Separatrix Pt. 02 Ch. 02

Chapter Two

She trembled underneath him. He knew the signs well by now, above her and inside her, holding her and connecting with her. He'd brought her to another blackout orgasm after she'd told him the story of her appearance in Mesopotamia. The strong emotions she'd experienced back then still reverberated inside her as she related the story.

She'd been trembling already, just from telling her tale, before he'd even begun to make love to her. "I'm having trouble controlling these thoughts," she said. "I was able to before. I don't know--" she stopped. She moved into his arms and buried her face in his chest. "It's you. You can't control yourself. It's having an effect on me. And you're the first one since then..."

"First lover?"

She shook her head. Maybe she laughed but stifled it. "First-- first full connection. Do it to me, please. I need it. Please."

He knew what she meant. And now here she was under him, trembling as if he'd given her an electric shock. She was talking, not just mumbling in a dream, softly, in a language he thought he recognized from his recordings. He could see that, inside her consciousness, she was still active, not blacked out at all, but he could only sense shadows. He put his lips on her cheek. The shadows seemed to brighten a bit. He took her head in his hands. He saw movement, heard voices. Physically inside her sex he could feel her respond to the words, which were somehow turning her on. He concentrated, gripped her head closer, pressed his forehead against hers, but the scene, if that's what it was, wouldn't resolve.

He slipped down to take a nipple in his mouth, sensing that the intimacy would help. There was a man, surrounded by a cloud of confused emotions, and somewhere a woman.

He withdrew his cock and moved further down her body, pushing her legs apart with his head, and reached his tongue in to touch her clit. It was like turning on a light.

# # #

She was flying. It wasn't a dream. She was in some kind of transport, very nicely furnished, a private luxury aircraft, but not narrow, not a tube, a circular room with large windows spanning most of its perimeter that showed a forested landscape not far underneath, over which they were traveling at high speed. She vaguely knew how the aircraft worked, some kind of ground effect, but she wasn't a technologist and didn't care. His desire to know how the aircraft stayed in the air tugged at her memory of this event, but could not match the pull of the others in the cabin.

There were three of them, she and a man and a woman. The woman was indistinct, dissolving in and out of her awareness. The man-- the man was ugly. A long, horsy face, big ears, big eyes.

She wanted him. Not because he was ugly, though that helped. He was ugly in an interesting way, because so few people were not pleasant-looking. She wanted him because she saw vistas through him, worlds beyond this one.

They'd opened themselves to each other before the flight. He had access to a device, a small white pyramid-shape that the woman placed between them in the waiting room as their aircraft was being prepared. She stared at it.

"First you need to agree," the woman instructed. "It works in stages."

She understood. In the device's triangular face she saw virtual controls she willed to activate. Some of the Ugly Man's history appeared. He was much older, over four times her age of nearly 70. He'd been the director of the Org's research since before she was born, his personal history intertwined with the Org's as far back as she could perceive until it faded behind the accumulation of events and experiences. In comparison, her own personal history was so short it was fully open to him. She had to sit back on the soft waiting room seat. The view down his history was vertiginous, the sense of sinking was disturbing her own equilibrium as his formidable consciousness washed over and spread into her. She sat up and looked back at him. He kept a steady gaze on her.

"When you're ready," the woman continued, motioning toward the device. She sensed eagerness in the woman's urging, although she wasn't connecting with her. She'd hardly noticed the woman's appearance before. Pale skin, golden hair, as distinctively different as the Director but, in contrast to him, physically as perfect as anyone could want. She knew what the woman was asking. New controls had appeared above the device by which she could open herself to the next stage.

Her personal savant protested. The device was not illegal--- almost nothing was illegal-- but it was condemned in most communities of most cultures. She ignored her savant and worked the controls. His desires, that had been vague hints before, were still masked, but bright and aggressive. She became instantly wet and needed to squeeze her legs together.

