The Life of the World to Come Read Online Free PDF

towel.
    He always has enjoyed bathing. Something Freudian relating to guilt, perhaps? Edward seemed to have some sort of personal dirt-repellent force field, of course, but I remember the way Nicholas used to revel in clean water and soap.
    When I opened the door and stepped out under the overhang, Alec had already snaked out of the mail-suit and was sitting in the tub, wearing only that torque. He was leaning back into the rain with an ecstatic expression on his face, letting it soak into his lank hair, which was becoming even lanker. The tub was rather low and didn’t obscure much of his nakedness, and I made a small involuntary pleading sound.
    He opened his eyes and looked at me. For a moment he seemed wary, defensive; then grinned his sidelong grin.
    “Would you, er, like to bathe, too?” he asked, all suavity, gesturing invitation as though the tub were ever so capacious. I don’t remember how I got out of my clothes and across the garden, it happened so fast.
    It was insane. The storm was beating down on us, the tub was impossibly tiny, and I was worried about that long back of his—but oh, how that man could kiss. We writhed ineffectively for a few minutes before he simply stood up in the tub
and hoisted me into the air as though I weighed no more than a feather. He is phenomenally strong. I slid down, pressed against his body, and he thrust his face into my breasts with a whoop of inarticulate glee. The rain bathed us, and the fragrance of the garden was sweet.
    God, God, God.
    I believe I was in the act of offering Him my soul, or whatever a thing like me has, if He’d only let this moment stretch out into eternity, when my groping hands found the pattern of electronic wire just under the skin of Alec’s shoulders.
    God?
    I leaned forward over the top of Alec’s head and looked down. It was like the most beautiful tattoo you can imagine, an intricate pattern of spirals and knotwork in dull silver, winging out over both his shoulder blades and twining up the back of his neck. But it was wire, installed subcutaneously and tapping somehow into his nervous system and brain. So that’s what the torque was for? I touched it gingerly and had a momentary disorientation, a view of my own breasts seen from—well, not the angle I was used to, anyway.
    “Alec, darling,” I said cautiously, “this is a rather unusual tattoo you have.”
    He said something in reply, but under the circumstances it came out somewhat muffled. I bit my lower lip and said: “I beg your pardon?”
    He lifted his face to look up at me. “You know how I told you I’ve got this big custom cybersystem, to work the rigging on my ship? This is how I run it. I’m a cyborg, have been since I was eighteen.”
    Gosh, what a coincidence!
    Though of course what he means by cyborg and what I would mean by the same word are entirely different things.
    He looked alarmed until he realized I was laughing, and then he chuckled companionably and went back to what he’d been doing as I gasped out, overwhelmed by the cosmic joke:
    “Oh, perfect—!” And then I thought I’d been struck by lightning, because the flash of revelation was very nearly that
blindingly bright. I seized his face in both my hands and tilted it up to stare into his eyes. “ What year did you say it was where you come from?”
    “Er … 2351,” he said, polite but confused.
    “But that’s only four years from—” I said, and then the whole mystery of my beloved came together. An extraordinary man, with extraordinary abilities, who bears a grudge against Dr. Zeus. A cyborg, and not a poor biomechanical slave like me but a free agent, with both the ability and the determination to slip through the Company’s defenses and do the impossible. And what was that blue fire playing around our bodies? Oh, dear, it was Crome’s radiation. Was I seeing the future?
    And I didn’t know the half of it yet.
    I laughed and laughed. Then I writhed down and we embraced. Somehow or other we