Bodies of Light (6 page)

“Even sex in these bodies is limiting,” Alyn added. “If we could make love to you without the encumbrance of these flesh and blood shells—oh, you have no idea of the ecstasy we could experience together!”

 
“Maybe I do have some idea.” Christine turned to face him. “The last time we were together, I felt something—different. It’s hard to bring it back, now, but it felt as though we were floating in space. I wasn’t really aware of my pussy, my clit, my breasts, yet everything felt incredibly good. It was like I was inside my orgasm. But I wasn’t alone—I knew you were there, both of you. I could touch you, somehow, even though I had no hands. I could feel you, around me, inside me… That’s when I understood that you were something far beyond human…”

She broke off, noticing that Alyn was staring at her in amazement.

 
“I knew something special had happened but I didn’t realise…” Zed murmured behind her.

“You slipped free!” Alyn spoke slowly, his voice full of wonder. “Oh, Christine!” He released her and sank back into his chair.

Christine looked from one of her lovers to the other. “If I did it once… Zed, Alyn—you left your bodies behind eons ago. Can you teach me how?”

Zed’s face darkened. “There’s some danger, sweet. If you leave your corporeal form, setting your astral self loose, there’s always a chance that you won’t be able to return.”

She offered them her hands. Alyn and Zed took firm hold. Their eyes, amethyst and jet, sparkled with excitement. She kissed one, then the other, long and deep.

“To be with you—truly with you—that’s a risk I’m willing to take.”
  

Chapter Six

Christine lay on the table in the mess hall, feeling silly. Zed had piled mattresses from several of the cabins on the hard surface, then arranged her on top of the heap like a sacrificial lamb on an altar.

“Are you comfortable?” he asked.

“I’m great. But what difference does it make? I thought the goal was for me to leave this body behind.”

“We want you to relax completely—to stop thinking about your body. Last time it was extreme pleasure that pulled you out, but this time we want to try another method. Meditation is more predictable and easier to control.”

“Are you ready?” asked Alyn, peering into her face.

“As much as I’ll ever be,” she answered, resolutely ignoring her twinge of fear. So what if she couldn’t return to her body. This body didn’t have much of a future anyway.

Zed clambered on to the table and straddled her torso just below her breasts. His cock, rigid once again, nestled in the valley between them. She licked her lips at the sight. Moisture trickled out from her sex, dampening the mattress.

“This not exactly the way to get me to forget about my body,” she laughed. “Every time I look at your cock, my pussy gets wetter and my clit gets harder.”

“Sorry!” Zed joined her laughter. “You have that effect on me. But let me see what I can do.” He closed his eyes, turning inward. His form seemed to shimmer. The effect was gone so quickly that Christine wondered if she had imagined it. In any case, his penis deflated until it flopped, limp and innocent, across her ribcage. “Is that better?”

“Better? Well, it’s certainly less distracting!”
 

“Alyn, turn off the lights.” The room grew dim. The control panel in the kitchen area provided the only illumination. Zed’s face hovering above her was wreathed in shadow.

He cupped his hands in front of his chest, about six inches apart, as though he were holding a ball the size of a grapefruit. “Relax. Take deep, slow breaths,” he told her. “Focus on the space between my palms.”

Christine struggled to let go of the arousal that was raising her pulse rate and making her pant. She closed her eyes for a moment to centre herself, then followed Zed’s instructions. Initially she saw nothing but Zed’s burnished muscles through the gap between his hands. Before long, though, she noticed that the empty space was occupied by a faint glow. The light brightened gradually and congealed into three luminous strands that twined together, rotating at a stately pace in an ascending spiral. The filaments were born near his wrists, coiled upward and disappeared at his fingertips, in a smooth, endless flow.

“Concentrate on the light,” Zed murmured. “Follow the light.”

The slow-moving helix fascinated her. Her eyes traced its path as it emerged out of nowhere, rose and vanished. At first the streaks of brightness appeared pure white, but as she focused she noticed tiny flecks of colour: amethyst in one, gold in another, ruby in the third. Like jewel dust the motes danced in the beams until they reached the upper limit and winked out of existence.

