The Sex Sphere Read online

  "We'd better get out of here," Sybil said after a while, gently disengaging Virgilio's arm from her waist. "There'll be fallout."

  "The Rape of Persephone," Virgilio said, shaking his head. "Blasted to radioactive dust."

  "And all those poor police."

  "E vero."

  One of the feathered little gents chanced a peck at Sybil's hand. "Shoo," she said. Somehow the bird reminded her of Tom in a baseball cap. Same height.

  "Good-bye, Virgilio."

  "Good-bye. But we see each other again, eh?"

  "I don't know yet. I'll be at the Savoy, under Burton."

  "Burton?"

  "My last name."

  They kissed almost tenderly, then helped each other out of the pit. One of the penguins aaaawrked arrivederci.

  "This way," said Virgilio. "I know the man at the front gate. He can give you clothes."

  "And you."

  They walked through the park, the zoological garden, naked in the strangely warm night. Sybil had an unreal, larger-than-life feeling . . . as if she were a person in a book.

  In the magic of the moment, Virgilio divined her sentiments and said, "We are a painting come to life. The dust has settled."

  Sybil could feel the truth of this. The soul of some placid Dark Ages Eden scene, A-bombed into energy, was passing through.

  And then they were at the gates. Behind them frightened animals roared. Virgilio hammered at the guardhouse door. No answer. He kicked the door once, twice, thrice, then stopped to nurse his battered foot. The door swung open.

  At first Sybil was relieved . . . she'd begun to fear the guard was dead. But then the light hit the guard's face. Burned blind. Virgilio asked a rapid question, the man croaked something back.

  "He was looking out the window," said Virgilio. "Trying to see what the police were doing."

  The man's cracked skin was weeping lymph, his eye-whites were bright red.

  "Let's hurry and get away from this awful place," begged Sybil.

  Virgilio strode over to the guard-room closet and found a flimsy plastic raincoat. "Take this." He fumbled in the blind man's pocket and pulled out a ten-thousand lire note. "And this. Run now. The door to the right of the gate is open. I will help my friend to his car. Luigi."

  Blind Luigi leaned against Virgilio, babbling and hugging his arm. Sybil slipped on the raincoat, smiled a last good-bye at Virgilio, and rushed into the radioactive night.

  The main gate was flanked by two columns holding up snaky white elephants. To the right, just as Virgilio had said, she found a door that opened.

  Sybil walked a few hundred meters along the zoo's outside wall. Then came a street with traffic. A taxi, a real one this time, stopped. The excited driver had to take a circuitous route, skirting the cordoned-off streets near ground zero. He wanted to talk about it. But he spoke no English. Sybil kept quiet, trying to put her thoughts in order.

  The hardest thing to think about was . . . Alwin? His face and voice were gone . . . had she been married? But she had three children, didn't she? Or was it two? Sorrel, Tom and . . . Ida?

  Sybil entered the Savoy Hotel from the side, in case there were reporters in the lobby, and got the elevator up to their floor. Her parents had the TV on so loud that she could hear it down the hall.

  "Let me in!" she shouted, pounding the door. "It's Sybil."

  A child opened, a wet-faced little girl in a yellow dress. "Mama!" she cried. "Mama why were you gone so long? There was a bomb!"

  "I know, Ida." Sybil leaned to kiss her younger daughter's tense face. "I was there. I barely got away."

  "My name's not Ida, Mama. My name is Sorrel."

  Sorrel? Sorrel was eleven, not six. Or . . . ? "Well, look, where's Tom?"

  "Gran'ma put him in the crib with a bottle. Where's your clothes?"

  "Sybil." Lotte Burton, Sybil's mother, came rushing out of the suite's living room.

  She was a frail, pessimistic woman, originally Viennese. She'd met Cortland Burton, Sybil's father, on a youthful visit to America. He'd wooed and won her, and she'd settled there with him in Baltimore. And now Cortland had a big engineering-management job in Frankfurt.

  "Sybil, where have you been? You could have been killed! Have you heard? Have you heard what that Anarchist Archimedes did?"

  A jog of memory. "My . . . Alwin? They're blaming him for the bomb?"

