Wonders of a Godless World (20 page)

For one thing, it’s noisy. There’s no insulation around all the valves and pumps that keep the shuttle functioning—insulation would be
extra weight—so every clang and gurgle is painfully loud. And it’s smelly too. Washing facilities are limited, and yet people sweat and stink the same way they do on earth. The toilet, technical wonder that it may be, is not exactly airtight when it comes to odours—and microgravity plays hell with human digestion, the result of which is farting. A
lot
of farting.

Still, occasionally I found time to float and spin for no other reason than the simple joy of it. And more importantly, I eventually managed to press my face to a window and—for one long uninterrupted hour—stare at the earth spinning below. Now…I’d read all the reports of those who had been in space before me, and I was familiar with the emotions that those men and women had experienced when they’d gazed upon the earth for the first time from afar. They always talked of the ethereal beauty of the planet, of its delicacy and uniqueness, of its soft glow and of the gossamer thinness of its atmosphere.

It wasn’t like that for me. Looking down I saw beauty, yes, but not the beauty of an eggshell jewel—I saw the beauty of an immensely powerful beast. I saw the hard, carved faces of the continents, and the inexorable currents of the oceans flowing. I felt the atmosphere humming with electricity, and the inside of the planet bursting with suppressed heat. I sensed what a savage thing the world really is—strong, hot, and driven by systems so vast that they dwarf mankind and all his works to nullity.

In short, I saw the monster that has toyed with me these last ninety-two years. But for once I was safe from it. No landslide could reach me up there on the shuttle. No fumes from beneath a lake could float so high. No downdraft could blast me with furnace winds, no ocean wave could mesmerise me and sweep me away. Oh, the earth held me fast in orbit still, it’s true, but otherwise, just for once, it could not touch me.

So I felt no loneliness as I gazed down. I felt no hopelessness or homesickness. All I felt was a dizzying relief. That, and the desire to be even further away; to be on a spacecraft, racing to the outer edge of the solar system; to watch the giant globe dwindle to a blue marble, and then to a pinpoint, and then to nothing at all
.

From that moment on I scarcely cared about my experiments and tests. What concern of mine was it if other people would have trouble leaving the planet? I knew now that, when the time came, I would have no difficulty. The separation syndrome was a problem for lesser minds, and for lesser beings than myself. Oh, I performed the minimum duties required of me, I ran my tests and recorded my results. But I did no more.

I confess that I became a little strange. A week in, I felt so detached from earth it was a struggle to remember that other people still lived down here. Even video links didn’t help—the world they showed seemed too weird. People could not float at will down here, rooms were deformed by oddities like floors and ceilings, and every movement looked heavy and sluggish and wrong. I was so much more at home in space. In my mind it was already my natural environment, and where I would spend my eternity.

But all too soon, the sixteen days were up. My tests were done, the mission complete. I did not want to go. But I comforted myself, as I packed my things away and we manoeuvred for re-entry, that at least my return to earth would be only temporary. I would see space again one day. I had savoured release now, and there was nothing the planet could do about that. Its long dominion over me was broken.

I’ve beaten you, I cried silently from my seat, staring at the little window. We were descending into the atmosphere, and on the other side of the glass the fires of re-entry were already beginning to glow. I’ve beaten you!

The glare outside grew brighter and brighter.

And brighter still.

And then…

What a shooting star we must have made. One hundred tons of space shuttle, disintegrating across the daylight heavens.

I don’t really remember it. The concussion of breaking up at the speed we were travelling was far too severe. I have the dimmest recollection of the shuttle slewing sideways, and then a series of hammer blows and…well, then nothing.

I awoke to find myself tumbling through air. If it can be called waking. I was blind, and deaf. I could taste flesh burning, and I knew somehow that a wind was howling about me, but there was no other feeling from any part of my body. Looking back, I can only assume I
had
no body—that most of it was gone, burnt away even beyond pain. I must have been little more than a charred lump of bone and calcified tissue, a smoking piece of hardened debris arcing down from the main fireball. A human meteorite…

Then came another concussion, and I was in water. I tasted salt. It was the ocean. But I had no arms left with which to swim, and no body fat left with which to float, so I continued to fall, sinking into the depths. I didn’t mind. The ocean had welcomed me before. But even as I sank, there came a stinging that grew into intense pain. It was my skin, beginning to knit itself anew. My immortality had been strained to breaking point, yes, but my body was already beginning its recovery. I drifted away then, before the agony became too great, and rolled in the comfortable darkness for a time.