# # #

Jake felt her legs squeeze his head on the bed and could taste her reaction. Her desire for this ugly man, the Director, and the Director's sharp desire for her tangled in a dissonant mix in his mind. He tried to make her come, to wipe away the scene, his uncomfortable sense of sexual desire for a man, his own uncomfortable jealousy of her desire for that man. But she wasn't ready and the memory pulled them both back.

# # #

They were in the aircraft cabin. She couldn't take her eyes off the Director. She wondered if that device had somehow manipulated her emotions, which would be unethical. But no, it was all much simpler than that. He knew her. He knew her career and he'd seen what she wanted even before making this intimate connection, it was why he'd invited her on this trip, and now that he could see more deeply into her she knew he was right. She could see deeply enough into him to understand. He'd seen her need for adventure, for something more interesting than the endless vista of a pleasant life, yet also her reluctance to follow the path other adventurous people chose, emigration to the Moon or Mars colonies, or even to join one of the many primitivist cultures here on Earth. She needed something new, something that would suit her skills and stretch her sense of herself.

She moved to him, touched him, slid her hands over him, felt his very slim body through his soft and silky clothes. The longevity treatments did that as a person aged, forcing the body to be more and more efficient, carrying as little fat as possible, always growing, though as slowly as possible. She saw his desire for her. She also saw, though he tried to hide it, envy. He was too old for all the treatments she would need, and even too big-- the technology had strong mass and volume limits.

She stood, removed her clothes, light gray shirt and pants she'd been given before the flight, and sat naked on his lap, facing him. Her dim sense of the Pale Woman, connected to the Director, became sharper and plainer. His arousal appeared as a fluid energy in him, in his body but mostly in his mind, and that energy radiated to the Pale Woman. She'd had relationships with women in her youth-- most young people tried out every kind of person, male or female, of every shape and size and color and personality-- but the woman's sexuality seemed walled off from her, only sensed through his consciousness. She'd heard of this kind of relationship but had never experienced it before, a kind of voyeuristic connection. She would never want that for herself but she wanted the Director so she let the woman observe as she bit his ear and neck and felt him respond.

She wondered if she could get him inside her-- she wanted that-- but the aircraft began its descent and too soon they were on the ground.

She closed her mind-- feeling a bit of relief that she could still do that-- and put her clothing back on. They were met outside the aircraft by several people, all dressed in white, plus a small group of musicians playing with acoustic instruments a rhythmic, welcoming melody. A road conveyance took them over a path that led to a spacious set of living areas that soon became roofed and they were inside. The air was clear and scented with forest. At a balcony she could see that they were halfway up a tall mountain.

# # #

"Where was this?" He'd crawled up to hold her. She'd awakened. "I mean, where will this-- I don't know."

"Tenses don't make sense anymore, do they? It was, in my life, somewhere in the northwest of North America. I have no idea what you would call it now. Might not be anywhere inhabited."

"And this is where it all-- I mean, this was the beginning..."

She curled up to him and put her lips to his ear. "Yes. I need to tell you."

# # #

I sat at the balcony sipping an energy drink after the Director and the Pale Woman had gone off somewhere. I'd already caught on that clothing shades meant a lot here. We three newcomers, who appeared to be the only guests in this place, were wearing simple, light gray shirt and pants. The attendants, as I thought of them, all wore white. So it was immediately noticeable when a man walked up to me in a very dark gray, almost black, outfit.

He sat down across from me. He was even skinnier and taller than the Director, so probably older. "Thank you for agreeing to visit us," he said.

"How could I resist?" I responded. Let me explain that, at that time, I'd worked in the Org for nearly thirty years as an archaeologist and historian. I'd always signed up for the most challenging assignments. I'd crawled through caves to investigate burial sites; I'd joined and lived with two different primitivist cultures. The Org promoted and supported those cultures and needed from time to time to evaluate how well they were emulating the original cultures they were based on. My work in those cultures was a plus. And recently I'd poured through medieval manuscripts in the ruins of various churches and monasteries. I was one of their top historical operatives. But this was the first time I'd been invited to join the elite management in one of their retreats. You'll probably find it ironic, but longevity results in progress in many situations actually slowing down, because we all have so many years ahead of us.

