by Pat Powers
Chapter 22
A discreet tug on my cock
A discreet tug on my cock by Lady Astra got me out of my dark musing and got my attention back to the dance. Of course Lady Astra would not tolerate inattention when dancers were dancing. Not that I minded watching.
"The seduction is over," said Astra. "They have brought their audience into the spirit of the dance. Now they move into a more lively dance that expresses their feelings. Typically in Gorean dance this often devolves naturally into the floor exercises."
"Floor exercises?" I asked. "Like in gymnastics?"
"Floor exercises, yes," said Astra. "Not like in gymnastics."
Something about the way Astra said that made me suspect that the Gorean floor exercises were ... well, the kinda thing I'd come to expect from Gorean slavegirls.
As Astra predicted, the musical tempo picked up. It was familiar. I found myself rocking back and forth a little in time to it. Lady Astra's hand rocked back and forth a little on my cock. Felt kinda nice. The tune seemed familiar, and suddenly I realized that I was listening to a performance of Cyndi Lauper's "She-Bop" played on synthesizer and Middle Eastern stringed instruments, flute and drums, and without the annoying vocals.
The dance quickly became much more raunchy than the seduction. And yet it was a joyous, upbeat sort of raunchiness. The dancers flung their hips and butts with abandon, sending their veils and jewelry flying and jangling around them. But the moves of the hips were authentically raw and urgent and sexual. These were women who knew from personal experience to what uses the area between their hips might be made, and that knowledge flowed from their hips as they moved.
I had many times before seen strippers make similar moves, though never with such ferocious sexual intent. The strippers made the moves, but they really didn't MEAN them. The Gorean dancers were dancing for their masters and husbands and lovers and they MEANT every last finger swirl, hip twitch and lip lick. It made their dance an order of magnitude sexier.
Chapter 23
Her habit of wearing nothing but a sling thong whenever she appeared in public
Greyman9 was a tough enough cypher to make a hacker's heart sing with pleasure at the thought of breaking it, but PGP with a 1024 key was no picnic, either. Although Thomson thought he could have broken the code eventually using distributed processing, Bowman's finding the private key code made things one hell of a lot easier.
Thomson had opened all of Speakman's PGP-encrypted files within minutes using the key Bowman had provided. Then he ran a text-search utility much like the one Bowman had used earlier on Speakman's hard drive, searching the now clean ASCII text for "April" and "dancer" and "Gorean" and "kidnap" and such.
The hits on "April" all related to the month. The hits on "dancer" all related to dancers, but not in a way that seemed to relate to April Dancer -- none referred to belly dancers or belly dancing. There was nothing on "Gorean" but a surprising number of hits for "kidnap."
The bulk of the hits for "Kidnap" were in a single file folder whose contents consisted almost entirely of stories about women being kidnapped and raped. Well, kinda raped -- in many of the stories, the victim quickly fell in love with her captor, often during the rape or directly as a result of it.
The stories were all badly written -- typically, they began like this: "Sandy was a petite blonde whose breasts were extremely large and whose long, tanned legs led up to a butt that was round and luscious. Her turned-up nose and the spray of freckles beneath her laughing green eyes made her the center of attention in any gathering, that and her habit of wearing nothing but a sling thong whenever she appeared in public."
Thomson glanced at a couple of the stories, found them fairly disagreeable but not the sort of thing that constituted a smoking bullet -- no plans for kidnapping or anything like that. They were a pretty good indicator that Speakman was still indulging in rape fantasies, but Thomson wasn't surprised by that.
The AOL username and password gave Thomson a chance to check Speakman's mail. Here Thomson finally caught a break. Reading unopened mail would have given Speakman a clue that he'd been hacked, so if Speakman had been the kind that deleted or saved and then deleted his old mail as soon as he got it, there wouldn't have been much Thomson could do without giving away his game.
But like most folks, Thomson kept old mail in the system, discarding only junk mail and other stuff of little interest. This gave Thomson about a hundred pieces of mail to deal with. He sighed and started opening them, knowing most of them would be boring, fearing that all of them would be. But he would keep at it because there were few pleasures as keen as the pleasure of putting the smoking bullet in your clients' hands.
Chapter 24
A fleeting feeling that shines briefly on the conscious mind and then vanishes like a shaft of sunlight obscured by clouds
At the end of "She-Bop," the music switched to a song I recognized immediately because the flute had been discarded for tenor saxophone, and a jazzy version of Edgar Winters' "Easy Street" arose. The dancers were now paired off, and they began removing each others' thongs and bras, slowly and sensuously, displaying the revealed womanly goodies to the audience in time to the music, with friendly flourishes, as if they took pride in one another's appearance. Not all of the dancers were wearing thongs and bras to begin with. Those dancers who were already naked paired off and began caressing one another in a sensuous way, displaying one another's charms to the audience as they stripped off various items of clothing and ornamentation.
In short order, all the dancers were naked. Well, kind of naked. They still wore their jewelry, and typically there was a lot of it -- armbands, collars, ankle cuffs, waist chains, slave rings, toe rings, nose rings, navel jewels, pussy rings and pussy jewelry. One of the dancers wore a butt plug whose exterior was encrusted with jewels. There were also silk scarves still on their bodies, attached to their headbands, their waist chains, wrist cuffs and on bands around their knees.
