THREE NIGHTS OF CONNIE

1. A Night in Malaysia

The whole facility was spotless.  For the last three days, ever since
Doctor Hieronymus Blasphemy had confirmed that they would indeed be
receiving a visit, the entire staff had been wrapped in preparations.
Coffee-stained tables were wiped down, floors were scrubbed, terminal
monitors Windexed.  Eminent physicists, doctors, botanists,
phrenologists -- the greatest and most cracked minds of their
generation, men, women, and others destined for the Nobel Prize or the
insane asylum -- dropped their labors, their mad experiments, their
unhallowed designs and picked up mops as soon as they heard the name of
their visitor.  One surgeon, whose name was high on the Mossad death
list, even brought a potted plant from home to decorate her Brain
Complicating Device.
    They arranged PowerPoint slides to highlight the last year's
progress; the senior staff assembled their notes and pondered how best
to explain their research in lay terms.  Each one of the cadavers had a
pipe placed in its mouth.
    As the day approached, the women of the facility, entirely
unconsciously, dressed wildly.  Their hair was disheveled.  The men,
mostly hopeless scientist types who found nothing more attractive than
a well-turned equation, arrived in the morning sweaty and extroverted,
with fiery eyes and nostrils dilated like a bull's.  Everybody sweated.
 They had thought themselves immune by long exposure to the sweltering
Malaysian heat, but since the announcement the unchanging climate had
risen ten degrees.  Even the clouds felt the coming friction.
    Hot weather always preceded a visit from Constance Marsh Dobbs.
    Dr. Blasphemy was somewhat intrigued and not a little terrified at
the thought of an official visit from the Bride of "Bob", but he was
mostly annoyed by the disturbance.  He was a cold man, the terror of
Dobbslab which he ruled like a czar.  The Dobbses trusted him because
the rest of the scientists, otherwise unmanageable, followed his word
to the letter.  Just as he followed the Dobbses.
    When the physicist personality of Nikolai Vlachenko, a brilliant
schizophrenic, announced that he was ready to open the long sought Gate
to the Third Hell, Hieronymus sought him out privately and reminded him
that no one under any circumstance was to tamper with certain energy
states until after the Rupture.  The madman raved, threatened Dr.
Blasphemy's life, smashed a formaldehyde jar along with its priceless
specimen.  But he obeyed.
    No one knew the punishment for disobedience, because no one had
ever given Dr. Blasphemy cause to inflict it.
    Why was Connie visiting them now?  It wasn't to see a new discovery
-- the whole complex had been suffering from a yearlong dry spell.  All
they had found lately was kid's stuff: new ways to reanimate the dead,
twist and mock God's creation, negate the fabric of time itself.
Nothing to interest "Bob".  The Xists, from what little data they'd
been able to gather, did all that and more as absent-minded doodling.
The director sighed to himself, as he often did, and wished he had more
Yeti genes in his blood to inspire him.  He would gladly volunteer to
work under a full Yetinsyn, a Doktor instead of a Doctor.  His
hierarchical instincts, no doubt a human atavism but also the cause of
his curious influence over others, required a superior.
    "Daahctoorrr..." hissed a grotesque, mucousy voice behind him.
    "Yes Igor, what is it?"  "Igor" was their nickname for the lab's
trained Shoggoth.  Countless eons of unguided evolution had granted it
the power of speech, after a bit of inventive cybernetic surgery and a
shitload of lightning.
    "A vghisitorrh."
    Hieronymus whirled.  The shambling, gelatinous thing towered over
him.  It appeared more shambling than usual.  Bits of it kept melting
and reforming.  He saw a long red streak over its nerve array that
looked suspiciously like lipstick.
    "Have you already greeted the visitor?"
    "Ughlaghablaghagruuuummmmm...."  It melted to half its height right
in front of him; he had to step back to avoid getting Igor on his
shoes.  It twisted two semilabia into a parody of human lips, smiling
them.
    "I'll see her in myself."
    Briskly Dr. Blasphemy covered the quarter mile between his study
and the "front door," a reinforced airlock.  The complex itself
stretched for miles, like the brachia of human lungs, opening into
domed alveoli of living quarters and research labs.  It had only the
one airlock.  They feared no human intervention -- not with Dobbstown
ten miles away -- but airborne contamination from the thick jungle life
outdoors could affect the experiments, or, worse, the other way around.
 Floor conveyors sped most of the scientists down the corridors.  Dr.
Blasphemy declined to use them.  One assistant who had suggested
Segways had been turned, very instructively, back into an ape.
    Bits of Igor littered the sides of the passageway.  It must have
had a hell of a good time.
    She stood just inside the airlock, immaculate.  The journey, the
jungle, the rather invasive decontamination scrubbing, and whatever she
had done with Igor had not even mussed her hair.
    To his human eyes, she looked entirely different from the last time
Hieronymus had seen her, at a dining function after a meeting of the
Council of None which he occasionally advised.  She looked different
every time he saw her.  But she felt the same each time.  You felt the
heat of her any the time she was there, even with your eyes closed. You
never really stopped feeling it, even years later.
    He felt terrible for keeping her waiting.  For the sake of
architecture as well as etiquette.  The metal walls of the corridor
were already softening under the heat of her presence.
    But what, might the poor SubGenius who has never made her
acquaintance ask, did she look like?  Leave her description to a better
writer.  Nay, leave it to the poets, the Gods, the stars.  Leave it to
the image of beauty you treasured most in your childhood.  Leave it to
the Virgin Mary, Aphrodite, Sappho and Leda -- then know that all your
mental images don't even begin to tell.
    What the doctor saw most at that moment were her eyes and her
mouth.  They reminded him of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring.  His
soul, better than his mind, leaped at her.
    He tucked his soul neatly back into his chest, politely, and
greeted her equally politely though with real pleasure.  A paradox, our
Doctor Blasphemy.
    "Mrs. Dobbs, you honor us all by your visit.  I am utterly
privileged to have you here."  He made a slight bow, a Malaysian custom
he had picked up.
    "It is a privilege to be here," she said.  "Thank you for
overlooking the inconvenience of my visit.  I've brought you a
present."  With both hands she offered him what looked like a decayed
cow's neck.
    The scientist in Dr. Blasphemy saw it first.  Forgetting his guest
he took the gift and looked it all over and cooed like a child -- the
spirit of science is always childlike.  "Thank you!" he cried, "thank
you so much!  It's really Xist, isn't it?  A genuine Time Confuser? How
delightful!  It'll take me months to disassemble it.  I can't wait to
show Dr. Insanity this, he's been wanting one for years!  He'll be so
jealous!"
    She smiled at him.  Her smile was beatific, transcendental. "That's
the scientist I came to see.  And what do you have for me?"
    "Myself, the lives and work of my staff, our eternal devotion and
adulation, and the entire output of this unique facility.  And this
humble token of the same."
    He presented her with a mirror.  The handle was of tanned foreskin.
 The border, worked in gold, depicted a man and a woman, one on each
side, outstretched and touching extended fingers and toes, gazing in
unutterable lust at the mirrored surface in the center.  She looked
into it and adjusted an eyelash.
    "I thank you, and look forward to using it.  My husband and I are
very happy with the interesting work you do here."
    She wore yellow from top to bottom.  Her hair was blond that day,
but her skin was Chinese.  Yellow was the color of the local royalty.
Connie was making a point.
    "Well, then," said the doctor, "let us begin the tour."  She took
his arm charmingly.  He led Connie down the hallway, delighted that she
too did not care to use the conveyors.  Each time her heels clicked on
the metal floor he felt the vibration in his blood.
    "Where is the High Epopt at the moment?" the Doctor ventured.
    "Anywhere and everywhere," she said.  Whether she was being ironic
or not Hieronymus certainly couldn't tell.  "He is in the slack of the
Antarean lizardgator licking its own salt glands; he is in the little
girl setting fire to an orphanage; he is in the wise-ass kid cutting up
in church."  Such words, corny as they were, came from the mouth of
Connie and thus transfixed him.  "More pertinently, he is nailed to a
bedpost at home.  He wanted to come but I'm afraid I killed him a
little harder than I intended."
    Dr. Blasphemy made another brief bow.  "And here," he said,
indicating, "is the physics wing of the complex.  We have three
accelerators, one cylinder right on top of the other: wotrons on the
top floor, mutrons on the second, slackions on the first."
    "Slackions aren't particles," said Connie.
    "Quite right," he answered, leading her into the wing.  "But
whatever we _are_ dealing with acts just as a slackion would if it
_were_ a particle.  It totally baffles us.  In fact I've had to
intervene several times, just to make sure Patel doesn't blow up the
planet prematurely."
    They visited the wotron level.  The scientists greeted Connie
profusely, almost falling over themselves.  Emma Constance Berenice de
Maufrigneuse, the only female scientist on the floor, clearly had
difficulty walking.
    "Perhaps," said Connie, "you could show me the use of this
machine."
    "Certainly," said de Maufrigneuse.  "If you would just put on these
safety goggles."
    "Unnecessary."
    They turned the lights out.  Two plexititanium windows showed a
section of the accelerator's torus, seven feet in cross-sectional
diameter, sixteen miles in circumference.  The other scientists barked
out instructions, their dominance instincts were coming out.  Dammit.
If she stays here much longer, thought Dr. Blasphemy, they'll start
peeing on each other.
    De Maufrigneuse pulled a huge, heavy lever to initialize the
collider.  You could hear the hum of the magnets, the revving up of
machinery.
    "The pumps," she said in her usual monotone, and her colleagues
switched open the magnetic gates to the Central Soul Tank.  Hundreds,
then thousands of human souls pumped into cylinder.  They looked
ghostly.  Some put their hands and faces to the windows; their
expressions were terrible.  Thousands more were pumped in, until they
compressed and collapsed into an undifferentiated soul-paste.  Some of
it congealed into virtual matter, thinner than the thinnest gas.
    "Electricity," said de Maufrigneuse -- she looked like she was
feeling plenty herself.  Connie left the side of Dr. Blasphemy, put her
hands on the physicist's shoulders to steady her.
    Arcs of lightning fired through the cylinder.  The magnets began
propelling the soul-matter.  They watched it whoosh past the windows,
left-to-right, the crackling electricity tearing through the thickening
medium.  The souls howled in agony, but this was visible only on the
nearby meters; their feeble psychic energy in such cramped conditions
could not create perceptible sound.
    "Oh-la," mumbled de Maufrigneuse.  It was not an order.  Connie was
doing something to her shoulder.  But the other scientists knew
perfectly well the next step in the sequence.  They primed the luck
resonators.  The luck vibrations, squeezed through the soul matter,
brought the latent wotron particles to full activation.  Through the
windows Dr. Blasphemy could feel the faint echoes of luck waves, which
no shielding can entirely absorb.
    "I want more power," de Maufrigneuse said, a little louder this
time.  The male scientists rushed to comply.  The churning increased.
Connie had her face pressed to the window, gazing at the interactions
inside.  The flicker of ghost-light on her face was unearthly. Everyone
but her wore goggles to prevent the "Lost Ark" effect, yet her face was
not melting.  What did she see?
    They themselves could increasingly see the sparks of particle
collisions through the windows.  Not the particles themselves, of
course, but the energy of even a single wotron in full smiting state
burned fiery holes in the surrounding soul-matter.  The power was
kicking in, exciting and propelling the trapped wotrons so that the
sparks lengthened into long burning streaks.
    "More!" said de Maufrigneuse, and they tried to do so, shunting all
the souls they could into the medium, keeping the escape valves closed
as long as they could.  The room began to shake.
    De Maufrigneuse shouted "Full power!"  Dr. Blasphemy shoved the
others out of his way, jammed in his personal access code, rerouted the
entire facility's power supply to the accelerator.  Damn the other
experiments -- they had a visitor!  Let her see a real show!  The
wotrons raged, span, smote vast rifts into the screaming soul around
them.  Mutilated half-particles fell into pain vortices arranged in
helical spirals along the inside walls of the cylinder; subtle
instruments built into the walls recorded the velocity and proto-slack
of each soul-mote as it was annihilated.
    They all felt the flecks of smashed wotrons and the subtler spray
of proto-soul bombarding their own Nental Ifes.  The bean accelerated,
hit a peak, and then with augmented power and the influence of their
visitor burst in a massive flash of sexhurt-goodbad-darklight.
Everyone's goggles blackened; the instruments fried; the accelerator's
torus warped out of shape, impossible to repair, it would take a year
to rebuild from scratch.
    When the backup power came up, Dr. Blasphemy tore off his goggles
and looked around.  It looked like Hell in the red emergency lights.
