by Lou Anders
It was a Saturday, so the four of us breakfasted together in leisurely fashion as the sunlight spilled in yellow pools across the kitchen. Lyssa scrambled some eggs—daughter Karen’s favorite—while I prepared endless relays of hot toast for Mark and myself. Every now and then Lyssa and I would catch each other’s gaze above the industrious small heads of the scarfing kids and share a secret grin with each other. After a while I had to sit down at the table with the kids because those intimate grins of hers were making my weary, still slightly throbbing penis swell again inside my slacks. I diverted my mind by making earnest conversation with Mark about the iniquities of various of his schoolteachers.
After breakfast was over, the table and counter wiped clear of crumbs and smears, the dishes stashed safely away in the dishwasher and the kids safely out at play in the yard, Lyssa and I clung together for a long moment, feeling the familiar curves and angles of each other’s bodies through the resented barriers of our clothing. If it hadn’t been for the kids, we’d have made love once more, there and then, on the floor or the kitchen table. My fingers on the crotch of Lyssa’s pale blue jeans, I could sense her renewed dampness. My own excitement was far more obvious.
She touched a hand to my lips.
“Later, later,” she said with a lopsided smile. “You’ve got a date for tonight, mister. Don’t forget.”
I kissed her one final time and made for the door.
Whether it was the afterglow of love or whether it was carelessness, or whether it was simply an unexpected quantum event—as if that weren’t a tautology—I do not know, but as I walked down the bright dusty street of our semirural small town, my mind anticipating eagerly a visit with my wife Isolde, my feet took a wrong turn and I was sitting in a cluttered one-room apartment listening to poundingly loud music that I eventually recognized as Bryan Adams.
Damn!
These things sometimes happen—in fact, probably more often than anyone quite likes to admit. The pathways through the interstices of the polycosmos are more than infinite in number, so it’s hardly surprising that our instinct, being powered by neurons that are somewhat, if only slightly, less in number than those pathways, should occasionally lead us astray as we journey between the realities. Usually it doesn’t matter at all, of course: you emerge to discover yourself with a partner of either sex who is, shall we say, similarly inclined, and whom you have always and forever known and loved. Bathing in the mutual love, either alone together in bed or on a long country walk with the dogs or yelling and screaming with the kids on a carnival roller-coaster—or wherever, all the myriad ways there are in which love can be made—you establish your presence, your soul, your identity, so that the whole great machine of the polycosmos keeps trundling along toward its eternal futures.
But sometimes you’re not so fortunate with these missteps of the mind, and this was what had happened to me now.
I had landed myself in one of those realities I call digitopias.
If you’re lucky or simply more stay-at-home than most of us, you’ve never encountered a digitopia. They’re rare—thankfully rare. So let me explain.
Everybody knows that the totality of existence comprises the polycosmos, which is the sum of all the infinity of infinities of realities that there are or ever could be. Each of those individual realities can be considered as not just a universe of its own but also a microcosmic (if you can sensibly use such a term of entities that are so vast) polycosmos in itself, for it, too, comprises countless infinities of realities. And, of course, each of those realities is in itself a further polycosmos… .
Every event, every action, every slightest shift of a quark will—and does—spark a new reality, yet there are also infinitely many and infinitely large families of realities brought into existence at the birth-moment of each of the universes; these families are like the major branches of some unimaginably huge and complex tree, with the other realities serving as its twigs and buds and leaves. What distinguishes one family from the next is that the physical laws governing each are not quite the same as in any other family. At the birth-moment, the Big Bang, of each universe/polycosmos-in-the-making there springs into reality whole gamuts of possible sets of physical laws under the reign of which a viable universe might run, and all of those viable sets are reified.
The most important physical law that can be varied from one to the other concerns the rate of passage of time: as a second passes in one, a year might pass in the next, or a millennium. If you cared to, you could pick a pathway through the interstices between the realities of even just our own small universe so as to travel into realities where everything is many billions of times older; or, by going “the other way,” you might enter realities (if you were fool enough to do so) where the Big Bang initiated itself scant milliseconds before. It’s as if you could travel freely backward and forward through time, except that all the realities and subrealities are different existences—they’ve evolved independently and, of course, at variant rates, and some have been majorly influenced by trains of events that have never even touched others.
Still, if you move carefully among the interstices, you can restrict your travels to realities—whether within our universe or elsewhere in the polycosmos—where the speed of time’s flow is always much the same, and where the physical laws, too, are not so divergent from those you are accustomed to. The sun is still yellow-white in a sky of blue. When you drop a dish, it falls swiftly enough to smash on the floor—or at least it does fall, rather than drifting off to the side or floating blithely up and away.
But some of the very tiniest variations in the physical laws can have the most profound consequences, and they can make two realities that should, on the face of it, be nearly identical in fact be strikingly different.
The behavior of the electrons of the antimony atom is one area of relevance. In almost every reality where there exists such an element as antimony at all, which means 99.99999999 percent repeating of the realities within our own local polycosmos, the polycosmos that we’d regard as our universe’s families of realities—the electrons squat lumpenly around the nucleus, unwilling to be dragged away from it. In a few realities, however, those electrons are prepared to be far more freewheeling, and in a tiny percentage of those miserably unfortunate realities it has been discovered that antimony can be used to “dope” silicon such that minuscule transistors may be manufactured.
