by Rudy Rucker
"Not too close," I cautioned, keeping the bomb-core high overhead. "Just hose me down. Me and the death sphere."
He dialed up the nozzle and played a hard stick of water over my suit. Bits of black dust washed down with the clear rivulets. I raised one foot, then the other, letting him clean the soles.
"Don't forget my hands." The splattering pressure moved up my arms and played across my hands. For an instant the water got between my fingers and the bomb's steel shell. It shifted a bit. I stifled a scream.
If it fell from up there the Styrofoam really might be crushed. The mass would go hypercritical. The air would burn and we'd all see God. Half-assed, but effective. I kept wondering if I should just drop it and get this mess over with. But maybe I could still get out.
Peter turned the water off. "OK, kerl, you're clean."
The death sphere was getting heavy. Still holding it high, I jiggled it like Dr. J. ready to unloose a half-court swish.
"Beatrice," Peter shouted. "Open the door. Don't shoot. Don't shoot him."
The door rolled open. I could see Beatrice and Giulia out there, machine guns at the ready. I walked towards them, Godzilla with his giant boulder.
"Back off, bitches. Get the front door open. You, Giulia, you get the Maserati ready." They moved. Amazing, the respect that nuclear weapons bring.
So I rode out of the Supercortemaggiore garage, standing up in a convertible and clutching an atomic bomb. Just like the President of the United States.
Chapter Eight: The Attack of the Giant Ass
Sybil climbed out of a taxi in front of the Herald Tribune building. The children were safe at the Savoy with her parents, who'd arrived last night with Sorrel. Sybil was going to set Susan Spangle straight about that story she'd printed claiming that Atomic Alwin, the Anarchist Archimedes, had gone over to the Green Death voluntarily.
As she paid the driver, something strange caught her eye. A slowly moving purple convertible with someone standing up in it . . . a man dressed all in white plastic and holding a shiny metal ball over his head. The ball was bright in the hot afternoon sun. A politician? Some kind of ad campaign?
Nope. It was me. I saw her from fifty meters and yelled at Giulia to stop and let me off. I wanted to get the poison suit off before touching my wife.
"OK," Giulia said, casting a glance up through her heavily made-up eyes. "Arrivederci." Through this whole thing she had never seemed anything but languidly detached. I really had no idea what she was thinking.
But who cared. I was free and safe. I stepped gingerly down out of the Maserati. Giulia did a sharp U-turn and sped back towards the garage. We didn't have much time. Hurriedly I set the bomb down on the hot pavement and unzipped my radiation suit. What a relief to get out in the air again!
Sybil recognized me and came running down the sidewalk. "Alwin, Alwin."
"Sybil!" I picked up the bomb and hurried towards her as fast as caution would allow. This was no time to stumble. I hoped the water had washed all the plutonium dust off the bomb shell. "Get the cab back, Sybil, they're coming for us!"
Sybil heard the fear in my voice and called to her taxi-driver. She'd tipped him well, and obediently he rur-rurred thirty meters in reverse. The back door opened. Sybil hugged and kissed me. I picked up the bomb and we got in.
"Back to the Savoy," Sybil told the driver.
"Bene."
"What Savoy? Where are the kids?"
"My parents are here. They got a suite of good rooms, and the kids and I moved in with them. But, Alwin, how are you?" She glanced anxiously out the taxi's back window. "They're still after you?"
"I think they must be. I've got their bomb." I patted my steel soccer ball. "This, believe it or not, is an atomic bomb. Did you ever play with those little cracker-balls that you throw on the ground and they go off? This is like the same thing. It's full of plutonium."
"Oh, my God!" Sybil slid as far away from the bomb as possible. "Is it radioactive?"
"It's OK as long as it's sealed up tight. The plutonium in there is really poisonous though. You'd have to have one of those white plastic breathing suits to take it apart. We can turn it over to the police or something when we get to the hotel." I gave Sybil a kiss. The feel of her soft cheek brought back the memory of the sex sphere.
Thinking of the sex sphere, I suddenly recalled an image from Edwin Abbott's Flatland: A three-dimensional sphere who shows herself to the two-dimensional Flatlanders by moving through the plane in which they live. The Flatlanders are squares and triangles sliding around in a single plane, and when the sphere moves through the plane they see a circle which grows and shrinks.
