The Jumping Off Point

A story by Keith Croes

She won 20,000 meticais with one red chip on number 3l and leaned over the green table, fingers scrabbling at her winnings, brown eyes traveling from him to the boy at her side back to him. He had lost a small bet and grown bored. She watched his profile down the table pull back, disappear behind a row of faces.

"I want him. Tell Mario I want him," she hissed in Portuguese, scooping one handful, two, and plucking the final few chips into the black pouch the boy carried. The boy careened off through the crowd.

She stepped backwards on tiptoe in tight new shoes, trying to follow his progress. The mouths of the shoes tugged at her heels like the thick, sucking mud of the river bank.

Her place at the table was soon consumed by the shouldering gamblers and she watched him walk, his right hand pocketed and his left arm swinging, into the alcove of a small bar off the main room.

Standing now, settled on the slope of the new shoes, she pressed her open palms against the black fabric of her dress. Her wiry hair was tied at the back of her head and she could feel its pull on her scalp. A diamond pin pierced her left nostril. She began to walk toward the low rectangular entryway of the bar, unmindful of the stares of the men in the crowd around her.

Her bare legs swept against the dress like marble through wind, strong legs that only a few years before could outrun every boy in her neighborhood. How they would laugh if they knew what she wore under the dress: a pair of lacy black panties whose rear was a string that ran up between her buttocks. Some of them now, though, she knew would maybe do more than laugh. Four thousand meticais maybe some of them would find in their household budgets to release the black string from its dark refuge.

She wore nothing else under the dress.

Maybe he'll see me, invite me to sit down, she thought.

She stood with nervous hands off to the side of the entryway, not quite ready to look in for him.

The flash. Could it have been the diamond? Just the diamond?

The lens rolled from his open palm into his jacket pocket and he sat. His hand found the button at the center of the table.

"Mineral water," he said. "And a glass of ice."

"Yes? Yes?"

The boy's cheeks alternately puffed and hollowed with his racing breath and he stood at attention, flitting brown eyes eventually finding a focus and lifting toward her. The pouch was gone, as she knew it would be. Winnings were returned to the house.

He delivered his message in a desperate rush. "Mario says he already calls for you."

"For me?" She reached out and hooked a hand around the boy's neck. "He calls for me?"

The boy nodded solemnly in her grasp. She kissed him on the forehead.

Christ, how is this done? How is it ever done?

At some indefinite point you are at the mercy of chemistry, they had told him. All the training in the world can't help you.

Man, that's no shit. No shit indeed. No shit indeedy-doody.

It could be worse, he thought. She could be a nun. He laughed out loud.

He saw her coming, silhouetted in the entryway. His temples pounded.

"May I sit?"

He rose. "Yes, please."

"Oh, you are American?"

He searched for avarice in that observation and wasn't sure if he found any.

Just let it happen, this first moment. Here's where it starts. Here's where it better goddamn start.

He forced himself to look at her. She was lithe, graceful, with a face so exotic it was hard to take in all at once. Outside in the casino he saw that her skin was dark, the color of rich earth. Now in her face he saw a stunning victory of genetics, where black and white and Oriental resided in simple beauty. There was something almost boyish about her, though her body, her presence, defined a space that every man recognizes as the absolute feminine, filled with equal parts magic and terror. There was humor near her lips. He felt a sudden, irrational desire to ask her where those lips had been.

How is this done? How is it ever done?

They sat. He stared at the diamond in her nose.

"Yes, I am," he said finally.

"Are you here on business?"

The English was excellent, the accent captivating, like music. But the melody was orchestrated, rehearsed. Implacable as a wall.

"Yes."

"You look too young to be a businessman. And too thin."

She smiled. It gave him the creeps.

"How old are you?"

"Twenty-three."

"What's your name?"

"Mora."

He nodded and looked thoughtful. After a moment she asked, "And what is your name?" This time he heard the wall crack, the tiny quaver of a girl trying to be all grown up and oh-so-sophisticated. The imperfection was a foothold.

"Steve."

"Steve," she repeated. "Is this your first time in Mozambique?"

He nodded. "Would you like something?"

She reached out and, without lifting it from the table, used two fingers on the open neck of the small bottle to turn it so that she could read the label.

"Mineral water? You do not drink anything stronger?"

He shrugged. "Sometimes."

"Could I have white wine?"

His finger sought the button at the center of the table.

"White wine," he said, and they waited silently for the drink to come, his eyes moving past her to the people in the casino.

There's no rush, he thought. She's not going anywhere. I bought her. Joplin bought her.

Obliquely he realized that she did not press him to talk. She seemed to be studying him and the people around them in the bar with a certain patience. She seemed comfortable, as if she were exactly where she wanted to be. He figured her comfort probably stemmed from the fact that she had found her john and was ready to embark on the next few hours in a businesslike manner. But it calmed him nonetheless.

