Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two
Page 5
It’s unlocked. You push it open and walk on air into the air. Here the floor is not only transparent, it’s some kind of transparent gel itself, soft and spongy.
It’s like walking on invisible cloud drifting westward above the spires of Notre Dame Cathedral, and the ceiling and walls are a seamless video screen displaying a cloud deck that you’re moving through, and there’s a hidden fan blowing artificial zephyrs so that you can feel a wind of passage caressing your body to complete the effect.
The Captain is an unselfconsciously naked Adonis standing in the middle of the air over Paris, hands on hips and grinning at you with an unabashed erection.
“Welcome to my parlor,” said the spider to the fly.”
Bronzed gymnast’s body, hairless save for the golden curls at his pubes matching his long flowing main of hair blowing in the wind. A Greek God with the attitude of a stage-diving rock god surveying his sea of panties-tossing groupies.
There’s a part of you that would like to punch him right in his grinning mouth, but that’s already once upon a time in a galaxy far, far away, after all, this is just what you came for, now isn’t it.
He knows it, you know it, and he knows that you know it too. No fencing match foreplay needed or possible up here in the middle of the air. It’s cut to the chase, your clothes are gone before you can even think about it, you’re bouncing through the sky above the Seine tracking the tour boats, and into his arms.
The open-mouthed deep-tongued kiss is steamily sensual, but far too electrically erotic to last for long, you’re lapping your tongue in snaky swirls down his sweet smoky smelling chest before you can think about it, and long before you get to the object of your desire, your loins are moistly afire, and you’re not thinking at all as you sink to your knees, grabbing his buttocks, and suckling him up like a babe at the teat.
You’re so lost in moaning and writhing and fingering yourself in anticipatory arousal that you not only don’t know how long it’s lasted, you don’t even realize that he’s been standing there absolutely still and silent until he holds you by the cheeks, gently pushes you away, and lifts you, panting and deliciously frustrated, to your feet.
“Nice for the opening act, but not a Sky Captain’s final act thing.”
“No problem, I can deal with that!” you cry, shoving him over backwards onto passing Paris with your strongest two-handed shove, leaping atop him legs spread wide, reaching down to guide him to the sweet spot.
But before you can, he wraps his legs around your waist in a wrestler’s scissors, flips you away off of him onto your side, rolls away, and up into a full lotus sitting position, looking down at you lying there stunned and quite pissed off.
“What the fuck was that about?” you demand as you pry yourself upright facing him.
“The Flying Fuck.”
“The what?”
“Look down.”
You’re floating on hover right over the Eiffel Tower. From this position and angle and what’s lighting up your mind’s eye’s frustrated prurient interest, the City of Light’s signature edifice looks quite obscene, the four supporting towers two sets of spread-legged and intertwined wirework thighs in carnal embrace, and the knoblike protrusion atop it seems to be this phallic French monument’s equally monumental glans, squarely beneath your quivering buns.
The vision is a turn-on and a turn-off. Quite literally massively sexual and massively gross.
“What kind of pervert are you?” you demand, hastily looking away.
“A Sky Captain.”
And, rising, he takes you by the hands, and pulls you to him, belly-to-belly, pubes to pubes, he still lasciviously engorged if not even more so, you likewise even more somatically aroused, despite, or perhaps even because of, your frustrated and outraged ire.
“Close your eyes,” he tells you insinuatingly, snaking his hand between your legs and stroking the quick of you even more insinuatingly. “Imagine we’re standing atop the Eiffel Tower.”
He looks you right in the eye with an intensity that’s both terrifying and terrifyingly erotic. You can’t help yourself, you have to close your eyes.
“Imagine leaping off it together into the freefall freedom of the air, don’t be afraid, this is just a dream, you’ve had flying dreams, now haven’t you, who hasn’t, and you’ve had sexual dreams, you can’t deny it, and old Dr. Freud would insist they come from the same place. . .”
He presumes even more welcoming liberties with his thumb and forefinger, melting your fears with your own heat, opening you up like a flower. . .
“This place. . .”
You’re spreading you thighs, you can’t help it, you don’t want to help it. . .
“Now open your eyes.”
You can’t help yourself, and now maybe you don’t want to. You do.
“Look down.”