When I woke again I had skin, and arms and legs—and although I was otherwise an empty shell, I could feel sunlight on me
.

I was lying on a beach.

I was here.

The orphan opened her eyes.

For a moment she didn’t know where she was. Then she saw that it was her own room, she was on the bed, and through the window it was nearly dawn. She was wholly awake, after her long dream and the foreigner’s tale…

A sudden, inexplicable thrill ran through her.

She sat up, stark naked, her body feeling charged with energy. What was it? Why was she so excited? The foreigner’s story?

Yes, there was something he’d said, something amid all the woders of rockets and machines in space and his fiery descent…

No, it was something he
hadn’t
said!

He had told his tale in full now. The story of all his lives. Every place he had been. And he had
not
been to her island before. Not in his last life. Especially not twenty-one years ago. He had never met her mother.

She leapt up. She had to go to him. She had to be near him now, to touch him. And even as she threw on some clothes, his laughter echoed in her.

Very well then, dear orphan, come if you must. Come straight to me, do not wander. Talk to no one. But you are right.

Whatever else I am, I am not your father.

The orphan hurried across the compound. The lower sky was aflame with red, but it was night yet. Nothing around her seemed quite real. The hospital, the jungle, the mountain—they were two-dimensional, pretend things made of paper. It was only the dream world, the foreigner’s world, that was vivid anymore.

And ah, his presence was like a ball of heat she could sense even out in the yard, right through the crematorium walls, as if she was freezing and he was the only life-saving fire. He was her bright saviour who had fallen, burning, from the sky to illuminate her. And the excitement in her gut was almost a nausea.

Then she was in the back wards, the darkness no impediment. She came through the dayroom—empty now, the television useless with no power cord—to the doorway of his cell. He was there, alone in the gloom, prone and helpless in his bed. But to her special sight his body glowed luminous beneath the sheet.

He did not speak. She moved to his side, lifted a corner of the sheet, then tugged it away completely. For the first time, she looked upon his naked form with full understanding of who and what he
was. It was all so clear now—the delicate, bare sheen of his skin, clean of any hair or mark or scar. It was
new
, that was why. His old flesh had burnt away in the sky as he hurtled down to earth, and this skin was freshly grown, too young to be anything but smooth and pale.

Yet
he
was not young. He was age and strength and wisdom. He had lived so many lives and seen so much. Pain had seared him, yes, but it had refined him down to something sparse and beautiful. She wanted to possess him, to absorb him, to encompass his inner vitality tighter and tighter, until it shone within her too.

But did he feel the same way? Doubt pierced her. There was nothing new about
her
skin, there was no sparse beauty about
her
body.

His laughter was gentle in her mind.
How many times do I have to tell you…

And that only fed the hunger already awake in her. But the doubt persisted. She had seen herself through the eyes of others too many times—patients, nurses, doctors—and beheld the squat, awkward child they all saw.

Look through my eyes then.

Startled, the orphan lifted her gaze and saw that, while his eyes had been closed when she’d entered the room, they were open now.

See what I see.

The offer was irresistible, and she flowed into him. The world spun, and then she was blinking at—herself. The perspective was low, from the bed.
His
perspective. She wasn’t fully inside his body—she was still in her own, upright—but it was through his eyes that she saw. And she was unrecognisable to herself.

It wasn’t that she was a different shape. She was still square and stumpy, her hair cropped short by hospital scissors, her dour face
glowering at the foreigner in stubborn puzzlement. But to
his
eyes, there was no dullness or stupidity in her—there was only strength. And her flesh strained against her drab clothes not because she was fat, but because she was bursting with hidden light and power, more than her body could contain. And the only emotion she could detect in the foreigner was a desire to see that power unveiled, to glory in every inch of her.

Yes. Take off your clothes.