The reason I call such godsforsaken realities digitopias is that they have a science of microelectronics—tiny computers everywhere, gadgetry proliferating like a plague of locusts and devouring all the soul-stuff of the people of the worlds.
The reason I knew I’d accidentally danced into a digitopia was that the Bryan Adams track that was filling my ears was being played by a small black machine with on its front a display of moving lights that served no purpose.
And so on.
Well, there I was, dumped like a beached whale into a digitopia. I could have turned straight around and left—I could physically have forced myself to do that—but it would have been to violate the rules of love that keep the polycosmos (and the polycosmos of polycosmoses, and all the tiny polycosmoses that swarm within and alongside every particle of us) evolving and growing and alive. I had to stay here for at least long enough to give whatever love I could to the partner who awaited me, and whom I had known and loved for a long, long time.
I was sitting on the floor of the apartment, fully clothed, my back against the wall beneath a curtained window. Opposite me, also sitting with her back against the wall and also fully clothed, was my longtime fuckmate (her term) Kath. I’d asked her several times if maybe, you know, we should get married, but her answer was always the same: she didn’t want to commit herself to anything too long-term that she might not be able to sustain. Only once did I try to explain to her that there was a way of having both permanence in love and yet also constant change and freshness.
She’d looked at me as if I were crazy.
“You’ve see
n it yourself,” I’d said. “You must have. You know those moments when your gaze meets someone else’s across a crowded room or on a train, and you all at once realize that, even though you’ve never met or spoken to this person and probably never will, you recognize them as somebody you’ve known intimately, body and soul, for as long as you can remember. And you can see them recognizing you, as well, in the same way.”
“You fancy them, like?” said Kath, struggling to grasp what I was saying.
“No, it’s not that at all. What the pair of you suddenly realize is that you’ve spent a whole love story together, but not here, not now, not in this reality—so it’s a love story you’ll never be able to read with your lives, a love story that you’ll never know.”
Kath began to chortle. “You’re just saying you sometimes fantasize about fucking other women, breaking it to me gentle, like. But that’s OK. Sometimes I fantasize about fucking other guys, so we’re equals. Quits. You hungry?”
(I remembered all these things, you see, even though I’d never been here before.)
“No,” I insisted. “Sure I sometimes wonder what it’d be like screwing pretty women I see in the street or meet at parties—I’m not a saintly monk, or whatever—but I’m not talking about that.”
“What are you talking about, then? You keep saying what you’re not talking about, but what you’re saying doesn’t make much sense. Not really.”
“I’m talking about the encounters all of us sometimes have with our lovers, but our lovers in realities other than the one we happen to be in. Maybe we’ve been able to cross into those different realities briefly in dreams, or something, or maybe it’s just that our awareness can seep through the boundaries that separate the realities—I don’t know. But it’s a fact. Those little instants of recognition—they’re a fact.”
“You’ve been watching too much Star Trek.”
And that was as far as the conversation went.
Gazing across at my fuckmate now, I felt my heart lift with song and loving, because she was very, very beautiful. Her hair was a cascade of black curls surrounding her oval face. Her skin was gray with the weariness of existence, and I wished I could do something to change that; but for all that she was lovely.
“Kath,” I said as the CD reached its end and the machine grunted and squealed softly, changing to another. “Kath, come here. I want to hold you.”
“Nah, not right now,” she said. “I wanna spend some time with the veerigogs. Wanna join me?”
I sighed.
Veerigogs. VR goggles. The latest craze in this dismal digitopia. Kath had bought (or, I suspected, stolen) us each a pair as soon as they’d started appearing in the high-street electronics stores. Put on a pair of veerigogs and you enter a fake, or virtual, reality. If you have the right plug-in-and-play program chips, you can choose any fake reality from the large palette of scenarios the manufacturers have devised. You can use a pair of veerigogs on your own and the illusion seen by your eyes and heard through microspeakers in your ears is so all-embracing, so entirely convincing, that your other senses are deceived as well: you can touch the surfaces, you can smell the odors, you can taste the tastes of the imaginary world. But the way most people use veerigogs is together, fucking with each other while their senses tell each of them individually that they’re fucking someone else: a movie star, or a rock singer, or …
When Kath had teased me about fantasizing fucking other women, she was counting the use of veerigogs as fantasizing. But there’s a difference between a fantasy and a fake reality.
“OK. I guess so.” My voice sounded eager not because I was skilled at disguising my true lack of interest but because, by definition, I loved this fuckmate of mine and had done so for as far back as my memory would go: giving her pleasure, in whatever way I could, was to gain pleasure for myself.
She tossed me my veerigogs and began to haul herself out of her overalls. I caught the gadget and began myself to undress, staring at her body as it was unceremoniously revealed to me.