The waiter was a trim, short black man, unobtrusive and friendly. She sipped from the wide-mouthed glass he had placed before her, the liquid a subtle green in the low light. Beneath the table her bare thighs rubbed together.

"You called for me?" she said.

His thoughts retracted from somewhere. He nodded, a simple acknowledgment of fact.

"I also called for you."

She saw the interest detonate in his eyes.

"You can do that?"

"Oh yes." She smiled.

"And then someone would've asked me if I wanted you?"

She nodded.

"And why did you call for me?"

"Because you were the one I wanted."

He looked at her, and beneath the long unknowing that stretched between them he also felt the primitive stir of his sexuality. He could take this woman happily. For what it was worth. And he had no idea what it was worth.

"And why did you call for me?" she asked.

He glanced down at the empty bottle of mineral water, then out toward the casino, then back at her. "I called for you," he said simply.

She sipped, brown eyes regarding him over the rim of the glass.

What was it worth?

To her, maybe 4,000 meticais. Maybe that was all. To him, who's to say?

At least the gate had not drawn resoundingly closed as it had four times before -- in France, Thailand, Canada, Indonesia. What a crashing incompatibility there can be between people. No second chances. No considered reversals of opinion. Clang, I do not like you, you are an idiot without chance of redemption, don't let the door hit you in the ass.

At some indefinite point you are at the mercy of chemistry.

And he was no chemist, not when it came to women. He was just a healthy hetero white male stuffed full of Star Service training and hanging now on the distance between him and a young black whore. Homosexuals also could fold together into the jumping off points, and maybe they felt the same distances between one another. But this distance was his distance. And hers. And who knows, her distance may be the greater.

What was it worth, making love to this woman?

It seemed a natural step, perhaps inevitable. When it came to male-female relationships, he didn't know if there could be love without sex. And if race would make a difference, he didn't know that either. He had never known a black woman outside of training simulations.

First things first, Steve-o. Does she have the subfield? Or is it the goddamn diamond?

"Would you like to take a walk?" she asked.

He looked surprised. "I was just thinking... yes."

At the rear of the casino was a lighted pool, a wild variety of tropical plants, towering palms like moonlegs, a narrow beach down to the roiling Indian Ocean. They walked side by side in the humid night on a wandering paved path lined by lights like mushrooms with glowing underbellies.

They did not touch. After a while she locked onto his arm.

Suddenly, as if triggered by her action, he withdrew something from his pocket and turned her away from him, bending her ear forward with his thumb. While that seemed odd to her at the moment it happened, what occupied her mind was something else: the vivid memory of the time she had been ambushed by neighbor boys along the river -- four or five young faces hovering eagerly between her spread legs, examining the sprouting, curly knots of pubic hair. That too had seemed odd, but not threatening.

So she said nothing and offered no resistance, turning toward him when he was done, sensing that some question had been answered. Her cupped hand went up against his cock and she stretched on tiptoe to whisper in his ear, the shoes sucking at her heels.

"Such a beautiful night," was all she could think to say.

"Yes."

She was surprised to find him erect through his trousers and even more surprised by the explosion of excitement that rang through her, and her fingers squeezed and stroked and she wanted him. She hadn't had a man in many months, and never one as beautiful as this.

She went limp suddenly and hung from his neck by one arm like living jewelry, her cheek against the buttons of his shirt just above his belt.

"Do you... do you have a room here?" she stammered.

"Yes," he said.

He was in her from behind and she pressed back against him, holding herself there. He reached down to the bedstand and picked up the lens, put it to his eye like a jeweler's loupe and gasped. A thin fan of intense blue-white light spread upward from the crack of her ass, casting a vertical line up his abdomen like the boundary of a laser surveying tool. Two fans on the perpendicular axis leaked from the bends of her knees, angling up through the room behind him, and he could see the white seams behind her ears and the bright bluish cast on the rumpled sheet under both of her armpits.

Vaguely, within her, the subfield outlined her shoulder blades, ribs and spine, as though her skin were some loosely woven fabric.

"What?" She laughed and wriggled her ass back against him.

The light show shifted, reflected off the large mirrors in the room.

"Hold on, baby," he said.

It took him several thrusts to realize that the bouncing cone of light that seemed to originate at her face was the glowing beacon of the diamond pin in her left nostril, and the music he heard was her cries.

A slice of sun rose and fell on the billowing white curtain before the sliding glass doors, opened slightly to the balcony. The capital city of Maputo was a distant thrum of horns and engines. A plane wound to the depths of audibility. She lay on her side, her face buried in his armpit and one dark brown hand on his chest, his right arm touching softly behind her almost to the domes of her buttocks.

