Late one night at the Omphalos, during the Year of the Comet, Morikand began telling Slit and me about a vision he had at the beginning of his tenth month in the womb while Harry was giving it to his mother in the ass. It began, he said, the moment Harry's glans penis bullied into the bend of Cynthia's sigmoid colon and nudged him in the fontanel...
He is walking along a narrow gully between the phantomlike stone shapes of a rugged terrain, a kind of badlands. He wears no headlamp and the darkness in the rift is of unthinkable depth: it is an ancient, cold, virgin darkness, unviolated by the sun; yet he moves with a sure step, neither cautious nor hurried. In the blackness around him there is the occasional grinding rattle of an icefall or a rockslide set in motion by the subtle but constant vibration of the underground pumps. From somewhere behind him, at an undeterminable distance, comes the low wheezing snuffle of a stalking cat; yet within him there is music. He is approaching the outer perimeter of the heated zone, and with every step the snow grows deeper; he is not dressed for it, wearing only a parka over his flight suit, and yet he is not cold. There is a smile on his face-though probably it would not be noticeable from the outside, even if there had been a light; it is an inner smile. It may be hard to swallow, but occasionally he even does a little slapping dance step as he pushes on through that inky gloom. After a time-a few minutes? a few hours?-he comes to a halt. It is not as though he is hesitating, uncertain, but rather as if he had reached some landmark, though according to Morikand the fellow has never set foot in this region till now. All that can be determined by eyesight is that the rocky shapes, black fingers against a blacker sky, defined only vaguely by the feeble backdrop of stars, no longer flank his path but seem to have fallen away to the sides. He is standing, apparently, at some kind of brink. This deliberate pause lasts only a few seconds, and he proceeds into the void, moving at the same confident gait as before. Suddenly a stubby phallic crag looms up before him. He stops at its base and looks up. At the very top, shimmering faintly, stands a female figure...
It is fourteen years now since Morikand told this. Though I am, like everyone else, loaded to the gills with the new hormones, nevertheless I am an old man and I admit that my memory fails me on a great many things. But where Morikand is concerned, I remember everything with the most startling clarity-just as though it had happened yesterday. I close my eyes and I am back there again in the heart of the Glades, at the Omphalos. I can hear the night sounds- the croak of the frogs and the chirp of the insects, the gurgle of black water and the crackle of the campfires. Someone out on the end of the dock is playing a bamboo flute, and there are fuck noises coming in pleasant little bursts from a nearby tent. The three of us are at the north point of the island, Morikand and I sitting cross-legged on the ground, facing each other. Morikand s back is to the east, and Halley s comet streams up the sky behind him like a fantastic plume. On his battered old helmet, its coma framing his head like a halo and its tail flaring up at a rakish angle to the south. His hair flows from the helmet and lies, upon his pale, skinny chest in jet black tentacles. To his left and right the sky is like an enormous shield of indigo, without star or cloud. Slit is stretched out on her back between us; Morikand's cock is draped over her face and she is gently juggling my balls with her big toe; she is like a connection, a conduit of beautiful living flesh between Morikand and me. Her sun-bleached bush gleams and shimmers in the light of the comet, and Orpheus' little behind shines like a double moon against the deep bronze of his mothers belly as he sucks quietly at her titty. A cloak of utter peace and tranquility stretches from horizon to horizon.
Beyond the horizon-that of course was another story. To the north the Black Death was sweeping the country, fanning out from New York in a wave of horror. To the west the whole lower half of California had collapsed and was washing into the sea. The military junta was in full power, and all around us the Black and White War flared and subsided and flared again like a dying star. But the Omphalos was, the eye of the storm; it was the Garden of Earthly Delights planted squarely in the middle of Hell; it was the pleasure dome of Kubla Khan, a world altogether apart from anything I had ever known before. This is not just from my own point of view, it was the same with the others-refugees, all of us, from a world gone stark staring mad. All of us that is except Morikand, who was Morikand just the same whether at the Omphalos or in the midst of a napalm attack. He was like Kipling's cat, who always said, "I am the Cat who walks by himself, and all places are alike to me."
But when I defended my memory a moment ago, it was only to assure you that I am telling this-Morikand's prenatal vision I mean-just as he told it to me that night in '86-not in his exact words, maybe, but for all practical purposes this is just the way he laid it on us. If were a hundred and four instead of sixty-four, I would remember it just as well; it is a thing I could never forget.
"What is your name?" he says. "Celeste," she replies. Her voice is in perfect resonance with the music within him. He strains his eyes, but she is nothing but a silhouette against the abysmal sky. Her arms are at her side and her legs are slightly parted. The sun, a cold bright star on the horn of Taurus, hangs just above her right shoulder. Somewhere up there in the vault of space the Comet-an immense black cloud of frozen slag-lumbers like a titanic specter into its aphelion. As he is about to speak, the luminous donut of Styx Station II rises without warning from the desolate peaks of the western horizon behind him, and the girl at the top of the crag is bathed from head to foot in eerie lunar light. Her hair is parted in the middle and stands out from the sides of her head in two flowing wings of green gold, bound with a chain of black plastic. From her right ear hangs a breeder's medallion, flashing faintly as it spins. Like him, she is not dressed for this climate; standing there in her metallic party dress, she looks as though she might have just stepped out of a fashion show in Syrtis City: the shimmering sleeves are long and full, ungathered at the wrists, and the opening of the bodice is in the shape of an inverted heart, flaring out from her slender neck, curving beneath her strong but voluptuous breasts and coming to a point between them. The skirt is composed of vertical metallic ribbons which encircle her lower torso like a ring of limp sword blades, points downward; they hang from just below her bust to the tops of her thighs and are connected by strips of clear plastic. Even in the dim light of the space dock he can see that her nipples are unpainted and that she wears no undergarment: the nest of golden down between her open thighs gleams darkly between the slats of her skirt. Their eyes meet, and the music reaches an ice-melting crescendo. He unzips his parka and lets it fall to the ground. A thousand voices sing the name, Celeste! Even the sudden snort of the cat in the distance is little more than orchestral punctuation to that heart-swelling chorale. But when the girl says; "Then there isn't much time?" he glances behind him in the direction of the sound. He sees that they are in a small crater with a flat rocky floor and a ragged rim. The crag juts up not far from the eastern wall, whose crumbling summit rises higher than the top of the crag. He turns again and looks back down the long straight rift which enters the crater through a V-shaped gash in its western rim. At that moment another snort comes echoing faintly up the rock-strewn gully. "No," he replies, "there isn't much time," and she says, "There's a little hollow up here, with hardly any snow in it."
"All right." And he springs up the slope and vaults over the ledge. The top of the rock is roughly oblong in shape; it is scooped out and there is a kind of shallow cave at one end. On the concave floor of this hollow she has spread a fur coat. They stand facing each other, their eyes drinking deep. She reaches out and unzips his flight suit. As he peels it off, she releases a catch and her dress falls about her ankles with a brittle hiss. Raising her face to his, she takes his erect penis gently between her fingertips and presses its head against the warm downy groove between her legs, her stiff, electrifying nipples just touching his chest. She speaks softly: "What is yours?"
"What?"
"Your name. I tried to find out at Er City, but they wouldn't tell me."
It was just then the Night Raiders hit us.
After that glorious year at the Omphalos it's no wonder we were taken by surprise. The war seemed a million miles away; we had shed the war like a snake sheds its skin. We no longer lived along its fringes as we had in years past, plundering what it left behind, fleeing before its onslaught, dwelling in holes like rats as it raged overhead. God, what a life that was! True, it was like living constantly in a draft of ozone, exhilarating at times beyond belief; no one could live off garbage and track through the carcasses of the dead as long as we did and not know the heady intoxication of just being alive, of just waking up in the morning to find the life blood still flowing in one's veins; but it was not for me. I had a task to perform: a book, nay, a bible to write. There could be but one reason for the string of catastrophic circumstances which, had killed my wife and children and thrown Morikand Jones and me together in the midst of chaos: I had been chosen by Destiny to tell the world of the new Messiah. That was the way I saw it, and no amount of derision from Morikand could dissuade me. I probed his fantastic mind, I locked horns with the enigma of his soul, I took notes like a fiend, at every lull in the fighting I worked on the book. In the past, more often than not, writing had been a grueling task for me, but this was a labor of love, a sheer joy-my pencil flew over the paper like the wind! It kept me young; it kept me going. But that was why I wanted to get out of the populated areas-to finish my great task in the tranquility of the wilderness. It was my idea-as you may remember if you read my book about how Morikand was begotten-to set out with Charlie Boat in search of the secret stronghold of Prester Steve, a safe haven for free souls, rumor had it, somewhere in the fastnesses of the Everglades in a region beyond the interests of either the Blacks or the Whites. In such a place we could all do our thing in peace-I could write my book, Charlie could sail his boat, and Slit could have Morikand's baby. (At that time she was about five months gone.) The search, of course, turned out to be a wild goose chase; Prester Steve was evidently somebody's pipe dream. But one day during , our fourth month in the Glades (after a wonderful hair-raising experience!) Morikand suddenly lifted his arms and said, "This is it."
"This is what?" sobbed Charlie Boat-or "Charon", as Morikand called him. "Prester Steve's," Morikand replied, "what else?" We were standing at the time right in the center of an utterly desolate hammock which no doubt had never before felt the tread of man. It was the island soon to be known as the Omphalos commune. But the point is that once established in that long dreamed of haven of tranquility, I never wrote another word. Never until now, fourteen years later, in this sterile hole in which I have been tucked away to die. Writing demands tension; there must be a need: at the Omphalos there was neither of these. So, as I say, after that year of calm the storm took us utterly by surprise. The Comet should have tipped us off.
At the , first burst of gunfire Slit sprang up, clutching Orpheus to her breast, and ran for the stockade. Morikand let out a whoop-almost .as though someone had cracked a joke-wrapped his arms around his head and rolled backwards off the bank into the water, helmet and all. I jumped up and stood there for a moment in a crouch, trying to force my brain to function. The air was alive with tracer- bullets and the screams of women and children. People were running in all directions-it was a complete panic. I had one ghastly, familiar vision of soldiers running in single file like hunchbacked shadow figures against a blinding sheet of liquid fire that lit up the whole island, and then I was hit from behind by something that must have resembled a sledge hammer. I have a vague recollection of being trampled by heavy boots, nothing more.
When I came out of it, the first thing I saw was the broad black face of Charlie Boat, his white eyeballs glowing in the firelight. When he saw that I was conscious he blinded me with a wide-angle display of his magnificent choppers arid stuck a lighted number in my mouth. I took a deep drag and held it until my head began to clear.
I was on my back, my dome pillowed between Marina's enormous tits, which were bare and felt very warm against my ears. I started to get up but the pain brought me down again.
"You OK, man?" said Charlie.
"Yeah, I guess so," I said, "except I think my ribs are caved in, and I have a headache you wouldn't believe. What happened?"
Charlie took the number back and shook his head-which like mine had a bloody bandage around it-and Marina said, "The Whites hit us, Rusty."
"Whites? But why?"
Charlie shrugged and said, "It was De Raiss's Special Forces. Night Raiders. Hit us hard, man. Look around."
I put an elbow in Marina's crotch and jacked myself up a little. The whole village was leveled; there wasn't a hut or a tent left standing, and the stockade was a tangle of smoking logs. A few trees were still burning. "The bastards wiped us out, didn't they?" I said. "Did they get our stash?" That was an attempt at humor, to break the gloomy mood. After all, the grass and the trees would grow out again, and we could rebuild our huts in a few days. But nobody laughed.
"They didn't even get them guns Ham brought in last month," said Charlie. "Looks like they come for cunt! Least that's all they took-or almost all."
"Cunt?" I looked around again, this time at the people sitting around the fire. Every eye avoided, my gaze. Many had wounds and bruises from the raid, but there seemed to, be no severe injuries. I suppose I sensed the truth already. "How many did they get?"
"Four or five, looks like. Mag, Sarah, Birdie-ain't seen Stacy either. There's some guys out in the boats now. Maybe-"
"Slit?"
Charlie hung his head and said nothing.
It took me some time to muster the courage to ask the next question. I took a tremendous toke off the number and held it forever. "Charlie," I said finally, trying to keep my voice steady, "what did you mean, that was almost all they took?"
He lifted his eyes to mine and I saw the tears in them. He put his big black hands on my shoulders and said, "Orphie's gone too, Rustam. The motherfuckers got little Orphie."
"Morikand knows?" I said. He nodded. "Where is he?" Charlie jerked his head toward the south end of the island.
"Down there somewhere."
"How did he take it?"
"Well, when we told him about the kid, he kinda nodded-you know how he does, man, like maybe he knew it already. But... Say, Rusty, you ever seen Morikand surprised about anything?" I said very truthfully that I had I not. "Me neither, so I don't know for sure, but he got a real funny look on his face when he found out about Slit, man. It was like maybe he expected the kid to get it, but not his chick, you know?" I didn't know at all; I didn't know anything except that my- temples were pounding with rage and that all my pains had gone away. "Anyway, after that he don't say anything, he just walk off."
I got up and did the same. Passing the stockade, I deliberately stepped on a few hot embers, just to add fuel to my fury, stoke up my determination. It was a way, I suppose, saying to myself, "You see, old man, you're not so old after all; you can stand pain with the best of them!" (I was not deceiving myself altogether in this, either; true, I would be fifty in a few months, but I was in far better shape than I had been at twenty.) I saw Morikand through the smoking tree trunks. He was standing alone at the shoreline, his lean naked form silhouetted against the comet's reflection lying still as death on the black water.
It didn't make any sense. Sure, we knew about Col. De Raiss and his Night Raiders; even in the deep swamp the news filtered in. De Raiss was in charge of the so-called Big Cy Sector (to the military everything is a "sector"), which included all the land south of the Caloosahatchee River and west of the line separating Hendry and Collier counties from Sago Beach, Broward and Dade. I say "land", but a good seventy percent of this triangle was inundated: except for the higher hammocks, like the Omphalos, and a few coastal regions, everything south of Lake Tafford had lain under from two to six feet of beautiful black water ever since the early part of '83 when the Whites had bombed the Bean City commune, destroying in the process their own flood control structures. De Raiss's base camp was supposed to be on a spit of high ground somewhere near the ruins of Grass Point Landing, not far from Lake Okeechobee and a good sixty-five miles north of the Omphalos. Rumor had it that for all his reported ruthlessness and zeal it was all he could do just to defend his outposts and maintain his pacification campaigns along the Gulf. To our knowledge he had never penetrated the deep swamp and was not likely to; certainly the Omphalos was of no strategic value to either side. Yet, we had been hit. I was in no frame of mind to figure it out; the important thing now was that they had taken our women-left our guns and dope and taken our women, among them Slit and her baby, aside from Morikand the two most important people in my life. It was just as if they knew what they were doing-taking Orpheus, I mean. I remembered how, in the Bible, King Harod had killed all the babies...
"They may be still alive, Morikand," I said. He shrugged without turning around. My mind became muddled; I had had a reason for disturbing him, an idea: what in the hell was it? "How do you suppose they slipped up on us like that?" I asked, as if it mattered. No reply. "They must have, used those boats with the electric motors, eh? Quiet as hell, those things... " He flicked some sand with his toe, as much as to say, Leave me the fuck alone. "Listen, Morikand, goddamn it," I blurted it out; I hadn't forgotten it at all, "maybe the boy's dead; yes, no doubt he's damn well dead and gone! All right; but not Slit: a dead cunt's no good to anybody. So we're going after her. If we start now we can take 'em when they make camp. We've still got the guns Ham brought, and- Well, goddamn it, we've got to try anyway! What do you say?"
He said, "Shit," and spat into the water, shattering the Comet like a blob of mercury struck with a hammer.
Taking this to mean no, I said, "Well, fuck you then!" and stormed back to where Charlie was sitting.
"Come on, Charlie, get up off your black ass and round up the men. I'll get the guns. We're going after 'em: Well take 'em when they make camp. They'll never know what-"
"They ain't going to be makin' no camp, Rusty. They headed due north, full speed ahead. I seen 'em. There ain't enough dry land between here and De Raiss to take a shit on, much less make camp. Anyway at that speed they're already halfway to the base. They'll be inside the wire before we could put a canoe in the water."
I knew all that, but it made me mad as hell to hear it." After a moment I said, "But we've got to try it, Charlie."
He nodded gravely. "What's Morikand say?"
Through the smoke we could see him, still standing there like a statue. I began to collapse inside, and my headache came back like a stampede. The bubble of our pleasure dome had burst wide open and I was trying to hold it together with my teeth. Defeat began to creep into my bones like a plague of worms. It was a major effort just to shrug my shoulders. "We'll talk to him in the morning," I said.
"That's flowin', man," Charlie replied. "Meantime, you better lay down and take it easy, or else you won't be going noplace."
I said, "Shit" and spat into the fire, unconsciously mimicking Morikand. I could be stubborn too. Marina, the big blonde, was lying back now, her legs spread and her head resting against Ralph's strong black chest. Ralph was her man; he was stroking her cheeks and neck with his long fingers. I glued my eyes to those bullet-nosed supertits of hers like a drowning man grabbing for a buoy and after a long moment of concentration began to feel the effect in my cock. Stepping up close, I inserted a dirty toe into her shaggy crack and said, "How 'bout some dick?"
She had been staring blankly into the fire. Now she looked at me and said, "After what-?" After what you've been through? no doubt, or After what's happened? maybe, but either of these would have put me down; she started over: "Aren't you tired, Rusty?"
"Fuck no," I answered, probing for her clit.
She grinned half-heartedly and looked up over her shoulder at Ralph, who gave her a little slap on the tit and said softly, "Go ahead, baby, swing a little. I was goin' out to cut a cabbage anyway."
Marina and I went down to the water to wash off; we were both streaked with soot from head to toe. The Comet was dead overhead. I tried not to look at it.
"I'm sorry about Mag, Rusty," she said as she squatted in the shallows and splashed water up her cunt.
"Yeah." (Mag had been bedding with me more or less regularly during the past several weeks.) "But I still have you, don't I?"
She waded out and joined me in the chest deep water; at that depth the pain of keeping upright was somewhat diminished. "I didn't know you liked me that much, Rusty," she said.
I grabbed her floating boobs by the nipples and said, "Are you kidding? With tits like these? Not that I don't dig your mind too, you understand, but I'm a tit man from way back."
I sloshed them together to make the water shoot up through her cleavage, splashing her in the face. She giggled and said. "Why is it ol-" (she was going to say old guys) "-some guys like big boobs and others like little ones? "
"When I was a baby," I said, "my mother-she had big ones like yours, huge things!-with cherry tarts for nipples; every night she whitewashed 'em to cut down the glare, you know? Well, anyway, this bitch used to show these monsters to me, see, always keeping them just out of reach, and when I couldn't stand it anymore, just when I would be about to go out of my little baby mind, she would laugh like hell and ram a bottle into my mouth. So you see, I was depraved at a very early age. Ever since then I've been a sucker for a big tit."
Her laughter-faked though it may have been-was good for me; her tits were good for me; her bushy gash and her fat ass-it was all good for me. She had the body of the Earth Mother, into which one could burrow like a mole and stay down till doomsday. We found some burlap sacks, rinsed them out, and spread them on a little patch of unburnt grass at the edge of the firelight. I was aware of the others eyes on us as we started to play. Huddled around the fire like that, hugging their knees, their faces hollow, they looked like the damned, posing for Michaelangelo. It burned my ass. I waited until Marina's wet fingers and warm lips had my cock at the ready, and then I got up on my knees so they could see my erection (just to prove I wasn't faking it) and said, "Hey, what's the body count?" They said as far as they knew nobody was dead. "Well then how about calling off the funeral, for Christ's sake. It's like making love at a wake. Where the hell's Sack? Hey, Sack, lay some sounds on us, man!" He said glumly that the Raiders had smashed his guitar. I felt like saying, Well go fuck yourself then, but I held it back.
An involuntary grunt of pain-half curse, half groan-escaped my throat as I crawled over Marina. "Want me to get on top, Rusty?" she asked softly, her voice disgustingly full of concern.
"Shut up!" I hissed it at her like a mad alligator. "And stop treating me like a ninety-year-old cripple!"
"Ok, Grumpy," she challenged, "give it to me like you mean it-and you better make me come too!"
Make her come! I'd make her foam at the mouth, by God, if it killed me. And it damn near did. Marina was no limp blossom when it came to a fuck, no well-stuffed mattress to do push-ups over, no indeed, and maybe that was why I chose her in the first place, cantankerous old fart that I was-to prove myself, I mean. God! after all those years, still searching for a proof. Anyway, she was through humoring me; with amazing ease she flipped her ass off the burlap, flexed her legs, and clamped her massive thighs around my head, the pressure of her heels driving my face into her twat. Her wet bush was soothing to my lips, but she tasted vaguely of gasoline. In ten minutes the bastards had polluted everything. The taste reminded me of my childhood when Flemming and I used to siphon gas out of parked cars just so we could drive the Model A to the River and get stuck in Owlshit Slough. And then I met May. And then I got married. And then Ellen was born. And then... I was becoming delirious, burning with fever. My ribs were so many shuttered eggshells and my skull was caving in. My ears were flaming marshmallows, squashed flat. The only thing that kept me upright was the ramrod of hate and fear that was jammed up my ass and imbedded in my brain. I cradled Marina's broad hips in the crooks of my arms, clapped a double handhold on her bomblike udders, and dug in.
In a minute her syrup began to flow; it was good; it cut the gasoline. The challenging expression on her face began to soften, and the cockled surfaces of her great oval areolas began to smooth out under my fingertips, the nipples lengthening and swelling. I sloshed the frothy honey from her hole up into the top of her slit with my tongue and went to work on her clit with maniacal fury, slobbering like a juicehead. In seconds she had a hard-on as big as a rooster's prick and twice as hot. I gave it the side-to-side ripple, the dog-lap, the cat-lick, I dressed it down fore and aft, I sucked it, I bit it, and if she hadn't come when she did I'd have chewed it up and swallowed it. She went info a lurching fit that nearly demolished my jawbones; and made, my spine go off like a string of firecrackers, pop! pop! pop! My insides were completely gone, I was a jellyfish with a shell, Humpty Dumpty halfway down. My every motion, every slight expenditure of energy promised to be my last. Nevertheless, I pried her thighs open somehow, jacked her shuddering ass even higher, Buried my jowls in her flooded gash, ran my tongue to its roots up her downspout and polished her off with my nose.
At last her tremors ceased and she went limp. I was Beyond limpness, numbed into rigidity. I remained oh my knees between her legs, my beard completely saturated with drool and cunt gravy-it was up my nostrils and even in my eyes; I smeared a little over my dome for good measure. Perhaps it would make the hair grow back. I remembered when I had tried to pick up a schoolgirl in the park one day: skinheaded creep, she called me. Why these pre-War images? That was before I became a writer. Writers are terrible lovers until after they learn to make love to their typewriters. It's an apprenticeship they are forced to go through. I used to take mine to bed with me every night. When my wife went to the bathroom to jerk off, I would rip off its ribbons and fuck it behind the drive wheel. Those spacer gears were murder, especially if it was turned on. Wow. I was going mad. There before me, in the form of a dripping cunt and two pulsating weather balloons, lay sanity: the last outpost: the Earth Mother, Queen of Fuckland in the Valley of Oblivion. I spat a gob of molasses into her bellybutton and said, "Come on, we haven't started yet."
As I stuck it in, she continued to lie there in an attitude of crucifixion, a silly grin playing about her parted lips, her blue eyes looking up at me through half-closed lids; but when I withdrew after a half dozen strokes and jabbed my cock into the crack of her ass-hopefully in the general direction of her scupper-she gave a little yelp and her legs shot straight up in the air. My coordination was going fast: my penis, which had apparently come unstrung from my brain, kept thrusting away of its own accord with frightening force, every jab going wide of the mark; if she had had less padding on her I would probably have broken my cock. But if I had let go of her tits long enough to find the hole, I would have been undone: my thorax was connected to my abdomen only by a piece of twisted gristle no bigger around than my little finger; to loosen my grip would have been to founder, to drown in the sweat pool between her dugs. Finally, both of us cackling hysterically, Marina reached around and pulled one cheek aside, guiding my prick into her hole with the other hand. With a demonic burst of strength that was absolutely sourceless-unless it came from the devil himself-I dug my hooks into her slippery sun-browned hips, lifted that ponderous butt completely off the ground, and drove into her rectum with everything I had-all the way in on the first thrust. This spastic assault knocked the trapped air out of her cunt, farting a hot splash of fuck foam against my belly: it was music to my ears. How sweet, how healing these repulsive sounds of the flesh when one is sick at heart! What is life after all but one good healthy cunt fart?-preferably in the face. One swift jab and it is over.
After that first stroke I never let her catch her breath. I kept pounding at her until her eyeballs started to wobble, and then I went into high gear. If I had slowed down, I would never have made it. Besides, I was anxious to see if the remains of my body were capable of producing semen; I had my doubts. Something was fucking up my eyes: or else Marina had grown two extra tits. It must have struck me funny, seeing those four popeyed boobies bounding up and down her chest like two pairs of giant squash-remember the story of the Running Squash? The Running Squash was a sort of Gingerbread man from the vegetable patch; nobody could catch him. You can't catch, me, I'm the Gingerbread Squash! I suppose they burned that in '76 with' everything else. It must have struck me funny, I say, because somewhere along the line I realized I was laughing hysterically-not loud, just hysterically. I may have begun to shoot at the same time I began to laugh; if so, I just got in under the wire, because I was well into it when Marina started. I remember seeing her jaw drop, slobber bubbling out of the corner of her mouth, her eyes rolling up into her head, her stomach knotting up, her tits-all five or six of them-pounding against her belly below the folds, and my guts, ground into a thick puree, squirting painfully out the end of my cock: that's about all.
I don't believe I went to sleep exactly; it was more like a stupor, or suspended animation maybe. When I was able to make my eyes focus, I saw that the Comet was fading in the west; only its head showed above the clouds along the horizon. The fire had burnt down to the coals, and there was a greenish smear in the east, like phlegm. What was this in?
A glooming peace this morning with it brings; The sun, for sorrow, will not show his head.
Romeo and Juliet, I believe. (At sixty-four one's Shakespeare comes back to him like a flock of long-lost pigeons, ragged with age and ready for death.) Everyone was asleep, or in attitudes of sleep, ringed around the dying fire as before. The children and most of the adults were wrapped in scraps of burlap; some were bare-ass, but all were huddled up like fetuses: that was what hurt. Ordinarily those bare brown and black bodies would have been stretched out under the sky, their tenderest parts bared to the elements, the very picture of carefree peace and harmony, as much a part of nature as the trees or the birds or the alligators who used to sun themselves on our beaches without fear. Fear. It had crept over the Omphalos like a poisonous fog. It had curled us up like worms.
I disentangled myself from the dead weight of Marina's thighs and stood up. The pain no longer came from this place or that place, it was all over. But the pain was good; it was better than being numb: I took a kind of perverse pleasure in it. I tried to gel the snarls out of my beard, but it was a solid lump of starch. My groin too was caked with it; my balls crackled when I walked-or staggered, to be accurate. I was dizzy as hell, and my fever seemed to have risen. I went past the smoldering stockade toward the center of the island. Approaching the "Shrine of Orpheus," as we affectionately called it, I realized (or imagined) that my armpits were swollen. Good God, I said to myself, fever, headache, swollen lymph glands-maybe I've got the plague! They brought fire, pain, fear-why not the plague too? Wonderful! Given a choice, who would not choose the Black Death as the way to go? I could see it clearly: "This Contains The Residue Of One Rustam John Smythe Who Died Of The Black Death During The Year Of The Comet." That's what it would say on the label of the bottle containing my remains (conveniently reduced to ashes during, a napalm strike), to be dropped with great ceremony into the Lake Leethy sewer system in the dead of night. Ah, but who is given a choice? Nowadays it's done by the numbers.
The Shrine was intact-which was not very surprising, since all it was was a ring of rocks. There wasn't much even a Night Raider could do to a ring of rocks. I stood outside the circle, looking down, trying to remember why I had come there. I knew why I had come there the first time; I wasn't likely to forget that, plague or no plague. At that time this was the only clear place on the hammock-a sort of cave in the dense undergrowth with a deep soft floor of leaves and moss. It was not over twenty feet across, about the same diameter as the circle of stones we put there later to mark the spot. All that day I had been on the edge of panic: there we were in the middle of nowhere and Slit was about to give birth. Two weeks early. Just the day before I had insisted that we head for the Gulf coast to find a doctor: at that time the Blacks held the high ground from Jerome to Chokoloskee; Charlie didn't know exactly where we were, but if we could find the old ACL tracks and follow them southward we couldn't miss. I had been thinking all along, without concerning myself very much over it, that when the time came we would either have found Prester Steve's camp or be close enough to a field infirmary to get there in short notice. But now it was too late; we had hardly got sail on the barge that morning when Slit started her labor. "It's going to be today," she announced cheerfully. Good God. As my Uncle Farley would have said, we were up Shit Creek without a paddle. It wasn't so bad until I decided to make a pelvimetric examination. It was just as I had feared. Pulling Morikand aside, I said, "Bad news, man. Her pelvis is obstetrically inadequate." Morikand seemed unmoved, but Charlie hissed , in my ear: "Speak English, man!"
"There's no way that baby can get out of there through the hole, Charlie; we're gonna have to cut her open."
"Fuck you too, jack," said Slit, who had heard every word, "You ain't cuttin' me open!"
"You don't understand, Slit," I said. "Your birth passage is too small, don't you see? You're too goddamn little to have babies! That's the goddamn trouble! I knew it the minute I saw you!" I raved on. Morikand sunned himself. Slit tried not to laugh at me. But Charlie was getting as churned up as I was. At one point he dragged me into the stern and said, "Hey, Rusty, what we gonna do it with, a machete?" I hadn't thought of that. "Don't you have a pocket knife?" I asked. He shook his head. "I ain't even got a can opener."
By noon her cramps were coming every five minutes. Charlie and I were running around like a couple of old ladies: you would have thought we were having the baby instead of Slit. Morikand seemed rather bored with the whole thing; every so often he would yawn. I rinsed my hands over the side and did a rectal probe. "Get your finger outa my ass, Rusty." That was what she said every time I did a rectal probe. Good God: her cervix was already a good 6 cm. dilated! She was panting too! The time was up. What in the fuck were we going to do? I remember wondering briefly if a Caesarean had ever been performed with a machete. "When do we start cuttin'?" whispered Charlie. "Now," I said. Just then Morikand opened his eyes, yawned, and pointed over his shoulder with his thumb. "Head over there, will you, Charon?" he said matter-of-factly. We looked off to starboard in the direction he had indicated and saw a large hammock through the willow heads a couple of hundred yards away. "Nothing over there but a hammock, kid," said Charlie. But I was still sane enough not to go against Morikand; I told Charlie to do what he said. Of course he's right, I thought, it will be easier on dry land. The overhanging willows were so dense we couldn't land, so Charlie and I leapt out to cut a passage. No sooner had we opened up a hole and waded back to the barge than we discovered that Slit and Morikand were gone! Vanished! On the fore thwart where Slit had been lying I saw a big puddle of slimy fluid. I stuck my finger in it and took a sniff... "Good God, Charlie, her water's broke!"
