A Feast Unknown

by Philip José Farmer

  My penis was rising like a drawbridge.

  Caliban looked at it and then shouted, savagely, “I will tear your prick off, my friend, and keep it for a trophy! It was with that that you raped my cousin, my beautiful Trish!”

  I said nothing. I continued to advance.

  “You killed her!” he shouted. “You raped and murdered her and you threw her body to the hyenas!”

  I did not know what he was talking about. It was evident that he thought I had committed some crime upon someone he loved. I knew it was useless to reason with him, so I kept on walking toward him. And my penis was now rigid and at a 45-degree angle to my belly. It seemed ready to burst with blood. This bothered me, because I needed every bit of energy for the combat. Also, I must admit, I felt ridiculous and so was at a disadvantage. This feeling resulted in anger, and I did not want my judgment dissolved in its heat.

  I was now close enough to see the color of those peculiar eyes. They were whirlpools of gold-flecked bronze, and they did not look quite human.

  “You monster!” he shouted. “Don’t you care? Doesn’t it disturb you at all?”

  It was no use telling him I was innocent, and I knew that he had put his weapons aside for the same reason that I would have. I was the only great challenge he had ever met among men.

  I stopped, pulled in my arms from the side, and extended them before me. He stepped forward, halted, and put out his hands. I moved forward another step, and we gripped each other’s hands. I exerted pressure to throw him off balance; he did the same to me.

  This was not to be a long drawn out battle. There would be no kicking, gouging, kneeing, hitting with the fists or the edge of the palm. Our positions were far too precarious for those. Moreover, both of us, I believe, wanted to demonstrate his superior strength in a simple and undeniable manner.

  I had never met so powerful a man. He was not as strong as a gorilla, but then neither am I. He was not quite as powerful as the strongest of the males among The Folk. But then neither am I.

  We strained to throw the other to one side and so send him through the space between the mountains to the river three thousand feet below. Our muscles cracked; our bones creaked. Sweat oozed like our departing strength from our skin, stung our eyes, and ran coldly down our ribs and our crotches.

  We swayed back and forth in this footless dance. He glared down at me, and I up at him. I don’t know what he saw in the gray of mine, but I suspect that it was the same lust to kill that was in his gold-spotted bronze. We came closer and closer. Our arms were forced outwards by the pressure we applied and forced backwards, and we neared each other until our chests and noses were almost touching. His breath was hot on my wet face.

  Then we came together. Our chests rubbed. Our bellies touched. And I felt that elephant trunk of a penis against mine.

  I think that he was upset then. At least, his face changed from snarling hatred to an unreadable expression.

  He looked as if he wanted to look down to verify what his other senses told him. He did not dare to do so, of course. He, no more than I, dared to change his attitude. The least unbalancing or weakening in one direction, and the other would upset him.

  Eventually, one would weaken, and the end would be swift then.

  Until that clasping of hands a few minutes before, I would not have believed that any human could withstand me so long. Now I knew that it was possible that I had met my match. More than my match.

  I knew it, but I did not really believe it. If I had, I think I might have weakened just a trifle with the doubt and the surprise. And that would have been enough for him.

  I was hoping that a similar doubt would corrode his strength just enough for my purposes. But there was nothing in the expression on his savagely handsome face or in those peculiar eyes or in the gracefully massive muscles to indicate that doubt was turning his bronze into lead.

  By then, our peters were crossed like swords.

  And I was beginning to feel the slow up-build of an orgasm.

  My aberrant condition was going to betray me. Kill me.

  No matter how I fought it, I would be subject to a certain amount of transport and involuntary contraction of muscle and loss of force.

  Caliban did not know what was happening, but he knew that something was occurring in me. He smiled thinly and said, “I am stronger than you, you filthy ape!”

  I could feel the slight tremors in his belly and a slight jerking in his penis.

  His eyes widened, and he said, “What the hell!”