Instantly, everything she was wearing seemed too restrictive to bear. She didn’t hesitate. Still inhabiting his eyes, she watched as her hands fumbled to undress. It was confusing, the double viewpoint—to still be inside her body by touch, but outside of it by sight. But soon enough her clothes were gone.

Ah
, the foreigner breathed.

She had never stood naked in front of anyone before; she would have been too ashamed. But now it felt wonderful. Cooler, as if the temperature had rapidly dropped, and free, as if she was suddenly half her normal weight.

And, through his eyes, it
looked
wonderful, too. Her clothes had been so ugly. Without the constrictions of sleeves and straps and waistbands, her body had taken its natural shape, and it was
right
. She wasn’t square at all. She was round, she was made up of circles—the circle of her hips, the circles of her breasts and, within them, the smaller, protruding circles that terminated in her nipples—all of them proper, all of them in proportion, all of them swollen with a particularly female potency. And all of them, to his gaze, focused around the great orb of her belly, and the mound partly hidden below it, where a whole new world of curves and circles opened…

You see?

She saw. And she felt. Her hands were moving over herself, and the sensations were so maddeningly pleasant that it made the world
spin again, and then she was back behind her own eyes. The foreigner lay naked on the bed before her, and she was acutely aware of the contrast between her body and his, how angular he was—his shoulders wide, his torso narrowing into his hips—and how particularly
male
that made him.

A shudder ran through her of outright…starvation? Yes, it was a physical need, a deprivation. It wasn’t like it was when she played in her room alone, just for fun, fingering the little button of sensitive flesh between her legs. That wasn’t going to be nearly enough to satisfy what she felt now.

She reached out, finally, and touched him. And yes, she had touched him before, but never like this, never so gently. His skin was cool and firm, and her fingers trailed along his side, defining his chest and his hip and his upper thigh, sensing the muscles there, unused, passive, yet promising so much.

But her fingers wouldn’t do. She needed to smell him too, and taste him. She sank to her knees and lowered her head so that her mouth followed just above her roving fingers. And then, right where his hip bone pushed against his skin, she bit him, her mouth opening to absorb as much flesh as she could.

She shuddered again, tasting salt on her tongue, the thrill of consuming him setting her alight down low. He could feel it too, she knew. Excitement steamed from his mind and made the air tingle. And yet his skin did not flinch or quiver or respond in any way. And when she raised her mouth, her gaze fell upon his penis, lying pallid against his leg. It had not stirred since she’d entered the room.

The orphan did not know much about sex, but she knew that if the foreigner was like other men, then his cock—if he was truly aroused—was supposed to be erect. And the peculiar hunger in her
wanted
it erect.

Alas, my orphan…

She understood, of course. His body was rebuilding itself. He had told her. Nerves and muscles were not yet connected.

But oh, the disappointment!

What can I say? I’m free to roam with my mind, but to affect reality, to shift flesh and bone, that’s not something I can do.

And yet, you…

Yes? She stared at his blank face, alert. Was there a way?

When you called to the breeze, up on the hill, you were very close to success. Perhaps, here and now, if you tried again…

Ah! Was it possible? Calling the breeze had been a basic procedure, a matter of warming air to make it rise, and she had failed. To do something like this, to influence someone else’s body—she didn’t know how to even attempt it.

Look within, beyond the skin. You’ll find systems and patterns and order there as you would with any natural thing.

The orphan nodded. She swung herself onto the bed, her legs astride his shins, her breasts hanging down over his thighs. She stared at his penis, smooth and pale, and at his balls beneath, as hairless as the rest of him.

How did it all work? That was the question.

Blood. The blood must flow and fill.

Blood…Yes, she could see the veins, faint blue, running along the soft tube of flesh. And then, deeper in—there. Tissue. Like a sponge, ready to absorb blood and engorge to hardness. Ha. It was all so simple.

Only no…there were nerves too, clusters of them radiating out from the sheathed head, running to his groin and his balls and his spine. Not simple at all, but complex! Those nerves were the key, she saw, for they would send the signals that would make the blood flow. At least, they would in a normal man, where the nerves
were connected. But in the foreigner those impulses had nowhere to go. The way was closed.

You will have to move the blood yourself.

