The Brothel Creeper: Stories of Sexual and Spiritual Tension (36 page)

“How many tides at peak operation?” she asked.

“One a minute. Nearly one and a half thousand per day. The sea will go in and out like a turbocharged cock!”

Cicero cleared his tungsten throat. “With respect, robots are careful and gentle lovers. Even though I am beyond seduction, I can be ordered to enter a woman, to pleasure her. I do not ram. I slide with infinite delicacy. So the tides will not be as you describe them.”

“I stand corrected,” said Morales.

Daniela admired his lack of ego in this instance. To be contradicted on such a topic by a robot! She said, “You told me the project was cancelled on the eve of its implementation. Something to do with women, you claimed. I’d like to know how that could be true…”

Morales chuckled without mirth or irony.

“There’s no mystery. The monthly cycle of females. Menstruation. Linked to the moon, as we all know. One lunar orbit, one vaginal period. But imagine a world with fifteen hundred orbits every day! Women will be in a permanent state of discharge and discomfort.”

“I see. Then it’s imperative you don’t pull the lever!”

“Too late! I already have!”

Daniela looked at the console and saw it was true. She reeled and steadied herself on a table, Cicero helping her. The liquid in her head, in her inner ear, was shifting. The balance of gravity was subtly different now, but she rapidly acclimatised to the sensation. She barged past the unseen robot, reached the window and craned her neck up. Dimmed to a ghostly disc by the rising sun, the moon could still be seen in the greenish sky, but it was travelling rapidly westwards, steadily accelerating. Within a few moments it was gone, then it rose again, a blur, a phantom scream in the dome. Daniela felt an ache in her pelvis. Blood trickled down her thigh.

“What do you hope to achieve with this?” she screamed.

“With the violation?” said Morales.

“Yes, yes!” She groped for him, to beat his chest with fists. But he had already retreated. “That’s the word!”

Morales answered calmly, “It’s the only way to stop the quims taking over everything. Even though they are artificial, they will bleed too. Men will reject them. Most men, at any rate. Generally one does not fuck at that time of the month, a
time
that is now constant.”

“Even if they do, they won’t breed,” said Cicero.

“Madness!” hissed Daniela.

“Shall I tell you how we, Cicero and I, know that cunt is the fifth cosmic force? A prediction machine told us.”

Daniela snorted. “What?”

“I’m not referring to the paranormal, to the spirits of Candomblé and the psychic adept. It’s mainly an inevitable, logical process with only a single factor that belongs to chance. A square grid of lights, one thousand by one thousand: one million lights in total. The sequence is simple. Binary. The first light flashes on, goes off. The second flashes on, goes off. And so on. When the millionth light goes off, the cycle repeats. But now the first light stays on for the entire cycle.”

“I’m not sure of the relevance of this.”

“Every light will eventually take its turn staying on. Sometimes there will be more lights on than off, sometimes vice versa: symmetrical patterns might appear. In fact they
will
appear. So will a far greater number of asymmetrical patterns. Every possible pattern that can be framed in a grid of that size will eventually be formed. They have no choice.”

“Do you understand the implications?” asked Cicero.

Daniela said, “Randomness!”

“No, my dear,” chided Morales. “Quite the opposite. A relentless working out of every feasible combination of illuminated bulb and unlighted bulb on the grid means that some meaningful pictures will be generated. Pictures that are false, pictures that are true. Every scene that can be imagined will be presented. Do you comprehend? Every scene that ever has been or ever will be. And every variation of those scenes. Truth. And lies, trillions of lies. How to differentiate between them? That’s the issue. But think about the grandeur of the device. Such a simple machine! Yet at some point during its operation it will show your birth with every detail correct. Your first kiss. And the exact way you will die. Your real death!”

“Among billions of false ones,” said Cicero.

Morales giggled. “We asked it to show us the missing force of nature. We guessed there had to be one. But what was it? I prayed to the grid. That was just for the emotional satisfaction it provided, for I don’t believe the gods are real. We knew that eventually the main relay would burn out. And when it did, we had vowed to regard whatever picture was on the grid at that instant as an accurate representation of the unknown force. Think of it as a game, if you prefer. A serious game. How long did the device take to provide an answer? The combinations were created at enormous speed. We didn’t want to wait millennia or aeons for the picture. The patterns came and went: they flowed into each other, metamorphosed.”

“Abstracts, endlessly swirling,” sighed Cicero.

“With the occasional crisp image of something recognisable. A bird, sock or canoe. Then the relay fried in its own oil of blue sparks. The image that it stopped on was simple, perfect. Cunt. Why not? What could be better? And I’m not a man given to the temptations of the flesh. I am almost as asexual as Cicero there, yet I never hide from facts. The generative organ of the female of our species is a fundamental force.”

“I had defined you as a misogynist,” said Daniela.

“Not at all! But women do tend to sabotage my works. How can you ruin this one, my dear? The moon is beyond even your reach. No ladder will take you so high! No toucan or butterfly!”

“Not even a moonmoth,” chortled Cicero.

“I’m leaving now,” declared Daniela. “What will happen next?”

“Good question,” said the robot.

“The authorities will cope,” insisted Morales.

