The Sex Sphere (13 page)

Virgilio’s hand slid down and pressed into Sybil’s ass-crack. With a sigh and a shudder, she pressed back.

“Look at this statue,” Virgilio was saying. “My favorite. The
Rape of Persephone
, by the immortal Bernini.” He gestured with his free hand, then let the momentum carry his hand onto Sybil’s lower belly. She glanced at his strong hand, knuckles tufted with black hair, then looked obediently at the statue. In the distance she heard Alwin and Giulia going upstairs.

The statue. A wild-faced man holds Persephone high in the air. Persephone’s face is docile, bovine, conventionally alarmed. The amazing thing is the modeling of the abductor’s hands pressed into Persephone’s soft warm marble waist and thigh. The flesh sinks and gives, just so.

Virgilio slid his hand down and kneaded Sybil’s cunt. She felt enclosed by his strength, front and back, wearing him tight and dirty. Her knees felt so weak.

She slid down on the cool marble floor and lay there, mouth and legs open, reveling in her submission. This was like a dream. Nothing mattered anymore but sex.

Virgilio danced out of his clothes. He knelt by her head. She opened her mouth wider, showing her tongue, and he pushed in. She let her mouth go big and wet and soft, let him pump deep and deeper, loving the taste of his skin, the smell of his balls.

Now Virgilio was tugging at her panties. She raised up helpfully, and he got them off, then crawled around to fuck her. She let her mouth stay open and slack like she was still sucking him, and pressed her hands behind her back.

His face was flushed and swollen as his cock. He pushed into her as hard as possible. She pushed back, infinitely soft and wet and deep…yin to his yang. They caught a wave of sex-rhythm and rode it to shore, surfer and surfboard, engine and wing, screaming to touchdown, twitch, twitch, twitch.

Virgilio slid off her and kissed her twice, then drew his head back and stared at her appraisingly. “You are the first American woman I have…”

“Fucked? Well, you’re my first Italian. My first anything since our wedding.”

“Truly?” Virgilio looked very pleased with this news. “How long?”

“Eleven years in June.” And now I’ve finally had a lover, thought Sybil to herself. I finally did it. I won’t have to die a goody-goody.

Suddenly the Italian bitch upstairs started yelling something. With a quick leonine motion, Virgilio was on his feet. He whipped his pants on and picked up the bomb. “Let’s go upstairs, Sybil.”

Sybil rose. Her dress…she’d never taken it off…slid down and covered her wetness. Virgilio looked impatient, so she didn’t bother putting the panties on, just stuffed them in her purse. She followed him upstairs, marveling at the smooth play of muscles in his naked back.

Giulia was screaming louder and louder, drowning out the soothing drone of Alwin’s explaining voice. When Sybil saw what was in the room, she screamed too.

Later she would describe it as looking like a cross between Salvador Dali’s
Young Virgin Auto-Sodomized by Her Own Chastity
(an ass floating free of its legs) and René Magritte’s
The Listening Chamber
(a room filled by a single enormous apple). The giant ass had Giulia and Alwin trapped in a corner. They were both undressed. Sybil felt a sharp spasm of jealousy. Virgilio stepped up to the giant ass and started yelling, his A-bomb raised high overhead.

The bitch’s screams had drawn what looked like police; three of them came charging up the stairs. Virgilio turned with a snarl, and one of them shot him in the leg. The bomb dropped.

CHAPTER NINE

Babs the Bad

Giulia became very agitated when she noticed the sex sphere. I tried to explain to her that it was a friend of mine, a lover aroused by the sound and smell of the hot piece we’d just torn off. She wouldn’t listen.

“Can’t you wait?” I asked the sphere sharply. “I’m milked dry. Shrink, damn you! Virgilio’ll get you.”

But it was hard to make myself heard over Giulia’s screams. The sex sphere kept growing. She glided close and gave me an insistent nudge. She had her vagina aimed right at me. Before I knew it, Giulia and I had been backed into a corner, right under a picture of the Virgin Mary nursing baby Jesus.

Giulia had completely flipped, and I was getting worried, too. I had formed a vague idea that the sex sphere was a
hypersphere
extending into the fourth dimension. Which meant that if the sphere’s giant cunt swallowed me I could end up someplace very…different.

