Now he thought back to Tantamount, twin sister of Oubliette. Too bad she was scientist first, woman second; she had the body to give a man a real lift. Had Prior known then what he knew now, he would have thrown her down on that lab table and cooled his erection in her body before she even had the chance to get the loaded tampon out, and bugged out of there forever.
But when he slept, it was of the succubus he dreamed, there at the beach. She was neither man nor woman, that demon; but when she assumed the female form she was one hell of a fuck.
He woke as his penis-socket spewed into the blanket. He'd had a wet dream, but he wasn't even wearing an organ. Depth of ignominy.
Chapter 21—Black and White
Next day was a harder trek. The sun was out and the surface of the ice cream melted, mucking up their boots and becoming disgustingly slippery. Fat Stedman took a heavy spill about midday, soaking his bottom in liquid strawberry, and that was it. Yale and Miles decided to sacrifice their ambition in order to see him back, generously. Of course there didn't have to be a trio going back, because the alert robots would zero in on any lesser group and take it back anyway. But it was Prior's job not to mention such details. After all, these were paying tourists, and their pride would be salved by making it back on their own.
Now they were three, and the next dropout would terminate the project. That would be Klo. Prior could see she was already tired. She had been tempted to go back, obviously, but probably had realized that she had waited too long, and now the onus for termination of the excursion would be on her. For what that was worth.
Ahead of them Mt. Icecream towered in all its sugary splendor: the pinnacle a mile above the base camp in elevation, many miles on the slant, and many leagues by foot. Red, green, blue and brown overlaid its yellow underbase, with black and gray streaks coursing down like lava from a volcano. The red would be strawberry or cherry, the green pistachio or lime, the blue blueberry, the brown chocolate, and the streaks syrups of assorted flavors. All genuine and of excellent quality, up here where it was uncontaminated by the germs of man. The substance of Mt. Icecream would have carried a snobbish price tag in any store on Earth. Very little was exported, however, because the expense of shipping was greater than that of manufacturing an equivalent grade locally. A few super-snobs made a point of serving it on special occasions, but that came under the heading of conspicuous consumption. Every so often, these past three weeks, Prior had gone out with the shovel and scooped up some particular flavor on order for Earth shipment. But this was a standing joke among personnel and tourists alike: after all, it was only ice cream.
Klo saw him looking, and came up beside him. “It is beautiful, in its grisly way,” she remarked. ‘What do you think made it?"
“God made it,” he said. It was the standard ploy, straight from the guide manual. The fact was, no one knew who had made it or who maintained it. It did seem to be beyond coincidence for the flavors and constituents to match Earthly standards so precisely, yet there was no possible connection. It was just here, and had to be accepted on that basis.
Ambert Black came up too, as ornery as ever. “Big benign whiteass God with a long whiteass beard,” he said sarcastically. “Got nothing better to do than make a mountain of upperclass ice cream. Probably shits it in His off-moments. Why worry about unimportant little things like war and poverty and disease?"
“Maybe God's tired,” Klo said, unoffended. “Time for a change in administrations."
Black was silent a moment, uncertain whether she was agreeing with him or ridiculing him. Prior wasn't sure either, but did appreciate how neatly she had thrown the big Negro off balance.
“Maybe God ain't just tired,” Black said at last. “Maybe He's dead. And his last Will & Testament was to be buried under an everlasting pile of ice cream. Maybe it's every man for himself, now."
“Makes sense,” she agreed amicably.
Black shut up, still not sure which side she was on. Maybe he felt a dawning kinship with her—and maybe he was afraid of that, Prior thought. In many ways, the plain white women of the species had it as bad as the strong black men.
They continued climbing. As elevation increased, temperature decreased, despite what people said about warm air rising. The greater labors required in the steepening ascent kept them all sweating inside their wrappings, however. Klo was red-faced, and neither from the light of the waning sun nor from any embarrassment; her breath fogged out in a noisy bellows-rush. But she wouldn't give up.
They made Stage Two. Even Black admitted his fatigue. He stripped without ceremony and plunged into the warm shower. He had enormous muscles, stout haunches, numerous scars, and a massive hanging ebony penis.
