Starblood

them what he wished. It was not an altogether pleasant simile…
    He found Arthur Leland in a bedroom on the second floor. He was with a woman, a sleek, large-breasted black woman whose skin shone ebony and smooth as she maneuvered on the mattress to accommodate her lover. Timothy felt the low, pulsing ache, the sickness that he got whenever he was around the most stunning of women. He had thought that he had outgrown it in these last few hours. But now he knew that was not so. Perhaps he would always be burdened with it.
    The woman shrieked, and Leland, sensing the source of her horror, rolled off the bed, fumbling in the pile of his clothes for a gun. Timothy tweaked him into sleep, and the Brethren chief slumped naked on the floor.
    The black girl was almost to the door, her wonderfully smooth, dark body moving with the swiftness and stealth of a cat. Timothy put her to sleep as well.
    Arthur Leland was a ladies' man, and Timothy's mind chose to use the analogue of a brothel to help the mutant search the man's thoughts. Almost all of them were erotic, or had erotic connotations, even when the thoughts dealt with business. But the hundreds of full-bosomed, smooth-thighed women who represented the thoughts of Arthur Leland only made Timothy's aching quasi-sexual longing worse than it had been. He wished his own mind could have come up with a less disturbing analogue.
    The subconscious was a madhouse of sado-masochistic sexual longings, disgusting, ugly dreams that made Timothy spasm with disgust and uneasiness. He wanted to withdraw swiftly, retreat from both these places of flesh, but he gritted his teeth and remained, doing the job that he had come to do, that he must do if the future were to be as he planned it.
    Finally, he left the mind of the Brethren master and floated again within his own body in the dimly lighted bedroom, trying to regain his senses. He had been inundated with sensual visions, exotic dreams of virility, potency, pleasure. His perspective, now, was tilted, and he knew it would require more than a second or two to settle into his normal state of mind. Until he accomplished that, he could not risk proceeding with the plan, for fear he would act foolish once again, as he had when he had first arrived at Stutman's house and been shot.
    Unconsciously, he had drifted across the chamber to the fallen body of Leland's dark mistress. With ESP fingers, he reached out and touched the softness of her flesh, traced his feeling yet invisible fingers along the forbidden mounds and depressions of her body.
    He did this for a long time. He did not realize how long. When the trance broke, at last, he pulled away, ashamed of himself, confused and worried.
    He left the bedroom and floated along the quiet corridor. He found a reading room where the shelves were filled with nothing but erotica. He left there in more haste than he would have liked, for haste indicated a reluctance to face this most basic part of his makeup.
    He forced himself to go back. Once in the room again, he inspected the volumes of prose, poetry, photography and art that Leland had collected to satisfy his almost obsessive curiosity about sexual matters. It occurred to Timothy sometime later that he could one day know the sensual world if he wished. Certainly with the knowledge of the aliens at his disposal, man would learn the secret of cloning, a process believed possible even today but hampered in practicality by the primitiveness of modern science.
    Cloning: Take a single rabbit cell. It contains all the genes and the stringy chromosomes of the animal. From it, all the characteristics of the animal can be ascertained. And from it, an exact duplicate of the first rabbit can be made. Scientists can clone a copy. Or will be able to some day. And the same thing for a man. It was not inconceivable that very beautiful people would allow—for a price—scientists to clone a copy of them from one of their cells. Then, as science further developed, a brain transplant, moving another man's memories and gray tissue into the new body, would be a simple procedure.
    One day, perhaps, he would know sensuality. No, not perhaps. He was certain of it. One day, he could have a mistress such as the dark girl, any sort of mistress he wished. And then, no area of human experience would be closed to him.. He would be the first totally free man in the history of the race.
    He was not totally free now, even with his ESP. And there was no sense in pretending