The Sex Sphere

by Rudy Rucker

  The bitch's screams had drawn what looked like police; three of them came charging up the stairs. Virgilio turned with a snarl, and one of them shot him in the leg. The bomb dropped.

  Chapter Nine: Babs the Bad

  Giulia became very agitated when she noticed the sex sphere. I tried to explain to her that it was a friend of mine, a lover aroused by the sound and smell of the hot piece we'd just torn off. She wouldn't listen.

  "Can't you wait?" I asked the sphere sharply. "I'm milked dry. Shrink, damn you! Virgilio'll get you."

  But it was hard to make myself heard over Giulia's screams. The sex sphere kept growing. She glided close and gave me an insistent nudge. She had her vagina aimed right at me. Before I knew it, Giulia and I had been backed into a corner, right under a picture of the Virgin Mary nursing baby Jesus.

  Giulia had completely flipped, and I was getting worried, too. I had formed a vague idea that the sex sphere was a hypersphere extending into the fourth dimension. Which meant that if the sphere's giant cunt swallowed me I could end up someplace very . . . different.

  Just then Virgilio came charging in like Serpico. He even had his shirt off, the fucking greaser. I craned forward to check Sybil out and, sure enough, her face had that just-fucked flush. Jealousy and remorse hit me like twin furies. What had we done? Eleven years of faithful wedlock down the tubes.

  The sex sphere's split was bigger now, opening and closing like some veiny slobbering man-eater from the fetid swamps of Heinlein's Venus. I was so depressed I didn't care if she got me.

  Virgilio was being a crazy asshole and waving the A-bomb around. I yelled at him to power down. Just then some people came running up the stairs. They had uniforms, and looked like police. But they weren't. They were Green Death. Peter and Beatrice and Orali, the remaining snoid.

  A bullet caught Virgilio in the leg, oh shit. The bomb slipped out of his grasp. I took the only way out. I jumped feet first into the sex sphere's snatch.

  The sphere got out of there in a hurry. We moved off into the fourth dimension. As we left normal space, I felt a horrible wrenching sensation all over my body, as if I were being torn right out of my flesh. The strong walls of the sphere's vagina pressed in, holding me together.

  Though nestled deep inside her, I could peep out. As soon as we'd broken the fetters of conventional 3-D space, I could feel myself acquire an extraordinary mobility. My eyes rolled this way, and that way, and other ways too. In one direction I could see down into the wood-floored room in the Casino Borghese.

  "Down" is not quite the word. I could see the room as from a distance . . . yet from no particular direction at all. Floor, ceiling and all four walls were spread before me. Thanks to the forgiving wood floor, the bomb had failed to detonate. Peter was looking it over while Beatrice and the snoid stared at Giulia wriggling into her dress. Virgilio lay on the floor, moaning.

  But Sybil . . . my Sybil stepped across the room and quickly picked up the tiny sex sphere cross section, far down a hypercurve from the fat part holding me. No one noticed. She dropped the little spherelet into her purse. I hoped she would know to smeep me back. Hoped she'd get a chance.

  The Green Death were over on one side of the room, regrouping and discussing. It looked like Peter wanted to just run off with the bomb, but Beatrice wanted to take Virgilio and Sybil hostage. Giulia gestured a lot and seemed to be having trouble explaining what had happened to me. The Green Death gang wasn't at all hip to the nature of Lafcadio Caron's hypersphere.

  Just then the situation took another turn for the worse. The real police arrived. I could see them outside the little museum, crouched behind bulletproof shields and shouting through a megaphone. I wished I could hear what they were saying. According to the news-show I'd seen, they thought I was one of the bad guys. Right now I was better off in hyperspace.

  From my vantage point everything looked very strange. I could see through Sybil's dress, see that she had no panties on, and I could even see her guts and bones. It was a little as if everything were transparent. Her beating heart, the sperm in her womb. I prayed she'd survive the impending melee.

  But meanwhile there was so much else to see! A roll of my eyes and the Casino Borghese vanished. I was staring into raw hyperspace. It was crowded with moving forms, some round like my girlfriend the hypersphere, some angular, some branching. The motions they described were far richer than anything our 3-D space exhibits. The usual left/right, forward/backward, up/down movements were all there . . . but there was a fourth type of motion, call it ana/kata. Thus, rather than saying I could look down at the Casino Borghese, I prefer to say that I could look kata at it. Rather than saying the sex sphere moved up out of normal space, I say that she moved ana out of it.