Instruments were smoking, throwing off sparks.  The fire sprinklers
were soaking them.  All the scientists but himself and de Maufrigneuse
were twitching on the floor -- too much wotron radiation; they were
going into luck spasms as each cell in their bodies gambled for
independence.  And so they had missed what only de Maufrigneuse and
himself had seen in the sudden flash of light-that-was-not-light: the
true form, or at least more of the form than is ordinarily accessible
to human perception, of Constance Dobbs.
    She was far vaster in five dimensions than in three.  Her tentacles
were everywhere.  She was an octopus, a seahorse, a dragonfly, an
orchid, a mythological medusa, a medusa of the sea.  The Doctor's mind
reeled.  It was incredibly arousing.
    De Maufrigneuse must have felt the same.  She wrapped her arms
around Connie, who had in turn completely wrapped her body, legs and
all, around the physicist.  They were locked in the deepest kiss Dr.
Blasphemy had ever seen.  Connie was fully dressed and fully naked at
the same time.  Ordinary physics were still distorted by the collision.
 The two women literally intersected in space.  He saw the kiss
continue, the bodies melt into and through each other,
interpenetrating, or, more accurately, interweaving.  Intolerable heats
built up and released in wave upon wave of energy.  All the babies born
at that minute in hospitals across Malaysia were to grow into
incredible beauties and full-blood Yetinsyny.  Then gradually the
distortion subsided, the invasions relaxed into gentle caresses, and
when the doctor regained his ordinary vision Connie stood as poised and
immaculate as ever.  De Maufrigneuse was snoring.
    "When she wakes, she'll be able to tell you the name of your
mysterious particle," said Connie.
    "I'm happy to hear it.  Come, it'll be a while before power is
restored; let's take a look at the biological wing."
    There they saw all manner of interpretations of the physical
vehicle of life, strange, cruel, and beautiful.  In one they showed
Connie how her own conscious mind could, temporarily, be mechanically
synchronized with the minds of insects in the mating phase.  It amused
her, but they all saw how amateurish their attempts were next to what
came naturally to "Bob's" bride.  As she coquettishly said herself, "I
hardly need to be a bug to devour the head of a man I've fucked."  Only
Dr. Blasphemy knew to whom she referred (it wasn't "Bob").
    One daring scientist worked up the courage to ask Connie for a tiny
cell sample.  She let him take it, knowing that he would never use it
for science.
    Somewhere between the biology wing and the Chamber of Terrors
(where the scientists ate lunch), Connie pointed out a plain, unadorned
door in the corridor.  "What's that?" she said.
    "That?  It's nothing; it's a supply closet."
    "I must see it more closely."  And she dragged him in.
    Hours later they emerged, Connie fresh as before.  Hieronymus's
clothes were in shreds.  His skin was covered in bite marks, lipstick,
and distinctive strips of circular hickeys.  Parts of him were
literally smoking.  On his face was rapture.  In his voice a newfound
depth.  He was grinning like a Dobbshead.
    In the metaphysical labs they saw mostly impractical experiments:
attempts to achieve slack without pain, to make money without risk, to
engineer a working cooperative society, to rehabilitate a Pink soul.
None interested Connie except for a bizarre experiment by Meimei the
Talking Gorilla, who was rather frowned upon by the other scientists
because, being a true gorilla, how SubGenius could she be?  "Slack goes
everywhere" was Connie's answer when Hieronymus mentioned this much
later.
    Meimei was pursuing the theory that evolution actually goes
backwards, and that to stimulate the soul is to devolve it.  She
investigated this by combining the genetic material of the rare
Saturnian grasshopper, a microscopic little crystalline mite which for
reasons unknown had achieved nearly Perfect Slack, with the DNA of
record company executives and patent lawyers.  Her theory predicted
that the mite would emerge with more Slack than before, the challenge
being that the compound's best instruments were lousy at detecting the
difference between False Slack and the real stuff.  That, and the
grasshopper-executive hybrids tended to die off too quickly or to
"monsterize" (which isn't really a scientific term, but you heard it a
lot at the facility).
    Connie spent an hour with Meimei, working with the gland cultures,
adjusting instruments.  When their hands brushed together Meimei
shuddered.  It was apparently all she needed because she loped off to
have a banana and cigarette by herself.
    "And now," said Doctor Blasphemy as he escorted her in the
direction of his own quarters, "would you like a tour of the
residential facilities?"
    Connie shrugged.
    "Perhaps the hate reservoirs?"
    Connie shook her head.
    Doctor Blasphemy waited patiently.
    "You must wonder," she said, "why I came here."  She looked him
right in the eyes.
    "The thought did cross my mind, yes."
    "It wasn't for a guided tour."
    The doctor took her waist in his hands.
    "I came to learn the progress of our experiment."
    "Ah.  Of course.  That would explain it.  Damn."  She had come to
see the real experiment.  "Bob"-damn it all!  It had not occurred to
him on the way to the airlock because, as a simple precaution, he
always wiped his brain when he left his shielded rooms.  Not even the
subtlest telepath could get the information because he didn't have it.
But Connie's eyes were a special case.  The memories flooded back.
    "You want to know what we've learned so far."
    She nodded.  "And I have bad news.  We believe the Church is
beginning to suspect."
    He swore to himself.  The Church of the SubGenius!  Every time he
tried to get some work done they inevitably nosed in and complicated
everything.  As though they were "Bob's" only instruments!  As though
X-Day and the Rupture were all that "he" had PreScribed!
    "Come this way," said the doctor for the benefit of nearby
technicians.  "There's a delightful experiment going on in the other
wing; one that's come a long way in recent weeks."
    They walked to Hieronymus's quarters.  He reached for Connie's hand
and held it.
    "You know, I love my husband very much," said Connie.  "But he's
not the brightest in the family.  Hardly the most practical."
    "His follies are known and praised by us all--"
    "Yes, well and good, but if the experiment yields the result we're
hoping for I'd rather take care of the data myself.  For "Bob's" own
best interest, of course."
    The doctor nodded.  "I was just thinking the same thing."
    They entered the doctor's own private lab, the
compound-within-a-compound where he monitored the only real experiment
in the whole facility, the one that mattered.  Omicron Epsilon.
    They were there for two long hours, and then Dr. Blasphemy showed
his visitor to the exit.  She let him kiss her hand on the way out; he
began there and finished at her ankle.
    The doctor returned to his labs.
    "DOCTOR!" screamed Grausamkeit Winkelstuck, the compound's best
teratologist.  Her blue eyes flew open.
    Dr. Blasphemy looked at himself through his own torn clothes.  He
was hairier!  He could see the black hairs growing, thickening before
his eyes.  He felt them.  No, he felt through them!  Each one was a
little sensor, an antenna.  The smells of the room grew vivid, three
dimensional -- his latent nostril glands were activating.  His breath
came in gusts.  He felt his brains expand -- it hurt his skull as they
pushed against the constricting bone -- and he saw in a burst of
clarity how the Revised Theory of Painslack he had pursued for months
was mere child's play, a restatement of an already known formula.  His
feet thrummed with energy.  The spines in his back twitched.
    He looked at, then into, Grausamkeit's ever-widening eyes.  He let
his perception jump into them and feel her inside and out.  He smelled
her -- completely smelled every molecule she exuded, every message her
body had to tell hum.  His musk glands announced his response.  His
penis rose erect.  No, wait: his twin penii.
    "No need to call me doctor," said Hieronymus.  "I'm a Doktor now."
    "Oh, Doktor!" the scientist cried as he hoisted her over his
shoulder and carried her out of the room, out of the complex, and into
the steaming jungles of Malaysia.

2. A Night on the Moon

That night the Earth formed a crescent of blue-green silver.  On days
when it was fuller Joerg could make out the shapes of continents, and
those were the days he became desperately homesick.  The crescent, on
the other hand, four times bigger and twice as bright as the moon
appears to Earth, only reminded him how dull it was to be the entire
crew of the SubGenius Foundation's Moon Base One.
    With a growl the Reverend Joerg Verkaufer banged on his console,
above which lay the huge reinforced observation panel through which he
could see the Earth.  His home planet hung in the same place in the sky
every day, changing shape but never position thanks to Luna's
synchronous rotation.  Joerg kicked backwards.  The kick sent him
sailing gracefully across the ten-meter-long room, corresponding
roughly to the dome of "Bob's" forehead.  The moon base was shaped like
a relief map of a Dobbshead; some wag in Malaysia had worked out that
this was the "mathematically perfect form" for a station in a
low-gravity, atmosphere-free environment.
    Joerg landed on his futon -- it was a practiced maneuver after an
Earth year on the station -- and grabbed a half-empty bag of Doritos.
He munched them contemplatively.  The long banks of computers did their
beeping, blinking-lights routine.  He wondered, not for the first time,
if all the beeping was necessary or if the scientist types had just
enjoyed building them that way.  Certainly the Jacob's Ladder was
excessive.
    Graaah.  He jumped to his feet, which lifted him an extra three
feet in the air, and bunny-hopped to the kitchen in "Bob's" left ear.
    Rummaging, he pulled out a pack of Lucky Strikes, a bottle of milk,
and some Wheaties.  He had breakfast standing.  He was in a funk and he
knew it.
    How had he gotten himself into this mess?  It was like that one
cosmonaut who had been stuck up in space when the Soviet Union
collapsed.  Imagine that phone call: "Hey comrades, I'm ready to come
down now."  "Uh, yeah, about that..."  Only the drunken, aggressive,
syphilitic Russian Bear at its most decayed was still more reliable
than the Church.  Joerg recalled the conversation with "Bob" that had
started it all:
    "Hey Joerg, how'd you like to live up in space?"
    "Sure, "Bob"!"
    He'd been kicking himself ever since.  That slick-haired
smooth-talking shit-eating pipe-sucking con artist.
    Well, Joerg thought, nothing to do but try to preserve my sanity
for one more day.  He looked at himself in the polished steel doors of
the kitchen pantry, behind which was enough junk food, breakfast
cereal, beer and smokes to keep him alive for ten years -- grisly
thought.  He looked a mess.  His beard was thick and had crumbs in it,
his hair was greasy, his eyes were sunken and pleading.  Like Arthur
Dent, he wore only a dressing gown.  He made a face at himself.
    To the shower.  Fuck it.  Even SubGenii ought to clean themselves
now and then.  He bunny-hopped to the other ear.
    He emerged an hour later and felt, surprisingly, pretty good.
Restored.  He must have really needed that shower.  In an orgy of
self-maintenance, he had even shaved off the beard and brushed his
teeth.  He picked up around the main quarters, at least enough to lift
it from a den of misery up to a mere den of squalor.  He whistled out
loud to himself.
    Then he noticed that he was whistling "Take Me Off to Space" and
shut the fuck up.
    Now he sat back down at the controls and checked the status.  All
readings were exactly as they had been for the last year.  Which made
him wonder -- again, not for the first time -- just why the hell the
station needed a "human" occupant.  The computers were more than
capable of running the place.  Joerg still didn't grok half the
functions they performed.
    There was the big function, of course, in the bowl of the pipe.  He
monitored that one very carefully.
    But the rest was routine.  Joerg attended to it as best he could.
Let's see... the Conspiracy was firing another nuclear device at
Jupiter, trying to turn it into a star.  That wouldn't do.  He aimed
the dual station lasers (they fired from "Bob's" nostrils), targeted
the payload of fissile material, typed in his password, and tapped
"Enter."  There was no light, noise, or shaking -- they'd be crappy
lasers if there were -- yet in twenty-some minutes the twin beams would
reach the missile and detonate it somewhere in the asteroid belt.  Let
the bastards chew that over.
    A beeping noise -- that is, a less familiar beeping noise -- to
Joerg's left caught his attention.  He chuckled.  Well I'll be damned,
another Mars probe!  How much money did NASA have?  Every attempt was a
new public-relations disaster, excepting the one time they got wise and
filmed the whole thing in Arizona, spending the rest of the funds on
rare Scotch whiskey and hookers.  Someone high up must have told them
to keep trying.  Did they still want to reach their contacts among the
Barsoomians?  There was no need to let the Conspiracies of two planets
hook up.
    Joerg double-clicked the icon representing the probe.  His cursor
turned into a little animated hourglass.  It turned over and over for a
while.  Then the brains of the lander opened in a new window on a
different monitor.  Joerg looked around a bit, decompiled the routines
he was looking for -- they wrote it in embedded Java, for "Bob's" sake!
 Were they kidding?  He added a few lines of bytecode, just enough to
make the lander break off communication a few hundred feet above the
ground.  Mission accomplished.
