A Song Called Youth (110 page)

“It’s beautiful,” he heard himself say. Clumsy at this kind of thing.

“
Mais . . . 
I am cold here,” she said.

He knew an opening when it was offered him. He put his arms around her and she came to him easily, dropped all pretense instantly, and kissed him, lingering only a moment on the lips, going quickly to a mesh of tongues, pressing her breasts against him, full enough for him to feel even through their clothes, and it went on and on. They kissed till they swayed from standing too tightly together, and then she took the initiative again and took one of his hands, guiding it up under her coat, under a sweater, into a good place, between flesh and the moist, welcoming, static-electricity itch of damp, body-warmed wool. She closed his hand over her breast. Closed it instructively, hard. To let him know her taste: she liked a hard grip, at least for now, she wanted aggression.

“Yes,” she said as he squeezed, hard, felt the tissue give like a swollen sponge but exquisitely silken (blocking an image of Claire, forcing himself to concentrate on
now
—and it wasn’t difficult to focus: the desire was roaring through him like a subway express).

“
Oui,
” she said as his other hand gripped her ass and bruised it. “
Forte.
Harder
. Oui.
”

Following his instincts, he bit her full lower lip. Not quite hard enough to break the skin. “Oh,
oui, encore,
hurt me a little, tell me what I am . . . ”

She taught him things. She directed him; instructed him to abuse her just a little, and both of them sensed that it was entirely appropriate for the two of them, it was in the pocket, it was
them.
Knowing full well she was a political feminist, Torrence himself a believer in absolute women’s equality. And simultaneously: she asked to be dominated. And he fell into it with an almost frightening naturalness. Almost tearing off her clothes, not bothering to remove his own. He simply dropped his zipper (she liked that, too, this time) . . . 

They lay on a bed of shed clothing, Torrence almost tearing into her, taking her, the first time, till he came, resting like a lump of slag on her, then hearing her whisper to him again,
Hurt me a little, hurt me a little .
 . . 

Near Tijuana, Mexico.

At the same moment, but during daylight: in the same instant that Torrence thrust himself into Bibisch, Jerome-X lay on his back in the very center of Bettina’s double king-size bed, staring up at the Brobdingnagian folds of her flesh descending on him, her enormous, doughy-soft but powerful thighs, the great waddling smothering ebony pillow of her belly hanging down, almost covering the black and chocolate and glistening pink bifurcations of her vagina; the small, floral organ nearly hidden in folds of thigh flesh like the interior of some oversize Claus Oldenberg orchid; an orchid of swollen flesh and surreal excess. The smell of her soap and the smell of her musk and sweat and skin . . . 

All of it coming down on Jerome like a sexual apocalypse.

”Take it,” she ordered him. Obediently, he opened his mouth. She snapped, “What’d you say?”

“I said, ‘Yes, ma’am.’ ” And the gratification of his submission made his cock even harder as she encompassed his face and very nearly, deliciously nearly, smothered him . . . 

Torrence, afterward, holding Bibisch tenderly in his arms, kissing her eyelids, kissing her lips softly, stroking her head soothingly as she nestled against him. As if comforting a child frightened by thunder. “
Toujours,
I adore you,” she said. “I never stop watching you.” She sighed—and then stiffened a little, looked sharply at him. “You won’t tell anyone what I ask you to be doing? OK?”

“No,” he said. “I won’t.” The moonlight streamed over her white skin. “You look almost . . . ” He almost said
made out of moonlight,
but stopped himself. “You look good in the moonlight, it fits you . . . ”

Would he tell anyone?
Hell
no. He was amazed at the things he’d done, amazed at his own rapacity. He’d never done that sort of thing . . . role playing, sexual-discipline games, even talking dirty in sex. Never. He’d had no idea it would evoke such arousal in him.

God, am I that sick?
he wondered.
Is that me, or has the war done it to me, made me this way?

But he knew, even as he asked himself. Sexual dominance was deeply a part of him, and always had been. It had been closeted in him, till now. Maybe it
was
a sickness, but he had felt it shiver sympathetically in the core of him, and he knew it was integral to him.

But he also knew it wouldn’t work if she didn’t enjoy it. He was too empathetic to be a true sadist. He was just a little bent, apparently. Just a bit . . . kinked.