You’re standing in midair in his tight sensual embrace, legs spread wide high above the Eiffel tower, held aloft on the magical power of his hand, on your own erotic energy coursing up your chakras like the elan vitae of the goddess you seem to be in that moment, as he brings you to the brink and holds you there, palpitating in the near ecstasy of it, soaring on the delicious energy of your presently not unwelcome frustration.
“The Flying Fuck,” he tells you knowingly. “You’ve always dreamed of it, now haven’t you, one way or the other, who hasn’t, it’s the impossible dream and the dream of the impossible. Until now. Because now we can really do it.”
“You’re crazy! It is impossible!”
The magic is suddenly all gone.
You’re standing on a spongy transparent floor in an airship over Paris. This guy is running the mother and motherfucker of all pussy-teasers on you with his hand and the most outrageous seduction in history with his words, made all the more outrageous because it’s so utterly seductive. He’s made you want it more than you’ve ever wanted anything, but you know you can’t have it. Like a bad daddy handing his kid the most delicious lollypop in the sweet shop and then snatching it away.
You shove him away. He doesn’t resist it. He grins and he’s still got a grinning erection. You’re about to punch the son of a bitch in the mouth.
“Oh no it’s not!” he tells you forcefully. “Oh yes we can! Oh yes I have! ”
“You have. . ? We can. . ?” You hate yourself for practically whimpering like a dog begging for meat off the dinner table. “But—”
“How?” He does an abracadabra move like a schlocky stage magician. “With magic, of course. Don’t you believe in magic?”
“In the magic of a young girl’s soul?” you sneer. “In the magic of rock and roll? Give me a break!”
“This airship is floating on vacuum, now isn’t it, on nothing but nothing. Can’t your young girl’s soul see magic in that? So why not thee and me beneath our own magical balloons?”
Put that way, you can imagine how, but. . .
“How come I’ve never heard about this? How come it’s not in the supermarket tabloids? How come it’s never been on cable TV?”
“Because the best magic is secret magic,” he suggests.
You give him a fish-eyed stare.
He shrugs. “Because most jurisdictions keep their friendly skies rated G. After all, these days you can’t even light up a cigarette in an outdoor soccer stadium. Mardi Gras over Rio, maybe, but Orlando or Salt Lake City? It might not scare the horses over Paris or Amsterdam, but imagine the rubbernecking traffic jams!”
You can’t help laughing at that, but an exhibitionist within you that you didn’t know was there can’t help but being turned on by the sleazy fantasy.
Fantasy? Haven’t you entered that Magic Kingdom already, and certainly not the Disney version, and a dirty little bird is whispering into your nether lips that, yes, you’re up for it.
“Where?” you find yourself asking breathlessly.
“Where there’s no law that says those who go up have to come down, put that in your bong and smoke it, Werner von Braun.”
“Where on Earth is that?”
“Beyond the rainbow,” says the Sky Captain, “and somehow, I don’t think we’re gonna be in Kansas, do you? Come on Dorothy, click your heels. . .”
And you do, you click the heels of your naked feet, one, two—
—and on the third beat, you’re wearing high-heeled red pumps, and there is a rainbow, and theCloud Nine is sailing through it.
It must be magic, for now you’re standing beside the Sky Captain in full kit at the bow of the upper deck promenade, and you’re once more decked out as the Coca Cola girl.
And if that’s not the Emerald City the airship is easing into aerial orbit around, it certainly belongs floating over Oz. A ring of greenhouse glass through which you can make out the furnishings of hotel suites embraces the equator of a glittering neon-pink globe the size of an asteroid big enough to be the one that did in the dinosaurs to make room for hot-blooded life, and there’s plenty of that on display.
Slung a few hundred feet below the giant disco ball is an even huger globe of netting made of synthetic fiber that’s all but invisible, a miniature planet made entirely of air. Swimming within it like a cage full of soaring birds are scores of oversized and overthick hang glider balloons. Hanging from them are couples—well not all of them, some of the vacuum wings seem just ungracefully capable enough to support threesomes—a tropical bird tank of naked or minimally fetishistically accoutered human flesh performing every conceivable variation of the Sky Captain’s Flying Fuck in mid-air.