    It was fun to play vandal with Conspiracy equipment, but it was an
empty kind of fun.  False Slack.  They didn't need him for this!  It
surely didn't take an organic operator to double-click an icon.  This
was just make-work.
    An alert lit up -- another touch from the scientists, it was
literally a 10-foot long sign above the window with "ALERT" in big LED
letters.  It blinked and made a loud farting buzz at each flash.  Joerg
pulled its plug and looked at the attached console.
    The Deros colony from Beneath the Hollow Moon was attacking, trying
to tunnel their way into the base from below.  Hell with this.  Joerg
switched on the Internet.
    SubGenius.com -- nice new design.  Real high-tech, he laughed to
himself, looking around at the ultra-futuristic equipment of the
station.  Still, he missed the energy, the boldness of the old web
designs.  When had the Church aesthetic turned into "slick but gray"?
Had something gone out of the Church when the world failed to end?
Something that could be revived?  Was that why he was floating up on a
fucking rock in fucking space?  He put on the Hour of Slack.  Good: it
was one with ESO.  They sounded all the more surreal and appropriate
echoing out into the infinite night.  He checked the latest Churchly
News.  There was no latest Churchly News.
    Ho hum.  He tried the Stark Fist.  That was even more out of date,
but there were a few articles he hadn't read.  He perused some of the
post-X-day fan-fic, which made him nauseous.  How childish, how petty,
how Pink to dream up sadistic little revenges on all the humans who had
done the author wrong, even for as little as looking at him the wrong
way!  Where was the point in that?  The Rupture will happen or it
won't; if it does who cares about the poor bastards left behind?
    Then he remembered a few of his colleagues from his old Pink job
and understood completely.  Being alone in a moon station 250,000 miles
above the Earth did have its advantages.
    He switched over to chick.com and read some comics.  There was a
new one, "The Peace Maker," featuring an African American Jesus Freak
as laughably unrealistic as Alan Keyes.  It had an impressive panel of
the nail going through Christ's wrist -- the wrist, not the palm, for
Mr. Chick is as pedantic in his love of gore as a Holocaustal.  Amusing
but also a tad irritating, that Chick.
    Bored, he fired up MAME and played a little Galaga.  He was getting
frighteningly good at it.  He weaved between the pixellated missiles,
dropped his bullets right on the big evil insects in the top center,
intercepted the divers.  Once he had hollowed out the commanders he cut
the front lines to pieces.  He repeated this stage after stage.  When
he cleared stage nine he felt the whole ship tremble.  The Dero
invasion must be getting closer.
    He switched off his game and looked at the battle reports.
    The station was easily winning.  The Deros had tripped one buried
mine after another.  The nano-drones were disassembling the survivors,
making notes of the pitiful recent improvements the Hell Creatures had
made in their manufacturing process.  There wasn't even a marked drop
in the nano supply; they'd be able to re-stock themselves out of moon
rocks within the week.  For fun he logged into the cellar gun and
blasted away a few invaders, but Galaga was better.
    An hour later the invasion was over.  Joerg prepared himself a cup
of tea.
    As he sat there at the controls, tea trembling in his hand, he
looked out the window at the barren moon surface.  It was beautiful in
its way.  The Yeti once had enormous cities here, back when Mutantis
was young, but they had cleared away after the great continental
see-saw and the general disgust and introspection that had followed the
dilution of the Seed.  So old was the Moon's pockmarked surface that he
could still see the telltale scratches where once had lain the
foundations of mighty temples, forums, and arcades.
    Sometimes he thought he saw ghosts out on the surface.  That could
be an effect of the strange radiations swirling around the Pipe -- who
knows what kind of entities were getting sucked into the receiving
bowl?  That bowl was the Receiver, the designated "Inbox" where the
Foundation hoped that some Thing, any Thing would send its response to
the Laser Project.  That, he reminded himself, was of course why he
really had to stay up there.  But what if the signals never came, or if
the Pipe failed to recognize them?  Anyway, for all Joerg knew those
"ghosts" could be the same Yeti who once had lived here, now invisible
except when amusing themselves at his expense.
    He saw a ghost now at a great distance, a vaguely human shadow.
Cute.  It shimmered in the distance, approached.
    The air in the station was hot, wet.  From his extended shower,
doubtless.
    The vision got closer, resolved into a curvaceous female figure in
a poodle skirt, blouse, and permanent wave.  She was walking, which
surprised Joerg when he noticed her shoes.  The Moon makes it hard to
walk at the best of times, what with the dust and the rocks and the low
gravity.  It is absolutely impossible to walk outside in high heels.
    Which meant that this was just an apparition, or else...
    Joerg leaped up from his chair.
    Connie stepped through the observation window as if it wasn't made
of foot-thick reinforced plastic, smiled at Joerg with indescribable
charm, and gave him her right hand to kiss.  She kept her left behind
her back.
    The feel of the skin of Connie's hand, especially to Joerg who had
only felt his own hand for more than a year, caused all the hairs on
his body to wake and his neck to shiver.  He smelled her skin as he
kissed her, very gracefully.  The scent went straight to his head.
    "Hi Joerg," said Connie.  "I thought you might be getting lonely up
here, so I baked you some cupcakes."
    She showed what she'd been hiding: her left hand was in an oven
mitt and held a large tray filled with the most delicious-looking
cupcakes Joerg had ever seen.  She set the tray upon his desk and
removed the mitt.
    Joerg stuttered out a thank-you.
    "Well, goodbye," she said, turning to go.
    "Wait!  I mean, ah, would you like to stay and chat for a while? It
gets pretty lonely up here; I'd love the company."
    "Why, I'd positively adore to," she said.
    She grabbed Joerg's bathrobe with both hands and ripped it off,
then jumped on him like the face-hugger in Alien, arms and legs wrapped
around him, lips pressed to his.  He fell right back into the futon,
almost dashing his brains out on a metal desk corner, and silently
thanked old Luna for going easy on the gravity.
    He pulled Connie to his chest, felt with his hands her shapely back
and shoulders.  She looked right into him with her clear beautiful
eyes, looked and looked and breathed, like she was breathing him in.
Then she kissed him on the lips with brief, delicious little kisses,
like flower petals.
    She bent her head and opened her mouth; Joerg kissed her deeply,
tasting her.  She ground her groin against his.  He unzipped her
blouse.  She shook herself out of it, breaking the kiss.
    The shape of her shoulders and her neck, of her breasts in her bra
were gracious beyond all reckoning.  Her skin was soft and smooth.  She
sat up on him, legs on either side of his waist; then she reached
behind her back and unclasped her bra.
    When it fell away Joerg gasped, just like the first time, when he
was fifteen, that he had ever fumbled a girl's bra off.  Indeed it felt
just the same.  His heart was beating like crazy.  She was... she was
perfect.  He sat up and bent his face to her breast; she pressed him to
her with both hands.
    He kissed all around her left breast -- it was exactly the perfect
size -- nuzzled it, and understood for the first time that part in the
Song of Songs about a woman's tits being "like two fawns".  Clearly
Solomon had once met Connie.  Joerg was gentle with her nipple -- it
was the kind you wanted to treat luxuriously -- kissing it, suckling
slowly -- then at her urging bit ever so slightly, more sort of
scratching it with his teeth.  With his hand he stroked and caressed
her other breast, squeezed it -- how good it feels to squeeze soft
round things!
    He switched, attended the other breast, devoured without consuming
it like the fire in the burning bush.  His hands were all over her now,
enjoying the feel of her, discovering her.  He loved how it felt to
hold her sides with his hands while she ground down on him, all while
he kissed her and smelled her.
    She turned and they were on their sides.  He kissed the top of her
chest, her neck, devoured her ear.  The smell of her hair was like the
incense of Helle.  There was a lingering smell of tobacco.  How quickly
had she gotten here from "Bob's" Malaysian palace?  He guessed seconds.
    She bit his neck, hard, but in exactly the place where a hard bite
feels good.  Then she bit around his chest, pushing him onto his back
and dragging her tongue quickly, not teasingly, down to the hair above
his penis.
    Fellatio for Joerg had mostly been a disappointment.  He had spent
his teen years and twenties madly pursuing it, like any man, and when
he got it mostly wondered what the fuss was about.  Always it was
either too intense and businesslike or else too little of anything.
Only one woman, a SubGenius he would never forget, had enjoyed herself
with him; only one had ever sucked on his cock with artistry, with
poetry.
    But even that poem had been a haiku, whereas Connie went for the
epic.
    She spent a long time smelling him.  Not sniffing, but deep,
drinking up long draughts of his scent up through her nose.  She
smelled all through his public hair, while her mouth put little
worshipful kisses on the top of his cock; she smelled all around it,
not quite tickling -- once she bit hard on his thigh by surprise, just
painful enough to stop him from stopping her; she breathed in the smell
of his balls while touching them with her fingers, alternating with
playful little licks; smelled under them too and them smelled the skin
of his shaft, deeply, filling her lungs as if intoxicating herself with
him, reading him.
    Then she took the sides of his penis with her fingertips and licked
just the bottom of him, quick and light and fast and wide.  That went
through him like a bolt of lightning.  She placed his tip against her
barely-parted lips, just touching them, and looked at him so that he
was in danger of falling into her eyes and her mouth at the same time.
Behind her eyes he saw galaxies.
    Then she opened her mouth a fraction and let the tiniest part of
the tip of his cock slip in.
    It was like melting into a cool river of electricity.  Sparks arced
out: the tip of her tongue played with him, stroked the end of him, got
to know him, tasted the first dissolving drop.
    Then in one motion she dipped his penis all the way into her mouth
and withdrew it all the way out.  It happened so fast that the
sensation didn't hit his brain until a second later.  He reeled! and
the room shuddered!  She had _held_ him with that one quick stroke,
taken him and summed up the whole of his being, physical and spiritual,
with her mouth, and brought it into her private taste completely.  THIS
was fucking.  This was the art of Connie, who gives her worship as well
as she demands.  Sacred, obscene.
    She squeezed her lips together and pressed her tongue to the top of
her mouth, without biting; then she put her hands behind his ass and
pulled him into her.  Slowly he sank into her mouth.  It was tight! His
body whole twitched and his hips jerked forward, half-voluntarily, but
she rode him and pressed him into her at the same slow rate.
    And as he felt the enormous wetness and pressure and suction and
coolness and burning heat of her mouth, as he slid one inch after
another deeper into heaven, Joerg sensed another thing even more
amazing: that she was truly ultimately _tasting_ him.  A man knows the
difference.  If a woman is only working to please him, he can tell; if
she is listening with her tongue and mouth, tasting, he knows; if she
savors it, adores it, puts her soul in it, then dear "Bob" how he
knows!  Connie was tasting the man she sucked with more attention than
a meditating Zen Master, with more appreciation than a collector over a
long-sought comic book, with more sheer gusto than a tiger devouring
its prey.  Joerg could feel the fire of her love in the very blood of
his cock.
    And then she opened her mouth and took him in completely, and the
symphony began.  He could feel everything.  She played him; she played
_with_ him; then slowing down let him discover her for himself, let him
explore her mouth slowly and deeply with his penis.  For Joerg it was
pure wonder.  He stroked her hair and cheeks gently, while with his
manhood he slid himself as slowly or as quickly as he pleased, going
back and forth with little strokes over each new bump and ridge he
encountered.  He thrilled to rub the base of his penis against her
tongue, the very end against the hard ceiling of her mouth.  She
invited him deeper, and he rested the tip just at the entrance to her
throat, rocking back and forth there to feel the tightness of it, how
it contracted around him, how the uvula tickled him.  She stretched her
tongue out as he filled her throat even deeper, and she told him of her
joy with little licks at his balls.
    The pleasure grew and grew, spreading like honey through his blood
from the head of his penis onward, until his balls burned and tingled.
The pleasure went into his legs and toes, even into the foot glands,
and up through his shoulders and even out to his fingertips.  When it
hit his neck he threw his head back and moaned, but it went on to
envelop his brain in the pleasure that he had before believed only
accessible to the nerves of the body; and then he felt the melting as
though she were sucking out his brains through his dick, and he knew
what can only be felt and not described.
    Yet the andgasm itself came only from a long way off; miles off it
seemed.  Connie was more active now.  She swished her head around,
rubbing him against every corner of her mouth.  She shoved her throat
down on him as if wishing to consume him, to impale herself.  She did
such things that he could not imagine how she did them, only guessed
that they would be biologically impossible for a human woman, maybe
even for a Yeti.  And the heat in his manhood didn't fade but grew
hotter, grew to boiling, trembling, tickling.  It felt as though his
penis grew harder every instant until it would harden beyond stone and
into melting lava.  He expected his balls to pulse at any second, the
liquid to surge through him and melt into the honey of her mouth.