Her brown hand was the first thing he saw, napping small and dark on his pale chest, and his first awareness was of a contentment that seemed bottomless. And so it was with unwelcome alarm that he felt it drain away into the quiet room, dissipate, a nebulous night-thing unraveled by the day until she was a stranger beside him, a figure of unfathomable doings with harsh hair and an ominous smell beneath the shards of her perfume.

Waves of cold sweat erupted everywhere and his pulse quickened. Roused, the dark hand skittered off his chest. She moaned and he felt a tickling vibration in his side.

I can't believe she's still here. If she stays, then we'll go from there.

"Good morning."

His voice sounded pleasant enough.

"Hello." Her bleary brown eyes blinked and she displayed a smug smile, stretching like a cat and clutching the pillow against her cheek.

"Would you like some breakfast?"

She nodded.

He rolled out of bed before she could reach out for him.

"Go ahead and call down. Get me some coffee, will you?"

He walked naked into the bathroom. As he showered, he remembered his wallet on the bureau. It would settle everything if she disappeared with his wallet. Hello, Joplin, send money. I've been robbed. He grimaced, then grinned.

As he dried himself with the huge Hyatt towel, he fought the urge to peek out into the quiet room, but his ears were pitched for any sound. After a moment, some tinny dance music came up -- from the radio mounted in the bedstand, he realized -- and his face flushed with a quick excitement. He was shaving when she entered the bathroom, the long nail of one finger brushing briefly against his hip as she passed behind him. Her middle finger, he thought. And she did it precisely. On purpose.

She arranged herself on the white plastic toilet seat and began immediately to pee. The razor had evened his right sideburn and cleared most of the foam off his cheek. Bending his nose with one hand, he gazed over at her.

She smiled shyly, yet her eyes never left his.

"Twenty-three, huh?"

She covered so little of the toilet seat and was perched over it in such a way that she looked irredeemably childlike. Unbidden, his dick began to harden. He leaned up against the cold porcelain of the sink.

She wiped herself, found the flush handle and tracked across the damp mat, clinking the shower curtain closed over the echoing sibilance of rushing water. Fingers slicking at the foam, he located the lower border of his left sideburn and scraped slowly downward.

She was still in the shower when the tray came, with silver plates and napkins folded like leafy white plants, tiny white ceramic bowls of butter, wicker baskets with pastries wrapped in linen, glasses of juice topped with clear, clinging plastic wrap, and a carafe of coffee.

Wearing only a towel around his waist, he directed the tray to the low glass table in front of the sliding glass doors, moving a leather-bound book out of the way. The book was embossed with gold lettering: VISITORS GUIDE TO MAPUTO. The previous day he had seen the admonition in six languages on the inside front cover: PLEASE DO NOT REMOVE FROM ROOM. He could read four of them.

He turned off the radio and, naked, waited for her with the bedsheet pulled up to his waist, shoulder blades meeting the cool, carved wood of the headboard above the pillow tucked against his lower back.

She's a girl, a fucking kid. She thinks she passed the first test by not ripping me off. I'm her ticket out of here, every whore's dream. She could no more love me than fly.

She strode into the room and stopped, rubbing her head with a towel. With the shiny corkscrews of her pitch hair on the loose, she was an ancient jungle goddess, the most breath-taking feminine animal he had ever seen. He searched suddenly for the diamond pin, which was no longer in her nose, and found it on the bedstand next to him.

Then he remembered what he'd told her the night before, suspended above her, part of her: "Come with me to America."

God, the things you tell a woman.

But she, he knew, was his ticket out of here. And she could fly.

"Coffee?"

She shook her head. "No, the tea is mine."

She sat naked in a white upholstered chair, the white curtain breathing behind her. Her elbows did not quite reach the armrests left and right. There were yellow crumbs on her lips. She held the muffin in both hands, and in her eyes was the distance, pushing back against the stranger that he was.

Still covered to the waist and glancing repeatedly back up to her face, he leaned over and thumbed open the hinged lid of the carafe, pouring himself a cup of coffee. A crumb fell past her breasts and the flat expanse of her stomach into the crevasse of her lap, his eyes following its entire path as if it traveled in slow motion. On her thighs were several spots the size of coins, darker than her dark skin.

"What happened there?" He nodded, bringing the cup to his lips.

She swallowed. "I was in prison. They burned me with cigarettes."

She set the remnant of the muffin on a white plate and stood bent over with one hand clasped between her knees, filling a cup with steaming water from a small teapot, then took the cup of coffee from his hand and placed it back on the tray. In one movement she was beside him in bed, pulling the sheet up to her chin.

He looked down at her.

"Your name is Mora?"

Her eyes fluttered.

"What is your last name?"