"I can't believe you got away, Alwin," Sybil said, kissing back. "Let's get out of Italy as soon as possible. Let's leave tonight. We could go to my parents' house in Frankfurt."
"I'd rather just go to Heidelberg. I feel too shaky and fucked-up to face a family reunion." I sighed and looked at my trembling hands. "Maybe I can sell the magazine rights for my true-life adventure and we can move back to America. It's so much safer there."
"I know," Sybil said, putting an arm around me. "I feel so . . . exposed in Europe." We rode in silence for a minute. It was late afternoon of Holy Saturday, the day before Easter.
There was no business traffic, but plenty of tourists. An obelisk slid past, covered with hieroglyphs.
"How did you manage to get kidnapped in the first place, Alwin?"
"Oh, these guys tricked me. A big guy called Virgilio pretended to be a pimp. And somehow he got me into a taxi that . . . " My voice caught. There was something horribly familiar about the set of this taxi-driver's head.
A car behind us honked loudly and the taxi pulled over. "What are you doing?" demanded Sybil. "This isn't the Savoy!"
The driver turned, the same little wart as before. The front door opened and Virgilio got in, pistol in hand. The taxi pulled back into the traffic.
"These are the same guys," I told Sybil with a tired groan. "Where the fuck did you get this cab?"
"The man at the desk called it for me. Do something, Alwin!"
"I'll introduce you. Sybil, this is Virgilio Bruno and the wart. Wart, this is Bruno. Virgil, this is Sybil. Alwin, this is the Green Death's atomic bomb. Here, Virgilio, could you just take the bomb and let us off at the Savoy?"
"You have forgotten something, Alvino," purred Virgilio. "Something of Lafcadio's."
He meant the sex sphere. But I wasn't going to give her up without a fight. "I don't know what you're talking about."
"Everyone knows," insisted Virgilio. "Everyone knows from the news that Lafcadio stole something valuable from the Mont Blanc lab. He was a physicist there until the theft. Since then he spoke only about Dante and about spheres. I wonder what he had?"
Sybil stared at Virgilio in sick fascination. He was beautifully dressed in a white linen suit, with a light-pink silk shirt and a dark-salmon knit tie. His finely chiseled jaw was blue with whiskers, his nose was hooked and tough-looking and his eyes were soft with a brutal sensitivity. He was, in short, she'd most like to be abducted by. He gave her a lazy smile. She fought to keep herself from smiling back. She was being irrational. The man was evil, a ruthless criminal. But yet . . .
"Virgilio's right," Sybil heard herself saying. "I read it in the newspaper this morning. The dead man had stolen some special thing the Mont Blanc lab made. Some kind of degenerate supermatter?"
"Hypermatter," I corrected automatically, and gave Sybil a sharp nudge.
"So you have seen it?" Virgilio demanded.
"No, no. I'm just correcting the word. I do that for Sybil all the time. She's turned some of her memory functions over to me. We're symbiotes. But let's stick to the point. Here's the bomb. Worth maybe ten million dollars. Whether Lafcadio had a sample of hypermatter I have no idea. Just let us out. Here is fine."
We were driving through the Villa Borghese park, not far from the Casino Borghese art museum. Via Veneto was only a kilometer from here.
"Come
on, Virgilio," I repeated. I didn't bother threatening to set the bomb off because I knew Virgilio wouldn't believe me. Neither of us was the kind of person to set it off. He'd sell it to the government or to the terrorists, whoever offered more.
There was a sudden crack, and the rear windshield shattered. I threw myself down onto the seat, pulling Sybil with me. Someone was shooting at us. A tire blew out and the car lurched.
"Sybil," I whispered, "if anything happens to me, get Lafcadio's sex sphere. I have it in my pants pocket. It's a tiny sphere that grows."
Virgilio leveled his pistol over us and fired four wild shots out the jagged hole where the rear window had been. An answering bullet caught the wart in the back of his head. Bloody curds flew, and the car skidded out of control. I pressed the bomb into the seat springs and braced myself.
Blessedly, there was no crash. The car just coasted off the road onto the smooth grass, piddled this way and that and finally bumped to a stop. Virgilio fired off another shot, and there was a satisfying scream. But at the next triggerpull, his pistol only clicked.
"Fotte," Virgilio muttered. "Out of bullets."