    But they did not.  Instead he felt them boiling, frothing as Connie
made love to his manhood, fucked her own mouth with it.  She moaned
around him as though feeling all he felt and knowing what was going to
happen.  The cum boiled and slid molten through the base of his dick.
But it did not shoot.  No.  Slowly, like the mercury of a thermometer
dropped into boiling water it rose, pressing through his dick as she
licked him and her mouth flew up and down on him, pouring unimaginable
pleasure through him at every millimeter, until the fire reached the
very glans and he thought that he would faint, melting the head and
Connie moaned loudly, like an animal, and out the first drops poured
into her welcoming mouth's warmth, dissolving there so that she groaned
with the joy of the taste.
    The next drops came and the next, and Joerg came, not in spurts but
in a steady stream.  It filled her mouth like the stream that pours
from a man long over-stimulated and unsated, but not for a few long
seconds only, for the stream thickened, strengthened, and spilled out
hard and steady as piss from a full bladder, only it was not urine but
his seed that poured.  It was pure, fiery bliss.  He could feel it,
attend to it, with the slow luxury impossible in mere human orgasms.
And Connie purred like a kitten, not moving now, only sucking hard and
drinking like there was room in her to suck the universe.
    It continued; with her hands she stroked his legs and sides and
belly and nipples, drawing his attention to how they felt when he came
in her mouth.  To his amazement Joerg discovered that he wasn't running
dry at all, that Connie could keep him going for as long as she wished.
 She let a bit of him drip down her chin, playfully, just to show him.
    So, like a man on incredible drugs, he leaned back on the futon and
gave himself up to sensation.  Long his attention remained on the
luxurious gorgeousness pouring out through his manhood obscenely into a
mouth of pure beauty.  Connie moved now, showed him how it felt to come
in her as she slid his penis deeper inside her mouth; how different it
felt to melt in her as it slid out.  She would nearly let go, holding
just the tip with her lips, unmoving, scratching him to draw attention
to the rest of himself so that the stream of cum pouring from him
slowed to a trickle; then she would stroke wildly and wetly, throwing
her head up and down, pulling his hands down to squeeze her breasts...
and he would melt anew.
    She changed her angle, brought her knees around to his head so that
his penis now went straight down her throat, and showed him how
different her entire mouth felt this way, how it allowed her to swallow
him even deeper.  Yet most luxurious of all in this new position was
the way his arm and hand were free to enjoy all the softness of her
body.  His took in the silky cool skin of her back, slid his hand
across her shoulders, so much like the silkiness of fucking in her
mouth.  He lifted up his hips rhythmically, and she gracefully received
what he fed her.
    Then his hand took her leg, enjoying the firmness and silkiness
thereof, and brought the calf to his face where he simply nuzzled her,
enjoying the beautiful feel of her skin on his face, and gave her
little kisses of appreciation.  He could smell the inviting magic of
her womanhood as he smelled her skin.  All this time his cock was
pouring into Connie's wildly sucking mouth.  How good it felt to kiss
her skin with all the love in his heart.
    He sought her ass with his hand and squeezed it, and this released
something animal in him, so that now he turned to the side, taking her
with him, and squeezing her ass he thrust himself against her wildly.
Connie bucked against his hand, bucked her face to his crotch, rubbing
and squeezing her own breasts.  She was fucking him, and fucking
herself, and fucking herself using him and vice-versa, so that he could
not tell where the one of them began and the other left off.
    Then all at once she grabbed his waist with both arms and squeezed
him so tightly into her, pushing him even deeper into her throat than
he had ever imagined possible, and he did the same, pressing her body
tight to him, thrusting again and again up and down inside her mouth.
And all at once came the andgasm on top of the andgasm, and he released
into her throat like a firehose, like a torrent of fire, like an atom
bomb, and her nails tore down his back like steel claws.
    It passed like a solar flare, leaving him with only a trickle of
cum barely more than twenty or thirty times more pleasurable than
ordinary SexHurt.
    Connie released him from her mouth and looked at him; her smile was
as wild as her eyes, her hair disheveled, her look hungrily triumphant.
 Joerg jumped on her and planted kiss after kiss on her, kissed her
mouth so deeply that it was like another kind of fucking.  The stream
from his cock at last trickled to a temporary halt.
    "What would you most like now?" she asked.  Her bare chest rose and
fell.
    He wanted to say: "In all the entire universe, there is nothing I
want so much as to taste your cunt.  I want to lick it.  I want to open
it like a flower and suck on every petal.  I want to find the little
hole inside and explore it with my tongue, rubbing the soft walls and
drinking deep from the wells of you.  I want to find your little pearl
and lavish attention on it.  I want to devour you through your cunt and
know the most womanly taste of the goddess of femininity."
    He managed to say: "You."
    "Play with me then.  Enjoy me.  I'm not going anywhere."
    He turned on his back; she got on her elbows and knees, so that her
cunt was just a few inches above his face.  It was beyond beautiful.
    Latent in the genetic soul of every SubGenius, male and female, is
the inscribed image of the Perfect Cunt, the Cunt sculpted beyond
perfection.  Each lip, each hair, the delicate hood of the clit, the
shape and proportion and smell all exactly as they should be; like
Connie herself ever-mutable -- for mutability is woman's nature -- yet
also always an artistic unity.
    This was the cunt which Joerg gazed at now, and in reverence he
lifted his head and placed upon it an adoring kiss.
    Then reverence swelled into hunger, and Joerg checked himself,
forced himself to go slow, for after all one does not get to eat out a
goddess every day.  He kissed, licked, smelled the insides of her
thighs first, delighting in the soft skin there, while his hands played
along her hips and lower back.  Connie for her part was not idle, nor
overly active; luxuriously she rested her chest on him, scratching his
legs with her nails to bring lightning bolts through them, and every so
often placing a wet kiss on the end of his prick.
    Now Joerg drew his tongue along her outer lips in long lazy licks.
They were just the tiniest bit chubby, and had thin wisps of hair the
same color as the pubic patch above.  The lips were exactly the way he
liked them best: "slightly al dente," he thought, and expressed the
thought with the slightest nibble of teeth, which made Connie squirm.
    He repeated this, over and over, a slow licking of one of her lips
and then the other, followed by the slightest touch of teeth, almost as
a ritual, the teasing open of a flower.  As he did so he caught the
first faint subtleties of her taste, intoxicating and strangely
familiar.
    Every woman tastes -- and smells -- a little different from every
other, and also different on any given day depending on her cycle, her
diet, even her mood.  Joerg had expected Connie to be like this, only
of course infinitely more so, as she is in all womanly aspects; also
from the rumors he guessed that he would taste a hint of calamari,
which was all right because he adored seafood.  And all this was indeed
so.  But in Connie, thin and delicate and barely detectible at first,
there stole upon him with ever-increasing potency the unmistakable
flavor of delicious dark forest honey, or rather of a mead, the
ultimate mind-melting mead of the Gods.  It went into his head, making
him drunker and more aware at the same time.
    When he could no longer stand to hold off -- for he had been
torturing himself every bit as much as he tormented Connie -- he kissed
her above her clit, on the high part of the hood, and nuzzled the thick
hair above -- then went down and, sticking his tongue far out, nestled
it between the delicate petals of her inner pussy lips.  They were
moist -- the flood of sensations melting on his tongue were more than
the brain could process -- and gently but swiftly he dove his tongue
all the way into her hole.  Ah, the deep feel of the walls around his
tongue!  The gush of moisture as she jerked her hips!  He felt rather
than heard her moans of pleasure as she crushed his lower body in her
arms.
    Now he swam in her: his tongue lapped her up as if he had been
dying of thirst; his hands rubbed her ass, opening her up for the
pleasure of his eyes and the better access of his mouth.  He licked and
sucked each of her lips, devouring them, swirling his own lips over
them, drinking up their juice.  He went in circles, then up and down;
then tightening his tongue he pressed in and out as deep in her as he
could reach, fucking her, then relaxing swirled his tongue around to
feel all inside.
    Now Connie, quivering, thrashed about in his arms.  Sometimes she
shoved her cunt against his mouth, demandingly; she would gyrate her
hips, rubbing herself all over while Joerg did his best to keep up.  To
give her more freedom of motion he let go of her ass and cupped her
breasts in his hands.  There is something majestic, something
indescribably royal and luxurious about the sensation of drinking from
a woman's cunt at the same time one's hands feel the shape and firmness
of her bosom.  Anyone who has experienced this loses the fear of death,
for in itself the sensation makes all the frustration and painful
brevity of life worth it.  This, one cannot help but think, is the
grand pleasure; and later, when you are plunging your manhood into her,
you remember the taste and know that much more fully what it is you are
enjoying.
    It was as he had this thought that Joerg bent his head and kissed
Connie's snatch as if it were her mouth; a French kiss, long and
exploring -- and to his amazement she kissed him back!  Her control
over her own cunt was so complete that she could kiss with it, use her
lips almost like the lips of the face, the inner lips like a pair of
delicate flower-tongues; then opening her lower mouth as wide as it
could go she allowed her man to explore her.
    The taste of her nectar was strong now, furiously strong in
proportion to Connie's excitement.  She let out impossibly low growls,
like a jungle cat.  It amazed Joerg that she could be so moved by a
mortal like himself, yet that is a part of her glory, for while "Bob"
can fuck a cinderblock, only Connie can be fucked by one.  So Joerg
showed her what he could do, and as the sweet mead flowed from her
pussy into his veins and awoke him into inhuman power and confidence,
he performed upon her with an artistry that was beyond human, yet
entirely his.  He wrote, as it were, his name upon her soul by means of
his mouth upon her cunt.  He opened her up and she was entirely his.
    As he was enjoying her in this fashion, he slipped his right hand
down to join his mouth, and so had the pleasure of stroking the
slippery sensitive skin on either side of her womanhood.  It was
delicious; it was as if he had never felt such places before.  When she
was ready, his two front fingers sought out her clit and, leaving it
within its hood, pressed gently down upon it, letting it know he was
friendly and gentle and there to make it feel good.  At this bit of
pressure Connie gasped and lifted herself away from his mouth, so that
he saw her spread wide open like a rare orchid bathed in glistening
dew.  He rubbed her cunt with his fingers, gently, and she opened and
closed her hole before his eyes, as though trying to grasp the nearest
manhood.  Soft, hungry movements the petals made like the swimming of a
sea creature.
    Her breath came fast now with many catches, and Joerg was now deep
in Connie's soul, so deeply buried in her central nervous system that
he knew exactly what she was feeling, knew what was to come, and now
and then he craned his neck and made little lightning flashes of licks
all the way down her exposed quim, the sensations causing her to jerk
and arch her back as if lightning had struck her, as if she were a cat
splashed by water.  Like a cat she got her revenge by scratching with
her claws, but high on her 'frop-like flower fluid he found the
sensations grand.
    "Would you..." then Connie breathed too hard to form words.
"Would... would you... like... to try something different?"
    Joerg's tongue was deep enough in her brain to know exactly what
she meant.  He waited for Connie to adjust her posture, so that now she
was turned around again and sitting on his face properly, squatting
with her thighs on either side of his ears, so that looking up he could
see her eyes.  His left hand took her hip and pulled her waist down;
his right fingers returned and went ever wilder on her clit.  Connie
positioned herself over his mouth, placed her hands like paws on the
ground before her.  She was trembling like mad.  The taste of cunt was
thick, pure, like velvety wine.  The arcs of electricity poured through
her, the goddess as much aroused and tormented by the glories of her
body as are all who partake of her nature.
    And then it came.  Just a small, just a friendly warming-up kind of
andgasm for Connie, but the room shook, and her scream rose into the
high octaves until Joerg thought that his eardrums would burst; her
hands ripped into the solid steel floor and tore up great chunks of
metal; her cunt squeezed reflexively so tight that Joerg felt his
tongue almost pulled from his mouth; she spasmed, re-melted; his
fingers flew over her clit; the delicious heat was unbelievable; into
that melting heat Connie sat and groaned and gave herself up and let
herself pee into Joerg's mouth.
    He felt it first as a little warm stream among the gushing hot
river.  It came just at the moment of Connie's peak, and as it
continued to flow he knew it was drawing out her climax, allowing her
to ride upon it like a ticklish wave as her pee poured into his eager
mouth.  He drank her stream, played with it with his tongue, tried
batting it around and using it to find the source, so that he could put
his lips tightly there and run his tongue in circles to massage the
tiny pee-hole, feeling the piss come out from her body.  And all the
while Connie moaned, sobbing out her pleasure, shook and shook, pausing
only to draw in ragged lungfuls of breath.
