Touch
I hurt.
Pain crawled through me like a flesh-eating worm, ravaging my nerve endings, nesting on my sinews, etching acid-bright paths through my bones and shriveling my flesh.
I'd never felt pain like this. None of my bots was programmed for it.
From somewhere nearby, a voice said, "Calm. Calm. There was an accident. An...explosion."
Explosion? A pod explosion? Pods didn't explode. Through my pain, thoughts drummed, distracting me.
"Damn," I thought. "Damn bot.” But I couldn't remember programming a bot for anything like this. I couldn't remember programming pain. I wouldn't. Not since the last time Taj had killed me, on...what was that thought-world? Cullocant.
My mind retrieved the word, and brought it to me, quivering and bleeding in its mouth, like a hunting bot with freshly killed prey, wagging its tail at the pleasure of overpowering the helpless creatures, at the sweet-hot taste of blood in its mouth, at the joy of pursuit fulfilled.
With it came images, feelings, a vague, pulsing memory of Taj. That last time, Taj's body-bot had been female, and mine had been male, and we played a game of loving in a world filled with green forest and white stone castles, and... Taj had killed me, in a dungeon, with exquisite, never ending pain.
Taj. My oldest contact, my closest node-companion, brought up in a pod next to mine, in the Life Center. I reached for his mind with mine, but nothing came. Nothing. Frantically, I dialed through the spider web of connections in my brain, reaching, reaching, trying for the rest of my node: Nin and Pem and Covan. Nothing. I reached for my connections, the bots that did my bidding in endless mind-spun worlds. Nothing there, either. I remembered what it felt like when a bot lost a limb, what it felt like to try to move the limb that wasn't there. It felt like it moved, but, at the same time it was too light, too easy, too... not there.
Lonely nothing echoed back all my calls and left me isolated, adrift. Just me and no pod. Lonely.
"Kel?" the voice asked. Something pushed at my arm. "Kel? Don't die. The pod... exploded. The Center burned."
Again, the impossible words, the impossible thought. I squirmed and felt something harsh, strange beneath me. Something cold. So... Not my pod. I was out of my pod. Opening my mouth, reaching for the pap with eager tongue brought no nourishment.
I smelled something acrid and unpleasant. Burning? I'd smelled burning before, through bot-sensors, but never like this, never this acrid, horrid smell with hints of burning meat.
"Kel, open your eyes."
My eyes? How could I open my eyes without a bot?
"Your body eyes, Kel. You can. You remember how."
Did I? I struggled through the mind-path to my own eyes, fought against them. Did I know? Oh, like all the rest of humanity, in my early pod-stage, beyond the reach of conscious memory, my nervous system had been imprinted with the knowledge that had served our savage ancestors well: body-talking, body-moving, body-walking. Besides, it wasn't all that different to do it with bots. Just different neural pathways.
It seemed simple. Yet I struggled, and struggled, and felt like I was lifting an immense weight.
Slowly, painfully, my eyes opened, revealing a scant slice of view: something burning in the background, bricks and scattered debris close at hand, and closer, closer, a human face that didn't look like any bot.
Male, I thought, though it was hard to say. So pale, that it might have been a maggot that had crawled, helpless, from beneath a rock. Smudges of something like coal marred the horrible whiteness, and, above it, dark red hair that looked as if it had been half torn by the roots and half burned away.
Improbable brown eyes blinked from amid the whiteness, and blinked tears down the smudged cheeks, and impossibly grey-white lips opened and trembled, and a sob tore through them, followed by the one word, "Kel.”
My name. This... thing knew my name. I struggled to move my own lips and tongue scraping and hurting,pronouncing the words, "Who? Who are—?"
"Taj," the creature said. "I am Taj."
Taj? Taj, pale and weak-looking? And crying? I stared, with open disbelief. I'd known Taj as a tall golden female and a dark, powerful male. I'd gone diving with Taj in blue-ocean worlds, together we'd hunted in sand deserts, and together we'd killed and died, and celebrated victory and rued defeat. I'd hunted Taj, and brought him down, and watched him die.
