THE THIRD AWAKENING

By

Dennis Weiser

SMASHWORDS EDITION

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Dennis Weiser on Smashwords

The Third Awakening

Copyright 2012 by Dennis Weiser

ISBN: 9781476003221

ISBN 9781300048602 [print copy at Crash Dummies Books]

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Acknowledgements:

© 2012 by Dennis Weiser

ISBN: 9781476003221 .

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Adult Reading Material

The Third Awakening

An Erotic Sci-Fi Fantasy Novella

About the Author

“Will not this monstrous reality become more real from day to day, and most real and true, perhaps, when it no longer exists?”

—Franz Werfel, Star of the Unborn, New York: Viking Press, 1946, page 7

Chapter 1 New Stanley

At the New Stanley I was standing at the far end of the bar, mulling over my drink which I was using, with some success, to perform a lobotomy. While so engaged, I wondered if it wasn’t about time for the Vivaldi tape to come up again. As I stood thinking this, a stranger came into the bar, strode up to me and said: “Okay, it’s time.”

“Time for what,” I said, not bothering to look up.

“Time for you to go,” he said.

“I have to finish my drink,” I offered without interest.

“You have no drink,” the stranger curiously replied. Suddenly I noticed that we appeared to be alone in the bar. My glass was empty, clean and dry, as if it had never held a drink.

“The Mother Ship’s waiting outside,” he added.

Ordinarily I would have found this scenario terrifying, the stranger insolent; but somehow or other, the whole thing sounded inviting. I had of late, it is true, become something of a stranger to myself; I had been drinking heavily for weeks, I know not for what collection of reasons. The bizarrely fashionable articles I had been reading in the Atlantic Monthly weighed heavily upon my mind. “Mustn’t keep Mother waiting,” I said cheerily. But then, as is customary for me, I sought some last minute excuse. Might I have a glass of water first? The water was undrinkable, the stranger informed me. This was no surprise; I had heard similar facts before, it seemed. Nevertheless I panicked. Where was Sylvia? I had to talk to Sylvia.

“Sylvia’s in New York,” the stranger told me, with an unmistakable note of weary disgust.

Chapter 2 The Mother Ship

The Mother Ship did not fit with current ideas, mine or anyone else’s, of how such craft should look. It had no lights, flashing or otherwise. It was bright green. It looked, for all the Universe, like an enormous bright green mushroom. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said, somewhat disillusioned. Then I blacked out—or everything else went black—and we were inside.

I awoke to discover myself warming my hands before a bright green coal, which lay underneath a convex lens or bubble; this coal emanated warmth and suffused a soft light, which by degrees increased. I was kneeling on something rather like Astroturf. The stranger from the New Stanley knelt beside me. When I withdrew my hands from the green coal, I perceived that it was liquid. I started to say “very nice” but something restrained me. Instead I asked: “Where are we going?”

“We’re going to meet everyone else,” the stranger said.

“Eventually here, you know—actually, it could be pretty soon—I’m going to begin having a hard time understanding what’s going on,” I confessed amiably.

“Oh, I don’t think so,” the stranger said and, for the first time that I could recall, he smiled.

Chapter 3 The Joracians

The stranger chronicled a queer history. Parts of it seemed vaguely familiar—due largely, I assumed, to the pieces I had been reading in the Atlantic Monthly (I decided to renew my subscription, if ever I got the chance). The stranger’s name was Àkbä; he described himself as a Third Level Joracian. Parts of his story, as I said, had to do with recent Earth history; these were the parts I seemed to understand—although what the food chain had to do with military spending, or top forty songs with American decision-making (as he implied) remained beyond my grasp. Àkbä made much, as well, of some peculiar connection between the dreams of domestic animals, suburban architecture, and political struggles in the Less Developed Nations—this, too, I utterly failed to parse. But the rest of his story—I was left behind here—involved a game, sort of like the Olympics, being played in a remote constellation. This game related to physics—or poetry—and it not only affected, but was also influenced by, events in every part of the cosmos, including those on Earth. But then, no, you see, it wasn’t really a “game” at all…I shook my head in perplexity.

Àkbä shortened his tale. “We decided to evacuate everyone.” By “everyone” I gathered he meant: everyone on Earth.

Chapter 4 Poetry

We were joined by a new figure, whom Àkbä introduced to me as Brôk. “This is the Earthling I wanted you to meet.” Brôk did something I was not ready for: pointing an index finger at each temple, he bowed from the waist. “Pleased to meetcha,” I said, a bit numb. “The pleasure is ours, I can assure you,” Brôk said, his diplomacy not missing a beat.

“He’s a poet,” Àkbä disclosed in a hushed tone to Brôk, to my consternation. This piece of intelligence was received by Brôk with the same sanctity one might presume would accompany a hot investment tip. Brôk had much the same reaction as any Earthman who is invited, unexpectedly, to a beautiful woman’s boudoir in order to peruse the larger meaning of certain passages in Blake or who is told he has just inherited a million dollars—that is to say, Brôk’s eyes grew wide with delight. Needless to say, I was puzzled.

Àkbä later explained to me that, of all the various occupations and professions to which the race of mortal Earthlings was prone, poets were the most highly esteemed; this was a constant throughout the Universe, to which Earth seemed to be the sole exception. Nowhere else in the Universe, he stressed, was poetry produced, although it was greatly appreciated; in certain prestigious quarters of this cosmos, he insisted, poetry was considered to be the distinctive trait of human beings, the very flower of Earth. However, he hastily added, this was true of poets strictly insofar as they concerned themselves with the creation of beautiful objects, with the production of poems. This too, it seemed to me, had a quasi-familiar ring to it.

Along these lines, he was able to tell me something about Joracian Society, which has three social classes. The First, and lowest, Level is composed of bureaucrats, basically political types. The Second Level, which devotes itself exclusively to meaningless and archaic ritual, resembles nothing so much as what we call religion. The Third Level has no translatable analog, but most closely resembles poetry and the behavior of poets—except, of course, that it would never occur to a Joracian to actually make a poem.

“What do members of your class do?” I asked Àkbä.

“We handle all Communications,” he answered.

“What are you going to do with all of us?” I inquired.

“After dividing you by kinship ties and scent, we plan to resettle you in colonies all over the Universe.” As he related the Plan, everybody would have at least some of the people they had known and loved back on Earth in their colony, but not all of them. For example, a brother or sister might share a life in a new colony with one another, but their father or mother would inhabit a colony perhaps a billion light-years away. The Joracians who researched the evacuation of Earth had access to mountains of human dream-data for each individual; the Joracian teams had their priorities straight in choosing the principles of composition for each colony. “We tried to respect everyone’s Unconscious,” Àkbä mentioned quixotically. Possibly, distant relatives and loved ones might be permitted to visit each other; certainly they would communicate. We would just have to adopt a “wait and see policy,” he said. “That is where the poets will come in handy,” Àkbä deduced.

I asked what he meant.

“If the Resettlement Program is to be successful, we are going to desperately need your support and assistance.”

This sounded pretty vague, so I was relieved when he got more explicit.

“Earth is gone, you may as well face it. The entire framework, secular and political, which made events and actions meaningful—all is vanished! If human beings are to avoid becoming extinct, they will have to be retooled for a higher activity and purpose. The seeds of which, it just so happens, are embedded in your world’s art and literature.”

Uh-huh, I thought: Right. At that moment, I felt as if I knew precisely what he was talking about.

“You, my dear friend, are going to help us to replant those seeds.”

Chapter 5 Vivaldi!

Àkbä told me a great many other things: that Joracians had discovered a way of living in total peace and harmony (they had not had a war in 100,000,000 years), that they were telepathic, that they could easily teach former Earthlings these skills. Meanwhile, we sped across galaxies, nearing our destination.

We emerged from the big green mushroom directly into the interior structure of the main building of what was to be my new home. I mentioned the blackout I experienced while boarding the craft back on Earth, and now asked Àkbä what our means of locomotion had been.

“Telekinesis,” he replied.

“Tele…?”

“Just like Star Trek,” he said, somewhat condescendingly.

He escorted me to an intimate space, the walls and ceiling of which seemed a kind of free-floating, gauzy, curtainy substance; this substance appeared to be blowing, almost breathing. The chamber was outfitted with a green coal like the one I had seen on the spacecraft.

“This will be your sleeping quarters for the present. An attendant will see to your dining preference when it is time. Everything from the National Voice Library, Library of Congress and University of Texas at Austin will be placed at your disposal. I leave you now to your rest and rejuvenation. But first, a surprise for you.” With that, he was gone!

Through the gauzy, blowing curtain came a tumbling figure I was delighted to see.

“Sylvia!” No sooner had I spoken her name than we were in each other’s arms, a greeting that quickly blossomed into serious kissing.

“New York was horrible,” Sylvia said. “I mean, I went to this party, and it was okay, but everyone was so cold…” Her voice trailed off as she began to consider her surroundings. “Sam,” she whispered. “What are we on?”

“Didn’t the fellows from outer space explain things?”

“I thought they were from New Jersey!”

This was going to take some time, I could see at once. But first, Sylvia and I had more pressing business to attend to. “Come here,” I said, taking her hand in mine. We knelt down beside the green coal. To my amazement, as we kissed, our garments began melting away.

“You think it’s okay, Sam—I mean—here?” she asked, a sigh of paranoia.

“It’s our bedroom,” I declared. “We can get something to eat later.”

“Great, I’m starved!”

“So am I!” With that, an uncontrollable bout of kissing broke out, as down Hedon’s slippery slope we both commenced to slide. Gradually falling into other routines, I began to notice a familiar sound washing all around us.

“Vivaldi,” Sylvia crooned, a wet velvet slurp in my ear.

“It’s about time!”

Chapter 6 Jambalya

Through misty veils of sleep, I thought I heard a voice say, “Yo’ Jambahlayah is served!” Groggily we rose, our eyes half-closed. The aroma of filet gumbo was overpowering. Someone had left steaming covered dishes on trays. Tall carafes held some chilled beverage, two fluted wine glasses beside them. “Sylvia,” I murmured gently in my love’s ear, “It’s dinner.” Removing a silver cover, I began to drool, suddenly realizing I was famished. Sylvia was soon beside me, raising a forkful to her dainty mouth. As I pigged out, making yummy sounds, Sylvia poured some of the liquid into our glasses. I watched as she sipped, pursing her lips in a little smile, her eyes all but closing. “It’s Asti,” she declared. “My favorite.”

Famished, we ate like pigs. Our repast continued in delighted silence for some time, broken only by sounds of animal satisfaction. When we had finished the food, or eaten all we could (the portions were magnificent; but I always try to stop eating whenever I feel just right), we sat back stupefied, our hands cradling our bellies. Then, to my surprise, Sylvia and I both let out a terrific belch simultaneously, and burst into laughter together. Sated, Sylvia found she was restless. “Let’s go exploring, Sam.” As we crept toward the portal, we were wearing the uniform of the Joracian High Command. She tried the door. “Coast is clear,” she said, grinning.

“This way,” I said, looking down the left hall. A guard was posted before a prominent-looking entrance. As I approached, this guard pointed to his temples in the same strange manner as Brôk had done. Before he could straighten up, though, we had passed through the double doorway.

It took awhile for our eyes to grow accustomed to the light. Sparkling, shimmering lights revolved around the walls of the room. There was sound too, a pulsating rhythm and a bass voice (or was it baritone?) that drove the music; it seemed I’d heard it before but all I could think of was: the Orson Welles of Rhythm-&-Blues. “Sylvia,” I said, “Where are you?” I couldn’t see a thing. Steaming mists rose off the central edifice, which gradually emerged, capturing my attention. “Sam,” Sylvia cried, “it’s a hot tub!” By the time we reached the edge of the tub, our clothes had magically dissolved.

