Pornucopia

by Piers Anthony

  “HA-CHOOO!” the demon sneezed in agony ... and exploded into vapor. At that moment the spell abated, and Prior's limbs were free.

  He had won again ... by a nose. Thanks to Black's seeming insults, which were actually advice couched in a manner the demon would not understand and counter.

  Chapter 28—Fourth Branch

  They moved on down the cherry caverns. This time Prior kept himself prepared: he had Normal, the six-incher, connected and halfway turgid. That way he was halfway ready for anything. Halfassed, as Black put it. But he hoped he wouldn't meet the fourth Branch soon, because the struggle with the third had exhausted him, physically and chemically. He wasn't certain he could get a full erection, let alone ejaculate!

  “Well!"

  Prior and Black both jumped. A demoness lay before them, dusky, sultry and sexy. She was another branch of the Cherry Tree, all right, for her cherry was bright red and sparkled between her supple, leaf-green-shaded thighs.

  “Sa-ay,” Black said appreciatively. “Can anybody play? I wouldn't mind cornholing that brown beauty myself."

  Prior wasn't sure of the legalities, but his limp member cast the deciding vote. He might get it up for this encounter, for the demoness was as luscious a piece as he had ever approached—but what if the next demon arrived on the scene too quickly? Sheer glandular fatigue would do him in when he faced the last branch. Black knew he was not eligible to approach the Spire itself—but that was not his purpose. He just wanted a good fuck, and he knew the risk entailed. “Okay by me,” Prior said.

  Black needed no further urging. “Now you stay out of it, the way I stayed out of yours,” he cautioned. “I know she's a bitch, and she'll kill me if she can, but this here motherfuckin’ horn will not be denied.” And, indeed, his erection was impressive.

  “Right,” Prior said, realizing only now that it had not been indifference or cowardice that prevented Black from coming to his assistance before, but the man's own code of ethics. Three was a crowd, when it came to serious combat or fornication. Except for advice from the sidelines.

  Black advanced penis-first on the waiting female, took hold of one arm and breast, dropped onto her torso and issued a pneumatic sigh. “Just let me dip my stick in your transmission, black baby,” he said.

  She shimmered—and Black found himself embracing a crocodile. Great and green and alligator-hided, with a thrashing tail and elongated snout and cruel hungry eyes.

  Prior, watching, was as dismayed as Black. There, but for the grace of circumstance and a flaccid member, went he! He had known the demons could change shape, but this was ridiculous.

  Black, whatever his political sentiments, was sexually normal. Bestiality was hardly in his line, when he considered it degrading to sample the lubricity of even nonblack human females. Prior saw the ebony penis losing elevation as it brushed the cold belly-scales of the reptile. A luscious woman-form was one thing, demon though she might be; this was something else.

  But there was no release from that embrace. The crocodile's immense jaws whipped around, snapped at Black's face—

  But Black had brought up his wrist with the amulet. A blue spark jumped, singeing the reptile's teeth. “No kissin', cousin!” Black cried. “You can't hurt me. I got protection!"

  “Human bastard!” the crocodile muttered, licking the charred surface of the tooth. “Think you're pretty mortal smart!” And it changed into a monstrous crab. “Well I'll just pinch you to see if you're real!"

  Two gigantic pincers reached for the man. One went for the throat, and Black had to fend it off immediately with the amulet.

  The other pincer moved simultaneously for his groin, and Black, distracted by the threat to his neck, didn't catch it in time. It clamped on the genitalia and wrenched—and suddenly Black was a bleeding eunuch. He screamed once, horribly, then fainted.

  Prior was appalled, sickened, and terrified, but also angry. The foul-mouthed Negro was his friend in his black-humor fashion. Black had twice summoned cherry branches for him to tackle individually, and had once thrown him a penis when he had been caught short. Last time Black had given him the life-saving hint about the Demon's nose—the facial aperture without deadly teeth. And Black had gotten them safely here by summoning the hellephant.

  Yes, Black was a friend in deed and sometimes in word. Prior knew he could not have made it this far without the man's timely assistance. Black didn't deserve such mutilation and death, when all he had wanted was a decent dusky rock.