"The Director of Technology can be very persuasive, can't he?" He sent a link to a corpus of experimental results, all new to me and quite a large amount of data.

I was already very attracted to the Director, after years of working with him. There was a presence about him. I was looking forward to a few days of sex with him and he'd hinted we'd be doing some new things together, which excited me. I'd even suspected that he might present me with some new work. That was also an interesting hope. But this corpus was totally new, groundbreaking. I was shocked. And thrilled.

"I understand, Historian, that this will all take some time for you to assimilate. But your previous successes argue that you'll be able to master it quickly."

"I confess I know very little about the physics involved."

"That's fine. We have experts who can manage that. And who will spend as much time as necessary to explain the details. What's important to us, to the Org, is that you've proven yourself able to absorb a vast amount of disparate knowledge and produce invaluable insights from it. It's almost as if you're a living savant. We highly value you and the service you've already performed for us."

"I'm truly flattered..." I realized he hadn't bothered to introduce himself. I thought I knew what that meant. People very high up didn't bother with names. My savant didn't recognize him.

"Chief," he answered, understanding my unspoken question, knowing what the word would do to me.

I was speechless, which you know I never am. The chief of the Org. It would be like you suddenly meeting the President, or the king of England. No, it would be more like you meeting the mysterious leader of the think tank that counsels them. He kept an extremely low profile, which is why my savant didn't recognize him. It also meant, given that I could now identify him, that I was part of the elite. Whether I wanted to be or not. I wanted to be, of course, more than anything else; but I couldn't help wondering what would happen if I refused whatever challenge they planned to put before me. It was scary.

My savant was pleased. Very pleased. It had not liked many of my life decisions. It was always trying to keep me safe, like most people's personal savants, and I was always pushing myself, taking risks in situations and environments that would test my abilities and spur me on to greater successes. But it seemed that the Org had finally seduced my savant as well as me.

The Chief got up and walked off, back the way he'd come. That was it, my interview. I was left with a mountain of information to study. My savant notified me that it had taken on a commitment to keep everything that happened here confidential, including of course the chief's identity. It also gave me directions to my suite.

My suite was, of course, elegant, with wide transparent partitions open to a gorgeous view. The weather was particularly nice. But I spent my time focusing on the corpus.

Dinner was outside on a large patio, you might call it a plaza, it was so large, and was a series of gourmet treats, one small delicacy after another, each one described in detail by someone in white. I remained quiet while my two companions swooned over each bite. Even with the connection mostly closed-- my savant had been nagging me incessantly about it and this time I decided to take its advice-- I could feel how good it all tasted to them. But I stayed quiet. I'd spent too long grinding acorns and disemboweling sinewy chickens to appreciate food as art. But then dessert arrived.

"What-- what is this?" was all I could say. The Director and the Pale Woman got some kind of small, fancy confection, plainly dessert, but the attendant had laid before me a large oblong dish holding an object that looked like nothing more than a long, curved, erect, white penis. Disembodied, to be sure, laid in a puddle of beige sauce, partially covered by brown and red sauces. No foreskin or meatus. But still.

"It's an extinct fruit that we believe was called a bana. We have been able to revive it. Try it."

First let me tell you that the Director had been eyeing me all through dinner as if I was going to be served as the dessert. The Pale Woman too. Even with the connection nearly closed, his desire, probably amplified by the woman, penetrated. So when I sliced off a bit of one end and put it, with the beige sauce, in my mouth I didn't need a neural connection to see what was going on in his mind.

However, the bana was very good. "Delicious," I announced. They'd been watching me anxiously, not just because of sexual anticipation. They really wanted me to like this dish. "It's just the craziest fruit. Why would it grow this way? I mean, I remember from one of my excursions, there was a tropical fruit that looked maybe like this."

"Plantain."

