Complete Stories (39 page)

Trying to hold a smile, Denny stole a look at the clock. Three minutes.
Rapture in Space
had been on for three minutes now. Eighty-seven minutes to go.

It was another bruising half hour or so until Denny and Silke began to get the hang of spacefuffing. And then it was fun. For a long time they hung in midair, with Denny in Silke, and Silke’s legs around his waist, just gently jogging, but moaning and throwing their heads around for the camera. Actually, the more they hammed it up, the better it felt. Autosuggestion.

Denny stared and stared at the clouds to keep from coming, but finally he had to pull out for a rest. To keep things going they did rebounds for awhile. Silke would lie spreadeagled on the floor, and Denny would kind of leap down on her; both of them adjusting their pelvises for a bullseye. She’d sink into the cushions, then rebound them both up. It got better and better. Silke curled up into a ball and impaled herself on Denny’s shaft. He wedged himself against the wall with his feet and one hand and used his other hand to spin her around and around, bobbin on his spindle. Denny lay on the floor and Silke did leaps onto him. They kissed and licked each other all over, and from every angle. The time was almost up.

For the finale, they went back to midair fuffing; arms and legs wrapped around each other; one camera aimed at their faces, and one camera aimed at their genitalia. They hit a rhythm where they always pushed just as hard as each other and it action/reaction cancelled out, hard and harder, with big Earth out the window, yes, the air full of their smells, yes, the only sound the sound of their ragged breathing, yes, now NOW AAAHHHHHHH!!!!

Denny kind of fainted there, and forgot to slide out for the come-shot. Silke went blank, too, and they just floated, linked like puzzle pieces for five or ten minutes. It made a great finale for the
Rapture in Space
show, really much more convincing than the standard sperm spurt.

Two days later, and they were back on Earth, with the difference that they were now, as Denny had hoped, cashy and starry. People recognized them everywhere, and looked at them funny, often asking for a date. They did some interviews, some more endorsements and they got an XVID contract to host a monthly spacefuff variety show.

Things were going really good until Denny got a tumor.

“It’s a dooky little kilp down in my bag,” he complained to Silke. “Feel it.”

Sure enough, there was a one-centimeter lump in Denny’s scrotum. Silke wanted him to see a doctor, but he kept stalling. He was afraid they’d run a blood test and get on his case about drugs. Some things were still illegal.

A month went by and the lump was the size of an orange.

“It’s so gawky you can see it through my pants,” complained Denny. “It’s giga ouch and I can’t cut a vid this way.”

But he still wouldn’t go to the doctor. What with all the snap he could buy, and with his new cloud telescope, Denny didn’t notice what was going on in his body most of the time. He was happy to miss the next few XVID dates. Silke hosted them alone.

Three more months and the lump was like a small watermelon. When Denny came down one time and noticed that the tumor was moving he really got worried

“Silke! It’s alive! The thing in my bag is alive! Aaauuugh!”

Silke paid a doctor two thousand dollars to come to their apartment. The doctor was a bald, dignified man with a white beard. He examined Denny’s scrotum for a long time, feeling, listening, and watching the tumor’s occasional twitches. Finally he pulled the covers back over Denny and sat down. He regarded Silke and Denny in silence for quite some time.

“Decode!” demanded Denny. “What the kilp we got running here?”

“You’re pregnant,” said the doctor. “Four months into it, I’d say.”

The quickening fetus gave another kick and Denny groaned. He knew it was true. “But how?”

The doctor steepled his fingers. “I…I saw
Rapture in Space
. There were certain signs to indicate that your uh partner was menstruating?”

“Check.”

“Menstruation, as you must know, involves the discharge of the unfertilized ovum along with some discarded uterine tissues. I would speculate that after your ejaculation the ovum became wedged in your meatus. It is conceivable that under weightless conditions the sperm’s flagell3/4 could have driven the now-fertilized ovum up into your vas deferens. The ovum implanted itself in the bloodrich tissues there and developed into a fetus.”

“I want an abortion.”

“No!” protested Silke. “That’s our baby, Denny. You’re already almost half done carrying it. It’ll be lovely for us…and just think of the publicity!”

“Uh …” said Denny, reaching for his bag of dope.

“No more drugs,” said the doctor, snatching the bag. “Except for the ones I give you.” He broke into a broad, excited smile. “This will make medical history.”

