That the machine monitoring Garibaldi’s vitals makes a sound like blip is a rather welcome irony. Bester considers. He is alone with the recumbent…reprobate, he decides, is an appropriate term…and for the moment, that enlightening little constancy is the only sound. It is, perhaps, Garibaldi at his most pleasant and congenial. Perhaps, also, at his most intelligent—but no, Bester decides, that would be unfair. Garibaldi is intelligent, for a blip. He cannot be faulted if his relatively superior powers of deduction have, as is the way of the world to balance, afford the man similarly superior quantities of social ineptitude and generic rage.
He will need an outlet for all the inevitable rage. Bester again considers.
There is a sort of squelch as he rises from his chair, air escaping the cushion. Bester crosses to Garibaldi’s body, lays his gloved hand on Garibaldi’s chest—marks the quarter-second delay between the monitor and the actual pulse—and then, drops.
Within Garibaldi there is indignance, confusion, patterns with which Bester is as familiar as any of his brethren, patterns that it has grown easy to circumvent. He winds past those, to the hotbed of anger and—shame, of course, shame, Garibaldi manages to repress that only through how strong the rest of it is. Pleasant oneness runs through Bester—he would smirk, if he paid any heed but the compulsory to the physical right now—and he rewires.
Anger is most easily redirected inward. Bester guides those threads around each other, blocking the reciprocal surge in his own mind, shields raised and solid against the whips of Garibaldi’s unrestrained emotion. Unrestrained, even after Bester deals with it, diverts that anger where it can feed, where it can conflate itself with suspicion and selfishness and lust.
He is dimly aware that his gloved fingers are in motion, downward gentle motion.
It is simple, play but no game; the hot fibers of Garibaldi’s mind lash out futilely at Bester’s placid shields, and then, as programmed, tangle in on themselves. Yes. A firm wave of pleasure slaps past Bester’s wards, but only pleasure, as the Garibaldi’s impulses writhe and devour and replicate. Suspicion coils around lust, lust is shredded in the fray of selfishness, anger envelops all of them and Bester is aware that he sweats, that both of them sweat, and the monitor, blip. blip.
The heat on the other side of his glove is Garibaldi’s genitals, understandably half-hardened, the pulse there less delayed on the machines than his heart had been. Bester considers, and elects to be, if not decent, at least courteous. He curls the knuckles of his glove into Garibaldi’s pubic hair and wonders, belatedly, what the man’s opinion is of physical pain.