"Right. But you had to cook them. This--" I took another bite, this time with the red sauce, some kind of berry-- "is quite sweet. Doesn't look cooked."

"It's not." As I continued to eat he explained, "It's a distant relative of the plant you saw, but a clone, developed, we believe, even before genetic engineering. Clones, you know, are ridiculously fragile, not even qualifying as species, and all these were wiped out in one of the Modern Age's environmental catastrophes back then."

"And you found enough relic plant matter that you could sequence the whole genome? Remarkable." He shook his head. I tried another hypothesis. "They had some basic DNA sequencing tech back then. You unearthed a database that was somehow preserved?" Another head shake. I resumed eating the dessert. Way better than playing guessing games.

"We went back and got a sample."

I'd been absorbing the scientific presentations, or trying to, in my suite before dinner. They were very abstract. The latest advances in entanglement engineering and superposition, a lot about how the laws of physics work the same forwards and backwards, some very abstract math describing nonlocal physics that the authors admitted was a simplification of the real theory, which only savants could comprehend.

There was also a large block of geological analyses whose relevance I didn't get. But his simple statement put at least a few of the pieces of the puzzle together. "You can extract matter from the past?"

"No. That's not possible. At least not with current technology." He waited a beat. I took another bite. It was really quite good, just firm enough to feel good on the teeth, just sweet enough to please the tongue. "We send people back."

I almost choked. I had to put my knife and fork down on the table. I swallowed. I looked from him to the woman and back. It wasn't a prank. To add to my difficulty, my savant had decided to go mad at that very moment. It had read the corpus already, far faster than I could, and had picked up on the implications of the Director's statement before I had, why he was telling me this, why he was presenting evidence to me in this dramatic way, what his plans for me were beyond this evening. I had to mute it so I could think.

And I finally got it. I could travel back to an earlier age, maybe the original culture on which one of the primitivist cultures was based. Or maybe an era completely new to me. I could do it.

"We want to send you back," he said. He could sense my excitement. "You would be ideal. What do you think? How much would you like to do that?"

As an answer, I picked up the third of the bana I hadn't got to yet, getting my fingers messy. I looked the Director straight in the eye and put the end between my lips the way I had on the dozen or so stiff banas of the men who'd been lucky enough to win my favor, and became the first woman in maybe a thousand years to fellate this extinct delicacy.

# # #

She sat up, her energy reviving. She stroked him from balls to tip. He was still partly erect. She used her lips and tongue to get him fully there.

"Wait," he said. "Bananas are extinct?"

"Will be. Clones are inherently weak. That's why you see so few of them in the biosphere. Uniformity is a weakness, diversity is a strength. Basic ecology."

"But how did it happen?"

"We don't know. One of the climate catastrophes, no doubt."

"One of them? How many-- hold on, I don't think I want to know. Not that you would tell me anyway. But I'm sure bananas have been sequenced by now. Probably many times. It's an important crop. Your people couldn't find the banana genome? I mean, we've got petabytes of all sorts of information, not just banana DNA."

She laughed at him, a ridiculing laugh. As if he were responsible for all the failed technology produced today. "Your data storage is shit. All the magnetic data went away in the first Miyake Event."

"The what?"

"Look it up. They happened. Will happen. In fact, the first Miyake Event is generally regarded as the end of the Modern Age." As he grabbed his phone she explained, "Big electromagnetic pulse from space. Lots of possible sources. Solar flare, nearby supernova, the list goes on."

"Oh. That's bad. When's it going to-- never mind. But what about optical data storage?"

"Your so smart engineers put it on polymer disks. Bacteria and fungi got that."

"What can eat plastic?"

"Not much at the moment, but life finds a way, you know? Evolution happens. At least in the Bronze Age they wrote on clay and fired the important tablets. That lasts. Your crap all went away pretty quickly. We do sometimes find libraries that still had paper books. Once in a while there's the right kind of disaster and they get buried in the right pH and oxygen level. We can do tomography on those and get a lot of it. Of course, every age thinks they're the crowning achievement of history. But you actually called yourselves modern. I hope you find that ironic and humbling.."