  "You knew him? Oh, what will we do with you? And where did you get that dreadful raincoat?"

  "I . . . a man gave it to me."

  "And took your clothes? Sybil, even if you're single, you still have a child!" Lotte gestured at the diapered little girl crawling on the floor.

  Feeling dizzy, Sybil raised a hand to her face. Hadn't . . . ? She looked down at the tiny child. Sorrel? The shrinking baby slid onto its stomach and let out a newborn's mewling cry. Then disappeared. The children were all gone. They'd never existed.

  Chapter Eleven: The Machinery of the World

  I was crawling kata towards our space when the bomb went off. I couldn't tell if Sybil got away. But at that point I had problems of my own . . . big problems.

  In effect, the A-bomb burned a fleeting hole in the film of space that held Babs captive. She yanked her knotted tail free and bounded off like a bubble in deep water. I slipped and went tumbling ana.

  At first the tumbling had me totally disoriented. With each degree that I turned, the images around me would deform and change. Three given blobs might split or merge to two or five, while some other shape's angular facets would sprout interlocking crystals. It was a little like trying to make out a human body by watching a slideshow of three hundred sixty microtomed cross sections.

  But after a while some higher brain-center cut in, and I began mentally fitting the wildly changing scenery into a coherent four-dimensional whole. The process was really no more devious than the process by which one integrates the two hundred lines of a TV-screen picture into a single two-dimensional image . . . which is in turn interpreted as a three-dimensional scene. It's just a matter of processing information. Impossible? I saw.

  I saw Rome stretched out below me like a bright glass model, all open to the fourth dimension. Scanning further away, I could see Italy, Asia and the Arctic wastes . . . and the Earth's interior as well.

  Still further out coursed moon and sun, and planets bright and wee. The stars spread out the tangled skeins that knot to galaxies. The sprinkled whorls of starshine filled up man's mundane space; and looking down from up above, the celestial curve I traced.

  Oh yes.

  The space of our universe is the hypersurface of a vast expanding hypersphere. Babs had set me flying somewhere outside of it, all of me . . . and all my past.

  "What is man but a poor forked radish?" asks the Bard. Bad Babs the sex sphere had yanked me out of history like a carrot. Looking at my right hand I could see it through time as: a baby's chubby fist, a toddler's grubby paw, a schoolboy's ink-stained hand, an old man's trembling claw. There were the stitches I had in ninth grade, the ring I'd worn in college, the fashionable fingernail polish I might wear when I'm old. All at once.

  Earlier, I'd had glimpses of this, crawling ana Babs's breastline. My complete spacetime body was here, all of the Alwin Bitters sewn together in a long, four-dimensional stack. My awareness was primarily at the thirty-two-year mark. But all up and down my life I could feel myself as faintly real.

  I was aware of the past selves by means of a series of eidetic memory flashes . . . memories so bright and detailed as to be momentarily indistinguishable from the original events.

  My awareness of my future selves was a bit different. The future isn't fixed. A person's unlived lifeworm is, most often, a lashing blur, a constant skittering among the zillion options. When I tried to see into my future it was like watching all the world's TV channels at once: a multiplex information tangle adding up to white noise.

  I was floating high ana . . . or later than . . . normal space. Space was in motion, expanding like some huge
bubble. I noticed that as space grew up past any given cross section, that level of the worms would stop lashing and freeze into known history. Ana where I was, all the worms were still active, still flickering among many possible states.

  Free in hypertime, I writhed and hissed among the forms, transcendently aware. These variable futures were all in sync, dancing the music of mad cosmic glee, dancing the world's joy at its isness.

  My awareness sped up and I peered at one of the nearby forms, trying to make her out. It was Sybil, a few days hence, indeterminate, hypernow happy, hypernow sad. Looking at her form more closely, I could make out the fine grain, the individual atoms.

  A person's lifeworm is a tangle of atomic worldlines. A braid. The dotty little atoms trace out smooth lines in spacetime: you are the pattern that these lines make up. There is no one single atom that is exclusively yours. I breathe an atom out, you breathe it in. Your garbage helps my tomatoes grow. And so the little spacetime threads weave us all together. The human race is a single vast tapestry, linked by shared food and air.