But cry? Taj? I knew him. I knew him, damn it. I'd tasted the flavor of his soul, and gotten to know the frailty of my own. But damn it, this pale thing, with trembling lips, crying, couldn't be Taj. Wouldn't be Taj.
If I'd had the strength, I'd have spat his lie back at him. But my eyes, that I'd fought so much to open, closed down of their own weight. And all I managed was "Taj?" said in an incredulous tone, before I took the image of his trembling lips, his soft, crying eyes into the sleep that overpowered me like a bot malfunction.
***
The pain no longer dazzled across my skin, no longer sang through my nerves. Instead, it burned low, like an ill-fed fire, and I could think. I could remember.
I woke up feeling a weight over me, a light weight, as if my bot were covered with a blanket. It felt better. Warm.
The burning smell lingered, but other smells joined it. Cool smell of grass, warm smells of flowers.
Something wet and cool dabbed at my face.
I remembered waking up before. I remembered the creature-who-couldn't-be-Taj.
I opened my eyes and there he was, still pale, still unlikely, wearing something silver that looked like a blanket hastily slashed to make a hole for his head, and then just as shoddily cinched around his waist with something black and plastic-looking. He held a transparent plastic piece of something, filled with water, and dipped a bit of silver cloth into it, and dabbed at my face. Water dripped down my neck, soaked my hair, made me shiver.
He smiled, a crooked, infantile smile. "I thought I'd clean some of the worst of it away."
The worst of what? I looked at his face, where the smudges had disappeared, been washed way, leaving it looking still more juvenile, more naked.
"Who are--"
"Taj."
"You're not Taj."
He laughed, a sudden sound with no music, like the sound of blades scraping together when I'd fought Taj in a duel, in a thought-world that bristled with sudden death and easy revenge.
"I am Taj. I was thrown clear by the explosion, and crawled back. I remembered from the mind-touch where your pod was. I dug you out and dragged you away before you burned.” He held up his hands, the tips of which were scraped raw, their fingernails broken and dirty. "I didn't have tools. No bots.” His lips trembled again, and his eyes filled once more.
I wasn't ready for a fragile Taj. I sat up, and the blanket that had covered me — a silver blanket, like Taj's improvised garment — flowed down my body, to reveal.... I looked down, at the pale, scratched-up mounds on my chest. Oh. So my natural body was female. I'd never known. The educators don't tell us, of course. No use making you feel constricted to be this or that, when you can be all, feel all through the bots.
I felt hungry and something else, an odd, prickling urgency that some long-buried pathway training from infancy told me was an urge to empty my bladder. Bots didn't have bladders. And your pod takes care of that for your natural body.
I stumbled out of my blanket. Taj's eyes widened, and I felt amused. We'd pursued each other in so many different bodies, been loved by and loved so many perfect reflections of the other, and now he'd look — what? Aroused or shocked? — at my pale, scratched nudity. "I need to piss," I said. And, for some reason, atavistic training more than likely, I didn't feel like doing it in front of Taj.
Standing brought dizziness, an unaccustomed weakness of suffering flesh that had reclined too long -- reclined for most of its life, unless the pod had been designed to, sometimes, stand me upright. I wouldn't know.
I reeled and grabbed, and Taj was there, standing, supporting me. "It's hard the first time," he said. "I don't know how injured you got. You were buried in rubble, but I don't know--but I know it's hard standing up the first time."
He held my hand and steadied me with his hand on my shoulder until the world stopped spinning, until Earth quieted beneath my feet, until I drew breath calmly and didn't feel as if I were going to fall on my face.
Slowly, I pulled away from him, took a step, two. I stood facing ruins, of cement and bricks and something else that looked like black melted glass. Amid the ruins, oblong objects of the black-glass thing smoldered -- pods. From some of them human arms or legs protruded.
I shivered and looked away. On the other side, the debris was sparser, as if it had been thrown there by the explosion, and fallen on green grass and spring flowers. And farther away was a forest, thick with green trees.
I walked towards it, slowly, my feet feeling the grass beneath too strongly, like an ill-attuned bot, relaying too strong a sensation.