"You know, if you weren't performing fellatio on me right now, I would feel personally insulted. And I don't even think it's my fault."

"You are a very good man, an enjoyable and interesting, sometimes very interesting, companion. And a superb fuck. Oh, and an important inventor. And now intimately connected to my mind. So I'm happy to perform whatever sex you like until your heart, soul, gonad, each and every part of you, is content and achieves total satisfaction. But yeah, I'm insulting you. Soon I'm going to eat your DNA, speaking of DNA, which you should consider a profound compliment, but right now I'm insulting your whole fucked up civilization."

She went down on him again for an extended time, a smooth and slow and deep series of strokes that pleased his body immensely, staying just short of an intensity that would stress him, just giving him delightful oral pleasure. It was maybe her way of consoling him for being stuck in such a miserable and primitive, to her, time period.

She released him just as he started feeling that the delight was beginning to transform into torture. "You're not as fucked up as the Bronze Age, I'll give you that. They were totally at the mercy of the biosphere, and war was constant. And slavery. I had it really good as a slave, but most didn't. It was a nasty time in so many ways."

"And mine isn't? Thanks."

"I didn't say that. Your time's nastiness is there, but you've learned to mostly hide it. Those atomic warheads you have aimed at each other?"

"You mean they get launched at some point?"

She sighed. "This is a really nice blow job, isn't it? And we're both enjoying it a lot. Let's not ruin it." The next suck session was intense, torturous, the opposite of the previous one. She was obviously doing her best to wipe away his memory of the conversation they'd just had. It mostly worked. He ended up curled around her, groaning and shuddering.

At last she released him again and he began to uncurl himself. "This-- this ugly man you mentioned." He was trembling all over and something she'd been doing to him had left his cockhead tingling as if it was still in some kind of eroto-electric field. "The Director. What happened?"

"You really want to know? You're going to feel it with me. It was very intense. Maybe you're not ready."

It was a challenge. She was testing him again, daring him. "Tell me."

# # #

The whole scene took place on a thick carpet the attendants put down upstairs in an area, not exactly a room because it was open in multiple places, under a covering part roof, part canopy, kept quite warm though it was open to the evening air. The musicians were already set up there. The attendants led her up there and had her stand and wait. Soon the Director showed up.

"Where will you send me first?" I asked.

"We're still surveying. That will take time. And we'll need to prepare you. That will also take time." At a nearly invisible gesture the attendants went to me and undressed me. When I was naked he came up close and ran a hand over me, along the side of my head, down over my sternum, to my upper arms, over my hip bone. I'd expected him to touch me in a whole other series of body parts. He didn't touch my bush-- I still had some down there and it was wet with anticipation. It was all clinical. He was sizing me up. He sent me what you might call a prescription, a set of treatments I would need.

My savant immediately reacted, slicing and dicing the details. It liked the electro-enzymatic process to strengthen my bones, a new and very expensive treatment. It also approved the enhancements to my blood, immune system, and liver, as well as other adjustments, lungs, skin, and so on. It really didn't like the extensive genetic mods, necessary to improve radiation resistance, not just because the mods were so extensive, but the implied reason. Why was I going to need radiation resistance?

"I'll need some time to study all this."

"Of course. You have to agree to all of them."

"Understood. When are you going to fuck me?"

He just smiled. The musicians began playing a slow, non-melodic sound-- I wasn't ready to call it music. Another tiny gesture brought two attendants to me. As I stood and continued to face him they applied a lotion over my body, which tingled all over. They wiped that away, then applied another one that was quite sensual. It turned me on, not least because he was being undressed at the same time and more attendants were putting a lotion on him as he devoured me with his eyes. And the attendants could feel my excitement. They were connected in some way also, and spared no part of me, even my most intimate recesses. His cock, which was quite thick and long, almost certainly enhanced, stood out straight.