The newly naked dancers joined the already-naked dancers in caressing each other. They did not play to the audience in any obvious way -- they didn't glance at us and leer or anything -- but they did caress each other in rhythm to the music, and their bodies moved in rhythm as well.
I felt a gentle squeeze on my cock and realized that there had been, as they say, "a stirring in my loins." I glanced at Astra, who glanced back at me and grinned and gave me another squeeze.
Back to the dance. The slow, gyrating saxophone wails of "Easy Street" lent themselves handily to the dancers' moves as they continued caressing one another's bodies, and responding to their caresses. Their moves were still dancelike but were suffused with intense eroticism.
For example, one of the moves that the dancers did was to stand facing each other with their feet interlocked, i.e., one dancer's foot was between the other dancer's feet so that their groins were almost in contact -- maybe they were in contact, it was hard to tell. While so positioned, each of them leaned backward while pulses traveled from their sternum to their mons in response to the undulations of their bodies, and their hands weaved sinuously in the air, above, beside and behind them. It was a brilliant metaphor for genital-to-genital sex, but done so powerfully, with such grace and skill that it transcended the sexual and became something that included the sexual but was also something more, something that drew on all of the human spirit that responded to feminine grace, beauty and power.
The dance evoked a powerful response in the audience. The tone of the cries arising from the audience went from encouragement and pleasure to a full-throated, growling response to the dance. Some of the sounds the guys were making resembled screams and growls more than anything else, but there was a note of approval and pleasure in them as well.
As the dance progressed, pairs of the dancers began sinking down to the floor. Now they writhed together and separately, still in time to the dance, their bodies expressing depths of sexual feeling, animal pleasure in the feel of their own bodies and those of their fellow danc
ers, and longing for the audience. Their languorously outstretched arms, their legs that extended fully with unspeakable grace, their butts that twitched and rolled and rose in the air to reveal all, then sank down to cloak its womanly mysteries in its softly rounded shadows.
As I watched the dancers, it was as if a chasm had opened up before me, a chasm in which I saw unguessed new powers in the human spirit, and in human sexuality. This dance was a powerful expression of the raw female nature of these women, feelings which might only be expressed in dance because they were so unknown, so buried in the human spirit that their expression ordinarily came only in vague glimmerings, something so tiny as a gesture, a comment, a fleeting feeling that shines briefly on the conscious mind and then vanishes like a shaft of sunlight obscured by clouds.
These Gorean women had drunk deep of their female natures, unfettered by any care about what they should be feeling, and now expressed their natures so powerfully in their dance that it blew right past my conscious mind to the hidden recesses of my soul, where it shone with the pitiless, almost inhuman clarity with which pure experiences, untrammeled by conscious interpretation, manifest themselves.
The dance, the air that flowed around us, the feel of Astra's hand on my cock, the lust at the sight of those bodies flowing, writhing and whirling onstage, the cries of the audience, the cries of the dancers, all were merged into an overwhelming now that flooded my senses and filled my mind with a raw sense of lust and power and love.
I looked down at Astra's face and found her eyes gazing up at my face, luminous, almost glowing with the powerful feelings pent up behind them. I was not really aware of what I was doing when I swept Astra into my arms and kissed her full on the lips, a kiss she returned ardently. We tore each others' clothes off as we embraced and ran our hands over each others' bodies.
In moments we were lying on the floor naked, and Astra's body writhed urgently beneath mine. I thrust my cock into her, and she cried out as she received it. I grabbed her wrists and pinioned her hands on either side of her head as I thrust repeatedly into her. She moaned and writhed and her legs spread wide on either side of me as she responded to her own spirit. Her lips sought mine and we kissed as our bodies merged, a long deep kiss that was as simple and sexual as the thrust and response of our genitals.
Her hands writhed in my grip, not in an attempt to escape them but in passion.
"You are mine," I said, my voice guttural and thick with emotion.
"I am yours," Astra cried, "I belong to you." Tears were running from her eyes.
And so I took Astra there on the gym floor, with others around us, but totally unmindful of them. I took her like an animal, with no thought for her pleasure, or even for mine -- there was no thought at all in my mind, only a ferocious hunger for the woman writhing beneath me.
I did not see the dancers finish their dance with their posteriors raised to the audience, legs spread, asses rolling and twitching in an ancient signal of readiness and desire. I did not see the dancers crawling off the stage to the darkness of the audience, where they extended their wrists for binding, or their ankles, or opened their mouths for gagging, and then they continued the dance, this time with partners who took them to that blazing place that their dance had described.
Afterwards, as I lay with Astra's body snuggled deliciously against mine, I realized with a jolt that April Dancer was not an isolated talent arising miraculously from a welter of mediocre dancers practicing an obscure dance form. She was instead the best avatar of that form, a natural part of the dance that was being performed here. She would fit right in among these dancers who had sweated and writhed naked before us, exposing their labia and the souls with the same raw abandon, full of delighted submission to the spirit of the dance.