Avoiding the shards of stone and glass carefully, I made it to the trees, and, amid them, squatted and peed.
When I emerged from the trees, Taj was waiting, with the silver-blanket thing that had covered me, now slit for my head. I allowed him to put it over me, to cinch it at the waist with I now saw was a length of black cord.
"Is it so attractive, then?" I asked. "My body? That you can't help yourself?"
He looked down at me, puzzled. Strange for Taj to be taller than me. Male and female, in every body, we'd been the same size. But not now. Were females always shorter than males? Or was I an exception? No one had told me. Then he shook his head. "Hypothermia.” But he didn't smile.
"I'm hungry," I said. "Food?"
And Taj's face melted again, and he shook his head, and his lips trembled. "They should come to rescue us soon," he said. "They have to know the pod exploded. They will come to get us."
Maybe, but I was hungry now, with gut twisting starvation. I hadn't been this hungry since I'd been a feline-like hunting bot in a foliage-dense, hot thought-world.
I remembered seeing fruit in the trees around me. Hell, some of it ought to be edible. I led Taj by the hand to the trees, and we tasted three kinds of fruit before we found a round, firm green one which we ate.
That was the first surprise. The food tasted so much better than the virtual food eaten by bots, of the sugared pap swilled in rare moments of natural-body consciousness.
The sweet tartness of the food exploded on my tongue, while the juice ran down my chin, and the feeling and sensuous pleasure of eating filled me with a joy I hadn't known in many years.
I found myself laughing, laughing, and, looking at Taj, I saw his too-pale face brighten up with a smile I knew well from all his bots, and before you knew it, we were both laughing, laughing like children on an educational bot expedition.
In the trees around us, a sound stopped, a sound I hadn't been aware of hearing until it stopped. Bird songs. I grinned silently at Taj while I ate.
After a while, the birds sang again.
***
On the third day, I stopped hurting. I think all of that pain, that terrible torment must have just come from bruises and abraded skin. Never having felt pain before, I felt it with an impossible intensity.
Surely, I felt everything else with much more intensity than any bot had ever relayed to me. The grass smelled cool and green, and the flowers had a variety of smells, from spicy-hot to softly cloying. The trees, even, had their own smells, as did the birds that nestled upon them.
The smell of rotting flesh became unbearable.
Both Taj and I had been well taught. We knew there were better reasons than cultural or religious imperatives to bury your dead. And we did. With pieces scavenged from masonry and melted fragments of pods, we dug a grave in the soft earth, at the edge of the forest.
Shuddering with horror, we returned to what had been our life center, and collected bodies or — mostly — body parts, and carried them to the hole, to bury.
In a war-torn thought-world, I'd once walked across a battlefield for three days, and smelled the stench of rotting meat, and seen corpses balloon with the gases of decomposition.
But I'd never done it in reality, and I wasn't ready for the true smell, the true horror of it. I buried Nin and Pem and Covan, not knowing who they were, nor which of these anonymous parts belonged to them.
Crying, as much with disgust as with pain, I buried everyone I'd ever known. These pathetic fragments of flesh would never again hunt the thought-worlds, or carry out games of love and joy in rich mythic landscapes.
Afterwards, while the sun was setting in front of us, in a splendor of red and orange that was nothing like what the thought-worlds had allowed me, Taj and I filled the common grave that hid our friends, and the possible contagion of their death.
When the grave was full, and tramped back and forth by our bare feet to prevent scavengers from smelling the corpses and undoing our work, I stood in front of Taj, crying.
Crying. I, who had died a thousand deaths without a tear.
Taj reached for me, held me to him. He cried too, and I felt his sobs through my blanket, and his. "I know," he said.
But he couldn't know. His touch — his hands on my bare arms, his lips briefly on my forehead — felt like nothing the bots had prepared me for. And joy sang along my veins.
We'd made love in a thousand different ways, but his one touch undid my reserves, and I would have done anything, given him anything, for more of it.
"Come," he said. "Come to the river, where I first got water. We'll get washed."
He walked to the river. After a while, I followed.