"Belmundo."

"Do you have any brothers or sisters?"

"Seven brothers, four sisters."

"And what does your father do?"

"He is a sailor -- a merchant marine?"

"Must get home quite often. And why were you in prison?"

"They said I stole something. But the real reason was because I was married to a white man. He left me."

"What did your husband do? For a living, I mean."

"He was an engineer."

"Where is he now?"

"Denmark."

"How long were you in prison?"

"Almost a year."

"And they burned you with cigarettes?"

"Yes."

Her hands were flitting around his thighs, not quite brave enough to land on his genitals. "Touch me," he said. She did and they made love, slowly in a room bright with morning.

A high-pitched electronic bleating woke him in the afternoon. He groped for the phone.

"Yes? Yes, one more day."

He hung up hard and turned toward her, found the eyes, wide awake and as distant as the stars. He recognized nothing. How far apart were they? How is this done?

How is it ever done?

"What day is it?" he said sideways, thinking that his breath might stink.

"Tuesday," she answered.

Her returning breath was like a womb, warm and full of her private smell. She saw it stir questions across his face, and she spoke without looking at him.

"I have done this three times. Mario, he runs the casino, he is honest, you know? He pays what he says he will pay. The last time was in April. Each time I gave the money to my sister. Well, most of the money. I live with my sister. I watch her children."

April. Six months ago.

He would ask her again, though her answer meant nothing. Only her love, encompassing and true, would save him at the jumping off point. "Will you come with me?"

"Where?"

"To America."

"Yes."

"Because you want to leave Mozambique?"

"I must go and see my sister first. It will take a few hours."

"By all means, go! Go!" He kicked the sheet off both of them and they lay there, naked.

Her tiny black fist came arcing downward in a quick, stabbing thump to his solar plexus and his knees rose reflexively as he yelped. She stood alongside the bed, almost swaggering, a featherweight boxer posturing over a fallen opponent.

"Yes, I want to leave Mozambique!" she yelled, and he heard not the screeching of unbridled anger but a thundering control. "If you do not want me to go, if you do not want me to say yes, then why do you ask?"

"Because my life depends on it," he said, and then he laughed, retrieving the sheet and pulling it up over his waist while he laughed some more, uncontrollably, stomach muscles clenching and fists rolling in the wet sockets of his eyes.

She propped one knee on the bed and stared at him.

Finally, as the storm beside her calmed, she observed, "You are not a businessman, are you."

"Lay down." He slapped the bed. "Let me tell you about modern space exploration."

At that she crawled in, filled suddenly with a fear she had never known -- not even on the darkest nights in prison. She found his forearm, clutched it and nuzzled her nose up against his chest.

"What's the matter?"

She shook her head.

"You have a gift, Mora Belmundo. Here, put this to your eye." He was leaning over, reaching for something on the bedstand, then peeling open the fingers of her fist. "Put it to your eye. Look at yourself."

She worked her way up against the wooden headboard and he slipped a pillow behind her.

"That's right. Look down at yourself."

She screamed into the falling darkness, head thudding down the scrolled woodwork under the curtain of a waking dream, something in her belly button, something like stars spiraling and a thin wall of blue-white fire exiting -- or entering? -- her vagina, something like a dream that finally disappeared.

She came sullenly to dinner.

"I must call my sister."

They were in the restaurant at the top of the hotel, the one the guidebook called Maputo's finest, "overlooking a dazzling galaxy of city lights, like diamonds on black velvet." He had dressed her, holding her upright and rolling the minuscule panties up her legs, the strap up the crack of her ass, the dress falling over her like a pillowcase, pulled her wild hair back and tied it, then guided her to the elevator, steering her by the shoulders.

"Your sister knows where you are. I talked with Mario."

In candlelight across the table, he saw panic visit her face. "You can call her yourself after dinner, if you like. I told Mario you were going to dinner. With me. Okay?"

He peered at her.

"Okay?"

She tried to smile. "I have had only five men, and none of them were black," she said. "You want to know these things?"

He coughed into his fist, looked at the menu. "No," he said. "Yes. It doesn't matter. Are you hungry?"

"Are you?"

"I don't know."

He had already ordered white wine and now the waiter returned to deliver it. They watched the glasses fill.

"Let's think about it," he said. They drank. Outside were diamonds on black velvet.

After a while she said, "Who are you?"

"I'm an officer in the United States Star Service."

"What is wrong with me?"

"Nothing." He shook his head, his mouth full of wine, and leaned toward her. "You are a doorway, what is called a transpath or a subfielder. Thanks to a few thousand people like you, there are colonies throughout the galaxy, reaching outward every year, every day. Now you tell me -- do you want to know who you are, who you really are?"