There’s an old cliché that some people are more beautiful with their clothes on than off. It’s not something that I’ve ever much subscribed to, because I always love my wives wholly, and find them equally beautiful however I might see them. But, as I watched Kath, I was able to distance a part of my mind and see her as someone else might do, and that facet of me saw that she was a woman who was startlingly more beautiful naked than even her lovely, adorable clothed self. Her legs were long—longer even than Xanthe’s, and sleeker. Her entire body, had she ever learned to straighten it properly, had a dignity that was somehow chaste while at the same time deeply sensuous. I wanted to spend days just poring over each square inch of her skin, even the places where she’d bruised herself as a result of her habitual clumsiness. I wanted to lay my head in the small of her back and stare at the smooth, perfect twin drifts of her behind rising like hillsides, their foothills just inches from my eyes, the downy hairs on them making scintillating stars as the breeze blew across them in the sunshine. I wanted to try making love with her through simple touching—the two of us stroking each other’s faces and flanks, gazing all the while into the depths of each other’s eyes and souls, until our sensualities bubbled over. I wanted her to be astride my face so that I could lose myself in the warm world of her sex, kept from floating away into the ether only by distant sensations of her mouth on my own sex. I wanted to hear the loud pulsing music of orgasm, see the wraithed colors it brings, like trails of illuminated dust clouds out where the stars are young. I wanted us to dance together in our lovemaking to the place where there are no longer two, but one.
“Who do you fancy me being this time?” said Kath, grinning. Her breasts were pale little apples, pink-tipped, framed by brassiere creases, but she was unconscious of them as she fiddled with the fastening at the side of her veerigogs. “Marilyn Monroe? Michelle Pfeiffer? Winona Ryder?”
All I want you to be is Kath, I thought, but of course I didn’t say the words out loud because to do so would have been to hurt the one I adored.
“Natalie Marahat,” I said at random. Marahat had recently starred across from Richard Gere in a frothy little comedy we’d seen at Loew’s. She has a grace and style and slow-moving elegance and profound beauty, not to mention the most gorgeously appealing little smile—all of which were completely wasted in that movie. Somewhere in the polycosmos, I’d realized as I’d stared at the big screen amid the popcorn redolence of the movie theater, perhaps she and I had loved or would love each other—in truth, did love each other, because there’s no past or future in real love, just an everlasting present.
Kath chuckled. “In that case, then, I guess you’d better be Richard Gere.” She plugged the cord of her veerigogs into the box and tapped in instructions. “He’s a bit old for my normal type but … yes”—reading the microscreen—“I can have him when he was still thirty.” She beckoned to me to plug my own cord in. “And here’s Natalie Marahat for you.” All cozy. There, that’s settled.
Standing close to her nakedness, as I now was, I’d developed a quite enormous erection. I don’t mean just that it was hard as a rock—although it was—but that in this reality I had a bigger penis than in just about any other I’d so far been in. My balls were pretty gargantuan, too, dangling in a sac that seemed to stretch halfway to my knees, but my erection really was a truly impressive object. In fact, although not so impossibly huge that sex wouldn’t be practicable at all, it was probably too big and thick to be a very satisfactory part of genuine lovemaking, so I was quite relieved that it belonged in a digitopia rather than be an encumbrance elsewhere.
Kath didn’t seem to notice it, concentrating as she was on fine-tuning the physical attributes of Richard Gere as well as setting the controls to define the fake environment we’d find ourselves in.
“Now,” she said at last.
We lay down together on our futon and carefully donned our veerigogs, trying to synchronize as nearly as possible our entrance into the ar
tificial world.
I was on a very good imitation water bed. Lying there beside me, naked in the candlelight, was a truly lovely creature, her body flawless and perfectly proportioned. Natalie Marahat.
A fake Natalie Marahat.
What made the fakery obvious was exactly that: the flawlessness, the absolute perfection of her every proportion. It was as if her body had subliminal erotic triggers implanted in every pore. The result, instead of making my mind blaze with desire, was an overload of erotism that brought into stark blatancy the chill of her artificiality.
As this vision of loveliness put her arms around me, I thought as fervently as I could of the naked Kath I had left just moments before.
“Fuck me, baby,” said Natalie Marahat.
And so I fucked her.
Later, after we’d taken the veerigogs off, I tried to coax Kath into lovemaking on the futon, but she said she was tired, and anyway The West Wing was just about to start on television.
I left her during the first commercial break.
She didn’t notice me going, of course, because there was still the familiar slumped male on the couch beside her, nibbling crackers as he watched a woman on the screen tell him how he could say good-bye to all his allergies with only a long list of minimal possible side-effects. I slipped on a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt and a pair of old, worn-down sneakers, and made my way out of the apartment and down three flights of stairs and out into the streets of a city that was a blare of light and sound. I sensed that everywhere around me there were people busily watching other people doing things that they wished they could do themselves, or plugged into one device or another that would effectively obstruct their every fortuitous leaning toward discovering the ways you can skip through the interstices of the polycosmos, pausing wherever you will to fuel it with the love it needs to keep on living and becoming. All of these machines, driven by the properties permitted by the laws of physics to belong to the electron shell of the antimony atom in only a tiny percentage of the realities that make up the everness—all of these machines pretending to stimulate yet instead inhibiting the imagination from roaming through the infinite possibilities that the polycosmos reifies.