And indeed it did. The doctor designed Denny a kind of pouch in which he could carry his pregnant scrotum, and Denny made a number of video appearances, not all of them X-rated. He spoke on the changing roles of the sexes, and he counted the days till delivery. In the public’s mind, Denny became the symbol of a new recombining of sex with life and love. In Denny’s own mind, he finally became a productive and worthwhile person. The baby was a flawless girl, delivered by a modified Caesarian section.

Sex was never the same again.

============

Written in Fall, 1984.

Semiotext[e] SF
, Autonomedia, 1989.

Dennis Poague, a.k.a. Sta-Hi, was the inspiration for this story; he really did spend his inheritance on a phoning machine. I wrote this story shortly after seeing the IMAX movie,
The Dream Is Alive
, which featured pictures of the sexy astronaut Judy Resnick sleeping in zero-gee. The Challenger shuttle blew up with Judy in it a few months later, definitively deep-sixing whatever slim chance “Rapture in Space” had of getting into a normal SF magazine.

Semiotext[e] SF
was an anthology which Peter Lamborn Wilson and I co-edited. Originally we’d planned to call the book Bad Brains, but Peter felt doing this would conflict with the band of the same name. At the time, Peter rented an apartment upstairs from the apartment of my friend Eddie Marritz in New York City, which is how I happened to meet him. Eddie appears in the story “Tales of Houdini,” in “Drugs and Live Sex—NYC 1980,” and in the novel
Master of Space and Time.

A funny Dennis story. When we moved to San Jose, it turned out Dennis lived here, so we started getting together a lot. I was supposed to give a reading at an annual San Jose SF convention called Bay Con in 1987, and the day before the reading I was in a bicycle accident and had a huge black eye. I didn’t want to appear in public looking so bad, so I gave Dennis my manuscript of “As Above So Below,” and told him to do the reading. I figured he would enjoy this free taste of fame, and I was right—remember that one of
Software
Sta-Hi’s big obsessions is how to become famous.

Although I’d already made friends with the San Francisco SF writers, none of the fans knew at Bay Con knew what I looked like, so when Dennis appeared in a corduroy jacket and read my story, they assumed he was me. The funny thing was, when I came and did my own reading at Bay Con a year later, several people came up to me and said, “You know, I saw your reading last year and it was wonderful. You made the material so fresh and new…it was like you’d never even read it before!”

I first met Vlad Zipkin at a Moscow beatnik party in the glorious winter of 1957. I went there as a KGB informer. Because of my report on that first meeting, poor Vlad had to spend six months in a mental hospital—not that he wasn’t crazy.

As a boy I often tattled on wrongdoers, but I certainly didn’t plan to grow up to be a professional informer. It just worked out that way. The turning point was in the spring of 1953, when I failed my completion exams at the All-Union Metallurgical Institute. I’d been working towards those exams for years; I wanted to help build the rockets that would launch us into the Infinite.

And then, suddenly, one day in April, it was all over. Our examination grades were posted, and I was one of the three in seventeen who’d failed. To take the exam again, I’d have to wait a whole year. First I was depressed, then angry. I knew for a fact that four of the students with good grades had cheated. I, who was honest, had failed; and they, who had cheated, had passed. It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t communist—I went and told the head of the Institute.

The upshot was that I passed after all, and became an assistant metallurgical engineer at the Kaliningrad space center. But, in reality, my main duty was to make weekly reports to the KGB on what my coworkers thought and said and did. I was, frankly, grateful to have my KGB work to do, as most of the metallurgical work was a bit beyond me.

There is an ugly Russian word for informer:
stukach
, snitch. The criminals, the psychotics, the parasites, and the beatniks—to them I was a
stukach
. But without
stukachi
, our communist society would explode into anarchy or grind to a decadent halt. Vlad Zipkin might be a genius, and I might be a
stukach
—but society needed us both.

I first met Vlad at a party thrown by a girl called Lyuda. Lyuda had her own Moscow apartment; her father was a Red Army colonel-general in Kaliningrad. She was a nice, sexy girl who looked a little like Doris Day.