  The crab metamorphosed back into the crocodile, and the crocodile opened her jaws to take another bite of manflesh. The dripping penis and scrotum lay on the cold cavern floor, the blood melting into the cherry ice.

  Prior charged.

  If he had had time to think it through properly, he would have known he had no chance, and let the Negro's corpse buy him time to escape. He would have given up his insanely foolish quest for the Spire. He would have returned to Earth a sadder but more potent man.

  But now rage drove out all fear and all reason. His six-incher was not even rigid, but he tensed his legs to pounce on the crocodile.

  His foot slipped on the severed, peeled-banana penis. A testicle squirted out from under as Prior fought for balance. He couldn't stop; he had to fall, so he fell forward.

  And landed astride a tigress. Literally.

  “Another lover, so soon!” she purred, her predator-muscles orienting on him. “Well here's some real pussy for you, halfmast!"

  She twisted off Black and faced Prior, the deadly sharp claws of all four feet driving for his gut. But he still had some of the advantage of surprise; she was not properly braced for his impact, and the floor was slippery with diluted blood on the ice. He crashed into her bodily and shoved her sidewise, away from Black.

  Instinctively he wrapped his arms about her torso, pulling her tight to restrict those scraping claws. And then she was an enormous fat hen. “Squa-awk!” she squawked. “Let's have some cock!"

  He tried to wring her small neck, but the clumsy bird became an unclumsy bird: a giant eagle, its bill stabbing down at his eyeballs.

  There was hardly time to react, let alone think. Prior butted his head against hers, using his hard skull to blunt her sharp beak, and reached out wildly for Black's body. There was sharp pain in his skull as hair and skin were gouged, but he found the body. While he fought off the buffeting eagle's wings one-handed he wrestled with the Negro's body for that magic amulet. It was set in a bracelet, and if he could get it off—well, he could take the punishment of claw and beak for a little while, so long as he got hold of that protection.

  Meanwhile his opponent had changed her shape again. A man-sized hairy spider threw loops of sticky web about him while purple mandibles came at his face. But he got hold of Black's arm, slid along the wrist, hooked a finger under the band. As the spider's venom-dripping jaws opened to clamp on his nose, he hauled desperately on amulet and hand, and brought it between him and the demoness. The spark jumped again.

  “Now cut that out!” the spider said, jerking back while its face-fur smoked. Its six or ten eyes blinked in pain. “I'm just trying to offer you a little good hair-pie.” But already she was a shark, with seemingly endless teeth.

  “There's something fishy about you,” Prior grated. He put the amulet right into that underslung maw and drove it back. He had a weapon now—but he knew it could not win the battle for him by itself. It had not been enough for poor Black. He used it to fend her off while he concentrated desperately on his definitive weapon: his penis. He could vanquish her completely only by copulating with her—and it had to be fast, or he was dead, amulet or no.

  But it was hard to stiffen his torpid member in the face of these repeated changes of form. Now the bitch was a bear, now a snake, now a pig. Each form constituted a new attack by claw, fang or snout, and none was sexually conducive. And he sorely missed the semen he had so recently expended on the assless demon. An amulet was no substitute for ejaculate.

  Nevertheless
the heat of combat elevated his blood pressure, and his member gradually came erect. The abrasion it received during the struggle helped, though there was little sexual appeal in this. As his penis hardened, the demoness lost strength, for here was the thrusting phallus she most feared. Her scratches became shallow, and her blows futile. Finally she collapsed back into human form.

  Prior wedged her luscious thighs apart and forced his full-sized meat into her loosening hole. At least this vagina was ample. He had been half afraid she wouldn't have one. She screamed and went limp.

  He had won again.

  Except—

  Except that he hadn't come yet. And she hadn't puffed into smoke. That was suspicious.

  She was playing possum, though she had carefully avoided assuming the possum shape, evidently hoping he'd be satisfied with the seeming victory. She must have known that he couldn't come quickly, so her loose vulva was safe for the time being. If he fell for that ruse, who could guess what deviltry she would come up with once she recovered the initiative?

