Free Stochastic Man by Robert Silverberg Page B

Sikkimese dope sets up a breeder reaction in my brain. “Next year is too soon,” I tell them. “Quinn looked incredible tonight, but we don’t have enough time to hit the whole country with him between here and a year from November. Mortonson’s a cinch for reelection anyway. Let Leydecker use himself up next year and we move Quinn into position in ‘04.” I would have gone on to outline the whole feigned-vice-presidential-bid strategy but Sundara and Friedman had vanished into the shadows, and Cataline was no longer interested in politics.
    Our clothes fell away. Her body was trim, athletic, boyishly smooth and muscular, breasts heavier than I had expected, hips narrower. She kept her Transit Creed emblem chained to her thigh. Her eyes gleamed but her skin was cool and dry and her nipples weren’t erect; whatever she might be feeling, it didn’t currently include strong physical desire for Lew Nichols. What I felt for her was curiosity and a certain remote willingness to fornicate; no doubt she felt no more for me. We entangled our bodies, stroked each other’s skins, made our mouths meet and our tongues tickle. It was such an impersonal thing that I was afraid I’d never get it up, but the familiar reflexes’ took hold, the old reliable hydraulic mechanisms began shunting blood toward my loins, and I felt the proper throb, the proper stiffening. “Come,” she said, “be born to me now.” A strange phrase. Transit stuff, I learned later. I hovered above her and her slim strong thighs gripped me and I went into her.
    Our bodies moved, up and down, back and forth. We rolled into this position and that one, joylessly running through the standard repertoire. Her skills were formidable, but there was a contagious dullness about her manner of doing it that rendered me a mere screwing machine, a restless piston endlessly ramming a cylinder, so that I copulated without pleasure and almost without sensation. What could she be getting out of it? Not much, I supposed. It’s because she’s really after Sundara, I thought, and is putting up with me merely to get a chance at her. I was right but I was wrong, for, I would learn eventually, Ms. Yarber’s steely passionless technique was not so much a reflection of a lack of interest in me as it was a result of Transit teaching. Sexuality, say the good proctors, traps one in the here and now and delays transitions, and transition is all: the steady state is death. Therefore engage in coition if you must, or if there is some greater goal to be gained by it, but be not dissolved by ecstasy lest you mire yourself wrongfully in the intransitive condition.
    Even so. We indulged in our icy ballet for what seemed like weeks, and then she came, or allowed herself to come, in a quiet quick-quiver, and with silent relief I nudged myself across the boundary into completion, and we rolled apart, hardly breathing hard.
    “I’d like more brandy,” she said after a bit.
    I reached for the cognac. From far away came the groans and gasps of more orthodox pleasure: Sundara and Freidman going at it.”
    Catalina said, “You’re very competent.”
    “Thank you,” I replied uncertainly. No one had ever said quite that to me before. I wondered how to respond and decided to make no attempt at reciprocity. Cognac for two. She sat up, crossed her legs, smoothed her hair, sipped her drink. She looked unsweaty, unruffled, unfucked, in fact. Yet, strangely, she glowed with sexual energy; she seemed genuinely pleased with what we had done and genuinely pleased, as well, with me. “I mean that,” she said. “You’re superb. You do it with power and detachment.”
    “Detachment?”
    “Non-attachment, I should say. We value that. In Transit, non-attachment is what we seek. All Transit processes work toward creating flux, toward constant evolutionary change, and if we allow ourselves to become attached to any aspect of the here and now, to become attached to erotic pleasure, for example, to