Klo just lay flat for ten minutes, getting her wind, and in that position she didn't look bad at all. Her stomach slimmed down, her breasts stood out on her heaving chest, and her facial features softened. Then she sat up and began peeling off the layers.
Prior was breaking out the staples, for the guide on such parties was also necessarily the cook and chief handyman. He watched, frankly curious to see what a dumpy woman looked like in the nude.
“Not as bad as I thought,” he said as she got there. “You are overweight, but there's muscle in your legs where it counts, and your breasts are even handsome."
He thought she'd blush or get mad—he hardly cared which—but she just shrugged and got up to find the shower. “Get out, you scorchskinned phony,” she yelled in to Black. “You can't hog the only facility forever. My turn coming up."
“I'll get out when I'm ready, you whiteassed whore!” the man yelled back jovially.
Klo pushed through the curtain and stepped into the shower with him. “Get out when you're ready, then, black woodpecker.” Prior paused again in his preparations. Either he'd have to fetch the first-aid kit in a hurry, or this acquaintance was ripening faster than anticipated.
“Say, I must be hard up when long pig starts looking good,” Black muttered, sounding surprised rather than angry. “Long fat white pig, yet."
Prior relaxed. There would be no race riot for the nonce. Black had a weakness for stout women...
The water splashed. “Gimme that soap, Derby,” she said, and the curtain bowed as she wrestled around him for it, not waiting for him to tell her to get it herself, whiteass.
“Get your boob off my tube!"
“If that's God, he ain't dead,” she said.
“I said I was hard up! So it's hard and it's up. What's it to you?"
“Let me feel that.” More splashing and curtain-bowing. “You're half-right. It's fairly hard and up."
“Fairly hard!” Black cried indignantly. “That's pure polished ebony ivory horn. You couldn't soften that black bastard with a white sledgehammer!"
“My white socket-wrench could screw it down, though."
Prior's interest in sex had diminished after the workout the statues had given him, but three weeks in the candy snows had cranked up his scrotum and put blood-pressure behind his pet-cock, as his last night's imaginings had demonstrated. This trek had hardly promised an outlet.
Ah, well. It showed that such things were unpredictable. He stripped efficiently, plugged in Monster, and parted the bustling shower curtain.
They did not notice. Klo was hard at work softening the ebony ivory with her socket, and Black was plumbing the depths of the long fat white pig in the vertical position, front face, while the steamy water plunged down over both.
Prior considered the openings, then retired temporarily from the field. He was stuck with a twelve-inch erection and no place to cool it. But he was merely daunted, not defeated. He had had experience with grouped statues, after all.
He braced himself, then stepped naked out into the blizzard landscape of Mt. Icecream. The vanilla sleet cut into his skin and frosted his fingers and toes, but melted instantly from the heated organ. He scooped up a double handful and rubbed it over his mighty penis, and gradually the monster diminished into a midget. He dived back into the
warmth of Stage Two.
With cold-stiffened fingers he unplugged the now-empty phallus and set it aside. He unlimbered a unit he had never had occasion to employ before: the bifurcate double-lengther. He locked it on and returned to the shower, forked member perking expectantly.
Chapter 22—Two-Horse Sleigh
The tableau remained. The white had not yet softened the black, but was making progress.
Prior limbered his two-headed snake and stepped into the shower with the pair already soaking there. That hot water felt extremely good, now. They didn't notice him, though it was now quite crowded. Their bodies were plastered together, chest to breast, merging at face and crotch, and the hot water coursed down along all available channels. Klo was stretched and Black humped to accommodate those connections, so that the one was not dumpy and the other not tall. It was working very nicely, actually. She stood on tip-toe, and her feet lifted from the floor with every slow thrust Black made, and her buttocks tensed and quivered alternately.
“A touching scene,” Prior murmured, but neither heard him. “No sense rushing things, I agree."
