The Sex Sphere (24 page)

Cortland’s pilot, a taciturn German named Wolf, helped them inflate the raft. Sybil fired test-shots from the PB and the Uzi.
Zweeeeef! Brdrdrdrdrt!
The particle-beam was a pale-purple ray; the Uzi had tracer-bullets that shot like a Fourth of July fountain.

“Sybil,” said her father, just as she pushed off shore. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

“There’s no one else, Daddy. I have to.”

“I know.”

The helicopter got back aloft as fast as possible. The river was misty and very dark. But Sybil had a pair of Cortland’s heavy night-glasses, his company’s latest invention. The glasses were a pair of tiny infrared TV cameras coupled to two little screens, one in front of each eye. Looking through them, Sybil could see the riverbanks as pink shoulders sloping down to the yellow-green river. Her hands were hot red, the sky dark blue. The raft was streamlined and equipped with a silent water-jet engine, so she made good time.

Before long, Sybil was sliding under the Schlierbach-Ziegelhausen bridge, just one big bend away from Heidelberg. She hugged the left bank and stared anxiously at the sky. She held her PB at the ready. High on the left, the
Gästehaus
slid by.

Sudden sweet memories sandbagged Sybil: Alwin and the children catching a hedgehog, Alwin reading E. M. Forster to her on the long winter evenings, the two of them dancing to reggae tapes on Friday nights, the wine, the talk, the good sex….

Just then a sphere rushed past, right in front of the raft. Sybil leveled her PB and pressed the button.
Zweeeef!
Nothing left. Had this piece of Babs had time to tell the others? And where had it been going?

Sybil strained to push all her awareness out into the night. Just downstream glittered the lights of Heidelberg. She took off the night-glasses. Almost time to land.

She could see the castle up on the left, hovering like a thought. It was bathed in floodlights and lit by flares, as if for a holiday. A rocket shot up from the castle’s octagonal belfry, then another and another. The hoarse roar of many men’s voices drifted down. Something was going on up there, something big.

Sybil glided up to the locks and found a ladder. She slung the Uzi under her left arm and the PB tube under her right. Praying that Babs wouldn’t pick this moment to pounce, she climbed to the concrete riverbank. So far, so good.

There were stairs to the street, deserted. Trying to look every which way at once, Sybil skittered across a bright intersection and darted into the shadows of some modern apartment buildings.

Another roar rose from the castle. The whole sky up there was red. A block away, two drunks hurried past. American soldiers. A bottle smashed on the cobblestones. Sybil stayed in the shadows.

Not far from here was a little-used trail up to the castle’s L-shaped grounds. If she used this trail she would come out at the opposite end of the L from the castle, far from the crowd, and with a good view of what they were up to.

The drunks’ clumsy footsteps and hoarse voices faded away. Senses strained to the limit, Sybil moved forward.
I’m ready to kill
, she repeated to herself.
I’m going to kill Babs and...and Alwin
. She held a weapon ready in each hand.

In some of the buildings children were crying. But the streets were totally deserted. Everyone was up at the castle: all the men and all the sex spheres. Sybil found the path and hurried up.

As she climbed higher she could see more and more of the bizarre celebration. A lurid red glow illuminated the castle park; most of the trees were on fire. In the background were the jagged castle ruins, hollow and dead.

Set in the midst of the crowded park was a single huge sex sphere…a giant ass with gaping hell-mouth cunt. A few late-arriving sex spheres shot past and merged into the mass of the one great Babs. The air tingled with pheromones. The crackling trees bathed the scene in jump-jump eldritch light.

Men with horrible twisted faces pressed up to the giant sex sphere like sperms seething around an egg. One by one, they were worming their way into the gaping vaginal rent: damned souls entering the gate of hell, children following the Pied Piper under the mountain. Naked and distant, they looked rudimentary, like forked parsnips. In their sexual frenzy, some coupled together. Others hunched twitchingly against the sex sphere’s sagging breasts, or rubbed their faces against the sphere’s broad, glistening anus.

The livid mob surrounded the sphere’s crack like a puddle. Body by body, the pool grew smaller, as one man after another reached his heart’s desire, the stink wet hot dark embrace.

