A World Between (22 page)

An exterior shot on the shimmer-sceen entrance to a large silver building, a grander version of the Transcendental Science lodge in the Cords. A plaque over the entrance proclaims: “Pacifican Institute of Transcendental Science.” A man exits, bare-chested in a Pacifican bucko mode, but wearing a high-collared black cloak reminiscent of a Transcendental Science tunic. The angles of his face are like hard steel slabs, and his eyes are dead-looking and deeply sunken.

Cut to a tracking shot; the camera follows this man as he boards a floater and skims down a typical Gotham street. But the scene on the street is far from typical. Men move haughtily down the center on floaters, motorcycles, powerskates, many wearing the high collars of Transcendental Science, all of them ramrod-stiff with cold eyes focused on some internal vista, arrogant zombies. All the women are confined to the peripheral glideways, slinking along with stooped shoulders, and some walking hand-in-hand. The lighting is grim and ominous, the atmosphere thick with unwholesome sexual tension.

Cut to an interior shot of a luxurious Gotham tower living room—plush couches, deep carpeting, a panoramic window looking out over the city. A beautiful red-haired woman sits on a couch, a smoldering sexual vision, barechested, wearing only a filmy skirt. The arrogant man from the previous shot enters, flips off his cloak, throws it on the rug imperiously, strides over to the couch, towers over the woman, snatches her up into his arms, and kisses her with a cold inhuman passion.

They stand there for a long moment kissing. The man’s hands begin to roam over her body, cupping her breasts, sliding between her legs. Their hips grind into each other rhythmically. The man moans hoarsely and slowly bends her backwards toward the couch...

Suddenly the woman breaks away, dances across the room, and stands there, hands on hips, her body a paradigm of desirability, her face tilted upward proudly, a thin smile creasing her lips.

Woman: “No!”

Man:
"No?
What do you mean,
no,
Lysistrata?” He gestures commandingly. “Come here, woman!”

Woman: “No means
no.
We’ve decided. No more getting off for you, bucko, until you mend your ways. We’re tired of making love to cold machines. Transcendental Science or
us!”

Man (angrily, moving toward her): “Stop this foolishness...” He leers at her cruelly. “There are always
other
women who’ll be more cooperative...”

The woman removes her skirt and runs her hands over her bare flesh tantilizingly.

Woman: “Not any more. No woman will get it off with any man until the Institute is banished from this planet forever. What’ll it be—your minds or your wongs?”

Man: “I’ll show you what it will be!”

He dashes across the room, grabs her, throws her down on the couch, and leaps on top of her. The woman offers no resistance. She just lays there like a slab of dead meat as he groans and writhes atop her. After a few minutes, he stops, defeated.

Man: “How long do you think you can keep this up? You have needs, too...”

A closeup on the woman’s smiling face.

Woman: “And we have
sisters
to fulfill them. Think about
that
while you whip your whacker, bucko!” She laughs and twists her face into a parody of ecstasy as the frame freezes.

Woman’s voiceover:
“Lysistrata,
sisters! Stay plugged in and see just how powerful Sisterhood can be!”

Karla Mantee laughed. She snuggled closer to Angela on the loungecouch, and kissed her briefly on the lips. ‘Tell ’em, sisters!” she said, waving a fist at the screen.

“Who needs men? There are plenty of women around who know how to give women what they need. Let ’em all whip their whackers!”

Angela scowled. She pulled away from Karla, and shook her head in that gesture of wiser disapproval that Karla knew so well.

“What’s the matter, Angela?”

“That,”
the older woman spat, nodding towards their net console, Karla eyed her uncertainly. “But that’s great...
isn't
it?” she said somewhat plaintively. “It’s going to give Pacifican lesbos a whole new army of lovers!”

Angela snorted.
“A whole new army of lovers
she mimicked sarcastically. “Now
there's
a wonderful turn of phrase for you!” .

“I said something wrong?” Karla asked innocently. Angela sighed. She smiled ruefully and put a warmly protective arm around Karla’s shoulders. “It’s not you, babe,” she said. “But there’s an ancient saying: when politics intrudes in the bedroom, love goes out the door. Or words to that effect.”