***
In the next few days, we explored the forest, all around us, all the way to the river and found only small animals, so tame that they didn't run from us.
We fished in the river, with improvised tackle, and got fish and roasted them over an open fire. We gathered fruit.
But always, always, we returned to the site where the life center had been. We slept there, at night, fearful that a rescue team would come and not find us there. During the day we walked and talked, and fished, and harvested, always, always with an eye to the sky, for the flycar that would come to rescue us.
But no one came. For months, and months, no one came.
Gradually, the skies darkened and eventually snow fell, and we lived from our stored fruit, inside a crude hut put together from the scavenged remains of the Life Center.
And we saw nothing. Not even the caretaker droids that were supposed to look after us and keep us fed, in the life center. Perhaps they, too, had perished in the explosion.
***
"Maybe we were the last ones," Taj said. "Maybe this Life Center was the last one. Maybe....” He let the sentence hang, unfinished. We were outside our hut, in the warming spring weather, picking wild berries from bushes that had sprung all over.
"No, don't be stupid," I said. I looked around the bush at him, and shifted my tiptoes on the ground, while I sat on my heels. He looked anything but stupid. His dark brown-red hair had grown back as had his beard, which obscured his face and most of his neck. His skin was darker than it had been just a year — it must be almost a year — ago, and he looked healthy and strong, and offensively male. "The life centers were built because there were so many humans, and it was easier to look after them this way, and keep the environment pristine. The droids only got what was needed to keep humans alive. Nothing was wasted. But there were too many of them. Of us. Of humans. That was the whole point. We didn't see more than... what? A hundred pods?"
He shook his head. "Yes, but, Kel, that was what? Three hundred years ago? Since then reproduction has been dictated by planners, not individuals. The human race has been husbanded…could have happened."
His eyes looked infinitely sad.
"You mean we might be the only humans?"
He nodded.
I never knew how it happened, but suddenly Taj stood by me, lending me his hand, helping me stand.
We'd touched very little in all this time. No more than necessary. But now he was touching me, touching me of his own volition, and his hands felt the planes of my face, caressed my shoulders, found the pathways of my arms and legs, the unknown territory of my middle.
Oh, we'd coupled so many times before, and in so many different ways, but nothing compared to this true-body touching, this entwining of flesh and blood and all too-frail skin.
Where before nothing but the most exquisite pain, the greatest pleasure had done to satisfy us, now the touching was almost too much, muddling my brain, confusing my thoughts. Taj filled my senses.
It was all I needed.
Afterwards, we lay entwined, each in the other's sweaty arms. His head rested on my chest, my back on the sweet grass and I thought what fools our ancestors had been, to agree to be podded.
***
That's when we heard the sound of the flycars overhead.
They landed, dark and oval, and somehow strange, like eggs laid by some alien bird, near our hut, a few yards from us.
We sat up and watched, bewildered.
The doors opened. The droids came out — glass-smooth, and man-like in their shape, things of beauty to my newfound eyes.
They poked around, examined the tomb. They hadn't noticed us, yet.
Taj stirred, stood.
"Be still, love," I said, in a whisper. "Let them leave. You and I can have all this world for ourselves."
He looked at me, as if from very far off, so far off that he had trouble making out my features from that distance.
Then he turned, and ran, still naked.
The droids noticed him, when he got close, and I heard him say something, in a great hurry, of having survived the explosion, of being so glad he'd been rescued.
I got up, I backed away into the forest. I climbed a tree, and sat there, on a branch.
They didn't look for me. When Taj pointed to where I'd been, they came just to the edge of the forest.
They said things, in their soothing droid voices, about Taj having hallucinated me.
They weren't equipped, you see, to trace scent or even sight of humans. They'd been designed to look after quiescent humans, not to hunt runaway ones.
I watched their flycars fly into the sky, gilded by the setting sun. Taj left aboard the first one.
And I'll sit here, till night falls, just in case. Then I'll eat some berries, and I'll set out, on foot.
There's no reason to remain near the ruins, anymore. Tomorrow, I'll walk through the forest, see what's on the other side.
Someone, somewhere, must need a human touch.