Sybil sat up and looked around. A purple Maserati had pulled up next to the taxi. It, too, had a flat tire. A tall Italian woman in the driver's seat was pointing some kind of machine gun at them. The man in the seat next to the Italian woman lolled back, dying with his mouth open. Virgilio must have shot him.
I sat up, recognizing Giulia and the dying snoid, his splayed teeth bloody in the late afternoon sun. Too bad it hadn't been Beatrice. A police car sang in the distance, and Giulia looked agitated. I hoped she wouldn't start shooting.
Virgilio threw his empty pistol on the grass and stepped out of our taxi. "Let's make a deal," he suggested to Giulia. "You have us. But the carabinieri are coming. I have a hiding place. In the Casino Borghese. Your gun, my hiding place and we'll share fifty-fifty."
"What about us?" Sybil put in.
Virgilio gave her a calculating look, taking in her light-brown hair, her wide hips, her supple skin. "You are our hostages. You and Alvino . . . and Pauline Borghese. Let's hurry."
I had sort of used up my day's ration of initiative, and didn't even resist when Virgilio lifted the bomb out of the backseat. "Be careful not to drop it," was the best I could muster. "It could go off."
"Bene," Virgilio growled. He led the way, Sybil and I followed and Giulia covered us from the rear. It was after closing time, and the tour buses were gone from the Casino Borghese parking lot. We hurried across it, heels tapping. The police horns were much closer now.
Virgilio drew a key out of his pocket and sprang up the steps. The old guard sitting inside recognized him and tipped his hat.
"My brother is head of the museum guards' union," Virgilio told Sybil, pleasantly. "You'll be able to look around in here undisturbed. Without the usual . . . " Balancing the bomb in his left hand, he pumped his elbows in and out to indicate crowded conditions.
Giulia pointed her gun at the guard and jerked it towards the parking lot. With an indifferent shrug, the old man packed his lunch and newspaper in a satchel and walked out. Looking back I could see the blue flashing lights of police cars. They were crowding around the two disabled cars and corpses. It would be a while till they thought to look in here. The old guard wasn't telling. He ambled across the grass towards a bus-stop. It seemed like every monument or museum in Rome was Virgilio's to use as he pleased.
He was already in the next room with Sybil, holding her by the arm, showing her the statue of Pauline Borghese propped on a couch. I'd have to watch this guy. But why should he bother with Sybil anyway, when Giulia was here?
I looked up at her. With her long legs and high heels, she was fully two inches taller than me. Her hips were practically at my shoulder level. Clumsily I threw an arm around her. Her straight-line mouth twitched in a half-smile. Standing this close I noticed for the first time that her skin was a bit rough under the makeup. The sex sphere twitched in my pocket. I could feel the pheromones building. The sphere was messing up our minds.
"I'm glad to see you again, Giulia. Even with a machine gun." The sphere pulsed steadily, pumping out the magic molecules of lust.
"Come," Giulia said imperiously, and headed off in the opposite direction from Virgilio and Sybil. I knew I should stay with my wife, but I couldn't stop myself from following.
The sound of Giulia's high heels on the marble floor thrilled me to the core. I had to half-trot to keep up with her long strides. We passed two rooms, and Giulia darted a hurried look into each one. What were we looking for? A place to fuck, I hoped. Surely the pheromones were affecting her as much as they were me.
We came to a flight of stairs and she started up. I paused, straining my ears to hear what the others were up to. I seemed to hear Sybil protesting weakly against the insistent blur of Virgilio's voice, lowered to an amorous murmur. That was an angle I hadn't bargained for. If the sphere could drive Giulia and me into a sex-frenzy, then it could do the same to Sybil and Virgilio. Hating myself, I started up the stairs after Giulia. I caught up at the top and got my arm back around her hips. She threw a quick smile down at me, then stopped by one of the rooms. Pictures and a smooth wooden floor.
"Come, Bitter, come make amore."
I nodded vigorously. She slung her Uzi across the room, stepped out of her dress and unhooked her bra. I tore off my shirt, dropped my pants, and slipped off my underwear. Without my having to ask, she knew to leave on her heels, stockings and garter-belt . . . though it took a minute for her to maneuver her panties out from under the garters. Meanwhile I kissed her on the neck, on the nipples, on the navel. As soon as her cunt was uncovered, I knelt down and began licking it, tasting her piss and sweat. I tilted my head back and looked up past her garter-belt, past her big nipples, worshipping her body, her unreadable face.