  The hyperforms around us often seemed to be turning inside out, not by everting, but by . . . changing perspective like one of those self-reversing line drawings of a cube or a staircase. It was hard for my 3-D eyeballs to keep up with it all. Only by rapidly sweeping my eyes ana and kata could I begin to grasp the whole picture.

  Cautiously, I slid my head a little farther out and tried to get an overall picture of the sex hypersphere. If I held my eyes a certain way, I saw nothing but the same cross section I'd jumped into. Huge tits and ass, an open-sesame crack. But by bending my neck kata, I could sight over one of the nipples, for instance, and see it as just one cross section of a whole ridge-line of nipple-tissue dwindling down to a dot on the spherelet in Sybil's purse.

  Keeping my neck turned kata, but rolling my eyes left, I could see the continuous furry furrow of the hypersphere's cross-sectional vulvas ending, again, in Sybil's purse. I wondered what it was that kept this particular hypersphere from moving entirely away from our normal space. A snag that Lafcadio Caron had somehow set? I recalled a paper of his on three-dimensional knottings of hyperspace objects.

  I'd had some worries that my brain might fall out. But, for now, nothing untoward happened. Growing more reckless, I wormed my shoulders and arms out of the sex sphere's minge. Moving my arms around was an incredible sensation. By slight kata-ana twitches I could, in effect, move them right through each other: just as two coins on a tabletop can be made to miss colliding if one is slightly raised.

  The hyperspace around me was filled with strange, thrilling vibrations . . . as if hundreds of songs were being sung at once. This or that tune would slide into prominence, then segue out as I moved again. Waving my arms in abandon, I forgot my troubles and danced.

  Time passed. When I thought to look kata again, I could see that Sybil was caught in a stalemate. The Green Death had tied her and Virgilio up, but now the real police had the Green Death pinned down in the museum. Beatrice must have threatened to set off the A-bomb, as the cops were making no signs of invading . . . just yelling over a bullhorn. For some reason Sybil and Virgilio were naked and tied together face-to-face. Were they fucking again? I couldn't stand to watch. Going back kata there was, for now, the goddamn last fucking thing I wanted to do.

  I turned my head ana, straining to see what lay in the hyperspace direction away from normal space. I was by no means embedded in the sex hypersphere's largest cross section. She bulged out and out for several dozen meters before reaching maximum girth. Ana there her sexual characteristics faded out and were replaced by some other kind of patterning.

  I wriggled the rest of the way out of her birth canal. Born again in a higher world. Praise Jesus. I stood on the sphere, swaying a little.

  It gave me a weird, spaced-out feeling to move around in four dimensions. Strangely vivid memories of things past kept flashing in on me, and I had a little trouble remembering exactly what was going on.

  My body parts had a disconcerting way of seeming to change radically, depending on what angle I looked at them from. Sometimes my legs were naked, sometimes clothed. And in the greatest imaginable variety of raiment! I recognized jeans, suit-pants, knickers and shorts. For one unsettling instant, I looked down and saw chubby infant's legs sticking out of a shitty
diaper. Mellow yellow. A moment later, my hand became a skeleton's claw. I pressed my eyes shut and concentrated on the present.

  When I opened them again, things were a bit more orderly. My limbs no longer seemed to flicker back and forth in time. Now, when held at certain angles, they simply disappeared. I decided to work my way ana to the sex hypersphere's wide part and demand an interview. Ana: further out. Kata lay Green Death, faithless Sybil and pigs who hunted the Anarchist Archimedes.

  I got down on all fours and crawled up to the summit of one of my sex sphere's breasts. Then I turned my hands and feet in such a way that they became invisible, and pushed. The breast beneath me grew slightly larger. I had moved ana to a new cross section. I kept doing this . . . pushing myself along in some invisible direction . . . and slowly the breast-mound flattened. A few more pushes and the nipple faded into a welt, then a freckle, then blank skin. I was getting near the hypersphere's maximum cross section, the equatorial sphere.