Lyuda and her friends were all beatniks. They drank a lot; they used English slang; they listened to jazz; and the men hung around with prostitutes. One of the guys got Lyuda pregnant and she went for an abortion. She had VD as well. We heard of this, of course. Word spreads about these matters. Someone in Higher Circles decided to eliminate the anti-social sex gangster responsible for this. It was my job to find out who he was.

It was a matter for space-center KGB because several rocket-scientists were known to be in Lyuda’s orbit. My approach was cagey. I made contact with a prostitute named Trina who hung around the Metropol, the Moskva, and other foreign hotels. Trina had chic Western clothes from her customers, and she was friends with many of the Moscow beatniks. I’m certainly not dashing enough to charm a girl like Trina—instead, I simply told her that I was KGB, and that if she didn’t get me into one of Lyuda’s bashes I’d have her arrested.

Lyuda’s pad was jammed when we got there. I was proud to show up with a cool chick like Trina on my arm. I looked very sharp too, with the leather jacket, and the black stove-pipe pants with no cuffs that all the beatniks were wearing that season. Trina stuck right with me—as we’d planned—and lots of men came up to talk to us. Trina would get them to talking dirty, and then I’d make some remark about Lyuda, ending with “but I guess she has a boyfriend?” The problem was that she had lots of them. I kept having to go into the bathroom to write down more names. Somehow I had to decide on one particular guy.

Time went on, and I got tenser. Cigarette smoke filled the room. The bathroom was jammed and I had to wait. When I came back I saw Trina with a hardcore beatnik named Starsky—he got her attention with some garbled Americanisms: “Hey baby, let’s jive down to Hollywood and drink cool Scotch. I love making it with gone broads like you and Lyuda.” He showed her a wad of hard currency—dollars he had illegally bought from tourists. I decided on the spot that Starsky was my man, and told Trina to leave with him and find out where he lived.

Now that I’d finished my investigation, I could relax and enjoy my-self. I got a bottle of vodka and sat down by Lyuda’s Steinway piano. Some guy in sunglasses was playing a slow boogie-woogie. It was lovely, lovely enough to move me to tears—tears for Lyuda’s corrupted beauty, tears for my lost childhood, tears for my mother’s grave.

A sharp poke in the thigh interrupted my reverie.

“Quit bawling, fatso, this isn’t the Ukraine.”

The voice came from beneath the piano. Leaning down, I saw a man sitting cross-legged there, a thin, blond man with pale eyes. He smiled and showed his bad teeth. “Cheer up, pal, I mean it. And pass me that vodka bottle you’re sucking. My name’s Vlad Zipkin.”

I passed him my bottle. “I’m Nikita Iosifovich Globov.”

“Nice shoes,” Vlad said admiringly. “Cool jacket, too. You’re a snappy dresser, for a rocket-type.”

“What makes you think I’m from the space center?” I said.

Vlad lowered his voice. “The shoes. You got those from Nokidze the Kazakh, the black market guy. He’s been selling ‘em all over Kaliningrad.”

I climbed under the piano with Zipkin. The air was a little clearer there. “You’re one of us, Comrade Zipkin?”

“I do information theory,” Zipkin whispered, drunkenly touching one finger to his lips. “We’re designing error-proof codes for communicating with the…you know.” He made a little orbiting movement with his forefinger and looked upward at the shiny dark bottom of the piano. The Sputnik had only been up since October. We space workers were still not used to talking about it in public.

“Come on, don’t be shy,” I said, smiling. “We can say ‘Sputnik,’ can’t we? Everyone in the world has talked of nothing else for months!”

It was easy to draw Vlad out. “My group’s hush-hush,” he bragged criminally. “The top brass think ‘information theory’ has to be classified and censored. But the theory’s not information itself, it’s an abstract meta-information …” He burbled on a while in the weird jargon of his profession. I grew bored and opened a pack of Kent cigarettes.

Vlad bummed one instantly. He was impressed that I had American cigarettes. Only cool black-market operators had classy cigs like that. Vlad felt the need to impress me in return. “Khrushchev wants the next sputnik to broadcast propaganda,” he confided, blowing smoke. “The Internationale in outer space—what foolishness!” Vlad shook his head. “As if countries matter any more outside our atmosphere. To any real Russian, it is already clear that we have surpassed the Americans. Why should we copy their fascist nationalism? We have soared into the void and left them in the dirt!” He grinned. “Damn, these are good smokes. Can you get me a connection?”