Stochastic Man by Robert Silverberg

become attached to getting rich, to become attached to any ego aspect that ties us to intransient states—”
    “Catalina—”
    “Yes?”
    “I’m very looped. I can’t handle theology now.”
    She grinned. “To become attached to non-attachment,” she said, “is one of the worst follies of all. I’ll have mercy. No more Transit talk.”
    “I’m grateful.”
    “Some other time, perhaps? You and Sundara both. I’d love to explain our teachings, if—”
    “Of course,” I said. “Not now.”
    We drank, we smoked, eventually we found ourselves fornicating again—it was my defense against her yearning to convert me—and this time she must have had her tenets less firmly to the fore of her consciousness, for our interchange was less of a copulation, more a making of love. Toward dawn Sundara and Friedman appeared, she looking sleek and glorious, he bony and drained and even a bit dazed. She kissed me across a gulf of twelve meters, a pucker of air: Hello, love, hello, I love you most of all. I went to her and she pressed tight against me and I nibbled her earlobe and said, “Have fun?” She nodded dreamily. Friedman must have his skills, too, not all of them financial. “Did he talk Transit to you?” I wanted to know. Sundara shook her head. Friedman wasn’t into Transit yet, she murmured, though Catalina had been working on him.
    “She’s working on me, too,” I said.
    Friedman was slumped on the couch, glassy-eyed, staring dully at the sunrise over Brooklyn. Sundara, steeped in classical Hindu erotology, was a heavy trip for any man.
     
    —when a woman clasps her lover as closely as a serpent twines around a tree, and pulls his head towards her waiting lips, if she then kisses him making a light hissing sound “soutt soutt” and looks at him long and tenderly—her pupils dilated with desire—this posture is known as the Clasp of the Serpent—
     
    “Anyone for breakfast?”
    I asked. Catalina smiled obliquely. Sundara merely inclined her head. Friedman looked unenthusiastic. “Later,” he said, voice barely rising above a whisper. A burned-out husk of a man.
     
    —when a woman places one foot on the foot of her lover, and the other around his thigh, when she puts one arm around his neck and the other around his loins, and softly croons her desire, as if she wished to climb the firm stem of his body and capture a kiss—it is known as the Tree Climber—
     
    I left them sprawled in their various parts of the living room and went off to shower. I had had no sleep but my mind was alert and active. A strange night, a busy night: I felt more alive than in weeks, and I sensed a stochastic tickle, a tremor of clairvoyance, that warned me I was moving to the threshold of some new transformation. I took the shower full force, punching for maximum vibratory enhancement, waves of ultrasound keying into my throbbing outreaching nervous system, and emerged looking for new worlds to conquer.
    No one was in the living room but Friedman, still naked, still glazed of eye, still supine on the couch.
    “Where’d they go?” I asked.
    Languidly he waved a finger toward the master bedroom. So Catalina had scored her goal after all.
    Was I expected to extend similar hospitality to Friedman now? My bisexuality quotient is low and he inspired not a shred of gaiety in me just then. But no, Sundara bad dismantled his libido; he flashed no signs except exhaustion. “You’re a lucky man,” he murmured after a while. “What a marvelous woman…. What... a... marvelous...” I thought he had dozed. “. . . woman. Is she for sale?”
    “Sale?”
    He sounded almost serious.
    “Your Oriental slave girl is who I’m talking about.”
    “My wife?”
    “You bought her in the market in Baghdad. Five hundred dinars for her, Nichols.”
    “No deal.”
    “A thousand.”
    “Not for two empires,” I said.
    He laughed. “Where’d you find her?”
    “California.”
    “Are there any more like that out