Indeed. The city administrators did their best to restore order. Workers were sent out to find the vulvas and convey them to a single location, the central square of the city. House to house searches were conducted. Because of the bleeding, few men refused to give them up. Wide shovels scooped the loose organs, piled them in wheelbarrows. Hired ruffians armed with whips herded others along like slaves. Confiscated and confined to the central square, they had their legs removed by teams of labourers armed with clippers and then were set out in neat rows and columns.

Daniela wasn’t permitted to approach the square. The police had blocked all access to it. She went home instead.

On her balcony she studied the vista with binoculars.

She lowered the lenses, noticed something hanging from her railings. She approached and bent down. A lever! The second lever: the one that created music from the objects that surrounded it! She resisted the impulse to pull it, went in search of a small hacksaw, removed it delicately. This one was thin but as long as an arrow. She wondered.

Far below in the square the vulvas were sessile.

A grid of them, perhaps one thousand on one side, one thousand on the other. No need to count. It seemed to Daniela an opportunity too good to waste. She rummaged in a cupboard for her longbow, the relic of a young flirtation with the sport of archery. She still had the muscles to draw it back to its fullest extent. The sun was going down, the moon was a solid streak of copper light, a pulsating afterimage. The shadows of the city shifted at odd angles, the geometry of the newest future, this one. She aimed, exhaled and watched the improvised arrow soar.

The thin lever landed in the middle of the grid. The impact had the same effect as if she had pulled it. Music.

The quims, the daughters of her fever dreams, sang together. A complex choral work of fantastic strangeness.

And yet somehow familiar on the cellular level.

The basic anthem of our species!

Daniela saw that the workers in the square had stopped moving. All eyes watched the grid, all ears sucked in the erotic madrigal. But the vibrations and harmonics of the music had an unexpected epiphenomenon, a side effect. In random order, unlike the rigid prediction device of Morales, individual cunts attained orgasm. Many came simultaneously. As they climaxed they bloomed for a moment, then closed. Abstract patterns rippled throughout the array. A few coherent patterns also. This was a quivering, hedonistic, organic version of the drab unfeeling engineering favoured by men. It threatened the hierarchy of convention and so could not last. Someone down there would find a way to terminate the radical music. Already a dozen men were stirring themselves, conferring, scratching heuristic heads.

On a whim, Daniela told herself that the final image on the grid would be an accurate representation of her own death. It was no more foolish than the ritual devised by Morales and Cicero.

A government agent had gone to fetch a dog. He set it loose among the singing vulvas. It found the lever, brought it back. The stick was snipped into tiny lengths with the clippers used to remove the legs. Abruptly the music ceased. The final group orgasm ebbed away. And Daniela raised binoculars to consult the oracle, to learn her doom.

She confronted herself on the matrix of lips.

Yes, the pixels of pleasure showed Daniela, legs apart, with Ivan shaving her. Was this the truth? Was his razor fated to end her life, whether through accident or psychotic impulse? But then she peered closer. The real solution was inside the first assumption. She ran out of her apartment, found Ivan in his favourite bar, dragged him away.

“Hurry! I’ll explain when we reach the jungle!”

They loped down the streets. Voices hissed at them as they went. Daniela recognised the spite of her friends, Rita, Isabel, Marta, Yara and the others. It wasn’t unexpected. They kept going.

And plunged over the threshold of the city into the eternal green. A pair of long arms flung themselves around her waist and an unseen voice said, “You won’t avoid responsibility this time!”

It spoke with Cicero’s voice, but it wasn’t him.

She said, “Let me go, Doctor.”

The arms were too feeble to hold her, but they tried. “I said that artificial men were unreliable, didn’t I? He ignored my orders to intercept you! I had to come myself and pretend to be him.”

“You weren’t convincing enough, I’m sorry.”

“Where are you going, my dear? Why are you fleeing with this man? I saw the final pattern on the yoni grid. He will murder you with his evil blade. You should be running
away
from him.”

Daniela wrenched herself free, stumbled.

“That’s wrong, Doctor. I saw something else. A picture within the picture. I believed it. Tell me about the fifth lever, please. What were those rumblings under the ground after I pulled it?”

“No, my girl. I won’t help you again.”

“What did that lever do?” she almost screamed. She lunged forward for Morales, squeezed him in her own arms.

He literally began to crack under the pressure and whimpered, “Very well. I suppose it won’t hurt to tell you! There’s a world under this one. A backup. It’s empty but has been lovingly prepared. The fifth lever opened valves and flooded it with oxygen, primed it.”

Daniela pushed him away. He fell over, weeping. She grasped Ivan by the hand and dragged him into the undergrowth. The secret path was discernable to her eyes, not to his. They reached the mound, the underground maw. Ivan drew back from it, trembling. She explained rapidly, not caring how much or little he understood, panting at him.

“The image showed you shaving me. A sunburst, grotesquely magnified.
That
is the answer to my death, not the razor! The sun is going to turn into a supernova. It will flood our planet with hard radiation. But safety and a new dawn are waiting for us down there.”

Ivan frowned. “Won’t we be lonely? I don’t—”

Daniela placed her finger over his lips. “Humans wasted their best chance in the upper world, so it’s time for something different. I managed to conceal one of the artificial vulvas. It escaped detection despite the searches. I have it on me but I need you to fertilise it and fertilise its descendants. I’ll be a queen in an underworld, the semi-divine ruler of my own genital realm. And you can be my male concubine and lackey.”

“Where did you hide it?”