Sylvia was ravishing; her body had never looked so beautiful. We stood together, feeling the bubbles procreate around us, our hands discovering the surface of our bodies as if for the first time, arms encircling each other’s waist, drawing our lips and the centers of our bodies together hard, with a slapping sound. But before our lovemaking could begin in earnest, Sylvia hunkered down into the water, only her nose, mouth and eyes showing above the water line. I could see that something was on her mind.

“Sam,” her brows furrowed, “do you like this place?”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. These Joracians—I don’t trust them.”

“They’ve taken on the job of relocating all of Earth’s inhabitants. I think we have to trust them.”

“Do you think we’re all right here?”

I explained to Sylvia, as best I could, that the Joracians were, from all I could gather, our very good friends and that, on the whole, I believed their plan for evacuating Earth an environmentally sound one indeed. I suppose I must have gotten a bit long-winded. Suddenly, the water seemed very hot to me. Sylvia had, on the contrary, grown colder. She had moved away from me as I spoke and now sat sulking at the far edge of the tub, her knees drawn up to her perky little chin. “What’s the matter?” I asked. “I’m sure you’re right!” she snapped back. “It’s just—well, it all seems a little…too good to be true?” I remember thinking: downright preposterous; but I never said a word. I drifted with the moment instead, letting Nature take its course. That’s what Laotzu said to do; and I fancied myself something of a Taoist.

Sylvia seemed to grow more distant with each passing moment. It was just one of her moods. “We better get out,” I said. I don’t remember dressing. But no sooner had we crawled back through that steamy fog than we found each other, plain as day, dressed just the way we came.

“Far out,” I muttered.

Chapter 7 The Hall of Memory

Àkbä was waiting for us in the hallway. “There you are,” he said. “I’ve been looking for you.” “Where are we going?” I asked. “To the Hall of Memory.” Sylvia could come too.

By what means of transport we reached the Hall of Memory, I cannot say. One moment we were bathed in utter blackness; the next we emerged into a gradually suffused luminescence—the golden light of late afternoon—of a fair-sized chamber. Though the room held neither card catalogs nor computer monitors nor stacks of books, I recognized the ambience at once as only too familiar: we were in a library! There were a dozen or so oval-shaped pods of a bluish-green tint. As I approached one, it opened rather like an oyster’s shell. Within the pod, there were strange controls and a comfortable-looking seat. I climbed in without hesitation. As the pod lid began to close, I saw Sylvia climbing into her own pod.

Sitting in near-darkness, I began to think some popcorn, raisinettes and a Pepsi might be nice, when suddenly a female voice asked me (the voice emoted warmth and charm): “What do you desire?”

“What works are in this library?” The voice took me on a brief tour of the control panel, which lay at my fingertips. It was really quite easy. As I reclined, the controls adjusted themselves to my angle and position, and the dark ceiling of the pod became a screen on which images appeared. I had only to speak the names of authors or titles of works for entire cross-referenced compilations to appear onscreen, seriatim. A large circular button allowed me to move through these works, forward or backward in time; thus, I could examine, virtually as I thought of it, the most recent scholarship on, say, Charles Dickens, or any and all occurrences in the popular press related to that body of literature. Uttering another qualifying command—for example: “detective story”—and my search would shift in yet another direction, piling up detailed reference upon reference to Dickens relevant to that genre. I began immediately to play around with this remarkable toy until, after a few hours had passed (they seemed but minutes!), my thinking turned toward the serious business of “retooling” humankind for their new adventure, as Àkbä had called it. I wondered if I had the poetic resources for this new task.

After what seemed another hour, I was satisfied that all of the literary treasures to which my fine, Midwestern, liberal arts education had exposed me were indeed intact, having been successfully salvaged by Joracian foresight. But there was one glitch: I could find no reference to the body of works of two giants, George Orwell and Hannah Arendt. Then I searched for Perry Miller, author of Errand into the Wilderness, Nature’s Nation, and a particular hero of mine. Nothing! There was not the slightest hint that any of these persons had ever lived or written a word. All reference to them seemed to have been expunged, as if by some invisible hand and design, deleted or airbrushed into oblivion. For a moment, a piercing forlorn quality shot through me like panic and then was gone. Of all works of philosophy, literature and criticism, these were the ones I felt I would surely miss the most. It was very odd indeed that they should go “missing” like this, in my time of need. But I could not take time to grieve just then. “Let me out,” I said, more weary than I knew. The pod lid slowly rose and, as I climbed out, I saw that the Hall of Memory was dark.

Chapter 8 High Tribunal

I blacked out again. When I could see, I was standing beside Àkbä before a strange-looking contraption. As I looked more closely at it, I could see that it was a kind of door, rather like a ship’s hatch with a circular handle for opening and shutting watertight compartments. Except of course this door also had a console of nine buttons colored blue and green and black. When it began to emit a low humming sound, Àkbä turned the wheel once counter-clockwise and the door swung open. I know neither how we got to our destination nor precisely what our means of locomotion had been—it was like being shot along a dark tunnel at tremendous velocity. But there was no real sensation of moving; only a recollection of a sequence of tiny explosions seen peripherally. Very pleasant little puffs. I barely had to turn my head. When I asked him where we were going, Àkbä said: “To the High Tribunal of the Joracian Council.”

Then we were there. Side by side, Àkbä and I walked along. It was no stroll; he kept a brisk pace. The further we went, the more things opened out. When we had passed down several halls and crossed an equal number of chambers, I began to get an idea of just how monumental was the structure that housed this Council. The lighting was uneven; rooms you were moving toward seemed dark until you reached them. The walls were littered with ornamentation, colorful graphic images of every shape and size. Though I caught only fleeting glimpses of them, I was struck by the fact that none of these images was recognizable to me.

Àkbä instructed me as we made our way toward the inner sanctum. A trial of three Joracians was being conducted, he explained—I could see that he was worried about it; his counsel was terse. These three Joracians were charged with treason. They were deadly foes of Earthmen. The reason for my attendance at this spectacle was soon made clear to me. “I want you to observe their behavior very carefully,” my friend said.

The High Tribunal of Joracians was in session. Everyone wore the “imperial uniform of judgment,” as my host referred to it—everyone, that is, except me. I was a little uncomfortable in the new blue suit that had, in a twinkling, replaced my tunic, for I knew that I “stood out” in this regal gathering.

My uniform was impressive, to say the least: it consisted of a flowing robe of bright blue cellophane with naugahyde epaulets from which streamed plastic strips of different lengths and colors. Embedded in the cellophane were long chains of what appeared to be tab-top rings. On closer inspection, it was obvious this was not what they were at all; nevertheless, the coincidental resemblance was mystifying.

Inside the chamber, the din was incredible. The whole thing reminded me of nothing so much, at first, as an Amway Convention, everybody talking all at once. I heard the phrase “Ortho-Aesthetic Body” dropped several times, and wondered what they were all talking about.

When the prisoners materialized, Àkbä said discreetly: “I want you to watch them carefully.”

It was not easy to tell a Joracian’s age, I soon discovered—they all looked about thirty-five or forty; but, somehow or other, I had an intuition that these three were no kids. So it could be no youthful indiscretion that had brought them to the dock. No, these were hardened criminals—dangerous rebels! They stood so calm, gazing stolidly at their surroundings; it was enough to break my heart. They didn’t even seem to be aware of what they had done.

Àkbä asked me to say a few words on behalf of the Earthlings, so I rose and addressed my words to the conspirators: “The People of Earth may seem a worthless and perverse lot, but I assure you, what they most want is to live a life of fulfillment and personal growth.” I remembered a couple of lines from William Blake, so I added: “If you have formed a circle to go into, / Go into it yourself and see how you would do.” My companion regarded me with astonishment as I sat down.

A hush had fallen over the entire chamber—what an audience!—but only momentarily as the prisoners were now summarily removed. As it happened, the three of them brushed past the table where I was sitting. One of the rebels paused in front of me just long enough to say: “You amaze me.” Joracian guards took them away. I attributed his having been affected to the Blake lines. If he was that responsive to Blake, then perhaps there was hope for his rehabilitation, after all.

“What will become of them?” I asked Àkbä.

He looked at me a long moment. “Oh, they’ll be reconstructed and returned to useful productivity.”

Àkbä took me on a tour of the basilica. It was a maze of halls, alcoves and atria, winding and interconnected; I was glad I had him to guide me, or I would have been lost for good. He told me the names and purposes of the various rotundas, porticos, vaults and vestibules, but to me they were just big empty rooms. There were no windows and little light, but—curiously, I thought—the walls in every chamber were covered with the same peculiar designs that I had earlier noticed, nonrepresentational images of every conceivable shape, texture and size. At first I thought it was some sort of non-objective art, but in a few of them I could recognize some halfway familiar detail: a human eye, a fingerprint, a numeral or letter of the alphabet. Though I could not exactly decipher their meaning, I felt certain that these were the visible emblems of a truly advanced race, infinitely wise and kind.

“That’s exactly right, Sam,” Àkbä said, as if reading my mind. “Our culture requires us to work in teams,” he added, by way of explanation, “to promote clarity and understanding. Many of these teams produce the icons you see around you.” He stopped and pointed out one design in particular, mentioning that it had taken all the awards at the recent games.

“Games? What are they?” I asked.

“They’re special convocations to determine the ultimate constituents of reality.”

I perked up. “When are they held?”

“In principle, they cannot be planned for or scheduled. They occur only under conditions of absolute necessity. When any of a number of things are cosmically suitable, then it happens.”

He must have noticed my puzzlement.

“Of course, in another sense, the Games go on continuously…”

“Where are they held?”

“In the Fifth Dimension, at the Source of Gravity. We call it the G-Spot. You see, Sam, consciousness exists simultaneously on many different levels. Those levels actually comprise fissures leading into other dimensions. Some part of every conscious entity is always present in the Fifth Dimension.”

“How do you figure that?” I asked, somewhat skeptically.

“Because: existence on more than one level is a sufficient condition for existence in the Fifth Dimension.”

This was more interesting than anything I’d ever read in a book and I told him so.

“Sam, your performance earlier pleased me. You’ve earned a reward. So, if you will follow me—”

“Where to?”

“You’ll find out, soon enough.”

We took a ride in what was the strangest elevator, or distant cousin to an elevator, I’d ever seen: a pressure-locked cylinder with portals at either end. The control panel was more than I could handle; fortunately, my executive friend knew how to operate it. Instead of going up and down, it revolved like a carnival ride—although I had a vague sense of lateral motion, like flying along a pneumatic tube.

“We use this to bypass wormholes,” Àkbä offered without further embellishment.

“The house of poetry has many mansions,” I replied, intentionally cryptic.

We had apparently reached one of them when we stepped out of the elevator into an expansive world of neither depth nor contour. Not a single familiar object was present, in spite of there being sufficient light.

Wherever we were, it had plenty of atmosphere, too: a gauzy, milky light palpable as thick fog, shifting in an endless sequence of flat planes, surrounded us as we walked.

“Where are we?” I asked, only to find that my companion had disappeared and I was alone. Or not alone, exactly, for through the milky light, a figure approached…in the shape of a woman!

“Welcome to the Temple of Fitness,” she said in a husky drawl. “I am your high priestess, Zithôra.”

She was as white and pale as the ambience in which we floated; bleached ringlets covered her head. Her face was round, with a pointy little chin. Her alabaster arms were bare and the wet, gauze-like wrap she wore clung to her body like a second skin, disclosing the shapely contours of her breasts, stomach and hips like a Greek lyre. Zithôra’s eyes were large and hypnotic: two blue fires that penetrated my very soul. Yet I felt strangely at ease and safe in her presence. She licked her lips in a way I can only describe as spiritual. When I cleared my eyes to look again, I was licking those full lips, the priestess’ arms encircling my neck and back and then…the strangest of all experiences began to happen to me—to us!—as, I don’t know how else to describe it, our arms and hands and fingers and eyes had somehow become interchangeable. I could not tell where she began and I left off, the intensity of our passion growing exponentially in what was definitely a sexually-charged yet mystical transfiguration; our love-making both carnal and transcendent, trading a focused awareness of each of the body parts whose ownership—each act whose authorship—we exchanged. In some part of my mind, the whole thing was definitely disturbing and yet I was completely distracted both by the intensity of the pleasure we shared as well as by the deep conviction that the unparalleled event was sublime, even holy. “Who are you?” I heard a voice asking. It took me a while to realize that the voice was my own. “I am You,” her voice returned. “I am in You.” “And I in You.”