After a lot of yelling and thrashing around we found tracks in the mud leading straight into the tangle. There were two sets of tracks. "The bastard's making her walk, Rusty! Come on!" And we charged into the jungle like a couple of rhinos, bellowing our brains out. Pretty soon we got a response: "Hurry up, you guys, you're missing the fun!" It was Morikand, his voice cool and collected. We plunged ahead, tumbling over each other in the process; it's a wonder we didn't fall on our own machetes. At last we broke out of the brush. There was Slit, squatting right in the center of the little clearing-squatting, I say! It was that peculiar kind of squat practiced daily by Orientals, Negroes, Indians, etc. (Slit was a blonde mulatto), but which Caucasians find extremely difficult to assume and impossible to maintain for any length of time; the feet are flat on the ground, the knees well apart, the trunk almost perpendicular; the trick is that the femur must make an almost perfect right angle with the lip of the acetabulum, the hinge taking the full weight of the body. The "third world squat," I like to call it. It is the very symbol of close-to-the-earth peoples. Anyway, there she was, squatting in the mulch, her wiry little body taut as a bowstring, her burlap smock dangling from a twig. Charlie and I had burst in from the side, to her left, so that it was a moment before we saw the worst. One glance at her crotch and we froze solid, clutching each other like two men on a narrow ledge in a windstorm. The baby's head was sticking out between her labia. I felt sick. I was afraid to move or even speak for fear she would topple over. Her eyes were almost shut, her face streaked with tears, her mouth open wide, and she was saying, "Ah, ah, ah!"-a sound that broke my heart and made my hair stand up on my neck at the same time. What the hell were we going to do? It was obvious the baby's shoulders were stuck at the pelvic opening, just as I had predicted. The alternatives passed before my mind in a nonsensical flash: Let her die? Behead the baby? Slice her open with my sap-stained machete? Hope it's a bad dream? Pray? Just when I was about to do something-what, I don't know-shit my pants, probably-Slit digs her fingers into her knees, strains, grunts, and pushes out the baby.
A black streak shot past me and skidded to the center of the clearing; it was Charlie, down on his knees and elbows, suddenly full of action. He dragged the baby out from under her butt by the ankles and held the bloody thing up in the air, gunk and all, slapping it on the bottom and splattering mucus all over himself and Slit, babbling like an idiot. It had dead leaves and mulch stuck all over it, so that at first I thought she had produced something with spots. At last I got my ass in motion and sprang to the rescue, yelling, "Get the cheese out of its face! Get the cheese out of its face! It'll smother, you idiot!" But Charlie didn't hear a thing: he was screaming at the top of his lungs: "It's a boy! It's a boy! Look at that, man! Look at the prick on the little motherfucker, man! How 'bout that shit! How 'bout that shit!" and on and on, while the baby quietly suffocated. Finally I got the cheese out of its nose and mouth, and by Christ it said something! It said something like "Ungk," and then I think I started to shout, myself. Somewhere in the middle of this hysterical celebration I happened to look down at Slit, whom we had completely forgotten. She was calmly hauling the cord out of her bloody cunt. "Jesus Christ!" I yelled, dropping to my knees. "Stop! Let me do that! You'll-!" But before I was halfway down, the placenta fell out on the ground like a big sloppy pizza, and as soon as I grabbed her shoulders to steady her, her feet flew out from under her, and splash!-down she went, right on her ass in the middle of the placenta. Charlie, myself, the baby, everybody was covered with blood. Somehow this had a sobering effect on Charlie and me, though not on Slit, who lay there on her back in the leafy rot, giggling weakly.
What had Morikand been doing all this time? Reclining at the edge of the clearing, watching, hands folded behind his head, looking as though he would burst out laughing at any minute. Charlie and I dragged the placenta out from under Slit's ass, milked down the cord, cut it with one of the machetes and lay the cheesy baby gently down beside its giggling mother. Then we stood up, looked at each other, and started to blubber like women at a wedding; and that was when Morikand jumped up and said, "This is it!"
I lifted one of the sooty rocks with my toe, hoping to find a scorpion underneath; at this point a good scorpion sting would have put me out of it for good-just in case I didn't have the Black Death. If I had come to the Shrine to firm up my purpose, my resolve to rescue Slit and Orpheus, the trip was a failure. The hard truth was coming in with the greasy dawn. We would not talk to Morikand about it this morning, or any other morning. I was a stubborn old fool. No, I wasn't even that; the whole thing was a sham. I never had any intention of going after them; I only wanted the others to think that. Did I fuck myself half to death to prove I was still a man, still bold enough and strong enough to make such an expedition? Shit no; it was only to make them think I was trying to prove myself, that I was sincere in wanting to make the attempt. What a worthless old fart I was. Better to be a stubborn fool than a worthless fart. What difference did it make that it was impossible? We had done the impossible just staying alive this long, considering the way we lived and the state of the world. We should have tried. Goddamn it, we should have tried...
Standing there at the Shrine and thinking of Marina-staring at the northern horizon in the direction of De Raiss's base and thinking of Marina-I remembered how I had left Uncle Farley in the bar that night in 1960 and gone to a whorehouse. It had been my first night out in years. My wife was in the hospital having our first child, Ellen. Was she having trouble? Were there complications? I couldn't have cared less. I was out for cunt, and that was that. (How different Ellen's birth from Orpheus'! Imagine what a change would come over the world if women went out and squatted in the woods to have their babies!-if there were any woods left, that is, or any babies.) But even as I rode my whore that night, even as I pumped a pint or more of pent up bile and misery into her bottomless cunt, I was riddled with guilt; it had long ago poisoned my blood and my semen. What if I had known then that in a short five years my own wife would be working in that same whorehouse? And who would bring her to that? Me, R. John Smythe, the friendly pornographer. Guilt. "You should have been at the hospital," said Guilt. "And you should be halfway to De Raiss right now."
"Fuck you," I said, my stock reply. But it sounded as hollow then as ever. The son of a bitch had tracked me even to the Omphalos.
I was by now almost out of my head with the fever. I turned to the snot-smear dawn and said, "What the fuck difference does it make? We're all going to die of the plague anyway, just like everybody else. 'All are punish'd!' " My Shakespeare was coming out like poison from a black boil. I staggered back down through the smoldering tree trunks, fell on Marina and fucked her till the lights went out.
I Was in a deep state of delirium for the next three days. To all appearances I was as good as gone; they had the shovels ready. Someone, it was rumored, had even carved a plaque for my headstone, which read, HERE LIES RUSTAM SMYTHE WHO FUCKED HIMSELF TO DEATH But on the fourth day, by some miracle, my fever broke, and it looked as though I might be good for another year or so. On the fifth day I was on my feet-unsteadily so, to be sure, but on my feet nonetheless. I was a new man. Like the gasoline-flavored cunt juice, like the piece of ass, like the hot coals I stepped on, the sickness too had been good for me. To have passed those four bleak days in good health would have been a very bad trip. I saw things now in a different light. Slit was gone, and Orpheus was no doubt dead; we hadn't a ghost of a chance of getting either of them back. It was a thing we would have to accept. Acceptance: wasn't that what lay at the very core of Morikand's message to the world? Wasn't that what he had been trying to drum into me all these years?-or to put it more accurately, wasn't that the message one was expected to extract from the phenomenon of Morikand Jones?-for Morikand never taught or preached, except for dropping a few enigmatic koans from time to time just to fuck one's mind up. Yes, we would have to accept it; what was joy without sorrow and grief? There were other girls, there would be another baby to carry Morikand's blood to its destiny. We might have to move the Omphalos deeper into the swamp to avoid further raids, but what of that? Up until a year ago we had been constantly on the move anyway. Sadness does not go away, but if given a chance it will grow a shell.
Morikand, meantime, had disappeared-cut out toward the south a couple of days ago in one of the canoes. But that wasn't unusual, and we knew he'd be back soon. On the evening of the second day following my recovery Charlie and I were sitting on the dock playing with Marina's tits, watching the Comet rise and talking in "me above vein-the acceptance bit-when up walks Morikand from the direction of the stockade. He had his helmet on his head, his hair hanging down in two long braids, and his enormous cock coiled up in a burlap loincloth. He had a bush knife strapped to one hip, two bandoleers full of ammo crossed over his bony chest, and one of Ham's rusty old rifles slung over his shoulder. We all three unhinged our jaws in unison and gaped at him like a trio of goldfish.
"Ready?" he said.
"Ready for what?" Charlie and I asked in the same voice.
"To go get Slit, what else?"
CHAPTER TWO - COURANTE
All right now, here we go. Dim the lights, fire up the hash pipes, batten the hatches, dog down the air locks, and draw the drapes. We are going into the thick of it. The Aquarian Age is upon us, and we are going in with our pants down and our cocks at the ready. Roll the caissons and keep the ammo coming.-And sterilize the spikes too: after fifteen years I may be losing the touch.
Tromp, tromp, tromp- The heavy tread of boot-shod feet, several pairs, in step, echoing down a hollow hallway. Approaching. Black curtains on the windows. Red sheets on the bed. Crossed sabers on the wall. Flashing in the candlelight. Shadows of the exposed rafters flickering in the vault of the ceiling. The heady odor of perfume, Camphor, wine, cunt, old wallpaper and moldy wood. On one wall hangs a portrait of Gen. George S. Patton, Jr., framed in brass; on another a drypoint print of Carlton Coon matted with blackskin. You must feel that certain heavy hollowness, that roar of silence which the walls of old wooden houses exude through their wormy pores like powdered mothballs. The bedposts are iron, the chair cane, and there is a roll-top desk. All very spooky. The footfalls halt outside the door. A few words are exchanged-crisp, but unintelligible because of the overtones-the brass knob turns, and Col. De Raiss enters the room.
He examines the walls, he scrutinizes the floor, he peers at the ceiling, he checks the candles, he makes a mark on the desktop with his forefinger and darts a glance at the bed. You get the feeling he is inspecting a barracks. Now he appears to relax a little, unbuckles his pistol belt and hangs it on the cane chair, cowboy style.
"How do you like the room?" he says with a sly grin, unbuttoning his shirt, "Not exactly what you expected, eh? Hm, hm, hm." (That's the way the Colonel laughs: Hm, hm, hm; it is one of those laughs that seem to originate in the sinuses and which at times resembled a snort.) "I would like to say that I had it fixed up just for you, but, as you know, hm, hm, hm, there have been others before you-none of whom, by the way, have regretted their decision. A little better than the, ah, cage, eh? Hm, hm-But I want you to understand, my dear, your past few days in the cage should not be construed as punishment. I'm afraid Sgt. Studhardt may have given you that impression, eh? No, that was nothing more than the standard quarantine procedure required by all incoming personnel, prisoners or otherwise. You asked, I believe, about your companions? the other girls in your party? Their treatment has been the same as yours-lenient and humane. Separation, of course, is required by the quarantine statutes. The plague, as you know, commits no discrimination by sex. Hm, hm. No indeed: man or woman, adult or child, white or black, friend or foe-it's all the same to the plague. The plague is neither patriot nor rebel, my dear. The plague, like those from whom you were rescued,"-he looks up from the half-unlaced boot which, containing his left foot, rests on the seat of the cane chair which stands a short distance from the bed-"is an anarchist!
"Ah, but what is the War or the Black Death to us tonight, eh? We are far from the battle zones, my dear, and you will find these quarters of mine-of ours, that is, yours and my other, ah, female companions, among which, hopefully, your four black friends will soon be numbered-a word from you, I'm sure, will do the trick-ah... what was I saying? - Ah: these rooms, you will find, are as far removed and insulated from the daily routine and regimentation of military life as possible. Oh, a few rules must be adhered to, but nothing distasteful, believe me. Oh yes," he went on, nodding his head confidently and winking several times as he carried a bottle of wine (San Diego port, I believe it was-one of those famous bottles of 1979 vintage found in the possession of a captured Japanese fisherman who had by chance recovered them from the sea in his nets some months after the Quake, distinguishable by the oil stains on the label and sold by the junta at fabulous prices) and two glasses to the bed, "you made the right decision, my dear. Compare this, ah,"-with his free hand he made a wide sweep in the air, indicating the room, or perhaps the whole upper floor, of the house-"well, I won't say splendor, but perhaps luxury would not be inappropriate, eh?-compare this, I say, not only with the squalor in which we found you-and from which we have saved you- but also with Sgt. Studhardt's stockade, of which I believe you had a glimpse, eh? from the cage? Oh yes, I'm afraid Sgt. Studhardt would soon have had you as a guest had you not changed your mind when you did. 'Let me have her for a week or two, Colonel,' he said to me, 'I'll bring her around for you, sir."No, no, sergeant,' I told him, 'she just needs a little time, that's all. She'll come around,' I said. Hm, hm, hm. And I was right, wasn't I? Hm hm, hm. Here's to the many pleasant nights ahead of us... " They drink to that.
The Colonel is now sitting on the bed with his curious legs crossed. He is down to his dog tags, his khaki skivvy drawers and his olive-drab cushion socks. He goes on: "Believe, me, my dear, your child is in the best of hands. Our medics are of the best stock the army has to offer, and that's saying a lot. He is getting the best of care, the best of care. How grateful you must be to us, now that you understand, eh? Why, how would the boy have grown up in such surroundings as we found him in?-such corruption and disease!-among those drugged degenerates!-God! I cringe to think of it. That boy is going to be reared in a clean, moral, God-fearing environment, and-being white like he is-he'll get the very best education any mother could want for her child. Oh, I understood your concern-that was where I had it over Sgt. Studhardt, you see. No doubt you had heard those ugly, rumors about white soldiers eating black babies for supper like the Blacks do with white children, eh? Not a word of truth in it. When you've been among us a while, you will see that a white man-an American, that is-never stoops to the conduct of his enemy, never degrades himself by imitating the atrocities of his opponent; never.
"But your perfectly natural concern for your child, ignorant of these things as you were, escaped Sgt. Studhardt altogether, you see. All he could think of was his injured men-which was also natural, of course. You did raise a bit of hell that first morning. It seems Pvt. Stover is going to lose that eye, and the fellow you got with your knee, well, he's still pretty bad off-may be permanently disabled. But, as I say, I understand your motivations, and ah, hm, hm, hm, I might even add, just between you and me, that I admire your spunk. Hm, hm, hm. I Wondered at the time if you'd show such spirit in bed."
The sly grin. A sip of San Diego. A raking eye.
"Now, don't misunderstand me about Sgt. Studhardt. He's a damn good soldier, a damn good soldier. Why since he took over the stockade he has been practically the mainstay of our intelligence operation. His, ah, persuasiveness, as I might call it, with your tight-lipped brand of prisoner is very nearly invaluable, very nearly invaluable. And in the field! Why, in the field Sgt. Studhardt can smell a nigger in a hole two miles away and drop a mortar shell right in his lap on the first shot, and that's a fact. The only point I meant to make was that, as far as women go, well, to tell the truth the man's a bit of a boor. Lacks gentility altogether. As for myself-hm, hm, hm-well, I like to think I have a certain way with a woman, especially a pretty one like yourself. Maybe it's the French blood in my ancestry, eh?"
Slit smiled and stretched out luxuriously on the red sheets.
"-I don't mean that in an un-American way, of course," the Colonel adds in a confidential tone, draining his glass and setting it on the floor beside Slit's. The sly glint gleams in his beady eyes and the grin crimps the corners of his thin lips. He claps his hands lightly together, places one of them on Slit's thigh, just above the knee, and says, "Hey... ready for a little fun?"
Slit lays her let's-do-it smile, on him and replies, "I thought you'd never get to that."
"Baby," says De Raiss, rising to his feet and grasping the waistband of his skivvy drawers with the thumb and forefinger of each hand, one on either side of the snaps, "we have just got to it. We have just got to it."
There is a dramatic pause as the Colonel stands there beside the bed, his gut drawn in, the front of his drawers slightly extended by what must be his cock, his narrow shoulders thrown back, legs slightly apart, poised for the unveiling and somewhat resembling a contestant in a farting match listening to the countdown, his eyes, pinched close about the bridge of his nose, dancing over the delicious morsel of dark docile girlflesh spread out before him...
Slit is wearing the nightie they have given her. It is made of see-through black tricot, trimmed in lace and fastened at the shoulders with little black ribbons. She spreads her tawny sun-streaked hair, gleaming in the candlelight from its first encounter with shampoo, in a wide fan upon the crimson pillow and arches her back to make the hard little mahogany nipples of her milk-swollen tits press against the sheer bodice of the garment in vivid relief, stretching it taut as a drum and drawing its lacy hem up to her hips. She spreads her lithe brown legs and flexes her pelvis in a seductive upward roll, as though about to go into a horizontal belly dance in slow motion, giving the looming Colonel a blood-quickening view of her high-humped cunt, the crotch of her tiny panties-a window of the sheerest nylon-stretched tightly across the slightly parted lips. (This, by the way, is the first pair of panties that ever had the pleasure of touching Slit's sweet little ass.) She sees the white flash of her own smile reflected in the Colonel's glassy eyeballs as she opens her arms in a gesture of invitation...
With great solemnity and several deft flips of his wrists the Colonel pops his snaps, drops his drawers, and on his hands and knees advances onto the field, still wearing his dog tags and his cushion socks.
At the bend of her knee he makes a sharp turn to the left, deploys his hands along her left and right flanks, and with his tongue in the vanguard and his ass flying recon launches a frontal attack upon the- But we need a better shot of Col. De Raiss, who cuts a weird figure in the nude. His head is not too different from the slightly glorified sketches of him one sees from time to time nowadays in men's magazines (there are no photos, apparently): bony, small, shaved except for a skull cap of short blonde bristles, and a narrow pinched face culminating in a beak. That is his head; his body is something else again, here described for the first time. The body of Col. De Raiss resembles in part a scarecrow, in another part a clown balloon, its extremities the first, its central regions the second. More particularly, the arms below the elbows and the legs below the knees are gaunt like the head, ending in long fingers and knobby toes (although we are not seeing these latter just now, what with the cushion socks), but the upper arms are fleshy, the thighs flabby, the buttocks droopy, and the paunch swollen. One has the impression he was put together from rejected leftovers-whatever came to hand. This dual nature of the Colonel's appearance is reflected in his pecker. This curious appendage, like the rest of him, starts out to be one thing and ends up another. It has an admirable girth to it at the root, and scrutinizing only the first two inches, you expect at least another four or five to lie beyond; but you are deceived: for the length does not go with the girth, and in looking at those first two inches you have seen damn near the whole thing-about two thirds of it, actually. It resembles a sawed-off shotgun. The snub-nosed head, flayed of its foreskin, is a sort of reddish mauve in color, and the shank, a weak olive-drab, always looks dirty no matter how hard he scrubs it. (The foregoing description, I should explain, pertains to the member only in its erect condition; flaccid, it disappears all but the head.) This then is the conglomerate apparition we see swarming over Slit's spreadeagle form, oozing up between her thighs like a giant slug.
After burrowing briefly in her thinly veiled crotch, plowing her hairy furrow with his beak and tickling it with his tongue, he advances over her belly and lays siege to her tits. He does not immediately strip them, however, preferring such pleasures to be realized gradually, to be drawn out, mulled over, savored, and pounced upon in the fullness of time.
And so it goes on. The shadows flicker, the candles drip, the room warms up, the walls secrete their dark oils, the juices flow, the sweat breaks out, the bed squeaks, and we look on, remembering fucks long past, cunts once hot and tight, now moldering in the grave... But I grow morbid. I was afraid of that. Put my hand in your crack, love, to prime the flow...
Slit sucks his tongue and tickles his balls and pulls at his prick and fingers his asshole and soon has him panting like a locomotive. (We are back on the track! I remember you now: you are the one who used to fuck the little boys in the ass with your nipples! Nadine? Marsha? But never mind; just stick with me-we'll get through this yet.) After a while she rolls him over on his back like a turtle and sits on his paunch. His fleshy parts turn red as the bed sheets and freckles pop out all over his body like blackheads. With a passionate jerk she rips the nightie from her tits and rubs them in his face. He grunts, he drools, he sucks, he gasps.
He catches the flying shreds of the gown and tears them free of her body. The laughter of lust invades the camphorous silence of the hollow walls. In a sudden frenzy of urgency the Colonel, milk and spit bubbling from his mouth, hooks his fingers in the hip band of Slit's panties and rips them in two, throwing the pieces into the shuddering gloom. Slit laughs wildly, grinds her slimy cunt against his belly, grabs both tits in her hands and shrieks, "Open your mouth!"
"Aaaaah-!" says the Colonel, agape and bug-eyed.
Squirt! squirt! squirt!
Not only does it go in his mouth, but into his eyes, ears and nose as well. Hot white milk, sweet and pungent, running from his eyes, soaking the pillow, beading on his oily bristles, flooding everything. It comes out not in a single stream but in a spray of streams, fine strong needles of milk shooting from every pore of her digit-like nipples, stiff, swollen and black with excitement. De Raiss gurgles and sputters like a goat at a bacchanal, and while he is gurgling and sputtering Slit shifts her ass to his chest and sandwiches his jowls between her sex-slick thighs. Through a blur of milk the Colonel sees that deep-cleft twat staring him in the face, its thick nest of wet wheat tickling his trembling chin, its heavy musk inflaming his nostrils. With a cry like that of a famished wolf before a bloody carcass, the Colonel digs his hooks into the naked cheeks of Slit's ass and pulls that frothing mouth to his own. She throws back her head, clutches her tits, and starts a vibration in her hips that smears syrup and slobber all over the Colonel's sucking cheeks. Her cunt is moving faster than his tongue. He can't keep up with her. He can't even breathe. He is into it up to the eyes. He is swamped in it, inundated by it, drunk on it. His fingers dig into the crack of her wildly oscillating ass and his tongue laps the raw meat like a flag in a hurricane, while overhead those fountains of milk spray forth undiminished, fanning out, sputtering in the candle flame, raining down into the pounding gloom. And she cries, "Oh! Oh! Stick it up my hole! Way up inside! That's what turns me on!" The Colonel opens his mouth all the way and says, "Ahghlblbl!" driving his snaky tongue as far as it will go up her tube, whereupon she contracts her bladder and pisses down his throat.
(Did I take you by surprise? Or were you expecting it? Don't answer; just keep your hand on my cock and your tit in my ear; we're doing fine.) The Colonel erupts like a geyser.
Urine spraying from his mouth and nostrils, he knocks Slit head over heels to the floor and bounds from the bed as though a stick of dynamite has just gone off under his ass. He gag, he chokes, he coughs, he strangles, he makes a noise like a drowning man with a death rattle.
A toilet communicates with this room; the Colonel needs to communicate with this toilet. He starts off toward the door in a headlong rush, and though blinded by the milk, eventually reaches it, but not without ricocheting once off the roll top desk, crashing twice into the wall, and falling over the cane chair.
Meantime, Slit is already on her feet. She pounces on the chair almost before the Colonel wrenches his feet from the rungs. The grip of the pistol is as cold as ice to her feverish palm. Gun in hand, she darts across the room and flattens herself against the wall beside the door to the John, draws back the hammer with both thumbs, and waits.
Slit is tiny. The gun is large. And heavy. And cold.
De Raiss pukes, roars, blows his nose, rinses his mouth, soaks his head, and comes charging through the door, bellowing like a bull.
"All right, you little bitch! You really did it! You have really fixed your little black-! Where are you?"
"Right here, motherfucker," says Slit quietly.
I love that. "Right here, motherfucker," she says, shoving the muzzle of the automatic firmly against the shaven base of the Colonel's skull. Charlie and I cracked up when we heard that, we went down in flames, the both of us. What a beautiful line! Right here, motherfucker. Talk about cool, wow. I wish I could end it right there; but no; we are going all the way; we are going in over the horn; she goes on.
"You had the wine and the salad, Colonel, you wanta try the main course now?"
"What's that?"
"That's like when I blow your motherfuckin' head off, Colonel."
"Ah."
"One wrong move, that's all it'll take. Now, get your ass over to that telephone. You're gonna have my baby and my friends brought up here, Colonel, and then we're all gonna take a little walk right out the front gale, real cool like. See, 'cause if it ain't cool, Colonel... " She twists the muzzle into the "fleshy hollow just below De Raiss's external occipital protuberance.
The Colonel raises his hands to the level of his shoulders and says, "Looks like you got the drop on me."
"Move!"
She shoves him forward with the gun. Toward the roll top desk. She is holding the gun with both hands. Her hands are tiny. The gun is heavy. The hammer is cocked. Her knuckles are white. Her lips livid. Her jaw set.
"Pick it up, motherfucker." Perhaps you hear a tremble in her voice.
De Raiss lifts the receiver, jabs a few buttons, and speaks: "Ah, Col. De Raiss here. I'm afraid you'll have to give me a hand, Corporal, I've got a wild nigger on my hands. Would you step in for a moment, please."
Slit shuts her eyes and pulls the trigger.
Since the end of the barrel is closed by the fat of the Colonel's neck, the hammer makes only a dull thwak as it falls on the firing pin. Slit's mind and body were braced for an explosion; this thwak is an implosion: it leaves a hollowness in her brain and in her bones. The shock lasts just long enough for De Raiss to snatch the weapon from her hands.
"Hm, hm, hm!" he chuckles, "Surely, my dear, you didn't think I'd bring a loaded-" It is just at this-moment-just as the word loaded clears the Colonel's larynx-that Slit comes to her senses and delivers a wondrous solid kick to his unprotected groin. That done, she springs for the window. Throws back the black drapes. Smashes the glass with her fists. What would she do?-descend the sheer wall like a spider? jump for it? fly like a bird? She might have made it, who knows? Slit had the agility of a monkey, the bounding grace of a deer, the speed of a marsh rabbit, the lightness of a sparrow.
But this place is ruled by a black star that hangs day and night from the tenth cusp like a spider on a thread, just above the shingled rooftop. Here even the Black Death wouldn't have a chance.
This window looks south. She has one brief view of the Comet's reflection in the scattered pools, a faint somber dotted line pointing; the way to the Omphalos, and then she is on her knees, and then on her back, writhing in pain, clutching frantically at the big dart imbedded in her right buttock.
A cold numbness creeps up her spine.
Her last image is of De Raiss curled up in a naked heap under the roll top desk, saying, "Uh! uh! uh!" and the corporal standing in the open doorway, still sighting down the barrel of his air gun.
We plunge on, deeper, into the catacombs bred of the black star.
They got Orphie. I hung onto him as long as I could and then they got him and now I ain't never gonna get him back.
(Keep your cunt near my nose and we'll get through.) I wonder if you have been feeling the darkness; waiting a little impatiently for a ray of sunlight to brighten these pages; hoping maybe for one of my famous open-air daylight fuck scenes as of old: if so, forget it. The darkness I have shown you so far is nothing to what we are into now. This darkness is not the darkness of a dense hammock, nor the darkness of a smoky night, nor the darkness of an old house, nor even the numb cold darkness of unconsciousness: no, this is a fetid, wormy, putrid, gaseous, metallic, bug-crawling, rat-scratching darkness that chills the soul and puckers the asshole. It is a darkness in which you wake up naked, with terror in your heart, a darkness into which you dare not extend a hand or a foot or a cry or even a sob, a darkness which fills you with dread and a profound longing for the oblivion of death. This darkness is deeper than the darkness of death. This is the darkness in which Slit finds herself as the tranquilizer wears off.
She is in a cylindrical tank of corrugated metal about six feet in diameter and higher than she can reach. The air is heavy and sickening, rank with putrefaction. In the center of the floor is a small circle of ragged perforations, surrounded by piles of dung teeming with maggots: this is the toilet: you piss through the holes and shit on the floor. There is a hideous scurrying sound, like tiny claws on metal, and the rattle of insects. The tank in fact is alive with roaches; they swarm up the walls and try to feed between your legs. This is Slit's new apartment; this is where she wakes up, naked, alone, very small, very young, and utterly lost. After a long time she returns to the dungheap, picks up a hard lump and heaves it quickly up into the dark. The turd shatters against, the roof with a thin metallic thud. The cell is apparently about eight feet high. She has explored it thoroughly, and there is no escape. She sits down among the roaches, thinking, "They got Orphie. I hung onto him as long as I could and then they got him and now I ain't never gonna get him back." And she quietly weeps herself into a stupor.
Slit was kept in this tank for six days. (That's my own reckoning; hers ran nearer to six weeks, which is to say, an eternity.) At uneven intervals a steel hatch in the roof was opened just wide enough to admit a small plastic sack full of gruel and immediately clanged shut. Sometimes the sack burst when it hit the floor, and at these times Slit was almost relieved: it was such foul tasting stuff, this gruel, that she could hardly gel it down without vomiting. It was a time of blackness and despair; it was unbearable, but she bore it; it was grim and ghastly but she clung to sanity; she ate the garbage they gave her, she breathed the poisonous air, she pissed in the drain and she shat on the floor; the roaches swarmed, the rats scratched, the flies buzzed, the worms crawled; it was horrible, but she survived. Then one night, for it is always night in this story...
She hears voices: "-lost a little weight, but her breasts are still good. When will she come to?"
"Soon. Come here."
"Yes, Sergeant?-Hey! what are you doing?"
"What the fuck you think I'm doin'?"
"-But not now, honey, later we-"
"Now."
"But-"
"You want the nigger? Or shall I throw her back in the can?"
"... All right. Let's go to your quarters."
"Negative. The Colonel'd be on us before we got the door shut. I'm riskin' my rank just lettin' you in the stockade. He's got spies everywhere. Lemme see them tits-!" The whirr of a zipper. "-Mm, nice, real, real nice... "
"But, Sergeant, the bed's too small for three of us, and-"
"Turn around and put your hands against the wall."
"You gonna frisk me, Sergeant?"
"I'm gonna fuck yuh, baby."
"You're a real animal, aren't you?"
"You better believe it. Bend over."
"Like this?"
"Spread your legs a little more. That's it."
"... Oh, Jesus! Mm! Oh, God, be careful, Sergeant. I haven't had anybody but the Colonel for so long, I'm probably all shrunk up inside."
"Don't worry, baby, I'll stretch yuh out... Uhn!"
"AH!"
"Sh!" There are no more words now, just grunts and moans and heavy breathing and slish-slosh noises, growing louder and more violent and then ceasing. A door opens and closes softly. Slowly the heaviness passes from Slit's lids and she opens her eyes.
She is on a small bed in a small room. She is still naked, but her body has been washed. This time the sheets are white, not red. This time there is a woman in the room, not a man. The woman is naked too. She is a big-titted thing with a dark brown bush between pale thighs. Her nipples are large, her navel deep, her belly rounded. Her hair-a shade lighter than her bush-is arranged in a high swirl atop her well-shaped head; a few strands of it have fallen over one eye: very sexy. She has full lips, hoop earrings and a hungry eye. Slit is on her back; she squints up at the woman standing at the foot of the bed; the light is painful to her eyes. The woman smiles, bends over, takes Slit's ankles in her hands and gently spreads them apart. Her eyes feast on the sight of Slit's cunt; the view is head-on, right up the hole; her tongue runs hungrily around her parted lips and she flows onto the bed, covering Slit's body like a warm cloak of flesh...
