BOOK SIGNING





They call me the king of erotic sf, the guy who can write a spicy,
rollicking space opera in the grand old tradition, complete with
intelligent-but-virile hero raging through the spaceways with raging
hormones. Yeah, I write 'em -- the multi-book contracts and even
occasional awards roll in -- but I can't seem to live 'em. My own sex
life is a mess, or maybe nonexistent would be more accurate. You see,
I'm still, well, inexperienced at the advanced age of 35. That's me,
Gorman "Virgin" Varagian.

Sit me opposite a nice-looking woman in a restaurant and I begin to
stammer, and sooner or later spaghetti sauce drips down my shirtfront.
Take me to a dance and propel me into the welcoming arms of a waiting
partner and I step on her toes and stumble all over myself. Push me
under the covers with a hot-and-horny soft-and-curvy female and I
fall out of bed. In short, socially inept. Incompetent. The complete
boob. Helpless. Hopeless.



    Biff Poltroon smashed through the shattered entryway armor into the
    bunker. No one left standing, though the smoke made hard to be certain
    even with his helmet visor set on infrared/illuminate. Blast-AutoRifle
    at ready, he scanned the formless shapes on the cracked plastiment
    floor. There! In the corner something had moved. Curiosity won out,
    and Biff held himself back from flash-beaming it to make sure it
    stayed dead. He approached and gingerly prodded the body with the
    bayonet on his B-AR. It was still among the living, or rather, *she*
    was. The soot-smeared uniform had colonel's insignia, but that was
    one pretty female inhabiting it. There was a spatter of blood, but
    nothing life-threatening. Then she opened her eyes, and he bitterly
    regretted admiring the twin cones of her tunic-clad breasts. She
    was pointing a recoil-pistol directly at him.



So, I finally resign myself to spending the rest of my life alone, with
no one to spend my royalty checks on. And what happens? At a book signing
I was starting to doze off while some or other local dipshit droned on
about what an honor it was to have me there. Some honor. Suppressing
a yawn, I pulled out my trusty old ballpoint and looked up at the line
of fans holding copies of "Ravished Planet," and . . . BOING. She was
looking me right in the eye. I recognized that look, boy did I ever. This
dame wasn't just after my signature on her book flyleaf, she wanted my
signature on her bod.

Fire engine-red hair and an out-of-fashion voluptuous, yes, zaftig
build. Dangerous curves ahead. My type. Yes, definitely.

So I signed her book. "To a very special reader, a reader I could relate
to . . ." And I managed to slip one of my business cards between the
pages, a card that unfortunately lacked the phone number of my hotel
room. That earned me a toothy smile and a wink from her. And her hand
did something I couldn't quite follow as I was already getting ready to
sign the book of the next fan in line.



    The explosion rocked the walls and pulverized much of the
    ceiling. Those asshole artillery jocks playing around again! Smoke and
    dust made it hard to breathe. Coughing, Biff looked over at where the
    colonel had been threatening him with a lethal weapon. He could still
    see in the actinic-UV band. Her head and arms were protruding from a
    heap of rubble. Heaving up the roof beam that had landed on her, he
    dragged her out. She was unconscious, but seemed otherwise uninjured,
    except for cuts and bruises. Damn, but these genetically modified
    humans were tough. Her r-pistol was nowhere in sight, and neither
    was the only exit from the bunker. They were sealed in. Entombed.



There was a room key rattling around in my shirt pocket, and it wasn't
mine. I had a hunch its owner had red hair.

Wiping the sweat off my brow, I walked down the hall on the thirteenth
floor. "Gory Gorman never runs from a challenge," I kept repeating under
my breath. Dammit, I hated the nickname "Gory." It was what my childhood
tormentors used to taunt me with when I'd turn down a dare. "Gory, Gory,
'fraid he'll be sorry." It was why I've landed in deep doodoo so often
in my adult life. Crazy courage -- that was what I was about. "I won't
run. Not this time. Not even if I can't get it up again."

There it was, directly in front of me. The door to room 1313. The doorway
to my fate. I raised my hand to knock. There I stood, frozen, hand poised
in midair. The hand unclenched and slowly sank back down to my side. I
couldn't do it. I had to do it. There were voices approaching. I held
my breath and pounded on the door.

"If it's the famous author, use the key. Hello?" Her strong contralto
came through the locked door in clear, bell-like tones. The voices were
closer. I inserted the key.



    Biff gave up after an hour of attempting to dig through the rock
    and dirt blocking the entrance. Damn. If he only had a lepton
    disintegrator. But those babies weren't standard issue for Hegemony
    paramarines.

    Nothing left to try but to awaken the colonel. Maybe she could come
    up with a bright idea. Those G-mods reportedly had an average IQ
    of over 300. The women anyhow. They were the thinkers and problem
    solvers. The men, stored in creches for reproductive purposes, were
    considerably stupider, only in the 180 range. Maybe you didn't need
    all that much brainpower to get it up and stick it in.

    Colonel Whoever was already awake. No more nonsense with waving around
    dangerous toys.  She must have figured out that they were both in
    the same fix, and had to either find a way out or die together.



She was wearing a silk wrapper, an elegant, expensive-looking robe that
matched the color of her hair. Then I was inside the circle of her arms
and that expensive-looking robe lay in an inelegant heap on the floor.

She toppled me over backward onto a plush king-size bed, and climbed
on top, rubbing her bare nipples against my chest. I barely had time to
notice that the covers had been pulled back. She had been expecting me
all along.

Here I was with a ready and all too willing woman lying on me, and of
course I went soft. Impotent, as usual. Nature's little joke that had
preserved my virginity for so long.