Those attendants withdrew and two others came up and stood behind him. They began to massage him, up and down his spine, along his neck. The Pale Woman appeared. I felt their connection and immediately opened myself up to them. My savant of course rebelled so I had to mute it. It overrode the mute, something it's only supposed to do in an emergency. I had to shut it down. I had no idea what was going to happen, but I wanted nothing more than to find out. She didn't come close to us, instead lying face down on a padded table the attendants wheeled in. Two more attendants appeared and began to massage her. I could feel in the pair's senses that they were being massaged in sync. I'd at first wondered why I was left out, since no attendant was massaging me.

I would realize soon that I had a different role. I could feel what they did want, her desire even more than his. I sank to my knees and gave them what they both wanted.

# # #

"Come here." She pulled him off the bed and had him stand next to it. She knelt. When she took his cock between her lips he was back in the scene she'd described. He was the Director, enjoying her mouth. He was also her, enjoying the Director's cock. He had to control himself. Part of him wanted to pull away from her, to break the spell. He looked down at her, holding him between her lips with her eyes closed. It brought him back to the present. But then she slid over him and it was like being dropped suddenly through a trap door. And then she stopped and he was back.

She released him and stood. She hugged him. "Men are really delicious. I know you can feel it." He had nothing to say to that. "Come on. I'm starving-- I mean food. Let's get dressed and go somewhere. I'll tell you while we walk."

# # #

It was an extraordinary experience. Unique on many levels. Let me explain. They didn't want what you people call a blow job-- which is a hilarious term, by the way. I didn't suck him, I just held him in my mouth, he was thick enough that I couldn't do much more anyway. And I do mean 'they'. They wanted this, the pair, the Director and the Pale Woman. I could sense how integrated the two were, at least at the proprioceptive level. I know that males of your era are taught to fear homosexual contact, but my age is mostly free of that. Really, I was fellating her as much as him. Think of it that way.

And that wasn't the most extraordinary part of the experience. That was just the beginning. As I was concentrating, the Director's hands took hold of me. Two of the attendants, strong men, lifted my hips and stretched me out horizontally. I flailed a bit at first, but I saw the Director's vision of what he wanted, which led me to trust these men, holding me up basically by my chest and thighs. I kept my head tilted back so the Director could slide himself deep into me. The musicians hit a long seventh chord. The woman whimpered. I could feel that the masseurs, who were still working, had found some kind of node in the pair's spinal column and were pressing hard, painfully hard, into both of them.

I had a beautiful, creative thought then. I was floating in air, literally, holding both a man and a woman in my mouth, and I saw that I was one end of a spectrum extending from exquisite pleasure to tense pain and it took only a simple outstretching of my tongue to lift my end, the pleasure end, beyond what the pair could take. At that same moment the masseurs freed the node they'd been deeply manipulating, releasing endorphins into their nervous systems.

The Pale Woman spasmed on the table so hard her masseurs had to hold her from shaking herself off it. Her orgasm exploded through her body and raced into his. I felt it too and it was really quite fantastic. Even the masseurs and other attendants felt it. The men holding me up almost dropped me. We all came a bit. I gushed. Shared orgasms are doubled orgasms, don't you think?

I started sucking madly on the Director's cock-- I couldn't control myself-- but my handlers-- that's how I thought of them-- pulled me off and spun me backwards to put my very wet pussy where my mouth had been, and two more attendants appeared to help, female. I was very sensitive to the gender of each attendant. They spun me onto my back, and spread my legs. Soon that big cock was filling me up and I thought I'd ascended to some kind of sex heaven. I mean, I was still floating, there were hands all over me, not just holding me up but also feeling all over me and although I wasn't directly connected to any of the attendants, I could feel though the Director the pleasure they were receiving from touching me. I couldn't help responding to that pleasure with my own. I couldn't hold my head up, just couldn't maintain the presence of mind to think to do that-- the big cock, that seemed be swelling even larger inside me, was thrumming its way up as far as my insides could take it and I was overwhelmed with the sensations.

