Wonders of a Godless World (19 page)

He leapt.

The orphan was thrown back into her own mind, and her own body. Somehow, she had ended up sitting slumped against the wall, legs splayed, her hands at her sides, like a broken doll. She couldn’t seem to move. And there before her, on his knees still, the archangel lifted his head, his anguish gone. His eyes were blinking as if they had just opened for the first time, full of wonder. And then his hand was reaching out, fingers trembling, to touch the bare skin of the virgin’s neck.

The girl shuddered. But not in disgust, it was a shiver of pleasure. Her blind gaze wandered from the TV screen and her hand rose to rest upon the archangel’s fingers. He shuddered in his turn, and for an instant they held that position. The orphan didn’t breathe. Maybe it was going to be okay. Maybe the virgin would turn and they would stare into each other’s eyes and it
would
work.

But the boy kept shuddering, his arm quivering violently, and it was not from excitement—he was like a man fighting to keep
his fingers pressed to a red-hot stovetop. He was staring in horror at her hand on his. And then, with a cry, he wrenched his fingers free and fell back from her in agony.

The orphan didn’t need to enter his mind to know why. It came flooding out of him. His shock and anger and betrayal. She had
tricked
him. She had seemed so pure. She had appeared to reject the baseness of his nature. But it was a lie. At his first caress, instead of chastely tolerating his touch, she had turned greedily and sunk her talons into his hand. She was like all women after all, hungry for him, and eager, no doubt, to engulf the serpent at his waist. Hadn’t his book tried to warn of this? Images rushed up from its pages—devouring females with poisonous tongues; worms of decay crawling beneath smooth skin. How could he have forgotten that woman was a vile thing, her body a deadly pitfall for man, full of lusts that would destroy him?

The orphan bowed her head. Of course. He could not want
her
if she wanted
him
. His awful book still held him locked in paradox. If the virgin was pure she would not desire him, and if she desired him she was not pure…

And the virgin herself?

The orphan switched to the girl’s mind, and discovered alarm. Where had her angel gone? His hand had pulled away before she’d had a chance to see him. Why was he hiding again in the dark? The virgin had turned from the television and was crawling forward blindly, hands outstretched. Her fingers clasped the air directly in front of the boy’s face, but he was backing away, rigid with disgust. The orphan caught more snatches from him, images of blood and boils, and of rats gnawing at his skin. And yet she felt too the strange pain and pleasure of his giant erection, growing ever harder.

Meanwhile the girl’s frustration was nearing panic. Why wouldn’t he touch her? He was close, she knew, her skin was all aflame, every hair standing on end, shivering to be stroked. How could she force him to come back? How could she show him that she was ready? She raised herself onto her knees and undid the buttons of her pyjama top. And as it fell away, her skin showed pale blue in the glow from the television, her body thin and yet curved, casting shadows across itself. Naked from the waist up, she spread her arms and waited, her head upright, a willing offering.

The archangel stared, also on his knees, his gaze roaming across the forbidden landscape of her breasts. They contained, his madness assured him, only sinew and bile. But indecision beat on his forehead—he had no control left, no refuge, his tower was gone, he was subject to the thing straining hugely in his groin. Slowly, he stood. And as he did so the shadows hardened along the line of his jaw.

The orphan understood—he was forging a new self. If he could not escape from the woman then he must confront her. And his book gave him only the one means. He must become an avenging angel. A visitation, sent to her by his god. He stalked a circle around the kneeling girl. Yes. He had been sent to save her, to punish her weakness. He had come to abject her pride and to exalt her soul; to drive the evil from her female form, by brute force if need be, and fill it with divine grace.

He reached down, trailing a finger along her cheek. In reply, the virgin quivered and moaned. Then quickly he turned his wrist and, backhanded, slapped her hard across the face. She went sprawling to the floor.

The orphan did nothing. She was paralysed, overcome by the wave of sheer joy that burst forth from the virgin, even as the girl fell. His touch! Her angel’s touch! The fire in it, the passion in it!
And all of it real, not viewed distantly through a window, but actually happening to her. Sensation was pleasure and pleasure was sensation, and both were a gift from her wonderful demigod. She had even glimpsed his face as he struck her. He was fiery and stern, and indescribably beautiful.