Just then Virgilio came charging in like Serpico. He even had his shirt off, the fucking greaser. I craned forward to check Sybil out and, sure enough, her face had that just-fucked flush. Jealousy and remorse hit me like twin furies. What had we done? Eleven years of faithful wedlock down the tubes.

The sex sphere’s split was bigger now, opening and closing like some veiny slobbering man-eater from the fetid swamps of Heinlein’s Venus. I was so depressed I didn’t care if she got me.

Virgilio was being a crazy asshole and waving the A-bomb around. I yelled at him to power down. Just then some people came running up the stairs. They had uniforms, and looked like police. But they weren’t. They were Green Death. Peter and Beatrice and Orali, the remaining snoid.

A bullet caught Virgilio in the leg, oh shit. The bomb slipped out of his grasp. I took the only way out. I jumped feet first into the sex sphere’s snatch.

The sphere got out of there in a hurry. We moved off into the fourth dimension. As we left normal space, I felt a horrible wrenching sensation all over my body, as if I were being torn right out of my flesh. The strong walls of the sphere’s vagina pressed in, holding me together.

Though nestled deep inside her, I could peep out. As soon as we’d broken the fetters of conventional 3-D space, I could feel myself acquire an extraordinary mobility. My eyes rolled this way, and that way, and other ways too. In one direction I could see down into the wood-floored room in the Casino Borghese.

“Down” is not quite the word. I could see the room as from a distance…yet from no particular direction at all. Floor, ceiling and all four walls were spread before me. Thanks to the forgiving wood floor, the bomb had failed to detonate. Peter was looking it over while Beatrice and the snoid stared at Giulia wriggling into her dress. Virgilio lay on the floor, moaning.

But Sybil…my Sybil stepped across the room and quickly picked up the tiny sex sphere cross section, far down a hypercurve from the fat part holding me. No one noticed. She dropped the little spherelet into her purse. I hoped she would know to
smeep
me back. Hoped she’d get a chance.

The Green Death were over on one side of the room, regrouping and discussing. It looked like Peter wanted to just run off with the bomb, but Beatrice wanted to take Virgilio and Sybil hostage. Giulia gestured a lot and seemed to be having trouble explaining what had happened to me. The Green Death gang wasn’t at all hip to the nature of Lafcadio Caron’s hypersphere.

Just then the situation took another turn for the worse. The real police arrived. I could see them outside the little museum, crouched behind bulletproof shields and shouting through a megaphone. I wished I could hear what they were saying. According to the news-show I’d seen, they thought I was one of the bad guys. Right now I was better off in hyperspace.

From my vantage point everything looked very strange. I could see through Sybil’s dress, see that she had no panties on, and I could even see her guts and bones. It was a little as if everything were transparent. Her beating heart, the sperm in her womb. I prayed she’d survive the impending melee.

But meanwhile there was so much else to see! A roll of my eyes and the Casino Borghese vanished. I was staring into raw hyperspace. It was crowded with moving forms, some round like my girlfriend the hypersphere, some angular, some branching. The motions they described were far richer than anything our 3-D space exhibits. The usual left/right, forward/backward, up/down movements were all there…but there was a fourth type of motion, call it
ana/kata
. Thus, rather than saying I could look
down
at the Casino Borghese, I prefer to say that I could look
kata
at it. Rather than saying the sex sphere moved
up
out of normal space, I say that she moved
ana
out of it.

The hyperforms around us often seemed to be turning inside out, not by everting, but by…changing perspective like one of those self-reversing line drawings of a cube or a staircase. It was hard for my 3-D eyeballs to keep up with it all. Only by rapidly sweeping my eyes
ana
and
kata
could I begin to grasp the whole picture.

Cautiously, I slid my head a little farther out and tried to get an overall picture of the sex hypersphere. If I held my eyes a certain way, I saw nothing but the same cross section I’d jumped into. Huge tits and ass, an open-sesame crack. But by bending my neck
kata
, I could sight over one of the nipples, for instance, and see it as just one cross section of a whole ridge-line of nipple-tissue dwindling down to a dot on the spherelet in Sybil’s purse.