It seemed we were destroyed in the explosions that followed, the great erotic disintegration that returned us panting, heaving, sweat-soaked to our separate bodies. We lay in each other’s arms, Zithôra on top of me. Remember me, I thought she said. “What was—how did we—do that?” My eyes unclosed. But she was gone, vanished into the mist as suddenly as she had appeared. I sat up, not sweating, not breathless. I was wearing my blue suit; but now, I noticed, a lightning-bolt emblazoned the left arm of my jacket.

An air of unreality permeated this place. I rose and groped my way through the fog. Àkbä found me as I emerged from the fog’s edge. “Are you ready?” he inquired, point-blank.

“I guess so,” I said.

Chapter 9 First Assignment

“Sam, I’m going to leave you with your first resettlement group,” Àkbä informed me, once we were back inside the mushroom. His hands carefully plotted our course, touching the knobs and buttons and graphs of the console panel with the deft touch of an experienced navigator. As he did so, he explained to me how one went about navigating such a craft, where the maps of the galaxies were stored in the Mother Ship’s memory, and how to locate one’s place in each map. (“You Are Here,” each map proclaimed, a little blinking mushroom noting the place, rather like a shopping mall’s diagram.) “But I warn you, Sam…your fellow Earthlings are confused and frightened. It will be no easy task to organize them. But that is the task I charge you with now. You are at liberty to share with them all that I have told you about the Joracian Resettlement Plan—whatever will aid you in persuading them to come on board.”

“Do I have access to any…materials?” I asked, feeling a sudden sharp lack of confidence in my own abilities.

“The secrets are within you,” Àkbä said with a faint smile. I felt his support growing inside me and I began to radiate confidence. “If anybody can succeed in this venture, you can!”

All sense of fragile motion ceased. “Here we are, good buddy. Good luck. I’ll be back in a couple days.” With that, I felt a sudden vacancy or sense of separation and found myself sitting in the corner of what felt like a large gymnasium. The walls were dark mountains of shadow, and the time of day felt like twilight. At the far end of the gym huddled a crowd of maybe fifty or sixty humans, their long purple shadows touching my feet. A few in that crowd noticed my presence. They began to shout and point; soon everyone was crowding around me, yelling and pointing. “Who is he? Is he one of them? Let’s kill him!”

I could see I had my work cut out for me.

First, I introduced myself to them. I gave it to them as straight as I knew how. “Earth is past. Finished. It’s history.” If we’re going to survive in our new world, I explained, we would have to acquire some new skills, and a new outlook. “The Joracians took us out of geo-context because it was no longer healthy for us.” I described the Resettlement Plan, how all of us were scattered in myriad colonies all across the universe, arranged by kinship ties and scent. The Joracians were willing to share the secrets of their advanced peaceful civilization—safe technology, telepathy and more!—but we would have to organize and develop ourselves, our… consciousness. “Our destiny now is in our own hands. But we must be willing to prepare, to develop ourselves, to–to learn to work in teams.”

“What sort of work?” one fellow asked, a sneer and a raspy cough of a voice. I could see he might be trouble.

“Creative work. Self-discovery, development, you know. Trying to be a better person. A–and poetry. Any kind of writing, really—”

“What did you say your name was?”

“Marz,” I said. “Sam Marz.”

“You’re as full of shit as a Christmas goose, Sam Marz!”

I just looked him in the eye and said nothing; but I did not smile.

There was a moment or two of uncomfortable muttering among the others; then a woman spoke up:

“I believe you, Sam.” She turned to the others—a woman maybe in her late forties—and said: “He’s right. There’s nothing for us on Earth any more. We’ve got to do what he says.”

A considerable discussion of this last point ensued, with many voices participating; some old, some young, men and women—hell, we even had a few teenagers. I suggested that we all sit down in a loose semicircle, with me facing the half-circle of people. We gave ourselves enough room so we could sort of stretch out and be halfway comfortable, you know, and then…we started to talk, one at a time, introducing ourselves, where we hailed from back on Earth, and what our lives had been like. It was a varied group, too, with some blue-collar workers, firemen and policemen, some college professors, some retail business types, and secretaries, a veterinarian, a lawyer, some housewives, a taxidermist, and even a lifeguard! A wonderful group; and as soon as the first wave of disclosure slowed, I taught them a simple meditation to help them relax and acclimate themselves to our new adventure. Introducing them to the child within themselves, we imagined a safe and secret place in a forest, in the mountains, by the sea—wherever they wanted to be, really, the first place that came to mind—where they might like to create a sanctuary…and so the first meeting came to a close. I suggested that perhaps we should all rest for a few hours.

The group had gotten to its feet, and a few individuals were milling around at the edges of the gym, when somebody yelled: “Hey, look here: there’s food!” And sure enough, there was a long table laden with boxed dinners of cold fried chicken, cole slaw, potato salad and two huge vats of iced tea. I suggested we form two lines to take advantage of this unexpected feast in an orderly fashion. I asked one of the girls to help me serve the iced tea; and we waited until everybody else had received their dinner and drinks before we served ourselves. Her name was Kim and she was from Springfield, Illinois. We sat down to share a meal and get acquainted.

“Where are you from?” she asked, after we had eaten a few mouthfuls of fried chicken.

“Missouri,” I told her; I had lived in Kansas City, Missouri. “I was born in Philadelphia but I grew up in St. Louis. I moved to Kansas City after college.”

“I had some family in Kansas City,” Kim told me: her only sister and brother-in-law. “They really like—liked it.”

“Kansas City was a very friendly place. Nice people,” I replied. St. Louis, by contrast, was rather stodgy and patrician. But I said nothing to Kim about this. If you can’t say something positive, after all, it’s really better not to talk.

“I wonder where they are—?” Kim asked and suddenly, an icy chasm yawned between us: she looked bewildered and tiny. “Is this going to be all right?”

“Everything’s going to be just fine, Kim. Don’t you worry.” The degree of reassurance in my tone of voice surprised even me.

As we finished eating our fill and pushed the boxed debris aside, it seemed to disappear. The space we occupied had grown darker and darker; we could no longer see or hear the others.

“Kim?” I leaned forward, peering hard to make out her face, when I noticed that my clothes had dissolved, and I was lying on my back with a huge, throbbing erection! Kim crawled up on top of me, naked as the day she was born, and began kissing me on the lips as she swayed back and forth, rocking her hips slowly at first but with steadily increasing momentum. I cupped her large breasts (Kim was small but well-endowed) with my hands, licked her nipples, kissed her lips wildly, ferociously inserting my tongue deep into her hot red orifice, kissed her chin, her forehead, temples and eyelids.

“Ooh, lover, it’s soo-oooh good!” Kim crooned in a husky voice.

I grabbed her love handles gently but firmly and began thrusting her down, faster and faster, on the rapidly approaching crescendo of our passion.

The moment, when it came, was like that pause between a nuclear explosion and the eerie billowing of a mushroom cloud: it seemed to last an eternity, then it was quickly over and everything became qualitatively different. Kim had collapsed on top of me and we lay panting and dripping with sweat in each other’s arms.

Our reprieve was brief. A second libidinal formation soon followed the first, as Kim—who, in our copulatory dénouement, had rolled off to the side—began to stir. She clambered between my legs and seized the purple tube in her hands, her hot little tongue behaving like a strange foraging animal, independent and single-minded, oblivious to all but its own inescapable instinct. Kim was insatiable: her tongue and its devotions were driving me crazy! When I could bear it no longer, I pulled her off me and, rising to my knees, mounted her from behind. We joined in a repetitive, thrusting maneuver, bouncing her off my groin. It was exhilarating and seemed to go on indefinitely. A short gasp, followed by a kind of whispered wheeze, elicited from Kim, as her torso eased forward and down, her arms outstretched. So we continued, throughout the night…

When I awoke, Kim was cradled in my arms asleep, where she had spent the night. I was relieved to find us both dressed. She opened an eye. “Sweet dreams?” I asked. The corners of Kim’s mouth curled up in a smile. “Dream of the apples,” she whispered.

A breakfast of fruit and juice, whole grain cereals and skim milk, fresh-baked wheat and raisin bagels, coffee and non-dairy creamer was prepared for us and waiting, just as dinner had been the night before. After a leisurely meal, it was time for me to get down to work.

Chapter 10 Mini-Ship

The time passed quickly during the next few weeks. Working at a feverish pace, I arranged the entire group into small cells of four or five persons. I shared what little I knew of philosophy and poetry in order to help them achieve a heightened awareness and sensitivity to each other and to themselves. Within the first few days, an elite of nobility began to shine forth as certain individuals, picking up my drift, took on natural roles of leadership; and the whole project began to blossom beyond my wildest hopes and dreams. Some of it, at first, was like psychotherapy process group work, with persons encountering—some for the first time in their lives, no doubt—their own acquired, unreflected defenses. There was quite a lot of confession and sobbing as one man, who had been a policeman on Earth, recounted his abusive childhood and the father whose cruelty—cloaked behind sham robes of authority—he’d been made to idolize: this man had killed a prisoner, the crime gone undetected all these years; yet he confessed it openly to us.

In no time at all, everyone was really working at self-realization, grappling with their actual, unresolved childhood issues, identifying and locating the inner child of his or her authentic self. As I consulted daily with my trusted lieutenants, Sharon and Ted and Kim, scheduling our plans for monitoring and spurring on this wonderful work, I began to have a vivid sense of what Plato’s Academy in ancient Athens must have been like: a gathering whose sole purpose lay in discovering and speaking the truth, through a disciplined and passionate conversation. Kim was especially a source of great pride and pleasure to me: under our communal tutelage, she had lost her feign of vacillating confusion, become extraordinarily self-possessed, a graceful, eloquent woman-warrior and poet.

As I was meditating on my future plans for us, a seminar on Being and Knowledge, Àkbä appeared before me. “Well done, Sam,” he said. The group had vanished; Àkbä explained that they were being teleported to new frontiers where they could carry on with other Earthlings the work for which they had been so well prepared. He had met with other Joracians on the Council; so successful had been my little “experiment”—Àkbä used this term, he emphasized, to indicate just how tentative and skeptical some of his race had been about my chances of success!—that the Council had decided unanimously to use it as the model for the whole Intergalactic Resettlement Project. In short, I was being promoted.

“You will henceforth visit all of the colonies, overseeing the process of coordination and initiating new recruits. You will monitor the growth work you have instigated, performing special training as necessary,” Àkbä announced. “I have been authorized to present you with a new uniform, one which bears the Insignia of Imperial Splendor,” he added in a hushed tone, a tear glistening in his eye. “This is the highest recognition of merit and most sacred honor my world can bestow.” Even as he spoke, I felt my raiment undergo a sea-change, my old blue suit with the lightning-patch fell away and I stood enrobed in a radiant white gown, a purple cape and a truly boffo cap, adorned at the tippy-top by what seemed like a propeller (except it didn’t move). My old shoes were transformed into shiny, azure boots; a gold chain and medallion hung around my neck. I looked at the medallion later, but I couldn’t figure out the Insignia at all; except to see that it was obviously a cross between a hologram and The Miracle Picture of Jesus—you know, the one where the eyes seem to follow you when you walk across the room? If I held it at an angle, it looked like a few vaguely curved lines painted on black velvet, reminiscent of a flaccid cock-and-balls; but shift the angle of the medallion ever so slightly, and this was replaced by what resembled nothing so remotely as a gigantic, ornate capital “A”. I soon realized that these devices were as nonobjective as those sublime images I had earlier seen on the walls of the basilica at the Palace of Justice.