  He was beginning to feel the same sensations as I!

  It was a question of who would ejaculate first, and I thought that it would be me.

  I was about to release him, if possible, and throw myself backward and away. If I did it quickly enough, and he was seized in an orgasm, I might be able to keep away from him until we were both over the spurtings, and we could then resume the fight on equal terms.

  He bit his lip and said, “God! What’s going on?”

  I tensed for my effort to break that metalled grip.

  A voice bellowed in English, “Stop! In the name of the Nine!”

  22

  The granite slab covering the entrance to the caverns had slid into a recess. Nine people stood on the apron of rock near the other end of the bridge. Eight were of the Nine. The tall long-bearded old man with the black patch over one eye was missing. The ninth person was a tall Negro dressed in the blue Roman toga-like robes of the Speaker for the Nine. He held a wooden staff, nine feet high, on top of which was carved a crux ansata. A third of the length down was a carved representation of the symbol which the Finns call hannunvaakuna.

  He shouted at us again so loudly that the mountain returned an echo. “No more fighting! Come to me, and I will give you the order of the day!”

  Caliban backed away from me until I could not reach him. He would not turn away until I said, “It’s over. For now.”

  His penis was beginning to shrink and to drop. Mine stayed erect for a much longer time. In fact, for a minute, I thought I was going to have the orgasm.

  The eight of the Nine were dressed in differently colored robes with hoods. Their faces were hidden, and they turned away and were gone before I reached the ledge. This was the first time I had ever seen more than three at a time. During the many years I had served the Nine, I had seen all of them. But it had always been three one year, another trio the next year, a third trio the following year, and then, the fourth year, the cycle began anew.

  I could not imagine why the old man whom we addressed as XauXaz was not present. I did not ask. The Nine discouraged questions.

  The Negro in blue was the majordomo, the Speaker for the Nine. He would serve for three months of the year and then go. I had been Speaker several years ago and my wife two years after that.

  He said, “Peace between you two until the Nine say war. Follow me.”

  We halted in the first cave, where he went through the ritual of getting us through the guards. These were five men and five women, naked as everybody except the Nine and the Speaker, but armed with automatic rifles. Behind them were heavy-caliber machine guns, flame-throwers, a whippet tank, and a Bofors cannon. They were serving their four-hour duty, as did everyone who came through this entrance.

  A woman took a sample of blood from our thumbs and disappeared into a wooden booth. She came out a moment later and handed two small cards to the Speaker. From a pocket in his robe he took two cards and matched them with the others. Then he handed all four to her and said, “Follow me!”

  The next cavern, unlike the first, was not lit with batteries of lamps on the walls and overhead fluorescent cylinders. It was dark, and we progressed through it by placing our hands on the shoulders of the man before us. Since I had been the Speaker, I knew that he was following a narrow beam of sound transmitted through a small device in one ear. If he strayed to one side or the other, the sound would die out. I did not doubt that all sorts of scanning devices were studying us.


  In the next cavern, which was empty, and was really a trap for any invader who got this far—the ceiling would fall on them and then the floor would drop out—I studied the Speaker. He was a tall, well-built, handsome Negro with a light-brown skin. He looked as if he were thirty.

  Suddenly, I knew why he seemed so familiar. He was a New Yorker, a millionaire who had recently disappeared after the explosion of his yacht in Long Island Sound. Several people had been brought in for questioning, but no one had been arrested. The newspaper articles said he was 60 years old but looked remarkably younger. He was supposed by the more superstitious in New York City to be using voodoo to prolong his youth. The black militants had accused him of being an Uncle Tom and of refusing to use any of his fortune to help his people. Furthermore, a million dollars was missing from his bank account.

  It was easy to understand the explosion and the disappearance, now I had seen him here. He was getting to the age when questioning and astonishment about his youthful looks would increase geometrically in proportion with the passage of time. He could use makeup to seem older, but that had its annoyances and limitations. The Nine had ordered that he “die.” He could start a new identity elsewhere after he had served his three months as the Speaker.