The orphan watched on, disbelieving. The archangel fell upon the girl. Her back was flat to the floor, and he splayed her arms out, holding down one of her wrists and with his free hand pulling away the lower half of her pyjamas. The virgin did not resist. She allowed him to also force her legs apart, and the more he pressed down, the more the joy lifted her up. The orphan, caught in flurries of the girl’s pleasure, felt her own body responding, as if it was herself on the floor.

But the orphan was inside the archangel’s head, too. He was staring down at the girl’s outspread form, submitted utterly to him, and yet it wasn’t enough, his fury demanded he force the submission further. His erection was aching, and until he had humbled her fully he could not be delivered from it.

He glanced about the room. There—the virgin’s clothes! He took them up, tearing the hospital pyjamas into shreds, his limbs angelically strong. Then he proceeded to bind the torn segments to her wrists and ankles, and the other ends to points around the room—the legs of the old couch, a water pipe that stuck out from a wall—until she was tied fast, unable to move at all, spreadeagled on the floor.

And still the virgin’s joy washed over the orphan. Glimpses through the girl’s eyes showed the angel working above her, his arms like thin wings, and the more he immobilised her, the more her excitement built. She wanted to be tied, she wanted escape from this beautiful being to be impossible, she wanted to be trapped by him, taken prisoner by him, possessed by him. She wanted
every bit of herself, inside and out, to be exposed and available to his touch.

All of which only enraged the archangel more. Every shift and squirm of her body mocked him. Binding her wasn’t enough either. He cast about the room again. There. He strode to the television and ripped the power cord from it. The screen went black with a pop, and in the virgin’s mind the shining window slammed shut, but she didn’t care, she didn’t need the window anymore. The angel had become her window. He was a blazing figure in her darkness now. He loomed over her, wielding a flaming whip in his hand, ready to bless her skin with its touch.

The orphan was powerless to look away. The boy raised his arm and snapped the television cord down across the girl’s breasts. He grunted with the effort, the virgin gasped in ecstasy, and a red welt flared across her chest. Then down came the cord again. And again. In near silence—apart from the hoarse breathing of the boy as he laboured, and the panting of the girl as every blow struck.

But the archangel could not be sated. The girl’s pain did not suffice. That much was clear from the eager sounds she made, and from the way her skin writhed up to meet the whip. And his own body throbbed in response, betraying him, mastering him, in need of punishment as much as hers. He tugged feverishly at his own clothes, ripping off shirt and pants and underwear, and then he stood naked astride the girl, his hateful erection, as giant as a club, jutting out above her.

(And the orphan saw, horrified, the many jagged white scars that ran the entire length of it, on the underside, from the tip right down to the pouch of his testicles—and she understood at last what he had done to himself with his knife, the repeated mutilations that had led the authorities to commit him.)

Again he plied the whip, once to the girl, and then once to himself, across his back. Pain. Pain would save them both. But for the virgin it was only pleasure, more and more pleasure. The welts across her skin burnt like gold, and her shining angel was naked too now. His body, all aglow with his love for her, was the most exquisite thing she had ever seen. He stroked himself with his whip, and then stroked her too, sharing the gratification. And best of all, the blows were moving one by one down her body, from her breasts and her stinging nipples, down over her belly, and almost to between her outstretched legs, where she could feel herself peeling open for him.

The archangel was groaning in frustration. No matter how he slashed at her, and no matter how he slashed at himself, her moans only grew louder, his erection more strained. He fell to his knees between hers, and there her most tender spot awaited him, glistening wet and flushed purple with expectation. With his last strength he plied his whip, cut after cut, to that spot. And every other stroke, he cut at his own genitals, balls and cock, his back arched with the agony. Again. And again. And again.

The virgin cried out in rapture. The archangel cried in torment. The orphan was swept helplessly between the two of them, slammed about by gusts of pleasure and pain, love and hate, mastery and submission, and she thought she must either scream or faint if they did not stop. But then the girl was convulsing, coming, her bruised cunt clasping and grasping at nothing, and the boy was convulsing and coming too, his erection spurting out vast white jets into the air.

Then it was over, a wave collapsing on itself. Spent, the archangel sank full-length beside the girl and lay there like a corpse.