Then yet another attendant, a woman in white, took my head in her hands and held me like a living pillow. Someone wiped my face with a cool, moist cloth.

The musicians segued to a rhythmic progression, up and up, that matched the big cock's growing thrusts, and I could feel my own orgasm building. The Director knew what to do with that cock. Both my nipples were getting twisted, someone was lightly rubbing around my clit, someone else was probing my anus. There was no way I could resist, no way I would ever want to resist, and I came harder than I'd ever come up to that point in my life, and of course my orgasm raced through the Director and the Pale Woman and everyone else.

# # #

"So that's how you became a time traveler? Having sex with that ugly guy?"

They were sitting at a picnic table in a city park where food trucks lined up along a street. For a while, after she'd finished her story, there was not much either of them were ready to say. Walking felt good and he was starving too. The treatment definitely was accelerating his metabolism. They'd bought burritos. He'd inhaled his and was now watching her devour hers.

She paused her meal. "I became a time traveler by devoting my professional career to a powerful global-historical and archaeological research organization for more than three decades and demonstrating my superior skills. The sex was a bonus." She resumed eating.

"Um."

"Your civilization is really fucked up about sex, you know that?"

"So you've mentioned multiple times, and I won't try to argue with you about that. But are you saying that your civilization is free of sexual problems?"

"How do I compare to other women you've known? The women of your era."

"I'd have trouble comparing you to any other woman of any era. You aren't implying, are you, that you're a typical, average, run of the mill woman of your time?"

She smiled. He thought his compliment might have hit its target. There may have been some condescension in that smile, but if so it wasn't directed at him. Perhaps it was aimed at every other woman who had ever lived. "Sex is not transactional in my time, at least not in common cultures. Let's just leave it that it was a win-win. The Director and I had been attracted to each other for a long time. There were rumors about him that I found intriguing. There were other rumors about what his teams were working on. I knew I'd find it all very interesting. He knew the same things about me. My becoming part of his project allowed it all to happen." She finished her meal, scrunched up the aluminum foil, and wiped her fingers. "Feel like walking some more?"

He stood and faced her. "Unless you'd like more bana." He wiggled his hips.

She snorted a laugh and stood up. But she did brush his crotch in passing. They strolled down the street in silence. She was leading and seemed to be heading back to her place. "So that was the beginning of your relationship?" he asked. It was stupid of him to be jealous of a man who wouldn't be born for another thousand years, but he couldn't help himself. He hadn't exactly answered her pointed question, but they both knew the answer: compared to the women he'd known of his era, she was, well, incomparable.

"Yes, but not the way you think. The sex with the Director and his partner was a one-time event. I think it was mostly because of the woman. Our time was perfect because it was unique. A repeat would have ruined that perfection. I got that emotion from them afterwards."

"You said yes. About a relationship."

"I did. The attendant, the woman, who held my head? Afterwards she lay with me. I was wiped out."

"Not the Director?"

"He was of course with the Pale Woman. Which was fine. My woman held me, then helped me get back to my suite, then washed me and put me to bed, and held me as I slept. The rest of the crew, the attendants and musicians, had an orgy, she told me. Made sense, given the intense sexual energy they'd been exposed to. She and I became lovers and I lived with her for a couple of months during the beginning of my training and the treatments. If you're going to be jealous of someone from this experience it should be her."

"Right now I'm feeling jealous of every person, male or female, who ever lived at any time, anywhere, because potentially any of them could be, or maybe were, your lover."

"I think you have it backwards. They would all be jealous of you if they knew what I'm going to do to you when we get back in my bed."

# # #

She started with a massage. "You know that other primates have much stronger muscles than we do, right?" He didn't but he kept quiet. Her fingers were pressing forcefully into the muscles along his spine. The pressure would have been painful except she could tell from their connection just where she needed to press, which somehow communicated to his muscles to relax and let her do whatever she was doing. Small waves of contentment spread through him each time. "It seems our species made the decision a few million years ago to redirect our metabolisms to feed our big brains instead of our muscles. I got that corrected in preparation for my assignment."