  I wondered if the Nine were thinking of the same thing for me. I could not go on forever with my present identity. Only the fact that I spent so much of my time away from civilization, and my passion for obscurity, had prevented an order from the Nine. Even so, when I went to England or elsewhere, I whitened my black hair and wrinkled my face.

  I suspected that Caliban was in my position. Rivers and Simmons had mentioned briefly that “Doc” had not been able to entirely hide his name and qualities from the world. A writer of pulps had somehow learned something of his strange rearing and training, his extraordinary, perhaps unique, qualities and abilities, and something of the hidden place where he rehabilitated criminals. The writer had used Caliban as the basis for a character, under another name, of course, in a series of wild science-fictional adventures, most of which were the result of his imagination. But there had been some fact in them. Apparently, the two old men had figured prominently in these adventures but also under different names.

  23

  The fourth cavern was enormous. It contained a village of prefabricated huts with bright lights on the end of tall stone pillars illuminating the lower part of the cave. The huts were provided with lighting, heaters, hot and cold running water, liquor, tobacco, and furniture.

  Although I had learned much when I was the Speaker and had been in twenty caverns, I did not know where the supplies came from or where the water was pumped or the electrical generators were housed. Nor did I know what entrance the Nine used.

  Caliban and I were marched into the central square of the village and dismissed. He went into the house marked with a card bearing his name: I went into the house prepared for me. Here I shaved, showered, and then ate a meal cooked by a famous Parisian chef. I wanted to gorge myself but I ate relatively little. I did not care to have a heavy bloated stomach when I went through the ceremony in the Council Cave of the Nine.

  The woman who served me was a big titian-haired Dane with the greenest eyes and the softest thickest reddest pubic hairs I have ever seen. She was only an inch shorter than I and truly had the figure of a goddess. I knew her well, since she often came to the caves at the same time as I.

  After I had eaten, I lay down on the bed. She lay down beside me and began to kiss me. I responded fervently and stroked and cupped her great shapely breasts, and gently rubbed the huge nipples. We went through the usual preludes of uninhibited and experienced couples, but when my penis failed to respond in the slightest to her skilled sucking, she stopped. She looked puzzled and hurt.

  She said, “You must have been through something terrible.”

  “Nothing to talk about,” I said.

  “Nothing to talk about! That means nothing to you?”

  I was silent. She said, “I heard about you and Caliban on the bridge.” She shuddered. And then, surprisingly, she laughed.

  “Cocks crossed,” she said. “What is the matter with you two?”

  “I wish I knew what is the matter with me,” I said. “Is there something wrong with Caliban, too?”

  “Aside from you, he’s the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen. But he has that horsecock. He can only get it into very large women, you know.”

  That did not seem likely to me. I was a doctor and I had also read much in medical pathology. I had never heard of a single authenticated case of a man with a penis so large that he could not get it into a normally sized woman, provided that there was lubrication and the woman was not frightened and endowed with a powerful sphincter. I told the Countess Clara Aakjaer so.

  She said, “You may be right. I told him to try me once, I thought I could take him. I was eager to try, but he said no, he knew it was no use. He wanted me to suck him off instead. I refused. I love to suck cock but only if it leads up to getting fucked. I’m funny that way.

  “Anyway, I know that he has had a long love affair with his cousin, Trish Wilde.”

  “She’s one of us?”

  “Yes. She’s an extraordinarily beautiful girl. She has his bronze coloring and even looks like a female Doc Caliban. But they never came here together. I just happened to be here once when she was. I knew her name but I didn’t connect her with Doc until I happened to run into her when I was visiting New York. She took me up to Doc’s apartments in the Empire State Building, and we had dinner together. We couldn’t talk about our common interest in the Nine, of course, because his other guests were outsiders. But afterwards we had a long talk. Trish, by the way, warned me to stay away from him. Outside the caves, he’s hers, she says.

