The Hero King

by Rick Shelley

  “How many dominoes were there?” I asked.

  “Who counts? There were as many as were needed. What more matters?”

  “How many of these cycles have there been?” I asked next. “Do you really want the one that is ending now to be the last?”

  “How many?” She smiled. “Who counts?” she repeated.

  “And were they all the same?”

  “Enough alike to get monotonous.”

  “Then you might welcome a diversion that offered the chance for something different. Four balls might introduce some novelty,” I suggested. “Who knows, you might even produce twins—two cycles running at once, parallel, maybe even running in different directions. That would ease the monotony.”

  She considered it for a moment. “It might at that.”

  More silence. In my mind I could hear those damn dominoes clunking toward oblivion.

  “Ah, if we’re going to conceive a new world, don’t you think we should get about it? This would be a poor time for coitus interruptus.”

  “How quaint,” she said, wrinkling her nose.

  “And what’s the gestation period for a universe?”

  “Have courtship rituals fallen so far?”

  “A, it’s better than offering you twenty bucks for a trip around the world. B, who know’s what’s proper here; I’ve never made love to a goddess before. And C, we just don’t have time for chocolates and roses.”

  She shook her head. “Is it really worth it then?”

  My smile was forced. I had gone into the close too soon. I could almost feel every muscle in my face to get the smile in place.

  “You’ll never know unless you try.” I was feeling decidedly perverted by then, like a dirty old man offering a little girl candy to show him what was under her panties. Which was really a ridiculous way to feel with this naked giant sitting across the table from me.

  “Very well, little man, show me that it’s worth it.” The way she said that, I wondered if I would even be able to get it up. I felt little enough compared to her size; I didn’t need the sarcasm. I had heard about psychic impotence. I figured this would be a bad time to have my first personal experience of it.

  “Here?” I asked, and I tried to make the single word sound sarcastic all by itself, a sort of “how gauche” expression. The Great Earth Mother laughed in my face, a loud, raucous bass rumble. I could feel myself shrinking even more.

  “There’s not that much hurry,” she said. “We have more time left than you’ll be able to manage.”

  Forget “Fire and Ice.” The world was going to come to an end without a replacement because the Great Earth Mother liked to indulge in sexual put-downs.

  “We’ll go to my bedroom,” she said, uncoiling herself from the stack of pillows on the floor. I took one last pull at my wine and got up.

  I’m tempted to say that the bed of the Great Earth Mother was the size of a football field, but that would be a gross, and obvious, exaggeration. But, if you put one corner of the bed at home plate on a baseball diamond and lined up the adjacent sides along the foul lines, the pitcher’s mound would cause the bed to wobble. The bed and bedroom looked like something from a Hollywood art director’s idea of a fantasy harem in some Arabian Nights picture. The bed was immense but low, only about a foot off the floor. The coverings looked like satin. The wall hangings were of the same material. There were piles of pillows and cushions everywhere, on the bed and on the floor. The colors were pastels with a few dark accents. There were neither torches nor candles in the room, but it was well lit. The lighting was indirect with a vengeance. I couldn’t spot where any of the illumination was coming from. There was simply light where it was needed, in just the proper amount.

  “This is my playroom,” the Great Earth Mother said. She went to the bed and crawled out toward the middle of it, her butt moving provocatively as she moved directly away from me. She got near the center and flopped over on her back, spreading her legs wide.

  “Are you just going to stand there with your clothes on?” she asked. “I thought you were worried about the time.”

  I started the process of undressing, taking off my swords, mail shirt, and so forth. The Great Earth Mother reached down between her legs. What started as a casual

  scratch turned into something more specifically erotic. Then she held out her hand, thumb sticking up.

  “This is what you have to compete with,” she said. A big thumb. It was going to be close. I finished undressing. “Come to Mama,” she said.

  18

  The Big Bang

  I looked out at the Great Earth Mother lying in the middle of that huge bed. Her breasts jutted up yet, very little flattened because she was on her back—two volcanoes waiting for my attention. There was still a problem of scale. If I got my head up to her breasts, my feet would be dangling over her genitals. —Okay, that was a bit of an exaggeration, but the working parts still wouldn’t have connected. As I started crawling out on the bed toward her, I thought, I’m still sixteen and this is just the wildest wet dream ever. Somewhere inside me, another voice said, Go with the flow. If I had been just a little less frightened, I might have considered singing a chorus of “Climb Every Mountain.”

  But that long crawl did give me time to get aroused. It was a unique point of view, a unique pilgrimage.

  Her thighs were as thick as my waist, but on her frame, it looked right. I wondered how much Playboy or Penthouse might pay for an eight-page centerfold spread on the Great Earth Mother—if either magazine was left after World War Three and the current dive into chaos … and if the Great Earth Mother could be bought.