An odd little figure darted around the edges of the manpool, herding them forward. The figure was short and yellow, and seemed to have a wheel instead of feet. Occasionally he would pause in his feverish activity to stare attentively towards the top of the sphere. A single man squatted there near the sex sphere’s summit, just beneath her huge, pleased mouth. Sweating and grinning, he shouted down instructions. He was the procurer, the Devil, the Pied Piper: Sybil’s husband, Alwin Bitter, me.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

A Happy Ending

I could feel the bullets coming, sense them with my field. The first burst would have hit me in the head if I hadn’t jumped clear.

I landed on a fat man wedged in between Babs’s labia. Sybil was still firing her Uzi. I could see the tracer-bullets
thipp
ing past.

“
Pass doch auf, Sie doofe Narr
,” hollered Fatman: “Look yes out, sir goofy fool.” Skull-faced Thinman, just ahead, pulled Fatman fully in.

Men seethed around me. Ugly men with warts and wens, limps and humps, scars and age-spots, blind white eyes. I was lost in the crowd, and crazy Sybil was firing at random. Sudden blood-flowers bloomed th-th-th-th-there on Babs’s hide. Men screamed like women. I stayed low and worked my way around to the shelter of the sphere’s other side.

Wheelie Willie
, I called with my mind,
come help me!

Tilted over at a high-speed angle, the little rascal came buzzing round the great curve of flesh. After my
Schnookeloch
knob-job we’d scored him some hash, and he was in high spirits.

“Everything’s right on, Alwin! Babs’ll haul this whole bunch off to Hilbert Space in a few minutes. Is it really trippy there? Are we going too?”

“Not yet. I still have much to do. When I return to Hilbert Space it will be in glory. The reason I called you is…”

Suddenly the smooth wall of the sphere above us split open. A tightly collimated beam of pale-purple light punched through. I recognized it as a particle-beam. Sybil was shooting a particle-beam laser at Babs!

The beam had eaten a hole right through the sphere, but no important centers had been cut. Babs rose hugely off the ground, looking this way and that for her attacker. All but a few dozen of the men were lodged in her womb, and she moved heavily. Thirty meters away stood Sybil, a tiny courageous figure with a weapon in each hand.

“That’s my wife,” I told Wheelie Willie. “We have to save her.”

The sphere’s great mouth opened to show cruel teeth. “Vhell, vhell,” she boomed. “Little Sybil Burton Bitter.” A plump, struggling figure slid out of Babs’s stuffed cunt and dropped maggotlike to earth.

Black-painted and tense, Sybil stood her ground. Another beam of purple light flicked forth. Babs dodged it and zoomed fifty meters straight up. Her bulk seemed to cover half the sky. For a moment, the angry firelit monster hovered, and then she dove.

With our minds tuned together, Wheelie Willie and I had formed a plan: a desperate suicidal rescue. As Babs dropped, he and I surged forward. I flew like Superman, my arms stretched out. He followed right behind, his wheel a screaming blur. Directly above us, the sex sphere’s mouth was swooping down.

I snatched Sybil and sped away. Babs’s piggy eyes were too far around her curve to see. Noble W. W. poised himself right on ground zero. He made there by his one oblation of himself once offered a full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice and satisfaction for my sins. He gave himself as substitute, fooling Babs’s gross mouth.

In a flash I’d landed Sybil in the shelter of the
Gesprengter Turm
, the Sprung Tower. Babs thought she’d eaten Sybil, but she was looking for me with her eyes and her hypersenses. I used my mental powers to disguise our vibes: Sybils and I would scan as a rabbit and a slug. Babs searched vainly for another minute, then settled down to load the remaining men. Perhaps she thought I’d gone off to grieve.

“Let me
go
,” said Sybil, waving her Uzi.

“Put that down.”

The Sprung Tower was “sprung,” or blown in two, by the troops of Louis XIV, some three hundred years ago. Half of it still stands, and half of it lies on the ground in one huge piece. Originally it was used as a fortress, with several floors and lots of gun-slits. What remains of the top floor is good and solid. Sybil and I were up there, peeking down at Babs through one of the tower’s loopholes.

“I’m supposed to kill you, Alwin.”

“Be reasonable, Sybil. I haven’t done anything to you.”

“You killed all the women in Heidelberg.”

“Babs did that.”

“You brought her here.”

“I know this
looks
bad. But Babs is trying to bring freedom and immortality to everyone. You should see how things look from Hilbert Space, Sybil.”

“Help me get rid of that sphere for good. Or else.”

