Lightpaths

by Howard V. Hendrix

  Waving, Jhana settled into her seat as the cart closed around her, separating her from Seiji. She sighed. Somehow her conversations with Seiji had become like the stereogram patterns in the Chameleon—blatantly about one thing, latently about something else, something deeper, something more. She was beginning to enjoy Seiji’s company entirely too much. The thought that she was merely playing him for information, that he was supposed to be nothing more than a source—she found that idea more distasteful than ever. She sighed a second time. This Mata Hari stuff just wasn’t her calling.

  * * * * * * *

  Hours later—late into the evening, in fact—Roger was at last finishing his overview of the materials his mole-rat imp had gathered for him. After going through so much of it, he was indeed far more hopeful for the success of his project. Evidence of the still powerful but usually latent power of olfaction in human sexuality was everywhere in the literature, and he dutifully squirreled away comments and notes. Having come at last to Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, published in 1900, he felt he had gone as far back as he needed to go. Krafft-Ebing’s work definitely marked a hinterland boundary of some sort, for the book often seemed less a work of science than a collection of anecdotes on aberrant sexuality.

  From the electronic text of the old book, Roger excerpted relevant passages by cursor, or point-and-shot them into note-form before throwing them into a notepad memory file.

  Excerpted notes and sections from Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis:

  Althaus—sense of smell important re: many species’ reproduction. Almost all species at time of rutting emit a specially distinct odour from their genitals.

  Schiff—extirpated olfactory nerves in puppies. As animals grew up, male unable to distinguish the female.

  Mantegazza—removed eyes of rabbits. Defect constituted no obstacle to procreation, proof of importance of olfactory sense in sexual life of animals.

  Many animals (musk ox, civet cat, beaver) possess on their sexual organs important glands which secrete substances having a very strong odor.

  Cloquet—calls attention to sensual pleasure excited by odour of flowers. Richelieu lived in atmosphere redolent of heaviest perfumes in order to excite his sexual functions.

  Zippe—cites both a passage in Song of Solomon (‘And my hands dropped with myrrh, and my fingers with sweet-smelling myrrh, upon the handles of the lock’ ) and the esteem in which geographically disparate peoples hold pleasant perfumes for their relation to the sexual organs, as proof of olfaction/sexuality link.

  Most, professor in Rostock—“I learned from a sensual young peasant that he had excited many a chaste girl sexually, and easily gained his end, by carrying his handkerchief in his axilla for a time, while dancing, and then wiping his partner’s perspiring face with it.”

  Krafft-Ebing—“The case of Henry III shows that contact with a person’s perspiration may be the exciting cause of passionate love. At the betrothal feast of the King of Navarre and Margaret of Valois, [Henry] accidentally dried his face with a garment of Maria of Cleves, which was moist with her perspiration. Although she was the bride of the Prince of Conde, Henry conceived immediately such a passionate love for her that he could not resist it, and made her, as history shows, very unhappy. An analogous instance is related of Henry IV, whose passion for the beautiful Gabriel is said to have originated at the instant when, at a ball, he wiped his brow with her handkerchief.”

  Jager—regards the sweat as important in the production of sexual effects, and as being especially seductive.

  Ploss—holds that attempts to attract a person of the opposite sex by means of the perspiration may be discerned under many forms in popular psychology.

  —love of certain libertines and sensual women for perfumes indicates a relation between the olfactory and the sexual senses.

  —tribal custom among Philippine Island natives: when it becomes necessary for an engaged couple to separate, they exchange articles of wearing apparel as tokens of faithfulness. These objects carefully preserved, covered with kisses, and repeatedly smelled.

  —histological conformity between nose, genitals, and nipples: all have erectile tissue.

  Roger stopped his scanning, surprised to observe that his own tissue was demonstrating some erectility. Strange, for none of these descriptions should have aroused him that much. Contrary to the olfactory emphasis of his research, his personal kink was quite visual, as he was well aware.