White fingers on bronze breasts, squeezing, caressing. kneading, pinching, clutching; hot lips, dangling boobs, stiff nipples, a wet tongue, a hairy crack, cunt grinds against cunt, tit presses tit, lips touch lips, saliva mingles with saliva, the blood quickens, the pulse pounds, the juice flows, the room spins: Slit is caught up in this whirlwind of lust.
Suddenly the woman twists around on the bed and dives head-first into Slit's crotch, and the noise of her lapping tongue fills the room. Slurp, slurp, slurp! Come on, let's get with it, goddam it! Let's get the sap running, the syrup flowing! Churn up your cunt and ram it in my face! Let me smell you in heat! Let me choke on your frothy beard! Smother me with your tits! Sit on my face, spit on me if you like, piss on me, anything-just don't abandon me! We've a ways to go yet.
-Slit gets a double handhold on the cheeks of that wide white ass looming and lurching above her face and pulls it down to her mouth. At the first sweep of her tongue the long hairy jaws open up and release their contents in a thick warm torrent over her lips and cheeks: it is part semen, part cunt juice, this teeming brew, and it spreads over her skin like protoplasm. She locates the clit and goes at it with all the energy she can muster.
Soon the woman is shuddering and jerking all over, her big tits driving against Slit's belly like battering rams, and when she starts to come the convulsions in her stomach bring her hips down hard and heavy on Slit's head, and the girl's entire face is swamped in that foaming cunt. Even as she feels herself slipping back into, unconsciousness, Slit keeps her tongue in furious motion against the little knob of twitching nerves at the core of the woman's body...
"Hey... Are you awake? Are you all right?"
Slit opens her eyes and smiles. "Yeah. I'm fine."
"Would you like a drink? "
"Yeah."
The woman goes to a table on the other side of the room and returns with two glasses-of what, I don't know, but it cleared Slit's head. The woman now has on a pair of panties and a hip skirt, but she is still bare from the hips up. Her big jutting tits swing and bounce when she moves. She sits down on the bed, smiling.
"My name is Corrine. What's yours?"
"Slit."
"I mean your real name."
"That's the only name I got."
The woman shrugged. "It's appropriate. You have a nice one-"
"I guess that's how I got the name." They both laughed.
"You surprised me, Slit. I didn't expect you to be so cooperative... I mean, after what you did to Col. De Raiss and those other men-and especially after the way they've treated you. I'm the one who got you out of there, you know."
"Thanks."
"I can do a lot more for you too, if you'll let me... Listen, honey, I don't like this place either, but here we are, and there's no way to get out, believe me. Why not make the best of it? If we can stick it out until the War's over, they'll probably let us go. I can get you back into the harem right now, tonight."
"What about the Colonel?"
"Shit! I've got that bastard in my hand, honey. If I say the word, you're back in. I'm his favorite girl. After what you've been through, aren't you ready to go back?"
Slit paused and then said, "Yeah, I'm ready."
"That's what I wanted to hear. It's really not a bad life at all, if you give 'em what they want. But, honey, if you try to escape again, there won't be anything I can do for you. And next time it'll be worse, much worse, It'll take more than a piece of ass to get you out of Studhardt's hands again. He's a monster, Slit He's not a man, he's a monster."
Slit raises her eyes to Conine's. "Why were we brought here?-me and my baby and my friends?"
"I don't know, honey. They don't tell us anything. Everything around here is a military secret. But what does it matter? You're here, that's the point. Do you want to live in the stockade or in the Colonel's house? That's the only question that means anything to a girl in this place. Are you ready to accept that?"
Slit nodded her head.
"Good. I liked you from the first, honey. I knew we'd make it good together." This in a low sensual voice. "Well share the same bed on the nights we're not with the Colonel... Would you like that?"
Slit cradled one of Conine's heavy tits in her palm and smiled, caressing the nipple with her thumb.
This base camp was located at the southern tip of a finger of land bearing northeast by southwest and about four hundred yards across. In the center of the base stood the wooden building, formerly a farmhouse, where the Colonel lived with his women (or his "slave girls", as he jokingly called them) and his headquarters personnel. East of this house were four rows of tents and a few Quonset barracks; to the west was a small airstrip. Around the perimeter were several artillery emplacements, but at this time these had been out of use for quite a while, the blacks having been driven far out of range and more or less bottled up along the southwest coast of the peninsula; it had been over a year since the base had been under attack. In the northeast corner was the stockade. It was about a hundred yards square and enclosed by two chain-link fences, very high and topped with barbed wire. The main building, a large concrete dairy barn divided into tiny cells, stood near the center of the enclosure and was surrounded by prefab POW huts. Around the outside of the barn were the "cans"- twelve-foot lengths of corrugated steel culvert pipes, closed at each end with iron plates and set on end; it was in one of these that Slit spent her six days. Sentries patrolled the fences at all times, and the whole place was lit up with flood lamps. The only gate into the stockade was at the middle of the south fence.
A jeep containing two women now approaches this gate from the North. Corrine is at the wheel, Slit sits beside her. Slit is now wearing a pretty little white smock, high at the hem and low at the neck; she is all tit and leg. Her long hair, gathered at the top of her head in a white bow, flutters about her neck and shoulders in the light breeze off the marsh. She is radiant under the flood lamps. Her wrists are unchained. She is safe now. She will live. In Hell the Devil's bedroom is the safest place.
The jeep stops before the gate.
The guard does not leave his gatehouse; he is leaning against the door frame, a kind of smirk on his face.
"Well, here I go again," says Corrine, "You see what it's costing me to get you out of this place? My pass is getting a workout"
"Your pass?"
"See, we're not allowed to go any place around here without a pass-not even out of the house. Usually a pass is a little piece of white paper they give you, but tonight I'm using the one I was born with. It has hair on it and I carry it between my legs." Giggle. "This is just a quickie, I'll be right back."
Corrine hops out of the jeep, leaving the motor running. Slit watches her skip up to the guard and waits until they disappear inside the gatehouse. Then she slides under the wheel, throws the jeep in gear, cuts hard to the left, and guns the engine.
Between the first row of POW prefabs and the south fence there is an open space, a kind of passageway, about ten feet wide and clear except for some GI cans behind the huts approximately halfway from the gate to the southeast corner of the double fence. Slit takes these GI cans on the left front fender like a row of ten pins. It makes a hell of a racket, and it's just then that the machine guns open up. Evidently, her close proximity to the huts prevents them from using the lasers; if they had used the lasers of course it would have been all over. As it is, only the sentry at the fence corner ahead of her and the guard at the gatehouse behind her have a clear shot. Neither of these have time for more than one or two bursts, the former being obliged to leap out of the path of the speeding machine, the latter being delayed by something.
The jeep hits the wire at full speed. It hurtles straight through both fences, springs into the air at the top of the fill, sails out over the black water in a snarl of wire, and strikes the surface with a tremendous splash.
The firing ceases. Armed men and the beams of searchlights converge on the spot from all sides. The water is still, no movement. A cable is attached to the jeep and it is winched up onto the bank. The grill, the windshield and the tailgate are riddled with bullet holes. The driver's seat is empty. The entire area is methodically searched, sounded, probed and dragged. There is no sign of Slit.
At dawn a white smock stained with blood is found hidden in a clump of sawgrass five or six hundred feet from the east fence. Nearby a white ribbon is plucked from the drink.
Meanwhile, several miles to the south...
CHAPTER THREE - SARABANDE
Morikand, Charlie Boad and I were lying low in a cypress head, waiting for nightfall. Now that we were on the move, now that we were actually approaching the base, the futility of the whole thing was coming over me like a big black cloud. What chance did we have? None. What would we accomplish by getting ourselves captured or killed, one or the other of which was sure to happen? Nothing. The only plan we had, as far as I knew, was to get to De Raiss, the man himself, before he got to us-which, when you thought about it, was no plan at all. The most perplexing thing in all this was Morikand, a born pacifist if there ever was one. Never in his life had he raised his hand against another human being, not even to save himself. And now there he sat, armed to the teeth, for all the world resembling an Apache on the warpath. I still couldn't imagine him actually using those weapons. In other words, this rescue, so called, was beginning to make even less sense to me than the capture. However, we had come too far now to turn back, and Morikand seemed strangely cool and confident. I said nothing.
When it was dark enough we dragged the canoe out of the bushes and pushed on.
A pinpoint of light flashes on the horizon. It grows larger, approaching us from the northeast.
"Patrol boat," says Charlie. We ship our paddles and wait.
What if they spot us? Then what? Contact with the enemy. What the fuck am I doing out here? An old man with his ribs caved in, who never won a fight in his life. Frankly, I'm about to shit my burlaps.
"They won't see us," says Charlie, "They'll pass to starboard." (Thank God!) "Anyway, they ain't lookin' for nobody. It's just a routine patrol."
"How many in the boat?" Morikand asks, removing his helmet.
"Usually two," says Charlie.
"Flowing," says Morikand, "Light the lantern."
"What?"
"Light the lantern." Morikand casually slips his bandoleers off his shoulders and drops them in the bilge. "Hurry up."
The light was getting closer and closer, speeding silently over the chirping marsh. It was one of those electric jobs, this patrol boat, quiet as death even at full tilt. With an even deeper silence my balls withdrew into my groin and migrated toward my throat.
"But they'll see us, man!" Charlie hisses in alarm.
"Yeah!" says Morikand with a broad grin, slapping Charlie on the back. "Like that's the idea, man."
A voice, which, though it originated in my own throat, nevertheless sent cold chills up my spine when I heard it, said, "Do what he says, Charlie."
The lantern is lit.
The garish eye of the patrol boat rolls in its silent socket and gazes at us across the black grassy reach like Polyphemus entering the cave. The cave is the night and the night is a skull, and the Comet hangs in the east like a beacon, unconcerned, placid, cold and enigmatic...
It is a strange thing, but at moments of danger the mind will sometimes, at great peril, wander from the mark-perhaps to avoid looking danger in the eye, to put it off for a moment. I found myself thinking about the world-cavern of the Arabian astrologers, the cave of the universe, containing all time, past, present and future, all in fixed orderly shells, concentric and immutable. I thought about Morikand's Confessions, about how his first paternal earthly ancestor, according to him, would not be born until the year 3069, born nine light-years away in a world dominated by humanoid machines. The question of the success or failure of our hair-brained mission seemed to fade into insignificance. A kind of terrible calm came over me during those few seconds. I felt that we were caught up in the midst of some vast incomprehensible design, absurd perhaps, with neither cause nor effect, but fixed nonetheless, its outcome, if it had one, stuck fast in an orbit like the Comet which loomed over my shoulder in the periphery of that cavernous night. Charlie, myself, Slit, Orpheus, the men in the patrol boat, De Raiss, even Morikand-what were we but random particles of cosmic dust, adrift among the inexorable cogs of an immense fucking machine, acting out some ridiculous slapstick comedy written one night at the Zodiac Bar by John Cage and the god of buffoonery?
"Here they come, man," hisses Charlie, "What the fuck we gonna do when they get here?"
"Nothing," says Morikand, slipping over the side into the chest-deep water, "Just be cool. I saw this done in a spy movie once when I was a kid. Douse the light."
A spy movie! In my crazy state of nervous suspension-a hybrid of extreme fear and extreme calm-this statement almost makes me laugh out loud. Morikand going to the movies?-it is unthinkable.
Charlie blows out the lantern. The evil eye is bearing down on us. In a moment we'll be flooded in its light. Morikand disappears into the darkness on our left, carrying his rusty old automatic rifle over his shoulder by the barrel.
There is a hissing flutter as the boat loses speed and settles deeper in the water. The headlight scans the water. We sit there like mummies, waiting for the beam to hit us. A loudspeaker shatters the silence: "State your name and status and prepare to he boarded."
We are momentarily blinded by the light. Its arc sweeps over us once, stops, and starts back. But at that moment a loud clear voice cries out of the darkness: "Morikand Jones here! Status, questionable! Come aboard!"
The searchlight homes in on the voice, hitting its mark on the first sweep. There stands Morikand, some two hundred feet away, hip-deep in the water, his pale face and chest standing out against the blackness behind him like a light bulb and his long hair streaming about his shoulders. His teeth are bared in a broad grin, and he holds his rifle at the ready.
The loudspeaker growls again: "Throw down your weapon."
Morikand fires from the hip, shattering the headlight with a single burst. There is a terrific surge of sound and we can see the silhouette of the patrol boat rise in the water and lunge ahead, guns blazing. I grab my rifle, but Charlie says, "No, man, don't! You'll hit the kid! It's too late, man,. they're right on top of him!"
It's true. We see two more short snorts of fire from Morikand's rifle, and then the boat is on him, belching flame and bullets like an aquatic dragon. Its black bulk screams over him at full speed and shoots on into the dark. It's the bitter end. At the thought of seeing Morikand's broken body fished out of the drink, riddled with holes, I go cold all over. Charlie and I are speechless; we can't even squeeze out a goddamn.
Then there is a sort of splintering crash in the distance, as of a heavy body passing through foliage. And then, wonder of wonders, up wades Morikand, grinning like a cat shitting hand grenades.
"Hey, Charon," he says, "was that cool or was that cool?"
"That was cool, baby," says Charlie in a voice on the edge of ruin, "that was very fucking cool!"
"Hee, hee! I thought you'd like it."
"Goddamn it, Morikand," I blurt out, "they plowed you under! They ran you down! What the fuck did you do?"
"Why, I ducked, Rustam," says he, "just like in that spy movie."
We found the patrol boat piled up in a cypress head about a hundred yards to the south; Morikand said he planned it that way. One soldier was still in the boat, slumped over the wheel, the other had been thrown free; we found him in a clump of ferns. Except for a few dents in its aluminum hull and the loss of its eyeball, the boat was virtually undamaged; it had struck no large trees, only plowed into some saplings which cushioned the impact. Charlie immediately began examining the jets and fiddling with the controls like a kid with a new toy.
But the men? you ask, They were dead, yes? No. They were alive; very much so in fact. Each had received but one wound on the side of his head, just behind the temple, a glancing blow from a single bullet. Somehow-by luck? skill? magic?-Morikand had simply knocked them unconscious. But how so? Charlie and I, even without the headlight in our eyes, had not been able to see those men. How could Morikand, firing from the hip, blinded first by the light, then by the machine-gun fire-Morikand! who had never before to my knowledge so much as touched a gun, let alone fired one-with that murderous hull bearing down on him at top speed, how in the hell could he have done it?-spy movie or no? With three short bursts, yet! And how had they managed to miss him with their machine guns, even without the light-because you could see where he was by the fire from his rifle-and at such close range? Clearly, the whole thing was impossible; and yet, there it was.
Such were my thoughts at the time. Later, after what happened at the base, I wondered why he had bothered to use the gun at all.
We stripped the soldiers, bound them securely, back to back, to a large tree, and Morikand and I put on their uniforms, boots and all. (I felt as awkward as a duck.) Then we shoved the patrol boat back into the water and climbed aboard. All this per Morikand's instructions.
I said, "What about Charlie?"
"He's black," said Morikand.
"I'm hip," I replied, "but-"
"What he means, Rusty," said Charlie, "I'd never pass for white."
"Besides," Morikand added, "he would be out of character. Charon is the boatman, we're the lost souls. The boatman never goes ashore, everybody knows that." I didn't like the sound of it: we had apparently jumped from the spy movie to the Last Judgement. Morikand drew his bush knife, flipped it into the air, caught it by the blade and thrust it out at me. Ah, I thought, now he wants to play mumblety-peg. At this point it would not have surprised me. "Shave," he said.
"The devil!" I replied.
The old gabled house looms ominously against the sky. It looks like the towers of Mordor-black, deadly, invulnerable. The dark huts and tents surround it like a Medieval hamlet at the foot of a castle. The hamlet is dark; a few windows in the castle are dimly lit. As we ghost along through the still water the house seems to grow before us: a giant cobra, spreading its hood before it strikes. It dominates the landscape. The night is full of fangs.
We approach the base from the southwest to avoid the lights of the boat dock to our right. The big guns at the south end of the air strip are dead ahead. Charlie cuts the jets. After an unbearably long time the flat hull grinds softly on the sand. I see movement, a dark form moving from east to west along the top of the built-up bank several hundred feet ahead of us. A sentry, walking his post. I nudge Morikand and point out the figure. He nods. As the sentry passes to the west of the artillery bunkers, I whisper, "Now?"
"No. Well be visible against the dock lights. Wait until he comes back."
We wait. Here he comes. Past the guns. Past the first row of huts. He stops. If he shines his light on the water, we're fucked. My balls are in my throat. He moves on. Down toward the dock.
"OK, Rustam, old man, over the side we go." We slip into the shallow water. "Charon, if we aren't back by dawn, split."
Charlie says, "Uh huh," like, the hell I will. I tell him to forget it; if we're not back by dawn, we won't be back at all. "Get goin'" he hisses, "that mother be comin' back in a minute!"
We get through the wire with no trouble and spring across the open sand toward the huts. There is a kind of roadway between the rows, leading straight toward the big house. We have not taken ten steps along this road, when a group of four or five men step out from behind a tent up ahead and start toward us. Probably a night detail of some sort returning to their barracks. I get that "Oh shit" feeling, and my joints begin to freeze up. I am not at all convinced that our get-up is going to fool anybody, especially at close range. With my beard gone, my neck shaved, wearing boondockers three sizes too large, baggy pants, a beret on my dome and a burp gun hung over my shoulder, I feel more like a clown than a soldier. And Morikand, for Christ's sake, didn't even cut his hair; he's got it tucked up into a helmet liner he found in the boat, the bastard; it's all right for me to shear myself like a sheep, but not him. (Actually, I was relieved: imagine Morikand Jones with short hair!) Anyway, here we go up the road to doom, bold as you please. Morikand must have sensed my panic. "Just flow, man," he says. Oh yes, just flow. Cool as anything. Like we do this every day. Wow.
The men stop in front of one of the tents. They are muttering and peering at us suspiciously as we come up; at least it seems that way to me. I try to ignore them. Suddenly, as we draw abreast, one of them goes stiff as a stick and snaps into a salute. The others do likewise. "Good evening, sir!" they say.
I react to this by pissing my bag trousers, but Morikand, calm as a rock, returns the salute and says, "As you were, men." For the first time I see the silver bar on his helmet liner. The son of a bitch is a lieutenant!
We reach the house without further incident Over the door at the top of the stairs it says, HQ COMPANY, but to me it reads, Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. Through the screen we see a clerk with his feet on the desk and the officer of the day, a captain drinking coffee from a green mug. Morikand draws his forty -five. I unsling my burp gun. This is it. We open the door and walk in.
"Good evening, gentlemen," says Morikand with a pleasant smile, "I wonder if you would be kind enough to escort us to Col. De Raiss's quarters?"
The captain puts down his green mug and the clerk, a corporal, takes his feet off the desk. They look at us and then they look at each other. I level my muzzle at the corporal's head, and Morikand covers the captain. At any second, I'm thinking, the general alarm will go off-sirens, bells, whatever they use for such things; I'm ready to pull the trigger at the first sound. But there is no sound. It's almost too quiet. It's spooky and unreal. These men somehow don't seem shocked enough at this audacious entry of ours.
"We got any choice?" says the captain.
"None," says Morikand, "lead on."
"Up," says I, playing the bad-ass, jerking my gun at the corporal.
At our left there is an arched doorway opening on a dimly lit hallway. The captain and the corporal arise and lead us through this arch. We move down the corridor, up a flight of creaky stairs, down another corridor. Not a soul in sight, not a sound except our footsteps; the place seems deserted. It's late; no doubt everyone is in bed, the Colonel included. It will be easy now; the hard part's over. Somehow it seems too easy.
The captain opens a door at the end of the second corridor. More stairs, narrow ones this time, leading up steeply into the gloom.
"The Colonel is up there," says the captain.
"After you," says Morikand.
They hesitate. I prod the corporal in the small of the back with my burp gun, and he enters the passageway. I'm beginning to enjoy this. Strange, the feeling of power a gun gives you; a gun is an extension of one's cock, psychologically speaking.
At the top of the narrow stairs there is a narrow door. A strip of yellow light shows at the threshold.
Morikand says softly: "Open it, walk to the far side of the room, put your palms and noses against the wall, and keep them there."
"Move," says I with another prod.
The captain opens the door and enters the room. The corporal follows. It is a garret; evidently we are in the easternmost gable of the house. Our prisoners do as they are told. Morikand whips off his helmet liner, shakes out his hair, and steps over the threshold. I am right behind him.
The sight that meets our eyes chills me to the bone.
To the right of the door, under the wormy eaves of the steep roof, stands a man with a strangely familiar face. He has a tiny head and a bulky body. His grin is almost a leer. He is standing in the fork of a sort of iron table built roughly in the shape of an X and fitted with a hand winch at each of its extremities. On this table is a small naked girl; she has dark skin and long blonde hair. She is stretched out spreadeagle, on her back, her wrists and ankles bound with wires attached to the winches. The man is standing between her legs, stripped to the waist. Another man, an enormous greasy-looking man, stands at her head, leaning against an upright, his arms folded over his massive chest; he is dressed in khaki, the stripes of a master sergeant on his sleeves; he too is grinning at us. The first man has a large automatic pistol in his right hand. The barrel of the pistol is sunk up to the trigger guard in the girl's cunt. A drop of blood hangs from the stock. The girl is Slit. The man's words fall on my ears like cold lightning.
"Ah! Mr. Jones, I believe. We've been expecting you. My name is Col. De Raiss, and this is Sgt. Studhardt on my right. It seems you've already met Capt Logan and Cpl. Sloan, eh? Hm hm, hm. Now if you will please hand your arms over to Capt. Logan, I'll remove this one from the body of your, ah, what? wife? Ah, but you anarchists don't believe in marriage, do you? Stupid of me. Your woman? Is that the proper terminology? Hm, hm, hm. Well, however that may be, I'm afraid this cold metal is a bit unpleasant to her, ah, tender parts. A bit painful too, apparently. Ah, no vulgarity intended, Mr. Jones, but you will notice that the weapon is cocked, eh? Hm, hm, hm. Capt. Logan, if you please."
To go on with this is unbearable.
What we need is an antidote. A cold beer and a hot blonde to kill the pain. Ha! The story of my life. Dylan was hung on booze, Bird on horse, Cocteau on opium, Hamm on his pain-killer, Artaud on evil; Smythe is addicted to cunt. Where another man takes an aspirin, Smythe dives for the nearest cunt, the sloppier the better. 0 sweet elixir of oblivion which floweth and bubbleth from thy hairy spring! (Hang with me, love.) Here I go then, skipping over the cold beer and jumping directly to the hot blonde-though in this case it happens to be a brunette...
With a rattle of bamboo and a tinkle of bells she parts the bead curtain and swims into the candlelight like a seductive fish. The high swirl of her hair is chocolate brown, her skin pale as sea foam: she is like a hot fudge sundae, all ice and lava. Her name is Corrine, and her tits are as big as your head.
Her body is wrapped in a wide sash of glass gauze after the high white party fashion of the times; it is blood red and as sheer as water. It passes over her right shoulder, around her voluptuous hips and down her right leg in spiraling criss-crosses secured at the ankle in a loose bow. Her left tit and her left leg are bare. Her lips, eyelids, fingernails, toenails and one nipple, the bare one, are painted in pale luminous blue; the veiled nipple is unpainted, an erect turret of rose-tinted olive. Her most prominent feature is her cunt. The thick T-shaped bush of dark brown curls that clothes her hump thrusts boldly against the gauze, inviting the eye and tempting the tongue. This cunt is like the prow of an ice-breaker, the ram of an ancient galley; it goes on before her, invulnerable in its vulnerability.
I have one of those hard-ons that neutralize the brain cells. As Corrine approaches the foot of the bed I fling back the sheet to show it to her-my hard-on, that is. I spread my legs, prop up my balls with my forefingers and wave my cock at her with my thumbs. She licks her lips and smiles with her eyes.
Now, through the bead curtain behind Corrine comes another girl-a black one this time, Mag by name, my Omphalic sackmate of old, in a manner of speaking ("old" meaning ten days ago, though it seems like ten years). She wears big gold hoops in her ears and her face is framed in a sunburst of black wool. Her full lips are unpainted, but her conical black nipples are tipped with gold. In her navel a scarlet jewel sparkles in the candlelight, and she wears gleaming gold bands on her wrists and ankles; except for these, and a tiny hipskirt of gold net belted with brass medallions, she is naked. When she sees me her eyes light up and her ivory white teeth flash in the gloom. But only for a moment.
I avert my eyes.
A vague creaking accentuates the silence. The old house is flexing its joints. I concentrate on Corrine-the bounce and swing of her tits, the fluid undulation of her belly, the ice ram of her cunt. She is for me; Mag is for him. They stand there at the foot of the huge bed, facing us, waiting for our approval...
There is an elbow in my ribs and a hm hm hm in my ear: "What do you say, Jack?" he says.
-But shit; I suppose I must fill in the blanks.
Obviously, Slit has been recaptured. She was taken, I believe, only an hour or so before we shoved off from the cypress head for the last leg of our journey-the night we took the patrol boat. They found her huddled in a clump of sawgrass, naked, bruised and bleeding, a good three miles south of the base, whereupon they gangbanged her on the spot-"they" being the search party, four enlisted men. (This was an "unofficial" rape; the Colonel was not informed of it, and I didn't find out about it until much later. To De Raiss, "morality" among his men was as crucial an issue as morale, and breeches of either were severely punished.) You have had a glimpse of what awaited her at the base.
Next, it seems that in stripping the crew of the patrol boat we had overlooked a tiny radio which one of them had hidden on his person-exactly where I could never figure out, unless it was up his ass. Also, apparently we had not tied them up very well. The result of this was that the entire base was ready for us when we arrived. Morikand's bravado stunt of announcing his name was responsible for the singular character of our reception; because Slit had just been dragged into the Colonel's presence when an aide brought him the news. Even in her battered and exhausted condition she had found the strength to lift her head and say, "That's my man, motherfucker! He's comin' at ya!" So that was that, the Colonel's perverse sense of humor being what it was.
We were clapped in irons, stripped, inspected for plague, separated and locked up.-At least I was locked up; I assumed they had done the same with Morikand. Early the following evening De Raiss himself visited my cell; I was given a bathrobe, with which I speedily concealed my nudity, the door was locked, the guard dismissed. For a moment De Raiss scrutinized me in silence. Then his sharp little face broke into a grin, and he said: "Sago Beach High? American History? Old lady Hosenose?... " Suddenly it hit me like a truckload of shit. "Bull!" I blurted out, "Estabul De Raiss!"
"Jack Smythe, you old son of a bitch!"
We slugged each other in the chest, pumped each other's arm and laughed like cocksuckers.
"Well, kiss my ass!" I said, "You know, the first time I saw you I said to myself, 'Now that face looks familiar, damned if it doesn't!' "
"Same with me, Jack, same with me. 'I know that fella from somewhere,' I said to myself, but I couldn't place you until I saw your name on the form. Isn't this a kick in the ass? Hm, hm hm! My God, how long's it been, Jack?"
"Oh, shit... " I rubbed my chin and looked at the ceiling. "Must be about thirty-two years, Bull."
"Thirty-two years! Son of a bitch. Time flies, doesn't it, Jack?"
"Sure as hell does, man. Well, looks like you've done all right for yourself there, Bull."
"I came up through the ranks, Jack, did it the hard way. Got a field commission in Viet Nam and that-oh God, what a fiasco that was, eh, Jack? Brother, if they'd listened to me, we'd have won that war, you damn well better believe it! And if we'd won that one, this one would never have got started, never have got started, believe me. Oh well, I guess I shouldn't complain, eh? Hm, hm, hm. I was a major, you see, when the junta took over, and then when this thing broke out they kicked me right up to colonel. Hm, hm, hm."
"Full bird, no less!"
"That's right. And, Jack, "-he lowered his voice and nudged me in the ribs-"don't let this get out, but I'm expecting my star any day now."
"No shit? Why, that's great, Bull, glad to hear it... I guess, ah, when that happens you'll be transferring out, huh?"
"No, no, I imagine I'll be here until we get this thing mopped up, Jack."
"Uh huh."
"Hm, hm, hm! That old Hosenose was something else, wasn't she, Jack?"
"Sure was, Bull. I wonder if the old bitch is still alive."
"If she is, it's no fault of ours, eh, Jack? Hm, hm, hm! Well, listen, tell me about yourself. What have you been doing all these years?-Should a gone in the military, Jack, I mean it. It's a good life, keeps a man young."
"Yeah, well, I did go in, Bull, right after high school. Marine Corps. Only stayed in a year, though; broke a leg at Pendleton and been 4F ever since."
"Too bad. It's a good life. And the country needs good men, Jack, men of our generation, men who know where their duty lies-needs 'em now like never before."
"Uh huh."
"Too bad about Pendleton, eh? I guess you felt pretty bad about it, having been stationed there and all."
"Oh, yeah, that really broke me up, Bull. All those men-"
"And guns! And helicopters!"
"Right: all those guns and helicopters and men, sploosh!-into the briny. Wow."
"Then what?"
"Hm? -Oh! Well, after that I came back to Florida, worked for my uncle for a while, various other things. Since the War broke out I've just been sorta drifting, trying to keep my head above water, heh, heh. You know how it is these days, Bull."
"Mm. Got any family, Jack?"
"No, no, not any more. Lost my wife and kids in an air raid in '77."
"Dirty niggers!"
"Yeah, well, actually it was a White raid, Bull."
"Aw, rotten luck, Jack, sorry to hear it."
"How 'bout you, Bull? Ever get married? "
"Oh, hell, yes! Got three kids, cutest little buggers you ever saw, hm, hm, hm. Anxious to get back to them too."
"Uh huh."
"Say, Jack, whatever happened to the writing?"
"Writing?" (Uh-oh, I thought.) "Sure. When we were in school, you wanted to be a writer, don't you remember? I wanted to be a sea captain, and you wanted to be a writer."
"Oh, that! Ha, ha! Yeah, well, you know how those things go, Bull. I mean, you didn't make sea captain, either, did you?"
We laughed again and punched each other in the chest some more. By now the horseshit was up to our necks; I wondered how long we were going to avoid the issue. (I should mention here that in school Bull De Raiss and I hated each other's guts.) Suddenly he snapped his fingers, as though he had just thought of something.
"Hey, Jack," he said slyly, "I've got something I want to show you. Come on, we'll go up to my room.-Ah, now, Jack, you understand of course that, technically speaking, you're my prisoner, hm, hm."
"Oh, sure, Bull," I assured him.
"Not that I think you'd give me any trouble, you understand, it's just that, ah, in the presence of the men you'll have to address me as Col. De Raiss, and I'll have to ask you to, ah, slip these on"-he produced a pair of handcuffs-"just until we get up to my rooms. You don't mind, do you, Jack?"
"Oh, shit no, Bull-er, Col. De Raiss, that is."
"That's my boy. Stick out your hands."
It seemed that every door in this place opened on a surprise; the Colonel's was no exception. The first thing I saw when I walked in was a cunt. By "cunt" I don't simply mean a chick; I mean a cunt per se-hair, hump, crack, cheeks, the whole bit.