Karla cocked her head at her lover. Angela was older and more sophisticated than she was, and she knew it, and it was part of what drew Karla to her. But sometimes it made her awfully hard to fathom. “You mean it’s bad because bucko-lovers wouldn’t be sincere if they got it off with us just to make a point with their men?” Angela nodded. “There
is
that,” she said. She scowled again. “But that’s the least of it. What really worries me is that these effing off-worlders are telling Pacifica that every Pacifican lesbo is a natural ally of theirs, as if it were impossible to be a lady-lover and a real Pacifican too. That we all think with our crotches. It fucking well
insults
us. And it’s not going to make life any easier.” “Hey, I never thought of that...” Karla said.

Angela grimaced. She hugged Karla briefly, and gave her a little smile. “I’ve got a feeling you’re not going to be the only one,” she said. “Sisterhood is powerful— but so is the stench of a big vat of rancid jellybelly oil.”

The lights of Gotham dwindled away behind the boat, a handful of stars cast from the sky, a ghostly sheen of light rippling on the waters. The only sounds were the waves lapping at the bow of the boat, the wind snapping the sails, the keening of the lines. Now at last Cynda Elizabeth knew what it was to be truly alone on the naked surface of an alien planet; like the tall blond man guiding the boat over the surface of the sea, Pacifica was frightening and seductive, exotic yet deceptively tranquil, breathing with the oceanic rhythms of raw creation.

Why am I here? Cynda wondered. This is an insane risk. If Bara found out...

Perhaps that was part of it. Something about this planet moved her toward risk, perhaps for its own sake, perhaps because she yearned to taste its reality before that which made it the world it was was swept away by the irresistible tide of history.

She had seen much on her tour of the planet, yet she had been allowed to touch nothing. The rolling green plains, the icy beauty of Thule, the sere desert Wastes, the endless emerald isles of the Island Continent—they had all unreeled themselves around her like a travelogue tape while she remained encapsulated in her own reality. Surrounded by sisters, traveling, eating, even sleeping in a communal body, all under the watchful eyes of Bara’s unseen agents.

Contact with the Pacifican sisters had been limited to speeches and formal meetings; never alone, never on a one-to-one basis. Cynda felt that she had seen everything and knew nothing. As for the Pacifican breeders—the mission had moved around the planet as if Pacifican men did not exist.

But these strange creatures
did
exist, striding through the streets like ancient machos, roaming the world at will, working side by side with their women everywhere, bursting with a confident energy of a sort she had never seen before, so utterly unlike the few pale breeders of Earth— and although her mind could hardly contain the concept, unlike the machos of long ago, too. Almost as if they were sisters inside, trapped in alien bodies. Though they didn’t seem to
feel
trapped
m
their hard-muscled bodies; they seemed to glory in it, and in the way the sisters looked at them...

“Let’s just drift for a while,” Eric said, tying a line to the tiller and lowering the sails. He leaned back against the gunwale of the open cockpit, his bare chest slick with salty spray, glistening in the starlight. Cynda felt a thickness in her throat, a queasy lightheadedness rising from her chest.

“Are you glad you decided to sneak away from your keepers, Cynda?” he said, staring at her with an insinuating smile. “How do you like what you see out here, away from the city?”

“It’s .strange...ynda said softly. “Ifs not like Earth at all. Maybe Earth was like this long ago, before the Holocaust, before humans poured over every centimeter of it...

Eric nodded. “That was the dream of the Founders,” he said. “A place where men could keep their civilization without... without overwhelming the planet. I hope we’ll always keep it that way.” He frowned. “But you people wouldn’t understand that...

Cynda looked out over the dark waters as the boat drifted in a ragged circle at the whim of the sea. The city lights seemed so long ago and far away. Earth, the ship, the mission, her sisters, the past—these were an even dimmer reality. All that existed was the boat and the stars and the sea and two humans lost in the dark immensity, and the only real time was now.

“Perhaps we might learn,” Cynda said.

Eric smiled at her, arched his back, and shook his long blond hair.
“You
might learn, Cynda,” he said. “You’re not like the rest of them.”

“I’m not?”

