by Rhys Hughes
Far below in the square the vulvas were sessile.
A grid of them, perhaps one thousand on one side, one thousand on the other. No need to count. It seemed to Daniela an opportunity too good to waste. She rummaged in a cupboard for her longbow, the relic of a young flirtation with the sport of archery. She still had the muscles to draw it back to its fullest extent. The sun was going down, the moon was a solid streak of copper light, a pulsating afterimage. The shadows of the city shifted at odd angles, the geometry of the newest future, this one. She aimed, exhaled and watched the improvised arrow soar.
The thin lever landed in the middle of the grid. The impact had the same effect as if she had pulled it. Music.
The quims, the daughters of her fever dreams, sang together. A complex choral work of fantastic strangeness.
And yet somehow familiar on the cellular level.
The basic anthem of our species!
Daniela saw that the workers in the square had stopped moving. All eyes watched the grid, all ears sucked in the erotic madrigal. But the vibrations and harmonics of the music had an unexpected epiphenomenon, a side effect. In random order, unlike the rigid prediction device of Morales, individual cunts attained orgasm. Many came simultaneously. As they climaxed they bloomed for a moment, then closed. Abstract patterns rippled throughout the array. A few coherent patterns also. This was a quivering, hedonistic, organic version of the drab unfeeling engineering favoured by men. It threatened the hierarchy of convention and so could not last. Someone down there would find a way to terminate the radical music. Already a dozen men were stirring themselves, conferring, scratching heuristic heads.
On a whim, Daniela told herself that the final image on the grid would be an accurate representation of her own death. It was no more foolish than the ritual devised by Morales and Cicero.
A government agent had gone to fetch a dog. He set it loose among the singing vulvas. It found the lever, brought it back. The stick was snipped into tiny lengths with the clippers used to remove the legs. Abruptly the music ceased. The final group orgasm ebbed away. And Daniela raised binoculars to consult the oracle, to learn her doom.
She confronted herself on the matrix of lips.
Yes, the pixels of pleasure showed Daniela, legs apart, with Ivan shaving her. Was this the truth? Was his razor fated to end her life, whether through accident or psychotic impulse? But then she peered closer. The real solution was inside the first assumption. She ran out of her apartment, found Ivan in his favourite bar, dragged him away.
“Hurry! I’ll explain when we reach the jungle!”
They loped down the streets. Voices hissed at them as they went. Daniela recognised the spite of her friends, Rita, Isabel, Marta, Yara and the others. It wasn’t unexpected. They kept going.
And plunged over the threshold of the city into the eternal green. A pair of long arms flung themselves around her waist and an unseen voice said, “You won’t avoid responsibility this time!”
It spoke with Cicero’s voice, but it wasn’t him.
She said, “Let me go, Doctor.”
The arms were too feeble to hold her, but they tried. “I said that artificial men were unreliable, didn’t I? He ignored my orders to intercept you! I had to come myself and pretend to be him.”
“You weren’t convincing enough, I’m sorry.”
“Where are you going, my dear? Why are you fleeing with this man? I saw the final pattern on the yoni grid. He will murder you with his evil blade. You should be running away from him.”
Daniela wrenched herself free, stumbled.
“That’s wrong, Doctor. I saw something else. A picture within the picture. I believed it. Tell me about the fifth lever, please. What were those rumblings under the ground after I pulled it?”
“No, my girl. I won’t help you again.”
“What did that lever do?” she almost screamed. She lunged forward for Morales, squeezed him in her own arms.
He literally began to crack under the pressure and whimpered, “Very well. I suppose it won’t hurt to tell you! There’s a world under this one. A backup. It’s empty but has been lovingly prepared. The fifth lever opened valves and flooded it with oxygen, primed it.”
Daniela pushed him away. He fell over, weeping. She grasped Ivan by the hand and dragged him into the undergrowth. The secret path was discernable to her eyes, not to his. They reached the mound, the underground maw. Ivan drew back from it, trembling. She explained rapidly, not caring how much or little he understood, panting at him.
“The image showed you shaving me. A sunburst, grotesquely magnified. That is the answer to my death, not the razor! The sun is going to turn into a supernova. It will flood our planet with hard radiation. But safety and a new dawn are waiting for us down there.”
Ivan frowned. “Won’t we be lonely? I don’t—”
Daniela placed her finger over his lips. “Humans wasted their best chance in the upper world, so it’s time for something different. I managed to conceal one of the artificial vulvas. It escaped detection despite the searches. I have it on me but I need you to fertilise it and fertilise its descendants. I’ll be a queen in an underworld, the semi-divine ruler of my own genital realm. And you can be my male concubine and lackey.”
“Where did you hide it?”
Daniela smirked. “Where do you think?”
Ivan gazed her through his long lashes, nodded once, and she pushed him roughly into the opening. He slid down the incline. She followed, propelling herself with her hands, and soon caught him up. The oceans of a new reality awaited them, unknown continents ripe to be populated with sensual blooms aching with creative hunger. She said, “It’s a long way down. I wish we had music to make the descent enjoyable.”
Without speaking, Ivan groped for a hidden pocket on the inside of his jacket, extracted a long white flute.
“Where did you get that from?” she asked.
“I made it myself. From the right thighbone of my uncle. That’s what dead uncles are for, isn’t it? Try it out.”
The melody was already inside her head. She played it. They followed the notes down. Far behind them the atmosphere sizzled. But the currents of air that rose up the passage were like cool tongues. All the way down, they went, to establish her empire based on endless lust. To live not wisely but joyously amid the steaming cunt forests, to generate absurd myths together and brand new mysteries of eroticism and death.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rhys Hughes was born in 1966 and began writing from an early age. His first short story was published in 1991 and his first book, the now legendary Worming the Harpy, followed four years later. Since then he has published more than thirty books, his work has been translated into ten languages and he is currently one of the most prolific and successful authors in Wales. Mostly known for absurdist works, his range in fact encompasses styles as diverse as gothic, experimental, science fiction, magic realism, fantasy and realism. His main ambition is to complete a grand sequence of exactly one thousand linked short stories, a project he has been working on for more than two decades. Each story is a standalone piece as well as a cog in the grand machine. He is finally three-quarters of the way through this opus.
Check out his blog at: http://rhysaurus.blogspot.com