He was surprised by the brown eyes, the curiosity. He had expected something else. A black speck marked her pierced left nostril.

"Mora, at this moment, with a little instruction, you could think yourself to the stars, light years away. You would have to go to a special place on the earth called a jumping off point. There are only five known jumping off points on the earth, and only one in the United States. It is in Joplin, Missouri. That is the headquarters of our space program."

She was stunned, but he could see she understood. Completely. Perhaps she had read somewhere about space exploration, about transpaths.

"What you saw in yourself was the subfield -- through a special lens. Only a few transpaths are born every year. They have a...connection with the subfield. This connection allows them to travel great distances. And so we look for transpaths. It is part of our...program. Space exploration depends on them. There is no other way to get to the stars -- no other way we've yet found to go faster than light."

He paused, fingers on the stem of the wine glass. "I was looking for you," he said.

The waiter reappeared.

"Uh, a salad, please, for both of us. While we make up our minds. Okay?"

She nodded. The waiter left. He could think of nothing immediately to say.

She shrugged. "Or someone like me."

He tried to camouflage a jolt of some desperate origin.

"You," he said.

"Maybe I was looking for you, too."

"I hope so. Joplin hopes so. Do you have a passport?"

She shook her head, sipped her wine.

He looked out the huge windows. Miles of diamonds, deep.

"No big deal," he said absently. "We have an agreement with your country."

"You want to take me to Joplin, Missouri?"

"More than that. I am not asking you to leave Mozambique, Mora. I am asking you to leave this planet. To go to the stars."

"With you? You are also a transpath?"

He sighed and carefully straightened the place setting in front of him. "No, I'm not a transpath. I simply want to go, have to go. I want you to take me. Most transpaths can take others with them -- sometimes whole families. It makes colonization possible."

He looked at her. At some indefinite point you are at the mercy of chemistry.

She swallowed. "There is a catch?"

"Yes. A dangerous catch. Not for you, because you will make it to the other side regardless. But you can only take those you love. And those who love you. You can fold together into the jumping off point. But if they don't love you, they will die on the way. And if you don't love them, they will likewise die."

"And you would take me to Joplin, Missouri, and try this?"

"Yes. You are not the first transpath I have met. But you are the first I think I could love."

"And thinking is enough?"

He laughed, but his face quickly darkened to the point where the hackles rose on the back of her neck beneath the knot of her hair. "No. At the jumping off point, it must be real. There is no way to measure it, no way of telling how much...ambivalence or insincerity or uncertainty on the part of either of us would cause my atoms to condense and strip off the subfield and scatter through space. I'd like to avoid that. I figure when the time comes, I'll know. So don't be surprised if I back out at the last minute. In which case you'll be reimbursed for your time. I'll just...leave you at the altar. You know that expression?"

She nodded. "When would we go?"

"We can leave for Joplin tomorrow. We could jump off within a week."

"And what would be...on the other side?"

"A new world. Full of life. A few other colonists. That I am prepared for -- to survive where we are going. Our discoveries would become humankind's discoveries. It would be a hard life. We may go on to many new worlds before we're through."

"And you would protect me?"

He sought her hand between the glasses and silverware and candles. "I would protect you. If I make it. Do you think you could love me?"

She looked startled. "I wanted you the first time I saw you," she said slowly. "I loved you the first minute we were together."

Her eyes fell and she smiled sheepishly. "What is your last name?"

"Ferguson."

"I must see my sister, Steve Ferguson." She sniffed her armpit. "And get a few things."

They refused the salad. In the elevator they kissed, and before the lids came down he looked for the distance only to find himself awash in the brown eyes.

Tuesday, he thought. Or Wednesday.

He flattened his pillow in order to see the red digits in the side of the bedstand: 1:15 a.m.

Wednesday. So this is it. My first pick-up in what, three years? And yeah, she's good in bed -- great, maybe -- but it cost me -- Joplin -- 4,000 meticais, about 100 U.S. dollars, and now I'm supposed to be in love? Okay, maybe I got a little for free, on the house, but love? Don't whores hate men?

Can she love?

And what's this about prison? Was she raped? How many times? Never had a black man? Cut me a fucking break. Only did this three times? Only had five men? Jesus Christ to fucking Sunday. Who is this fucking woman? Does she have a hand on my heart, or am I reaching down my own throat?

He found the phone and plucked the numbers carefully. The bathroom light was on, the door cracked open across the room.

He spoke softly. "Hello, Joplin? Ferguson, Steve, coming in loaded, request afternoon flight from Maputo, October 16 -- correction, 17. Registered Maputo Hyatt."

His head sank into the pillow.