    The pee filled his mouth, and he swallowed it down greedily,
marveling that it tasted _exactly_ like Veuve Clicquot.  It even had
champagne's fizziness.  If the taste of Connie's cunt was glorious,
godlike, the decadent flavor of her pee was of pure elegance.  This, he
thought, must be the stream into which the greatest musicians tap.  It
tasted musical.
    It lasted long, her pee, and as it lasted he luxuriated in drifting
his hands up and down her body, relishing the unusual feelings it gave
to Connie, the way it made her tremble.  As her stream slowed to a
trickle, Connie's breathless gasps slowed, and when it had ceased both
felt the glow of satisfaction.  Each of them was deep within the other
now.  Connie's pee and nectar suffused his insides like a holy spirit.
    Then Connie lay down next to him, and for a while they simply held
each other, enjoying each other's warmth.  Lazily they caressed.  They
kissed: Connie rediscovered -- it was always a rediscovery -- her own
magnificent taste in Joerg's mouth.
    When the kisses grew deeper, and the squeezing tighter, Joerg
rolled Connie onto her back and raised himself over her.  He was
incredibly strong, more full of energy than any mortal man, awash as
his brain was with Connie's fluids.  He kissed all around her neck, her
breasts; he let his manhood, harder than the steel of the space
station, rest lightly against her pussy, sliding around freely,
teasing.  Connie squirmed towards it, as worshipful of his cock as he
was of the dazzling body beneath him.
    Tenderly, almost begging, she took it between her fingertips and
placed it just within her, nestling it to her lips and lapping, almost
licking it with her cunt.  He pressed it in, just an inch -- and his
eyes nearly popped out of his head!   The pleasure!  Everything up to
that point had been mere preparation, the initiation to the doorway of
Connie's mysteries.  He was fucking Connie Dobbs!  Now it dawned on him
with the clarity of exploding stars just what that meant.
    He plunged his whole length into her -- it sunk home immediately in
an iron-tight sea of moisture, but the second it took stretched like
taffy into hours, years, millennia.  This was Time Control.  This was
Slack.  Each inch, each millimeter of his descent into her was miles of
filling and falling and stuffing and splitting and rising and plunging
and completing.  The sweet kiss of her cunt, wrapped around him like a
glove, like molten steel, like the mouth of desire at the erotic center
of the cosmos drank him in, and he pressed into her, giving it to her
in his unique way, filling her eyes and heart with his own just as he
filled her womanhood.
    He knew that he loved her, had always loved her as tenderly as she
loved him.  They loved each other cruelly too.
    Penetrating all the way into her, completely inside her, he pushed
harder, greedy to fill her beyond all physical limits.  Locked they
were, with him thrusting into and into and into her, not yet willing to
pull out for even a moment, instead pushing ever deeper.  Her clit
ground against the hairs above his cock.  Now rather than support
himself he wrapped both arms around her, squeezing her as though to
squeeze his whole self inside her, or rather to open his chest and
stuff her inside him.  Their mouths locked; his tongue buried into her
mouth as his prick buried itself up her hole.  It felt as if Connie was
all hole, a Hole in woman's form entirely incarnated to be filled.  He
filled her.  He grew so hard in the wonder, the burning white light and
the roasting red heat of her body that he felt himself more erect than
ever; he felt himself stretching her, pulling the walls of her
womanhood wide.  On his lips, in his nostrils he still savored the
sumptuous taste of her cunt; now as he drank those same sweet fluids
directly from the source, directly through his dick, feeling what they
were doing with him, he discovered them all over again.
    With hesitation at first, not knowing if he could survive such
sheer bliss, he pulled out half a millimeter, then slid back in.  He
moaned in an agony of joy.  Connie moaned with him.  He had tears in
his eyes.  The pleasure was agonizing.  He looked deeply into Connie,
pledging her his soul, his service, his everything.  He shook his head
in amazement.  Then he tried a longer thrust.  It felt twenty times
more powerful than the one before.  It was excruciating.  The pleasure
made his penis feel like a whole new instrument, a pillar of light not
flesh, and this agony of pleasure spread and encompassed his whole
body.
    He fucked her.  Every motion, every tiniest muscle movement, was a
complete fuck, the truth to which all fucking aspired.  Now throwing
himself into her, live or burst he cared not, he sped his stroking,
sinking his fire into hers.  Like the gorgeousness of nuclear fusion,
beyond any written word to convey, in and out he fucked her, sliding
with her, riding her, completely filling every pore of her, even
through her fingertips and toes.  Connie's eyes opened in shock,
overwhelmed: they swallowed his gaze, and in the dark pools of Connie's
eyes he swam as in pools of oil, as in the sweet oils of the grasping
cunt in which he slid.
    Long and continuous and sinuous they wrestled thus, for a long time
with him on top, then writhing this way and that; on their sides; later
with her riding him; then even standing with Connie's body wrapped
around his, supported like a doll in the low Moon gravity.  This
position Joerg especially loved.  As he stood his whole body was itself
an erect penis, a tower, and there he lifted her, loved her, filled
her.
    He dropped his head to her breasts and kissed them starvingly,
sucked them greedily as she thrust her cunt down on him with all her
force, satisfying her need to be filled with him, to be fucked.  With
Joerg holding her sides to support her, Connie lifted her arms way up
above her head, clasping her hands, loving the freedom of it.  What a
pleasure it was to fuck Connie this way, lifting her whole body up and
down on him with only his hands, feeling the fullness of her inviting
cunt!  Seized with longing, Joerg licked up and down her side's
sensitive skin, then daringly went to her armpit, kissing her there.
When he saw that she did not object, didn't lower her arm or become
ticklish or upset, he kissed it again and again, even licked and bit
and nuzzled it.  Her smell concentrated through her armpit made him
delirious.
    "Let us now," said Connie, and Joerg, reading her mind, lowered
them slowly down, Connie's legs still wrapped around him, his cock
still thrust deep inside her.  He sat Indian-style, and she settled
onto his lap.  Letting her cunt sink downward, her legs drawn up, she
filled herself even deeper than before.  Joerg felt the end of his
manhood press into a place he had not explored yet, deep and tight, hot
and grasping and alive.  They had reached a plateau of pleasure, a
moment of utter relaxation and rest in the center of the agony of sheer
ecstasy, the eye in the sexual hurricane.  "Feel this," Connie said.
    Joerg sat perfectly still.  He was utterly buried within her.
    Not moving a single outside muscle, Connie began to use her cunt.
Many a SubGenius woman knows this trick, holding a man in her and
squeezing him in ways that only real women can.  All those who do this
are participating in the great art, the great ritual established in
Connie's honor.  Now she played her music upon Joerg's cock.
    It began deep, deep within her: faint pressure on the tip of his
manhood, faint manipulation like the distant touch of tongues or
fingertips.  It went in circles around the very end, then in spirals,
for slowly as the tongues and fingers circled they moved their way
along the head.  Joerg looked at Connie, who was beaming with pleasure,
and also pride, but above all deep concentration on the delicious
sensations in her cunt, for she was pleasuring herself every bit as
much as Joerg.
    The spiraling touches danced along the very edge of his glans, the
not-quite-most-sensitive part, and increased ever so slightly in
firmness.  Then they grasped him below the head, on the most sensitive
skin of all, and involuntarily Joerg moaned.  He wanted to jab his hips
up at her, fuck her wildly, but he was hypnotized by what she was doing
to him; his was a charmed snake.
    Now she changed her rhythm and licked and sucked up and down the
long underside of his penis -- all without apparent motion, just
holding and squeezing.  She did this for a while, then drew spirals all
around him, above and beneath on both sides.  She squeezed his entire
manhood at once, sucking hard, but for only an instant.  Then delicate
again, she licked all around again, using her cunt like a tongue, then
two tongues, then three.
    She leaned forward a bit, and whispered in his ear.   She told him
how it felt to have him in her, how much she liked how his cock felt,
how she loved the feeling of being fucked by him, of fucking with him
and through him.  She whispered a secret of everything that must not be
repeated, and it went right to his manhood and set it throbbing in her.
 These motions of his cock she held and rode, but they echoed through
her quickening breaths.
    Then she did a new thing: she squeezed just the head of his manhood
in a tight circular grip, almost like a thumb and forefinger held
together.  She slid her "fingers" just past his prick, then down,
squeezing, so that it felt as if he were sliding deeper into her.  Yet
they were not fingers but the muscles of her glorious rippling cunt.
She squeezed all the way down to the base, reversed and pulled up,
milking him.  She did it again, but time fluttering the whole inside of
her pussy at once, using it like a vibrator.
    Joerg could not believe it, even from Connie.  But she sat there
daintily upon his lap, meeting his eye; and in her eyes, glassy and
dilated with pleasure, he perceived the twinkle of mischief.  Sitting
perfectly still, she was fucking him up and down with ever-increasing
force and pressure.  Two, three, four squeezing rings joined the first,
and they all moved up and down on him, stroking and rippling.  All at
once she would squeeze, then pull up and down, then tremble and let
their mutual pleasure dissolve in her cunt.  The goddess bit her lip
for joy.
    And now, without moving, Connie went wild.  They fucked madly,
leaping into each other, sliding all the way in and out with oily
friction, fiery collision, thrusting and bucking with force unbearable.
 And all of it was within Connie's cunt, and Joerg's prick trembled,
and grew and grew, hardening, widening, in incredible agony of joy,
fucking into her, feeling the full sensation of plunging into her body.
 Even Yetis in heat, wildly copulating, don't generate a fraction of
the incredible intensity of Connie's cunt left to do what it does best.
    She smiled and leaned back a bit, adjusting the angle of Joerg's
penetration.  She looked at Joerg as if they were conspirators, like
two schoolchildren sneakily holding hands under a table.  Then she
lifted up slightly and let herself slide back down in the Moon gravity;
lifted again, higher, and slid down again.  With a sigh of pleasure she
opened her cunt to him even wider.  She reached out her hand to caress
his face, then let him bite two of her fingers almost hard enough to
draw blood.  Joerg, released from the hypnotic spell, thrust upwards
into her, arching up again and again, impaling her deeper each time
immeasurably sweet.  The golden fire of her cunt lapped over them both,
now so sublime, so radiant, so far beyond agonizing, beyond unbearable,
that it flipped over into a perfect unhurried enjoyment, from ultimate
SexHurt into immeasurable, beyond-ultimate SexSlack.  Each of their
frenzied melting thrusts into the other was a thrust of Slack, wild,
ecstatic, unrushed.  Joerg looked down and saw Connie's gorgeous body,
the elegant shape, the intoxicating skin, that perfect beautiful pussy
that summarized so well the beauty, the sweetness, the promise of
Constance Dobbs.
    And now the coming ecstasy of andgasm came to Joerg again, but
different this time, sweeter, as much a bursting of love as of lust. It
came close, closer, boiling upward from his balls, and he thrust into
her, reaching into her cunt toward her heart.  Feeling him come, Connie
kissed him, sliding her tongue around in his mouth, rapidly squeezing
the muscles in her cunt like the fluttering wings of butterflies.  She
nibbled him, stroked him, bit him, twisted him, inscribed designs of
runic power all over his cock, all while throwing herself upon him,
letting herself completely go.  She held his shoulders for better
leverage as she drove herself up and down. Joerg's cum frothed, boiled
forth, burst into her like a boiling geyser.  Connie felt it exploding
into her, and overjoyed she dug her nails into his shoulders and ground
herself onto him, writing poems with her cunt.  With her mouth she
thanked him, obscenely licking his lips, chin, neck.  He felt her
breasts, squeezing them as hard as she liked; she squeezed his cock
even harder, drawing him to greater and greater climax, as he boiled
and boiled into her, filling her as it felt forever.
    Riding him now as he came in her Connie swung her hips back and
forth, as if to get his come into every nook and cranny of her
incredible cunt.  Twisting, she rubbed his penis inside against her
inner walls, let him feel all the texture of her cunt, the pleasure of
coming in her as his head rubbed against her.  Joerg's hands ran
through her hair; there was something inexpressible in the silkiness of
her hair running between his fingers as his come poured into the
silkiness of her hole.
    She took him now from one lazy world to another, sinuously,
pleasuring herself all the more as he filled her with his seed.  They
took their time.  The incredible sensation of biting her shoulder while
buried inside of her cunt haunted Joerg's dreams for years afterward.