Keeping my neck turned
kata
, but rolling my eyes left, I could see the continuous furry furrow of the hypersphere’s cross-sectional vulvas ending, again, in Sybil’s purse. I wondered what it was that kept this particular hypersphere from moving entirely away from our normal space. A snag that Lafcadio Caron had somehow set? I recalled a paper of his on three-dimensional knottings of hyperspace objects.

I’d had some worries that my brain might fall out. But, for now, nothing untoward happened. Growing more reckless, I wormed my shoulders and arms out of the sex sphere’s minge. Moving my arms around was an incredible sensation. By slight
kata-ana
twitches I could, in effect, move them right through each other: just as two coins on a tabletop can be made to miss colliding if one is slightly raised.

The hyperspace around me was filled with strange, thrilling vibrations…as if hundreds of songs were being sung at once. This or that tune would slide into prominence, then segue out as I moved again. Waving my arms in abandon, I forgot my troubles and danced.

Time passed. When I thought to look
kata
again, I could see that Sybil was caught in a stalemate. The Green Death had tied her and Virgilio up, but now the real police had the Green Death pinned down in the museum. Beatrice must have threatened to set off the A-bomb, as the cops were making no signs of invading…just yelling over a bullhorn. For some reason Sybil and Virgilio were naked and tied together face-to-face. Were they fucking again? I couldn’t stand to watch. Going back
kata
there was, for now, the goddamn last fucking thing I wanted to do.

I turned my head
ana
, straining to see what lay in the hyperspace direction away from normal space. I was by no means embedded in the sex hypersphere’s largest cross section. She bulged out and out for several dozen meters before reaching maximum girth.
Ana
there her sexual characteristics faded out and were replaced by some other kind of patterning.

I wriggled the rest of the way out of her birth canal. Born again in a higher world. Praise Jesus. I stood on the sphere, swaying a little.

It gave me a weird, spaced-out feeling to move around in four dimensions. Strangely vivid memories of things past kept flashing in on me, and I had a little trouble remembering exactly what was going on.

My body parts had a disconcerting way of seeming to change radically, depending on what angle I looked at them from. Sometimes my legs were naked, sometimes clothed. And in the greatest imaginable variety of raiment! I recognized jeans, suit-pants, knickers and shorts. For one unsettling instant, I looked down and saw chubby infant’s legs sticking out of a shitty diaper. Mellow yellow. A moment later, my hand became a skeleton’s claw. I pressed my eyes shut and concentrated on the present.

When I opened them again, things were a bit more orderly. My limbs no longer seemed to flicker back and forth in time. Now, when held at certain angles, they simply disappeared. I decided to work my way
ana
to the sex hypersphere’s wide part and demand an interview.
Ana
: further out.
Kata
lay Green Death, faithless Sybil and pigs who hunted the Anarchist Archimedes.

I got down on all fours and crawled up to the summit of one of my sex sphere’s breasts. Then I turned my hands and feet in such a way that they became invisible, and pushed. The breast beneath me grew slightly larger. I had moved
ana
to a new cross section. I kept doing this…pushing myself along in some invisible direction…and slowly the breast-mound flattened. A few more pushes and the nipple faded into a welt, then a freckle, then blank skin. I was getting near the hypersphere’s maximum cross section, the equatorial sphere.

But not really a sphere. All sorts of strange shapes rose up around me: armchairs, cave-mouths, saguaro cacti. Seemingly disconnected blobs of skin-covered tissue drifted past. I kept turning my head this way and that, trying to keep my bearings.

The celestial music I’d heard before damped down, and a single stuttering murmur took over, like a taped conversation cut up and played wrong speed. Was the sex sphere finally talking to me?

Just then the skinscape around me necked up and out. I lost my footing. For an instant I tumbled, my limbs aflow, now young, now old. I stood up again, thoroughly disoriented. I seemed to be in a small pink room, a sepia-tone replica of our Heidelberg apartment. A chair rose up behind me, catching me in the back of the knees. I sat down heavily. Sybil walked into the room.

Her face was missing, but as I thought this, the skinpatch arranged itself into her features. She was screaming at me. I had a feeling of
déjà vu
.

“All you think about is yourself,” said Sybil’s harsh, angry voice. “I can’t stand it any more.”

“What do you mean?” I muttered right on cue. “Take it easy.”

This was a replay of a fight we’d had last month. And the month before that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that.