De Raiss's rooms were on the second floor of the old farmhouse; they were on the left as you approached the door to the narrow stairs at the end of the hall. Still spouting horseshit in the above vein, the Colonel locked the door, unshackled me, sat me down on a plush divan, hung up his hat, removed his coat, and ducked out of sight behind a large cedar chest. Under the hm-hm-hms I could hear a kind of metallic clicking; he was opening a safe, is what it was. In one corner of the room was an ornate china cabinet with bottles of wine and booze on top. I could have used a joint. My brain was going over and over like a ferris wheel. Overhead were the garrets. The cunt was good in this respect, if in no other, that it helped keep my mind off the garrets. As to this cunt- She was sitting directly opposite me on a reclining armchair with her bare feet on a footstool, knees up, thighs spread asunder. As I have intimated, she wore no underwear. She was a Latin type, Puerto Rican, no doubt, with dark skin, beautiful features and jet black hair-especially between her legs. She looked only about sixteen or seventeen, had a trim streamlined body and tits about the size of grapefruit, but shaped better. She wore a sort of strapless smock, very short, made of light printed cotton and gathered low around her bust with an elastic ruffle. When I say low, I mean like just above the nipples, which stuck out in cute little points against the thin cloth, and the hem of the skirt of course was in her lap. She was very nice. And Christ, what a crevice! From where I sat it looked like it went all the way from her asshole to her bellybutton-all hair and meat. It made my nostrils quiver and my ears went up in flames. She just sat there like that, with her arms folded over the top of her head and a kind of what-do-you-think-of-that? look on her face, watching me watching her twat. (She reminded me of you, sweet. Are you still there? I'm strung out now, but I may need you later on. You are my muse, so keep a wet hole handy; if you go dry on me, we are finished.) De Raiss startled me out of my trance-just when I was getting a bone on.
"Surprise!" he says, thrusting a large metal box under my nose. On the surface this box didn't look very surprising-not compared to the box across the way. It was simply a green metal box such as you might logically expect to find in a military post; while that other box- "Go ahead, Jack, open her up! Hm, hm, hm." I opened her up.
At first glance I saw nothing more than a double row of paperback books, stacked on end, backs up. So the Colonel read books. It was a little surprising, but not very. I looked up at him. He was grinning at me as though about to fart a pineapple. I looked back down at the books. A few titles leapt up at me: Diane and her Wonderful Box; Four Dirty Movies; Come; Divertimento for Skin Flute and Orchestra; Merry's Cherry and How She Lost It; More Smut from Smythe; Who Cocked Kitty Robin; - I'm a son of a bitch if he didn't have the complete pornographic works of R. John Smythe crammed into that box-even the ones under pseudonyms! I broke out in a cold sweat.
"Never made it in the writing game, eh, Jack?" he said, "Hm, hm, hm."
"Uh, well, no, not really, uh, see, these books are just, uh... Well, OK, Bull, there they are. Looks like you got me. What now? "
"Thought they all went up in the '76 Burn, eh, Jack?"
"Yes, I did."
"Who do you think was in charge of the Florida Confiscation of Obscene Material squad?"
"You mean-?"
"That's right, Major Estabul G. De Raiss. Hm, hm, hm. Hey, don't look so glum, Jack! Hell, I thought you'd get a kick out of this, old chum!" He snapped his fingers. "What you need is a drink." He placed the box on a coffee table and turned to the girl, making a sign with his hand and holding up two fingers, then changing it to three fingers. The girl smiled, got up, and swung her ass over to the china cabinet. "That's Chichi, by the way, Jack," said De Raiss, sitting down beside me on the divan and nudging me in the ribs, "Nice, eh? Hm, hm, hm. She's my, ah, housegirl, you might say. Like her?" I said I thought she was very attractive. "Attractive, hell!" he came back, "What I mean is, would you like to fuck her?" I shot a glance at the girl; she had her back to us, pouring drinks, and did not turn around. De Raiss explained: "She's deaf, Jack, can't hear a word. Doesn't talk either; that's one reason I like her. Can't stand a loud-mouthed broad, how about you, Jack? Hm, hm. Gave her that name myself-Chichi. Yes, it seems she and some other greasers wandered into one of our mine fields. Blew her eardrums all to hell. Been with me ever since. A fine piece of tail, Jack, mighty fine." The girl returned with three snifters of brandy. The elastic ruffle seemed to be slipping lower and lower; I expected her tits to pop free with every step she took, and when she bent over to set the glasses on the coffee table, I looked into the open window formed by her plush cleavage and the narrow ruffle and saw her bellybutton. De Raiss made some more signs to her with his hand, whereupon she sat down-on my lap. Whatever my facial reaction was to this, it brought another "Hm, hm, hm!" from the Colonel. It was a very loud hm-hm-hm, almost a ha-ha-ha. Before settling down, Chichi had given her skirt a little flip in the rear, so that it was her bare ass that pressed hotly upon my thighs through the thin bathrobe, and her tits, bulging just under my chin, were now bare to the nipples; I could see the upper halves of her chocolate areolae above the ruffle. It was nice, but disconcerting. (But nice.) I clinked snifters with her and slugged down the brandy. De Raiss took a sip, cleared his throat, and delivered this speech: "Jack, let me get right to the point. The hard facts are these: first off, you have, as you know, been indicted by the junta courts as a professional pornographer, and for the last ten years you have evaded the law. On this count alone I would be obliged, as a military officer, to see that you were brought to trial. Secondly, and on top of this, it is now apparent that you have fallen into bad company and for some time now have been consorting with hard-core anarchists, perhaps even with Blacks themselves. Thirdly, in the company of two of these anarchists, you did willfully and deliberately attack and seize a United States Army patrol boat, inflicting bodily injury upon its crew and considerable damage to government property. I need not mention your subsequent hostile infiltration of this base and your attempt upon the life of its commander, namely, me. Hm, hm, hm. So, then,"-he cleared his throat again-"technically, Jack, you are a degenerate, a fugitive, a pirate, a terrorist, a traitor, and, most importantly, my prisoner."
There was a pause, during which I downed another snifter of brandy. In spite of the pressure of that hot ass on my cock, I was as limp as a boiled string bean. He went on.
"Now don't get me wrong, Jack. I mention these things only so you understand my position. You see, the boys from White Sands have a habit of dropping in unannounced from time to time, just to look things over, you see, and, hm, if they should find a prisoner-especially one with a record like yours-unconfined, loose, free as a bird, living of all places in the commanding officer's quarters!-well, it would be a bit embarrassing for me, Jack, to say the least, hm, hm, hm. However, we do get a brief warning before these inspections-an hour or so usually-which will give us plenty of time to get you down to your cell, where I'll have to ask you to remain until they're safely in the air gain. We're talking about two, three hours at the most, that agreeable to you? " I looked at him quizzically, utterly confused.
"Jack," he laughed, punching my arm, "you didn't think was going to keep you locked up, did you? Lock up an old friend? What do you take me for, for God's sake? Hm, hm, hm! And besides, Jack,"-he lowered his voice and leaned close-"I've been a fan of yours for years, old buddy-as you can see by my collection, eh? Hm, hm, hm. Read everything you ever wrote-several times in fact. Why, there's more filth per pound in that box than any other cash of pornography the world over! Nastiest stuff I ever laid eyes on!"
"Uh, yeah, well, I'm glad you like it, Bull," I stammered.
"Like it! I eat it up, Jack! Eat it up!-Of course, ah, this is just between you and me, you understand. If it should get out that I-"
"Oh, sure, Bull, I understand. You can count on me."
"That's my boy," he says, refilling our glasses. "Hey, Jack, you know what I'd like to hear?"
"What's that Bull?"
"I'd like to hear the inside story, straight from the horse's mouth. Do you follow me?" I was beginning to, but I shook my head in the negative. "Tell me this, Jack, am I right in my guess that most of this stuff is, ah, nonfiction?" I gave him the answer he wanted. "Aha! Just as I thought! Well, then, what I want to hear is what happened between the lines, or rather, between the books,"-the nudge in the ribs again-"do you get me, Jack?"
"I gotcha, Bull," I said, returning the nudge.
So. I was to be a court jester, was I?-a troubadour with a hard-on, no less. Very well then: I would play the part of Scheherazade, and on the thousand and first night (metaphorically speaking) I would nudge King Shahryar in the old paunch and say, in the words of Moses, Let my people go! And he, the pacified Pharaoh, titillated to a fare you well, would clap me on the back and say, Why, sure, Jack, nothing easier! Far-fetched maybe, but what other chance did we have? Something of the sort might actually work, if I could keep my cool. In any case, my position seemed fairly secure for the moment, and I decided to risk a few questions.
"Say, Bull, what about my friend and the girl?"
"Eh?-Oh, don't worry about them, Jack. As soon as J realized who you were, naturally, I had them transferred to more, ah, suitable quarters. However, it will be necessary to keep them confined for awhile. You can understand that I can't let all my prisoners run loose, hm, hm, hm."
"Oh, sure, Bull, I understand that." Better not to push it just yet. I tried to clear my mind of the image of Slit on the rack. Chichi helped. I had slipped my hand under her skirt and was letting it slide at will over the smooth warm skin of her bare buttocks. Overlay the images with the tangible, that's the trick: cunt is the best, because it is opaque, but sometimes the image is blinding and shines through everything, even through the wall of the womb. (It is the mages you must help me to conquer, love; wrap them in the folds of your flesh and dissolve them with your vaginal acid; it is an image which will finally do me in.) "Hey, Jack, speaking of your friend, this Jones fellow-I was looking at his medical report this morning, and either one of my medics made a hell of a typographical error or-well, according to the report the bugger has a fourteen inch pecker!"
"No, that's right, Bull, fourteen inches soft."
"You're shitting me."
"No, straight scoop, Bull. He was born with six-of course he had a hard-on at the time." The Colonel almost fell off the divan. I thought he would choke to death on his own hm-hm-hms. Obviously, he was not familiar with Morikand's Confessions, and I didn't think it wise to broach the subject. Instead, I took the opportunity to run my finger down the crack of Chichi's ass as far as her cunt; she lifted one cheek slightly to give me working room. When De Raiss had recovered I said, "What about his baby, Bull?"
"Hm? Baby? What ba-? Oh, I see. Hm, yes, I should have known that, shouldn't I? So it's his child, eh? Hm, hm. Well, the boy's fine, Jack, doing just fine. Getting the best of care-as I've tried repeatedly to assure his mother. Well, of course I understand her concern, but-"
"Uh, maybe if I could take a look at the kid, I could assure Slit about him and-"
"Slit! Yes, that's the only name she would give us, hm, hm, hm. Ah, but no, Jack, I'm afraid that would be impossible, quite impossible. True, I'm the commanding officer, but even I must adhere to certain restrictions, certain unbreachable articles of the code, you understand, and one of these, I'm afraid, is that there can be no fraternizing between the prisoners. No, that's one privilege, unfortunately, that I won't be able to grant, Jack. But I give you my word, they will all receive more than adequate treatment on this base and will have no cause for complaint-and that includes the four black girls removed last week from your, ah, what?-commune?"
"Yes, well, camp, actually is a better word.-Say, Bull, can you tell me why those girls were, uh, removed?"
"I'm afraid I can't, Jack, no-I couldn't even if I knew, which I don't. No, that was all carried out according to orders from the top, Jack, from the very top, straight from White Sands. General August signed the order himself."
"The president of the junta? But why? It doesn't make sense, Bull-"
"Jack, I'll even go out on a limb and give you the actual wording of the top secret dispatch. It said, 'Abduct and imprison, peaceably if possible, by force if necessary, five (5)' "-he drew the parentheses in the air with his finger-" 'black female anarchists from central Big Cy sector for interrogation,' and it was signed, as I said, by the General himself. The girl you call Slit was taken by mistake; in the dark the men mistook her for black, you see. Hm, hm, hm."
By mistake! "But... interrogation for what?"
"Ah, now that it didn't say, Jack. That's the army for you, eh?-White Sands especially. Dribble it out to the man in the field, a little at a time, that's their motto, or so it would seem. Well, but what does it matter, eh? Here we are and that's that... Oh, say, by the way, Jack, what's that boy's name, the Jones baby?"
"Orpheus," I said with pride.
"Orpheus, eh? Hm. Odd name... Well! I think we've covered about everything for now, Jack. How about a hot shower and a bellyful of good army chow? " (Nudge.) "Sounds great, Bull," I said, easing my finger up Chichi's hole as far as the knuckle and working on her anus with my thumb. Probably De Raiss had an inkling of what I was doing-though Chichi's face betrayed nothing.
"Hey, Jack," he said slyly.
"Yeah, Bull?"
"Want a little piece o' that before your shower? Hm? How 'bout it?"
"Well, uh-"
"Don't you like her? Here, take a look at her tits." He reached out and jerked down the top of the girl's smock. "How 'bout them apples, Jack? Hm, hm, hm!"
"Very nice," I said, cupping a boobie in my free hand. And very nice they were, too: firm, jutting, not a trace of sag, yet soft and mobile, like two plump ducklings. Out of the comer of my eye I saw De Raiss making signs to her again, and when I lifted my eyes from her naked bosom, she lowered her mouth to mine and touched my lips with her tongue. I sucked it into my mouth, slipped three more fingers into her crack and plugged my thumb into her asshole. Electricity shot through her tongue and her oil boiled my fingers down to the nerve ends. I was at home now: the images had gone underground, and the world was a cunt again.
Chichi threw a leg over my lap, pivoted around on the hand that had her like a bowling ball, and jerked open my robe. My cock sprang up between her legs, and she grabbed it with both hands, rubbing it against her belly and pushing it into her navel, driving me crazy as our lips and tongues came together again. I drew my hand from her genitals and smeared the hot juice over the full firm cheeks of her ass, sliding my mouth over her chin, down her neck and into the hollow of her bosom, leaving a winding snail trail of saliva from her lips to her nipple. And then she was pitching forward, running my prick rapidly up and down her hairy groove, whipping her clit into a stone-like erection with the head and smothering me with her heaving tits. And then De Raiss jumped up and dashed around behind her, hm-hm-hm-hming like a fiend; as soon as Chichi stopped jacking herself with my cock and guided it into her gooey hole, the Colonel grabbed the wadded-up smock and snatched it off over her head. Ah, sweet naked embrace! The twilight of remembrance. Tangible void of flesh. Devour me with your shaggy jaws...
Moaning and drooling over my dome, she drove at me with her hips at a furious tempo while I mauled her tits with delirious abandon and watched that hairy mouth sliding up and down my pole in a flurry of foam and a flood of cream. Somewhere in the distance, at the periphery of perception, I could hear De Raiss jabbering away like an idiot.
"Hm! hm! hm! Look at that, look at that, willya! R. John Smythe himself! Under my own roof! Under my own housegirl! Screwing away to beat the band! How about that! How about that! Just like in the books! Hm! hm! hm!... " and so on.
-But now back to the tandem bed and the hot brunette, sans the cold beer...
"Looks good to me, Bull," says I in reply to his question, drawing a bead on Corrine's forehead with my leaking bazooka. (This is happening, if I have not mentioned it, on the third night of our imprisonment.) .
"Hm, hm, hm! She's my favorite, Jack. Thought you'd like her, being a tit man like myself, hm, hm, hm. Me, I'm having a little black meat tonight. What do you think?" He nods at Mag.
It is no use avoiding it; besides, are we not equally guilty of the same thing, Mag and I?-a person saves his skin as best he can, does he not? Our eyes meet. With mine I try desperately to convey these words: It isn't like it looks, Mag, I have a plan, I'm going to get us out of here. But there is nothing in her face but a sort of sad scorn. She shifts her gaze back to De Raiss, but just for a moment-a split second before she looked away-I thought I detected something else in her eyes: a fierce rage hidden behind her smile...
Corrine swings around to my side of the bed and lifts her right foot to the mattress. I let go of my cock, untie the bow of her body sash, and whisk the wrappings from her leg. She raises her arms above her head, thrusts her ridge-backed cunt to the fore, and says, "Pull."
I pull. The sheer glass gauze slides smoothly around her shoulder, her tit, her waist, her hips, as I haul it in, hand over hand. The last coil falls from her cunt and she is naked. She removes a long daggerlike pin from the high swirl of her hair, and her thick dark tresses come tumbling down over her pale shoulders. Her dense T-shaped bush bristles in the candlelight and the big blue nipple glows like neon. Again she lifts one foot to the bed, massages her huge tits lovingly, and rolls her cunt up in my face, showing me the entire gash from hump to asshole. Her dark brown beard runs all the way from the rise of her mound to the crack of her ass; I can see it bristling from between the cheeks, and there are little fingers of curly fuzz extending down the insides of her thighs. I part the hair and the lips with my fingers and go in tongue-first. The next thing I know I am forced backwards onto the bed, and she is sitting on my face, grinding at my jaws with the gaping keel of her cunt. I get a firm grip on her massive dugs, fill my lungs with her sexual vapors, and go in for the kill. Soon her clit is all aflutter, and her entire frame begins to rattle apart. I wedge myself into her gorge to the jowls and suck up her syrup like there's no tomorrow...
While she's resting-lying there limp with her joints all separated- I wipe my face on her hair and prop up her ass on a pillow. Beside us, meanwhile, De Raiss has been throwing it to Mag in the ass, while watching me devour Corrine's box. Mag is on her knees, her gleaming blue-black bottom high in the air, her face half buried in the pillow. The Colonel is still at it, his clawlike fingers digging at her tits and his flabby paunch flapping against the solid cheeks of her butt like waves of jelly striking a seawall. As I flip Corrine's legs over my shoulders and slip my cock into her cunt, he says, "Hey, Jack?"
"Yeah, Bull?"
"Let's hear some o' that stuff."
"... Now?"
"Yeah, yeah! Come on!"
"Ok, then... " I start a slow stroke with my hips and try to get my brain working. Got to lay it on thick, tell him what he wants to hear. Conine's tits give me an idea. "Hey, Bull, you remember Nadine?"
"The one you call 'Tits'? The cunt that wrote the letter to her mother?"
"Right."
"Yeah, yeah! (puff!) Go ahead!"
"Well, one night my wife and I and Nadine and one of her boyfriends were sitting around the living room at, my place, see, just sort of passing the time of day.-This was in the old days, sometime during the late sixties. Well, anyway, there we were. My wife was sucking this guy's cock-Bob was his name, I think-and I was fucking Nadine in the ass while she ate my wife's pussy, you see, when all of a sudden the front door flies open and in steps the most luscious piece of pussy you ever laid eyes on, wearing nothing but a steering wheel cover and the elastic hip band of a pair of bikini panties! The rest of the panties had been torn to shreds and one of her tits was hanging out of the steering wheel cover, see?-And what tits she had! They were the size of honeydew melons and had great big nipples the color of tangerines. The bush of her cunt-it was platinum blonde like her hair-was all frothy, and cum was oozing out of her crack and dripping down her leg. Obviously, she was in some sort of trouble. I pulled my cock out of Nadine's asshole and said-"
"Hey, Jack? (Puff! Puff!) "-What?" Shit, just when I was getting warmed up.
"What about your daughter?"
"Huh?"
"Your little girl. (Puff! Whew!) Is it true you used to stick it to her, Jack? Eh? Hm? How about it?" Each of the foregoing question marks represents a nudge in the ribs. It is impossible to escape that fucking elbow of his.
I come back with a snappy "Uh... " Corrine looks up at me. I get a fresh grip on her hips and pump her hard until her eyes roll up. Well, what the fuck? It's sink or swim. If that's his fantasy, lay it on thick!
"Yeah, sure, I did, Bull. Banged the little bitch every chance I got. Not a bad little piece, either, I don't mind telling you, not bad at all. Well, what the hell?-she was mine, wasn't she? Why should a father be denied an occasional lay with his own daughter, for Christ's sake? I mean, shit!-even if she was only eleven.-"
"Eleven! (Puff! Wheeze!) I thought it was nine, Jack."
"Uh, yeah, well, eleven, nine, what the fuck's the difference? As a matter of fact, I believe she was eight first time I corked her, yes, eight sounds right. But the point is, it was my own business and nobody-"
"Yeah, yeah! Hm, hm, hm! (Gasp! Puff!) I'm with you, Jack! Go on! Tell me more!"
"Well, I remember one time in particular... I was out on the front porch, y'see, and a chick from down the street was sitting on my lap-skewered on my cock, as a matter of fact-spindled, you might say. In other words, I was fucking her-or else she was fucking me, one or the other-"
"Like you and Chichi the other night!"
"Right, Bull, now you've got it. So there we were on the porch swing, going at it slow and easy, see, when out of the house comes little Ellen-that's my kid. Now,-"
"How old was she then?"
"Ah, let's see... I can't tell you exactly, Bull, but she was just starting to get a little fuzz on it."
"Oh, (puff!) shit! Too bad."
"... Well, now, wait a minute, now that I think of it, maybe this was before that. Yes, by Christ, it was before that! The little whore was as bald between the legs as I am on the head-and not a sign of a tit-"
"Except for little pink nipples?-about this big?-with little dimples at the (wheeze!) centers?"
"Why, yes, Bull, that's it exactly. Say, Bull, "-now it was my turn with the elbow-"you wouldn't have, ah, by any chance had a little hanky panky going back home yourself, would you-with a daughter of your own, I mean?"
"No! Of course not! Get on with it! (Whew!)" Wrong tack; up helm and ready about. "Well, so there we were, this chick and I, slow-fucking and enjoying the sunset, when out pops the kid-just a little tyke she was at the time. Now, this chick of course had doused her panties, but she still had her dress on, and I only had one of her titties out for sucking. And me, I was fully clothed except for an open fly, so, I mean, while we weren't exactly what you would call decent, at the same time we weren't yet down to the raw and dirty, y'see. But even so, this chick gets all nervous and begins to lose heat, with the kid there and all. She tucks her tit back in and starts squirming around and making faces and snarling things in my ear, like, 'Get that brat the fuck outa here!' and all like that, see? So I tell Ellen to go back in the house, but she refuses. Unruliest kid in the world, that Ellie-that's what we called her, Ellie. Spoiled rotten, y'see. She just sits down there on the swing beside us and refuses to budge. 'I can stay here if I want,' she says, 'I live here, she doesn't.' That 'she' was full of poison, too. Imagine, jealous, at her age! Well, so the result of this intrusion was that after a few minutes my chick unspindled herself, snatched up her panties and stomped off in a huff, leaving me with an unfulfilled hard-on, so to say, and May not due back till midnight."
"Out whoring, eh?"
"Yes, as a matter of fact, she was, Bull. So when the chick was gone, Ellie says, 'What were you doing?"What do you mean?' says I. 'What were you and that lady doing?' she says, 'Why was she sitting on your lap? "Maybe it's none of your damn business,' I said, 'and why the hell didn't you go in when I told you to?"Because I didn't want to,' she says, and then she said, 'I know what you were doing."What?"You were fucking,' she says. 'Where did you learn that word?"From you."Well, what if we were?' I said, 'It's no business of yours, is it?'-"
"Hey, Jack, (snort! gasp!) was this the first time?"
"Yeah, first time, Bull."
"Hold it a minute, Jack!" He pulls his stubby root from Mag's rear and turns her over on her back. "Let's try the other hole for a while, honey. (Pant!)"
"Sure thing, bully boy," says Mag, wrapping her legs around his waist like blacksnakes and inserting the head of his cock into her wooly slit.
"Hm, hm, hm," he snorts, pumping up her gold-tipped tits. "Bully boy, is it? Hm, hm, hm. Here's my bully horn. Uhn!" He rams it in, what there was of it. "Let me know if I'm hurting you! Uhn,uhn, uhn-!"
"Oowee, that hurts so good, bully boy!" says Mag, matching his strokes with hers.
"Hm, hm, hm! (Puff! Pant!) OK, Jack, go ahead!"
Mag's eyes roll in my direction and the whites flash in the candlelight. I concentrate on Corrine's left tit, manipulating it with both hands and gazing into the distended nipple as a fortune-teller gazes into a crystal ball...
"Well, anyway, Ellie pouts for a while, see, and then she says, 'I can do that too."Do what too?' I asked. 'Fuck,' says she, bold as you please. 'The devil!' says I. 'I can,' she insists, 'want me to show you?"What do you mean, show me?"Take your thing out again.' And with that, damned if she didn't stick her little hand in my fly-it was still open, by the way-stuck her hand in and yanked out my dong, which was still stiff as a stick and slimy as a slug. 'Why, the little slut,' I'm thinking. Well, before I can say anything, she jerks up her skirt and straddles my lap, quick as a flash. 'Hey!' I said, 'why aren't you wearing pants?"None o' your damn business,' she says, sliding her smooth little pussy up and down the underside of my big nasty dick, 'I bet I can do this better than she can.' Well, I'll tell you the truth, Bull, the little whore was driving me crazy. I mean, what can you do when they jump on you, right?"
"Right, right! (Whew!) I'm with you, Jack, go ahead!"
"So I said, 'Wait a minute there, Ellie, you're not doing it right. If you want to learn to fuck, I guess I might as well teach you properly. Better that you learn these things at home than out on some street corner. Now, the idea is that this has to go into that, you see?' She says, 'I know it, stupid!' Oh, a spoiled brat know-it-all if there ever was one! So then she starts trying to get it in, see?-but of course without any luck. I let her fumble around awhile, just to show her that she's not so smart after all. And then, too, it was kind of, ah, pleasant, I might say, that fumbling, if you. know what I mean-that long black hair of hers brushing my belly and her plump little butt on my-well, anyway, it was rather nice, but after a minute or two, I said-"
"Wait! (Gasp!) Just a second!" King Shahryar is ready for another shift with his blackamoor: trying to stay coupled but failing, he twists his unwieldy bulk, holding Mag in a bearhug, and throws himself down, belly-up, on the bed. Now Mag is on top. She shakes her bombshell tits in his face and reinserts his prick in her hole. This is better; at least her eyes are not staring up at me. Nevertheless, I continue to fix my attention on the plush white fucking machine below me, speeding up my stroke a bit for stimulation. Corrine's cunt is undulating powerfully inside, opening and closing, squeezing and releasing me with a kind of ferocious rhythm all its own; if it had teeth in it, I would be a gelding. I continue my pleasant tale.
"So then, after a minute or two, I said to Ellie, I said, 'You see, smarty, you don't know how at all. Here, let me show you.' And I lifted her ass up a little and gently slid the head of my peter down to the bottom of her slick hairless little crack.-" At this point De Raiss began to get his gun; he grunted and flopped and sputtered like a speared walrus. It must have been the best orgasm he ever had-or the beginning of it, at least. I went on, triumphantly, "It's a good thing I was still slippery from that abortive fuck with my neighbor, because-" That was as far as I got. In the next few moments things happened so fast that I don't know if I can get them in the right order. It's all a sort of horrible bloody blur to me now. As nearly as I can recall, this is the way it was.
First, there was a scream of pain: that was De Raiss.
Then there was a shriek of rage: that was Mag.
Something red spurted up into the quivering candlelight and spattered on the white sheets. Mag's left hand clutched something long and sharp; it had a jewel at one end; it was the daggerpin that Corrine had pulled from her hair. Its blade had passed all the way through the fleshy part of De Raiss's left shoulder and was imbedded in the mattress beneath him. He must have dodged aside just in time to miss getting it in the neck.
Then the pin was in the air again, poised for the strike, and Mag was screaming-or else she screamed and then raised the pin, I don't know.
"You rotten pig motherfucker, I seen what you done to him, I seen it, I seen it, I seen it-!"
It came out all in a gush of outrage and savage fury, and the pin flashed downward.
I hit her in the ribs with a body block and we both went crashing to the floor. I tried to hold her down, but it was impossible. She was like a greased eel. The first time the blade went into my gut I didn't even feel it. I saw it, but I didn't feel it. The most vivid thing in my memory is the sound of a bell, a very loud electrified bell, and I remember thinking, So, they use bells then and not sirens, eh? Even as her teeth flashed in a snarl and her arm drew back again, I kept trying to whisper in her ear-whether I yelled or never got a word out at all, I can't say for sure-these words: "If you kill him we're sunk!"
"You!" she shrieked, "You-!"
The pin went in again and this time I felt it.
Mag was in tears, screaming hysterically. She pulled the bloody pin out and shook it in my face. "Why you think I come up here, Rusty? You think I couldn't take it down there in that shit hole? Shit! You think I'm like you? You think I can't take any motherfuckin' thing them motherfuckers can dish out! Shit! I saw him! That's why! I saw him and I say I'm goin' up there and kill that motherfucker dead! They got him buried! You know! You seen him! They got him buried up to his neck in the mud and they pourin' shit and sewer on his head! They gonna kill him! And you! Just look at you! You as bad as him, you dirty pig!"
I was shouting, or trying to shout, at the top of my lungs, "Who? Who's buried?"
"Morikand!" she cried, "Morikand! Morikand!"
And each time she said that name she jabbed the long blade into my ribs.
The room was spinning around in sickening red spirals, and then for one murderous moment everything stopped dead. The cogs jammed and the cavernous machine hung frozen in the vault of time. I saw a huge monstrous shape loom up behind Mag, a swarthy giant made of khaki and black leather and cold steel. It was Studhardt. I remember the leer on his face. He caught Mag by the hair and jerked her head backwards on her shoulders. I saw him draw the pistol from its holster. I remember how coolly he did it. The bore of his gun looked about two feet in diameter. I don't remember the explosion, only the hot splatter of flesh and bone in my eyes, and then I was out of it.
CHAPTER FOUR - JIG
Several dozen men are coming at me. Huge men, a phalanx of them. Each has a single eye in the middle of his forehead. I have a burp gun in my hand. I swing it up and start firing. They are all around me, laughing. One, larger even than the others, stands before me with his hands on his hips. I let him have it in the guts. He opens his shirt and shows me his bulletproof vest. They all laugh like idiots. I jab the muzzle of my gun right in his eyes and hold the trigger for thirty seconds. The ratatatat shakes the world to its foundations, but still the bastard is grinning at me. He unzips his face and shows me the steel mask underneath. They all join hands and dance around me in a ring, chanting merrily. I wander through a cavern of laughter. It is very dark. The air is close and unbreathable. With my last breath I haul my limp body over a ledge. There on the ledge is a little girl in a rocking chair. She is naked and her legs are spread. It is freezing cold and I am losing my grip on the rocks. Below is a bottomless pit. Overhead is a pinwheel of fire, tumbling across the sky, illuminating the obscene figure of the naked child. She is laughing and fucking herself with a huge knitting needle. A voice in the distance says, Hey! Hey, Jack! A cloud blots out the pinwheel and bursts into a rain of blood. I lose my grip and slip into the void.
"Hey, Jack, wake up, old buddy! Hm, hm, hm."
I opened my eyes. I was in bed, inside a large tent-a hospital tent. My ribs were bound with bandages. De Raiss stood beside the bed. He rattled on about something. I couldn't concentrate. I was lost in thought, but what I was thinking about escapes me.
Then I heard him say, "Jack, I don't know how to thank you for saving my life. That was sheer heroism on your part, and believe me, it's not going unrewarded, no sir. If you were in the military, I'd see to it that you got the Purple Heart, nothing less. But since you're not, well, we'll think of something, old buddy. Hey, how's the gut? That little wench kinda punched you full o' holes, didn't she? Hm, hm, hm. Made a goddamn sieve out of you, according to the doc. Nothing serious though, I understand, just a matter of patching the holes, don't you know?-so as you don't leak when you take a drink. Hm, hm, hm! Me, I just got a scratch, thanks to you-and Sgt. Studhardt of course. Well, how about it? Feel up to a little walk?"