    Transported, beyond everything, he slid his hand over Constance
Dobbs.  His left hand went in between the cheeks of her ass.  The shape
was so wonderful, so good to squeeze.  He squeezed her ass, driving his
manhood crazy as it felt the echo of the motion through her cunt.  His
fingers sought her asshole.  The skin around it was so soft, so
delicate and sensitive that he tarried there a long while, teasing.
Connie moaned; he hadn't played with her asshole yet.  Now, as they
locked in a kiss and she drove against him, arching her rear end up to
his finger, he found her hole with his extended middle finger and
gently touched it.
    Such a delicate little hole, the beautiful asshole of Connie.
Demure.  Shy, private, and hidden, its star pattern the stamped image
of the first nanosecond of the Universe.  He touched Connie's asshole,
stroking it.  It was moist from their play, so that he could slide his
finger back and forth over her anus, enjoying the way it slid, pressing
just slightly enough to open but not yet to invade it.
    With a groan Connie altered the angle of her thrusts; Joerg felt
her push her ass toward his finger!  With delight he rubbed it a little
more firmly, running circles around the tiny opening, playing
especially with the sacred zone of skin between the two holes.  He
pressed his finger into her -- she pushed too!  Her anus opened ever so
slightly and nibbled at his fingertip.  So soft, so slippery it felt.
He was barely inside, but she squirmed back and forth, and even as his
hand followed the motion of her ass his finger slid just the slightest
bit deeper, a delightfully exotic slippery feeling.
    She lifted herself up until his manhood, still throbbing, still
melting into her, was only half inside her.  Joerg knew what she
wanted.  He pushed his finger a little deeper into her asshole, and
Connie gasped in shock.  Gently he played at rubbing his finger in and
out, just slightly, not even pressing the first knuckle in, just enough
to feel how gorgeously slippery it felt.  The sensation drove Connie
crazy; she squeezed her eyes shut, squeezed her cunt around him, as she
let him violate her ass.  Sometimes her anus would also squeeze tight,
and then he withdrew, gave it time to relax at its own pace, like a shy
girl coming out of her shell.  Again and again Connie's hole tensed up,
again and again it relaxed, each time relaxing a little further, a
little hungrier, and Joerg sunk his finger a half-millimeter deeper. As
he did so Connie let herself fall down upon his manhood, impaling her
rear as well.  Now he felt the tight rubbery ring of her asshole, the
strongest and yet most delicate place.  He moved with patience, soothed
it and pampered it.  The ring relaxed, though it still squeezed his
finger deliciously tight.  So beautiful it felt.
    "I'm ready," Connie whispered in his ear with the voice of a wild
animal.  "You've got my asshole ready.  Fuck me there.  Up my ass.  Oh,
I can't wait to know how you feel up my ass."  The words, weak enough
out of context, were something else entirely when whispered by a woman
like Connie as he felt her there in both her holes and knew what they
were going to do.
    Deep inside her anus he slid his finger -- such delights, such
mysteries to be found in Connie only and none other, which modesty
forbids me from describing!  As he pressed in two, three digits of his
finger past the ring he found that he could move his finger freely, and
he did so, swishing it around, enjoying all the insides of her rectum,
her sweet inviting ass.  Soft it felt there and friendly.  Best of all
was the feel of her fiery womanhood, filled to the brim with his penis,
growing ever hotter as his finger explored her ass.  To drive them both
even farther Connie slid herself  up and down on him, so that Joerg's
finger felt through the thin wall of flesh how his cock slid within
her.  Connie wallowed in the double pressure on the sacred nerves
between cunt and ass.  When he judged her well enough accustomed to the
presence of his finger he started gently, slowly to slide it all the
way out and in.  What a marvel to feel the outside of that delicate
rosette, then press in to discover all the wonders within!  By the
third or fourth motion Connie was snorting through her nostrils, eyes
wide open.  Her whole body vibrated, and the artistic ballet within her
cunt was caught in convulsive spasms, became a more primitive thing, a
drumbeat, syncopations of squeezing and quivering.  He could feel it
around his cock; his finger felt the rippling tremors echo deep in her
asshole.
    Connie's mouth opened.  Her breathing was ragged.  She shoved him
onto his back with both hands, lifted up until both penis and finger
slid out of her, pushed Joerg's legs down, then straddled him, knees at
his waist.  Breathless, Connie looked at him.  She reached down behind
her legs and found his cock.  Then carefully, she positioned it at the
tiny hole.
    Unable to speak, barely able to breathe, Connie leaned her body
backwards.  Joerg felt his manhood push on her hole without going in.
It pressed against her anus tightly, almost slipping away.  Connie
waited, as if for Joerg to squeeze it into the warm confines of her
ass, but he did not move.  She breathed out and breathed in, took in
desperate gulps of air.  Her nipples were hard as rocks.  Twin fires
smoldered in her eyes.  The room shook.
    She pushed harder, opening her anus with his cock, pressing herself
onto him.  A little more force, a little push -- and Connie yelled,
almost screamed, out a throatful moan -- her asshole widened just
enough, and the head squeezed slightly in.  Connie hyperventilated,
gasping in short desperate breaths, overwhelmed, dominated, impaling
herself, going out of her mind.  Farther she pressed, and they both
felt the head slide in to the slimy, slippery ring, opening it up,
invading it.
    Now Connie put her hands on Joerg's chest, and, closing her eyes,
giving all her concentration to the feel of his manhood, shifted her
weight back and sat upon it.  The cock slipped in an inch, then
ever-so-slowly two, three inches more.  He was in her asshole properly
now.  He felt her around his cock, warm and wet.  It was so different,
but so purely Connie.
    Down she pushed, not willing to move in and out yet, wanting first
to be completely filled.  She pushed herself down, fucking her own ass,
giving herself up to him.  Together they felt her take it all within
her, his whole cock, Connie's asshole filled to the brim, the few tiny
delicate hairs of her anus mingling with the wiry hairs of his manhood.
 Connie's anus surrounded his manhood, took it in, felt it hard and hot
and eager and welcome in her rectum.
    Biting her lip, she began to fuck.
    And oh, the sensation then, the privateness, the slipperiness.  Now
Joerg thrust up into her -- oh, to slide into the ass of Connie!  It
slid so well; she held it, fondled it, loved it with her ass so well.
    And so they fucked, and no mere words can begin to describe the
glorious wonders of the ass of Constance Marsh Dobbs.  Suffice to say
that as universe-shattering the experience was for Joerg, for Connie it
was even more so.  She was transported, gone out of herself and the
universe itself, mad with his cock in her ass, entirely, fully
transfigured and transfixed with the sensation of this man fucking her
asshole.  For it is the special grace of Connie to feel herself every
bit as much as she makes others feel; yet more, for her capacity for
sensation is immeasurably beyond our SubGenius reckoning.
    She looked at him, and knowing exactly what she wanted, Joerg
brought his fingers to her cunt.  He touched her there and was shocked
by the liquid fire of honey, so intense that the drug of andgasm passed
directly through the skin of his fingers into the blood, making his
whole arm climax then and there.  Liquid would have gushed in streams
from his fingertips if they had been built for it.  He massaged her
pussy, played with the delightful jewel there, amazed by what it was
doing -- and then, at the peak of wildness, of courage, of excitement,
he slipped two fingers into her cunt.
    An earthquake!  An explosion!  Her cunt was a supernova; entire
universes burst, grew, dissolved there an instant.  Connie shook; the
Moon itself trembled.  The pleasure worked through Joerg arm into his
chest, neck, face, body, brain.  Keeping his fingers apart, he felt the
sides of her cunt, felt his own penis through the fleshy wall between
cunt and ass.  She fucked her own anus upon him at a wild pace -- had
it been any other woman, Joerg would have worried that she was playing
too rough with herself; this being Connie he could only wonder how
rough she was going to play with him!  But he couldn't care, only adore
it.  His penis jerked into a third andgasm, released with redoubled
power into her ass, poured his gasping joy into her there.
    Something broke in Connie.  She screamed -- screamed! -- flew up
and down!  A gushing river of honey poured down from her, all over his
hand and stomach, trickling down to his balls and making them pump more
than he could ever have believed.  Her rectum spasmed around his cock.
The muscled ring of her anus milked his come.  Outside the window Joerg
caught a glance of the stars streaking, smearing; the very heavens
melting in the sky.  Then her mouth caught his; he felt her passionate
climax strike him; her tongue slithered down his neck like a snake; his
manhood grew and thrust all the way up into her throat; the fiery
juices of her andgasming cunt melted their skin and allowed their
insides to flow into each other; they melted, Joerg's fingers in her
cunt blossomed into trees of perception, touched her through every
single nerve, he penetrated her, he was her, they were one, they were
everything, they saw...
    Clouds.  Then thinning shreds of mist, and then an unremarkably
decorated living room straight off the set of a 1960's sitcom.
    "Oh, "Bob"!  I'm home!" said Connie.  There came from nowhere a
sound of spectral applause.
    In a daze, Joerg stepped into the living room, which, snug and cozy
as it was, he knew to be of infinite proportion.  The climax had not
dissipated; he was still deep in Connie's flesh, lying on his back in
the throes of the greatest andgasm he had ever felt, a melting, gushing
joy beyond human, beyond semi-human, beyond even Yeti.  Yet he was also
standing in a living room.  His pleasure had attained such transcendent
greatness that it was now an aspect of Perfect Slack, and to his
surprise Joerg found that he could see and reason perfectly clearly.
    Against one wall of the living room was a television.  Looking into
it, Joerg saw the entire history of his universe from the very
beginning through to the Time Intersection and back.  The picture
detail was perfect, so that he could see, for example, the mating of
two camels in the Sahara or the destruction of an entire nearby galaxy
by Yacatisma millions of years before the dinosaurs.  He saw his own
birth and childhood, his first date, even the shuttle that had taken
him to the moon.  Quickly, lest the vision fade, he sought out the girl
he had had a crush on for so long in school, and who he later realized
had liked him every bit as much, if he only hadn't been too clumsy to
notice; finding her he watched the first time she had masturbated
herself all the way to orgasm, sitting in an easy chair with legs
apart, all open to his vision, and with bittersweet nostalgia he saw
his own name silently form upon her lips.
    In front of the television was a sofa.  Sitting in the sofa was
"Bob".  His back was turned, but Joerg had the inescapable feeling that
"Bob" was looking straight at him, grinning.
    "Bob" turned.  His face was familiar, of course: aside from all the
Dobbsheads Joerg had seen, and the very design of the station, they had
also met in person before.  Joerg wondered what he ought to say.  He
sincerely hoped that the blindness of "Bob" was as great as legend made
it.
    "Howdy, son," said "Bob".  "I didn't expect to see you here.  Joerg
Verkaufer, right?  How's Mars?"
    "The Moon," Joerg corrected.
    "Aw, right.  Having fun there?"
    Joerg couldn't have answered that even if his body wasn't squirting
in infinite pleasure deep into "Bob's" wife's ass.
    "Well, don't just stand there with your mouth open.  How'dya like
to watch some TV?"
    Connie motioned for Joerg to do so.  She winked at him.
    "Sure," Joerg said, and jauntily jumped over the couch and into it.
    The television now showed the arrival of the Xists on Earth; Joerg
gasped when he saw when, why, and how it would happen.  All the
PreScriptures fulfilled, yet so unexpectedly!
    "I suppose this channel's pretty boring for you, it being your
universe and all.  Let's see what else's on."
    "Bob" twitched his Pipe -- Joerg could only surmise that it must be
the Remote Control behind "Bob's" cockeyed Vision -- and the television
switched to a different program.  It was Connie lying in bed, stark
naked.
    "Ahh," said "Bob".  "Now this is what I like."
    Both "Bob" and Joerg leaned forward.
    The Connie in the living room rolled her eyes at them.  "These
men," she said, and strode into the kitchen.
    The Connie on TV tossed and turned, spread-eagle, apparently
pretending to have trouble sleeping.  One hand drifted between her
legs.
    "Oh... darn it," she said.  "I'm so horny, I just can't sleep.
Who's going to help me?"  She parted the lips of her cunt to make her
point, toying idly with the treasures therein.
    A door opened.  Connie, entirely nude, walked in.
    "Hello?"
    "Hello!"
    In came Connie and joined Connie on the bed.  At first they kissed
like shy lovers; then they twined around each other in a knot of arms
and legs, smothering each other with kisses.  Hands explored; fingers
delved; teeth bit and left tiny purple marks.
    "Connie!" the two Connies said, for there was a third Connie at the
door.  She wore a thin sheer robe, which she threw aside, revealing the
glory of her figure.  Then she jumped into the bed.
    The two Connies teamed up to pleasure the third, enjoying her body,
covering her with kisses and more, when from the two sides of the TV
screen a fourth and fifth Connie came in and joined in the fun.