She could feel Alyn’s presence, off to her left, and could sense his concern. She knew Zed was watching her with those piercing jet eyes. Willing herself not to look at them, she trained her full attention on the hypnotic pillar of light. She dove into it, circling endlessly upward, spiralling into non-existence at the apex then regenerating at the base.

Christine forgot the two men. There was only the light, swirling, pulsing, drawing her ever deeper. The light rippled through her like pure water. The strands curled around her like laughter. Golden flames licked at her flesh without burning. Fingers of brightness soothed and teased her, kindling shimmers of delight.

“Christine!” Her name was a bolt of radiance, arrowing through the glow. “We are here with you.” It was true—their auras mingled with hers. Sparkling ribbons of silver and copper wreathed her presence, a crimson crystal beating in the velvet darkness. She knew them—Zed and Alyn, her attentive, untiring lovers—but now she saw how their gorgeous man-shapes were mere shells. Their full glory would have blinded her, if she had eyes. In her present state, unfettered by the limitations of her poor human senses, she saw them as they truly were: perfect, ageless, unutterably beautiful.

“I did it,” she said, or thought, or sang. Pride twined purple through the rainbow emotions that swirled around them. “Now I understand.” In their shared universe of flickering luminescence, she reached out to draw them closer.

“Lover,” came a bell-like song she recognised as Alyn. “Now we can truly be together.” His caress woke fireworks. Without a body, she felt the pleasure everywhere. It was searing heat, aching fullness, marvellous tension, buoyant joy.

“Darling.” Zed was a rich chord arcing through her, a rain of sparks that made her tingle and glow. He brought wetness, tightness, electric twinges that burned through her. The sensations recalled physical responses despite her disembodiment, except for their overwhelming intensity. She swelled and throbbed with need, wanting her lovers closer, inside her somehow, though she didn’t know how this could be possible. Before she could voice her desire, she felt their energy encircle and penetrate hers. Multi-hued pleasure exploded in her consciousness.

“Touch us,” Alyn sang, winding through her, drilling into her core.

“Open us,” Zed hummed, flowering incandescent at her centre. “Your mind is limitless.”

She reached into the luminous emptiness and allowed her thoughts to mesh with theirs. Now she thrilled with their sensations and emotions as well as her own. The connection should have been shocking, but somehow it felt completely natural. Alyn’s shy hunger and Zed’s raw lust seasoned her own arousal. The pleasure that shivered through them as she danced in their minds rocked her senses as well. Delight reflected back and forth. Each of them mirrored and amplified the others’ ecstasy.

Below these present-focused elements, Christine caught echoes of the aliens’ age-old pain and loneliness. She gathered Alyn and Zed into her self, singing liquid songs of comfort. Love wove its way into their shared tapestry of feeling, gleaming pure white among the lustrous strands of scarlet, emerald, turquoise and amber.

Peace, someone sang. Power, rang another voice. Pleasure, called a third. Their perfect harmony swelled. They twined together, spiralling upward, so intimately joined that none could say where one of them ended and the next began.

Christine sensed the shift this time. The universe burst open, drenching them in the brilliance of a million suns. Unutterable joy surged through her—and Zed, and Alyn. Their climax was hers as well. Their coming released energy. Hers absorbed it. She felt the exquisite pleasure of their emptying along with the deep satisfaction of being filled. That incandescent instant burned away the last traces of separateness and fused the three of them into one being—a bodiless embodiment of pure light.

They floated in a nurturing void. Sorrow, pain, doubt, all had been stripped away. All that remained was love.

* * * *

Stars. Christine returned to individual awareness to find herself surrounded by a million points of light. Were they in fact really stars? Instead of the mostly colourless sparks she was used to, these bodies blazed red, violet, orange, even blue, against the black backdrop. What else could they be, though? One of them seemed quite close, a glowing yellow ball off to her right. When she focused her attention on it, she could see planets orbiting the star, at least half a dozen of them.