One week. When would it happen? Thursday? Friday? Eight seconds before jumpoff in the astrosight when she would make a certain movement, act or react a certain way, let slip a few telling words that would trigger blatting klaxons in his head: You are not the one I want. I despise this part of you irrevocably. Would it be a smell? One of her strange other-race smells? There is something putrid in you, honey, something rotten in Denmark where your white engineer ex-husband maybe knows something I don't, smells something I can't.

Champing for air, he rolled to his side and threw the sheet down to expose a newborn layer of sweat. His hand brushed her buttocks, smooth and cool, and he brought his other hand down and held both her cheeks, drew himself close to her and pressed his soft cock against her. He felt instantly better. For what it was worth. And he had no idea what it was worth.

"Mora." He shook the sleeping figure. She whimpered.

"You've got to be willing to leave me at the altar, too," he whispered urgently.

"I know," she mumbled. "I won't."

Christ, how does this ever happen?

He rolled to his back and stared at the featureless ceiling, listened to the soft cadence of her breathing.

"Mora," he said finally, knowing she was asleep, oblivious. "I don't care if you've made love to the Boston Celtics."

He equally knew that he would have to go with the program. First thing in the morning he would check her police record.

He woke with a twitching leg in the fits and sputters of what seemed to be an ongoing dialogue, that if she took off, bombed out or otherwise told him to get fucked, he would have lost nothing but the time he spent looking for her. Mexico -- there was supposed to be a crop of transpaths in Mexico. And so his career would again be delayed. Only his career was becoming a career, an earthbound search for the first rung on the ladder, and what he really wanted was to fly, to evaporate into the subfield and come out fighting on a planet just the other side of God. Good officers had died on the vine waiting to fall in love for Christ's sake.

Can I love?

He was awake. And his hand, questing across the sheet, came up empty.

What followed was a kind of agony that blotted out any thought of looking for a note, so he didn't find it until after room service came with a carafe of coffee and he had drained it, then started aimlessly to poke around his belongings, contemplating packing up and leaving. Returning to Joplin without her. Coming in empty.

At some point in the last two days a promise he made to himself years before had raised its dubious head: that he wouldn't take her with him unless he would've taken her anyway, would've asked her to go with him even if he hadn't been a Star Service officer dependent on the love of a transpath to explore the universe, even if he had been just a tourist or businessman -- a regular guy. That he would take her only if he loved her. Though he appreciated the feeblemindedness of the premise, as he stuffed some underclothes in a laundry bag, he had the clear thought: I don't know if I love her, but I've already asked her.

The first night. He had asked her because he wanted her. The Service, the stars, his career -- had they really been on his mind at the moment he popped the question?

God, the things you tell a woman.

And now she was gone. The realization brought a knot of anguish to his chest that he carried around the room like a wound.

The note was on the bureau, written in fine, looping script on Maputo Hyatt stationery. With a great, sudden exhalation whose source and reason he could only guess, he snatched it up and held it in two shaking hands, forcing himself to read slowly.

Dear Steve,

The message light was on, so I called down. They told me that our tickets were in, and that our flight leaves at 2:30. I went home to pack. Don't leave without me!

I love you,

Mora

Cold with terror, he plunked down on the bed.

My God, she was going through with it.

With a horrified laugh, he picked up the phone and called the Maputo police department.

He had been married once. His wife and he were graduate students. She had fine, sandy hair, fair skin, bushy eyebrows she refused to pluck despite the jokes. She was at once handsome and feminine, a Nordic warrior gone gentle. Found the whales. Found him a little primitive. Showed passion only for liberal causes. Politics. It brought the red to her cheeks.

He seduced her best friend. About that night he remembered one insane, drunken thought: "You can't fuck whales!"

He decided he couldn't be trusted. Years later he discovered that she had been having an affair with his best friend. It didn't matter. By then he was well into training, resolved to find and win a transpath, and he had come to believe in himself again.

She had wonderful lips. He remembered loving them, their sculpted slopes and angles, the insight they provided to her moods. But now, looking back, he wondered how they had defied any trace of deception. And whether he loved them less for their ability to mask her betrayal. Or had there been a betrayal? Did she love him -- truly love him in the confused depths of her liberal heart -- even as she made love to his friend?

Were she a transpath, even at the apex of their relationship, would both of them have emerged on the other side?

The seatbelt lights came on with a loud musical bong.

Only two hours from Maputo to St. Louis, but she had fallen asleep with her head on his shoulder.

"Hey."

She roused and looked up at him.

"Have you ever seen a whale?" he asked.

She shook her head. "No. They are all gone?"

"None have been sighted in a decade."

"Maybe we'll find some in other oceans," she said.

"Yeah. I'd like that."

She wore young clothes, Maputo boutique stuff about a year out of style. Made her look about five years younger, teenage streetwise punkish, but that was okay. In her eyes was not an inkling of doubt. For whatever reason, she seemed to be in this all the way.