    "You're so beautiful," each of them said.
    The Connies intertwined, formed mandalas, kaleidoscopes of
self-mutual-pleasuring exploration.  Subtleties of female love passed
before Joerg's eyes, nuances and revelations.  The aspects of female
nature that permeate the universe laid themselves bare to his sight,
and in the fullness of knowledge they became even more mysterious.  He
was drawn into the channel, watching, listening... feeling... then
entering, becoming the Connies who explored, and the Connies who
enjoyed the exploration, the Connies who tasted, the Connies who
squirmed beneath the tasting, the Connies, the Cunnies, the
Cunnspiracy...
    When the vision passed she was resting on him like an innocent
child, her head relaxing upon his chest, eyes closed.  Joerg smiled. On
a whim he kissed her eyelid.
    Connie yawned and woke up. "I have to go," she said.
    At Joerg's reaction to this she gave him a sympathetic look and a
peck on the lips.  "Don't worry, you'll see me again someday."
    "Couldn't you stay just a few days?"
    Connie giggled.  "You wouldn't survive."
    He suddenly realized that she was right.  His whole body was
incredibly sore.  Bruises and scratches everywhere.  His spine was
killing him.  He adored it.
    "At least smoke a little 'frop with me before you go."
    "Okay."
    So after she got her clothes on they lit up and talked about life,
the universe, and everything.  "Bob" never came into the conversation;
either Connie was careful of Joerg's feelings or else she didn't see
"Bob" as all that significant to the universe.  They said their
goodbyes tenderly with only a bit of groping.
    After she left, Joerg flopped in bed and slept thirty-six hours
straight.  He woke up feeling incredible, as though he had partaken of
the very Slack of "Bob", which of course he had.
    He got up and cleaned himself off, disinfected his many cuts,
applied burn treatments to the places where his skin was scorched (how
had that happened?), and went to the computer console.
    Joerg was ready for his mission again.  Bring it on! he thought to
himself.  For the morning's work, he'd see if he could hack into a few
Conspiracy networks back on Earth, run a little interference game from
above to help his fellow mutants below.
    "Damn," he thought to himself an hour later as he pressed the
"Enter" key, wiping the Homeland Security records on several prominent
Church hierarchs.  "These are terrific cupcakes."
    He munched a few more, and decided to put the rest in the fridge,
save them for a special occasion.  Inside the fridge Joerg discovered a
large water cooler that he had never seen before.  It had air holes
punched in the top.  Attached to it was a pink perfumed note with
glitter on the edges.  The note said:
    "I had a great chat.  Enclosed is an old friend for lonely nights.
Care for her as you would for me.  She needs fish every Friday."
    Joerg opened the cooler.
    Inside was a gorgeously oily blue-and-pink squid.  Though provided
with all the implements the prairie squid is famous for, she was
unmistakably feminine.  Her labial suckers were bright and delicate;
her long rigid face quivered gently.  Her eyes were nearly as lovely as
those of Connie herself.
    He checked just above the clitoral crease, stroking the creature
gently to relax it.  There, just where he expected, was a tiny yellow
cursive "C".
    This was one of the ninety-nine Squids of Connie, her pets, her
Cupids, born and bred to her service.
    He re-checked the kitchen, confirmed that he had a ten years' food
supply, and smiled.

3. A Night in Dallas

Softly did Sarah move through her days, with an unconscious grace that
drew the appreciation of the wise, the relentless hatred of everyone
else, and the persecution of her schoolmates.  Since she went to a
public school in the heart of Dallas the wise were almost non-existent,
while the others crowded her life like the ugly heat of the hostile,
too-bright sun.
    She did well in her classes in inverse proportion to the
subjectivity of the grading; thus at math, science, and sport she
excelled, while in history or English where it was her word against a
dried-up, bitter, jealous Texas schoolteacher's she did terribly,
always receiving whatever lowest grade still let her advance to the
next year.  Perhaps for this reason, and unlike the vast majority of
children seeking escape from two-legged monsters large and small, the
library was for Sarah no refuge.  Books did not appeal to her until
much later, when an accident -- a casual glance through a novel that
was to become her favorite -- showed her what she was missing.
    Her book in those early years -- she was no older than ten -- was
nature.  True, Dallas has pretty crappy nature.  A zombie city of
towering uninspired office blocks, testament only to the pettiness of
the human soul, even its few obligatory parks were lifeless things. But
Sarah found what she needed there anyway.  The nature she loved arose
not so much from the miserable patch of grass they called the
playground, nor from the "park" near her house, but from herself,
though she did not know it.
    You can see that there is much she did not know.  Very few SubGenii
know themselves well at that age, unless they are lucky enough to have
exceptionally perceptive and instructive parents or to be enrolled in
time at the Home for Slackless Children.  No one had told Sarah that if
she only acted like a dumbshit, her peers would treat her like an
equal.  No one had instructed her in Slack, in wearing the Masks of
Insanity, or even in pulling the wool over her own eyes.  Nor did she
know "Bob".  Every now and then a sex demon, drawn by her silence,
would approach to comfort her, manifesting as a gust of burning air or
a half-seen shadow in the grass, but Sarah did not know how to see it.
    At recess time she would sit in the shadow of the playground's
trees, where the weather was slightly less intolerably suffocating. She
toyed idly with a pinecone.  No other child was near her.
    Things were going from bad to worse.  She knew the resentment she
aroused in adults was increasing.  Just half an hour ago her teacher
had gone into near-hysterics, blaming Sarah for disturbing the class,
accusing her of all sorts of things.  To the best of her knowledge she
hadn't done or said a thing.
    When the school day ended she went home on the bus, trying not to
hear the other students.  When she had been smaller they had called her
names or pulled her hair; ignoring them was easy.  Some of the names
were even educational.  She could hit too when she felt like it.  But
now they were getting more catty, especially the girls.  They liked to
talk about her in low voices just outside her hearing, which for some
reason was much harder to take.
    Her strongest defense was a pool of inner coldness she had
developed, which served her well into adulthood.  She did not see the
others as her peers, or indeed as living beings at all.  They were
nothing.  Relegated to nothingness, their jabs were dulled from
wounding to merely irritating.  Perhaps it was this quality, the
ability as it were to eliminate with a glance or lack of a glance that
lent an aristocratic air to this uneducated, too-often unwashed girl.
    Her parents, good people but weak of mind, said hi to her when she
got home and left her to do her homework upstairs.  They themselves
watched TV in the living room.  It wasn't their fault: she had utterly
exhausted them in her infancy, having been as much a ball of fire then
as she was now a creature of ice.
    To hell with homework, thought Sarah.  The heat of the day stuffed
every corner of her upstairs room, the windows of which had carelessly
been left shut but undraped, so that the air of the room tasted foul
and unnourishing.  Sarah could almost see the pages of her books catch
fire, curl up.  She would have liked to be pyrokinetic.  Instead she
opened the window, and the dry stink of the outside air was worse than
the stagnant vapor it replaced.
    She flopped around, not so different from a fish stolen from cold
mystery-haunted seas and dropped into the desert, except in slow
motion, over an hour or two, for she was dying not of ordinary
suffocation but from the lack of a far subtler air.
    The outside doorbell rang.  Sarah ignored it; her parents were
bound to get it.
    Into her room crept the smell of cool clean air, not from the open
window, but from the hallway, from below.
    It billowed into the room, clearing Sarah's mind and relaxing her
skin.  All at once Sarah felt wonderfully alive without understanding
why.
    "Sarah!" her mother called.  "Come downstairs, honey."
    She did so.  There in the living room was a girl about Sarah's age
of remarkable personal beauty.
    "Hi Sarah!" said the girl.
    "It's your friend Connie," said Sarah's mother.
    Now here was a surprise!  And on the balance an unpleasant one, for
Sarah knew that she didn't have any friends.  And she certainly didn't
know anyone named Connie.  She had never seen this girl before.
    "My Mom said I could come over to study," said the girl to Sarah's
mother.  "We've got a big test on Friday."
    "Of course dear, I'm glad to see you're so studious."  Sarah's
mother was clearly enchanted by the girl, and understandably so.  Not
only was she lovely to look at -- and she was exceedingly lovely, the
more so the more one saw of her -- but her voice and very presence were
unearthly.  Simple words like "We've got a big test on Friday" fell on
them both like a spell, like a benediction.  It was an exquisite
pleasure to occupy the same room as her.
    "Oh," Sarah's mother said, remembering, "but we were just about to
have dinner.  Would you like to join us?"
    "I would love to," said Connie.  "Can I watch you cook?  I love
watching people cook."  With that she took the hand of Sarah's mother's
-- a simple, charming gesture -- and led her into the kitchen.
    Sarah was left standing.  She still hadn't said a word.
    Shyness kept her out of the kitchen.  Who, she wondered, *was* that
person?  She could not begin to guess.  By no means could she believe
that it was a practical joke; lumps of uselessness that her schoolmates
were, they could never come up with such an idea or the daring to
execute it.  A new girl in town?  Believable, but utterly incredible
that she would introduce herself as Sarah's friend.  Could Sarah have
ever met such a girl and forgotten her?  Impossible.
    "Dinner!" called Sarah's mother.
    The four of them ate in the kitchen -- two parents and the two
girls.  Sarah had no siblings.  The overcooked pork chops tasted,
inexplicably, sublime.
    "So Connie," said Sarah's father around his chop, "I'm not sure
we've met your parents.  Do they live far from here?"
    "Just up the hill.  Don't you know Mrs. Marsh?  That's my Mom."
    "Ahh, I've seen the house all right.  And what does your mother
do?"
    "She runs the aquarium over in Innsmouth."
    Sarah's parents looked at each other.  "Innsmouth?"
    "It's East of here; it's a pretty far commute."
    Her parents knew enough discretion not to inquire about the father.
    "Huh.  And how long have you and Sarah been friends?"
    "Oh, years and years.  Since second grade, I think.  We always have
the same teacher."
    Sarah drank her milk.
    "And she hasn't told us about you?" said her mother.  "Well, that's
our Sarah."
    "That's me," Sarah said.  She looked at the strange lovely girl.
    Dinner soon ended.  "Oh, let me," said Connie, and took a dish from
Sarah's mother's hand.  "You've already cooked for us."  Before anyone
could object the dishes and pans were scrubbed clean and placed, quite
unnecessarily, in the dishwasher.
    "Well thank you Connie.  You're a well-bred girl."
    "Can Sarah and I study now?  We have a lot to go over, and my Mom's
picking me up at nine."
    "Of course dear."
    "Maybe Sarah could stay at my house one of these days?"
    "We'll have to see."
    Connie stayed with Sarah until 9:30, when Mrs. Marsh, a strange
woman, arrived to pick her up and drive her home.

    The next day Sarah half-expected to see Connie in her class.  Until
seventh grade the class periods weren't divided into different teachers
for different subjects, so she had the same teacher all year, and the
same classmates.  Connie was not among them.
    Strange.  Sarah was lost in abstraction all that morning, barely
noticing when her teacher lost her temper again.
    Last night Connie had told her strange, unbelievable things, while
Sarah had sat utterly fascinated.  She could not recall having said a
single word herself.  A spell lay over those hours, so that attempting
to recall them was like remembering a dream, all the outlines hazy, the
events fantastic, the impact slipping away from the very words that
struggled to describe it.
    Just before the midday recess was the half-hour when students wrote
in their journals.  The exercise, nominally to encourage creativity,
was more to improve their handwriting than anything else, though
naturally the teacher also read the journals to find out who were the
problem kids.
    Sarah disliked her journal.  She found writing as undesirable a
chore as reading.  This time, however, she decided to try her hand at a
poem, and very quickly, without really thinking about it, wrote the
following:

    "CONNIE.

    Cold the world, and cold the human soul
    Like filthy snow befouled by cars' exhaust.
    Brief your years, bereft of any goal,
    For long before your birth your dreams were lost.
    Dead the choking summer days, dead
    The eyes of monkeys, their impotent hands, their tongues
    Excreting slime as poisonous as lead
    While judgment spews like vomit from their lungs.
    Will this be all that's left, until you die?
    Until your planet's end, no grand design
    Save "I've got mine, and fuck the other guy"?
    Then Christ's day is done.  The night is mine.
    In me, in me, is all restored.  My fire
    Will reignite the reasons for desire."

    She read it silently to herself, there in the classroom.  It was a
bad poem -- too loose, too cliched, too many compromises to fit the
form -- but it was far beyond her everyday journal scratching.  It had
come from another part of herself, the part that had listened to Connie
the night before.