And he felt a little better about it when he reflected that Bibisch had led him through the whole thing. She’d begun it, instructed him in it, and in some sense it was really Bibisch, with a kind of sexual judo, who’d really been in control the whole time.

“Did you know,” he asked, “that I’d get into, uh, this kind of thing?”

“Yes.”

“
How
did you know? I mean—I didn’t know myself. Am I . . . do I seem like I’d be a . . . ”

“No, no! When you fight, you are very strong and beautiful and efficient, but you are not cruel, and you are very kind to everyone. Pasolini and some others, they think you are . . . ”

“Soft?”

“
Oui.
But you are not . . . not soft. You are kind inside. I don’t know how I knew that your sex was . . . I don’t know.
C’est subtil.
Probably no one sees but me. I see because I am one too, from the other side . . . ”

He nodded. Still feeling a little revulsion at himself, but some relief, too.

Jerome-X lay in Bettina’s arms, serenely reposing in her great soft damp fullness. She stroked his hair soothingly, muttered sweet endearments, and he was happy. But something chewed a fusty little tunnel under the skin of his happiness.

Was he sick? He’d never done it this way before, and he’d been amazed at his own response. How had Bettina known he’d be complementary to her own dominatrix inclinations? Did he radiate some kind of sexual wimpiness? Doubtful. It had to be subtler than that.

He not only got off on being dominated by her—he got off on her obesity. Sexually, for Jerome, she was the Earth Mother, the Venus of Willendorf, the very incarnation of the fertility goddess, and she was a refuge he could explore for hours. He could sort of understand if someone found all that extra flesh unattractive but it hit him right in the basal ganglia—right in his sex. The more of her there was, the more lust it evoked in him. Bizarre.

Where did it originate in him? Was it Oedipal? Freud had been discredited, but still . . . Jerome had been alienated from his mother—no, that seemed too simpleminded an interpretation.

He shrugged. Probably he’d never know. He reflected that, in some strange way, he was in control when they made love. There was comfort in that.

“Dis time,” she said huskily, “we gone switch on our chips, and get on de same frequency. I got a frequency no one listen on to. And we gone use a little augments for it, and I show you some stuff.”

And in minutes, they were frequency-wired together, fucking electronically and somatically, and he saw the beauty and horror of her, saw her expanding in his mind’s eye like a mandala from hell.

With the flick of a nanotech switch, Jerome was in love.

• 06 •

The Badoit Arcological Complex, a quarter mile beneath the Qattara Depression, Egypt.

Steinfeld’s palms were sweating, though the room was almost painfully air-conditioned. Abu Badoit, seated across the low comma-shaped table from him on the confoam swivel chair, seemed centered and at ease, patiently watching the video on the table’s fold-out screen: a vid of Second Alliance atrocities, and interviews with European apartheid victims. He watched it almost as if he were sitting through someone else’s tedious home movie.

Why shouldn’t Badoit be at ease? He was sitting in the center of his power base.

Steinfeld had just met Badoit for the first time; he wasn’t sure the Arab leader was as unperturbed as he seemed. But his expression was as composed as his grooming. Badoit wore an immaculate real-cloth flat-black silk suit from Broad Street in London. He had been schooled at Harrow, which seemed to impart its gloss to his short, sculptured black beard, his impeccably clipped hair, and his onyx eyes. There were several platinum rings on the fingers of his right hand, one of them glowing with a big smoky diamond, and a rather incongruous gold-chain choker in his high collar. His was a dark, boyish face, but he was at least fifty, Steinfeld knew.

What did he know about Badoit? That Badoit was a
mutakallim
to some, an embodiment of the
Sanna
of the Prophets to others: Not thought to be divine but a man with a direct line to God.

Badoit, a good host, poured tea for them both, only flickeringly taking his eyes from the digi-viddy . . . 