  But not really a sphere. All sorts of strange shapes rose up around me: armchairs, cave-mouths, saguaro cacti. Seemingly disconnected blobs of skin-covered tissue drifted past. I kept turning my head this way and that, trying to keep my bearings.

  The celestial music I'd heard before damped down, and a single stuttering murmur took over, like a taped conversation cut up and played wrong speed. Was the sex sphere finally talking to me?

  Just then the skinscape around me necked up and out. I lost my footing. For an instant I tumbled, my limbs aflow, now young, now old. I stood up again, thoroughly disoriented. I seemed to be in a small pink room, a sepia-tone replica of our Heidelberg apartment. A chair rose up behind me, catching me in the back of the knees. I sat down heavily. Sybil walked into the room.

  Her face was missing, but as I thought this, the skinpatch arranged itself into her features. She was screaming at me. I had a feeling of déjà vu.

  "All you think about is yourself," said Sybil's harsh, angry voice. "I can't stand it any more."

  "What do you mean?" I muttered right on cue. "Take it easy."

  This was a replay of a fight we'd had last month. And the month before that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that.

  "It's fine for you," railed the simulacrum. "You go to your office, you go to your conferences. What do I have? Nothing but your coldness. And thankless work day after day."

  God, what a bummer. The hypersphere must have looked into my brain and read my memories. I'd taken Sybil to Rome specifically to get away from this shit. It occurred to me that it would all start again as soon as our trip was over.

  The pseudo-Sybil was crying now. I knew it was a fake, but the force of habit brought me to my feet. "Don't cry, Sybil. Things aren't really so bad."

  "Ha!" Her face was red and wet. "When was the last time you washed a single dish? You treat me like a servant, like dirt! There's no room for anyone but Alwin Bitter, Alwin Bitter, Alwin Bitter." In her mocking mouth my name became a curse.

  "That's not true," I protested. "I've just been wrapped up in my work. But I do care. You know that."

  "You do not. You just wish I would shut up. Why did I ever marry you? We haven't had one single good time together in years. I can't remember the last time you smiled at me."

  "What about last week? When we were in the restaurant and had trout?" I was having trouble remembering that this wasn't real.

  "Oh, sure, if we're out drinking our heads off you can put on a happy face. But when was the last time we did something normal together or even talked?"

  "Look, do you want to take a walk or something?"

  "And what about the children?"

  "They can come, too."

  "You know they won't. Sorrel will throw a fit."

  "So let's take a drive."

  "And you'll lose your temper and spank poor Tom again. I couldn't believe when you did that last week. You're really sick, you know that Alwin? You're a sick, selfish person. It's just me, me, me, and anyone else might as well be dead."

  I was getting mad now. "Look, Sybil, I don't have to listen to this crap."

  "Oh, sure. Get mad and hit me. That's your only answer, isn't it?"

  "I have no intention of hitting you." I was fighting for control. "If you don't mind, I think I'll go out for some air." I skirted her, heading for the door.

  "You mean, sneak out and get drunk, don't you, Alwin? And leave me to spend Saturday cooped up in this horrible apartment with all the children in the building."

  "I'll take the kids, I'll take the kids."

  The "door" held out a pink hand to me, and I pulled it. It thopped open and closed and I was in a different space, a copy of the single bedroom our three children shared. I felt spaced and half-crazed with hangover, just like on a regular Saturday. I had forgotten how to move ana and kata. I was locked into a bad-trip rerun the sex sphere had read off the wrinkles of my brain.

  "Hey, kiddies," I called. "Do you want to take a walk?"

  I could hear them giggling, but couldn't see where they were. The room looked the same as usual: Ida's sleeping-couch on the left, Tom and Sorrel's bunk beds on the right. But the desks were tipped over, and there were clothes and pieces of toys everywhere. They'd really trashed the room, the rotten little turds.

  There was a sharp scream from behind me. I turned and opened the door of the kids' clothes closet. The three of them were squeezed in there, faces dirty and eyes rolling. Tom was yelling about something Ida or Sorrel had done to him. They all looked frightened of me.

  "Come on, children, get out of there." I stepped forward and something smeared underfoot. A sudden, fruity smell filled the air.