The orphan gasped for breath. She felt tossed aside, thrown out just as the climax was being reached, and denied that climax
herself. The wild seas of emotion in the room slowly calmed, ebbing away until she finally felt alone again within her own skull. Movement crept back into her limbs and she propped herself up against the wall. What had happened between these two? What had they done?

The archangel stirred. He reared up on his arms and looked about in confusion. He did not appear to notice the girl. A whiff of some feeling came from him; the orphan could not quite grasp it—was there a tone of disappointment, of something that had not been achieved? He crawled away, dragging his clothes behind him, until he found his book. He took it up and then slumped, vacant, in the corner.

The virgin lay in her bindings, her breathing back to normal, her bliss faded, her eyes restored to their blindness. The sensation came from her, too. Of having reached a peak, yes, but also of having failed somehow.

So was that
sex
? So doomed, so disconnected, the lovers at such cross purposes with each other…? It was not what the orphan had ever imagined. It was awful. This couldn’t be what the foreigner had meant she needed to explore.

And yet, her own body and its reactions…

She crawled forward and began untying the virgin. And when that was done, she could stand it no more. Empty and cheated and more acutely turned on than she had ever been, the orphan fled to the privacy of her room, where she tore off her clothes, spread her legs, and masturbated until she came.

She dozed, languorous, above the sheets.

In her dreams, shapes and colours moved. Warm things merged and parted again. And then a voice was there, whispering up out of the depths.

Orphan…

She stretched her limbs. The foreigner was talking in her sleep. How nice. But then a lazy curiosity rose. He had never come to her like this before.

It can’t wait
.

She was aware that it was still night. She had been in this drowsing state for only a few hours. She was aware, too, that she was naked on her bed…but she didn’t care. Let him see, even if it was wrong, even if it could never be that way with him. She was barely awake, she could not be blamed.

Time is running short for us, orphan. There has been an accident.

The urgency in his tone reached her dimly. What did he mean? What had happened? Should she get up? Go to him?

No. Don’t come here. Not yet.

But he sounded so worried.

We must expedite matters, that’s all. I have to tell you about my fifth and final life, right now, while I have the chance.

Was there the time for that? If something was wrong…

We have a few hours yet, I think. And it’s important that you hear the full story before…well, before we go on.

His
final
life, the orphan noted. The life he’d lived before arriving at her hospital. And of all his lives, this was the one she’d been waiting to hear. It would answer her secret questions about where he’d been twenty-one years ago; whether he’d come anywhere near her island before now; or near her mother…

But then for some reason she was suddenly thinking about the archangel and the virgin. Why, she had left them just lying there in the dayroom. She hadn’t even dressed them. And if the nurses found them that way…

They have not been discovered. Forget about them.

Obediently, the orphan forgot. A wave of sleepiness washed over her again, and all sense of urgency faded. It was so comfortable there on the bed. Maybe it was only a dream anyway. But his voice was lovely. She could listen to him forever. To this story, and to any other story that he wanted to tell her.

It won’t take forever. And this is my last story.

Now, I drowned, but you know that I did not truly die from the drowning—that indeed I cannot truly die from anything. Nor, when I let myself be swept off that cliff, as insane as I was, did I expect to truly die. I was surrendering to the world, that was all, to its power and its terror. And it was wonderful while it lasted.

But it was only a temporary release, as these moments of passion must always be. And afterwards, inevitably, comes the regret and the dissatisfaction. In my case, it began in the form of a net dangling behind a small fishing trawler. I was dragged up rudely from the depths
and deposited on the bloody deck, gasping amid a hundred other sea creatures—a rebirth for me, even as they died. The fishermen were terrified, not surprisingly. I was not pretty to look at. I don’t know how long I’d floated down there in the darkness, but it was long enough; my skin had dissolved and fish had chewed away my extremities. I was screaming. They hid me below and made for land.

Once ashore, however, I recovered as I always had before. More slowly than those other times, perhaps, but just as surely. And for a while I let myself be distracted by the healing, and then by all the business of establishing my new identity, and regaining control of my finances. But eventually the formalities were complete, and there I was. Alive again. And that’s when the real disillusionment set in.

For what was I to do now that I hadn’t done before?

Where was I to go that I hadn’t already been?