The mainstream saw only a pale, watered-down reflection of the dance I had seen, reflected in April's dance. They thought it was she that was the genius, but the true genius of April's dance was here among these sweaty, ordinary women who had found the power to express themselves publicly as sexual beings and human beings and spiritual beings, all in one transcendent orgy of flesh and love and beauty and power. April was merely a finely wrought, relatively family-friendly expression of that spirit.
The mainstream was fascinated by April because it was only natural to respond positively to the spirit of her dance. The mainstream's hangups about sex would have prevented them from responding directly to the true Gorean dance I had witnessed, but they could glimpse it through April and so they found April a brilliant talent, a genius. And maybe for her ability to reflect what was so powerful and true in Gorean dance in a form that mainstream audiences could dimly understand, she was a genius.
That was why she was so hated by some, I realized suddenly, that was why she was kidnapped. April and her dance were in fact subversive, deeply subversive in a dangerous and subtle way. Her dance didn't express ideas in words that could then be countered by words issued from a tame talking head. The ideas that flowed from her hips and her hands flowed into her audience's subconscious minds, where they took root unseen and unfelt until they flowered into ideas and attitudes that their recipients might never realize had flowed from the expressions of a dancers' body.
And when it was over, and everyone rose from the floor, everyone smiled and laughed and joked with one another, as if some great deed had been accomplished, because the raw sexual event that had just occurred had not been in the nature of a denial of all that was best in their humanity, but a confirmation of it.
"Well, so I have an Astra now," I said, caressing her hips and butt.
"Yes, you do," Astra said. "I belong to you."
"Is there some Gorean way of signifying ... " I asked.
"You collar me," said Astra. "But you can do as you want to do."
"I'd like to tie your arms behind your back and my bathrobe belt around your neck and lead you out of here naked and leashed," I said.
"I would love that," Astra said.
I heard cheering and cries of congratulations from those who were not still locked in sexual embraces as I walked out with Astra on a leash.
Chapter 25
The losers at the bookstore fingered us
Back at my apartment, I swore softly under my breath as I took brief notes about all the phone calls I had received. Naturally, things would start breaking just as soon as I was out of contact.
It was too late to do anything much, so I went to bed. It took me a few minutes to fall asleep -- unusual, and I was up at the crack of dawn.
Unfortunately, most of the people I wanted to talk to were not up at the crack of dawn, so I got on my computer and did some research on some of the names that Andrew had given me.
Andrew was generally in his office by 9:30. I did not want to call him there, mainly because Andrew was suspicious enough of phone lines at the best of times. With this Greyman9 code freaking him out, he would only want to talk face to face.
So at 8:45 I fired up the van and headed over to Andrew's office. I was waiting in his parking lot when he arrived at work. I got out as he did.
Sure enough, Andrew put his fingers to his lips as I approached. I stood silently next to him as he unlocked his door and we stepped inside, and waited while he locked the door and led me to his back office. He locked that door, too, and then checked on several pieces of electronics sitting behind his desk.
"Well, we're not absolutely safe, even here," said Andrew, "but it'll have to do until I can think up something better."
"So you think the CIA is in on this?" I asked.
"It's definitely one of their codes," said Andrew. "Very tough stuff. Nobody else uses it, or can use it."
"Tougher than PGP?" I asked.
"Yeah, mainly because it uses longer keys," said Andrew, "but it's thought that it has a few nasty twists beyond PGP as well."
"Have you cracked it yet?" John asked.
"No, and I doubt that I will," said Andrew, "since nobody's ever been known to crack it."
"I
thought you hacker guys cracked everything sooner or later," I said, goading him a bit.
"This would be a case of later rather than sooner," said Andrew dryly. "Greyman9 is serious shit. And you can't go after it with distributed processing, because it's illegal to try to crack it. So you're stuck with local resources, while the boys up at Langley have access to supercomputers. They're in petaflop territory, we're piddling around with gigahertz. No fair."
"So the guys at Langley have you out-muscled," I said. "That's a shame, this could be who I'm looking for. CIA black hat types are definitely better suspects for what's been going on than the people I've run into so far. Were you able to get the number she was calling?"
"No," Andrew said. "Or rather, I got the number, but it leads nowhere -- it's a cell phone but there's no registration information to be found, which is highly irregular. It's like somebody with an in with the government is hiding the information, y'know."
"Well, much as this points to the CIA, I'm still not buying it," I said, "at least, not just yet. April Dancer is a lot of things to a lot of people, but I've uncovered nothing to make me think she's a national security risk. And the CIA has done some pretty dicey things in the past, but frankly, I can't see this working out at all well in terms of risk and reward unless there's something I don't know going on."
"Like you say, the CIA has done some dicey things," said Andrew. "And if this were an FBI code, I'd be wondering why you were so naive right now. Maybe it IS an FBI op and they are trying to cover their tracks by using an old CIA code."
"Unlikely," I said. "They could cover their tracks just as well using souped-up PGP and they wouldn't risk pissing off the CIA doing it. No, I'm thinking this isn't an official government mission at all. I'm betting this is something being done on the sly by some CIA ideologues."
"Mopus Deim?" Andrew asked.