He separated his dual projections and used his hands to curve them around the two-backed beast. First he concentrated on Klo's flexing posterior, guiding the right fork up into the dark wet cavity between buttocks and thighs. The preferred location was occupied already, of course, but the secondary one remained vacant. He didn't object to anal penetration, when it was not his own anus being penetrated.
He knocked against the tight sphincter. At first it resisted, but then, no doubt in response to the sensations of the moment, it relaxed, and he got the head of the snake in. Then that tense-quiver, tense-quiver rhythm as her toes left the floor helped him, and he worked up a respectable depth.
Now for the other half. He carried the left fork around to Black's back haunch and aimed for the secondary (but only) location there. Because he was already anchored on the right, he had to stretch to make the left. Fortunately the member had been designed for just such manipulations and was elastic. The tip reached target, and, after several charges, found its lodging.
Not a moment too soon! The long pig climaxed violently and the ebony ivory bastard triggered off in response. Both anuses clenched and puffed with the jettison rhythm, sending dual shock waves of urgency into Prior's crotch. He fancied he could feel the ejaculate galloping from the one body to the other, pressing against each rectal cavity and the member lodged therein. Prior was experiencing both halves of the orgasm, and was building for the most solid eruption himself since his prosthetic graduation.
Black, his organ spent, became aware of his other apertures. “What's this pig at my face!” he cried, jerking back his head. “What's this shit up my ass!” he yelled, jumping away.
Prior's left extension stretched like rubber but did not let go. Klo saw it too, now. “Snake!” she screamed, bolting for the exit. Her anus, too, was clenched like a trap on Prior's half member.
“Snake!” Black cried, echoing her. He seemed to be twice as shy of reptiles as she, oddly.
Black scrambled out of the shower, and Klo was pacing him. Both seemed berserk. Prior followed, perforce. The two halves of his penis remained hooked in the two sealed sphincters, and he could not detach it from his own side while it was under such tension.
Black burst out the door and into the snow, dragging his company with him. Klo skidded alongside him, then caught her footing and raced ahead. Like two thoroughbreds hauling a harness-cart, the black stallion and the white mare hauled Prior Gross along on rubbery bands stretching from crotch to crotch. The vanilla flew to the sides as their bare feet slipped and kicked. Then they hit a maple-syrup slick. Black windmilled, caught Klo by the left breast, and held his position. Prior's soles skidded on the goo. Now he was a water-ski amateur, his cord hitched to two live boats.
Klo's foot struck an encrustation of crystallized sugar—probably maple-sugar. She did a split and spun off to the side. Since she was the only one retaining secure footing, until this point, a splendid crash was in the making.
Prior's penis-head popped out of her bottom and snapped back stingingly. With half his forward pull deflected, Prior fell to the other side. Here there was an outcropping of pistachio that piled up as he plowed sidewise through it. This tension, combined with the shrinkage sponsored by the cold, was enough finally to yank out the other glans, and he rolled to a stop half-buried in green snow.
He was freezing. But before he uncovered himself he twisted off the bifurcate, shrunken member and threw it away. Not only had his orgasm been stifled, he had been hauled roughly and painfully from a hot shower to sub-freezing cold, and he had no one to blame but his penis!
Black trotted back, shivering. He saw the splay of pistachio. He pounced. “Got it!” he exclaimed, lifting the discarded member. “Fucking two-headed snake!” He inspected it more closely. He did a doubletake. He faced Prior, who was just standing up and brushing off the green. “Where'd you get this, Gross?"
So Black wasn't entirely naive about prosthetics. “Doctor named Oubliette Emdee, back on Earth.” Prior shivered and started back for the camp. “Want her address?"
Black considered, hefting the member. “Yeah. Yeah, I do. If she makes these in basic black."
“She doesn't make them, she fits them. But she has quite an assortment."
Black became almost friendly as the three of them crowded back into the warm room, shaking off ice. “It ain't that I hate you less, you white cocksucker, but that I hate cops more."
“Nice to know,” Prior said neutrally. It was possible to get along with Black if you didn't argue with him, as Klo had shown.