To the nearest open grave, yes. "Uh, I don't know, Bull. How long have I been here?"
"Just about twenty-four hours, Jack. It's night again, old friend."
Of course. It was always night. The sun had been assassinated by the NR's.
He leaned close. "Ah, Jack, you want to watch that 'Bull' business? The men, you know-"
"Oh, yeah, sorry, Bu-uh, Col. De Raiss."
"That's my boy! Well, look, they say it won't hurt you to be up and about for a little while, so if you feel up to it, I've got a little treat for you-a sort of a token of my appreciation for what you did for me.
"What's that, Colonel?"
"You remember the other day you asked me about seeing your friends, and I told you that was strictly against the code? Well, so it is, but now I'm willing to stick my neck out for you, Jack-seeing as how you stuck yours out for me-and grant you that request. It's the least I can do. What do you say?"
I said that was fine; but I had only one thing on my mind: finishing what Mag had died attempting.
I was sore as hell in the gut, but the pain was good. It was like when I had walked on the hot coals at the Omphalos that fateful night: it fortified me. Outside a jeep was waiting for us. We got in and the driver headed north, around the west side of the old house and up the trail to the stockade. Automatically, I looked for the Comet. It was still there, high in the east, but much fainter than before. Soon it would be out of Aquarius.
The stockade gate swung open, salutes were exchanged, and we sped through. The driver pulled up outside the barn in the center of the compound, and De Raiss helped me out of the jeep. We entered a short hallway where the Colonel left us for a minute to step into a little office on the left. When he was out of sight I made a move toward the driver with the half-formed thought of snatching his handgun from its holster, but a sharp pain in my side brought me up short. The driver looked at me suspiciously. In a moment De Raiss emerged from the office with Sgt. Studhardt at his side.
"There, now, we're all set, Jack. How's the gut?"
"Oh, just a little stiff, Col. De Raiss, otherwise fine."
"Good, good! Take more than a little poke in the belly to keep my boy down, eh? Hm, hm, hm. Well, let's get on then, shall we? Lead the way, Sergeant."
The side walls and ceiling of this hallway were flimsy-looking affairs of wallboard and sheet metal, but the wall at the far end, against which the corridor abutted, was of solid concrete, possibly an original partition of the old barn. It was gray and moist and imposing. It was pierced by a narrow rectangular slot closed off by a heavy steel door. Studhardt pulled a switch, and the door slid smoothly aside into the wall. As soon as we had passed through, I realized I should have made my move in the hallway, pain or no pain. The steel door clanged shut behind me, resounding through the hollow chambers like the crack of doom.
We were in a long high-vaulted room lit garishly by rows of naked bulbs along the rafters. At the far end of the room, opposite the steel door, was another door, this one of heavy timbers bound in iron straps with a small window of steel mesh and guarded by a man with a rifle. The wall to my right was crisscrossed with chains and cables and studded with hand winches of the sort we saw in the garret. Stretched on this wall, their arms straight overhead, their legs spread at grotesque angles, their feet about two yards off the floor, were three black girls. Sarah, Birdie, and Stacy.
They were naked.
Black blood caked their inner thighs. Sarah's right eye was gone. Stacy and Birdie looked dead. Their breasts, stretched taut across their emaciated chests, were motionless, the nipples shrunken pitifully. Neither did Sarah appear to breathe, but her good eye fixed me with a terrible stare.
The room went into a slow roll, from right to left, like a ponderous centrifuge. The world was silent as death except for a hm-hm-hm at the hub.
"Well, Jack, what do you say? Didn't I tell you they were getting, ah, adequate treatment? Hm, hm, hm. Adequate for niggers, that is. Ah, Jack, Jack. Too bad you couldn't have seen things my way, old buddy. We could have had some real kicks together, some real kicks."
Sarah's ghastly eye was turning me to ice. I couldn't turn my head.
"Oh, you had me fooled there for a while, Jack-in a way, I mean. Unfortunately, it seems you did a little talking while you were unconscious. Gave yourself away, old buddy. Hm, hm, hm. Well, I suppose it never would have worked out, anyway.-Ah, but you wanted to see the half-breed, didn't you? Sergeant, if you please."
"Comin' right up, sir-er, down, that is."
Studhardt marched over to the wall, flipped a lever and began turning a crank. There was the clanking clatter of a chain passing over metal and a movement overhead. I did not look up; my eye was locked to Sarah's; I didn't want to look up. Then the contact was broken.
Slit's body, bruised and bleeding, came down from above and hung between Sarah and me, dangling naked from one wrist, swinging with sickening slowness from side to side. A weak moan came from her swollen lips. As Studhardt came back toward us, he delivered a backhand blow to her legs in passing, increasing the length of her swing.
"Well, now," said the Colonel, rubbing his hands together, "that's all but one, I believe. Is the Jones fellow ready for his visitor, Sergeant?"
"Not quite, Colonel, but it won't be long now."
"Sorry to keep you waiting, Jack. Say, why don't you step over to the door there? I believe you can see him from the window, eh, Sergeant?"
"Yes sir. Good view from there."
I moved down the room like an animated corpse. The guard stepped aside. Through the window I saw an open space ringed with barbed wire. In the middle of this space, brightly lit with flood lamps, was the head of Morikand Jones. Running at an angle across the circle was a six-inch metal pipe propped up on wooden stakes, its outfall a few feet from Morikand's face. The ground around this area was soggy and green with slime. Two men were working around the head with shovels. The guard was a pushover because he was not prepared. The rifle came out of his hands easily, and I slammed the steel butt into his startled face with all my strength. Such things are easy when hope is gone. Everything moves at a rapid spritely pace toward the coda. There was even a kind of bliss attached to the pain as Studhardt's ten-pound fist buried itself in my punctured guts. I heard the rifle clatter to the floor and then I suppose he hit me on the back of the head, or maybe in the face, I don't know, but when I came out of it I was strung up on the wall with the three girls. Good. That was where I belonged. It was even better than a bullet in the head. I had always wondered how I would react to torture, whether I could stand the pain or not. Probably not. Well, all the better. I thought it would be good if I could laugh; the others would be proud of me if I could cough up a laugh, would they not? I tried, but it was useless. It only made the blood run faster out of my wounds. When the warm trickles reached my cock, I realized they had stripped me. Apparently, it just didn't seem right to these people unless you were bare-ass.
The wooden door swung open and a soldier came in, dragging Morikand by one ankle, his long hair trailing out behind, leaving a path of greenish mud on the slick clean concrete deck. They shackled his wrists and ankles and hung him on a ringbolt on the wall opposite mine. His head hung forward; I could not see his face but it was obvious that he was dead, or as good as dead! The soldier left the room, and the door shut with a booming thud.
The guard I attacked had been taken away, evidently; Studhardt held his rifle, its bayonet fixed, cradled on one arm. Beside Studhardt stood De Raiss, hands in his pockets, smiling pleasantly. "Well," he said, "now I believe we're all together, eh, Jack?-Ah, but wait! There's one more, isn't there, Sergeant?"
"Roger, Colonel, one more it is. I'll bring him right in, sir."
One more?...
Studhardt opened a small side door and someone pushed a black man out into the light. He staggered forward a few steps and came to a halt. His arms hung limp at his sides. He looked around but didn't seem to see anything. His eyes were glazed and there was a slackness about his mouth. He wore a pair of shapeless trousers, nothing else. It was Charlie Boat.
"Drop your pants, boy," growled Studhardt.
Charlie obeyed, his movements stiff and mechanical, like those of an automaton. The bastards had made a zombie out of him. A sexless zombie: between his legs there was nothing but a ragged scar which looked as though it had been cauterized with a blowtorch.
Oh, Charlie, you stupid son of a bitch. Didn't he tell you, man? Didn't he tell you? The boatman never comes ashore- "That's whut we do to niggers in the South, Mistah Smythe," said Studhardt, ducking under Slit's swinging feet and advancing on me with ah ominous slowness, "And now I'm gonna show yuh whut we do to nigger-lovers."
I always was the worst sort of a chickenshit when it came to pain. In the old days, for instance, whenever I had to have a shot in the arm or in the gums, I would always avert my eyes to avoid looking at the needle. I did the same thing now, as the needlelike point of the bayonet approached my genitals. First I looked at De Raiss. He gave me at little on-cornered smile and shrugged his shoulders, as much as to say, "Sorry about this, Jack, but that's the Army for you." No doubt this was all going according to orders from White Sands, signed of course by Gen. August himself. Poor bastard. We were alike in a way, Bull and I. We had each gone miserably astray in the eyes of the other. When they handed out the perversions to our generation, we had both stood in the same line; had our places been reversed, perhaps I would be down there and he up here, who knows? There was one big difference-two differences: a bomb and a holy man named Morikand Jones.
I looked at Morikand, hanging there on the hook like a skeleton in a spook house; at Slit's naked blood-streaked body, spinning slowly in the garish void; at Charlie with his death mask face and his mangled groin-and I thought, Well, Smythe, you old fraud, the free ride's over; now it's your turn to suffer with the rest of the world. Strike the gong and whack it off, motherfucker!
But it was not to be. Too easy. My suffering was to be postponed for a while. No gongs, no trumpets. Slow torture-death by writing-that's what I was slated for.
There was a sudden cessation of movement in the room. I felt a kind of jolt along my spine, followed by a curious sensation of weightlessness, as though my body were no longer suspended in the cables but rather by some painless unseen force. Studhardt, too, had frozen in his advance; the point of the bayonet was less than an inch below my scrotum. Slit had stopped swinging; the chain from which she dangled no longer seemed taut. Charlie and De Raiss stood as before. Then I looked again at Morikand.
His head no longer hung slack on his bony chest. It was erect, his neck rigid, his eyes open, his lips set straight as a knife blade. He was alive. He was more than alive; never in my life had I seen such an expression on Morikand's face. It defies description. It was intense, that's all I can tell you. He seemed to be looking at nothing in particular, and at the same time, at everything at once-taking the whole room into his vision. He still hung from the hook, straight and motionless as a scarecrow, and yet there was no slackness to his body now: it was as though his every muscle was contracted, poised, straining. And then he relaxed. I saw his body sag and lengthen from its own weight, and simultaneously my own weight returned, and my joints popped as the agonizing tension of the cables returned.
Studhardt lowered the rifle and turned around, obviously confused. When he saw Morikand looking at him, he said, "Well, lookee here, Colonel! The weirdo done come to life on us."
"Yes, so I see, Sergeant. Hm, hm, hm. Remarkable, eh?" But there was a vague uneasiness in his voice, I am sure of it.
Studhardt unsnapped the bayonet from the rifle and tested its cutting edge with his thumb. "With your permission, sir-"
"Certainly, certainly," said De Raiss with a wave of his hand, "but be quick, Sergeant, I have pressing duties." No doubt about it, the son of a bitch was getting nervous.
Studhardt crossed the room, knocking Charlie roughly aside on the way, and stood before Morikand, bayonet in hand. "Won't take but a second, Colonel," he said, lifting Morikand's enormous cock by the head and stretching it out horizontally. "Think I'll fill this one with lead, Colonel, and make a riot stick out of it."
"Get on with it, Sergeant!" De Raiss had moved over toward the rear door, as though he were anxious to leave.
Studhardt lay the blade of the bayonet once along the base of Morkand's outstretched member and raised his arm for the blow. It never fell.
Morikand's body went tense again and it seemed to me that the whole building gave a start. Studhardt's poised body went into a grotesque shudder as though he were being electrocuted, and then his hand sprang from Morikand's penis and he toppled over backwards like a felled tree. The bayonet clattered across the floor toward the center of the room.
I was weakening fast. Everything was getting hazy. I know that De Raiss made a quick move toward the bayonet, stopped, and began a slow retreat toward the door, but whether he said anything or not I can't say. According to the popular eulogistic myth that has grown up around this incident, he is supposed to have said something like, "Go ahead, you dirty anarchist! Do your worst! You can overpower me, but you can't overpower Civilization!" And then something about the forces of Right and Might tracking him down to the ends of the earth, and such as that. As fucked up as I was, I can tell you categorically that this is so much bullshit. In the first place, there was no one present in the room who could have reported it. The driver of De Raiss's jeep had not come in with us, and the guard I clobbered had not been replaced; there were no army personnel there except for Studhardt and the Colonel himself, and Studhardt at the time was in no condition to see or hear anything-though it is from him no doubt that the story originated. In the second place there was no time for a speech of any sort; there was hardly time for a blink of the eye. But the main reason I can't give a clear account of De Raiss's movements after Studhardt fell, is that what little eyesight I had left was focused on the bayonet.
It had risen from the floor in a tight spiral and was hanging there in mid-air, spinning erratically like a compass needle gone crazy. Then it was not spinning any more, and for a moment-just a split second-it hovered there, shocking and devastating in its motionlessness, its blued blade gleaming dully in the naked incandescence, pointing straight up the room, due north. And then, with a metallic flash and a splintering thud, it disappeared.
With my last ounce of energy I turned my head in the direction of the sound.
De Raiss was pinned to the wooden door, an expression of profound terror on his ratlike face. No part of the bayonet's blade was visible; it was sunk to the hilt in the center of his neck.
I am ashamed to keep passing out on you like this, but I was an old fart, after all, and not accustomed to having my belly made into a sieve. I must have lost about a gallon of blood. When I opened my eyes, I thought, "Aha! it was all a dream just like I thought," because that same snot-green dawn that followed the Night Raiders' attack was smeared across the eastern sky. But then someone raised my head, and I saw the tent peaks and the gloomy gables towering to my left. All about there was a flurry of activity. Troops dashing around, darting in and out of the huts, forming up, cursing, pulling down the tents, marching off, and in general creating a very large olive drab whirlwind. The sky was full of helicopters and troop transports, and everything was moving out at double time. What the fuck-?
"Well, you finally decide to wake up, Rusty?"
It was Slit. She had my head cradled in her arm. One of her naked boobies pressed softly against my cheek, and she was smiling.
"Slit! What-?"
"Hey, take it easy, Rusty, take it easy. Everything's cool now, baby. You done slept through everything. How you feel?"
"-I feel fine, though I can't imagine why. How about you?"
"Flowin'."
"Morikand-?"
"He's in there with Charlie and that motherless Studhardt." I looked in the direction she indicated and saw that we were outside the hospital tent. "He thought you'd like it better out here in the open where you could see what's goin' on."
"What the hell is going on, Slit? Why aren't we locked up or dead or something? Why aren't they paying any attention to us? What do you mean, he's in there with Charlie? -and Studhardt! What in the-?"
"Now, wait a minute, Rusty, I can't tell you all that at once, man. Just lay your old bald head on mama's titty and I'll tell you as much as I know-which ain't a hell of a lot. Morikand ain't hardly said a dozen words to me since he come offa that wall, and-"
"Whoa! Start right there, where he came off the wall. Don't worry, if you tell me he flew around the room like a bird, I'll believe you. I'll believe any fucking thing. Come on, spit it out."
"You saw him stick the Colonel?" I nodded. "Well, then he just slipped his hands and feet outa them chains and stepped down, like he was steppin' outa Charlie's barge or somethin', real smooth and easy. Then him and Charlie talked for a minute-I don't know what they said-and then the two of 'em got us down, you and me and the girls. That's when I saw Morikand was cryin'."
"Crying?"
"Well, not cryin' exactly-not like you and me would cry, Rusty-but there was tears in his eyes. I saw 'em. He carry me over to the wall and set me down with you and the girls, and I felt-I don't know, spooky, strung out, not numb exactly, but I wasn't feelin' no pain neither, no pain at all. Then I look over there and that son of a bitch Studhardt's on his feet, looking real funny, man, real weird, and Morikand comes up and says, 'Drop your pants, boy,' and he drop 'em. That fucker got a hell of a cock on him, "bout yay long." She held out her hands like a fisherman describing the one that got away. "So anyway, Morikand take a good long look at that cock and then he tell him to pull up his pants, and he toss that rifle to Charlie and tell him to watch the back door. Then Studhardt and Morikand went out the other door and pretty soon comes a whoop! whoop! whoop!- loud as hell. You didn't hear that?"
"No."
"Then there's this voice over the loudspeakers. It was that Captain What's-his-name."
"Logan?"
"Yeah. He says somethin' about a rocket attack from African subs in the Gulf at oh nine hundred hours, and ain't no way to stop it, he says. Gotta evacuate the base, startin' right then, on the double. Orders from President August, he says. And then there's some more whoop! whoop! whoop! and Morikand come back in the door. He stood there in front of us and got all tight in the stomach like when he was up on the wall, you know?" I nodded. "He looked at all of us, one at a time, and then he said, was we ready to go home? And we said yeah and stood up just like nothin' had happened to us. But you was still out of it, and he stood there lookin' down at you for a minute with a funny kind of a smile on his face, and then he said, 'Guess I better carry old Rustam,' and he throwed you over his shoulder like a sack o' potatoes and off we go, Charlie comin' along behind with the gun."
"So that's what all this is-they're splitting out!"
"Yeah. Everything's gonna be OK now, Rusty."
I had my doubts about that. "Go on," I said.
"Well, then we all pile in this little jeep truck and haul ass over here to the hospital, all of us naked 'cept for Charlie and Studhardt. But you know, Rusty, nobody seemed to notice that. I mean, the whole place was crawlin' with soldiers, just like now, but like they didn't even seem to see us, you know?-let alone notice we was bare-ass. See how they run right past us and don't even look?-and me with my little pussy hangin' out in plain sight."
"That's Morikand's doing," I said, "I imagine he could send the whole goddamn base into orbit if he wanted to. Just think, Slit, he's been keeping these powers from us all these years! I wonder if he even knew he had them until now... Well, what about Charlie? What are they doing in there?"
"I don't know. Sarah's in there too.-Hey, here she comes! Hey, Sarah!"
Sarah, her chocolate body as naked as the night, pushed her way unnoticed through a passing platoon and strode up to us, boobs abounce, hips asway, the very picture of vivacious health. I said, "What's happening in there, Sarah?"
She shook her head and said, "A miracle, Rusty, a miracle. I don't believe it." She had two eyes now instead of and both were bright and clear.
A moment later out walks old Charlie, grinning like a cat, all that horrible emptiness gone from his face. He walked straight up to us, yanked open his baggy trousers and kicked them off. "How bout that shit, Rusty? " he said proudly, "How 'bout that shit?"
In place of the ragged scar there now hung a prick of absolutely magnificent proportions-circumcised to be sure, but nonetheless a joint to be proud of-complete with a thick wreath of black curls and a set of balls as pretty as bird eggs. But the most startling thing of all about these new genitals of Charlie's was their color, for they were not black like the rest of him. True, the scrotum inclined a bit toward the sepia, but the shank of his cock was a warm Mediterranean olive and the head was as pink as a baby's butt. Where the white skin met the black there was not a trace of a scar-no sutures, no graft marks, nothing; there "was not even a definite line but rather a smooth shaded zone where the two areas blended together. I never thought I could get so excited over a prick, but damned if I didn't almost break up over this one. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.
All of a sudden Charlie gave a little start and said, "Hey, wait a minute!" He danced aside a few steps, grabbed his cock, and stood there in a kind of strain, staring down at the thing. We held our breaths. Then he began to piss, and we all cheered like lunatics. It did my heart good to see that strong full stream plowing up the sand. "It works, by God!" he bellowed, "The motherfucker works!"
When he had shaken it off and pranced back to us like a warrior returning victorious from battle, Sarah reached out and began to fondle the new member.
"That all you plan on doin' with this thing, Charlie?-pissin' through it?"
Charlie let out a beautiful, healthy, low-down, dirty laugh and said, "Let's you and me give it a trail run, what do ya say, baby?"
"I'm hip," said Sarah, running her nipples down Charlie's broad chest and belly as she sank to her knees on the tarpaulin that had been spread for us. She had her back to Slit and me, and so all we could see was her bushy head lolling around on her shoulders.
Slit said, "Hey, turn around, you two! We can't see a fuckin' thing!-'cept Sarah's ass."
By the time they got twisted around to give us the view Charlie's cock was fully erect and twice its original size. "Take your mouth off a minute, Sarah," I said. She slid her lips off the head and held the thing up for us.
"Ain't it nice?" she said, kissing it on the mouth.
Nice! By God, it was terrific! The shaft was as big around as your wrist and it had a nose cone the size of a plum. "One thing for sure, man," I said, "you got more than you came in with. That son of a bitch is almost as big as Morikand's!"-An exaggeration of course, but it really was a fantastic phallus by normal standards.
Sarah sucked it for a while, and then Charlie got down on the tarp with her and eased it into her wooly hole. It was a joyous fuck if there ever was one, a festive fuck, a fuck of thanksgiving, a horizontal dance of joy in celebration of the return of life and health and wholeness. Yet there lingered a sort of hollow foreboding in my soul...
When I was on the wall in Studhardt's torture chamber, when I thought my last moments were at hand, it seemed to me that I was at last on the verge of a true understanding of the master. It was impossible to see him there, hanging limp and lifeless in his chains, peaceful even in the depth of his suffering, and not have a profound if incommunicable comprehension of what he meant by acceptance. He accepted agony with the same tranquility as he had accepted pleasure. His very form was to me a semaphore of his love for the world in all its horror and delight, and most of all, in its chaotic absurdity. His body formed the letter "I", or the numeral 1. It pointed upward and downward at the same time. For all the apparent deviation in his life's course implied by his consent and participation in our stupid rescue attempt, in actuality it had only been a kind of senseless game to him, meaningless and insignificant. In his pacifism he had strayed neither to the left or the right: he had not taken a single life. Shallow, mystical, and "ideological" as all this may sound, at the time it came over me with the magnitude of a revelation, and just when I had it down, just when my hate was melting into something resembling understanding if not compassion, wham!-De Raiss has a shiv through his craw. It knocked everything out of joint again, and as I lost consciousness I lapsed once more into my normal state of confusion. It was still with me, this confusion, mixed with the joy of our apparent liberation. It was the source of my foreboding.
Physically, however, I was as fit as a fiddle. My gut was still bandaged up, but I was not bleeding, and I felt very loose and free of pain. As a matter of fact, so far recovered was I, that as I lay there propped up on Slit's boobies, watching old Charlie pumping Sarah's cunt into a lather with his brand new cock and chewing on those bulbous chocolate candy nipples of hers, with all those troops swarming around us, a veritable river of army green flowing toward the airstrip-I began to get a hard-on. Slit saw it and started jacking me in time with the rise and fall of Charlie's black ass, giggling happily and swabbing out my ear with her tongue. The tempo was presto and very enjoyable. Charlie wasn't at it long; I suppose he was anxious to see how his new cannon fired. He said, "Here it comes!" and Sarah grunted, "Me too! Give it to me, man! Give it to me!" and then they both started lurching furiously and saying, "Oh! Oh! Oh, Jeeeesus!" Obviously the thing creamed as well as it peed. I was about to pull my hand out of Slit's cunt and replace it with my prick, when the tent flap opened and out came Studhardt.
He was dressed in a hospital gown and flanked by two medics, hustling him along. I jumped up and got one good look at him before he passed us. His face wore that same sort of blank expression as Charlie's had in the barn-except that Studhardt had only one eye. I don't think Charlie even noticed him; he just kept grinding away between Sarah's twitching legs, and then Studhardt was lost in the- press of the mob.
A shadow fell across the sand, and I looked up to see Morikand framed in the door of the tent. His pale naked body, now free of muck and blood, struck my eye like a bolt of frozen lightning, fell and terrible in the gray light of that murky dawn.
Soon the base was emptied of tents, men and everything else that could be flown out. The last plane took off and droned away over the soggy cane fields to the north. We moved solemnly down the spit toward the boat dock. No one spoke. A profound and impregnable silence had fallen over the wilderness.
-"Why?" -"Because I felt like it, Rustam." -"You never killed anyone before. There were times when-"
"I never felt like it before." We were silent for about fifteen minutes, and then he said, "Ah, Rustam, Rustam. You think you saw a display of strength back there by one whom you admired for his weakness. But hasn't it occurred to you that it may have been the other way around? Would that make it any better? Or any worse? Sometimes it takes great strength to be weak, sometimes great weakness to be strong. Whenever either becomes difficult, relent: flow." It was the nearest Morikand ever came to the didactic. I realize now that in those few words he had explained everything, what had happened and what was yet to happen, but at the time I remained as confused as ever. For several minutes after that the frogs had it to themselves. Then he spoke again. "There's one other thing I'd like to tell you, Rustam. All that has happened since we left the Omphalos was a spur off the main track." He meant the main track of Destiny. "I foresaw the raid," he added, "but nothing else." A spur. Morikand was begotten on the night of July 4, 1959, in an abandoned gravel gondola-on a spur track. To that spur he owed his life; to this one his death.
All day something had been eating me. Something had been left undone, but what? Every time I tried to focus on it my mind became a blur. Now, with shocking abruptness, the block was swept aside, and it hit me -"Morikand! Orpheus! We forgot Orpheus!"-He just smiled and glanced up at the Comet. "No, man. Orphie made it."
CHAPTER FIVE - CHACONNE
Orpheus. My name is Orpheus.
He touches the velvet smoothness of her bare hips and says: "My name is Orpheus."
Harry slid his hands down over Cynthia's enormous silicone- and colostrum-filled breasts, locked his fingers under the heavy sag of her great taut belly, and drove his cock deep into her rectum. And a voice within the foetus said: My name is Orpheus.
And here I sit, forty-one years later, in a dust-free tomb, writing of wombs. Writing of wombs and cunts and tits and cocks and assholes like a young would-be stud, deprived of impotence even in my old age. It's just like the old days, now that Morikand's gone. This place is not much different from the house I lived in before the War. Even May has come back to me, improbable as it sounds. She was not killed in the air raid after all. She brings young girls to my room, exactly as she used to do. The girls are younger now for the most part, but that's only a symptom of the times. I still go for it in a way, but I guess I'm getting a bit old fashioned-as far as the prepubescent fucking fad is concerned, I mean. I never did go much for fads. But whatever you like. As if it mattered a goddamn one way or the other. Yes, she has come back to me. Come back after all these years to haunt me with her love. The worst thing about this place is the window. Through this window, at certain times, when the shields are down and the wind is right, I can see a little patch of sky; that's not so bad, but at night sometimes there are stars, and stars annoy me. They depress the shit out of me, the way they come back to the same place every twenty-four hours. It's only an illusion of course. It is I that keep coming back. But the illusion of repetition is greatly surpassed by the illusion of change. These days we are inundated by change: America fought back and won-or seemed to win-and now she is deserting the field. America, the bulwark of the West, in retreat? Unthinkable. Should the publication of such a statement precede my expiration date, be assured that the authorities would cut off my hormones-at the very least. America has found new strength in her retreat and has given it another name: manifest destiny. Africa and China are gathering for the spring; when the time is ripe they will pounce upon us like two young savages on an old whore. But they will find the bed empty. Western man, having made a slum of the earth, will have fled to the suburbs of the stars. Even now we are preparing for it: depopulation is the order of the day-unofficially, I hasten to add, but our course is no less set for lack of government endorsement. We are lightening the load; we are engaged in a veritable orgy of sterility; fortunately, the Black Death gave us a head start; well be ready for the bastards, you can bet on it. "Nobody here but us chickens," well say when they burst through the door. I, of course, will be one of the chickens, if I live to see it, still here, holed up, a pencil over my ear, fucking my brains out as usual, pausing only long enough to welcome the new crew aboard. The change, as I say, is illusory.
"The hawk in the egg kills the wren," as Dylan Thomas wrote, and in the warmth of the lurching womb lay the cold stillness of the Plutonian night, and he strokes the silken softness of her naked ass with his hands and says: "My name is Orpheus."
It is beginning now, this month, tonight, July 4, A.D. 2000-his part of it, I mean. He is fifteen years old, and they are celebrating the Fourth at the orphanage where he has lived since the end of the War. He is sitting on the grass with some other boys watching the fireworks. He sits a little apart from the others. All around the field the children are milling about, yelling, throwing sparklers and crushed ice at each other, playing ball and so forth. A little girl of about twelve or thirteen comes running and shrieking through the crowd, catches her foot on Orpheus' extended leg and tumbles to the grass in a giggling heap. Orpheus looks at her exposed panties. He continues to look at them until she pulls her skirt down. The girl stops giggling and says, "What are you lookin' at?"
"Nothing," replies Orpheus.
The girl has short sandy hair and big dark eyes. She walks over to Orpheus on her knees and says in an accusing voice, "You tripped me so you could look up my skirt, didn't you?" Orpheus shakes his head. "Yes you did. What group are you in?"
"Three."
"You think you're big just 'cause you're in Three, don't you?"
"No."
"Yes you do. You think you're a big man just 'cause you're getting out and you can trip anybody you please. What if I tell my boyfriend you tripped me and looked up my skirt?" Orpheus shrugged. "He's bigger than you and he'd beat your butt."
"You aren't supposed to have boyfriends here."
She smirks at him mischievously and says, "So?" Just then the boy who had been chasing the girl spots her and comes charging through the crowd. "Yipes!" she squeals, "Here he comes!" She jumps to her feet and runs away. Orpheus watches the boy chase her around behind the bleachers where it is dark. In the bright burst of a rocket he sees that they are on the ground.
About half an hour later Orpheus is leaning against a tool shed at the edge of the field, drinking a soda and watching some younger boys playing kickball. The little girl with the sandy hair comes up behind him and slips her hand into the front of his pants. "Hey, what are you doing?" he says, pulling on her arm.
"Seeing what you were thinking about. Wanta take a walk with me?"
"Where?"
"Around there."
"We'll get in trouble. I've only got a few more weeks.' "Come on, we won't get in trouble. I go back there all the time. It's dark, nobody can see. Come on."
"All right."
When they are in the shadows behind the bleachers, the girl says, "You were thinking about me, weren't you?"
"Maybe," answered the boy. "What about your boyfriend?"
"What about him? Anyway, he's not really my boyfriend. I just met him tonight. I don't like him anymore."
"Why?"
"He wouldn't run away with me. He said he would until after I let him do it to me. Come on over here, the grass is softer."
Orpheus sits down on the ground and the girl lies down on her back beside him. Her immature breasts stand up in sharp little peaks inside her sweater.
"Why don't you run away by yourself?"
"I don't want to," she says.
"I won't go with you either. I've only got a few more weeks."
"Who's taking you?"
"I don't know. Some people."
"It won't be any fun. You'll hate it. We'd have fun if we went together. You could make love to me whenever you liked."
"How old are you?"
"Sixteen."
"You are not You're twelve."
"I am not! I'm thirteen. And I'm mature for my age."
"What's your name?"
"Deedee."
Orpheus stands up. I'll see you around, Deedee."
"Hey! Don't you want to fuck me?"
Orpheus turns and looks at her. "I guess so, but I won't run away with you."
"Come back. I'll let you anyway. Please." She arches her back, raising her little behind off the ground, hoists her skirt up to her waist and jerks her panties down. Then she sits up and pulls them off her legs. A flare bursts over the bleachers and Orpheus sees the little brown powder-puff at the top of her slit as she unzips her sweater and spread-eagles herself on the dewy grass. "Hurry," she says.