  "Ida did it," shouted Sorrel joyfully. "Ida put banana on the floor." She gave Tom another poke in the kidneys and he turned on her, flailing his arms.

  I pulled them out of the closet, one by one.

  "God damn you, Sorrel, get out of that closet and pick up this room. Why do you have to eat on the floor, Ida? What kind of pig are you? Just calm down, Tom." His hair was in his eyes and he had a fleck of foam on his lips. "Try to act human."

  I got a piece of cardboard and scraped the banana off my bare foot and off the floor.

  "Pssss," said Sorrel, pointing at my penis. I suddenly remembered that I was naked. Why was I naked here in our crummy Heidelberg apartment on another horrible Saturday morning? For the moment I couldn't remember. "Pssssssss," said Ida. I wondered if there were any beer left from last night.

  Just then Sybil walked into the room. "Didn't I tell you children to clean up in here?"

  Tom gave a wild, unhappy laugh. "We're cleaning cleaning cleaning," he shouted, grabbing a broom and waving it. "I'll get the spiders." He flailed at the ceiling. His broom hit the paper shade covering the light bulb. The shade fell off.

  My heart ached for my son. Obviously this was all my fault. "Why do you work them up by coming in here naked?" demanded Sybil.

  "Pssssss," said Sorrel and Ida, each holding a pencil between their legs like a penis. I found a wet towel on the floor and wrapped it around my waist.

  "Fix that shade right away," Sybil ordered Tom. "Sorrel, you put those desks back. Ida, start picking up."

  I sprang to do these jobs, knowing the children wouldn't. But the shade tore in my hands, and when I tilted the first desk back up, all the drawers fell out. One drawer landed on my bare foot.

  I roared and threw things. BANG, a table hit the wall and gouged a hole! WHAM, the desk flipped and snapped a leg! CRASH, went the whole fucking box of Legos!

  The children screamed in terror. Sybil crouched in front of them, tense and protective. Flaring up like this, I'd put myself so far in the hole that it'd take a week to square it. Sybil might even leave me. Garbage, garbage, my life was garbage. I rushed out the door, face twisted in anguish.

  As I stepped through, the space around me gave a strange twitch. There was nothing outside. I was floating in emptiness. The door had disappeared. I waved my arms and legs. There was nothing to push against. Slow
ly I remembered I was not really in Heidelberg. I was somewhere in hyperspace. But why couldn't I see anything?

  "Alwin?" The sweet sound came from all around me. "Alwin, zis is Babs."

  "Are you the sex sphere?"

  "I'm Babs za bad hypersphere, za one who ate you up." The accent was pure Zsa Zsa Gabor.

  "Am I inside you?"

  "Your vhife, she don't understand you. You zshould love me best."

  "What do you want from me, Babs?"

  "I vhant to be free."

  This was getting nowhere fast. I still hadn't gotten back my ability to move four-dimensionally. As a physicist, it occurred to me that I might be imprisoned on the hypersurface of a hyperspherical vacuole in Babs's body. A kind of bubble.

  There was nothing around me, nothing but empty curved space. In the distance I could make out a sort of shimmer, a hugely distorted human form. That was me. I was seeing myself around the curve of the hyperspherical space bubble that Babs had stuck me onto.

  By way of testing my hypothesis, I took the towel off my waist, wadded it up and tossed it. It dwindled away from me, slowly twisting. Just as the towel seemed to reach the distant shimmer, I felt something hit me in the back of the neck. The towel had circumnavigated my cramped hypercell.

  "Let me out," I begged. "Please let me out of here."

  I can't take being cooped up. And now my position was like that of an ant on the surface of a toy balloon. No exit. It reminded me of a plastic Thermos bottle I'd had back when I was teaching at State. On the Thermos was a picture of a school bus with Donald Duck getting out, and of schmucky goody-goody Mickey Mouse right there holding up a stop sign. If Donald went right, he'd run smack into Mickey Mouse's Stop. If he went left, he'd immediately be at the back of the bus, and would then proceed up along it to that same mickey-mouse stop bring-down. In real life, the picture seemed to tell me, there's no escape from fascist bullshit mickey-mouse stop stop stop. Though, of course, D.D. could have slid up over the lip and into the milk.