Now I stood in the warmth of Àkbä’s glowing words. “No non-Joracian has ever received such an honor, Sam.” I was speechless. “With it comes great power.” He turned and, with a wave of his arm, showed a green mushroom standing a few yards away. “The mini-ship is yours. It will take you wherever in this Universe you desire to go. It is fully provisioned and programmed with navigation instruments, libraries of data from Earth, and can easily accommodate a dozen guests. The coordinates are preset for all your work sites.” He took me on a brief tour of the ship, and we spent the next thirty minutes or so going over the controls, navigational devices, maps and other equipment and information that I would need on my journeys. Àkbä provided detailed and explicit explanations of everything pertaining to the mini-ship, its maintenance and safe use. There were also online manuals and help at the touch of a button. A sense of gratitude overwhelmed me; and I flushed at the interest, concern and care my friend and tutor had shown me.

“Great power brings with it even greater responsibility,” Àkbä said. “But it also bestows privilege. It is high time that you were initiated into the Mysteries, Sam.” At this, everything began getting grayer and grayer and grayer until finally, I blacked out altogether…

Chapter 11 The CEO Club

I awoke to find my Joracian guide manning the controls of the mini-ship, his face tremulous with barely controlled excitement, a ferocious intensity in his eyes that gazed steadily ahead. The Universe looked like a fireworks display, with tiny red and green and blue explosions going off randomly, and colorful lines like trails of jubilant sparklers spiraling in every direction as we whirled through the space-time continuum. There was also in Àkbä’s visage something else, a quality I could not quite put my finger on—was it Courage? Independence? I regarded his face more closely; he seemed oblivious to my presence: Àkbä had a lean, gaunt face with high cheekbones, an expansive brow, a sharp aquiline nose like the beak of a falcon or an eagle, a mouth whose thin lips might have suggested cruelty were it not for the obvious goodness which radiated from his entire face (and which had been demonstrated to me so often that it was secure beyond all doubt of the character which lay behind this face). I realized that my friend perfectly embodied what I had always imagined Sherlock Holmes must look like. Last, I noted his eyes: hazel they were, at times appearing gray, at others blue, and gleaming with intelligence and integrity.

“Where’re we headed?” I asked after a while.

“To a very special place indeed,” he replied somewhat mysteriously. I said nothing further, waiting to see what might transpire.

All motion stopped and suddenly we were inside a gargantuan structure, on a circular ramp that winded dizzyingly up and upward, ever more steeply. I ventured a cautious glance over the edge of the ramp: an enormous canyon plummeted beneath my gaze, but I thought I caught a glimpse of a shimmering fountain or waterfall below, and the slow scuttling of ant-like figures which I took for humans. “This way!” Àkbä exclaimed as he whisked me down a narrow appending corridor where we stopped before a strange door or contraption. Àkbä drew back several sliding screens, from left to right, top to bottom, bottom to top, and right to left, revealing a large circular portal that vaguely resembled the shutter of a gigantic camera. My friend slid a blue card into a panel slot and the shutter opened! “After you,” my host invited graciously, an open palm. I crawled into the dark passage; he followed me in and the portal shut with a snap. The chamber seemed large though I could see nothing clearly. Before I could speak a word, this chamber began to revolve, faster and faster—it was like being inside a clothes drier, without the heat!—and we tumbled, head over heels, but before we could sustain any injury (the walls of the cylinder were padded with a soft substance like foam rubber), we began to float, as though weightless. I became dimly aware too of a linear motion, in addition to the revolutions (which grew less noticeable in our gravity-less state). We rocketed along at a tremendous velocity (or so I inferred); but whether we proceeded up, down or sideways, I could not determine with any accuracy.

Abruptly, all motion ceased, the shutter opened and Àkbä hopped out. I followed suit and, as I sprang out the aperture of the chamber, found us standing before a wide arched entrance, beyond which I could make out a murmur of many pleasant voices. This was where the Third Level Joracian Corps of Elite Officers met socially, Àkbä explained. I was about to participate in something he termed “The Rite of Vision.” Without more ado, I was ushered in through the golden archway to what my friend casually referred to as the CEO Club…

Inside the Club, a multitude of Joracian males and females of the highest distinction and rank were engaged in what looked like a New York cocktail party. Nearly everybody carried a clear, round flask, test tube or beaker, the upper end of which tapered off into an elbow straw. Each contained a smoky, gauzy, fog-like elixir, called a hyböl, each a different primary color, although some were white and milky looking. Out of each of the beakers or flasks protruded what I at first took for a tiny parasol; but on closer inspection, I saw that it was in fact something different.

I was at first struck by the singular physical beauty and vigor of this company; everyone seemed youthful, brimming with vitality and exuberance. The Joracian females wore gorgeous diaphanous gowns composed of the multicolored cellophane strips (with the little embedded icons I had mistaken for tab-tops) that stopped just above the knee. Beneath the gown, one caught just a hint of bikini bra and panties, or perhaps a bare breast, a brown nipple or a charcoal swatch of pubic hair below the tummy; but as the cellophane strips of each gown and the motion of its wearer visually mediated this, I could not be certain about any of it. Beautiful golden sandals, which rose and tied four or five inches above the ankle, adorned the feet of these female CEO’s, as well. Everyone was chattering and flirting and laughing. Àkbä handed me a large blue beaker and bade me sip through the straw end. “The Rite of Vision,” he said with a wink. I sipped: it tasted wonderful, cold and refreshing, something like champagne only more robust; but there was a slight aftertaste vaguely reminiscent of Windex. After the third or fourth sip, I no longer noticed the aftertaste.

The men, I now observed, all wore ornate party-hats, the intricate designs of which, from a distance, resembled the fliers, brochures and “hook” letters of direct mail marketing. Drawing closer, however, I could see that I was in error about this: what I mistook for letters were in reality only meaningless glyphs and ciphers. There were splashes of color and intriguing designs that, while superficially resembling images, were nonobjective; although they caught and held one’s eye impressively at first, they went nowhere and were meaningless. At least, they held no particular meaning for me. Perhaps, though, it was otherwise for the Joracians.

The females seemed to sport Hawaiian lais about their necks and breasts. This too I knew surely could not be the case; and, as I drew close to one or two of them, I saw plainly that what I had mistaken for lais was in fact an ornamental collar, sewn into the cellophane itself, and denoting the rank of the female CEO.

Àkbä introduced me to a select clique of male and female CEO’s.

“So,” one of the females said, “you’re the Geospo—I mean, the Earthling—we’ve heard so much about.”

“Sam is an Earth-Poet,” Àkbä informed the company. Once more: the breathless silence and wide-staring eyes. I had not yet gotten used to this, the typical response of Joracians.

When I questioned the company about their particular contributions to Joracian society and culture, the conversation got a little strange. The CEO’s were engaged in communications in some way or other; though precisely what any of them actually did seemed to evade specific description. They all seemed to work grueling hours, laboring in teams, manipulating mountains of data, consuming massive quantities of food and drink in the process; for what purpose or end result, though, I could not clearly determine from their oral accounts.

One of the female Joracians, a comely sprite named Daredroola, worked on a team that had designed the attractive hats worn by the men today. Yørg, a male, had a sudden inspiration; for he exclaimed: “Who has put a pubic hair on my hyböl?” The CEO’s in our group all broke into mad, gut-wrenching laughter at this, the women as well as the men. Only one of the females, a sultry-eyed brunette named Sulkie, hung back a little, a smidgen aloof. She now watched me with great curiosity.

“Sam will be preparing the Earth-evacuees for IRP,” Àkbä disclosed to the group. If I had thought them awestruck and wide-eyed before, I soon had a new measure, as the Joracian men were simply stricken with sick envying looks, the females closing around me, their hands reaching out to caress my raiment, breasts heaving against my sides, chest and shoulder-blades (I even felt a hard nipple here and there!). As the men dropped away, I saw my mentor grin and wink at me as he receded from view.

The female CEO’s bombarded me with a million questions I could not comprehend, but which seemed unswervingly to suggest that the project on which I had embarked lay beyond the ken of any Joracian.

“Did you find it…well, hard, Sam?” Daredroola asked in a long, luxurious whisper. “You know,” she said, licking her lips slowly, her eyes starting to cross as her face bobbed closer to mine. “You know.”

I wasn’t sure I knew at all…. But I had no time to reflect, as the throng of females pressed closer. The questions flew at me faster and faster.

“What about support? You can’t do this all alone,” a seductive voice crooned, as someone’s hand—so thick the crush of sweet, warm flesh on mine, I had no way to tell whose hand it was—reached through my robe and found my dong! Cool fingers began gently stroking and massaging me with all the familiar intimacy of an old flame.

“Yes, Sam, why, you’ll need oodles and gobs of help with all the Networking,” another said.

“Oodles and Gobs, Oodles and Gobs,” several began chanting like zombies.

I felt my feet leave the ground as the party of female Joracians lifted and carried me away, along a curving corridor, continuing to question me even as they bore me aloft.

“Have you feasted on the Ortho-Aesthetic Body?”

“How many combines do you personally own?”

“Whaddya wanna be when you grow up, Sam?”

“Won’t you share one of your lovely poems with us?” I was dimly aware of sniggering and derisive laughter; but I soon found myself in a dark room, floating and bobbing as if suspended mid-air in a sea of writhing, tangled, female bodies. The only light visible was that of a blue geometric plane a few inches thick on which our bodies were suspended; this plane moved and curved with our corporal motions; but what the source of that light might have been, I had no idea.

“Uh-mm, a-aa-ahh, which–I mean, what poem—” The cool fingers were joined by a thumb, and began caressing my handle with exquisite judgment, now pulling and tugging with brief frenzied vigor, now slowing, settling into a firm, throbbing tug…

“—should ah-ah–I recite for you?” I doubted that I could even remember a poem. A blue breast and darkened nipple waved mysteriously near my lips; I reached out and lay my hands along each side of its great bulbous contour, flicking the nipple with my tongue. As I did so, I heard someone emit a great long sigh like a hiss of steam.

I decided on “Masters & Johnson”; it was short, after all. I summoned all my strength and my very best voice and recited the following:

AFTER PERUSING MASTERS & JOHNSON UNTIL LATE AT NIGHT

Here's a psychic insight
Guaranteed to make flesh creep:
Too tired to make love and yet
Too wired to go to sleep.

The nipple was now elongated, blue and stiff; my tongue flicked and darted feverishly at it, inspiring audible moans like bruised little thunderclouds about my ears. The cool tentacles pulling and manipulating my penis were replaced by another, different set of sensations, a wet and vaguely suffocating pressure. I sucked a hard blue nipple into my mouth, pinning it flat with my tongue. When the breast circled away on a new orbit, Daredroola (the breast and nipple I had licked belonged to her!) pulled my face close to hers, pressing her hot full lips hard against mine, touching my tongue with hers as we kissed.

Every way I turned, on each side, there were new combinations of hands and feet and bottoms, lips and legs and masses of tousled hair to contend with, all writhing with excitement and pleasure. I had only to reach out for my hands to be filled with heaving breasts, to lick my lips for my tongue to meet the dewy circle of another’s mouth. The female CEO’s were insatiable and wonderfully devoted to pleasing; no sooner had I shaken off one worshipping caress or devoted mouth than another clambered instantly on, seizing hard the opportunity like some wild sea-beast feasting on succulent mollusk-morsels. If I merely stroked a buttock floating by, it pressed itself like a pillow to my face; if I touched or stroked a pudendum, the legs spread wide apart like mandibles of an arachtoid-Schwarzenegger, or muscle-bound pincers of some colossal scorpion Steve Reeves; glistening vulvae blossoming and unfolding like the petals of a rose; ripe meat of exotic alien fruit, drawing ever closer to my lips and tongue; the clitoral worm already squirming and writhing and throbbing in anticipation of shared ecstasy. Pairs of eyes of every shape and color swarmed about me like scavenger fish, darting this way and that, long lashes and short, their eyelids drooping and blinking like fireflies on a hot July night. Eyes of Joracian maidens shaped like almonds, like jewels, like orbs spun around me in the mystical blue plane of pleasure.