He saw that she was going to work on his front, so rolled over to lay supine. He'd been receiving her intentions in visual flashes during their walk back, all sorts of possibilities for physical intimacy, especially his favorites. He could sense the relief she felt at being able to finally tell someone her story. She worked on his thighs, then his arms, his hands, his neck, the small muscles in his face, his shoulders, more muscles than he remembered possessing. When her fingers slid over his scrotum all the energy she'd put into his body seemed to be drawn into his male organ and he was stiff in seconds.

He thought he understood. Images-- memories-- swirled in her. "So then you went to Mesopotamia and met your prince and princess?"

She continued to play with him, just barely touching as she ran a single finger up his length. "No, my first superposition was to medieval England."

"Really? I mean, you haven't said anything about that."

"It was mostly a bust. Remember all that geology the Org dumped on me in that first corpus? I got even more during my training. Geology is the key to accurate superposition. You need a mass, the more massive the better, that stays in one place for a long time. That's how they can track the entanglement back through the timeline. Mountains, preferably in locations where the climate and topography don't move huge cubic kilometers of soil and detritus around."

"And that didn't work out?"

"Well, they had to land me up in the north of the British island where there are some mountains. The plan was for me to walk and then find a horse to go south. We wanted to get me to London and maybe Oxford. I was supposed to plant some fiducials."

He sat up. Her desire had receded a bit, as had his erection, as she focused on her memories. "I know what a fiducial is. Or thought I did."

She moved off the bed, returning with her pouch, from which she brought out a small black disk. It looked like an old, worn coin, partially corroded. She let him handle and examine it, then took it back. "It's a ceramic loaded with an isotope array. We have devices that can easily detect the particular combination of isotopes. They're selected to be unique in a particular environment. Long lived, of course." To a questioning look, she explained, "Ruins are ridiculously difficult to find. Cities get built on top of other cities, floods cover roads and structures, everything gets churned up over the centuries."

She looked down on him. "I see one of my roles to be a curator for future historians. I'm pointing out what about the era seems important, and where they should look."

"You said that visit was a bust."

"They landed me in mid-spring, trying to provide a few months of good weather for me. I had a bag of coins we'd counterfeited, but mass is a critical issue. There's a reason they picked a really small person to superposition, and all I was wearing was this foil suit that kept me warm but which I would have to ditch somewhere before making contact with any historical individual. Unfortunately we didn't have detailed weather history and a major storm hit. The countryside was mud and ice and then there were floods that took out a main bridge. On and on. For my first trip they didn't want me staying more than a few months and they wanted me back at the landing spot for the return. No way I was getting to London and back, even if I could obtain a horse. I surveyed a couple of local villages, which was useful, but not much else. I got by, but I wasn't able to complete my mission the way I wanted. There was a stable separatrix in that period the savants were interested in."

"A what? Separa--?"

"Separatrix. It's a mathematical term. When a mathematical model can have two possible solutions. That's how the savants explained it to me. For us with human brains, it's a split in the time stream. I superpositioned to right after the Black Death, so the countryside was mostly empty and there was chaos all over. They calculated that I was unlikely to alter history in such a period. It was all about safety in the early trips, safety for the time streams. They were right, but it also meant I didn't get much done. I found some clothes in an abandoned cottage, tried to head south, but it was hopeless. Roads were washed out and there was no one left to repair them. I thought maybe I could buy a horse, but the prices had skyrocketed, even if you could find a healthy one."

"So you went back to your time, and then you went to Mesopotamia?"

"You want to hear about the prince. I can see it. You're a little jealous."

"No, no, I just want..."

She slid up and put her lips to his ear. "I know what you want. And I want to tell you."

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My thanks to my beta readers, @AlexFourways, @MormonJack, and @shelleycat1.