Beyond Infinity Read Free Page B

just a muddle.” But at the time Cley sensed life as swampy and sexy, so muddle seemed about right.
    She had avoided the company of most young women in her Meta. They seemed more attached to the trappings of the world, most of them on their way to being trapped into an attachment, already approved and ordained by the Meta. For Meta reasons, of course: Types naturally attracted one another, as the conventional wisdom had it.
    But Cley never got much of a buzz from the men of her supposed type. Nor from those in the nearby classes of human. She had an arranged meeting with a man of the Sigmas, once, which stood in her mind for the whole round-Cley-square-men puzzle. Sigmas were a rare intermediate rank of human who usually went nude. As she bandied nonsense with this one, she noticed that he had no apparent genitalia. There was nothing there at all, not even hair.
    He caught her glance and said blandly, “It’s inside.”
    “It?”
    “The ancient apparatus had several parts, true, but ours is integrated into one shaft.” He smiled, as if describing a mildly interesting toy. “The Original design was not elegant. Um, is not…and the danger!” His eyebrows shot up.
    “I thought the, uh, older gadget had at least two uses.”
    “Of course, but we do not excrete through ours.”
    “Uh, you…”
    “Use the rear exit for both.”
    Demurely put, she thought. “And the machinery comes out to play only at recess?”
    He laughed quite easily. She was blushing and wished she could stop it, but such control was not available to Originals. “Only as needed, to prevent damage. The shaft generates the semen as well.”
    She kept her eyes resolutely on his. “No need to have those messy add-ons dangling out in the air?”
    “In you Originals that was a design feature to keep the semen cool. We simply adjust our blood flow, lowering the internal temperature in their vicinity.”
    She kept a purely dispassionate expression on her face, afraid to let her lips move for fear they would lapse into a deranged leer, an O of astonishment, or something even worse. Shouting, Show me your plumage! for example. Or, Design feature? Seems more like a bug. But firmly fixing her face, she said instead, “Is it the same…otherwise?”
    For the first time he displayed a knowing grin. “Larger.”
    “Where have I heard that before?” Though in fact she hadn’t.
    “To give us an advantage.”
    “At?”
    “Social and biological.” His tone was bland, but the grin stayed put.
    “I’m just all atwitter.”
    Absolutely flat: “You should be.”
    “You’re too sure of yourself.”
    “And you, too unsure.” With that he evaporated, turning away and into the spongelike crowd.
    She felt put down, and also lucky, not to know what his next line was.
    So it came to be with the other classes and orders of greater-than-thou humans. They were almost jaunty in their arid certainty that their variation on the grand theme was the best, or at least better than the first. Their men plainly felt that she should be bowled over by the chance to enjoy their obliquely referred-to talents, endowments, or superior wiring diagrams. Their women twisted luscious true-red mouths (no cosmetics!) in sour amusement, sure that she was an upstart tart who had wandered out of her rightful level.
    Even if they were all scrupulously correct and had pots of advanced abilities, charm was not one of them. The best aspect of their company was that at least it was not addictive.
3

FIRST LOVE, OF SORTS
    F OR A LONG time she was terribly aware that everyone knew.
    They knew , she imagined, that she, as an Original, was going through the primordial fever pitch of oncoming sexual urges and could do nothing about it. Helpless, swept down the hormonal river.
    Plenty of Supra art suggested that they thought Naturals lived close to the deep, musky human sources. Cley didn’t feel all that swept away. Mostly the idea just embarrassed her.
    Other times, she was proud of it. She