Where was she? And where were her lovers? In the aftermath of their shared bliss, she felt little anxiety. All would be well. She trusted that she’d find them.

She returned her consideration to the nearest sun. Somehow it exerted a powerful attraction. All at once she was there, a mote of consciousness hovering within the solar system itself. She pushed aside the question of mechanism. She’d figure it out later.

One of the planets swung close enough for her to catch glimpses of the surface through intermittent clouds. The familiar shapes of the continents tugged at her memory for a moment before the truth hit her. Earth. She was hanging in space, a being of pure mind, looking at her home planet. Meanwhile, her body lay abandoned in a tiny space ship billions of miles away.

She had done it, without intending to. She had twisted space and travelled faster than light, just as Zed and Alyn had described. But how? And how was she going to get back to them, and to her body?

She turned her gaze inwards, away from the vision of Earth. Intuition as well as training told her there were other dimensions. She probed and tested the fabric of space time, finding whorls and wrinkles. Which ones were passages to other parts of the universe, though? Was it possible to create the necessary conduits as needed?

Christine brought up images of the equations she knew so intimately, the ones with which she had struggled for so many years with so little success. Immediately she saw transpositions and reductions she’d never noticed before. Perhaps material bodies blunted the intelligence as well as the senses. What was it Zed had told her? Take matter out of the equation and everything became simple.

She flicked mentally at the symbols, tumbling them into a new arrangement. Amazement flooded her, followed by triumph. There it was—crystal clear and astonishingly easy, at least if you happened to be a being of energy.

Imagine where you wanted to go, and you’d be there. That’s what the equations told her. Hard to believe and yet so sensible. Energy organised and animated matter. Consciousness added the ability to materialise objects—that was the secret behind Zed’s and Alyn’s physical bodies. An act of deliberate imagination was an act of creation, for pure intelligence. There was no movement, actually. Mathematically speaking, you were disassembling and reassembling the universe around you.

Some part of her must have been thinking about Earth during that transcendent instant of union with Alyn and Zed. Without fully intending it, she had arrived at the threshold of her old home. To return to her body, she needed to summon a clear image of the
Archimedes,
and of her lovers.
 

Alyn. Zed. Her coupling with them as an energy being had been incredible, but she still craved their physical bodies. She remembered Alyn’s silky skin, his dancer’s build, his pale, smooth cock like a pillar of ivory. She added Zed to her mental picture, stocky and powerful, black curls tumbling over his brow, black eyes challenging her, bronzed erection jutting from his groin like some massive tree branch. Arousal clearly was more than physical. The more details she added, the more excited she became. Finally she pictured her vacant form, lying on the mess hall table, awaiting her return.

There was no sensation of motion. She simply found herself on the
Archimedes
, hovering near the ceiling of the dining chamber and gazing down at her own body.
She’s pretty
, Christine thought.
She has lovely chestnut hair
.

Then an irresistible force claimed her, sucking her downward. She slammed into her material body and blacked out.

Chapter Seven

A siren rang in Christine’s ears. She tried to ignore it. She was so tired—she just wanted to sleep a bit longer. The persistent whine refused to go away. With a sigh, she forced her eyes open.

The alarm wailed in the long-short-short pattern that meant emergency. The mess hall was mostly dark, but a red beacon flashed in the corner. Christine sniffed the air. It smelt stale and she thought she detected a hint of smoke.

She swung herself off of the table, noting that every muscle ached. The room was empty. Where were Alyn and Zed?

“Report ship’s status,” she called, loud enough to be heard above the alarm. There was no answer. Then she remembered. She’d switched off the computer’s voice functions.
 

She clambered up to the bridge. There was no sign of her lovers. The viewport was still open, offering an unchanging view of star-strewn space. Heedless of her nakedness, Christine punched in the code to reactivate the ship’s communication capabilities.

“Report ship’s status,” she demanded, her voice shrill with anxiety.

“Serious hull breach in section B-7,” the computer replied, calm and mechanical as always. “Bulkheads have been sealed to slow atmospheric loss.”

“Oh shit,” Christine muttered.