Like a weeklong date, he thought. Just nurse the infatuation along for a few more days, enough for the first jump. If that's enough. God help me.

She squeezed his hand down the bucking runway. Pretending to look past her out the window, he watched her worried lips.

Most of their time at Joplin was their own. They spent no more than an hour a day suspended at the center of the astrosight, a glasplast sphere built around the jumping off point. The astrosight itself hung within a pyramid of gleaming struts thrusting up into the Missouri sky through a haphazard arrangement of barracks and nondescript administration buildings. The pyramid was designed to travel a millimeter a year across its concrete pad in order to follow the unaccountable north-northeast migration of the jumping off point. For reasons no one knew, the engineers had made the pad long enough to require no further extension until the year 15,516.

He was well-versed both in the operation of the astrosight and the psychokinetics of the jumping off process, and he explained everything to her in low tones that still managed to resound throughout the gridded sphere. These lessons required both of them to concentrate. The center of the astrosight was the jumping off point, and the woman resonated with it, afraid and exhilarated. At times, the substance of her seemed to flicker, as though she were drawn to some far place on the other side. Her fears were not unjustified, he knew, and she sensed the danger. She absorbed every nuance of his instructions.

The desk jockeys at Joplin, having long ago developed respect for the fragility of the period before jumpoff, kept the tests and paperwork to a minimum. She checked out. What little quantification the scientists could put upon her psyche, they could find no glaring pathologies that would disqualify her and more than a few characteristics that commended her.

Their most uncomfortable moment with the bureaucracy came during the first interview, when a black psychologist took what she thought was a disturbing interest in her sisters.

"Are they married?" he asked.

"Two of them."

"Could we have them flown out here?"

"Why?"

"We would love to meet them -- all of them."

"No. It would draw too much attention."

"What do you mean?" the black man asked.

"You are lucky you don't know." Her tone was mildly scolding.

"Look," Steve interrupted, "send someone out if you're so damned curious. But wait till we jump off."

He told her afterward how her ability sometimes ran in families, especially among females. "But don't worry," he said, "there's nothing safer in the world than being a transpath. If they send someone there to find out, he'll be as nervous and mannerly as I was. You can't force someone to love you, now can you? Your married sisters they won't approach at all, unless they think the husbands might be interested in space travel."

Thinking of her brothers-in-law, she giggled.

The two of them took long walks around the base and among the little shops in Joplin. Once she asked to go alone. On Saturday -- their third day on base -- he went alone, walking through a cold mist in sight of the pyramid.

He was impatient, uneasy. Though they were spending a lot of time together, they were not talking -- not really. They were socializing, both afraid of stumbling. The words came out of their mouths, but their eyes were focused inward.

Piss her off and she'll pack her bags and go home. Game over. There are fucking bartenders I'm closer to. And what if some willing blonde were to walk up to me right now -- would I be able to say no? And if I fucked her, would it matter?

Can I love?

And there was something else. There was the other side -- a planet called Tiadon.

Things were too fragile. He was not that graceful.

She had bought a dress with the little money she had converted to dollars at the airport. Blood red, it was draped over her knees, pulled from a gray plastic bag beside her on the bed when he returned. Still wearing his old leather flight jacket, he stood in the small bedroom of their quarters, the weak light of the drizzly afternoon falling through the windows.

"What the fuck is that?"

She looked at the garment on her lap as though she'd never seen it before, then held it against her chest.

"The last supper? The night before we go, remember?"

"You know you can't take anything with you." He tore off the jacket and threw it at a chair. "Your family could've used that money. But you needed a dress you'll be throwing away in a few days. Makes perfect sense." He knew she had arranged for her family to be compensated well, and that they wouldn't miss the cost of the dress. But blood was rushing into his face. He hopped on one leg, tugging off a boot. "What is it with you and clothes, anyway? You're quite the clothes horse, aren't you?"

He did not miss the defiant set of her jaw.

"It is our last supper," she said evenly.

"Do you know what they're wearing on Tiadon? Skins!" The second boot came loose and he pointed the toe at her. "They haven't got to looms yet -- that's next year. And they're about two years from metals, ten years from petroproducts!"

He was flailing the boot around, shouting. "We're going to drop in naked on another planet and you buy a dress? We take nothing, lady, nothing!"

"You want to fight?"

"Skins! All the rage right now is an animal called a childa. Has eight ripping forepaws. Killed ten people, five transpaths, before we got a foothold. Nothing. Nothing! We go in naked!"

He fell on the bed, his head on the plastic bag.

"I've always wanted furs," she said quietly.

He laughed and choked. She stroked his cold, wet hair.

"I want the stars."

"Do you want me?"

"Same thing."