  “But she was very frank. She said Doc could get into her but only with a lot of pain for her and she usually sucked him off. The worst of it is, Doc has great moral resistance to fellatio.”

  “What?” I said.

  “He was given a peculiar training from the age of two on,” she said. “It made him the greatest athlete and strongest man in the world—with the exception of yourself, of course. I don’t suppose he would have gotten to that state if he hadn’t had the physical foundation for it, he’s got the biggest bones of any man I ever saw—except you, of course.

  “He also was educated in the physical sciences and he became not only the greatest surgeon—under a different name by the way—but an extraordinary chemist, physicist, anthropologist, linguist, you name it. The man is disgustingly knowledgeable.

  “His father raised him to be a superman, the primary purpose of which was to do good and combat evil.”

  “Sounds like a super Boy Scout,” I said.

  “In a way, you’re right. His father hated evil with a passion you might call psychotic. His father was killed by criminals, you know.”

  “I didn’t,” I said.

  “Yes. Anyway, Doc was given a rigid moral training, and for a while he was thinking of becoming a minister. Would you believe that he had no sexual experience with a woman until he was twenty-seven?”

  “With a woman?” I said.

  “I mean he didn’t even masturbate. He suppressed his sexual feelings. He prides himself on his, self-control above everything, you know. He never brags about it, of course, he never brags about anything. Not bragging is part of the self-control bit. But you can tell he’s proud. I suppose that he may have been inhibited by the very size of his whang; it may have embarrassed him. This reinforced his moral reasons and ability to do without women. He told his colleagues, Rivers, Simmons, and the other three—I forget their names—that he was too busy to get involved with women. Besides, he didn’t want to endanger them.”

  “They didn’t accept all of that,” I said.

  “When Doc was twenty-seven, and was busting up a drug-smuggling ring in Los Angeles, he was captured. A woman, a member of the gang, the leader’s moll in fact, slipped him a drug and he was tied up
and carried off to a house up Topanga Canyon, I think Trish called it. Anyway, while the other gang members were gone, the woman—Big-Eyes Llewellyn, that was her name—raped Doc. She not only fucked him a number of times, she sucked his balls off.”

  “There was one woman who could get that bazooka in,” I said.

  “Yes, but Doc told Trish that she was a freak. Anyway, Doc tried not to respond but he failed hopelessly, abysmally. He found out what he was missing. The discovery did not delight him, it enraged him. He broke his bonds and killed the woman and escaped.”

  “He had to kill her?” I said.

  “No. That was what sent Doc into the first sickness of his life. He almost went insane after that; his conscience almost killed him. He had lost self-control, and committed two evil acts, for the first time and in rapid succession. First, the woman had made him lose his self-control by fucking him and then sucking him off. Second, his reaction to this resulted in another loss of self-control, and he had killed the woman as you would kill a chicken, by wringing the neck until the head came off. He confessed to Trish, a few years later when he met her, that he had an orgasm when the blood jetted out of her neck. It splashed all over him and the room.

  “He became very depressed and even suicidal for a year. He told no one what had happened. As far as his buddies were concerned, he had retired from society for a year to meditate and experiment. He went up to the Arctic Circle, somewhere in Canada, where he has a hideaway and stayed there for a long time. Then he came back with the intention of throwing himself into the battle against evil with a terrible fury. He would try to make up for what he had done by ridding the world of more evil.

  “It was then that he met his cousin. Apparently, their fathers had not seen each other since they were teenagers. Trish’s father had migrated from England to Canada and lost contact with the family. Doc’s father also came from England but much later. It was only by accident that they met and then found out they were related.

  “Doc and Trish fell in love. Doc told her all. Despite his moral prohibitions, he went to bed with her. She could take him, but it hurt her. She’s a big girl with a small cunt, or so she said. Then Doc did a strange thing . . .”