    In any case it wasn't for her teacher.  Sarah tore the page out of
her journal, quietly resolving that if her teacher asked about this she
would claim to have screwed up the first sentence and wanted to start
over.  Already Connie had taught her the value of preparing excuses in
advance.  She then wrote a page of nonsense about summer, her hair, and
so on.
    The recess bell rang.  The kids all poured from their classrooms
into the wilted plot of a schoolyard, there to play all sorts of games,
but especially the games of cliques, of exclusion, and of cruelty,
forming thereby a kind of Conspiracy-in-miniature, a little
topographical map of the beast that holds the planet in its grip.  It
was Sarah's favorite part of the school day, for, entirely excluded,
she was left to enjoy her solitude in what to her young eyes seemed an
enormous park.
    She wandered to her favorite corner, shaded by trees.  There,
radiant, was Connie.
    "Hi Sarah," said Connie.
    "What are you doing?"
    "Playing.  I've been waiting for you."
    "Why weren't you in class?"
    "I like it better out here.  Only I've been wanting to use the
swing sets, and I can't get started without a push.  Would you like to
join me?"
    The swing sets were not Sarah's favorite place, not one bit.  There
were six swings, too few for such a big school, so the kids were always
fighting over them.  The recess monitor had invented a rule that the
kids were supposed to stand in line for the swings and count to thirty
-- "one one thousand two one thousand" and so on -- but children are
vicious little bastards and always find a way around anything.  The
last time Sarah had tried the swings they had kept her waiting forever,
telling her that she was counting wrong and making her go to the back
of the line; when at last her turn did come two of the girls,
tear-stained and blubbering for all the world, immediately dragged the
recess monitor over and told her that Sarah had been on the swing for
_ages_ and refused to get off.  This is what humans call clever.
    But Sarah would not have said "no" to Connie for all the world, not
if she had suggested jumping into the fire together.
    At the swings was the usual crowd of boys and girls.  The younger
ones mostly squealed; the older ones were starting to imitate the
junior high school kids by looking perpetually bored.  Connie's effect
on them was immediate.  They swarmed around her, lovestruck, carefully
ignoring her companion.  Those of the girls who knew Sarah turned their
backs on her.
    "Hi, I'm Michael, who are you?"
    "Are you the new girl?"
    "What's your name?"
    "Where are you from?"
    Connie threw them all back with a look.  Then she said: "We want to
use the swings.  How do we know when it's our turn?"
    "Oh, you can take my seat," said one of the girls.
    Connie did so, and sat there regally, a queen on her throne far
above them all, at the same time a wiry little girl on a swing.  She
did not move.
    "When did you get here?"
    "Did your parents just move in?"
    "Are you a transfer student?"
    "Who's your teacher?"
    "What," asked Connie, still motionless, "about Sarah?  Is someone
going to let her sit next to me?"
    "She already knows you," said a boy who sat two seats in front of
Sarah in class.  "Don't you want to spend some time with us?"
    "Yeah, don't you want to meet everyone?"
    "Besides," said a popular girl, "you know you can do better than
her."  That made all the kids laugh.
    At the sound of human laughter Connie's eyes burst into fire.  She
_looked_ at each of the children, and where her eyes struck they fell
backwards as though scorched with flame.
    "NOW HEAR THIS!" thundered Connie's small child voice.  Though not
all of Sarah's classmates were at the swings, every last one of them
heard it, even one who was at home that day.  They were to hear it in
nightmare all the rest of their lives.
    "ANY ONE OF YOU who is still near these swings in thirty seconds,
or who gives Sarah the slightest difficulty within the next nine years
and nine days, will suffer my displeasure.
    "What does my displeasure mean?  It means I will withdraw all my
influence from your bones and blood.  Your bodies will twist in pain.
Your flesh will shrivel.  The glands that once animated you will wither
into ash, and you will see them pass out of you as you pee.  You will
become useless, barren, dry.  Every bite of food will be sawdust, each
breath as ragged and cutting as broken glass; all color will be nausea
to you, all thought misery, all sound a torture.  You will pray for
death but lack the courage to carry out your prayer, and the broken
thing that had once been a more-or-less serviceable body will persist a
long, long time.
    "Or, if you keep to my instruction, I promise you the painless,
empty lives you long for, until the end of the world."
    The other kids flew from the swings.
    Connie and Sarah were alone.
    Sarah didn't know what to say.  Thank you did not seem to suffice.
She thanked Connie anyway.
    "Oh, they're nothing," Connie said.
    This made Sarah smile.  "You want to swing?"
    "I'm not very good at it.  I can never get started.  Would you...
would you give me a push?"
    "Of course!" Sarah said.
    Gingerly, she got behind Connie and gave her a little push.  The
strange, lovely girl swung forward.  When she swung back, Sarah pushed
her again, a little harder.  She got Connie moving in ever-widening
arcs, to and fro.
    "The trick," said Sarah, "is to lean way back and kick your legs
out when you go forward.  Then when you go back lean forwards and tuck
your legs in.  Try it out, see?  Now look what I can do when you lean
back:"
    The sweep of Connie's motion was larger now, and as she leaned far
back at the top of her arc, Sarah took both of Connie's shoulders and
propelled her forward, throwing her whole weight into it.  Connie
rocketed forward!  She looked like she was flying!  Her hair blew back
and forth across her face as she swung, hands gripping the chains of
the swing.
    "This is great!" Connie said.  "Would you like to join me?"
    Sarah got in the neighboring swing.  She knew how to begin: kicked
away from the ground to herself started, then leaned forward and back
to build up her momentum, going higher and higher.  It wasn't long
before she was swinging as fast and as high as Connie.
    "Look," said Sarah, half out of breath, "we're married!"
    "What?"
    "That's what you say when two people are swinging next to each like
this.  See, we can even hold hands."
    The wind at the bottom of the arcs of their swings was
breathtaking, as centrifugal force joined with gravity to squeeze them
hardest in their seats.  At the high points on either side the moments
of perfect stillness and freefall made their hearts leap.  Connie held
out her hand.
    Sarah took it and they swung together.
    The recess bell rang, and they had five minutes to get to class.
    When they got off their swings, they were still holding hands.
    "I'm... ah... not going to see you tomorrow, am I?" said Sarah.
    "No," said Connie.
    Sarah's shoulders drooped.
    "Come on," said Connie, "you need to get to class."
    So Sarah went.

    All that school day, and all the long days that followed, Sarah sat
bored.  The heat of Dallas was creeping back up on her.  The other
students left her in welcome isolation -- she was more a pariah now
than she ever could have wished -- but they had never really existed
for her anyway.  The absence of Connie was another thing entirely.  It
was a presence.
    Were Sarah better schooled in philosophy, she could have taken
comfort in the feeling of missing her new friend so much -- for was
that not proof that something meaningful had taken place?  But Sarah
had no more philosophy than learning.  All that she saw now was that,
never having dined on beautiful companionship before, she had never
known her own hunger.  Now she experienced starvation, and it enraged
her.
    In the weeks that followed, she sometimes wondered if Connie had
been a figment of her imagination.  Of course the evidence was there --
the change in her fellow students, her newfound powers, her parents who
now and then still asked about Connie -- but she had no actual physical
evidence of her friend.
    ("She transferred to another school," Sarah would say when her
parents asked about Connie, and this was enough for them to explain her
foul, withdrawn mood.)
    No, it felt like imagination because whenever she tried to relive
that brief time -- less than twenty-four hours when she thought about
it -- it would escape ever further into her memories.  How had Connie
even looked?  She tried to piece together the eyes, the hair, the set
of the cheeks, but they blurred together, or rather apart.  Her image
of Connie was a union of every beautiful woman's features Sarah could
remember, especially her own.
    Those nights she would try to sleep, hoping to dream of her friend,
but the death-dry heat suffocated her and kept her tossing and turning
on sweaty sheets.  And the weeks of sleepless nights lengthened into
months.
    So at last, hopeless, Sarah determined to rely upon her own
resources.  She refused sleep deliberately, sitting up until exhaustion
took her to a restful though dreamless oblivion.  On her bed she would
lie with her arms at her sides, staring at the ceiling and thinking. By
this method she gradually discovered that her powers of thought were
strong.  She reconstructed her mind, and especially her personality,
bit by bit, on her own terms.  She redefined her own reactions to the
outside world.
    An example of her thoughts on these nights might be: "I am speaking
to a stranger I've just met, who is reasonably attractive, maybe
interesting, but probably an idiot.  He makes a joke.  A bad one.  How
do I react?"  And then she would cycle through the possibilities: "Am I
sarcastic?  Do I walk away?  Do I laugh?  A polite laugh, or fake a
real one?  Do I continue the joke, but make it funny?  Twist it?  Or
shall I be entirely silent and wait for what he says next?"  And she
would decide on her reaction, thinking through all the reasons why.
    At school, and with her parents, she made experiments.  It turned
out that the prohibition on students bothering her did not extend the
other way: she found that she  could approach anybody, though at first
it made them nervous.  It also scared the hell out of her -- much of
her former arrogance had after all been nothing but shyness.  This she
worked to replace with an honest, friendly, easygoing, open hatred.
Through trial and error, guided by her nightly musings, Sarah found the
techniques.
    Then one night she heard a knocking at her window.
    It had been more than six months since she had last felt that
uniquely cooling breeze.
    She threw open the window; threw it open in a smooth, measured way,
not to wake up the parents, for so had she trained herself in all her
violent movements.
    Connie was as beautiful as ever.
    "You've changed," Connie said.
    It was true.  Sarah felt it in herself without the need of a
mirror.
    "Would you like to come out with me?  I'm going to the park."
    "It's dark.  It's after midnight."
    "That's no danger for us."
    "Okay."
    Sarah turned out the lights and climbed out the window.  She was on
the second floor, but Connie showed her a clever way down.
    They were in the nighttime tomb of Dallas, when the heat rising
from the asphalt is still hotter than the afternoons of healthier
climes.  Yet for them the air was cool.
    Connie led them to the nearby park.  In the middle of the night,
with the full moon high and no one else around, it seemed an entirely
different place.  The few trees were silvered, enormous.  The grass was
almost clean.
    "You probably know by now who I really am," said Connie.
    "I believe so."
    "Not just the obvious, I mean.  The other."
    "Oh yes, then I definitely know."
    There was a swing set in the park as well, a bigger one than the
school's with longer swings.
    "Would you like to?"
    "I would absolutely love to," said Sarah.
    "Can I push you?"
    "That would be nice."
    Sarah sat in the nearest of the swings.
    Connie stepped behind Sarah, placed her hands upon her, and with
the gentlest of pushes began.  The night air was luxurious as wine as
it swept passed Sarah's skin.  Again Connie gave her a push, and again,
ever so gently lifting her into the night.  When she had gone some way
Sarah began to lean into the motion, pulling on the chains, and
Connie's pushes grew stronger.  Soon Sarah's legs were kicking high
into the open sky.  It was exhilarating at the top to see nothing but
the clear, luminous night.  The light pollution of Dallas drives out
all but the brightest stars, but this night Sarah saw them all as
clearly as from a mountaintop, for the sky itself had opened to them.
The sensation of flying suffused her.
    There, next to her, Connie was swinging too.  She had joined Sarah
on the adjacent swing.
    And there they flew for the better part of an hour.  Sometimes
Sarah looked at the sky, or at the beautiful nature of the park;
sometimes she watched Connie.  As they swung they spoke, in the
wordless language that Sarah had learned over long sleepless nights.
    When they had said what they wanted to say, they returned to the
ground and held each other's hands.  A long silence followed.
    "If you want me to make it here," said Sarah, "tell me that I will
see you again."
    "Someday," said Connie.  "When you're older, and I need you most.
In the meantime take this."
    "Thanks," said Sarah.
    Connie walked them back to Sarah's house, where she showed her a
clever way to get back up to her window.  They said no more words.
    Pausing before her climb, Sarah kissed Connie once on the cheek.
    Connie returned the kiss.
    Then Sarah climbed into her room and didn't sleep.
    Connie stood outside the house for a long time before returning to
her mother's mansion.
    It was many long years before Sarah saw Connie again.
    When she did, it was Sarah's aid in the nick of time that allowed
Connie to avert the world's end in '98.  Too many heartbreaking
failures had crept into the Plan, and now the Dobbses had to improvise.
 And in all the years that followed, through thick and thin, until the
Xists arrived at last, Sarah, now using a name that she had chosen for
herself, was with them.
    But that was many years later; in the meantime she lived, learned,
and grew.  All who knew her felt her extraordinary personal magnetism
and the cool refreshing breeze that seemed always to accompany her.