"I have been afraid to let you see me should you hate me. You've been afraid to demand it should I hate you. You must feel as though you're being blackballed."

He wracked with laughter. "Blackmailed," he said.

"Yes. Blackmailed." She looked upward and laughed, a cheery song in the gray room. Then: "Do you feel that way?"

"Yes." His voice was muffled. The plastic crinkled. "Who are you, Mora?"

"Someone you may or may not love," she said. "But you can always leave me at the altar."

For the rest of the evening, while they cooked dinner and ate and afterward, she told him of her childhood, spending a little extra time on the clothes -- how she had worn hand-me-downs of hand-me-downs verging on rags, and he felt alternately guilty and awe-struck by the sundry details of her life, forking New York strip steaks into the microwave and bringing French-cut frozen green beans to a boil on the range, timing the garlic bread, pouring the wine.

And then it was his turn, and he told her a little of his boyhood, but mostly of his fears -- of the planet and of her.

"One thing, though," he said, rinsing a plate under the hot stream of the faucet, "we get the place up to the Industrial Age and we're outta there. My expertise is metals, basic alloys. And we get a couple months a year on a resort planet. I'll point it out to you in the astrosight tomorrow. Beaches. Natural hot mineral springs. You'll like it."

A wet dishrag caught him in the back of the head, thrown with feigned outrage that he had scared her so about Tiadon.

He told her how he had felt superior to her until he had seen her test results, and then how he had felt inferior to her. Seeing her go hazy at the jumping off point hadn't helped any. How could he love a freak? That's how he put it, and she laughed again. He watched the ditzy merriment escape her upturned throat, her wonderful lips. God, she was black.

And young and incredibly athletic. She was, after all, a whore.

How is this done, he thought before sleep, cheeks stinging from the harsh knots of her pubic hair. How is this ever done?

What stuck in his mind, though, was what she hadn't said: How enchanting, these childa beasts. Just what I want to do for the next two years. Check, please.

He tried to hold nothing back for the remaining three days before jumpoff. He figured he'd just throw everything at her. And she did likewise, wanting him to see all parts of her, wanting him not to be surprised by anything.

It helped that they couldn't keep their hands off one another. Each day they strolled past the pyramid, and at some point along the way she would grope down between his legs. If he was not in the mood, he got in the mood.

He saw the guidebook in a quiet moment of passion. Passion -- the kind his ex-wife reserved for whales and environmental politics. His head hung over the bed. It was there on the floor, one corner protruding from under the bed: VISITORS GUIDE TO MAPUTO.

"You little thief."

"What? Oh, let's look at it!"

And they looked at it for over an hour.

Tuesday night at the last supper -- in a little restaurant they had found in Joplin -- she wore her red dress. He wore his dress whites.

"Well, are we in love yet?" he asked in the candlelight.

She shrugged her shoulders. "Guess we'll find out soon."

On Wednesday they walked through the chilly, sunny morning to the astrosight and went separately to separate cubicles. She emerged wearing the diamond pin in her nose. She wore nothing else.

"That's not going to make it," he said.

"I know."

They rose on the glasplast platform to the center of the sphere, both of them naked. All the constellations of all the skies glowed around them, the background grid slightly less bright but no less obvious in its geometric perfection.

"You know the coordinates and how they feel," he said. "Tiadon has eight jumping off points. We're going for one just slightly above the equator. It will be in full daylight. You will see this. You've already felt it."

He held her hand. "It's amazing, isn't it? A network between the worlds, more intricate than a spider's web. And you can go to any one of them."

"We can go to any one of them."

He looked at her and was startled. They were at the jumping off point, and for a moment she was invisible not because she was flickering into the subfield, but because she was naked, dark in the low light of the constellations, the crowded, diffuse hoop of the Milky Way. His eyes adjusted and he saw she had goosebumps. Her nipples were hard.

"Take me there," he said.

"Yes. But will you do me a favor?"

"Depends."

"When we get there, there must be a captain or something. Will you marry me?"

"Yes."

"You know, my mother did something like this to my father. Blackballed him? He was a merchant marine."

He hugged her, but kept her face pointed toward the blinking light that was Tiadon, below them and to the right.

"There it is," he said.

He looked down. Her breasts shook between his elbows.

"I wanted you the first time I saw you," she said. "I loved you the first minute we were together."

"I didn't think that shit happened anymore."

"Anything is possible."

"I love you, too," he said. "Thataway."

Her body ignited like magnesium, blinding white, casting the innards of the astrosight in stark relief, showing it for an instant as the lifeless mechanism it was, electronics embedded in glasplast. The diamond pin clicked off the platform and fell to the rounded floor, to a cluster of stars visible only from the southern hemisphere.

THE END

MORE STORIES BY KEITH CROES

keith@croes.com