Sybil poked me with her Uzi. The same gun she’d been shooting at me before. With a twitch of my will, I melted the barrel. Sybil dropped the hot weapon with an exclamation of pain.

“There’s only one way I know to stop Babs,” I said. “And it’s not any Uzi or particle-beam laser. You have to realize that she’s infinite-dimensional. Nothing we can do to her in this space can amount to more than a pinprick. But there is maybe a way.”

“Save us, Alwin. It’s your duty.”

“Why should I do listen to you if you’re talking about killing me?”

“Think of the babies, Alwin. The poor children. Having the world disappear is fine for you…you’re bored with it. But the little ones are just beginning. Shouldn’t they have their chance, too?”

“Well…”

“All the children in Heidelberg are alone. Locked up and crying. Is that fair?”

“You don’t realize what a sacrifice you’re asking me to make,” I complained. “Wheelie Willie already died for us, isn’t that enough?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Wheelie Willie, the little man I used to draw at Rutgers. He was alive. I found him in the Neckar. And just now he let Babs eat him so she’d think you were taken care of.”

“That’s…impossible, Alwin. You must be going crazy.”

I paused to recall exactly when Wheelie Willie had appeared. I’d been chatting with Huba. Just before that I’d been about to doze off; no, I’d been thinking about Hilbert Space.
Moving
in it. What must have happened was that I’d shifted the nature of reality. Probably the shift that made Wheelie Willie real had been the same as the shift that had turned all the Heidelberg women into sex spheres.

Enjoyable. It had been an enjoyable afternoon with Wheelie Willie, partying in the old town. Huba had turned back up, not really too pissed-off about his wife, and we’d gone barhopping. The funniest moment had come when we’d passed some really loud and plastic-looking American tourists. “
Deine Landsmänner
,” Huba had said, nudging me. “Your fellow-countrymen.” Around sunset, all the spheres had flown up to the castle, as if roosting there for the night. We men had followed them up and found that they’d merged into one humongous ass... Crazy? Sure. But I hadn’t questioned it till Sybil came blazing her way in.

Duty. Should. Fair
. Wife words. But maybe she was right. There was no rush, really, to destroy reality. In the Zen sense, there’s nothing to destroy anyway.

A gleam of light from a gun-slit lit up Sybil’s face. Wide mouth, deep eyes. A strong face, a good face. She smiled. I kissed her.

“All right. I’ll save the world.”

There are many possible realities, infinitely many. Yet most of them are not…alive. Most of them are like possible books that no one ever actually wrote. A group-mind, like humanity’s, lights up one given world. What makes this world different from some ghostly alternate universe is that
we actually live here
.

In my trip to Hilbert Space I’d learned how to take hold of human reality and move it. The first thing I’d done was to fix it so that I had superpowers. And then I’d begun shaking things, trying to get our group-mind free, free like Babs. But now I was going to have to undo everything I’d done. More than that, I was going to have to move our group-mind across the dimensions to some other universe where Babs might not find us. Dodging her wasn’t going to be easy.

“How will you do it?” Sybil leaned against me, familiar, intense.

“In a minute Babs will disappear. She’ll take all those sex-fiends up to Hilbert Space. While she’s gone we’ll run away.”

“To Frankfurt?”

I laughed shortly. “To a different layer of reality. I’ll move the human race’s group-mind to a different place and hope that Babs can’t find us.”

We peeped out of our stone loophole. The last man was in Babs now. Her sides swelled out like a hamster’s cheeks. Then she shrank…smoothly sliding off into hyperspace.

“This is it,” I told Sybil. “Say your prayers.”

I let my consciousness flow out. First to Sybil. Her complex self: part bad-girl, part school marm. Past her, to the children down in Heidelberg. Then up and down the Neckar. Fleeting images, snatches of German. I flowed across Europe—holding it all—Asia, Africa, Australia, the Americas. The mystical body of Christ, of Brahma, Buddha, Allah, you, me too.

Suddenly I’m thinking of a children’s book,
Make Way for Ducklings
, Father Duck looking for a place to land. God, the sunset’s bright. Hurry up, the sphere is coming. Down there is a safe spot, a mote in golden light. Hurry. Circle down….

***

We live in Virginia now. I’m sitting at a typewriter. There’s a magnolia outside my window. The kids are in school and Sybil’s in another room, working on a painting. I think I’ll go ask her if she remembers how we got here. One thing: if you see the sex sphere, I don’t want to hear about it.