It’s the grossest erotic sight your eyes have ever seen, a silent Casino show version of the Kama Sutra, and yet there’s a beauty to it too, the clean beauty of a vast naked ballet unfettered by gravity or shame or self-awareness. Okay some of the couplings are less than graceful, and some of the dancers could lose some flab, but it’s hard to conceive of what you’re seeing as “dirty,” there’s a freedom to that dance that makes you want to leap into it like a land-bound seal back into the frolicsome sea.
With who doesn’t really seem to matter, in that moment you’re another totally sensual pure devil-may-care animal.
And he’ll do.
“Shall we dance?” you breathe at him, taking his hand.
“Are you sure this is your fave rave dreamtime fantasy?”
“Sure enough to give you a try.”
“Look down.”
Transfixed by the vision within the ethereal net, you haven’t. Now you do.
There’s a small island there in an azure sea, a Greek one, to judge by the graying white ruins one side of the shore. The rest of the island is ringed by golden sands clogged with swimmers and sunbathers. You can’t see faces from this distance, but you know damn well in what direction their eyes are focused. Hotels front on the beaches for two thirds of the way around the island. There are yachts in a marina. You can hear the faint music of steel drums and electric guitars. An even fainter aroma of barbecue, sunscreen, tropical drinks shaded by paper umbrellas, two-stroke dune-buggy fumes, pollutes the innocence of the air.
“If it’s Tuesday, this must be Tijuana,” you groan.
“Oh it’s a little classier than that, but a lot more expensive! The exhibitionists in the sky have to pay through the nose to join in the dance, and it’s not that much cheaper for the voyeurs paying to just look.”
The vacuum air has quite whooshed out of your horny balloon.
“If you think—”
“It’s not about what I think, it’s about what you think,” he tells you. There’s something challenging in his eyes as he says it, sexual yet not sexual, unfathomably challenging, a seriousness behind the Captainly sex object facade you’ve never seen there before.
“You really do want to know what I think. . .”
“I really do want to know what you think.”
“Is this a test?”
“You could call it that.”
“It’s a desecration!” you blurt. “Up here in the clouds, free spirits, exhibitionists or not, are doing their mating dances for their own pleasures, and down there on the ground they’re watching it with their hands in their pants like pigs.”
He smiles at you radiantly. “You pass.”
“You mean I fail. I’m not going to—”
He silences you with a finger on your lips. “You pass. You really think a nice guy like me would be caught dead rolling in the air with you in a place like this? Not my style, babe, not the real deal, if you say yes, I say no. If you say stay, I say go.”
“Go where?”
“Wherever the angel of your spirit fears not to tread,” he says, sliding his hand oh so knowingly, oh so sweetly between your thighs. “Wherever the devil within you makes you want to go. We’re on top of this world together, and this Sky Pilot’s making you the captain of his soul. There’s more to this than dreamt of in their pornographic philosophies, the ying-yang of it is it takes two kindred spirits to reach the next level. Nothing personal exactly, but we’ve got to be. . . making love.”
“Making love? Where?”
“Anywhere that makes you feel. . . romantic, darlin’,” he croons. “Take me to the garden of your deepest heart’s desire. That’s the deepest desire of mine.”
He takes your hand and places it squarely between his legs. “Think of me as the genie of this magic lamp, little mistress,” he tells you. “Rub it and you get your wish. But I’ve got a better deal than that poor ectoplasmic harem eunuch. I get to go where your wishing makes it so too.”
You stroke it, no fairy godfather’s wilting wand this! And—
#
You and the Sky Captain are hanging nude together from bungie cords in balmy body-temperature mid-air under a black night sky brilliant with stars, the Milky Way a gauzy white wedding veil. Above you, the vacuum balloon is visible only as a wing-shaped occlusion of the heavenly starscape.
You take him in your arms, and you float there silently together in the tender black sea of night until the horizon begins to purple into a deep blue, and the rim of the sun peering up over the horizon line is bright enough to reveal what lies below.
A fluffy rolling white cloud-deck stretches from horizon to horizon.
But no, as the waxing sunrise casts a warm amber radiance and long chiaroscuring shadows over it, the cloud deck becomes an endless greening rainforest canopy seen from on high, hills and valleys from which the tentative songs of awakening birds rise up towards you, the rich sweetly earthy perfume of the foliage shrugging off the mists of the night.