“Yeah. There's this squad of whiteass cops back home. Cops ain't all bad—I heard of one once that wasn't, anyway—but these ones—five, six of ‘em—need a proper screwing. Know what I mean?"
“Six at once?” This man had big ambitions!
“Got to be, or they'll scatter. Every night they bust up somebody's crap game, grab the stakes, and play it out themselves. All them fat asses, bending over..."
Prior laughed. “I'll write out her address for you!"
Chapter 23—First Branch
The third day's hike was stiff, but still Klo didn't break. Now they mounted massive projections of rocklike sugar crystals that crumbled treacherously when subjected to the slightest stress or warmth. The candy grime got into their suits and wouldn't quite melt and wouldn't quite dry. At the margins of neck, wrist and ankle it became the consistency of half-chewed taffy (which it was) and pulled and chafed. In the crotches of thigh and armpit it became the consistency of luke-warm milk-chocolate, the kind that melts in your hand not in your mouth (which it was), and sucked and gooked with every motion. In the hair of the head it became caked butterscotch pudding; in the hair of the pubes, caked vanilla icing.
“Up farther where it's colder we'll be able to use pitons,” Prior said, for all the dubious comfort that was worth. Anything would be better than this gooey intermediate zone.
Stage Three was nestled in a chocolate crevasse. The chocolate looked like bare dirt, just as the distant pistachio looked like living foliage and the vanilla snow like vanilla snow. But the consistency of this chocolate was more like wood. The cabin roof was piled with purple-blueberry or black raspberry flavor, Prior judged.
“After this, the climb gets rough,” Prior said as they scraped rancid rind off their torsos. “This is higher than most parties get, so it's no shame to turn back."
“I hear no white man's made it all the way up,” Black said, with the accent on “white."
“I hear no man's made it up,” Klo said, her accent on “man."
“Not to Stage Five, no,” Prior admitted. “No human beings of any color or sex. The robots built that stage, and a couple of them were lost in glaciers or something."
“I ain't even going to fuck, tonight,” Black said grimly.
“Who asked you to?” Klo demanded. “You attract snakes."
“Save my g
reat black godless strength to put beautiful black Black on the friggin’ white pinnacle,” he finished, glowering at Prior. “First man to make it."
Prior laughed. “If we make it, you can step on the top first. You're the paying customer. I have other plans."
“Yeah?” Black looked at him suspiciously. “What?"
“I'm going to climb the Cherry Tree.” It was safe to talk about it now; they wouldn't comprehend the reference anyway, or care one way or the other.
“The Cherry Tree! You mean that's up there? On top of ol’ Icecream? I changed my black mind!"
“You know about it?” Prior asked, surprised.
“I'm a man, ain't I? I got a cock, don't I? But that sure ain't my kind of cunt. I ain't goin’ near it!"
Prior was intrigued. “You'll risk your precious black life to climb a stupid mountain of ice cream, but you're afraid of a little tree?"
“That tree, yes! I don't mind dying so much, but I'm choosy about how my ass gets reamed.” He rubbed his backside, perhaps remembering what Prior had done the day before, but decided not to make an issue of it.
It occurred to Prior that the talking statues hadn't told him everything. “I only want to climb it and get the spire at the top. You can stand back and watch. If I fall, I'm the only one who gets hurt. Then the robots will come and carry us all back down. What's so frightening about that?"
Black shook his head as he stepped into the shower. “You're a whiteassed pekkernosed candy-coated bugging stooge, but you don't deserve what you're headed for. I tell you this for your own cornholing good: layoff the Cherry Tree."
“Why? I need that spire."
“Like elephant turds in your beer you need it! And you can't get near it."
“I'm curious too,” Klo said as Black emerged from the shower. The Negro hadn't taken long at all this time; apparently he was serious about not fornicating. “What's so dangerous about a tree—a cherry tree, yet?"
Black ignored her and looked at Prior inscrutably. “They's no fool like a white fool!” He pondered while he toweled off his robust torso and Klo got into the spray of hot water. “Hokay. I know a little magic—black magic, of course—enough to haul down a branch or two. Suppose I bring one here, so you can see it? Then you'll know."
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