I’d tried, ever since my first death in the landslide, to come to terms with the earth and what it had done to me. But every time I thought I’d found resolution, an accommodation with the natural world, it had turned on me and destroyed me.

As a simple goatherd, working the earth and minding my own business, it destroyed me. As a delver into the earth and a developer of its wealth, it destroyed me. As a servant and defender of the earth, it destroyed me. And as a hermit, an aesthete, a denier of the earth—again the planet had not let me be. Can you imagine how trapped I felt, looking back over those lives? How hollow and cruel it all seemed, my immortality? How could I ever win? Where on earth—quite literally—could I go to be free? There was nowhere. I was imprisoned within the four walls of the globe.

And then, one night, in my despair, I turned my eyes to the heavens, and beheld a pinpoint of light sailing across the sky. It was a manmade light—not a plane, but something much higher up, beyond the
atmosphere. A satellite. Already a familiar enough sight, even then. This was two years after man had walked on the moon.

But watching that satellite, I had my answer. If I was indeed a prisoner on this earth, then perhaps I could break out of the prison…and go into space.

Are you laughing at me, orphan?

No, of course not. You have no knowledge of mechanical space travel and the difficulties it entails. But you would be right to scorn my presumption, because in that moment I swore I would go into
deep
space, beyond the moon, and beyond even the other planets. Out of earth’s sight, and out of earth’s clutches. Which was ridiculous. At the time, even the moon was scarcely within mankind’s reach. The idea of humans travelling beyond it was only a fantasy. The reality lay decades off in the future, at best…

Yes, but remember, what did decades matter to me? I had as many decades as I needed. I could wait. If it took a hundred years for man to range out to the other planets, I reasoned, then so be it. And if it took another century again to go beyond the solar system, well, what of that? I could be there to see it all, if I chose.

I drew up, thus, some very long-term plans. My first step was to move to the country that was most vigorously pursuing space travel—the country that had put men on the moon. It was a place I knew well anyway, from previous lives. Then I returned to university and began a whole new round of studies. Mathematics and aeronautics and biomechanics and a half-dozen other disciplines. It took time, but I had no shortage of time. I was young. My body was brand new, a whole life ahead of it yet.

Nor was I trying to leap into space with a single bound. In those days it was only a chosen few who made it into orbit anyway. For the moment I would be content with a role upon the ground. When my studies were complete, I took up a research position with the national
body that oversaw space travel. And there I worked away quietly for the next two decades. Yes, a full twenty years. You see what I mean by long term…

My speciality—and this will not surprise you, orphan, knowing my ulterior interest in the whole endeavour—was the question of how humans would survive for the long periods that extended space travel would involve. Not merely orbiting for a week or two, like the space shuttles, but going interplanetary, or even interstellar. Journeys that could take years. Or possibly centuries. To put it in terms of my own situation—how was a man like me to live, once he had succeeded in escaping the earth?

The simple answer is that, to survive, a man must take a little of the earth with him—air and food and water and heat. Which is fine in itself. Spaceships can carry tons of supplies, if needed. The only issue there is one of fuel. But beyond those necessities, our bodies are also specifically adapted to gravity, to certain radiation levels, to magnetic fields—and these things are not so easy to pack into a spaceship. There are sociological issues too regarding the behaviour of small crews isolated on long voyages. Hostility and paranoia can set in. Cabin fever. Conflict. Still, to me, all those problems were essentially solvable. I was more concerned with yet another complication, one more subtle and yet potentially more devastating than the rest, that had arisen during the early space flights.

I called it the separation syndrome
.

I knew of it from only a handful of cases, because only a handful of astronauts had gone far enough into space to experience it. I’m talking about the twenty-four men who went to the moon. Even they only hinted at it. But to a specialist such as myself, those hints set loud alarm bells ringing about the psychological hazards of space.

What the astronauts said was this—when they reached the moon and looked back at the earth, they felt one powerful emotion above all.

Loneliness.

Oh, that’s not the word they used—it’s not a word they were trained to use. But it’s what they meant. They looked back and saw how far they were from everything and everyone they knew, and a brief but utterly piercing bout of homesickness took hold of them. They felt small, they felt desolate, they felt alone. And for a few seconds of doubt, in their deepest hearts, they wondered if they might die.

Die!