  He knew how politically incorrect his kink was—especially for the son of a noted peace and social justice activist. The “progressive” types his mother had hung out with for the last twenty years were hardly perfect human beings, though—as he himself had learned. For a brief while at Oxford, Roger had tried to devote himself to the sort of Leftward causes that his mother would approve of—almost as if, for just a time, some of that maternal programming had clicked in. That didn’t last long, though, especially when he found that his ideas, his very thoughts, were devalued or ignored because he had “too much testosterone from that Y chromosome” and “too little melanin” in the layers of his skin. It was the worst sort of biological essentialism—the very thing the rads inveighed against, yet were guilty of themselves.

  Oh, he could use the trump card of his middle name and Asian blood, but then they’d use that too, not his talents or abilities, just the tokenism of his “positive” biological markers. That’s what it came down to, too often: being used, the faculty rads using the graduate rads using the undergrad rads, all in the name of undeniably enlightened and highly moral causes.

  Even to get a date he had to wade through all the faulty logic, the faulty generalizations of the Sex Wars: Men who blamed women-in-general for their own specific failures with certain individual women. Women who blamed men-in-general for their own specific failures with certain individual men. At one extreme stood the Androciders and Xtatix, who felt testosterone was a toxic poison that threatened the survival prospects of the species and could only be eliminated through the all-female reproductive process of ovular merging—as a result of which process no more males would be born and humanity would be saved. At the other extreme were the Gynociders and cYclones, who felt that estrogen was a toxic poison that threatened the survival prospects of the species and could only be eliminated through the all-male reproductive process of cellular Y-cloning—as a result of which no more females would be born and humanity would be saved. A plague on both their houses, Roger thought. He was glad to be shed of the whole lot of them.

  Thinking of all this reminded him of the holodisk he’d picked up on Earth but had yet to view because he’d been so busy since his return. He began checking drawers in his desk, seeming to recall that he had stashed the disk in here somewhere. Yes, here it was: Free Fall Free-For-All.

  As he turned over the pornholo package in his hands, he thought Why not? I’ve put in a lot of hours tonight. No idea what time it is, but there’s no one about, and there’s a player in the conference room down the hall....

  Getting up from his chair, crystal disk in hand, he padded out of the lab and down the corridor. In the dark of the conference room, the player’s control pad glowed dimly. Locking the door of the conference room behind him, he walked forward, slid the small disk into the player, physically thumbed Play and Projection Display, and waited for its contents to spring forth into the room in glorious “virtual three-dimensionality.”

  After a nice exterior establishing shot of a space habitat, the scene cut immediately to an orgy in low gravity, a moaning squelching squishing grunting knot of happily tangled bodies making the beast with many backs—all in slightly off-color 3-D. The low-gravity simulation was just wrong enough to remind Roger that the film had not been shot on location in space but on the cheap in some Earthside studio.

  Watching, Roger soon saw that the holo was yet another Earthbound fantasy about what life was really like in a space colony. The habi
tat culture’s greater respect for the rights of consenting adults was, as usual, exaggerated out of all proportion and translated into the accepted Earthside mythology of space colony life as an unending carnival of sexual license. Somewhere in the popular imagination space colony sexual freedom seemed to have gotten tangled up with the sensual heaven of Islam—and gone that heaven one better with the introduction of the much-overrated “zero-gee sex.”

  As the performers in virtual space before him feigned sexual ecstasies unknown to mere mortals, Roger felt like laughing. Watching orgies—zero-gee or otherwise—was not his particular kink anyway. He was glad when the action moved on to Commandante Professor Florio’s attempt to extract tall, dark, and glandsome hero Brock Rio from out of the moansquish pile—in order to assign him an Important Mission and get the Plot underway.

  Plot summary of Free Fall Free-For-All:

  Professor Florio explains at great length to Brock Rio that Earth has long since become a howling wasteland. The human population boom there went bust centuries before. Under the successive scourges of a generalized ecocatastrophe—with some mid-scale nuclear and biological wars thrown in for good measure—mere anarchy was loosed upon the Motherworld and the habitat severed all connections with the home planet. Now, however, in the interests of Science and the Future of All Humanity, Professor Florio has become convinced that poison levels have fallen enough on Earth that it is worth the risk to send One Brave Individual down the gravity well to Earth’s surface, to make contact with the few humans who remain, learn about and report back on their culture, and (without coercion) bring back one of the natives for examination—all to determine just how heavy a mutation burden the survivors of Earth’s catastrophe might now be carrying.