Then things got weird, as a bizarre geometry of the erotic invested these events. Joracian females, insatiable lusty CEO’s every one, lined up inverted along a line, stretching out to form a single complex “V”; I saw them as one who sees a solitary image reflected in an infinite array of mirrors, joined at the unitary point of their communal desire: vaginas extended along a single trajectory now mutated into a single, multi-faceted muscle, so that as I penetrated the nearest one at the angular origin of this Great V, I could feel the crux of my desire throbbing and pushing deeper and more deeply into all of them, simultaneously. It was extraordinary, like nothing I had ever felt or experienced before. Each way I turned, it was a different partner whose lips and breasts and thighs I saw writhing before my repeated vigorous thrusts, a different voice and smell of hair, different hands and heft of breast and buttock and touch of our mutual, multiple love-making… I wondered if the hyböl contained some drug that might have had anything to do with this magnificent hallucination.

At precisely the moment when I began to suspect that my passion might last forever, I lost all hope of control; the mirrors began to melt in a blue thunderclap. I struggled to hold on tightly to all the images, grasping blue love handles of hips, breasts, and arms. One by one, they evaporated in a downpour of shimmering, iridescent rain beyond which I could discern, for the moment, nothing…

I found myself lying in a blue mist, my sole partner the beautiful brunette, Sulkie, collapsed atop me. Her bedroom eyes were almost closed, though I could see her watching me. Sulkie batted her long lashes twice and her almond eyes opened wide. “Pretty good, Earth-man,” she said, licking her lips; then, laying her cheek next to mine, whispered sultrily: “So whaddya do fer an encore?” We laughed, but I could feel my cock begin to swell and throb once again; so I stuck it in quickly and Sulkie squealed as she threw herself with wild abandon into the rollicking, rock-n-roll rapture of our mutual dissipation. Tiny beads of sweat like magnified worlds embellished her forehead, her eyes strangely focusing and unfocusing as though entranced. Suddenly she stiffened, her back arched, breasts quivering, her eyes rolled back and her mouth opened as she emitted a long, shrieking sob of release. “Aieeyaiyaih!” she exclaimed through swollen lips, collapsing in a wet heap of bobbling breasts and tangled hair on my chest.

In a twinkling, we were arrayed as before, as though nothing had ever happened. “Come with me, Sam,” Sulkie said, “we need to talk. Please.” She led me to an empty rooftop garden, enclosed in a round Plexiglas dome. We sat down in comfortable chairs. Far above our heads, stars twinkled.

“Where are we?”

“The Starlight Roof.” Sulkie had assumed a serious look. I could see she was preoccupied.

“Sam,” she began, pausing as though selecting her words with great care. “You’re a wonderful lover. But I’m worried about you.”

“You are? Why?”

“Because. I care about you.” She sighed, her jaded expression reminding me of Shirley MacLaine in Irma La Douce. “I know it goes against everything I’ve been taught, but…you seem not to have been touched in some essential way by all of the…um, splendor of Joracian Culture.”

“What do you mean?”

“How long have you known the Joracian who introduced us?”

“Àkbä? Well, gee, I’ve known him—it seems like—forever?”

Sulkie raised one eyebrow, giving me a sharp disdainful look.

“Ever since I was evacuated…”

“Sam, haven’t you noticed that—well, you’ve been getting laid a lot lately? Ever since Àkbä took you under his wing?”

Had I? I supposed so. But what did that have to do with—

Sulkie straightened up suddenly.

“We’re being watched,” she said in a barely audible whisper. “Listen to me, Sam: Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac to these creatures. All the sexual frolic and erotic horseplay at these functions is mere window-dressing. Sex is just currency to Joracians. It means nothing to them. To us.” Sulkie crumpled shortly under the weight of her words. This was her own culture and people she was talking about. I could see it was hard for her to talk this way. I put my hand over hers, to offer some comfort.

“I don’t have much time,” she continued. “The others will be looking for us. If anyone asks, just say you wanted to go someplace quiet where the two of us could talk after the Rite of Vision. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Don’t get me wrong. Joracian Culture has accomplished great things. It has made possible the very way of life, the great goods and privileges that you and I have shared today. I owe every benefit to Joracian Culture…” Her words recalled to me the work of Resettlement that Joracian Culture was making possible. I felt a momentary thrill. But her voice trailed away and her head sagged on her hands. Hopelessness or dread flashed painfully across Sulkie’s face. “Don’t let them use you, Sam.” Just as I noticed with surprise that she was weeping, a voice startled me.

Another presence had joined us. It was Àkbä. “Your Sisters are looking for you.” Nothing but the greatest compassion was discernible in his tone of voice.

“I’ll be along in a jiffy,” Sulkie said defiantly. The figure withdrew. When he was out of earshot, she resumed. “We’re all whores, Sam.” Sulkie rose and kissed me on the lips, hugging my body tightly to her breast. “Some of us just have a higher—or different— price, that’s all.” Under the starlight, her lips trembled, her face ashen. “Beware the Ortho-Aesthetic Body!” Then she vanished. Had that been fear in Sulkie’s voice? She certainly seemed afraid. It had all happened so quickly, I couldn’t be sure. I felt exhausted, among other things; I wasn’t at my observational best, and mistrusted my instincts, even my very senses. And what in the world was the “Ortho-Aesthetic Body”? I made a mental note to ask Àkbä about it as soon as I got the chance.

Chapter 12 Colonies

I visited colony after colony, outpost after outpost, explaining to the Earthlings in each instance the nature of their newfound situation, and launching the work of recovery and restoration with single-minded passion. I soon became quite adept at spotting leadership potential among the evacuees, selecting team leaders to assist in our work. I was always amazed at how quickly they would take to my suggestions, pursuing the path of self-enlightenment and growth—often with a commitment that rivaled my own. Together, we replaced the old ingrained patterns of ideology and timeserving productivity with poetry and a love of discovering the Truth through communal dialogue.

Soon, I took to rewarding my lieutenants with special junkets in the mini-ship. We’d visit the hot tubs and the Temple of Fitness; I was delighted to share the experiences I’d had with new generations. On one occasion, I was in the hot tub with Kirstin, a lanky beauty with blue eyes, sipping hyböls and listening to Bill Evans. I opened one eye and admired Kirstin’s short sandy hair and the fine lilt of her perfect tits, the nipples slightly upturned. She asked me what it was like the first time I went to the Temple of Fitness. I described it for her as well as I could, the erotic quality, the sublime interchanging of body parts. Up to this point I had only allowed one person at a time on our junkets, occupying the others elsewhere. During her first experience, a young demigod named Zoltan, with whom she had shared a hierophany similar to mine, had met Kirstin.

“I wonder,” Kirstin mused, “what it would be like if several of us went in together?” As if suddenly aroused by the mere suggestion, Kirstin pressed close, kissing my lips, and gently giving my swollen knob short rhythmic tugs below the waterline. Aroused, we exited the tub and I lay back, while Kirstin performed an unforgettable cadenza on my skin flute. Without a word, she eased herself down onto my lap with a squishy sigh, wrapping her long legs around my waist, placing her palms down upon my shoulders. I held her face in my hands, felt the coarse locks of her sandy hair in my fingers, and looked into those China blue eyes while we fucked, naturally and unabashedly. “Maybe you could bring some of your Joracian friends, too.” “It might be fun,” I agreed as, clenching, she grabbed me fiercely, her arms encircling my back, holding me tightly as we both started to come…

By the end of my probationary period, Àkbä decided it was time that I became more intimate with the particulars of Joracian Culture. There were a dozen or more fundamental principles investing the Joracian belief-system, all more or less interchangeable and somewhat fuzzy; but the whole thing seemed to be based upon Desire and Confidence, which Joracians possessed in abundance, and all heavily tinged with eroticism. From an early age, Joracians were trained to visualize images of what they desired, as a first step toward bringing the desired object into being. At the same time, Joracians were the least materialistic of all persons I have ever known. “Ownership” was utterly foreign to them; Àkbä, for example, owned little more than the clothes on his back. Marriage was equally unknown to Joracian males and females, who used each other for sexual purposes as the spirit moved them. The individual alone was sacrosanct and inviolate.

Children belonged to the communal society. Joracians held Education, the acquisition of knowledge for its own sake, technical competence and the widening of horizons, to be sacred. “We Joracians are a race of Discoverers,” Àkbä often said, “always seeking new worlds to explore.” Joracians, though they had no family life as such, loved children. When I mentioned to Àkbä that I had never seen any Joracian children, he laughed: “That’s because they’re always away at school.” Joracians viewed all failures and setbacks as opportunities to be seized and transformed by persistence and creativity into resounding successes. “No true Joracian ever fails,” my mentor instructed.

According to Àkbä, Joracians believed desire to be the ultimate core of the universe, identical with energy, and all principles one with that of sexual desire. Yet, a strange asceticism permeated Joracian culture in the form of something called Clej Ameo, which the whole society viewed as more precious than success. It could not be literally translated into English. But listening to Àkbä talk about it, I soon gathered from context that it represented something like an ideal of loyalty or love.

On our next junket, seven of us arrived at the Temple of Fitness, three females and four males. I’d taken Kirstin’s advice and invited Àkbä who surprised me by accepting. Zithôra was there to meet Zoltan and me too; and they had brought many high priests and priestesses. The fog melted our clothes and it was difficult to see anything clearly; at first, I thought I was alone with Zithôra. But gradually I became aware of other flesh pressing in upon us. The priestess had been servicing my lob with sensational skill when I noticed, by a particular trembling of her lips and slight jarring of her head, that someone was pounding her from behind, doggy-style. I felt a sharp pain in my rectum and suddenly realized that I had been penetrated from behind. Before I could protest, Zithôra resumed her attentions to my knob-end with such sublime verve that I momentarily forgot the other sensations—perhaps they merged into a single erotic amphimixis, until pleasure and pain were indistinguishable. I thought someone had pushed her nipple into my mouth—a large nipple—but by the time I saw it was in fact a penis, the kaleidoscopic exchanging and interchanging of body parts had overtaken us. Caught up in a welter of erotic sensations so keen and overwhelming that they displaced all other thoughts, I no longer cared but simply rode along with the buffeting flow of feelings. I didn’t even care whose penis it was.

Several quite bizarre impressions occurred to me during the experience: of being Zithôra, of being Kirstin, of being Àkbä. At one point, though, I had the strangest fantasy: of Zithôra smiling then shoving her face down hard against my chest. I screamed and, when she held her face up to mine, I saw blood dripping from her lips and chin, something caught between her teeth. She had taken a bite out of my flesh; and her eyes gleamed with a strange light…

Afterwards, we gathered outside the fog, all of us exhausted. I was relieved to find no teeth marks of any kind on my chest (it had all just been a mystical experience!). Àkbä announced that he had decided to promote Kirstin on the spot and would be taking her with him, to lend her much-needed skills elsewhere in the Resettlement Program. We all hugged and kissed Kirstin and wished her good luck. Àkbä again praised my work in preparing her and said, “I have to return to the Palace of Justice, where my services are awaited. I leave you to your work, Sam. Good luck!” With that, he was gone; and I was left, once more, to my own devices. No one spoke much; and nothing was said about the group experience. It was just as well. I wasn’t sure I wanted to talk about mine, either.

Chapter 13 Virtual Reality

Now the timetable seemed to speed up. No sooner had I prepared each group of Earthlings for their new autonomy than Àkbä appeared, absorbing the entire flock of recruits in a great golden sphere, which subsequently vanished. My mentor explained that they were being transported to the next phase of their resettlement. I was beginning to grow curious about this “next phase” but never said anything to Àkbä about it. Finally, after I had completed a grueling tour of fifty communes, Àkbä placed his hand on my shoulder: “Sam, it’s time you got to see the results of your labor.” With that, everything around us began to dissolve; I sensed I was about to enter a new phase of my journey and experience.

