Hawking slid by them. Mars lost Phobos and Deimos permanently. They’re out there now, trying to solve the N-body problem by trial and error.

  The Moon got nudged pretty hard when the singularity intersected Earth’s orbit. I heard that it played hell with the Terries: weather, agriculture, tides, even the length of the day. Several million killed; Paristurned into a beachfront city. Earth was damn lucky to be as far away from Hawking as it was when it passed.

  Konstantine Station got tossed like a jackstraw—luckily, I wasn’t home at the time. Lots of injuries and a couple of deaths and several months of correcting burns to get back to L5.

  Yeah the crew of Wildcatter had heard all about Hawking, long before we had caught up with it inside Venus’ orbit. All of that info was in our heads during that final approach, but we were staring at something that our intuition told us was no big deal. Then Hawking cast its vote and we were suddenly on a slip-sliding trajectory down at over 0.8 gees. Son of a bitch, that landing was scary.

  I don’t know how well a full-auto system would have handled the landing. We all spent a lot of time kicking that one around during lounge time afterward.

  “This is bullshit!” was Cal Bartley’s summary then. “Goddam Snyder and his goddam credit pinching nearly bought it for us.” Cal had an irritating habit of being loudmouthed when he was skittish.

  Chan Singh shook his head. “And that’s your bullshit, Bartley,” he said. “Full-autos are out of the question on spec ships and you know it.”

  “Flock ass, Singh!” Cal handled language like a bouncer.

  “Old Man Snyder has more money than God. He could outfit this tub like the Constitution if he cared more for his crew than what lines his pockets.”

  “Hey, I’m no cheerleader for Snyder,” Chan said. “But if he did things the way you say he should, we’d all be working for table scraps. He got rich because he understands this business, and you’ll get rich working for him for the same reason.”

  “That’s easy for you, Singh,” Calshot back. “You’ve made yours.”

  “And I did it working the Old Man’s way.”

  “You were always a boot licker for Snyder, Chan,” Lou Williams threw in. “The Old Man’s a goddam horse’s ass and this trip proves it. We’re each paying a month’s expenses, and we’ll probably all wind up dead to boot—and for what? So that egomaniac can get his name in the books trying to bronco bust this worthless rock.”

  “Goddam right,” Cal added. “We’ve got a fortune waiting for us on Titan and Snyder’s got us out here mucking around like scientists, for God’s sake.”

  None of the crew, me included, was very happy about prospecting on Hawking.

  But Chan was right. Wildcatting had always been a wing and a prayer proposition, whether in space or in the early oil days in Texas. Speculator’s profits were narrow and that meant cutting corners, taking risks. The industrials had all of the fancy equipment and plush living quarters—and the full-autos.

  And they were the
ones that went after the big strikes: mining the large asteroids, drilling the huge oil reserves on Ganymede (or whatever that stuff was they found there). If you wanted to be comfortable, join the industrials. If you wanted adventure, sign onto a spec ship: rotten hours, primitive equipment, spitting in the Reaper’s eye every day and hoping he didn’t spit back. Everyone, including Cal Bartley, knew that when they signed on. I couldn’t side with Calon that account.

  I knew that Cal, like most of the rest of us, was intimidated by Snyder, and this was just his way of puffing up. Calhad already been with the drilling crew for more than two years when I joined on, and he was a full-timer too. I had heard that the Old Man had jettisoned him at least twice in the past for being insubordinate, but he hired him back both times. Calwas the best tool dresser to be had.

  Snyder had this thing about his employees. He seemed to think that we had joined the Marines when we signed on. Of course once you got on ship there wasn’t a hell of a lot you could do about that. Snyder was commander-in-chief there, and emperor and Christ-almighty-god too.

  There was a story going around when I first signed on that the Old Man had really spaced a driller once who had pushed him too hard. No one knew for sure if the story was true or just an invention of Snyder’s to keep us in line. In any case, it worked. None of us doubted that Snyder was capable of doing just that.

  It was because of the Old Man’s ways that I never became a full-timer on the Wildcatter. You had to be a hard case, or desperate, to put up with his crap, and I was neither. But Snyder paid well—a lot better than any of the other spec ship owners. And I have to admit that his single-mindedness had made him the most successful independent in the business.

  Snyder did have a few good points. His vessels were all spaceworthy. The crew quarters were warm and the life systems were doubly redundant. Even he understood that hungry, cold, or dead people don’t work very hard.