Chapter Three
Cory could not believe his luck. The one thing that could predictably have shaken him out of his somber mood had actually happened. He went through the first twenty minutes of Mixed Exercise in a kind of daze, reacting instinctively and, he finally realized, not acquitting himself very well in Citizen Zona’s eyes.
For someone who looked so wondrously soft and feminine, Zona had deceptively resilient and disciplined muscles. She seemed tirelessly interested in the drills, and she had the faculty of total absorption in what she was doing, a fact which Cory found progressively frustrating. But he knew these details only as a peripheral haze of fact surrounding the fantasy of being assigned to Mixed Exercise with the one girl in all the world who caused him sleepless nights, whose full-color vision he carried around in his head daily (larger than life, like a Statue, stretching high in her gym suit, straining every smoothly contoured muscle and thrusting every well-developed curve into delightful prominence), the one girl who caused him dry-mouthed jitters when he was close to her.
Feeling somewhat bruised and sore, and panting from exertion, Cory said, “Uh … maybe we should rest. Isn’t it rest time?”
Zona smiled. “Of course not. That’s quite funny.”
“It is?”
“But you waste your strength in talk.”
“I guess so. I can think of better ways to … uh … use it.”
Ignoring his inept hint, Zona feinted a light jab at his kidneys, fooling him into overcommitting, and flipped him. At the last second, stumbling out of control, Cory saved himself from a humiliating fall onto his back. In the process he severely twisted his right knee and, he was fairly sure, tore a muscle in his right shoulder.
“You weren’t expecting that,” Zona said calmly. “You’re not concentrating.”
“You’re dead right,” Cory admitted, wincing as he tested his shoulder. “I was concentrating on you, if you want to know the truth. It’s hard not to.”
The comment caused her to look at him closely, blue eyes curious, as if she were really seeing him for the first time. But her smile disappeared, replaced by an expression of faint disapproval, like a mother who has been overly indulgent to a naughty child but is losing patience. “You’re forgetting the first rule of Mixed Exercise,” she said.
She was not even breathing hard, Cory noted with chagrin. “You’re right about that,” he said. “What is it?”
“Objectivity.”
“Oh, yes.”
“Sexual objectivity.”
“I assumed that’s what you meant.”
“I didn’t make up the rule,” she said coolly, in direct reference to the Authority’s explication of the General Rules of Conduct as applied to Mixed Exercise.
Restricted World, Cory thought. How could anything constructed like Citizen Zona be anything but warm at all times? In his imaginings she had been melting and timidly complaisant, not at all like this reserved and self-confident exerciser. It was Cory who was burning up, partly because she had given him a real workout for twenty minutes, but mostly from being in such close … uh … contact with her, not only speaking to her, but actually reaching out to grip the smooth firm curve of her upper arm and shoulder in the formal First Position of Mixed Exercise, or sometimes accidentally (and not so accidentally) brushing the long line of her flank or the fine swell of her bosom, so disconcertingly defined by the skintight gym suit. These chance grippings and brushings were inevitable in mixed drills, and for the first time in his memory Cory wanted the compulsory session to go on and on. It was also the first time he could remember when the minutes raced by, as if the Clock had abandoned its own twenty-four schedule and raced to keep up with the shorter light-dark pattern chronicled in the sky.
Citizen Zona was younger than Cory—hardly more than twenty, he guessed—which might have explained her earnest attitude toward exercise. Had he been the same five years ago? Cory could not remember. The years blurred into sameness. She was tall for a girl, perhaps crowding close to the sixty-six inch height limit. (Her mother must have worried when she was growing up, but she had none of the slump-shouldered, flat-footed habits which tall girls often learned to minimize their height.) But Zona would not have to worry about her weight, not for a while at least. She was slender and firm from shoulder to calf, even though she had rather wide shoulders and a long neck (whose graceful line Cory admired past describing). Her features retained the tentativeness of youth, unlined and unmarked, dominated by those huge, steady blue eyes and by full, soft lips which held Cory’s gaze like a magnet. Her hair was dark, setting off the light eyes; it was cut short in the boyish and practical style adopted by all exercisers.
But no one would ever mistake Zona for a boy, Cory thought fervently.
Suddenly anguished, he heard the two-minute warning buzzer, signaling the approaching end of the Mixed Exercise period. He had been exasperatingly dumb for some minutes, unable to think of anything interesting to say to her, and Zona was so intent on her routine that she might have been working out with a set of bars.
Cory slipped into a medium tension armbrace with the girl. He had to blink through the sweat streaming into his eyes. “This is fun,” he grunted, “isn’t it?”
“Of course.”
“I mean … more than usual. That is … listen, there’s no rule against aftersesh meeting, is there? We could have a juice or something.”
She seemed to hesitate, causing his heartbeat to do the same. “No,” she said at last. “Other than the usual prohibitions about conduct.”
“Oh, of course,” Cory said quickly. “How about tonight? Are you busy aftersesh?”
“I’m not sure.”
“What do you mean? How can you not be sure? Either you’re busy or you’re not busy, right?” He would not give her time to think, Cory thought. She was a great exerciser, but she was not all that bright.
“It might depend …”
“On what?”
Zona did not answer. For a moment her blue eyes held his. Then, without warning, she slipped out of the armbrace, caught Cory’s wrist, pulled him forward, dropped her back and flipped him fifteen feet across the mat into the padded wall.
Dazed more painfully than before, Cory sat with his back against the wall, wondering if he had broken anything and trying to sort out the ringing in his head from the bell which announced the end of Mixed Exercise. He shook his head. Citizen Zona leaned over him solicitously, her generous contours offered to his blurred vision like a prize.
“Are you all right, Technician Cory?”
“Uh … I think so.”
“I don’t think you should think so much about aftersesh,” the girl said, her tone sober. But did he detect a hint of a smile on those soft lips, compressed in apparent concern? “I think you’ll be much too tired to do very much at all.”