You kiss, long but softly, open-mouthed, but there’s no frenzy of mating tongues up here, it’s a romantic kiss, a melding of the breaths of kindred spirits, of the angels of the air. And as if in response, as if at your silent summons, birds arise towards you from the forest canopy, shoals and schools of golden canaries, brilliant finches every color of the rainbow, as if you were snorkeling above a reef of tropical fish.
Then you are one with the tropical birds of the air as they dip and swirl around you, and you join in the dance, diving, banking, rising, in languid slo-mo, laughing and crying out in innocent delight. And as the sun rises halfway above the horizon in a crown of flaming rays fading the stars into a sky of radiant royal blue, you turn towards it, and he glides into the flowering quick of you with the same innocent grace.
Below a billion flowers are likewise unfolding and opening themselves up to the glory of the new day, red, yellow, blue, rose, purple, pink, all the colors of the floral firmament, transforming the forest canopy into an infinite Arabian Nights tapestry, a flying carpet of flowery majesty rocking and rolling on the sunrise breezes; wrapping you in an invisible cloud of overwhelmingly erotic and tenderly romantic fragrance you soar up into the dawn’s early light on the dance of his cock within you that rises and rises but never seems to descend, taking you higher and higher up out of the caresses of your lower lips upon it, up, up, and away from even fleshly organic rapture, your body rising and dissolving into the light.
A single vast swarm
of black and orange Monarch butterflies emerges from the forest of flowers and explodes into a silent fireworks fanfare, silky wings tickling you the last quantum of the way as you feel him riding up and over within you, as you, and he, and the sun, and your mutual bodily completion are transformed into one rapturous celestial light.
TERRY BISSON
b. 1942
Terry Ballantine Bisson was born in Madisonville, Kentucky, and raised in Owensboro, 1942--1960. He attended Grinnell College in Iowa and the University of Louisville.
After a brief time in Louisville, he moved to NY City, where he lived on and off for some thirty years, with sojourns in the hippie communes of the Southwest and South from 1969-1975. He worked as an auto mechanic and as a magazine and book editor. He published his first novel in 1981, and has been a working science fiction writer ever since. Politically he was part of the New Left, associated with the John Brown Anti-Klan Ctte and the May19 Communist Organization.
He has three children, Nathaniel, Peter and Zoe by his first marriage to Deirdre Holst of NY; and two stepchildren, Kristen and Gabriel and a daughter Welcome, with Judy Jensen, his wife and companion of 40 years. He and his second wife Mary Corey (of NY, Colorado and LA) are still fast friends.
Since 2002 he and Judy have been living in Oakland, California.
Bisson is the author of several novels: WYRLDMAKER (Pocket, 1981); TALKING MAN (Arbor House, 1987), a World Fantasy Award nominee; FIRE ON THE MOUNTAIN (Morrow, 1988, PM, 2009); VOYAGE TO THE RED PLANET (Morrow, 1990); PIRATES OF THE UNIVERSE (Tor, 1996), the most-reviewed SF novel of 1996; THE PICKUP ARTIST (Tor, 2001); NUMBERS DON’T LIE (Tachyon, 2005)--and two novellas, DEAR ABBEY (PS Publishing, 2003), nominated for the British Science Fiction Association (BSFA) award, and PLANET OF MYSTERY (PS, 2009). Overlook Press of NY released his ANY DAY NOW, in March of 2012.
Bisson's short fiction has turned up in Playboy, Asimov's, Omni, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Harper's, Socialism & Democracy, Tor.com, Southern Exposure, Infinite Matrix and Flurb. It is fairly often anthologized. A first collection, BEARS DISCOVER FIRE, was published by Tor in the fall of 1993. IN THE UPPER ROOM, published by Tor in May 2000, includes the Locus and Nebula award winning "macs," which also received France's Gran Prix de l'Imaginaire. In 2005 San Francisco's TACHYON published a hardcover collection, GREETINGS. PS of England published BILLY’S BOOK in 2009. (An online version illustrated by SF legend Rudy Rucker is available free online.) A new collection, TVA BABY, is a 2011 PM title.