Once again, our means of locomotion was unprecedented. “Time is not merely multidirectional,” Àkbä quietly informed me, “but a Vortex which renders all dimensions permeable to thought.” He laughed gently at my apparent puzzlement. The entire process was easily reducible to a set of Galanx equations, so named after the seven-year-old Joracian mathematician who, in the 60th Tir or cycle of Joracian history, had first discovered them. When I told him I didn’t see how that could explain the physical transporting of our bodies through vast stretches of space-time, he simply said: ‘Thought is physical existence.” It took a moment for the fact that I distinctly heard him tell me this—even as I watched his motionless lips—to sink in. And the Vortex is the key to Universal Servicing.

We stood inside a shimmering curtain or column of light a few feet in diameter. Nothing was visible beyond the wavering colors surrounding us. Àkbä was standing with his back to me; when he turned around, he was holding two blue hyböls, one of which he handed to me. It seemed to have a tiny parasol sticking out of the top; but as I looked more carefully at the object, I realized it was something painstakingly carved out of a fruit or vegetable of some kind, as delicate as origami—and edible! It tasted like apple. “Sit down,” my companion directed. A most comfortable-looking barca-lounger invited me to put my feet up. There was one for my friend, too. He joined me, reclining. When we had finished our hyböls, he placed a tablet in my hand. “Chew this. And make sure you swallow the juice.”

“What is it?”

“It’s like gum,” he explained.

I did as he suggested; it tasted like fire.

“You want another hyböl?”

“Sure.” I was beginning to feel good. He handed me another. I don’t know where he was getting them from.

“Now, Sam,” Àkbä said when I had finished my drink, “it’s very important that you listen to what I’m going to tell you and that you remember. I’m going to seem to leave you for awhile, but in point of fact I’ll be very close to you. I’ll be in telepathic connection with you throughout, but you’ll feel like you’re alone. Okay?” I had no idea what he was babbling about. ‘You won’t be able to touch anything,’ he mentioned.

‘Why not?’ I grinned.

‘Because we’re out of our bodies.’

I turned around and—sure enough!—there I was, reclining in the lounge chair, my blue hyböl clenched firmly in my claw, a grin plastered on my mug as I stared straight ahead into empty space. Àkbä sat coolly next to me, both of us motionless as ice.

I experienced a pleasant floating sensation as the column of colored lights began to spin, vibrate weirdly and reshape itself. Objects upon which my eyes could focus appeared and I let myself watch with absorbed fascination. Larger than life, like titanic gods and goddesses, their faces like moons and suns, their figures appeared to me; I listened to their conversation with the half-guilty feeling of a spy or voyeur; but this soon wore off, as I was drawn, deeper and deeper into the scenes I watched with increasing amazement and curiosity. Why was the young woman crying? Suddenly, I recognized the face: it was Kirstin! And the woman she was talking to was her mother, I now intuited: they had been reunited! While the great drama unfolded, I recognized others with whom I had worked and slowly came to understand that they had moved on to further stages of the Resettlement Process, were reuniting with loved ones all across the universe. Grasping how important my preparatory work had been, I could feel tears welling up in my eyes, until I realized that—disembodied as I was—these were simply “ghost” tears, like the somatic “tingling” of those with amputated limbs. As I watched the intimate stories of each person briefly unfold, I beheld an extended glimpse of the tremendous harmony and dignity of each life; and I felt an intimate acquaintance and kinship with the Joracian ideals of service and duty, of Clej Ameo. The coloI rful images and sounds swirling all around me gradually faded away; and I found myself back in my body in the barca-lounger, holding my hyböl. Exhausted, I sat shrunken by this experience of Sublime Encounter. I quickly drained the rest of my hyböl. Àkbä sat serene in his composure. “You see, Sam, your labor has not been in vain.”

I needed sleep. I told Àkbä this and returned to my mini-ship alone.

Chapter 14 A Curious Omission

I awoke, strangely uneasy. Disoriented, I plotted a course to the Hall of Memory. As I entered the dark hall, a pod lid opened invitingly. I climbed in and the lid closed. The familiar, friendly voice asked me what I desired, and I said I wanted to look at a dictionary. I flew through the D’s: “desist,” “desk,” “despicable,” “despise…” I consulted other dictionaries—in vain. Finally, nearly hopeless, I tried the OED. The result was the same: the word “despair” and its cognate forms did not exist. I tried Orwell and Arendt once again, and even Perry Miller. The result was the same in each case: “No Matching Entries.” I returned to the mini-ship and set a course for the CEO Club. Everything seemed just as I had left it. As I passed amid the throng of revelers, I sought some glimpse of Sulkie, even stopping one or two Joracians to ask for word of her. No one seemed to have any recollection of who she was. Someone pressed an orange hyböl on me. I could not refuse it. When nobody was looking, I deposited it in a potted shrub. On an impulse, I asked for directions to The Starlight Roof.

As I reached the site of our last meeting, shadows were deepening. One or two gray figures moved at the periphery of my vision. The Roof was otherwise unoccupied. I sat down at the table—the same table where Sulkie had warned me about the Ortho-Aesthetic Body—and began to wonder what was happening. At that moment I started to realize that I didn’t have a clue when, from nowhere, my ears detected the most beautiful choral music: an eclectic sorrowful singing of many female voices, floating about my ears, singing in a language I could not understand; yet somehow the sounds were familiar, as if I had heard them in a dream long ago. I sat transfixed, listening to the rapturous sounds until they passed away and were replaced by a solo jazz piano, reminiscent of Bill Evans.

By the time I returned downstairs to the Club, hardly anyone was left. I fell in behind a group of straggling Joracians, who seemed excited about something. “Where’re we headed?” I asked. One of the fellows looked at me as if I were insane.

“To the Feast of the Ortho-Aesthetic Body!” he exclaimed, somewhat annoyed.

We were led down a narrow hall, cool air rising up the darkened steps. Finally arriving at an enormous sunken amphitheater, I was amazed by the lavish spread arrayed on a great circular table, set for at least a hundred diners. A white tablecloth, gorgeously shimmering, serenely draped the table, each setting perfectly appointed. I felt a tug at my elbow and was surprised to see my mentor.

“I knew you’d find your way here, Sam!” He invited me to sit with him. Everyone hastily took their seats, as an exotic, high-pitched bell chimed eight times. A hushed silence filled the room. All chatter stopped.

The company consisted of both male and female Joracians, made up exclusively of elite members of the Third Level, the most powerful representatives of the Communicator class. I detected an edge to everyone’s anticipation, which I attributed to their collective appetite. Servers from the lower class, of both sexes, began pouring a fruity white wine, leaving full decanters spaced at even intervals around the table.

The feast consisted of several courses of small but delicate dishes; I particularly liked one, a paper-thin crust stuffed with lightly seasoned bits of fish or fowl. Sautéed vegetables, cut into such curious designs that I could not identify them, comprised a second course; and yet a third of soups, both hot and cold. We took numerous breaks from eating, so that no one would get too bloated before the main course. By the time we started the second wine, a robust Merlot, I was ravenous.

We did not have to wait long. A silence now of reverence or awe came over the group as huge steaming trays were wheeled out on carts and each diner quickly served up a heap of red meat, astonishingly seasoned with peppers, curry, ginger and saffron (to name only the herbs and spices I could readily identify), and dripping with a thick red sauce that tasted like fire to my lips and tongue! The entire party of eaters tore into their banquet with frenzy and, for several long minutes, we were all absorbed by our own hunger.

“What do you call this meat?” I inquired of Àkbä.

“Boorp-BÃH-Hakk-io!” he snarled at me, with a wild-eyed look I had never before seen. For some reason, it made me want to laugh; but somehow I was able to restrain my mirth. All returned to their busy occupation of consuming, reminding me of nothing so much as a dog at his bowl. Perhaps the wine had gone to my head, but I seemed to notice quite a number of guests with their heads bent away from the tablecloth, retching onto the floor.

When the main course had been devoured, a floorshow commenced as servers poured a delicate champagne. At first, I thought I was watching a fashion show, as several healthy-looking Joracians of both genders paraded, one at a time, down a runway at the center of the round table. The diners became quite animated and I saw them jot down notes on little chits of paper, which they handed to servers from time to time. Eventually, I noticed that each of the participants was scantily clad--the men in white loincloths, the women in white bikini tops and thongs--and suddenly I became disgusted. This was no fashion show, but…a-a beauty contest, pure and simple.

How degrading, I felt, but kept the thought to myself. When they got the contestants down to just two winners, the whole thing came to an end (the two finalists did not look very happy about this, either; both wore rather lugubrious expressions, it seemed to me). As I turned around, Àkbä was handing his chit to a server.

“If you have no other plans, Sam,” my mentor said; and invited me to accompany him to a sports recreation, something he called The Eek-O-Blast. My curiosity piqued by a new feature of Joracian culture, I agreed to go along.

On our way out, a Joracian hailed Àkbä. “What did you think of the ritual and nominating process?” My mentor admitted that he thought the entire experience had been rewarding. “I especially enjoyed the female we elected,” he added, cryptically.

“Tasty,” the other confessed, licking his lips. “Very tasty.”

Chapter 15 EEK-O-BLAST

The EEK-O-BLAST EMPORIUM existed in the heart of what appeared a domed stadium, filled with seats and tables, holographic “rides” and competitive spectacles in which participants could immerse themselves as much as they liked. The whole thing was quite bewildering to me, as officials were continually shouting out numbers in a most mystifying way. A perfect pandemonium, the only respite from which I could find was the hyböli that attendants were forever pressing into my hands. After a few of these radiant beverages, my flagging spirits began to rejuvenate and I observed more closely the activities of the other participants.

They seemed to divide into cheering teams or boosters, alternately bellowing forth a great din or cacophony. As there were many holographic games taking place simultaneously within the emporium, interminable stretches, where one could barely hear oneself think, were punctuated by brief intermissions of relative calm and quiet, lasting perhaps 30 seconds before the next sonic wave was unleashed. I watched one of these activities with fascination: holographic images of exotic creatures (a gazelle or impala) sped across a landscape, as if all their sins were chasing them. I grew bored with this after a few minutes, as there seemed to be no point to the exercise; but others around me appeared to be enjoying the creature’s flight, almost as if they anticipated some outcome.

I had somehow lost track of Àkbä and began to search for him. While I wandered around, someone handed me a tiny blue wafer that resembled nothing so much as a contact lens. “Put it on your tongue and let it dissolve,” the fellow said, pointing to his mouth. ”What is it?” I said, not wanting to appear rustic or rude. “Something like a mint?”

The fellow gave me a peculiar look and repeated: “Yeah. A mint.” With that, he was gone. I put the dot in my mouth, as he had suggested; but could taste nothing at all, certainly no mint flavor.

When I caught up with my mentor, his face was bent over a plate of polished obsidian; he appeared to be clearing his throat. As he turned to me with a startled look, I could see a fine substance resembling talcum powder on the tip of his nose and upper lip. “Here, Sam. You should try some,” Àkbä solicited me with an exaggerated grin and an exuberance I had seldom before seen in him. Putting a thin tube of colored plastic like a straw up to one nostril, “Hold it over the powder and sniff,” he instructed, passing me the tube. Not one for halfway measures, I quickly inhaled a thimble-full of the white powder up each nostril, then turned to my tutor with a shrug. “I guess I don’t get it,” I said.

“Don’t worry,” Àkbä said.

I watched with absorbed fascination, as a gigantic earth-moving machine appeared to be devouring a mountainside. A crowd had gathered around me to watch this exhibition, too. I suddenly began to feel a superhuman rush of power and enormous sense of elation, the likes of which I had rarely--if ever--experienced. I thought of the lovemaking I had enjoyed with Sylvia; I was reminded too of the immense satisfactions of putting the final changes on a really good poem. But there was nothing quite like the soaring and incendiary explosion that now seized my brain and nervous system. I truly felt like a god.