  Prior rammed into her the full six inches, finding no resistance. It was such a contrast to the vice-like tightness of the other female; this one was a cool ocean in her laxity. In fact, he had precious little to strive against, and his penis was freezing.

  That was her trap! She was zero weather inside, and his hot blood was rapidly chilling. He had to finish the job promptly, or his flesh would go numb.

  He couldn't come. He had to have incentive, stimulation, and friction, and there was no more of these here than might be had by having intercourse with a day-old corpse. In fact she even felt corpselike now—a body in the freezer.

  Black groaned and stirred. “Did you trim her wick, whiteshit?"

  So he was alive! “I have it in, but the juice is congealing. Do you have any more advice?"

  Black coughed unhealthily. “My old man—curse his black hide—always said...” He trailed off.

  “What did he say?” Prior demanded. His whole front was getting chilled; he might as well have been having intercourse with a bank of snow. “Don't faint now, you bastard nigger!"

  “Flattery ... nowhere..."

  “Listen, Black, I'm not flattering you"! My cock is an icicle! Tell me what you know!"

  “If you can't eat it, and you can't...” The voice became an indecipherable mumble.

  “What? What?” Prior shouted desperately. Not only was his member going numb, it seemed to be frozen in place in her ice-solid body. To withdraw now might well be to rip it off himself.

  “...can't fuck it..."

  “I know I can't fuck it!” Prior cried. “That's my problem! Tell me, you deballed wonder!"

  “PISS ON IT!” Black screamed furiously. And died.

  There went his last hope. Black's eleventh-hour help had pulled him through before, but there was no chance of that now. “Piss on it!” Prior echoed with mixed sorrow and rage. Why had he driven Black into such anger as the man lay dying? His thoughtlessness had cost them both their penises and their lives.

  Piss on it...

  Inspiration! Would it work?

  He resumed pumping, pretending that there was still fire in his phallus. “I'm getting near the climax, you demonic cherry whore,” he told her. “You're a corpse, but you can't cool my organ. Not deep down to the source of semen. It's sort of fun, fucking frigidity; a novelty, sets me off. You can't shrink me before I spurt. Feel that hot burble starting?"

  “No,” she said uncertainly.

  He jogged his dead member, hoping it was more rigid than it seemed, and not because of getting frozen. “What an orgasm! It's raging in my gut! I can't hold it back any longer, much as I enjoy playing with you! You're quite a lay, know that?"

  “You're quite a bluffer, know that?"

  “Ooooh!” he cried, twisting his face in simulated rapture. “Ah, crocodile-cunt, I've never had one like this! Aaaaah!” And he panted and tensed his whole cold body as though torn by the spasm.

  She changed into a giant, slimy, wriggling worm. But his member was wedged in the thing's cloaca, and he continued his act. “I'm coming! I'm coming! Swing low, sweet chariot! Feel that hot liquid!"

  And he compressed his belly and urinated forcefully into her quivering vagina as she changed back into a woman.

  “A-a-a-a-ah!” she screamed in climactic agony. She began to dissolve into chilly vapor.

  Suddenly her misty eyes opened. “You unmitigated fucker!” she snarled, metamorphosing into the tiger. Her hole clenched airily. “That's not ejaculate!"

  Prior just waited, letting his bladder drain into her, warming his cold penis during its passage. It felt almost as good as a real climax.

  “That's PISS!” the crocodile bellowed.

  But it was too late. She could not pull her wafting flesh together again. Slowly, reluctantly, angrily, and with multiple changes of form, she faded into brown, urine-saturated mist. His last drops spattered on the pink ice.

  This time he really had won—by cheating.

  Chapter 29—Fifth Branch

  He buried Black in the cherry-flavored terrain, and found some chocolate snow for a shroud. “You gave good advice, you ebony racist,” he said by way of benediction. “I'll take care of the cop-fucking matter for you, if I ever get back to Earth. Keep cool."

  Black kept cool. He was frozen stiff.

  Four branches of the Cherry Tree had been severed—each one worse than the last. Surely the worst was yet to come. But now he had to go on. He would vanquish the final demon, or die in the fucking attempt.