The orphan bent low, so that her mouth hovered above his cock, and she breathed warm air on it, preparing it for life. Then she reached out with her mind, exploring the byways of his arteries and veins, and the reservoirs of his heart. His heart, she began there—heating it with her thoughts, and squeezing it, so that it beat deeper and faster. Then she hunted through the tangle of vessels in his groin and found those that needed to be relaxed and those that needed to be tightened until at last the blood was allowed to pump into the waiting chambers of his penis.

The flesh trembled. Shifted against his thigh.

Then, magically, it began to rise.

Yes…

Yes! His pale body flushed with colour. Tremors ran down the length of him, his muscles twitching in the sudden surge of heat. He was coming to life, his essence concentrated into his stiffening prick. It had lifted now, so that it almost brushed against her lips—caused by her, existing uniquely
for
her.

Yes…

She heard a hoarse edge to his voice that suggested he wanted something more. And so did she—only, what exactly? What was supposed to happen next? She stared in frustration at his erection, straight as a broom handle.

And then she was remembering what she had witnessed in the virgin’s memories, the things the men had done when the virgin was a girl. And she was remembering too the night nurse as he had thrust his hips against her. The very idea had seemed so disgusting then, but now, extraordinarily, it seemed the opposite. There was the obvious hardness of the foreigner, and in comparison
her own urgent desire to enfold something, to clutch at something—something hard. So, what if she…?

The foreigner was laughing softly at her ignorance, but she didn’t care about that. The hunger was too great. In one compulsive movement she slid up his thighs, her legs spread, and lowered herself, using one hand to guide him straight into the middle of her. For an awkward moment it did not seem that it would go, the angle was wrong, or there was an inner resistance. But in her mind she was already wide open to receive him, and with a strange spasm, her cunt suddenly agreed.

He slid in. And in.

A formless sound came from him. The orphan held her breath, not knowing what to make of the sensation, whether it was pleasure or pain. But then a delicious warmth grew in her. She felt they were both rising off the bed. Not their shadow selves but their real selves—as if his paralysed hips were actually alive and thrusting upwards, pushing his cock in deeper and deeper, lifting her up and splitting her apart.

And oh, but it was
nice
.

Then, behind her, someone sniggered. She whirled about and saw a shadow in the doorway. A mocking face. It was the night nurse, grinning at her. She caught a vicious glimpse of herself through his eyes; she was stupid and ugly again, a ludicrous sight, hunched grossly over the foreigner’s body.

The orphan grunted in embarrassment and fury, but the night nurse ignored the warning, standing there with his eyes roaming cruelly, until she heaved herself up and off the bed, lunging at him. His grin turned to a snarl and he yelled something she couldn’t understand. Then he dashed away. She followed him out into the dayroom, but by then he was already scampering off down the hall
to the back wards, and she paused. She couldn’t pursue him naked through the entire hospital.

She gave it up and stood there a moment, feeling angry and excited and cheated all at once. All she had to do was rush back to the foreigner and resume the wonderful thing they had started…and yet she lingered, staring about at the darkness, not knowing why. The sweat was cooling on her skin, leaving her cold. And it was so quiet. The whole crematorium might have been deserted of life.

Well, the duke was gone, she reminded herself. And the witch. There were only the archangel and the virgin left. And they would be sleeping. That explained it. Except it didn’t. Not the sense of vacancy. Cautiously, the orphan pushed open the door to one of the bedrooms, the one the witch and the virgin had shared. Both of the beds were empty. Frowning, she turned to the other bedroom. The virgin must be in there with the archangel. But that was against the rules…

Forget them, orphan. Come back to me.

But it nagged at her too strongly. If the nurses found them that way, there would be trouble. She crossed to the door.

Please. Don’t go in there. Not yet
.

But she went. And yes, there they were, two shapes in the darkness stretched on one of the beds, the smaller figure cradled in the other’s arms.

Only…why were the sheets black?

And then she was really seeing. The swollen, battered face, the bloodstains around the mouth and eyes, the bruised throat. The virgin, dead, and—judging by the way the blood had crusted stiff—dead for hours.

And the archangel, rocking slightly as he held her close.