Orpheus steps out of his pants and kneels between her legs. She takes his prick between her fingers and rubs it on her pussy. Its lips are still wet from her last fuck. He put his hands on her slim hips and lifts his eyes to the sky. Libra is due south and halfway up.
"What's your name?" she asks.
"Orpheus."
The glow of the rising spacedock penetrates the pale depths of her irises, and gooseflesh races across her bare buttocks. He nudges her with his penis and says: "My name is Orpheus."
He lays his head between her hard little tits and begins to poke awkwardly at her crotch with his cock. She says, "Hey, wait, not like that. Don't you know how to... Hey, is this the first time you've done it? I bet it is, isn't it?"
"No."
"It is too, I can tell. Oh, don't be mad, I don't mind. Come on, let me show you." She puts her knees up around his waist, "now, raise up a little... That's it. I'll put it in for you... There. Mm... Does it feel good?"
"Yes."
"Don't you like it?"
"Sure."
"Me too. I love it. You're long. You're touching bottom. Can you feel it? He couldn't touch bottom with his, that little shit."
"Who?"
"That little shit I said was my boyfriend. I gave him a piece before. You're better. Don't slow down. Do you like my tits?"
"It's dark."
"Give me your hand."
She guides his palm over her naked breasts. Orpheus explores the hard mounds with his fingers, the puffed-up areolas, the little bullets of flesh at the centers, and keeps his cock moving rhythmically in and out of her pussy. It is very tight and very hot...
Very tight and very hot.
Yes, love I too have visions. Not of the future but of the past. Visions that will not stay in the dark where they belong. Visions that come flapping out of the past to perch on the window above my deathbed and blot out the stars. A vision of a man in his early thirties walking barefoot down a short hallway. It is night. It is the year of Apollo XI. Footsteps on the Moon. Footsteps in the hallway, on the threshold. He pauses and then enters the room. Moonlight streams through the blinds and falls across the small, lithe, but almost shapeless figure of a very young girl. Her long black hair is fanned out on the pillow in disheveled swirls. He stands there beside the bed, looking down at her. The shadow of his erect penis falls across the front of her nightgown, and a band of ghostly light illuminates her eyes. They are open. Large and brown with long black lashes. He glances at the other bed. The girl whispers, "He's asleep, Daddy." Behind him, down the hall, in the other room, he hears voices. Female voices. His wife has just arrived home. She has entered their bedroom to find a big-titted teen-age girl in the bed. They are talking, introducing themselves. Later they will make love, his wife and the girl-he promised the girl. Now they are only talking. His wife is undressing. They are waiting for him. He bends over the bed and lifts the hem of the child's nightgown. He runs his forefinger along the hairless lips between her open legs. "Ellie?" he says softly. "Hm?"
"Did you see that girl suck me off?"
"Uh huh. What's her name?"
"Sally. She's pretty, isn't she?"
"I guess."
"Have you been playing with yourself?"
"Yes."
"You're not very wet"
"It was a long time ago. I've been asleep. Aren't you going to lick me first?"
"Sure. You like that?"
"Uh huh, but the other still hurts."
"I'll be careful. Did Mama give you that thing to loosen up with?"
"Yes. But it's too big."
"Well, I'll be careful." He has been sitting beside her. Now he mounts the bed on his knees and cups her little buttocks in his hands. He lifts her pussy to his mouth and gives it a good swabbing with his tongue. She draws her nightgown up to her armpits and the stripes of moonlight flow over her chest. He thinks: She's starting to get tits; soon she'll have hair. This time he is careful to get plenty of slobber up into her hole. She begins to whimper. "I'm ready now, Daddy. Let's try it now."
"OK." She snatches the pillow from beneath her head and stuffs it under her bottom, bending her knees and opening her little legs all the way. As the man caresses the smooth lips of the child's pussy with the head of his member, mixing his secretions with the saliva, he notices that her eyes are tightly closed. It takes a long time to get it in...
Very tight and very hot.
"Why don't y'suck 'em?" said Deedee.
Orpheus bows his head and opens his mouth. His lips close around the plump little nipple. A bright white flare ignites and goes whistling down the sky, lighting up the pale bare girlflesh beneath him, "And there is an image." That's the way Morikand put it. I asked him what he meant, and he said, "In his mind there is an image."-"Of?"-(Sometimes you had to squeeze it out of Morikand.) "Of that," he said, jerking his thumb toward the now tiny and distant Comet over his left shoulder, "and of this." He made a circle around one of Slit's nipples with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. It was just Slit and Morikand and Charlie and me again now. Morikand had advised the others to split up into small groups and lay low for a while. (Morikand!-first a holy man, then a warrior, now a strategist-what next?) What he meant was, "It's me they'll be after now; stay away from me and you'll have a chance," and everyone knew it. But he didn't say it; that would have put them on the spot. Even so, some wanted to stick with him no matter what: Ham and Ralph and Sarah and Marina-Sack also insisted on coming with us because, he said, "Who's gonna play the guitar while you're ballin', man?"-and a few others, but Morikand wouldn't hear of it. We took Charlie's barge out to deep water and scuttled her. There wasn't a man, woman or child with a dry eye, watching that old tub go down. It brings a lump to my throat even now just to think of it. But the barge would have identified us, you see. There were no farewells. At Morikand's suggestion the four of us, in two canoes, slipped away in the dead of night. The Omphalos was a black skeleton against the stars. A few strokes of the paddle and it was lost among the willow heads. We headed south, more or less, following the channels whenever possible. Now, four days later, we were flaked out on the beach of a small mangrove island, just around the bend from God knows where. It was here that Morikand had resumed his tenth-month vision. We had been standing there watching the sunset; I was lost in thought and Charlie was pissing in the water; Morikand, facing Slit, slipped his fingers into the crack of her ass and said: Orpheus. My name is Orpheus -"An image of the Comet and a nipple?... Slit's nipple! His mother's! Then he remembers! He remembers being at the Omphalos, sucking his mother's tit with the Comet overhead-maybe that same night you started telling this! Maybe he remembers-!" I was going to say me, but Morikand cut me off, "He remembers nothing, Rustam. There is only the image."
Always, there is only the image.
That's the way it comes to me now, only in images. Even the words are getting muddled. I must put it down the way it comes. Stay with me if you can, and the devil take the hindmost. I am the Gingerbread Squash with a hormone hard-on, and I will continue until the props rot.
"Good?"
Orpheus nods his head as he sucks, rolling the other nipple between his thumb and forefinger.
"Oh! Come on, let's do it fast! Let's fuck fast!"
And her little hips jerk upward and lurch into high drive, banging ungently against Orpheus' straining loins. He gathers his knees under her ass and tries to match her speed, and in a minute they are synchronized. There are no more images-or more accurately, there is now only a dizzy swirl of images, erotic images, kaleidoscopic whirlpools of pleasure. And then his body surges and he hears himself grunting, and it is better than when you beat off, deeper, stronger, images of it going into the toilet and into the wastebasket in your room when the other boys are gone and of the stolen pictures of naked girls under your mattress and of the hairiness between their legs and of the one doing it to herself with a banana and smiling at you and of the women who come in the vertibus to visit the orphanage with their see-throughs and their painted breasts and their long window-skirts and of it spurting out into the dark when you did it on the roof and tried to see into the girls' dorm on the other side of the field and of the white panties of the little girl who looked like a woman under her skirt and the way her panties were thinner than what they allowed at the orphanage and the way they were caught in the crease between her legs and the way she had let you look before she pulled her skirt down and of how she had put her hand into your pants and grabbed your dick and of how her pointed tits look under the fireworks and how they taste and feel and how hot and wet she feels inside and how she moves under you and how different it feels shooting into her belly and shooting into her belly and shooting into her belly and- Voices through the wall: "May! She's getting killed!"
"No! You stay right where you are, Sally! Do you hear?"
"But, May, I don't-!"
"There; you see? She's laughing now... " -shooting into her belly...
He is finished, but Deedee is still squirming under him. She is doing something with her hand. He starts to pull out, but she says, "Wait! Don't take it out yet! Please! Just a minute, just... " Her hand is moving in circular sweeps at the bottom of her belly, and he sees that her middle finger is in the upper part of her pussy, and she is going, "nh, nh, nh, nh," in a tiny thin voice, and he just kneels there, with his dick halfway out, watching, and then a rocket with red and green spirals and whistle bombs goes off in the air and rains down in front of Libra, and she stops.
Orpheus lies down on his back and listens to Deedee panting. There is a voice on the loudspeaker, and then he says, "The fireworks are over. We've got to go." He sits up and puts his feet into his pants. "They'll be lining up." He pulls his pants up to his thighs and looks down at the girl. She is still spraddle-legged and her sweater is still open. The powder-puff between her thighs is only a dark blur in the gloom. He says, "Why did you do that?"
"What?"
"You know. With your finger."
"To make myself come. Don't you know anything?"
Orpheus says nothing.
"A spacer taught me that. He's very beautiful, and every time he comes back to Earth he comes to visit me and make love to me.
"Why do you lie so much? I'll bet you're not even twelve."
"I am too twelve!"
"You said thirteen."
"A girl I know taught me that."
"It's because you're too young to come the regular way, isn't it?"
"No! I just like to do it that way. Why are you so mean? You never even did it before, and now you're making fun of me, you queer!" She sounds as though she is about to cry.
"I'm not making fun of you. Come on, we're going to get caught."
"And I really do know a spacer. I met his daughter when I was in the Miami home, and I went to their house for dinner one time-plenty of times. He's going to take his wife and his mistress and his daughter to Syrtis City to live. They're going to be pioneers. They said if I would run away they would take me with them."
"No they didn't."
"You think you know every goddamn thing and you didn't know how to fuck! They're real groovy and they have parties where everybody comes naked and everything, and they said they'd take me with them."
"Why don't they adopt you then?"
" 'Cause I'm in One, stupid."
Orpheus stands up and snaps his trousers.
"They'd take you too, if you'd run away with me. They'd hide us, and they'd let us sleep together and everything, 'cause they're not straight or anything. And then when we got to Mars, everything would he cool. Will you come? "
"No. I told you I wouldn't."
"But that was before! You could at least be a little bit grateful. You didn't even thank me."
Orpheus shrugs. "It was your idea."
"You think you're a big shit just 'cause you're in Three! In Three, and don't even know how to make a girl come! Ha, ha, ha!"
Orpheus starts off toward the corner of the bleachers.
"Hey, wait! I'm sorry." She comes running up with her little tits bobbing and her panties flapping in her hand. "Look, I'm going out tonight. I'll meet you right here a half-hour after lights-out."
"I won't be here."
"I'm going anyway."
"OK. I won't rat. They're lining up, so I'm going. Don't follow me too close."
"I won't. Night."
"Night. Good luck."
"What did you say your name was?"
Orpheus. My name is Orpheus The rhythm of the last days was set decades ago by the frantic lethargy of Harry Jones' pounding backside as he buggered his overdue wife in the quiet little town of Uranus on the balmy shores of the Atlantic; and at the cold lips of the planetary womb, sixty-five years hence,- (On a sudden impulse, I said, "Morikand, you wouldn't know the configurations for that night, would you?-the night of the vision?" and he replied without a pause, "Mercury was in Taurus, Venus in Pisces, Jupiter in Scorpio, Saturn and Neptune in Scorpio, and Mars and Uranus were in Leo, dead overhead." I asked in astonishment how he was able to rattle it off like that, and he said that, he could see many things now that had been hidden from him before. "Before?"
"Before our trip. Some of it came back to me while I was buried, the rest later." Evidently, the expenditure of his theretofore unused telekinetic energy had restored and amplified his prenatal memory. "But you started telling this before," I said, "on the night of the raid."
"Yes, but I would not have been able to give it to you in any amount of detail. I saw, through Orpheus, the images of his beginning and those of his end, but the interim was a blank." The interim! If you asked me when things began to go wrong-your life, mine, the world's-that would be my answer: in the interim. "In fact, Rustam, it was only then, on the night you spoke of, that I began to remember even that much of it." Out in the reach, near the edge of the grass, a tarpon jumped, his silver scales clattering in the night. We were not far from the sea. "It had been submerged since before my birth." The vision itself then, or rather, his loss of it, was a sort of interim, between the leap and the splash. "You think you might lose it again?" I asked. He shrugged and ran the head of his cock up into Slit's armpit. When it slid up alongside her breast, she tilted her head to one side and kissed it lovingly. "Does it matter?" he said. Charlie grinned, and then laughed. Meanwhile, back in Cynthia's belly, at the outer extremity of the "interim"... ) -at the cold lips of the planetary womb, sixty-five years hence, a man in a crater, on a cold barren rock, three and a half billion miles from his birthplace in the lush warmth of a marshbound Eden, slides his palms up the smooth bare flanks of a green-gold girl, and with her lips brushing his, she says- Orpheus "Orpheus! Psst! Over here!"
"Deedee?"
"I knew you'd come. I waited for you. Didn't you bring anything? Clothes or anything?"
"No. I'll carry that for you." He takes her little traveling case.
"Come on, I know where there's a hole in the fence. Oh, Orpheus, I love you for coming! It'll be just like I said, you wait and see. Come on, well go along the tracks till we get to the Leethy elevated, and then if we hurry we can catch the eleven o'clock vertibus for Miami and-"
"Vertibus! I haven't got any money."
"I have. I stole some from the cafeteria. See?" She opens her purse. "I got enough for two tickets and some left over. Let's go."
As they hurry southward along the snarl of monorails, Orpheus looks again for Libra, but it is hidden behind the gloomy overhang of the factory on his right. In the east, over the rooftops of the orphanage, Aquarius is rising. There is no moon.
In the vertibus, speeding silently over the dense geometric constellations of megalopolitan lights, Orpheus lets his eyes wander out over the ocean. It is the darkness that intrigues him, not the lights. There is no darkness left on the land; it has been banished. Even the ocean is not completely dark; there are ships, and the vast crazy quilt of the sea farms, stretching their spidery tentacles toward the horizon; but it is darker than the land. There are nooks and crannies between the farms, and wide areas of inky blankness beyond. These voids are like magnets to his eyes...
Over Point Head Deedee stirs beside him and slips her hand between his legs.
"Isn't this fun? Have you ever flown in a vertibus?"
"No."
"I have. Lots of times. Aren't the lights pretty?"
" I guess."
"What's your last name, Orpheus?"
"I don't know. My parents were killed in the War. My computer name is Silabron."
(At the time Morikand told this I naturally had no idea his name would acquire the infamous reputation that is attached to it today. After the Confessions-never widely read-had been taken out of circulation in '76, the world-except for the handful of free souls who sought him out during the war, some of whom, by the way, made oracle-seeking pilgrimages to the Omphalos during the Year of the Comet and in fact gave the commune its name-the world at large, I say, had forgotten him. For this reason it never occurred to me to ask how or why the Jones was dropped from Orpheus' name. However it happened, it could not have been a deliberate thing. It must have been sheer accident, a departmental fumble perhaps, that both names were not entered in his papers at the base, because I myself naively gave them both to De Raiss-or at least I informed him that Orpheus was Morikand's child. The point is that if Orpheus had arrived at the orphanage with both his names, if in fact he had in any way been officially linked to Morikand or Slit, none of what I am relating could have happened-or I should say, none of it will happen.) "The computers make such funny names, don't they?"
"I can't help it." Orpheus turns back to the window.
"I know, silly. Oh, let's don't fight... Wanta fuck?"
"Here?"
"Sure. Everybody does it on the bus. Why do you think they have these curtains?" She giggles. "See, you're getting a hard-on."
"Sh! People can hear you, Deedee."
"So what? There's nothing wrong with having a hard-on, is there?"
She opens his pants and puts her mouth over his prick, running her little pointed tongue around the head, fishing out his balls and tickling them with her fingernails. But Orpheus only continues to stare out the window. After a minute the little girt sits up and says, "OK, then, if that's the way you want to be, you can play with yourself from now on!" And she slumps down in her seat as though going to sleep.
After a few minutes Orpheus turns from the window and says, "Take off your pants then."
"I'm not wearing any," she answers in a pouting voice.
Orpheus grabs her around her tiny waist and jerks her roughly onto his lap.
"Hey, this is-"
"Shut up," he says, yanking her skirt up to her waist and lifting her hot little ass into position. He finds the hole by himself this time and forces an abrupt entry-so abrupt that she whimpers with the pain. But Orpheus drives in again, even harder, and soon she is nice and slippery inside, and her whimpers become sighs of pleasure. He unzips the front of her dress and is not gentle with her hard little tits. He sucks and bites the nipples until they become taut turrets of flesh, and the rougher he is with her the more rapid becomes the rise and fall of her ass over his thighs. He holds her skirt up around her waist and watches the dim ghost of his member going in and out of her powder-puff pussy. He keeps watching as his semen begins to spurt into her body. Into the warm dark, close dark powder-puff pocket of her budding body. And then she leans back against the front partition of the compartment and begins to masturbate. Orpheus watches the way her middle finger goes up and down in the top of her feathery slit, now from side to side, now slantwise, now in circles, and then she clutches her little mound in her hand and makes funny noises in her throat.
Later, Orpheus says, "Let's take off all our clothes."
"OK."
So they undress. The naked child is like a white nymph in the cool, gloomy compartment, her body only faintly illuminated by the reflection of the electric galaxy passing below. Orpheus tells her to do it to him with her mouth, and she gets down on the floor between his legs and sucks him off. She says she has done that lots of times. She has done everything lots of times. Orpheus, it seems, has done nothing. I don't mean that his fifteen years (his "lost" years) were devoid of experience; I mean only that he seems not to have taken an active part in anything, that he seldom acted but only reacted, swinging about on the chain of circumstance like a buoy in a seaway, forever adrift but never free. Dylan Thomas wrote: Time held me green and dying Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
Only Orpheus is not singing. He shoots into Deedee's mouth and watches with what Morikand called "disinterest" as she spits the semen into the litter chute. He gazes not at the sea now but at the garish display of the teeming coastline, and the lights form themselves into erotic images, and soon his erection has returned. He gets down on his knees, and Deedee sits on the forward edge of her seat, and he fucks her that way until the pilot announces that they are approaching Miami's central terminal.
They leave the terminal and enter the swirling tangle of the buzzing city. They stick to the lower levels where it is darker and there are no vehicles. Deedee leads the way. About an hour later she points down a narrow passageway between two entertainment complexes. There, beside a door, under an amber light, a black woman leans against the wall. She is a couple of hundred feet away. When Orpheus looks at her she smiles.
Deedee says, "Have you ever seen one before?"
"No."
"I have. Lots of times. There were some in the Miami orphanage when I was there. It's not true what they say about General August killing all of 'em after the War, you know. Come on, we're almost there."
Deedee goes on ahead. Orpheus has not taken his eyes off the black woman. Her body is large and voluptuous, and she wears feathered hoops in her ears and a black tasselgown sprinkled with rhinestones. Her big brown tits are deeply creased and bulging brazenly above the sparkling breastband, and her long heavy legs are crossed seductively at the ankles. As Orpheus stands there staring at her, the woman casually parts her tassels and shows him her cunt; a wooly wedge of opaque darkness between her broad hips, a lush black island in the brown sea of her belly and thighs...
"Hey, Orpheus! Come on! It's just a nigger!"
At last he tears his eyes away and hurries after Deedee.
They step into an empty lift, rise to the fourth level and enter the deep-carpeted maze of an upper class residential compound. They pass a few people who do not seem to see them. Rounding a bend in the corridor, Deedee says, "Here it is. I hope they haven't moved."
"What if they've gone to Mars already?"
"Then we'll do something else. You worry too much. Aren't you glad to be out of that shithole?"
"I guess. They'll catch us, though."
"They will not. Jerry'll fake papers for us. He can do it easy. He told me so."
"Who's Jerry?"
"Jerry Weldon, the spacer that lives here, dummy. He's the one that got my cherry, and he'll do whatever I ask him to, you'll see. Do you know how to use the door com?"
"No."
"I do. Watch." She pushes one of the buttons beside the door and the little square screen flickers into life. The view is down a short streamlined hallway of pink plastic with rounded corners, the walls glowing brightly. A bead curtain that closes the end of the room is thrown back and a naked girl skips across the opening, her hair and body dripping wet. "Be right there!" she sings out. In the distance, through the now open door, Orpheus sees a curving pool of sky-blue water, sparkling through a screen of ornamental plants and small trees pruned into spheres and cones.
"See," whispers Deedee, "I told you they were groovy, didn't I? That was Esene, Jerry's daughter."
In a moment the girl reappears on the screen, now with a small towel covering her torso; its upper corners are tucked under her arms and its lower edge just barely reaches below her crotch. Her dark hair hangs in wet strands about her bare, suntanned shoulders. She looks about sixteen. Her body is small but fully developed, and her high round titties bounce delightfully as she runs up to the door com, breathless and radiant. "Yes?"
"Hi, Esene," says Deedee, "Don't you remember me?"
"... Deedee! You little whore!" Esene throws up her arms in delight and the towel falls from her body. Orpheus can just see the tips of her little pink nipples above the bottom of the screen. "Come on in!" The door slides quietly open and they step into a small anteroom with green and violet walls and a checkerboard ceiling. The outer door sighs shut behind them, and Esene bursts into the room, stark naked, the towel trailing from her hand. Her sparse little bush stands out in wet stringy curls along the lips of her cunt, and her tits are even more beautiful at close range. She is all smiles. "Deedee, how in the hell-?" She sees Orpheus. "Oh! I thought you were alone, Deedee." She tucks the towel under her arms again; it is only wide enough to reach from one armpit to the other, leaving the back of her body bare. She apologizes to Orpheus.
"That's all right," says Orpheus as the blood rushes into his cheeks.
Deedee laughs and introduces them. "Orpheus is cool," she says, slipping her arm around his waist, "He's my new lover. We ran away together."
"You ran away?" says Esene with a start.
"Sure. I told you I would. Your father said he would take me to Syrtis City with him if I could get a boy for your-well, you know."
"He said if you got out, didn't he? He didn't tell you to escape, did he?"
"Yes, he did, and he better take care of me too, 'cause I can get him in plenty of trouble."
Esene seems anxious to change the subject. She smiles at Orpheus and says, "So you're Deedee's lover, huh? Have you ever known such a twelve-year-old in your life? "
"No," says Orpheus, trying to keep his eyes off Esene's gleaming wet body.
"I've been swimming, as you can see. Come on in and make yourselves comfortable. I'll go put something on." She turns and skips into the house, the cheeks of her naked ass jiggling and jumping.
Orpheus and Deedee are sitting alone in a large sprawling room, waiting for Esene. He asks her what she meant about bringing a boy for something, and she tells him that Mrs. Weldon wanted a boy about his age to sleep with her sometimes. "He was just telling you that, Deedee. All this is stupid, and I'll bet that girl's calling the police right now."
"You're the one that's stupid, Orpheus. When we talk to Jerry, you'll see it's just like I'm telling you. You act like you want to get caught... I'll be jealous if you make love to Esene and her mother, Orpheus, but I won't be mad at you. We'll still be lovers, won't we?-even if we sleep with other people sometimes?"
"I guess so."
Esene returns wearing a short yellow tunic, open at the sides, nothing underneath. Her little button nipples show plainly through the thin fabric. Deedee has been kissing Orpheus and her hand is still between his legs. Esene says, "Hey, break it up, you two." The sight of the older girl makes Orpheus' cock jump beneath Deedee's hand.
"He likes you, Esene," she says, squeezing the swelling bulge inside his pants, "I can tell." Esene giggles and sits down beside Orpheus. Deedee asks her if her father is at home.
"No, he's on a flight. Sleena's here, but she's with somebody right now."
"Sleena's her mother, Orpheus. Wait'll you see her."
"Hey, you want to see her now? " says Esene.
"You said she was with somebody."
"Yeah. That's what I mean. We can use the intercom."
"Groovy!"
"Come on, well get them on the big screen-but you have to promise not to tell her about this! God, she'd kill me!"
They promise and she leads them into a room with a padded floor, leather furniture and a thirty-four inch intercom tube. "Can I use your shirt, honey?" she says to Orpheus. He removes his shirt and she hangs it over the eye of the intercom. "She won't see us now, but don't say anything after I turn it on, because I can't turn the audio down." She dims the walls and punches up her mother's room.
A tangle of naked flesh flashes on the screen. Two figures on a large green bed. A big-titted redhead sits astraddle the face of a lean bodied young man who is passionately lapping her hairy crack while she sucks his cock. The man's feet are toward the intercom eye.
"Deedee says, "Wow, tha-!"
"Sh!"
Deedee and Orpheus are sitting on a leather divan, Esene on the floor in front of Orpheus, her feet tucked under her. As the sex act on the screen progresses, Esene bends forward until her elbows are on the floor, her chin resting on the heels of her hands. Orpheus' gaze oscillates from the woman on the wall to the girl on the floor. Deedee opens his fly and pulls out his cock. Now Esene lifts her ass from her heels and elevates it to the full height of her thighs. The rear flap of her tunic is drawn up so far in back that Orpheus can see a few shadowy sprigs of hair between her parted legs. Deedee reaches out and throws up the flap, unveiling the golden globes of naked flesh. Esene does not protest. She does not seem to have noticed it. She continues watching her mother and the man. Deedee takes Orpheus' hand and places it between Esene's thighs. He feels the warm fleshy crevice close upon his middle finger and relax again. The fuzz is still slightly damp from her swim. Inside the groove is another kind of dampness. She goes all wiggly and swaybacked, her knees moving further apart on the cushioned floor. Deedee whispers in his ear: "Go ahead, she wants you to."
Orpheus unsheaths his finger from Esene's hole, stands up, steps out of his pants, and drops to his knees behind her. Her cunt seems to reach out, grasping for the head of his cock with its fuzzy lips. He reaches beneath her tunic and his hands close over the smooth firmness of her tits. Her stiff nipples bore into his palm. Inside, she is slick and alive. Her cunt is like a hand, clutching the full length of his cock as it slips in all the way, and the cheeks of her ass open like a flower and grind against his belly. She is tight and hot.
Very tight and very hot.
In the room above, Sleena raises her head, strokes the glistening member with her hand and lets the semen spurt up into her mouth, an expression of orgasmic ecstasy distorting her beautiful features, and at the same time Esene's body also begins to quake, and Orpheus once more feels his fluids pumping into the warm tight palpitating female darkness...
"But in his heart," said Morikand, "there is a deeper darkness." Those words, at least, I remember distinctly.
The next evening Orpheus is standing on the terrace beside the pool. Esene and Deedee are swimming, their naked bodies flashing and splashing in the brightly lit water. Beyond the terrace is the sea, overhead the sky. The bright white spark of Earth Station VI glides across Virgo and disappears into the umbra, and below the automated city drones on in its frantic lethargy. Sleena parts the leaves of a potted willow and approaches the railing. A long white silk gown swishes about her legs and tiny bells tinkle at her earlobes.
"Well, young man, how do you like our place?"
"It's very nice."
"What were you looking at?"
"Nothing-just the stars."
"Would you like to go to the colonies?"
"I-I don't know, I guess I would."
"Esene gives you a very good report, you know... Ha, ha! You don't have to blush, my daughter and I have no secrets." She leans back against the railing, and the front of the silk gown stretches tightly across her big round breasts, the profiles of their prominent nipples strikingly delineated. The blue light from the pool tints her gown and her face and shimmers up and down the swells and hollows of her voluptuous body. She looks at the naked girls cavorting in the aether-like water. "Do you like Esene? -sexually, I mean?"
"Uh-I-"
"Oh, come on, honey, you're not in the orphanage now. I am quite aware that you had her last night, and I'm delighted. Now, tell me, was she good?"
"Yes."
"That's better. What about me? Do you think I'm pretty-for an old bitch, I mean? "
"You're not old. I think you're... beautiful, Mrs.-"
"Call me Sleena. You're trying to flatter me now so I'll take you with me to the colonies, aren't you? Never mind, I like it. You know, that was a crazy thing you and Deedee did, running away. If my husband should agree to let you two stay with us, it's going to be some trick to get you cleared for space, let alone the Mars passage. However, Jerry is quite influential in the Service and not above a little deception now and then-and of course they are eager as hell for colonists these days, not nearly so restrictive as they used to be, you know. So, it might just be possible, if, um... " She slides her hand along the rail and touches Orpheus' arm with her forefinger. "... if things work out... In the meantime, though, it's not even safe for you to leave the apartment. They'll have warrants out for you, and if you're caught, there won't be anything I can do for you." She ran her finger up his arm. "Are you cold?"
"No."
"You have goose pimples on your arm... It's warm in my bedroom... Would you like to go up?"
"All right."
The bedroom is warm and luminous. The plush nest of hair in Sleena's crotch is as bright as flame, and her sucking mouth is like a furnace.
"Yet there is a void within him, a cold darkness, vague and unfulfilled."
"Have you ever fucked a mature woman?"
"No."
"How old are you?"
"Fifteen."
"Your body is... so wonderful... Esene told me your name, but I'm afraid I-"
"Orpheus."
He runs his fingers through her golden hair in the droning hollow of the naked night and says: My name is Orpheus.
He is walking alone down a shadowy corridor in the lower levels. It is late and the workmen are sleeping. I too am sleeping, not many miles away, my old wife beside me, my young cunt cradled in my arm. On all sides the dry womb of the somnambulist city grinds out its aimless and abortive patterns with mathematical precision. He stops at an intersection and peers down a side alley to his left. There is no one in sight. The throb of electronic music drums faintly through the walls of the alley. He enters the alley and approaches an open doorway beneath an amber light. He is looking up a narrow hallway, dimly lit and empty. He glances back once in the direction he has come, steps across the threshold and proceeds up the hall. His footfalls echo thinly in the hollow shaft. Up ahead an inner door opens, emitting a beam of greenish light and a spasm of music. Into the light steps a woman. A black woman in a tasselgown. She leans against the wall opposite the door, one hand on the wall, the other on her hip, watching him. There is a sound behind him. Footsteps. A voice: "Hey, you there!" He goes on. The woman smiles and throws back her tassels, baring the entire front of her brown body, her huge black nippled breasts, her deep navel, her broad flaring hips, the bristling black wool of her deep-cleft cunt. "You there! Stop!" He quickens his pace, but a brawny hand clutches his arm and spins him around before he reaches the woman. "Arright, kid, let's see your papers." It is a militia man. He does not seem to see the woman. "I don't have any papers."
"Let's go then. Get a move on!" When they reach the alley door, Orpheus twists around in the man's grasp and looks back. She is still there, her brown skin shimmering in the green glow, still smiling. She raises one hand and calls to him. "Bye, kid."
"Good-bye," he calls to her, "Good-bye!" In the rear seat of the verticar, speeding toward Control Central, Orpheus peers through the window grating, searching once more for the dark places in the sea, but it is all a blur now. His eyes are full of tears and he is weeping quietly.