  There are larger links as well: sperm, egg and umbilicus. Each family tree is an organic whole. Your spacetime body tapers back to the threads of mother's egg and father's seed. And children, if you have them, are forever rooted in your flesh.

  I'd dragged a lot of threads after me. Far down, at my spacetime body's thinnest end, my parents were deranged. And halfway up me dangled the three children: root hairs on my long stem of past. There was a certain slack, but now I'd drifted far enough to pull them out of normal space like me. I could feel the tugging in my groin.

  The four of us might have tumbled ever ana, ever farther from the moving present, pulling after us all traces of our pasts. But Sybil held. Unbreakable cords stretched from her to the children, and from them to me. For an instant the kids and I strained at Sybil's stable womb. And then my momentum was exhausted. The four of us went coiling back towards space's bright advancing curve.

  The children landed well, plugging right back into the holes they'd left, but I . . . I landed badly. It took a minute's wriggling to worm my way back into the compost of history.

  * * *

  The sudden thump brought Sybil bolt upright in bed. The children! Feeling her way in the dark, she hurried into the bedroom next door. There they were, the three little ones. Her treasure. Sorrel and Tom slept in the big double bed, and Ida nestled in the snowy whiteness of a roll-a-bed's crisp sheets. Everything was . . .

  "Sssshibyl?"

  The husky whisper seemed to come from the floor. Something long and thick was writhing there. Snake!

  "Ssshybil, it'sh me, Alwin."

  Alwin? A coil of flesh the size of a man's arm lay at her feet. A long pair of lips ran all along one side of it, strangely uniform lips which parted to reveal a single, unnaturally broad tooth.

  "I'm sshidewaysh," slobbered the long mouth. Rising up near one end of it was a sort of eye-stalk, a slit-irised eye some two meters long. A broad foot the size of a dining table leaned against Ida's bed, and a hugely distended beer-gut danced in midair.

  "What's the matter with you? The children . . . " She counted heads once more. "Were they gone with you?"

  "Yesh. Now hang on. I've got to get untangled."

  The mouth and eye withdrew. Two stacks of hands appeared next to the great jiggling belly. The foot over by Ida's bed skipped sideways . . . and then all the globs were gone. Sybil sat there silent. Once again her memories of Alwin took on solidity, and then he was in the room, the same as ever.

  A: Hello.

  S: Hi. You're back.

  A: How did you get away from the A-bomb?

  S: You wouldn't know, would you? Virgilio saved me. He took me out through a tunnel. It led to the zoo.

  A: No kidding. Virgilio. I hope you're not in love with him just because he fucked you.

  S: I'm not allowed to love anyone, not even you.

  A: Why do you say a thing like that? Look, you know where I was?

  S: Inside a giant ass. You jumped right in. It must have reminded you of Giulia.

  A: Is she dead?

  S: They're all dead, all three. And lots of police, too.

  A: What about me?

  S: What about you?

  A: Do they blame me?

  S: I'm not sure. They probably will now. For the last few hours everyone sort of forgot you ever existed. We survived.

  A: The children pulled me back.

  S: Yes, it was horrible. They got younger and younger and disappeared. I certainly hope you don't do that again.

  A: Aren't you curious about where I was?

  S: So tell me.

  A: I was in the future. The universe is a cross section moving up through hyperspace. Through four-dimensional spacetime. Babs pulled me up there and the worldlines of my sperm cells dragged the kids after. I'm surprised you didn't pull loose, too.

  S: Who's Babs?

  A: Babs the bad hypersphere. But why . . .

  S: Is that what the giant ass calls itself? It talks?

  A: I can't understand where she went. I didn't see her anywhere after the bomb went off.

  S: Let's go back to Heidelberg tomorrow. My father will buy us plane tickets.

  A: There must be a fifth dimension, a direction you can move in without worrying about time and your past self. Yes! That's it. At first, when I first peeked out of Babs, it was much more complicated than timeworms. That's what you are, you know.

  S: A timeworm?