Steinfeld let his gaze wander out the polarized window of the Egyptian’s office to the vast, fully illuminated, cluttered recesses of the underground Badoit Arcological Complex. A refuge from war, Jihad, and the ravages of global warming, the complex was one hundred seventy-five square miles of subterranean city, residence, clean industry, and hydroponic farming. It was built partly in a vast system of caverns underlying the lowlands of the Western Desert, and extending into man-made caverns carved into the bedrock. It was all lit by a mellow blend of electricity and reflected-sunlight shafts. Solar power, gathered on the Saharan surface, provided energy, driving toylike electric trams winding, underground, between the hulking blocks and opaque-glass pyramids of the complex; in two places the minarets of mosques broke the stark angularity with their ceremonious curves, spires, and intricate ornamentation. Nearer were swooping yellow-and-black banners with Islamic slogans declared in Classic Arabic lettering. The metal reinforced ceiling was just a hundred and fifty feet over the tops of the highest buildings. Now it looked like a mythical city under a metal sky that shone with a hundred small, strangely geometrical suns; in the evening, when they turned down the lights, it was a netherworld metropolis glowing softly under a perpetual lid of lowering cloud. Only, look close and the cloud became granite and plastic and metal. Huge, gleaming steel columns that were also elevator housings to the upper world stood at intervals for stability; the ceiling was triply reinforced against earthquake with a groinwork of high-tensility plastech girders.

When he’d first read about the Badoit Complex, it had made Steinfeld think of the Space Colony, FirStep. But now he thought Giza; of the sphinx, of the great tombs of the pharaohs, of the wonders of the ancient world. He was a little in awe of Badoit, who had created a quasi-secessionist Islamic state in the midst of the Arab Republic of Egypt—a masterpiece of quiet diplomacy, brilliant engineering, and relentless necessity. Egypt had been threatened with civil war between the Islamic extremists and the moderates; between the isolationists and the internationalists.

The political wisdom of creating a sacrosanct enclave for Badoit’s brand of moderate-to-fundamentalist Islam had been obvious; the wisdom of spending billions developing the underground Arcological Complex had been more elusive for many.

But Badoit had insisted the Arcological Complex could not maintain true spiritual integrity without economic and military self-sufficiency. True economic self-sufficiency required agricultural self-sufficiency; but in North Africa, a land of droughts and desert, the only agricultural surety was in a greenhouse. And the only military surety, in a land of coups and factions and extremists, was in a bunker. And the only economic surety, in a land of struggle over oil sources, was energy self-sufficiency. And as for cultural integrity—it was hard to achieve in a world suffused with transmissions and travelers.

Badoit envisioned a grand solution: a combination greenhouse and bunker. The complex’s location underground made television and radio transmissions highly controllable; the complex received only what it wanted to receive. Badoit’s commission of cultural censors allowed more than Jamaat-I-Islami law would—Badoit did not forbid vids or lectures where women showed independence and dressed untraditionally, and, within the limits of decency, much “western” clothing was allowed—but the arcology disallowed excessive violence in media, explicit sexuality, homosexual imagery, and non-Muslim theology: Islam was taught as an inarguable fact in schools, and Mosques throughout the arcology proclaimed the
salat.
Badoit strictly forbade so-called “female circumcision” or violence against women on the basis of non-traditional behavior. Yet theft was still punished with hand-amputation, and traditional dietary restrictions, including a fixed prohibition against alcohol, were in effect.

Here, too, travelers could be restricted in a way that was impossible on the open borders of an overground city, preventing entry by terrorists from rival factions, as well as inhibiting the cultural terrorism of those who carried the decadent ideas of the corrupt West with them.

The underground deep-water sources were not quite enough, but Badoit had recently begun piping seawater to a desalination plant, and water perfusion was at last adequate and he was able to sell clean water to other states; Saharan solar energy seemed eternal; the hydroponic greenhouses, thriving on reflected and artificial light, never suffered drought or pestilence.

Here and there the austere cityspace was picked out with palms and other greenery in small parks. Broad panels in the ceilings glowed, reflecting sunlight from a baffle of shafts.

Craning his neck just a little to look down, Steinfeld could see people—in traditional Bedouin garb, up-to-date printout suits, or gowns and veils—milling past the view windows of a mall.

The place had captured the imagination of the Arabic world. As a city, it was called simply “Badoit.” And Badoit, the underground city, was a second Mecca. Oil-rich Muslims from all over the Middle East had lined up to donate millions on millions to its construction, adding their largesse to grants from the governments of Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, Iran, the Republic of Palestine, and Saudi Arabia. In exchange, they received a place in Badoit, permanent or simply in case of emergency. A nuclear war had seemed close—this would be the only refuge.