Then we were on the floor and I was in her. She folded up her legs and dug those high heels into my back. I whinnied like a racehorse and hit the homestretch. Sweet coming come swelled my bag. I kissed her face, so close, and murmured, "Giul', oh Giul', gon' co' now ba' . . . "
In the blotchy phosphene haze of afterspurt I saw something move, off to the side there, my pants sliding towards us. I snapped up onto my elbows. The right pant-leg bulged out, round and full, then ripped and split to release the horny sex sphere. I could hear Sybil downstairs moaning, screaming in peak sex-come frenzy. Faithless whore. The sphere grew bigger.
* * *
Virgilio led Sybil past the statue of Pauline Borghese and into the next room. He set the bomb down on the floor, and put his arm around her waist. She could smell his cologne and faint sweat. Some other quality was in the air, too—some incredible charge of sexual tension.
Virgilio pressed closer. Sybil craned to see if Alwin was watching. What would he think of her, letting this brutally handsome Italian put his hands all over her? But Alwin wasn't looking, no, he was trotting after that big Italian woman like a pet spaniel. Going the other way. Well, so much the better. Why shouldn't Sybil enjoy herself too, for once?
Virgilio's hand slid down and pressed into Sybil's ass-crack. With a sigh and a shudder, she pressed back.
"Look at this statue," Virgilio was saying. "My favorite. The Rape of Persephone, by the immortal Bernini." He gestured with his free hand, then let the momentum carry his hand onto Sybil's lower belly. She glanced at his strong hand, knuckles tufted with black hair, then looked obediently at the statue. In the distance she heard Alwin and Giulia going upstairs.
The statue. A wild-faced man holds Persephone high in the air. Persephone's face is docile, bovine, conventionally alarmed. The amazing thing is the modeling of the abductor's hands pressed into Persephone's soft warm marble waist and thigh. The flesh sinks and gives, just so.
Virgilio slid his hand down and kneaded Sybil's cunt. She felt enclosed by his strength, front and back, wearing him tight and dirty. Her knees felt so weak.
She slid down on the cool marble floor and la
y there, mouth and legs open, reveling in her submission. This was like a dream. Nothing mattered anymore but sex.
Virgilio danced out of his clothes. He knelt by her head. She opened her mouth wider, showing her tongue, and he pushed in. She let her mouth go big and wet and soft, let him pump deep and deeper, loving the taste of his skin, the smell of his balls.
Now Virgilio was tugging at her panties. She raised up helpfully, and he got them off, then crawled around to fuck her. She let her mouth stay open and slack like she was still sucking him, and pressed her hands behind her back.
His face was flushed and swollen as his cock. He pushed into her as hard as possible. She pushed back, infinitely soft and wet and deep . . . yin to his yang. They caught a wave of sex-rhythm and rode it to shore, surfer and surfboard, engine and wing, screaming to touchdown, twitch, twitch, twitch.
Virgilio slid off her and kissed her twice, then drew his head back and stared at her appraisingly. "You are the first American woman I have . . . "
"Fucked? Well, you're my first Italian. My first anything since our wedding."
"Truly?" Virgilio looked very pleased with this news. "How long?"
"Eleven years in June." And now I've finally had a lover, thought Sybil to herself. I finally did it. I won't have to die a goody-goody.
Suddenly the Italian bitch upstairs started yelling something. With a quick leonine motion, Virgilio was on his feet. He whipped his pants on and picked up the bomb. "Let's go upstairs, Sybil."
Sybil rose. Her dress . . . she'd never taken it off . . . slid down and covered her wetness. Virgilio looked impatient, so she didn't bother putting the panties on, just stuffed them in her purse. She followed him upstairs, marveling at the smooth play of muscles in his naked back.
Giulia was screaming louder and louder, drowning out the soothing drone of Alwin's explaining voice. When Sybil saw what was in the room, she screamed too.
Later she would describe it as looking like a cross between Salvador Dali's Young Virgin Auto-Sodomized by Her Own Chastity (an ass floating free of its legs) and René Magritte's The Listening Chamber (a room filled by a single enormous apple). The giant ass had Giulia and Alwin trapped in a corner. They were both undressed. Sybil felt a sharp spasm of jealousy. Virgilio stepped up to the giant ass and started yelling, his A-bomb raised high overhead.