Now—these were individuals far too disciplined to dwell on their fears, or to allow such intangible phantoms to unman them for long. But they all noted it, in one fashion or another. And yet they had travelled only as far as the moon, only a few days’ journey away, where the earth was still visible and bright and blue.

What, I wondered, would happen when men looked back at earth longingly from a month’s journey away, or a year’s? When the planet was only a speck in space, without dimension or colour? Or worse, when the planet was so far away that it was lost completely, invisible across the void? How piercing would the homesickness be then, how crippling the loneliness, how overpowering the fear?

My modelling—lacking data, admittedly—showed frightening trends. It showed astronauts on interplanetary journeys reduced to acute depression and psychosis, to panic and dysfunction. I began to theorise that perhaps not merely a man’s body was dependent upon the earth, but that maybe his consciousness was dependent upon the earth as well. That our awareness was fundamentally enmeshed with the planet. So enmeshed indeed that it might not only be extremely distressing for humans to travel far from earth, it might actually be lethal to us. It might kill the mind and the spirit to be taken too far from home. And if so, then the implications for space exploration…

And the implications for me! After everything I’d been through, to find out that my planned escape might be a mortally doomed exercise!

I needed to know more, so I commenced new studies of astronauts. Ideally, I would have liked to observe and analyse crews who were going at least as far as the moon—but alas, those days were gone. The only missions we were sending beyond earth’s orbit anymore were unmanned craft, and they had no feelings to report.

Instead, I turned to the crews of the shuttles, and later the space station, and designed physical and psychological experiments for them to carry out. Officially, I was researching the long-term effects of microgravity. But privately—for I had not yet shared my fears—I was investigating the separation syndrome. True, these astronauts were so close to earth that the syndrome was barely in play—only two hundred miles stood between them and the planet—but I had nothing else to work with. Year after year went by and no definitive answer came. I felt I was peering blindly into the darkness.

The turn of the century arrived. In fact, of the millennium. I had lived to see a new age. It was almost thirty years since I’d drowned, and eighty-nine since I’d first died under the landslide. But then something remarkable occurred. My employers came to me and offered me a place on a shuttle flight, to run my own experiments, first hand.

I hadn’t expected that. Not so soon. My own plan had been to wait for more advanced forms of space travel. I would feign old age before then, and retire, and move away. I would change my name and appearance, and then return afresh to the space program, unrecognised by anyone. And only then would I fly into space, and search for the stars. The future was what mattered. A place on a shuttle mission served no purpose of mine at all.

Ah, but how could I refuse? You and I, orphan, may have flown beyond the atmosphere solely by our own willpower, but alone I was not capable of such a feat—not then. I had never experienced space, only dreamt of it
.

I forgot all about the future, and said yes
.

It didn’t happen immediately. There were two years of astronaut training to get through first, and then delays with the launch. But finally—only a few short months ago now, and how strange that seems—I found myself strapped to a seat in the crew section of a space shuttle, listening to the last seconds of countdown
.

Then came ignition. Then lift-off. And, at last, ascent.

But what a brutal process it was! For all my preparation, I hadn’t really understood the violence it takes to rip a craft free of the planet’s grasp. All I could do was grit my teeth and endure as the shuttle shook and kicked and twisted, labouring for eight endless minutes against gravity and the atmosphere. There was a small window visible from my seat, and through it I watched the sky outside turn deeper and deeper shades of blue, until finally it was black, and we had broken through into space. Then the engines cut out, and the imaginary hooks that had been sunk into my shoulder blades, hauling me down, finally let loose. And that’s when…well, when everything changed.

Microgravity is the correct term. But what a heartless name that is for a state so transformative to a human being—for a creature born to eternal weight to suddenly be weightless! Oh, true, others around me, in those initial moments, grew nauseous and faint because of it. But I felt fine. More than fine, I felt exultant. Some would have said it was only the blood rushing to my brain in zero gravity, yet it wasn’t that. I was a prisoner tasting freedom for the very first time, I was a bird taking wing.

However, there was no time just then for mere awe and wonder. We had work to do. There were experiments to be unpacked and set up and initiated—the first few hours passed by in a blur. The first few days, in fact. And anyway, I soon learnt that living in a shuttle is hardly as dreamlike as floating free in space itself.