-"He remembers, doesn't he? He has a vague haunting memory of how it was before the bastards hit us. He remembers the dark holy warmth of the Ompholos, a warmth he is unable to find anywhere in that world. He is being propelled outward into that dead sterile macrocosm of perpetual light and motion at an inverse ratio to the intensity of his inner compulsion toward the microcosmic silence and fertility of his own soul. He is split apart, adrift; his false starts, his apathy, his aimless convolutions, all the things which should tend to drive him inward toward the earth, toward the chaotic warmth which he seeks without knowing he is seeking it, instead force him ever outward, away from the center, farther and farther into that lacklove world of ordered sterility, a world which is atrophied at the core, but which nevertheless continues to expand into the universe by sheer momentum like a cervical cancer. Because it is necessary that he be caught between these two forces, like-why, by God, he is Aquarius himself! He is the very-"-"Oh, stop, stop! Ha, ha, ha! Rustam, you 're beautiful; you are a baroque fugue, a passcaglia of infinite extension. Sometimes I think you are a transmogrification of Dante himself. Me, I am only a flutesong, a chant beside a dying campfire, a formless ditty wheezed on a kazoo. Look:" -He removed his helmet and placed it upside down on Slit's belly-"Let us assume that we have the Absurd here before us in the helmet; immediately you will set about pouring it into molds of the most intricate and logical design, creating a grand pattern of interlocking forms, balanced and awe-inspiring. But my own portion would be gone long before you finished: I would have downed it in one gulp. To me the Absurd is like wine, meant to be drunk and enjoyed; to you it is a chunk of marble to be shaped and subdued."
"Listen, Morikand, one time when I was a kid I was sitting at a table in the school library. I was supposed to be working on a history paper or something, but I was reading Shakespeare instead-or maybe it was a fuck book, I don't know. But anyway, another boy and a girl were at the same table. The boy said to the girl, 'Judy, you wouldn't know what to do with a piece of ass if you saw one sittin' here on the table in front of you, would you?' "- "Ha! Rustam, I think you 're getting it."
I wasn't, but maybe that was the closest I ever came.
This time Orpheus is taken to the orphanage, the next time to the detention home, and after that to prison. He escapes every chance he gets, though he does not seem to have any real desire to escape, and each time he is quickly caught, and another five or ten years are added to his sentence. He spends most of the first two decades of the present century in solitary confinement. It is my feeling (or is it Dante's?) that it is not so much that he desires freedom, as that he is subconsciously driven time and again into the close darkness of the "box", as convicts call it. However that may be, on New Year's Day of the year 2019 Orpheus' days of escape are over. He and a veritable army of other undesirables are unceremoniously transferred to the Moon where they are put to work in the mines and underground foundries of the Montes Caucasus. Thus, eighteen years after his false start, Orpheus enters space through the back door. He will never set foot on Earth again. A year later he is exhaustively examined by a team of doctors, thoroughly interviewed by a board of officials, and sent forthwith to the Environmental Research Center for Interstellar Travel, called Er City, a space station complex in the asteroid belt, there to be used as a "Class A servicer for Class A breeding females," or in other words a stud. (Apparently, by this time the depopulation problem has become acute.) It is here, across a crowded room, against a backdrop of wheeling stars, that he sees her for the first time...
Everyone is exactly where they are supposed to be, precisely on time: Orpheus, Esene, Dr. Grosswell, she-and even I. Twenty-three years earlier, for instance, in 1998, back on old Mother Earth, old Father Smythe is out on prowl with a chemically induced hard-on. I had slipped out of my domicile in the dead of night and ducked into the dark decay of the city's substratum-the slum level, the "lower depths." It was like walking through the bowels of Mollock. I expected at any minute to reach the rectum and run slap into a mammoth turd, or to look up suddenly to see the head of a gargantuan cock come charging up a dark alley like a battering ram. One good jab in the ass and the whole rotten edifice from Boston to Key West would collapse like a fart full of iron filings. But perhaps I was only reflecting on my own condition. At any rate, to speak plainly I was out for cunt. Following the directions given to me on the sly by one of my cronies at the Death House-as we affectionately call our humble dormitory-I turned into a narrow lane, descended a sunken stairwell and tapped lightly on the door at the bottom. A tired brittle voice came from within. "Yeah?"
"Shad Morris sent me," I muttered nervously, "he said you have girls." I heard the rattle of a latch inside, pulled the door open, and stepped into a small gloomy room. An old woman with a shawl over her head sat at a wooden table. Her back was to me, and she was hunched over some papers. Beside her hung the string that operated the door latch. She glanced briefly at me and put her wrinkled hand back over her shoulder, palm up. I looked at it. She snapped her fingers. I said something apologetic, hauled out my wallet, and placed the last dregs of my pension in her hand. She counted the money and said, "Not enough for a fish, grandpa." I begged her pardon. "Pussette," she said with weary impatience, "That's what you want, I presume." From her tone of voice I expected her to add, you dirty lecher. That I could feel put down by a whore mother gives you some idea of the magnitude of my psychological collapse. I told her that was all I had; didn't she have something older? "My daughter," said the old woman, still bent over her papers, "She's forty." Forty! I don't know why, but I said, "All right."
"Last door on the left."
I passed through a ragged curtain into a short dusty hallway and entered a room that smelled of mold and perfume. The "daughter" lay on the bed, supine and stark naked. Her body was as pale as a grub worm and her hair was black as coal. Her big dark-nippled tits were saggy and her waist was thick, but nevertheless she still had a pretty good shape. Twenty years earlier she must have been dynamite. From the looks of her skin it had been about that long since she had seen the light of day. Here at ground zero it was always twilight, even inside the dwellings, and this room was no exception. What little illumination there was came from a tiny light tube inside a cracked cylinder of black glass. This lit a portion of the scaly ceiling fairly well, but the rest of the room hardly at all. "Well," I said, hanging my shirt on the clothes rack, "looks like you're ready."
"I am," she said without taking her eyes from the ceiling. Her voice had a distant dreamlike quality-and something else that for a fleeting instant made my skin crawl. "I've been preparing for you. You've come just at the right time, just as I knew you would. Everything is ready." What the hell was this? Perhaps I had stumbled into the nuthouse by mistake. She hasn't looked at me, I thought, evidently she takes me for someone else. I said, "Honey, I'm Jo-"
"No!"- she clapped her hands over her ears-"Don't tell me your name! I don't want to know. I don't want to know anything about you. I don't even want to know what you look like. You are the man who came at the right time, that is your only identity. When you leave this room you will no longer exist. Please, be kind. It must be this way." Maybe I went along with her in the hope that what she said might come true-that when I left the room I would cease to exist. I should have been so fortunate. She asked if I would please turn out the light, and I did. "Now come to me," she said, "and don't speak."
I crawled between her legs in the rank dark and explored the folds of her hairy cunt with my fingers and my tongue, and her warm thighs closed about my head with a strange gentleness-I might almost say, in a loving embrace. It was vaguely disconcerting, but the fetid swamp between her legs soon restored my equilibrium, and I went at it like a pig at the trough. I groped for those jellybag tits and lapped her into a thin froth, letting my mind regress back through the fantasies of my youth. I took her legs over my shoulders, drove my rehabilitated cock up her slimy hole, and pumped her with all the force and speed I could squeeze out of my feeble body. Strangely enough, she was tight and hot inside. Very tight and very hot. I made her tits slap together as rapidly as I could, like I used to do with yours, love, in the old days, on the floor of my cottage, on the banks of Lake Leethy, before the bomb fell...
As I was going out the front door, something made me turn around. The old woman had twisted halfway around in her chair and was staring strangely at me, her thin lips slightly parted, her eyes steady and unblinking. There was no doubt about it, the place was a madhouse. I said, "Goodnight, mother," and got the hell out. The dank visceral streets now threatened to choke the life out of me. I could scarcely breathe. I kept looking back to see if I were being followed. The overhead beams were swarming with ghosts and there was a skeleton in every doorway. I was cracking up. I stumbled into the nearest lift, ascended to my own level, fell into the first conveyor that came down the track, and rode through the buzzing streets, neither asleep nor awake, hearing nothing, seeing nothing, like a zombie, all night long.
It was the second time I had fled thus. The first time was twenty-one years earlier. That time I tried to escape from what I was doing to them, this time from what I had done. I had come full circle, and they had come back to haunt me. That bomb was a bomb of liberation; I ran and never looked back. Less than twenty-four hours after the blast I had met Morikand and entered upon a decade of ecstasy. As long as the War raged on, the ecstasy endured. With every earthquake, with every fresh outbreak of the plague, with every new indication that the Last Things were at hand, the ecstasy increased. But now the War was over, and Morikand was gone, and there was no more ecstasy. Smythe is Smythe again, and the aged ghosts of his past have materialized and returned to haunt him with their love-to lead their "prodigal home to his terror - The furious ox-killing house of love" -as the poet says. But I am only trying to confess, in my circumlocutious way, that at the instant in which she recognized me, as I stood there with my hand frozen to the door latch, I also recognized her.
Two days later there was a knock on my door at the Death House. I opened it, and there she stood. She wore the same shawl over her head. She looked so sad and tiny I thought my heart would burst. I tried to speak her name, but it was impossible. My knees turned to jelly, and I thought for a moment I was going to collapse in a heap at her feet. We embraced without a word and wept acrid tears that ate through to the bone. It was a good hour and a bottle of wine later before we were able to converse intelligibly.
"But how is it possible, May? It was a direct hit. Nobody could have lived through that. The house was demolished."
"We weren't in the house. You remember the Blacks that were hiding in the house across the street? That's where we were, Ellen and I."
"Getting fucked?"
"Yes. It was your idea, remember?"
"Only if they paid for it."
"Paid, my ass. Either we gave it to them or they took it."
"What about little Johnny? "
"He was in bed. We never even found his body. He must have been killed instantly. You were out in the shack?"
"Yes. I was knocked unconscious, that's all."
"We looked for you, John. We looked all over."
"When I came to and saw the house, I thought you were all dead. I just started walking. I hoped they would drop a bomb on me, too, but they didn't. They were hitting all around, but they missed me every time. I stayed out in the open, hoping to get shot, but nobody shot me. I walked all the way to Uranus in the middle of that holocaust without getting a scratch, and then I twisted my ankle and fell into a drainage ditch. That's where I met Mor- But never mind all that now. Tell me what you've been doing all these years."
"You saw it."
"I... Oh, shit! I'm too goddamn old to say I'm sorry, May. What the fuck good would it do anyway?"
"John, I didn't mean it that way. I've gotten to be such a gruff old bitch, I don't know how to talk to a... I don't know how to speak to my own... Oh, John! I still love you! I've never stopped loving you!-" She broke down again and wept in my arms. Her tears that day nailed me to the wall, and I have been bleeding to death ever since. The floor of my cell is a slough of black blood, and in the blood are the shadows of the images that will sound my final knell. On that day they will hand over the obsidian knife, and with a sign of relief I will lay myself open from gut to gullet in the prescribed manner, lift out the atrophied lump that was intended to be a heart, and place it upon the altar of Priapus. (But I am an old fart, love, and given to raving; clamp my nose in the vise of your ass and I'll thaw rapidly.) After a while my wife took another sip of wine and continued in a different tone.
"John?... You realize who that was, don't you-in the room?" I nodded-gravely, I suppose. "But there's something you don't know. I only found out today, myself. She stared into her wine.
"When you were with her... did she act strange?"
"She did indeed!" I repeated Ellie's nonsensical words to her verbatim. There was a long pause before she went on.
"John... that day before the air raid, there was something I was going to tell you. I never got a chance. You see, a few days before that Ellie had told me she was pregnant. She didn't want you to know, but-"
"Pregnant! Wasn't she taking her pills? "
"One night she forgot."
"Did she know whose it was?"
"Yes."
"Well?" ?
"It was yours, John."
"Mine... Well, all right, May, goddamn it, so it was mine. Where is the child now? "
"The 'child', John, would be twenty-one now-if it were alive. But it isn't. It was never born. She had an abortion. It wasn't just that it was yours; after all, she was only seventeen, and we were alone then, with no place to stay and nothing but the clothes on our backs. A friend-or one of my clients, I should say-performed the operation. After that, the way we had to live-well, there was no time for babies... "
"But, May, what's this got to do with the way Ellie acted the other night?"
"Maybe nothing. It happened a long time ago-it almost seems in another world. But maybe it has everything to do with what's happened. Maybe it affected her deeper than I had-"
"What do you mean, 'with what's happened?' Just what has happened? "
"You say she said she was ready for you."
"Yes."
"She meant it.-Not ready for you, of course, not ready for her dead father-" (Dead, yes, but still walking around-with a bone on, no less; I am one of those idiots who never knows when to lie down and die.) "We heard the news, of course, at the end of the War about a John Smythe that was involved in the anarchist trouble in Big Cy, but we never thought it was you. After all those years we... It was you, then?" I nodded. "But then, you were sent to prison-"
"I only did five years. Been out since '93. I've been rehabilitated, can't you see? They even gave me a pension. It's the American way. But, all right, you thought I was dead; go on."
"Ellie said nothing about this to me until today. Three days ago she went to the Ward clinic as usual for her examination and pills. While she was there, somehow, she stole a bottle of FSH. The next day she gave herself an injection."
"To... induce ovulation?" I saw it all now.
"Yes. She had decided to have a baby. I doubt if I could have stopped her, even if I had known. I've never seen her so radiant, John. It was as if the years had fallen from her: face, and she was young again... " I didn't know how much more I could take; I was crumbling inside like a dry sponge. I was back on the wall in Bull's dungeon, and May's every word put another turn on the winches. "She said when she heard the rap on the door, she knew it would be for her, because it was time. Everything was ready. She said this time she didn't want to know who it was. I wasn't to tell her anything about the man-nothing at all. That was the way it had to be, she said. I didn't know what to say. I couldn't get your face out of my mind. If it was really you... Oh, it's just too incredible!"
Full circle.
"You... you haven't told her it was... me?"
"No. I didn't go to sleep until the next morning, and when I woke up she was gone."
"Gone!"
"She left a note that said she wanted to have her baby in another place... and that she loved me, and that was all."
"But the Genetics Bureau-if she really is pregnant, they'll her and take the baby."
"I know there are places under this city that even the Militia doesn't know about, John. Truthfully, I doubt if we'll ever see her again, pregnant or not."
This conversation took place approximately two years ago; since then, as I've said, May has been staying here with me. She has exchanged one rat hole for another; the only difference is that not even fungus will grow in this one. Should an unwary gnat buzz in, it would die within seconds; it's the same with the human occupants, it just takes a little longer. Anyway, the necessary papers were processed without too much trouble-the Death House is not one of the Government's primary concerns-and May has been able to keep the fish house open-part time, as it were-so with what the house brings in, plus my pension, we don't do too badly. Before I began writing again, I even did a little pimping for her on the side, just like in the old days. It is as if we have started in again where we left off, as if nothing at all had happened in the interim. Six weeks ago May left the building early in the morning and didn't return until late in the evening. When I asked her where she had been, she said she had seen Ellen.
"Ellen! Well, where? How did you-?"
"They're both doing fine.
"Both?"
"She and the child. She thinks they're onto her, though. No doubt they'll grab the kid before long."
"Well, tell me about the kid-what is it?" (I repressed a desire to ask if it looked like me.) "A little girl. With hair the color of moonlight."
"What does she call her?"
"Celeste."
Early the next morning, after a sleepless night, I began writing this book.
He sees her for the first time across a crowded, room against a backdrop of wheeling stars. Their eyes meet, and for a time they are alone in the abyss of space. She is one of several dozen other girls who have just filed in from the docking bay at the center of Station Alpha. Sitting on the bench in the vestibule of Dr. Simian's breeding ward with four or five other inmates, Orpheus had watched without interest as the shuttle pod came slowly out of the void and smoothly lodged itself in the tubular dock at the hub of the space station like a metallic phallus stuck halfway up a dry rectum. Through the windows in the spoke walls he had seen the distant figures of the girls descending the gangway that leads to the wards. And then they had been led into the vestibule, and he saw her. And she saw him.
They are lined up against the curving panel of siliplex at the south end of the room, and from where Orpheus sits, her face is in perfect alignment with the station's stellar axis, ringed round and round by the bright turning triangle of Octans and the jewels of Hydrus. Her golden hair is like a liquid flame against the black gulf, a living sun, a nova, flooding the frozen heavens with its light; but in her sensual feline eye there is a warm dark fecundity.
Like the others, she is dressed only in a short white chemise and carries a towel folded over one arm. Apparently, they are lined up for an examination of some kind. They all appear to be in their early twenties, and each wears a breeder's medallion around her neck. But to Orpheus, all the rest are a blur; only she is in focus. Her wonderfully full firm breasts thrust their points boldly against the thin tight front of her chemise, tinting the white cloth with a subtle warmth, a pink translucence, and the short skirt which embraces the seductive flare of her hips adheres to every delicate contour of her belly and the triangular protuberance below it. Without taking his eyes from her, Orpheus touches the arm of the man on his left and says, "Those girls, why are they here?"
"They come over from Gamma, so I guess it's them breeders goin' out to Pluto. Grosswell's funhouse, you know. You see that big liner that came in from Callisto the other day-the electric?"
"Yes."
"That's the tub that's takin"em out."
"Why are they sending breeders to Pluto?"
"Beats the shit outa me-unless they're gonna feed 'em to Grosswell's pussycats-or maybe to Grosswell himself. You hear what that crazy bastard's up to now? "
"No." Orpheus is still looking at the girl.
"Don't you ever watch the news, Orphie? "
"No."
"Well, you should, it's better than a circus these days. The son of a bitch has developed some kind of giant cat-like a house cat, except the damn thing is as big as a bear, half animal, half machine. What that has to do with the star shot, I'm fucked if I know. They get away with anything nowadays as long as they call it 'research'-'specially Grosswell. You know, Orphie, when it gets to where a crackpot lunatic like that can get appointed to such a position, man, there's somethin' bad wrong in the world. And now all them cunts goin' out there to that God-forsaken rock-for what, I'd like to know? Man, I wouldn't trade places with one o' them for-" The man sitting to Orpheus' right cuts in: "Don't listen to that shit, Orphie, those girls are going to the Pluto base to train for the star shot. I heard the Warden talking about them. They're going to be the first generation mothers, handpicked by ERCIT, the cream of the crop from every breeding station in the System. They look it too, don't they?... Hey, forget it, Orphie old man, they're even out of your class. Ha, ha!"
A voice from the speaker over the office door: "Prisoner G Ten Eighty, the doctor will see you now."
"Hey, Orphie, wake up, man, your turn in the barrel."
Orpheus continues to look at the girl at the other end of the room until they call his number again, and then he gets up and enters the office.
Dr. Simian: "Relax, Silabron, have a seat. I'm afraid I have bad news for you. You're being scratched from the stud book and shipped out. As you may or may not know, your impregnation record, after thirty-one breedings, is zero. I've stalled ERCIT as long as I can, and now I'm afraid it's out of my hands. We've attacked this problem from every side, Silabron, and have succeeded in making neither head nor tail of it. Physiologically, you are an astoundingly perfect specimen of male humanity, virtually without a flaw. In all my years with Nat Repro I've seen nothing like it. Moreover, your sperm count has been at the optimum on every check, and-well, to put it simply, you are apparently as fertile as a jackrabbit. Your stamina and rebound factors are without precedent. When you first arrived here, Silabron, I thought we really had something. 'Think of the broods he'll throw!' I said to myself. I had visions of a new race coming from this station, a race truly bred for the stars! To be truthful, you were to be the mainstay of my upcoming debate with Dr. D. U. Grosswell III on the virtues of human manpower in interstellar travel versus those of his damned humanoid computers. That's why I've held onto you for so long, Silabron, but"-he shrugs his shoulders and turns his palms up-"I've used up my last chance, it seems. Barring some unforeseen miracle, our funds here at Er City-and all the other breeding posts as well-are going to be sharply cut and transferred to the Pluto base. In my opinion the System is taking the wrong turn, but without some spectacular evidence to back me up-evidence which I had hoped you would provide-I am only one small voice among a dwindling minority. Dr. Grosswell is very persuasive, and he has made dramatic advances out there to back up his arguments, bizarre though they seem to us conventional biologists. Yes, I'm afraid the trend is set... " The doctor examined the backs of his hands for a moment, popped out his tinted contacts, looked Orpheus in the eye, and said "Silabron, I know you're wondering why I'm telling you all this. I'm clutching at straws, that's why-probably the last straw. You are a convict, an incorrigible criminal according to your records, but you are also a veritable god among a dwindling race of weaklings. The fate of mankind may very well rest upon whether or not you can help me crack this problem. Perhaps you don't give a hoot in hell about mankind, let alone the System, or whether or not my funds are cut, and that's all right with me; I can understand your position. But I'm sure that this transfer order does concern you-and it should. You're to be sent to Pluto, Silabron." He watches closely for the reaction on Orpheus' face; there is none. "I'm sure you know something of the place-at least enough to know that Er City is a paradise in comparison. Because of your perfect conformation you've been selected as a model for Dr. Grosswell's android research. Now, there may still be a chance for a delay, if only you can give me something to work on, something I can use as an excuse for a temporary deference of this thing. Now think, Silabron: has there been anything unusual in your manner of ejaculation, for instance, or any sort of peculiarity in the internal reactions of your females at the time of emission-anything at all that might contribute to sterility in a super potent individual like yourself?... Speak, man!"
"No sir," says Orpheus in a voice without expression, "nothing I can think of."
There is a long pause while the doctor looks at him, studying his features, then he lowers his eyes and turns his attention to some papers on the desk before him, obviously annoyed and defeated by Orpheus' lack of response and apparent unconcern. "Very well, Silabron, you are dismissed. You will be taken aboard the Augusta tomorrow.
Orpheus rises to his feet and says, "Sir, is that the electric that's been standing off?"
"Yes," replies Dr. Simian sharply, "Dismissed."
Passing through the vestibule, Orpheus looks for the girl, but she is gone...
"Morikand, this girl-who is she?" By this time we had been on the little mangrove island for about a week, and the Comet was lost among the stars. It was not a bad gig: there was no fresh water of course, but there was usually a shower in the afternoon, and we had rigged a cistern from one of the sails; we had plenty of fish, and Charlie had even found an oyster bed not far away; Slit gave Charlie ample opportunity to use his new cock ("Moby Dick, she called it, quite appropriately, I thought), and the master and I also got our share; nightly Morikand would entertain us with installments of his "Orphic vision," as I might call it, and all in all it was not unlike the blissful days of our quest for Prester Steve-except for one thing, rather difficult to describe: I had begun to get a vague feeling of something resembling claustrophobia, as if the sky itself-the very embodiment of freedom and openness-were closing in on us. It seemed to me that Morikand's voice, as he told his tale on those warm nights on the shore of that dark rippling reach, itself reflected this foreboding mood of mine. One night I asked him about that, and he said, "Yes, now that you mention it, Rustam, it was rather painful at this point. You see, Harry had pulled my mother into an upright position and was trying his very best to stretch her breasts over her shoulders in order to suck them from behind, so that his angle of penetration made a wider angle with the axis of her body, with the result that he was banging the hell out of my head with his cock. I was getting my impressions of Orpheus' last twenty-four years at the rate of about a day and a half per stroke, which up until then had amounted to from two to three months a minute; but now Harry was really pouring it on, and I was getting it at a good nine months per minute. So with the increased force of the mallet-raps on my fontanel, together with the months piling in like that, yes, I did get a bit of a headache, Rustam, and it is no doubt a manifestation of that somewhat painful memory which you detect in my voice at this stage of the story. Sorry, old man." Slit giggled; Charlie said, "Wow," rolled his eyes, and dropped a live oyster down his throat. But the next night my gloomy mood returned. Instead of replying to my question about the girl, Morikand shoved another stick into the fire and said, "I'll be gone for a few days, maybe longer."
"Gone?" I said, "Why?" He laughed. "Don't worry, Rustam, I'll finish the story first." When Charlie asked him where he was going, he said, "I'm mentioning it now so you won't be alarmed if you find me gone in a day or so. I don't know yet exactly when I'll split." It had never been unusual for Morikand to disappear into a swamp or a slum-sometimes he stayed out a week or more-but never in all the time I had been with him had he given so much as a word of forewarning; this was unheard of and consequently, in his mouth, those casual words had the ominous ring of a farewell speech. We could get no more out of him, but as he continued his tale, Slit lay her cheek on his chest, and I saw the flicker of firelight on a silent tear.
Orpheus is lying in bed in his cell. It is dark. Suddenly the amber eye over his door lights up, and he hears the hiss of the corridor hatch outside. A female voice comes softly over the door com: "Silabron, G Ten Eighty?"
"Yes," replies Orpheus, sitting up but not covering his nudity.
"Markham, Double-you Thirty Oh Three, reporting for service."
Before Orpheus can speak again, the cell door shoots open and hisses shut. There under the amber light stands a dark-haired woman in an overcoat. She appears to be in her mid-thirties and is not wearing a medallion. Orpheus reaches for his robe, but at the same time the woman opens her coat and lets it fall from her body. She is naked. Her body is short and voluptuous, almost too heavy in the hips and thighs. Her tits are large and well shaped with not too much sag, and the nipples are dark little buttons. Her belly is softly rounded and dented with a deep navel, and her bush is a dense black T running up the lips of her cunt and across the prominent rise of her mound, its angles filled in with sparser curls. Orpheus replaces his robe on its hook and leans back against the cell wall, his legs spread casually on the bed, his cock draped over his balls.
"There's been some mistake," he says, "I'm not in service anymore."
She smiles and shakes her head. "There's been no mistake. I was sent here to be bred."
"Where's your medallion?"
"What?"
"Besides, you're too old to be a breeder. You'd better get out of here before the Warden catches you."
"What do you mean, too old? I wasn't too old for you the last-!" She breaks off and starts again in a softer voice: "How could I have gotten in here without a breeder's card? Tell me that."
Orpheus shrugs. "I don't know."
"All right then, so I'm a breeder." She walks seductively to the bed and lies down beside Orpheus. "So Breed me, daddy."
"All right. But you'll have to arouse me first. I wasn't expecting to have to work tonight."
"... Why are you trying to insult me?"
"I'm not.-Oh, wait a minute, I'd better turn on the cameras." He reaches for the switch.
"No!" she says, grabbing his hand."-Don't turn them on... please."
Orpheus chuckles to himself and settles back down on the bed. "Would you like to tell me who you are now?"
She pauses, and then looks up at him with a sly smile. "No. I want you to guess."
"All right."
She throws a hot, heavy leg across his body and mounts his waist, sliding the hairy mouth in her crotch up and down his belly and massaging his nipples with her fingertips. Soon his navel is full of her secretions, and she scrubs them into his skin with the brush between her thighs. Lifting her arms high and tossing her head back, she throws her tits into a violent, ponderous, bouyant, bounding, side-to-side motion, all the while grinding at the base of Orpheus' cock with her broad grasping ass. Now she leans forward and dangles her dugs above his face. So far Orpheus has not moved; he lies there with his hands folded behind his head and his legs stretched out, passive and unresponsive to the passionate efforts of this mysterious visitor. But now, as a shadowy nipple swings near his lips, he opens his mouth, and she lowers it in. His tongue encircles her stiffness, and she smothers him with her pillows of flesh. He applies the subtlest suction, and she comes down around him in groaning ruin. He can feel the jaws of her sex opening like the sticky petals of a carnivorous flower, gnashing at the flooded pit of his navel, the billowing muscular undulations of her belly rolling against his in destructive waves of uninhibited lust. Her trembling hand closes around his now erect penis and presses its length into the crack of her ass, her hot palm sliding down the long thick shank to his balls, her finger probing for his anus. Her nipple breaks from his lips, and hooking her feet under his thighs, she bends her glowing body into an arch, the dark stubby spires of her milk domes pointing toward the glinting eyes of the overhead cameras, the raw bore of her gaping cunt staring him in the face. He takes his hands from behind his head and slips them both into the creamy gash, knuckle-deep, exploring the palpitating membranes of her hole with his bunched fingers and squeezing her clitoris from its foreskin with his thumbs. Her whole body begins to thrash and quake, and when she again pulls herself upright he sees that her mouth and cheeks are wet with drool. She adds one of her own fingers to the eight already in her pulsing wound and brings it out dripping with sexual syrup. Lifting her buttocks from his abdomen, she leans forward and with a kind of frenzied tenderness smears the heavy juice over his lips. Orpheus smiles and draws his hands from her cunt. "Here," he says, "want some more?" With a hungry grunt she plunges her face into his cupped palms, slurps up their contents, bows her head above his, and lets the pungent brew of cunt-flow and saliva drip through her lips into his open mouth. And then their faces are together, and their tongues intertwine in the teeming fluids like living eels in a tank of honey.
She engulfs the head of his upright cock in her hairy maw, and with an urgent spasm brings her buttocks down hard upon his hips, piercing herself to the womb on his sword of flesh. They go into a noisy, sloppy, churning fuck that rattles the very anchors of the bed, and Orpheus lets her bring herself off twice before he releases his seminal volleys into her lurching body, and when it is over her balloonlike tits and the valley between them are slick and dripping with her own drool.
"You slobber a lot, don't you?" says Orpheus calmly, as though he had not exerted himself in the least.
"I'm... sorry," she pants weakly.
"Oh, that's all right. It's just that breeders don't usually slobber."
"... Don't you know who I am yet?"
"Well, I have a vague idea."
"You do?"
"Mm hm. You're the rich-bitch wife or daughter or mistress of some brass-balled ERCIT official, and you thought maybe it would be fun to come down here and see how the other half fucks. You got your sugar daddy to fix it up with the Warden, and here you are. So how about it? Does a convict fuck any better than an administrator? " She glares at him. "Your arrogance is very distasteful. I'm beginning to think you really are incorrigible, like it says in your records."
"Aha! You've seen my records; that proves I'm right. The Warden let you go through the files, and you selected the stud with the biggest cock, namely, me. Right?"
"And instead I got the one with the nastiest disposition!" And in a softer tone: "If you knew who I was, you wouldn't be so rude."
"Tell me, then."
"No," she says with a giggle, "you have to guess, or else I won't help you."
"Help me? How?"
"I'll tell you later-if you guess my name."
"I have it! Rumpelstiltskin."
She giggles and rises to her knees beside him. "Maybe this will help."
Throwing a leg over his neck and presenting her ass to his face, she lowers her mouth to his half-limp prick and begins cleaning up the excess semen and cunt drippings with her tongue, thoroughly licking off the stirring member, nuzzling into his sticky pubic hair, lapping the mucous from his scrotum, even pulling the cheeks of his ass apart and wiggling her tongue a short way into his anus. By now his hard-on is fully restored. She slides her lips down the shank one time and says, "Ring any bells?"
"No," says Orpheus, smearing the goo from her dripping cunt over the broad round cheeks of her ass with both hands, "but don't stop now. Maybe it'll come to me."
He pulls her hairy mouth down to his open lips and sinks his tongue into her hole, his nose burrowing into her puckering asshole, his hips driving his cock rapidly in and out of her tightly pursed lips, and he is striking the opening of her throat on every stroke. Forcing her heavy thighs further apart and lifting them slightly, Orpheus draws his tongue from her vaginal tube and sucks the stiff little finger of her clitoris from its folds, lapping it with such fluttering fury that she comes almost immediately, shuddering helplessly and almost choking to death on the shank of flesh lodged in her throat. Her released fluids flow freely over Orpheus' face as he continues his attack, and in a moment her hot, drooling lips are sliding up and down his member again, faster than ever. This time Orpheus times his orgasm to coincide with hers, and as the first spurt of fluid shoots into her mouth, her shaggy foaming cunt comes shuddering and flapping down over his sucking cheeks, covering his entire face like a mask of meat, flooding his ears with its bubbling discharge. His first blast knocks her mouth from the spitting muzzle, and instead of getting a new grip with her lips, she finishes him off with her hand, letting the heavy dollops jet into her eyes and mouth, as her body lurches on uncontrollably through an extended chain of bed-rattling, firebomb orgasms that leave her weak and gasping like a fish on the breach. It is a long time before she has the breath to speak.