I was about to ask my guide and mentor how this emporium got its name when a woman in a state of disarray and semi-nudity flew by at top speed, crying: “Eeee-eee-eeeek!” Three or four Joracian men, whom I took to be attendants, followed close on her heels. I did not see where their chase ended. A few fistfights had also broken out; so Àkbä proposed that we seize the opportunity to take our leave. I had never before noticed that he was such a fast walker.

Chapter 16 After Hours

We returned to the Club, which surprised me. It was surely very late. “It’s After Hours now,” Àkbä told me with a sophisticated wink. I sensed that we were about to share a delightful experience. No sooner had we arrived than we were met by a luscious and sexy young nymph, who soon divested us of our attire and led me by the hand deep into hidden recesses of the recreation center, cloaked in murky shadows of a weak blue light.

She quickly discovered the bulge at my crotch and, as we sank to the soft cushioning of the playing floor, began attending to its pleasure with inspired Rabelaisian zest. I fully expected her to climb on top and slip down over my serviceable member at any moment; surprisingly, she persisted in these delectations of her tongue and lips until her studied attention resulted in an ear-flushing, temple-pounding eruption. Even so, she did not remove my supple protuberance but continued her ceremony until I sank back, unable to restrain a tremendous sigh of relief.

“Ice wallow,” she said cryptically. I closed my eyes for a few moments, dozing off. When I awoke, I could smell the spicy steam of a hot tub nearby and quickly made my way to it. So thick were the shadows all around me, I could not make out another soul but only the vaguest hint or outline of other shapes. The tub seemed abandoned as I sank gradually into its bubbling, frothy water. But I soon discovered I was wrong.

Arms encircled my waist, hot breath at my neck and ears, and soft plump breasts rubbing against my shoulder blades signified that I had, once again, fallen into the clutches of another denizen of the Joracian Erotic Zone. This marvelous seraph slipped her hands down my sides, slowly, below the water, reached around for my newly-acquired erection, which she took gently in both hands, pressing her pudendum hard against my coccyx. Leaning forward, she licked my ear with her tongue. “Come with me. The Sauna!”

I did as she bid me. We raced, hand-in-hand, around a little corner to a massive cedar door, which this houri pushed open with ease. Inside, she disappeared in a thick fog of steam; I felt my pores open as never before. We kissed long and lasciviously; then, as I lay back on a wide wooden bench, she climbed on top of me, easing herself with a practiced precision over and around my blood-gorged, hydraulic pump.

I was used to mutual pleasure-taking with Sylvia; but never before had I encountered anything like the succubus I was now tupping. After massaging her Molly with the great iguana heaving at my groin, this exotic demoness began gloriously writhing and, at the apex of her lust, seized my head with both hands (gently tugging and massaging my hair and scalp with her canny fingers), pressing her lips hard against mine, her wet hot tongue exploring the inside of my mouth. Wave after wave of excitement rolled over us, taking me to new peaks of ecstasy. My expectations were not disappointed: we came together ferociously, she and I, sweat pouring off us in torrents. My heart was pounding fiercely in my chest when she suggested we go for a swim.

I had not known such a thing was available in Joracian society (Àkbä had never mentioned it). But the pool to which my partner now led me was like nothing I might have anticipated. A huge spherical container, open at the top (“Like a goldfish bowl!” I exclaimed), nearly filled the vaulted chamber. Naked figures of men and women hung suspended, moving effortlessly and slow, in the transparent blue liquid that filled the container. Ladders rose to the top; we scaled them now. Once at the top, she dove in and I watched with amazement as she penetrated the marvelous fluid. Wasting no time, I stepped off the edge…

The substance I found myself suspended in was not like water or any other liquid with which I had been acquainted on earth. While it had some of the properties of water, it felt much, much lighter: one virtually glided at will through the rippling gauzy aether. Another property of this curious substance took me by surprise.

“It isn’t water,” my consort said; and the strange sound and timbre of her voice amazed me. Even more amazing was the fact that her mouth had been open the whole time she spoke. “It’s a special element called esval borla fedomer. It’s breathable.” After some hesitation, I quit holding my breath.

“Bizarre sensation,” I said, a slight tingling in my lungs, like butterflies in one’s alveoli. Or the feeling one had as a child at Christmas time.

Even as this thought occurred, we had begun to discover new games. Perhaps due to the physical sensations afforded by the wondrous medium, my erection returned: I now penetrated my juicy cherub’s posterior just as her mouth and tongue found the hard pole of a young Joracian male. Transported through this flowing sublime, I saw that other naked bodies were engaged in similar frolic and sex-play, couples and trios and--to my astonishment!--at least one quartet. Each group seemed oblivious to all the others; and I soon returned to the soft buttocks of the creature whose hips I held firmly in my hands, unable to distinguish my pelvic thrusts from the zesty shaking of her bottom against the stiff spar of my lust. Greedily, I remained for what seemed (but could not have been!) hours until, at last exhausted by our vigorous sport, we crawled out of the gaseous orb and descended the ladder, our bodily surfaces dry as a bone.

If these erotic discoveries had come unexpectedly, the diversions that consumed the rest of the evening were a revelation. Settling down on soft, buoyant cushions in the deep shadows of the main room, nubile maidens brought us additional refreshments, of both liquid and solid variety. Somewhere a deep gong sounded, and a presence of some authority suddenly announced: “Clej Ameo is an Ideal of Service!” His voice was briefly drowned out by excited whispers and mutterings. When they subsided, the spokesman continued. “An Ideal of Service we shall now ALL EXPERIENCE—IN FULL!”

My hyböl was taking effect. I relaxed back into the soft cushions supporting me and wondered what new treat might be in store. I did not have to wait long.

A group of naked beauties were paraded before us; In the pale blue glow illuminating the room, I could just make out that their hands seemed tied by some light yet tensile braid and that these females were chained together. I watched with growing anticipation as they formed a circle, with breasts and pudendum facing out towards their onlookers. From the distance at which I sat, their faces projected a kind of feral excitement, as if sensing that their aroused hunger was about to be satiated.

Suppressing a wild thrill, I took a sip of my hyböl. A passing concubine offered me several consciousness-enhancers from a tray that she held beneath her fine bulbous tits (”Thanks ever so much, darling!” and I licked one of her nipples before she turned away). Suddenly, an army of over-stimulated Joracian males, worked into a frenzy of lust, swarmed over the stage from all directions, each one having his way in turn with the captive thralls. In fact, the pleasure-slaves were no longer visible but had disappeared entirely under the frenzied pack of males, their ravished cries (of unimaginable pleasure!) nearly drowned out by the clamoring jeers, taunts, snarls and boasts of their irresistible masters.

“C’mon,” Àkbä urged, tugging my elbow, having suddenly appeared out of nowhere. “It’s your turn, Sam!”

I tried to offer an excuse, claiming that I had perhaps overdone it with the hyböli and other chemical “enhancers” I had consumed during the course of the day. But there was no refusing him.

As we approached our ensnared quarry, I felt a stiffening sense of purpose. A bit bleary-eyed with all the exertion, I approached one lithe consort who sank to her knees with eyes closed (so reverently did she approach her duties!), performing a splendid fellatio on me at once. Intuiting her boredom or fatigue before she finished, I withdrew from her mouth-watering devices and slapped my porpoise into her with an exuberant solicitude that, by this time, had become second nature. My encouragement thrilled her, for she hooked her long lithe legs tightly about my waist, locking her heels together, even raising her knees to my ribs to show how much she was enjoying herself.

As I reached a bone-rattling climax, I noticed Àkbä (who had turned his aroused chattel over and was jamming his engorged member into her anus) slowly raising his head, his lips covered with blood. I wondered exhaustedly how he had managed to injure himself.

Pulling me away from our carnal sacrament, he mumbled through numb lips: “Let’s get out of here.”

After a quick shower and a change of garments, we headed for the mini-ship. Something was bothering me, a vague irritation that I could not quite put my finger on, like cosmic cockroaches gnawing steadily away at the edges of the Universe. I made up my mind to ask my Joracian pal a few questions once we returned to the ship.

Chapter 17 Brutal Ardor

No sooner had we boarded the mini-ship and sat down at the controls than I felt my sense of purpose begin to veer. Plotting my course, I formulated the words I wanted to use in my mind and had started to open my mouth when I heard a voice warn: “Don’t move, Sam.” There was a searing flash of light and a crackling pop over my right shoulder as Àkbä vaporized in a gray mist. I recognized the interloper’s voice. It was Sylvia! I wanted to turn to see her; but a jab of cold steel at the nape of my neck stopped me. Also: her tone of voice was—unfamiliar and unwelcoming. “I thought—I thought you—” I stammered.

“Thought I was dead?”

Now I turned my head to look at her. But this was not the Sylvia I had known. Sylvia was transformed. In her place was a foreign creature, tall, dark and deadly serious. Clad in a gray, close-fitting raiment, she wore black boots and a black cap that covered her hair and ears. The old carefree Sylvia was gone; the new Sylvia possessed a deliberate calm that infused and informed all of her bodily movements. She also pointed a ray-gun directly at my head.

“Sylvia, what’s happened to you?”

“Shut up, Earthnoid,” she ordered. “Get down on the floor and stay where I can see you.”

Something told me I had better do as she suggested.

She sat down at the controls. Her fingers played across the console, plotting a course of her own.

“Where are we going?” I asked. No reply. Sylvia continued working the console. I was vaguely aware of motion and knew that we had been on our way for some time, when Sylvia broke the silence.

“You’ve done quite well for yourself, haven’t you, Little Man?” I couldn’t understand her tone; her coldness seemed to be sheer calculated cruelty. Why was she treating me this way? I was shocked and—well: hurt.

“You’re a traitor, Sam. Did you know that?” She must have seen the shocked incredulity in my face. “No? I should shoot you right now…”

But she didn’t shoot me. Instead, she related a bizarre tale, the chronicle of her adventures since we had parted so long ago in the Hall of Memory. “It’s the tale of my Great Awakening to the true nature and agenda of Joracian Empire. To this vast and glorious civilization for which you, it seems, have become Chief Apologist and Lackey.”

I sat in unblinking disbelief but listened closely to the story she related, a strange one to my ears.

“As soon as you had disappeared into your pod at the Hall of Memory, Àkbä removed me from mine on a pretext of wanting to show me something very important on the mini-ship. I blacked out.

“When I woke up, my clothes were gone and I was being ravished by a gang of Joracian males, chief among them your pal, Àkbä. They’d given me some sort of drug… The sex wasn’t so bad—ordinarily, I might not have minded but they weren’t very nice about it.” Sylvia looked away as she said: “I don’t like being forced.” Her tone of voice was so vapid that it scared me. There was not a tear in her eye.

“After they’d finished with me, I was spirited away to a place called the Basilica of Bimbos, where I was cleaned up, body-painted, tattooed (with a flaccid Cock-&-Balls emblem: the Joracian logo!), perfumed and put on an auction block. The whole place was a center for slave-trade, prostitution and drug-dealing.” Sylvia played with her ray-gun, turning it this way and that in her hand while she spoke. “These activities, by the way, Sam, are the primary enterprises of your adopted Civilization, and the true staples of the Joracian economy.”

After a brief pause, she resumed her narrative. “A fat and wealthy Joracian named Trazmagor (he resembled Elvis in his years of final, bloated decline) purchased me at auction. A real piece of work, this Trazmagor, if you know what I mean. He used to have me give him head while slaves packed his ass with cream cheese before sodomizing him. Of course I was being sodomized by a male slave at the same time, so what the hell!” Sylvia’s smile was not pleasant to see. “This activity alternated with electroshocks, which were delicately and unpredictably administered to every part of my body—except the face. Traz had a thing about faces—by a sadistic little twist named Nytåal…I got good and sizzled. Then it was off to the cold showers, hot tub and steam room. The massage was splendid, however. I actually began to look forward to being raped and tortured because I knew the massage was coming…

“Trazmagor and I got to be pretty chummy after a while. He let me in on some rather tasty tidbits about Joracian Society. He not only explained Joracian customs to me, but actually took me to places so I could see their beliefs and traditions in action…”

She let this sink into my brain, which was pretty numb by this time.