  He arrived at last at the bottom of the cavern system, in the very heart of Mt. Icecream. Here he found a fountain: liquid ice cream spurting up from a tiny nozzle, shooting high up through a gap in the pinnacle, and fanning far above into perpetual snow. As he watched, the color changed from yellow to green: vanilla to pistachio.

  “PISStachio,” he murmured. “How appropriate."

  Mt. Icecream, it seemed, was a cold but active volcano—and this nozzle was the apparent source of it all. It must have taken centuries for the mountain itself to form.

  But what lay below the nozzle? Surely all that ice cream came from somewhere. Was the core of the planet made of it, and was this the only hole in the crust for it to squirt out? That seemed ridiculous on numerous grounds. But at the moment he found no better explanation for what he witnessed here.

  He stepped close to that ever-jetting phallus, feeling the convective wind at his back, and probed at the base. There might be a pipe leading in, a conduit for pressured ice cream—

  Heavy footfalls sounded behind him. Prior whirled to face the last branch of the Cherry Tree.

  It stood about seven feet tall. It looked a little like a griffin and a little like a goblin, but mostly like a walking phallus with priapism. It had snaggle-tusks that projected from the place its mouth should have been but wasn't, and a wickedly hooked beak without nostril-holes, and saber-claws, and a spiked tail and barbed wings. Its upthrusting animal ears were metallic, with serrated saw-blade edges but no apertures into the head. Its grotesque eyes were mere patches of light-sensitive skin. Its penis was just about two feet long from bell to balls, and proportionately massive. And it was absolutely rigid.

  “An eeg!” Prior cried, recognizing the form. “An adult eeg!"

  The creature made no answer. How could it, without a mouth? How could it really see him or hear him or smell him, with those sealed-over organs of perception? Now Prior saw that it had no apertures of any kind, especially not a rectum. Just that atomic cannon of a penis.

  Prior still wore Normal, and the respite he had gained by urinating into the last branch allowed him to bring it to attention with reasonable dispatch despite the lingering chill. He knew he could ejaculate, once he found appropriate lodging. But this demon was invulnerable, for it was completely without orifices. In all the galaxy there was no finer single-purpose fucking machine.

  The eeg charged on stubby goblin-legs, its phallus swaying heavily as though about to u
nbalance the entire body. The demon's eye-patches glowed cherry red, and so did the tip of its penis. What internal fires did this leakage presage?

  Prior tried to run, but his feet skidded on the ice and he sprawled ignominiously. The eeg came to stand over him, huge chicken-feet on either side of his body, that volcanic member looming. The intrusion of that timber would surely split a human body wide open. But there was no ready escape. The cold of the cavern floor gripped his naked body; was that why he shivered so?

  The demon lowered the boom. That hinged instrument was as thick and solid as Prior's thigh. It banged brutally against his buttock, a solid wooden club.

  Prior realized that he was in luck—of a sort. A penis that size couldn't possibly penetrate his anus, mouth, or any other bodily aperture.

  The eeg reached down with spindly arms and hauled Prior up with astonishing strength. It carried him to a region of massed stalagmites: giant spokes of cherry ice rising erotically out of the floor. It jammed him between two of them, headfirst, and shoved him down, so that his torso was pinned where the columns came together at the base.

  Oh-oh! Now he was thoroughly anchored. That huge penis just might get into him, if driven with enough force while he was tied down. After all, the Assyrians used to drive wooden stakes up the rectums of their captives and mount them along the highways. And the eeg was bracing against a fortuitously placed third stalagmite, orienting itself so that its entire strength could shove the cannon into the recalcitrant hole. The eeg must have done this many times before; trust it to know its infernal business.

  The club drove at Prior's posterior, harder and harder. His buttocks were bruising, his poor little sphincter was hopelessly out-classed. Neither flesh nor cartilage could withstand the savagery of this assault. It was like giving birth to a baby, sidewise—except that he was no mother, this was no baby, and it wasn't going but coming. In more ways than one.

  The icy stalagmites chilled his sides—but his body heat was melting them in return. Prior realized that he had a chance here to escape. He waited for another eeg-thrust, then sucked in his breath and shoved back against those translucent columns with both hands.