"Well?"
"Well, what?"
"Didn't that remind you of something-right there near the end?"
"Why, yes, now that you mention it. It reminded me of one fine day in the Lunar Caucasus. There I was, taking a pleasure tour of the mines, having an early lunch in a little cafetorium overlooking the Sea of Serenity, when suddenly a mess guard walked up and pushed my face into my bowl of mush."
She glares at him again, but this time there is a certain softness in her eyes-pity, perhaps. She lowers her eyes and says, "I can understand your bitterness, Orpheus, but why do you have to take it out on me? It wasn't my fault that you ran away... Was it?"
"No."
"I wanted you to stay with us. Why did you go? Was Mother so bad? Daddy could have prevented-"
"Wait." He puts his hand over her mouth. "In the first place, I'm not bitter. I was only having a little fun with you. In the second place, I wasn't ready to guess yet. I'm waiting for the next clue."
She smiles up at him for a moment and then swings her legs over the side of the bed. "I think I know the one you mean," she says, dropping to her hands and knees, backside toward the bed. Orpheus swings his feet to the floor, cradles his elbow in one hand, his chin in the other, and scrutinizes her hindquarters.
"Now where have I seen that tail before?... "
"It's a little wider than when you saw it last, I'm afraid." She looks back over her shoulder at Orpheus' cock, which is slowly straightening out between his legs, and adds, "But then, you've grown quite a bit too." She drops to her elbows, her chin resting on the heels of her hands, her knees out two feet apart, presenting an unimpeded view of the inverted bud of her asshole and the soggy flower of her cunt. Orpheus extends one foot and strokes the unfolded crack of her elevated ass with his big toe, nudging her anus and parting the bearded lips below it. He replaces his foot with his hand, and in seconds she is oozing again and pumping her legs like a cat in heat. Sinking to his knees behind her, he starts his prick in her cunt, slides his hands down to her dangling tits, and drives home. "Ah, so it's you, Esene."
With a passionate throaty laugh she says, "And who might you be, sir'!"
He kisses her nipples in the eternal hissing night and they sink to their knees in the fur-clad snow in the icy falling light of the orbiting fluorescence, and the cold distant eye of the sun is eclipsed by the looming head of the shaggy cat, but its snarl is a hymn in his heart, and he says: My name is Orpheus.
They are stretched out on their backs in the warm bed under the amber light, whirling through the barren void of the fifth shell...
"Orpheus?"
"Hm?"
"Why didn't you stay with us? You haven't told me yet."
"I don't know... Maybe for the same reason that I'm not going with you this time."
She sits up. "What? What do you mean, you're not going with me? It's all settled, honey."
He shakes his head, still gazing at the ceiling. "I'm off for Pluto tomorrow."
"Orpheus, I told you, my husband is taking care of that first thing in the morning. He's on the board of ERCIT, Orpheus, don't you understand? He can arrange for your pardon and everything. You're through being a prisoner. Oh, I can't wait to show you our new home on Titan! It's right on the outer edge of the base, and there's nothing behind the house but mountains. Just wait till you see Saturn setting behind those mountains, Orpheus! You wouldn't believe anything could be so beautiful. And we'll be together... If you want other girls sometimes, I won't mind. After all, I have to sleep with Tommy some of the time. Oh, God, I can't stand to think of you being sent to that horrible rock, Orpheus! How could you say such a thing, after I've... Orpheus, are you listening to me?"
"Yes."
"... You said, for the same reason... What is the reason, Orpheus? " Orpheus looks at her for a moment before answering. "I really don't know, Esene. Maybe I've been heading for Pluto for a long time now."
"I knew you'd come in time."
"In time?"
"We go aboard the Ship at zero minus twenty-four hours." She looks up at the revolving donut glowing in the black sky. "When the station comes around again, it will be time."
"Where are you from, Celeste?"
"Earth Station Six. Originally from Earth, but I don't remember anything about it, except that it was a big bluegreen ball in the sky. My earliest memories are of nursery."
"Oh, I wish there were more time, Celeste. I have never wanted to know anything about anyone, but I want to know everything about you."
"What do you need to know except that I loved you from the first moment our eyes met? My life meant nothing to me before that."
"Nor mine. But what have you been doing since you left Er City?"
"Waiting for you. The rest has been like a dream. Officially, I've been in training for the Sirius Mission. -You know, Orpheus, I never wanted to be a part of this flight. The thought of growing old and dying out there in deep space made me cold all over. I used to cry at night thinking about it. At first I thought of committing suicide, just so I could die in sight of the sun. But ever since that moment in the ward I have lived only for this, for you. Nothing else is important. Every time I have closed my eyes for the last three years, I have seen your face."
"And unofficially?"' "Unofficially, I have been the concubine of Dr. Grosswell-and the plaything of his wife Zama. It is she who has been responsible for every advance made out here, did you know that?"
"No."
"She has done it all. He does nothing but send reports to the Government and play with the girls they send him for android models. But what does it matter what I've done, Orpheus? I have never really existed until now."
"Neither have I, Celeste, never until now."
"It's true, isn't it, that I'm going to have your child? Tell me again."
"Yes. It's true."
"Oh, Orpheus! Make love to me again! Hurry! Before they come."
From his couch beneath the antenna deck Orpheus is gazing absently out through the glass bubble over his head. The drone of the intake pumps has ceased, and there is only the occasional clank and ping of the EVA crew on the hull of the scow, securing the fuel ports. The unwieldy looking tanker emits a silent burst of white fire from its stern nozzles and slips away toward the surface of Ganymede. But Orpheus is not looking at the tanker, nor at Ganymede, nor even at the huge striped ball of Jupiter looming ponderously off to starboard; he is gazing into the black depths beyond, into the nooks and crannies of the cosmic ocean. There is a muffled clicking sound beneath him, and he looks down to see Esene floating up through the hatch, her voluptuous body sheathed in sea green crepe, her massy tits rolling and rebounding weightlessly. She closes the hatch, pulls off her deck shoes, and launches herself gently and deftly up to the level of the couches.
"All refueled and ready to go, lover," she says, drifting past Orpheus at arm's length, "We're off for Saturn, the jewel of the Sky. Aren't you excited?-Hey, how about a free fall fuck to celebrate!""
"Again?" says Orpheus, reaching for her ankle but missing. "We just celebrated getting here, now you want to celebrate leaving? First we celebrated leaving Er City, then we celebrated the Ceres sighting, then we celebrated the halfway point, then we-what did we celebrate after that?"
"If you're tired of me already, I'll tell Tommy to turn this thing around and take you back."
"And I suppose we'd have to celebrate that, too, hm?"
"Stop playing hard-to-get. You're my employee now, you know. If you fall down on the job, I'll have to fire you. Come on, let's screw."
"As you wish, Madam," says Orpheus, unsnapping his couch hooks and drifting out into the center of the little cabin.
"Oh, now stop that, Orpheus. There's nothing wrong with being a domestic, you know. If you're good, I'll put you in charge of the estate. You'll have your own car and everything. But if you're bad, I'll cut you off."
"How awful."
"You know, you are a very uppity son of a bitch, Mr. Silabron-for an ex-con." He makes another lunge at her, but she sails out of reach, laughing at his clumsiness. "You think you'll ever get your spacelegs, Orpheus? Hey, how do you like my new suit?" She checks her drift against the hatch wall and floats up toward Orpheus again, her body spreadeagle and parallel to his.
The light faceted fabric of her suit covers her limbs and trunk like a long-sleeved turtlenecked leotard; but her nipples protrude bare and bold through round holes in the crepe, and a pear-shaped opening in the back exposed the crack of her ass all the way to the crotch. She rotates slowly in mid-air as if skewered on an invisible spit.
"Very nice," says Orpheus. "What did the tanker crew think of it?"
"Oh, silly, it's the style nowadays. This is 2021, not the Dark Ages, don't be so old fashioned. If you think this is something, wait till you see how they dress on Titan. You'll think you've walked into a nudist camp."
"I thought it was cold there."
"It is outside the colonies-so far they've only got minimal heating out on the steppes-but in the colonies it's seventy-five degrees all the time, and the air is wonderful. It doesn't have that stale artificial smell to it like at Syrtis. You've never been to Mars, though, have you? Someday we'll go there together. We'll travel all over the Solar System together, Orpheus."
"Fucking our fool heads off all the way."
"Correct. Undress, slave, and let me look at that beautiful thing between your legs again."
"Yes, ma'm," says Orpheus, slipping out of his shirt and unzipping his hip-huggers.
"That's a good boy. Mmm, I see I don't leave you entirely unmoved yet... Oo, it makes my pussy slobber just to look at your naked body, Orpheus. When we get to Titan, I forbid you ever to wear clothes around the house. I want to go around all day with a gooey crotch. Every time it starts to dry up, I'll take another look at you."
"At least your thighs won't chap."
"Are you calling me fat, you skinny bastard? "
"No, not exactly. Anyway, I rather like a fat cunt. Come here."
"Hey! What are you doing?-" Anchoring his legs around an upright, Orpheus reaches out and grabs Esene by the crotch of her suit, flipping her upside down. "There's only one thing wrong with this suit of yours. I'll show you." Holding her legs apart with his elbows, he hooks his fingers into the lower edge of the rear vent and tears a square patch from the crepe, so that her cunt as well as her ass is now exposed to view.
"There, now that's much more practical. The other way was only good for rump-sticking; this way you can fuck, pee, crap, jerk yourself, anything you like, without taking it off, see? Maybe I should go into fashion design, what do you think?"
"Oh! You son of a bitch, you've ruined my new suit!"
"Ruined it? I've improved it. Besides, you can afford it."
"You are absolutely incorrigible and should never been released from prison. Fuck me, before I send you back."
"Let's not rush into this, lady. How about a little sixty-nine while we're in position?"
"Yum!"
She gobbles up his cock, and he laps her hairy cunt into a bubbling stew as they tumble slowly over and over, gripping each other's waist and rolling erratically through the air under the curved vault of the cabin. The creamy sex lather whipped up by Orpheus' tongue whirls and spins and hovers in their wake like beads of mercury, and with every revolution the clusters of foam grow denser and the musky odor of cunt fills the chamber. In a slow-motion rebound off the hatch wall they float upward again into the vault, fetching up beneath the glass bubble, and through the fuzzy screen of Esene's bush Orpheus looks out into the deep cold reaches of space beyond the turning bulge of Jupiter's poisonous shoulder, beyond the bright unblinking eye of Saturn, into the black void where the dead Comet pursues its dismal and inexorable course, and for a moment his tongue slacks its pace. But only for a moment. Locking his gaze into the deep warm crease between Esene's trembling buttocks, he attacks her clitoris with renewed fury, and as the first orgasmic spasm contracts her flesh, he buries his jowls in her churning gash, drives his tongue deep into her hole, and pumps a tremendous load of semen into her mouth. Her cheeks fill and overflow, and the thick teeming strings and globs whirl away among the drifting foam...
"God, look at this cabin! Looks like we're in the middle of a snow storm."
"Most of it came from you. If you'll pardon my saying so, Mrs. Markam, you've got the sloppiest cunt in the world."
"God, you're crude. That settles it, I really am going to send you back."
"Fair enough."
"Right after you fuck me."
"Swim over this way, will you? I want to make another alteration to your suit."
"Oh, Christ, what now? Oh well, go ahead, it's ruined anyway."
Orpheus takes her nipples between his thumbs and forefingers and gives her floating breasts a violent shaking. When he lets go, they continue to bound and reverberate freely. "One thing about this zero gee business, it certainly takes the sag out of your tits."
"Now listen, Orpheus-!"
"Ah-ah-ah!" He puts his finger to her lips. "I was just about to give you a compliment."
"I don't believe it."
"It's true. I was about to comment on what nice cute little nipples you have.-A sloppy cunt, but very cute nipples."
"You're still going back. What are you going to do to my suit?"
"I'm just going to improve the front view a little." And with that, he rips the garment open from neck to crotch. "There, now I can watch your tits floating around."
"I could have just taken it off, you know."
"No, no! Not the same. Total nudity is too pure, too innocent. We want to keep it dirty, you and I, very nasty and very dirty, or else we are finished, don't you see? Those are the key words to the success or failure of our relationship, Mrs. Markam-nasty and dirty. By them we stand or fall."
"Orpheus, sometimes I can't tell when you're serious and when you're joking."
"Let's fuck."
Holding her ankles high in the air, he drives his cock into her oozing hole and in a rapid-fire burst of short strokes pounds the portal of her cervix into a shuddering dynamo, charging her body with blood-boiling electricity. Then he draws her ass up hard against his belly, the head of his member jammed tight into the door of her womb, motionless except for a subtle pulsation of the shank caused by the alternate contraction and release of his anal muscle, and says in a low threatening tone, "Now, come, you dirty slut, come."
And she does. Her black fringed, gold-lidded eyes roll up in her head, and the drool runs out the corners of her amber lips, and he watches the orgasmic waves roll up the creased bulge of her belly and break against her heavy thighs, and he can feel her foaming cunt-flutters rippling up and down his cock in a spastic strangle hold that starts his semen rushing into her lurching body.
Through the curving glass wall beside the bed he watches the scalloped shadow of the house shortening and shrinking across the rock garden in its flaccid retreat from the dim sun rising over the colony. Beyond the shadow, beyond the garden wall and the ruddy chiaroscuro of the foothills, beyond the sheer sunlit escarpment of the plateau, the bright vertical needle of Saturn's rings pierces the wine-dark sky. There is only the sound of Esene's breathing, the whining pulse of the piped-in music seeping through the walls, and the eternal muffled drone of the atmosphere pumps at the head of the valley. Saturn sinks fat and yellow toward the gloomy crags, its right limb sliced off by the shadow of the rings. Orpheus extends his hand at arm's length toward the planet, wraps his fingers around it, his fist blotting out both disk and rings, and squashes it like an egg. Above his thumb Sagittarius, with his arrow drawn to his ear, his bowstring rotting away, fades slowly in the brightening sky...
The intercom on the wall beyond the foot of the bed throws a flicker of bluish light upon Esene's bare belly, and a man's face appears on the screen. He has a square jaw, weak eyes and graying temples. Orpheus rolls over on his back and props his head on a pillow. "Good morning, Mr. Markam," he says with ironic cheerfulness.
"Er-Good morning, Orpheus. I'm sorry, I didn't know you were... I'll ring back later."
"Oh, that's all right, Mr. Markam, I'll wake her up." He pokes Esene in the ribs with his elbow. "Hey, wake up! Your husband's on the pipe."
Esene opens her eyes and says, "Huh?-Oh, it's you, Tommy." She yawns and stretches, spreading her legs wide toward the leering eyes of the intercom cameras. "What time is it? "
"I know it's early, dear, but we have to leave in a few hours. I don't want to keep the Commissioner waiting. And also... Well, I'll call back when you're decent."
"Might be a long wai-"
"Shut up!" Esene hisses, putting her hand over Orpheus' mouth; and then to her husband: "Give me five minutes, Tommy!"
The screen goes blank.
"Why do you antagonize him, Orpheus?"
"Who, me?"
"For three years you've done nothing but heckle the poor man. You have him to thank for your freedom, you know. Come on, let's get dressed."
"One more fuck to start the day off properly."
"Don't tempt me." She rises to get up. "Come on, we haven't got time-" Orpheus pulls her back down cm the bed. "We've got plenty of time. I don't see why we have to go on this absurd trip, anyway." , "All the staff members are taking their wives, Orpheus, it wouldn't look good for Tommy if I didn't go."
"Who gives a shit?"
"There you go again."
"But why me? Why can't I stay and whore it up a little while you're gone?"
"Where I go, you go, lover. How could I do without you for three whole months? You do enough whoring as it is-too much. Besides, anybody else would give his right arm to see the Hercules launch at close range. Don't you care anything about anything? The first voyage to another star-just think of it!"
"Hip hooray."
"Oh, you're so cynical, Orpheus."
"I'd rather watch it on the pipe, over a nice piece of young pussy. How can you get so excited about the beginning of something you'll never live to see the end of?"
"Oh, you wouldn't understand, you're so self-centered. Besides, it might not be like that, you know. They expect to have warping reactors perfected well within the lifetime of the first generation aboard the Hercules, and if they do, then they'll send a ship to take the personnel off and get to Sirius in less than ten years."
"Tremendous. By that time either Grosswell's androids will have wiped us out, or else well be too old to give a fart one way or the other. Either way, I'd rather stay home and fuck."
"If I told your parole officer how you talk, he'd lock you up. I had a surprise for you, but now I'm not going to tell you."
"Oh, come on, tell me." He flips her over on her lace and hoists her ass up against his stomach, running the head of his cock along the slippery lips of her hairy cunt and slapping her tits together. "Tell me, or I'll go off my hormones."
"Oh... stop that... mm, go ahead, stick it in."
"Not until you tell me the surprise."
"Well, when we go out to the actual launch site, you'll have to stay on Styx Station Two with the other domestics. Well be gone for a week. So... to keep you out of trouble until I get back, I hired a little playmate for you. Fourteen years old and just your type. Wasn't that sweet of me?"
"I'll let you know after I see her."
"Stick it in, you son of a bitch!"
Just as he does so, Tom Markam's face reappears on the wall screen. They are facing the intercom, Esene on all fours, Orpheus on his knees behind her, slopping it to her dog-style. He looks his employer in the eye and sets up a rolling pelvic stroke, slow but very pronounced on the upbeat.
"Sorry, Mr. Markam," he said, "I told her we didn't have time, but she insisted." Esene lifts her face to speak, but Orpheus steps up his tempo and she can gets nothing out but a slobbery whimper.
Markam clears his throat and says, "Orpheus, I want you to go up to the spaceport right away and supervise the loading of our personal effects. Hurry up with that now, it's getting late."
"Be right with you, sir. This won't take but a minute. Care to watch the finish? We don't mind, do we, baby?"
Esene answers with a blubbering grunt.
Markam says, "No thank you," and flicks off.
Orpheus lies stretched out on the couch of his stateroom on the rim of the giant spacedock Styx Station II, his feet propped up, his head cradled in his hands, watching the whalelike mile-long hull of the starship Hercules on the wall screen as it swings along in its ponderous orbit around Pluto, surrounded by a swarm of tenders and shuttlecraft. His eyes close from time to time, but he is not asleep. The voice of Interstel Control drones on.
"... and preflight preparations for Mission Hercules. We are at zero minus thirty-four hours, twenty minutes and counting. Final countdown procedures will begin at zero minus twenty-four hours, System Time thirteen point zero. Commander Morgan and the ERCIT officials-Commissioner Hitly, Vice President Gorgan, Secretary Markam and others-with their wives, have just left Styx Two in the shuttlecraft and are on their way to the launching orbit. A minor flaw in the number four ion engine, detected earlier by Anna and confirmed by on-board computers, has now been corrected, and all systems are go. We are presently awaiting word from Dr. Grosswell at Ground Base Pluto for confirmation of... " The door slides open, and a young girl with light brown hair steps into the stateroom. She wears a short pseudo-leather kilt with thin straps widening into small cups at her breasts. The pink tips of her nipples peek out through little holes in the centers of the cups. Orpheus turns down the audio with his toe and looks the girl up and down.
"Where'd you get that?" he asks.
"Mrs. Markam gave it to me. She's mad as hell at vou, Mr. Silabron."
"Why?-Stop calling me that, will you. If there's anything I hate, it's young cunts calling me mister."
"What's your name then?"
Orpheus. He runs his fingers through her moonshade hair in the stalking dark under the slagheap sky and says: "Why is she mad at me?"
"Because you didn't show up to see her off."
"Oh, that. She'll get over it. Well, I guess it's you and me for a while, hm?"
"Looks like it." She strolls up to the couch and lifts a booted foot to the cushion. Orpheus lifts her kilt and looks at her crotch. It is bare, and the little bush sprouting at the top of her slit resembles a nest of fine brown cobwebs. A powder-puff bush.
He fluffs it up and says, "I used to know a girl with a pussy like that. Of course, she was several years younger than you."
"Like 'em young, huh?"
"Well, I was, only fifteen at the time, myself. Let me see your tits, Tina.-Tina with the teeny titties."
"They're big enough to shove up your ass if you don't like 'em, buster."
"Touche! You really know how to handle old farts like me, don't you?"
"You better believe it, Orfus, or whatever the fuck your name is."
"Orpheus, Orpheus! Ha, ha! I think I'm going to like you, Tina. You're not too bright, but that's OK. Hey, but look, you think that little hole of yours can take a thing like this?" He opens his robe arid shows her his cock; it stands bolt upright, and he makes it jerk a few times to drive home the point. "-Without coming apart, I mean?"
"Shit," she says with a mixture of scorn and apprehension, "I've had bigger ones than that. Lots of them."
"You're sounding more and more like that girl I knew-the one with the cunt."
"Most girls have one."
"Yes, I guess you're right. Well, come on, let's make a stab at it-so to speak. Take off your clothes."
Tina unbuttons her straps and steps out of the kilt. Her tits are small but nice-rounded pyramids tipped with pink-and her narrow waist gives a sensual flare to her slim milk-white hips. She has that quality of wanton innocence common to girls who have just crossed the threshold of adolescence. At least twice a week I take one of these succulent types to bed, and-Ah, but I've said that already, haven't I? Perhaps I'm getting senile. A good sign, no? (Don't slow down, old girl: by God, we are getting there!) Orpheus stands up and slips out of his robe. The girl presses her sleek budding body against his, sandwiching his cock between them, her smooth flat tummy rippling along its underside, her stiff titties boring into his ribs. The top of her head just reaches to Orpheus' shoulders. She strokes his buttocks, slips her fingers into his crack and lifts her face to his, her little pink tongue extended at full length between her tangerine lips. Orpheus bows his head and sucks it into his mouth, lifting her easily off the floor by the cheeks of her ass and sliding her warm belly up and down his oozing member, making a trail of slime from her pussy to her belly-button. In the one-fifth G at the spacedock's perimeter she is as light as a feather. Orpheus releases the suction on her tongue and says, "How about a little topsy-turvy?"
"Huh?"
"Like this." Holding her by the waist, he flips her upside down. "Just let your legs fall over my shoulders... That's it. Hmm, you look very nice upside down, Tina."
"You don't look bad, yourself," says Tina from below, slipping her lips over the head of his cock and gripping his hips to steady herself.
Orpheus pulls her furry flower to his lips and parts its tender petals with his tongue as her mouth and tongue slides and slithers up and down his shank with a practiced stroke. She has done this lots of times. On the screen the picture has switched from the bright spiny whale with its blinking, bleeping school of scavengers to a ghostly rolling panorama of the barren pock-marked face of Pluto, lit only by the illuminators of Styx II as it tumbles along its tight orbit less than a hundred miles up. It is a grim, scarred landscape, strewn with fleshless bones and full of empty eye-sockets, cold and dead beneath its threadbare shroud of manufactured air. Over the wide warm V of Tina's up-ended ass, the cheeks curved like the horns of Aries, Orpheus watches this skull of a world until the girl's orgasmic tremors shatter it at the fault lines. At the verge of ejaculation he ceases to pump his hips and lowers Tina to the floor, drawing his cock dripping from her mouth.
"Don't you want me to finish you?" she pants, look up at him with a puzzled expression, "I swallow, you know."
"I'm sure," says Orpheus, "but first I have to do something. Now, look, get up on your knees and let your tits touch the floor... That's it. Now, swing your ass around toward the door, like this... " he places her in position. "Yes,-but spread your knees a little farther apart-that's it. Good! Now, I'm going out for a minute, and when I come back; I want to see you just like that, OK?"
"OK."
"Good girl." Orpheus puts on his robe and goes to the closet. He opens his suitcase, draws a laser gun from a side pouch, slips it into a pocket of his robe, and replaces the suitcase. At the door he looks back once at the naked hindquarters of the whorelet. "Now, don't move till I get back."
"OK, but hurry."
"Won't be a minute."
Orpheus opens the door and leaves the stateroom. He moves down the curving corridor in long loping steps, almost at a jog. At the recessed door of a lift he comes to a halt. Almost immediately the sliding door shoots back and a man in flight gear, a pilot, steps out of the compartment with a friendly nod to Orpheus. Orpheus says, "Sorry," and brings the butt of his gun down hard across the man's head. A few minutes later he is in the lift, dressed in the pilot's flight suit, rising through the perimeter decks toward the launching bay at the axis of the Station.
In the cockpit of the ground shuttle, slipping silently down through the black sky, Orpheus sits motionless in the pilot's couch, his arms folded over his chest, his eyes fixed on the ragged horizon of the pitted landscape. He is listening absently to the voices over the ship's radio.
"So far we have had no radio response from the stolen shuttle, Dr. Grosswell, but we have a good track on him, and it looks as though he's using the preset descent pattern. From what Secretary Markam tells us, the man has little or no flight experience, so he probably won't be able to alter the landing coordinates, in which case he'll come down right in your lap, Doctor. Over."
"Acknowledged. We'll be ready for him, Captain. We're having a bit of trouble down here, also. It's already been logged into Anna. I'm rather surprised we haven't had a hold."
"We can override and punch in a manual hold, if you think the situation calls for it, Doctor. Over."
"Negative, Captain. Anna Knows best."
"What's your trouble?"
"Rather similar to yours. One of the Hercules breeders disappeared from the briefing stables a few hours ago. However, search is underway, and we don't foresee a major problem as yet. We're still a good ten hours from embarkation. How are your men? Over."
"No serious injuries, Doctor, nothing we can't take care of up here. Do you have the shuttle on your scopes yet?"
"Affirmative, Captain. Heading straight for the spaceport. No problems."
"If he should shift coordinates, Doctor... Well, what can we do?"
"Hm, hm, hm. We have ways, Captain, we have ways. He has to touch down somewhere, and when he does"... Hm, hm, hm. Over."
"Just a moment, Dr. Grosswell, I have Secretary Markam on the line."
During the pause in transmission Orpheus looks down at the panel of crisscrossing lines before him. At the juncture of two of the lines a yellow light is blinking on and off. Orpheus unfolds his arms, pulls a switch below the panel and punches two buttons along its perimeter. The yellow light shifts to another juncture, and the razor-edged mountains below begin a slow drift to the right.
"Styx II to Ground Base. Dr. Grosswell?"
"Ground Base. Come in, Captain."
"Dr. Grosswell, I've been speaking to Secretary Markam. He wants me to relay this on to you. The parolee 0. Silabron is to be taken alive, and under no circumstance is he to be harmed in any way unless absolutely necessary. The Secretary was, er, quite insistent on this, Doctor. Over."
"Captain Ryan, you may inform the Secretary that no one is ever harmed on Pluto... unless absolutely necessary. Pluto out."
"-Dr. Grosswell! He's broken trajectory! Check your scopes! Come in, Doctor."
"Styx II, this is Pluto Control. I'm sorry, sir, but Dr. Grosswell has left for the spaceport. I confirm your reading on the shuttlecraft. It's heading south of us. Present course should bring it down in the Plain of Dis, about... five miles outside our perimeter. Over."
"Outside the heated zone? Over."
"Negative, but not far from it, sir."
"Can a ship set down out there-intact?"
"Not likely, sir."
"... Very well. Keep me informed-and I want to speak to Dr. Grosswell as soon as possible. Styx II out."
With a muffled hiss of its mainjets the shuttle begins its vertical descent. Orpheus rises from the couch, slips into his parka, and calmly descends the companion ladder to the air lock. He dogs the inner hatch and braces himself between the padded walls. The aligning jets sputter musically beneath him, making their final corrections, and then there is a gentle jolt and the sound of crumpling metal. The airlock shudders and tilts heavily to the left as the jets shut down. Orpheus pulls a recessed lever and there is a brief hiss of air. The outer hatch parts in the middle like an opening eye, and Orpheus climbs out into the ancient dark.
In the dim yellow light from the shuttle's cabin he can see a long rocky rift between the skeletal crags, stretching away into the blackness, straight as a Florida railroad. He moves ahead at a brisk pace and does not look back, and the cavern of the turning night is filled with music.
Morikand lifted the baby from its mother's arms and carried it off into the tangled jungle. When we had bathed Slit and recovered from the emotional exhaustion of what seemed to us a miraculous birth, Charlie and I went to look for him. We found the baby cradled in a tangle of huckleberry vines in the shade of a cabbage palm at the edge of the hammock. Morikand sat cross-legged beside him, gazing out over the black water toward the setting sun. Charlie said, "Hey, man, whatcha gonna call him?" and Morikand said: "Orpheus. His name is Orpheus."
"Oh, Orpheus! Orpheus-"
"Celeste-" His flesh swells in the boiling chamber of her sex and his glands ignite in a burst of flame. Her legs entwine, his naked hips as though to hold him there forever, as her body heaves and thrills to the hot surging jets of life streaming from his loins like magma...
He is lying beside her on the fur coat, tracing circular patterns with his fingers upon her breasts as they rise and fall in the ghostly glow of the spacedock falling toward the eastern rim of the crater. The finger moves down between her breasts, into her shadowy navel, and on over the smooth flat swell of her moon-white belly. As it enters the damp rumpled nest of her silvery maidenhair there is a sudden flash of green light across the top of the crag. It flashes again. And again.
"It's found us," says Celeste without taking her eyes from Orpheus' face.
"Yes," Orpheus lowers his lips to hers and kisses, them tenderly. "It's time for you to go. They'll be here in a minute."
He takes her dress from the overhang of their shallow cave, brushes the snow from it and hands it to her. Then he stands up and for the first time turns toward the flashing green lights. The eastern rim of the crater rises above the height of the crag, and on its crumbling summit, silhouetted against the hollow sky, crouches the cat-thing, its hideous eyes blinking on and off with mechanical regularity. It is huge and shaggy, and its whiskers glow red like incandescent filaments. Bits of rubble crumble away from its naked claws and rattle down the rampart. Then there is another sound, and Orpheus looks around to see moving lights in the rift, approaching. The headlamps of the search party.
"Orpheus-"
"No. Don't speak anymore. Go now. Hurry."
Celeste fastens her frontless party dress and extends her hand to touch Orpheus' face for the last time, her cheeks sparkling with tears. And then she is gone, scrambling down the side of the crag and running across the crater floor to meet the men coming up the rift. Styx Station II sets in the, east and only the green lightning of the cat's eyes splits the blackness. Orpheus vaults up onto the overhang, and the eyes go from green to red as the monster gathers itself for the spring. Orpheus smiles, extends his arms as in a gesture of invitation, and says: My name is Orpheus.
With a blood-red snarl and a flash of metallic fangs Harry Jones pumps his sluggish load into Cynthia's rectum, and the tired old Comet once more begins its dismal pilgrimage to the sun, and that was the last night we were to see Morikand alive, because in the morning he was gone, and I am leading a quiet life here in the Death House, reading Nietzsche and Nostradamus and dreaming of some lost apocalypse.