She noticed. If she had burst out laughing, as so many of the others had,
I would have been dressed, out of that room, and back down in the lobby in
two minutes flat. Instead, she was kissing my ear and caressing that all
too soft dick of mine. Then she was kissing me down there and caressing my
ear. And she took all of my softness into her mouth and loved it. I loved
it, too, but still I stayed soft. Would she give up on me now?



    What? She was in the process of stripping off her uniform. "Hey,
    what the bloody hell are you doing?"

    "We - seem - to - have - problem - here. To - calculate - solution -
    must - enable - enhanced - mode - capabilities. Trigger - event -
    for - such - is - reproductive - act. Must - join - flesh - in -
    order - that - this - unit - can - compute."

    Holy shit. This hadn't been in the intelligence briefing. Apparently,
    their super-think mode only switches on when they fuck. Holy fucking
    shit.

    She was facing away from him. There it was: her secondary, anterior
    vagina, in back, just above the top of the crack of the buttocks. That
    was the one with ultrafine internal muscle control and capable of
    dispensing bioelectric shocks in doses calculated to enhance the
    male's pleasure to the point of making him a sexual slave. Did he
    really want to go through with this?



She had turned me over on my stomach and was massaging my neck. Working
the tension out of my muscles. So soothing and comforting. I was drifting
off into sleep.

The sensation of something being rubbed into the crack of my ass shocked
me awake. Her fingers were applying something cool and slippery to my
anal opening.

"What the hell?"

"Hush. This will make it possible for our flesh to join. Trust me."

There was something gently stretching my asshole, then slowly twisting
and sliding in. A strange sensation. Turning my head around, I could
see her lying behind me, and she had on some sort of harness. She was
penetrating me with a dildo, and I couldn't believe how good it felt.
My cock was hard as a steel I-beam.

She had been pumping into me for what must have been a half hour. I had
come all over those pristine white hotel bedsheets at least twice, and
I was still hard. She pulled out of me with a liquid pop.

"Now, dear one, it's your turn to take the active role." She knelt down
and got on all fours, and that beautiful round ass of hers was sticking
up in the air like a sculpted marble monument. Still hard as a rock,
I parted her magenta lips and slid into her tunnel.



    Colonel Mu-Xyphen was issuing orders. She had gotten the both of them
    out of the bunker by calculating the balance point of the rocks and
    boulders plugging the entrance. All it took was one little shove on
    the right chunk of rubble, and the blockage had collapsed. They were
    free, but Biff wasn't. That last jolt of bioE from her electro-vag
    had completely destroyed his will. He couldn't even put together a
    thought without her permission.



"Mnemosyne. Call me Nemi. That flows easily over the modern tongue."

I hadn't even thought to ask her name until I awakened. It was the
morning after our marathon fuckathon and my mouth was dry and my head
was booming like a drum.

"I have been your Muse, then your lover, and now I am neither."

Muse? Lover? Neither? Was she getting ready to dump me? What the hell
was this?

"I have given you a gift, and taken back one. Never again will you
suffer from inability to love a woman. My divine dildo has infused you
with confidence, power, potency. Your phallic capabilities will make
you a legend among women. But then, never again will you scribble. Your
writing days have ended."

It was true. The plots for my next three novels had vanished into a black
hole inside my head. The characters were gone. The creative part of my
mind was as empty as the hyperspace that my blaster-toting heroes used
to navigate.

"Damn it, Nemi or whatever your damn name is, you can't do this! Writing's
my livelihood. It's my bloody identity. I won't give that up, not even
for a good fuck. Not even for a thousand good fucks!"

"Face it, dear Gorman, you're a hack writer, a second-rate schlockmeister.
At the semi-annual board meeting, the High Council of Muses has found you
in violation of Regulation 201-Z, egregious misuse of imagination and
creativity. The prescribed sanction is confiscation of your writing
talent, meager though it was. As I have mentioned, there will be ample
compensation. Now I command you to sleep, and when you wake, this will
never have been."



    Biff handed her all the Hegemony Fleet encryption keys and battle
    codes. She kissed him one final time, strapped on her liftbelt,
    and flew off into the flaming cyan and green Hellmouth VI sunset.



The ringing of the phone jolted me out of a deep sleep. It was my agent.
The book signing had been canceled because that chickenshit bookstore
owner had gotten cold feet. Mr. Barnes wasn't being very noble about
it either. He didn't figure an over-the-hill SF writer could generate
enough revenue to justify tying up his shop for an afternoon. But I was
no longer listening. A look at the date on my watch showed me it was one
day earlier than it should have been. I had dreamed the whole damn thing.
No book signing, no Nemi, and I was still impotent. Or was I? My cock
had never been this hard, even with a morning erection.

Thinking to use the dream as a story plot, I pulled out my Ideas Notebook
and poised my ballpoint over the first blank page. I couldn't seem to
string together even two words. It was as if I were a fifth grader
struggling to write a book report while my thoughts were on baseball.
My mind was as blank as the page.



    Biff Poltroon sits in a holding cell, awaiting trial for treason
    to the Pleiadian Hegemony. If found guilty, the penalty was total
    memory erasure. He would be reprogrammed as a used transport vehicle
    purveyor.



Now it's hard for me to compose anything much more complex than a simple
Thank You note. But, as a figment of what's left of my imagination once
told me, there are compensations. I'm no longer tormented by the creative
itch. I no longer have to carry a notebook to write down the ideas that
come bubbling up out of the Dark (nothing at all comes bubbling out of
the Dark any more). And I sure as hell don't have to attend those damned
book signings.

Ah, yes. The sexual difficulties are gone. I can get it up seven or eight
times a night and I'm sharing my favors with four girlfriends at a time.

And I no longer need worry about late royalty checks and getting fucked
over by agents and publishers. Last year, my used car dealership netted
three million after taxes.