He grinned and suddenly seemed to flow across the cockpit toward her. All at once he was sitting by her side. She could smell the strange heavy scent of his body. He flung an arm over the gunwale behind her, his bare skin not quite touching her shoulders. Her muscles tensed; something told her to pull away, but she resisted, and sat there staring up at the stars, unable to move, unable to look at his face.

“They wouldn’t be sitting here alone in a boat with... a
breeder ”
he said, sneering the last word contemptuously.

“What do you mean by that?” Cynda blurted, suddenly knowing all too well why she was here, knowing that he
_#
knew, too...

“You know what I mean,” he said huskily. With an almost subliminal movement, his arm touched her shoulders.

Her body quivered as if from a jolt of electricity. The bubble of queasiness that had been rising from her chest into her throat burst, filling her with a giddy, lightheaded freedom. I’m going to do it, she realized. I don’t care. I have to. Why shouldn’t I?

“Tell me about your breeders, Cynd^,” Eric said softly. “Have you ever gotten it off with one?”

Cynda flushed. “It’s our duty to produce a viable embryo if we can,” she said. “Radiation has made it very difficult. It was my duty...”

Eric nodded. He moved closer. She could feel the hardness of his body against her side. “Did you enjoy it?”

“I felt nothing,” Cynda said, but it was a twisted halftruth. The male creatures in the breeding chambers were no more than appliances. One ordered them to expose their piercers and prepare them for insertion, then one lowered oneself onto the organ and pumped rhythmically until the semen was deposited. A mechanical act as prescribed, nothing like honey-eating with a sister; no one felt anything. Even the breeders were repelled by sexual contact with others not of their own kind; they had been conditioned that way for generations.

“I could make you feel something,” Eric said. “I could make you feel something you’ve never felt before.” Cynda glanced downward into the vee of his white pants. She could see the long shape of his piercer tight against the cloth. His eyes caught the line of her gaze. He laughed. He took her hand. “On Pacifica, you can touch, too,” he said, and he suddenly thrust her hand between his legs onto the mysterious maleness of his body.

Cynda cried out wordlessly. A spasm of tension passed through her body, leaving a sweet lassitude in its wake. Yes, she thought. Why deny the inevitable? Why deny the truth? No one need ever know.

“Show it to me,” she whispered. “I want to see your piercer.”

Silently, he took off his pants, revealing his full nakedness. Cynda’s eyes were drawn by the angular architecture of his hips to the alien fascination. She reached out hesitantly and touched the bare skin of his organ. It throbbed and twitched under her touch, a thing alive. How marvelous! She had never touched one with her hand before. How warm it was! How sensitive! How utterly strange!

Without removing her hand, she looked up into his eyes. There was kindness there, but she also sensed that he was laughing at her inside. There was understanding, but also something cruel and cold. The combination was overpowering. She wanted... she wanted... she knew not what.

“I...I don’t know what to do,” she said softly. “Show me.” He grinned, and now the cruelty and laughter was more open, and it sent shivers up her spine as his expression seemed to somehow emphasize the colossal muscles of his arms, so dangerous, so enticing. He cupped her face in his hands and drew her mouth down. He slid through the surprised resistance of her lips. It choked her. It felt warm as roasted meat and smooth as velvet. He moved it inside her mouth uttering little soft cries.

It was the strangest thing that had ever happened to Cynda Elizabeth. It frightened and repelled her. It made her mouth go soft and her body throb with flame. It was like eating honey and like nothing else in the universe. She had to fight back a retch and yet she wanted to swallow it whole.

After a long time, he curled his hands in her hair and drew her head up to face him. He was breathing heavily, and his eyes had a faraway dreamy look. Cynda found her own breath coming in counterpoint to his.

“And now...” he murmured.

He bent over her, undid the fastenings of her shirt and trousers, and silently worked them off her body. Then they were naked together, under the starry skies, the boat rolling beneath them in complex rhythms. Now I’m going to get it off with a Pacifican breeder, Cynda thought, with a strange, almost mindless calm. With a
man
. Out here where no one can see.

She waited for Eric to lie down on his back and offer up his piercer. “Well?” she finally said.
“Well?”
He looked genuinely puzzled. Am
I
going to have to show
him?
Cynda thought. She touched his chest and gently pushed him backwards. He resisted.