  A: And we're all made of tiny hairs that are braided together. All men are brothers, all women are sisters . . . it's really true. We're patterns in a huge tapestry that weaves itself. But there must be other tapestries. A whole stack of them like in a rug store. The lashing ana ends might lead . . .

  S: Call the airport, Alwin.

  A: Do you think they're on duty this late? What time is it?

  S: Eleven-thirty. Oh shit.

  A: What?

  S: I just realized that it's going to be impossible to get tickets.

  A: The bomb?

  S: That's right. A lot of people are panicking about the fallout, even though they said on TV it won't amount to much.

  A: Of course they said that on TV. That doesn't make it true. Any idiot can figure that out.

  S: Don't start calling me names, Alwin, or I'll leave you flat.

  A: And do what? Go home with your parents?

  S: I don't want to hear your nasty comments about my poor parents. It's thanks to them we have this nice room.

  A: What happened to the other nice room? The one I paid for?

  S: That dump? We moved out when you got yourself kidnapped. If.

  A: If?

  S: Maybe the paper was right. You're the one who called himself the Anarchist Archimedes aren't you? Nobody really made you build that bomb. You wanted to. I bet you volunteered.

  A: You're nuts.

  S: All I know is that the police could show up here any time.

  A: God, this sucks. Babs was right.

  S: That is just so typical of you, Alwin, to be in love with a giant ass. I can tell, I can tell.

  A: I don't know why I'm on the defensive here. That stupid greaser Virgilio was really pumping it to you, last I saw. You loved it. You probably think he's something great just because he has an accent.

  S: He saved my life, Alwin. You got me into trouble and ran away. Virgilio stayed and helped me.

  A: He only helped because he had to. Green Death had him tied to you, for God's sake.

  S: How could you see what we were doing?

  A: I was out in hyperspace. At first I must have been in the fifth dimension. But when Babs took off I slid down to four-dimensional spacetime, and then just this. There's a great line in Flatland, you know, when A Square has been out in real space and he's falling back onto his two-dimensional world and sees how awful it is.

  S: It must be a real burden, Alwin, to have to be back with your family.

  A: The line goes like this: "One glimpse,
one last and never-to-be-forgotten glimpse I had of that dull level wilderness—which was now to become my Universe again." That dull level wilderness. Can you dig it?

  S: No.

  A: God. No wonder you wouldn't come loose when the children and I were tugging at you. You've got about as much sense of intellectual adventure as . . .

  S: Oh, shut up, Alwin. Let's get in bed.

  A: Where are my pyjamas?

  S: Your suitcase is over there.

  A: Thanks. Thanks for bringing it.

  S: You know, we still haven't done the Forum.

  A: The Forum.

  S: Do you think it'll be safe outside tomorrow? Or do you really think the fallout . . . ?

  A: I didn't see how big the blast was. Did it leave a crater?

  S: I don't think so. They showed it on TV. Most of that little museum is gone, of course, but you can still see a bit of the foundation and the front steps. And you know it's raining now. That's good, isn't it?

  A: Should be. Should wash it all into the river. Whatever you do, don't drink any more water here. It could have plutonium in it. Or eat any fresh seafood. Didn't they mention me on TV?

  S: Just at first, as the Anarchist Archimedes. As long as you were with Babs, you didn't seem quite real. It was like remembering a dream or a movie. I still can't get over that. It was like I'd never met you or anything. I felt so . . .

  A: What? Happy, free and liberated? Today's modern woman?

  S: Never mind.

  A: Look, if you hadn't yanked me back, I'd still be in hyperspace. I should have followed Babs. She moved sideways, like. Into the fifth dimension. The bomb set her free.

  S: How was that?

  A: This guy, a physicist called Lafcadio Caron . . .

  S: The man you killed in the Colosseum. Had you heard of him before?

  A: I didn't kill him, the snoids did. He was crazy. Heard of him? Yeah, I'd seen his name a few times, and I'd read one of his papers. What happened was that he did a proton-decay experiment and they trapped a hyperparticle, a piece of Babs. They stabilized it with a higher-dimensional force field. In physics, you see, we have infinitely many dimensions on the microlevel, but now . . .