  Without hesitation, hero Brock, outstanding space-pilot/anthropologist/ ecologist/linguist/ athlete/cocksman, accepts the mission. Bidding his coquettish blonde most-frequent sex partner Gwen Blanc a long, passionate, crotch-grinding farewell, he’s off in his spaceship to visit Mother Earth in her decay.

  All does not go as planned, however. Despite the fact that Professor Florio has programmed into ship’s memory the coordinates for that area on Earth’s surface which (according to satellite observation and computer analysis) is most likely to still be populated and least likely to be “genetically burdened,” Brock’s ship nonetheless malfunctions, crashing in the Poisoned Lands several hundred kilometers south of his destination.

  Wounded and dazed, all communication gone between himself and his home, he struggles for survival against fierce mutant beasts and even fiercer mutated men and women whose particular genetic alterations seem mainly to have multiplied their erogenous zones, so that supernumerary lips and breasts and buttocks and penises and vaginas are very much on display. Captured and kept as a sex slave, Brock is worn down almost to death by the sensual needs of the over-endowed indigenes.

  Escaping at last, he wanders in the desert until—falling unconscious and on the very brink of death—he is rescued by the leader of a komodo-dragon caravan that’s carting the remains of his ship northward. Regaining consciousness under the ministrations of beautiful dark caravan leader Morchella Esculenta, Brock quickly learns her language and explains to her about his ship and his own origin in the space habitat. Knowing of the space colony only through legends and superstitions, Morchella is at first skeptical, but gradually, as they travel toward her home in the city-state of Dodona, she comes to believe Brock’s story, even begins to fall in love with him. At the same time Brock is coming to truly appreciate her and her world—to enjoy living on the surface of a planet rather than in a hollow sphere in space. The broad bowl of the sky, the sense that this world, so damaged, is slowly renewing itself—all of this appeals to him. So too does the barbaric civility of Morchella’s ways.

  As he watched, Roger could see the pattern forming up for the payoff on his kink. The “true love” developing between Brock and Morchella (remarkably chaste up to this point, for a porno) seemed in the best traditions of women’s romance fiction, but back home in the orbital habitat Gwen was waiting, the triangle was forming. Triangles were old news in the traditionally female matter of romance—only this time they were tricked out in the traditionally male garb of action-adventure science fiction.

  Web powered, captioned plot summary of Free Fall Free-For-All, continued:

  Brock and Morchella reach Dodona, where Brock learns that Morchella is in fact the adventure-loving daughter of the High Priestess. Brock proves that he is the Chosen One From The Sky by fulfilling the legendary test of sexual stamina (satisfying the sexual desires of all the temple virgins in a single night). He then further astounds the rulers of Dodona with his ability to read and translate the Sacred Book, Guaranty’s Myth’s Edge and Nation, a dream text covered in gaudy metallic-purple adorned with lavender knot-work.

  Using materials gleaned from the Dodona Antiquarium, Brock the Chosen succeeds in restoring his transceiver to working order. Informing Professor Florio and the space colonists that he is still alive, he requests a rescue ship capable of carrying himself and (gazing approvingly toward Morchella) one other passenger.

  Preparations are made and the ship from space arrives with Gwen Blanc piloting. Leaping from her craft and striding past the assembled dignitaries, Gwen plants a fervent kiss on Brock’s mouth. Brock awkwardly introduces Gwen and Morchella to each other. From the sudden shift in her body language and her increasingly pouty demeanor, it’s clear that Gwen has immediately suspicioned that Morchella is the Other Woman. The handshake that passes between the two women is strangely prolonged, almost as if they are testing each other’s strength.

  As they return to the ship, Morchella and Gwen, in their ceremonial finest, walk ahead of Brock, very briskly and very straight-of-spine, almost as if participating in some strange foot race where each competitor not only has to reach the finish line first but also has to stand tallest while doing it.