“You know what the real kicker is, Sam?” I shook my head slowly. “The Joracians aren’t resettling any of the people they evacuated from Earth. A few—the ‘lucky ones,’ I guess you could call them—are sold, like I was, into prostitution and slavery.”

Sylvia leaned forward and whispered to me in a most disconcerting way: “Want to know what Joracians do with the rest of ’em?” Sylvia paused for dramatic effect—it worked. “Most are systematically exterminated in Games held for the amusement of elite Joracian sports enthusiasts. The rest participate in something called ‘the Feast of the Ortho-Aesthetic Body’…”

“Joracians consume us, Sam.” Sylvia looked at her weapon, then back at me. “They EAT US!”

There wasn’t much I could say to her. As much as I didn’t want to believe it, I sensed somehow that the story Sylvia was telling me was true. I was feeling pretty desolate, myself. I finally got up the cheek to ask Sylvia a question.

“So, where are we heading now?”

Chapter 18 New World

I was starting to get uncomfortable on the floor. So I asked Sylvia if it would be all right if I got up. “Sure,” she said, waving me to the co-pilot’s seat.

Watching through the space-shield sitting above the control panel, I could see that we were approaching something resembling a dark disk about the size of a tennis ball. The tennis ball gradually transformed itself into a black baseball, then a basketball. “Brutal Ardor,” Brian Eno’s variation on the Pachelbel Canon, unfolded slowly, inescapably echoing in my memory as I stared at the shape. When I realized that what I was seeing was an orb, it occurred to me that it was probably some moon or satellite. Mostly the color of black tar, its surface contained several dark brown blobs and patches, the color of nicotine stains. The place was uninviting and ugly. Just looking at it made me sick to my stomach.

We descended through a swirling storm of black soot. As she set the ship down, Sylvia holstered her blaster.

“We’re here. After you, Sam.”

The hull portal opened and we stepped off the mini-ship. Our eyes slowly met with a bleak, forbidding landscape like something out of a nightmare: strange, corkscrew-like rock formations, some of them more than a hundred feet tall, rose up everywhere we turned; these twisted accretions and the barren ground out of which they grew looked like they were covered with a virulent tar or creosote. A sky the color of gunmetal, inflexible and harsh, without depth or variation, blurred homogeneously at the horizon. No living thing stirred. A defensive shudder rippled down my spine. “Where are we?” I asked Sylvia.

“Home,” she whispered. Tears welled up in her brown eyes.

Home? What did she mean by that? The blunt realization slowly dawned on me, like a pang of remorse. All of a sudden I got weak in the knees and felt like I might leave my body. This…this was Earth, the Home of Mortal Man, which Sylvia and I were standing on.

“The Joracians have been using it as a dumping ground for toxic wastes.” Sylvia explained to me, slowly and carefully, how the Joracians were basically intergalactic marauders, entrepreneurial pirates who ravaged every planet they encountered, stripping it of all resources until they had sucked the system dry, leaving behind only a burnt husk of devastation and waste.

It was appalling. No clouds were visible overhead. There was no sky, no atmosphere of any kind. There was not a blade of grass or so much as a dandelion. No bird sang, no gnat buzzed, and no squirrel stirred. Everything was dead and cold. Alluring Gaia—he Blue Marble we had both adored—was now reduced to nothing but a cinder, a terrible cipher. “Do you think all the animals are gone, Sam?”

I had no idea what to tell her. My own complicity—duplicity!—in this catastrophe was oppressive, to say the least.

“They can’t all be wiped out, can they?” Sylvia suppressed a few sniffles.

“There’s no Resettlement Program?” I carped. I still could not believe it.

Sylvia was fighting hard to hold back her tears.

“This is their Resettlement Plan!” she declaimed in frustration.

I remembered now, with a chill, what Àkbä had told me about the Joracian traitors: “Oh, they’ll be reconstructed and returned to useful productivity.” This was the higher activity and purpose for which human beings had to be…retooled! It was all a cynical euphemism for…the Reconstruction of Nature! I saw now why Joracians had expunged all the writings of Perry Miller and Hannah Arendt. They had known—had seen—oo much! Their works—ike George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” and Nineteen Eighty-Four—might have tipped someone off to the likely machinations of the Joracian High Command.

Someone like me.

We walked around, dismally, for a time, but could detect no change or variation in the landscape wherever we went. The ground was sticky, the color of coal.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said.

But Sylvia sat down on a black rock. “I’m not leaving.”

She had made up her mind to do whatever she could to bring the trashed planet back to life. Sylvia couldn’t believe that some life—animals or something—had failed to survive. I couldn’t talk her out of staying.

Leaving Sylvia there on that barren rock that had once been the planet Earth was the hardest thing I’d ever done. I didn’t think I could bear to tear myself away. I guess I was still in shock.

“Bye, Sam,” she said in a hollow voice.

“Goodbye, Sylvia.”

When I had walked a few paces away, I stopped. “I’ll come back for you. I promise.”

By the time I got to the mini-ship, I knew exactly what I had to do.

Chapter 19 The G-Spot

The mini-ship’s navigational system was preset to take me any place I desired to go in the whole Universe. The Cosmic “Games” of the Master Joracians transpired continuously in the Fifth Dimension, in a kind of eternal Urzeit. I headed for the G-Spot now; it was my firm intention to do everything in my power to interrupt or alter the basic constituents of cosmic reality. I didn’t know precisely how I was going to do that or what I’d find when I got there; but I knew that it was the center of power and that, if I could receive a hearing before the race of Master Joracians anywhere, it would be there, at the site and source of their Sacred Games. I think I had a vague notion of making some sort of poetic spectacle—a piece of performance art, I guess.

As my mini-ship whirled along its trajectory through the continuum of space-time, I summoned all of my inner resources, whatever internalized forces for good I could muster. I closed my eyes and I suppose I must have prayed, though I don’t remember the words I used, or even if they were words. I didn’t know what to expect when I reached the Games, or how I would recognize them, or what anything might look like when I finally got there. Suddenly, everything was very, very still. I knew I had “arrived” the moment I blacked out…

I found myself at the crux of a huge amphitheater or coliseum. I was vaguely aware of titanic, oblique faces of Joracian Masters, my Judges, beyond the ringed lights that gradually came up all around me—it would be here that the ultimate constituents of reality would be determined, and the course of cosmic history influenced or altered. Above our heads stretched an enormous crystal dome, whose sole purpose I sensed preternaturally must be one of sheer magic. Instinctively, I knew at once that I was in telepathic communion with the Joracian Masters. Somehow I also knew (did They tell me?) that I would have to make my case in poetry, that whatever words I breathed into being would emblazon and animate the crystal dome above our heads. It was incumbent on me to create, immediately, a poem so crushingly beautiful and pure that the Joracian Entelechy would see at once the necessity of sparing all the poor foolish mortals, my kinsmen, brothers and sisters, parents and children. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath; then slowly opening them, I saw the darkness lift a little, as a white-hot beam glowed upon my face, then grew to include my whole body, and my voice rose, musical at first, then more resonant and melodious…

No, no (I thought: that wasn’t right). I licked my lips, blinked my eyes, and tried again.

But this was really no better. I surmised that my time was running out, however indulgent my Joracian Hosts might be. The mother of invention. Necessity was. All right, then, I thought: very well. And, taking a deep breath…

Yes, I thought: That’s the stuff. That’s more like it.

That “obtrude,” I wondered: was it right? I couldn’t remember exactly what it meant, but felt instinctively that it must be the right word. It was best, I thought, just to barrel my way through, trusting to sound; I could hardly stop now.

Then, for the first time since I had begun to speak, to recite—to create!—the words and sounds that poured through my mind, ordering themselves by an almost unconscious discipline, I noticed that the words flooded forth, taking color and shape in the crystal dome above my head; that the lines hovered, shining and unbroken, on the expanse of the Great Dome itself. Like some shaman or bard of old, I sang as in a trance, no longer composing words or lines but articulating all the pain and anguish, sorrow and hope and beauty from some place deep inside myself as pure sophisticated images flooded through me, a mere conduit of psychic energy, filling the crystal welkin. Timeless, unaware of the passing of time, I stood outside the natural order of birth and death, outside my own birth, as a spectator. I sensed the faces of my Judges gazing upward toward the dome, transfixed by the images I drew to their attention. I sensed too, as I sang, that their alien hearts were wrung with pity and compassion for all humanity; that in their infinite mercy they could and would undo this Great Injustice, and restore us to our home on earth, to our struggle to create a place of safety for the newborn, from which generations might strive to establish sane and generous societies, praising all humane industry, art and science to which the love of men and women foster gentle decency and devotion. As a final touch, I prayed that they would not permit us to become the unwitting victims of a final murderous rage, engulfing the universe, but would give us back our mortal home of water, grass and wind, the golden light of summer afternoons, crisp newly fallen snow on moonlit winter nights, the Harvest Moon in October, the V of geese seeking another Spring…

When I had finished, I knew that some momentous decision was about to be made, that the Judges were in a hubbub, disconcerted, perhaps in disarray (had I somehow angered them inadvertently?), but this lasted only for a fleeting moment, as my own consciousness, exhausted from this epic trial, began to split apart, shatter or dissolve; and the enormous oblique faces of the Old Judges swarmed and whirled about me. I could feel myself getting dizzy and dizzier, my face and hands and feet begin to tingle and grow numb, as I struggled to postpone but finally could not resist the uncontrollable wave of sleep that now overtook me…

Chapter 20 THE END

And I found myself back in the New Stanley, standing at the bar, my untouched drink before me. I no longer waited for Vivaldi, as strains of jazz now streamed into my ears. I was not alone; there were several people standing at the bar, couples dressed for dinner, sitting at tables, people talking and laughing. There was no mini-ship, no Resettlement Plan, no Joracian Empire. I took a sip of my drink—it tasted like formaldehyde. My cigarettes looked back at me with murderous intent; somehow, I didn’t want them anymore. The bartender stopped wiping a glass and looked at me: “About time to bring in the replacement humans, don’tcha think?” Nodding, I stepped outside into the brisk air of an early autumn evening, and decided to call Sylvia and find my copy of the Atlantic Monthly.

END

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About Dennis Weiser

Poet, novelist and philosopher, Dennis Weiser is former regular columnist for The Kansas City Business Journal and book reviewer for National Public Radio affiliate KCUR-FM in Kansas City, Missouri. His articles, poems and stories have appeared in Abramelin: The Journal of Poetry and Magick, Chouteau Review, New Letters, p.r.n., Thorny Locust, Literary Juice, and several anthologies from Outrider Press. The Mutant Terror (original title: Excellence), his parable of genocidal terror, was the featured “Original Fiction” in the April 2004 issue of The Illuminata (editor Bret Funk dubbed the work “Twilight Zone-esque”). An excerpt from Crash Dummies (“Tzytzyan Ysalane”) won first prize for prose fiction at the Printers Row Book Fair in Chicago and was published in Things That Go Bump in the Night (Outrider Press 2004). His poem “Hidden Song” was commissioned exclusively for publication in The Sixth Surface: Steven Holl Lights the Nelson-Atkins Museum, Jack Rees, editor (Kansas City: topo/graphis Press 2007). Dennis has given readings at Barnes & Noble, The Writers Place, Duff’s, Prospero’s Books, Venice Café, and Westminster College. A former member of Chicago’s TallGrass Writers Guild (1999-2004) and Kansas City’s The Writers Place (2005-2008), his profile is included at Poets & Writers (http://www.pw.org), Who’s Who in America (2007) and Who’s Who in the World (2008). He is currently writing his third novel, Soul Snatchers of Java.