  The performers playing the dark woman and the blonde stood almost exactly the same height and looked to be about the same weight, Roger noticed, though Morchella was fuller in the shoulders and chest while Gwen was heavier around the hips and thighs. An even match, he thought, his arousal growing.

  Plot summary of Free Fall Free-For-All, continued:

  Brock takes the controls of the three-seater and pilots the craft off Earth and up the gravity well, trying to ignore the tension behind him, where the two women sit at opposite ends of the back cabin like fighters in their corners. From his expression it’s clear Brock expects them at any minute to hear a bell and leap at each other.

  But they do not. The tension of the triangle continues to build and build as Brock spends more time with Morchella than Gwen will excuse, even in the name of Science. Finally one day, when the three of them are alone together in the padded confines of a low-gravity gymnasium, the tension explodes into action.

  This was what Roger had been waiting for: Contrasting female bodies rushing together with an audible smack; enraged cursing and yelling; stinging slaps; red-faced fury; murder in the eyes; circling, wary, crouching stances; hands extending like claws, grabbing hair and scalp and yanking savagely; women kneeing and kicking each other; female fighters clinching in hostile embrace, breast against breast, snared in each other’s arms; solid head-locks; choke holds; muffled grunts; short shrieks; arm-locked upper bodies; half and full nelsons; leg lifts; hip throws; scissor holds; hand clenches; long raking scratches; strangle holds; popping, stinging blows; the tangled ball of intertwined arms and legs; straddles; pins; submissions—all the impedimenta of his kink without a name—half voyeur’s spectacle and half sadist’s pleasure at seeing others’ pain—being played out in the virtual reality before him.

  Roger privately thought of himself as a scopogynomachiaphile—his own coinage for his nameless sexual obsession. He had been one for as long as he could remember, his kink like a dark twisted root anchored deep, irremovably, in the soil of
his soul. He didn’t know where his kink came from—his mother arguing with his crazy aunt? a girl-fight seen in grade school?—but he did know it was making him come now.

  Behind him a cardkey scrabbled in the lock of the door to the conference room. Putting himself quickly and sloppily back into his pants, Roger turned to see Marissa standing wide-eyed in the doorway. In the pornholo’s virtual reality, the fight played on, life-sized.

  “Oh, sorry,” Marissa said, embarrassed, closing the door again quickly.

  Roger sat, slumped and pondering. The new day must be beginning. He must have stayed in the lab all night. He felt numb somehow—too numb to get up and turn off the pornholo.

  Plot summary of Free Fall Free-For-All concludes:

  Morchella, Brock’s true love, defeats her blonde opponent. The habitat scientists determine that Morchella is not genetically burdened at all. When she opts to return to Earth, Brock decides to go with her—to monogamy and a settled life on an inside-out world. They ride off, not into the sunset but down the gravity well, new Adam and new Eve bent on re-establishing Heaven on Earth.

  As the pornholo credits flashed up, Roger found himself still wondering how much of it Marissa had seen—how much of his secret kink she might even now be figuring out. Would she make the connection between it and his other obsessions—mole-rat society, the human pheromone project? The thought of it made him curse his own stupidity. Twice in twenty four hours, once intentionally with that Tao-Ponto woman Jhana and once accidentally with Marissa, he had let too much of himself show, let his plans and desires be nakedly exposed to others. Who knew how all these non-violencers up here—especially his mother—might react if they became aware of a particularly crucial “side-effect” of the pheromone he was trying to develop? Would they banish him? Send him into life-long exile, never to return?

  He should be so lucky. What would be so bad about getting away from all these overpolite idealists, really? People who would hardly admit they belched or farted or did anything physical and human, much less admit of their own dark sides? If, amid all their public chatter in this Happy Isle In The Sky, the only truly private, individuating event was a guy watching a porno, then so be it. That said less about him than about the sad state of their so-called “diversity” here. He would be glad to be free of the tight constraints of their insufferable good manners, their intolerable tolerance.