  That crawl seemed to take an hour. I passed the level of her feet and moved on toward the other end of that special box canyon. Yeah, a lot of bad puns came to mind. I managed to cram several hours’ worth of them into the few odd minutes that actually passed. I crawled to her and up over her. I homed in on her breasts and face, not worrying too much about trying to keep my weight off of her.

  Her breasts were firm. The nipples rose to hard peaks under my hands. I slid between her breasts and moved farther north until our faces were level.

  “This is going to be even more awkward than I imagined,” I said. Then, taking my boldest move yet, I lowered my mouth to her, ready to kiss—ready to risk having her bite off half my face if she got a little carried away.

  The Great Earth Mother laughed again, but this time it was a more friendly sound. “I told you I always make sure of my own pleasure,” she whispered.

  Then I felt her skin crawling against mine, her whole body seemingly involved in some strange migration. My first thought was that she was changing into some hideous monster to do me, and with her arms wrapped tightly around me, I didn’t have a prayer of escaping. I needed a few seconds to realize what was really happening. She was shrinking herself down to my size.

  I knew that she was making herself smaller and not making me larger because more of the pattern on the pillow under her head became visible.

  “Is that better?” she asked when the shrinking act ended. She had matched my size quite closely.

  “Much better,” I said. “I don’t have to worry that I’m making love to a movie screen now.” Now, I adjusted my position to take some of my weight off of her. It was probably still not necessary for her comfort, but it was for mine.

  Patterns, textures, sequences.

  I guess that we all fall into habits in lovemaking as in everything else. The first time with a new lover, two sets of habits can clash, making the session less than satisfactory, or they can mesh, leading to something that can be quite extraordinary. Who does what, and when, and how? Once the Great Earth Mother and I got cooking, habits took over, saving some of the wear and tear on my overloaded brain. I had done this before, often enough that I didn’t have to think about what came next.

  The Great Earth Mother was every man’s dream in bed, responding, anticipating, encouraging, driving me to a frenzy that went on and on. The hero with f
our balls was making love to a real sex goddess. Time seemed to rest on the sidelines to watch. Our foreplay was more extended than I had ever managed before as the big mama bared all my nerve endings and kept me just short of ejaculation. I didn’t even have a chance to worry about the End of Everything coming before I did.

  “Okay, Hero,” she said at last, her mouth all over my ear. “Fuck me.” Well, that’s what heroes are supposed to do best, isn’t it? All in a day’s work, ma ‘am. Just part of the job. Service with a smile. Service as a verb.

  I entered her slowly, cautiously, more for my own comfort than to try to tease her. The Great Earth Mother had strung me out to such a pitch that the gentlest touch against the head of my penis was a ragged shock, threatening to tip me over the edge into premature orgasm and painful release. Maybe all I needed to do was make sure that the release was into her, but I had to hold out for a while at least, show some staying power, a touch of class, a hint of style. She had a poor enough opinion of Heroes without my giving her additional reasons.

  I also had to avoid thinking too much about all of that to keep from triggering what I was trying to hold.

  But it started very nicely even with all of the screaming tension of my extended arousal. The Great Earth Mother got me so crazed that I had trouble remembering just who she was and why I was screwing her. There was magic in the air, in the bed, the way it’s always supposed to be according to the trash—an air of conquest. Me Tarzan, you Jane. She might be Mother Goddess to the world, the creator of everything with the help of any appropriate stud, but she writhed around under me like any woman caught up in the moment, apparently as strung out by our match as I was. What a letter it would make to one of the skin mags! It was an Olympic performance, a level I had never reached before and never expect to duplicate. I’m not sure that I could even survive a rematch of that intensity. I’m only human.

  The theme from Rocky would have been appropriate background to this affair.

  Sweat-slicked skin, the aromas of active sex, the sounds of heavy breathing, garbled nothings, grunts, and gasps, it went on and on. I felt the Great Earth Mother scratching my back, felt the sting of flayed skin, and that finally brought some measure of awareness back to me.

  She wrapped her arms and legs around me and said, “Let’s see what you’re made of, Hero.”

  Then she pulled me tightly against her, her arms and legs overpowering in their strength, crushing the breath from me, forcing my orgasm to match hers: bucking and yawing, a scream that sounded as one even though it was drawn from two throats.

  And then I felt her skin crawling against mine again. There was a swelling sound like the “ocean’s roar” from a seashell.

  And then I fell in.

  Alice fell down a rabbit hole into her strange adventures, but Alice was just a little girl, facing a little girl’s dream fears. Me, I was a Hero, full-grown, tested in battle and in bed. While the Great Earth Mother grew beneath me, I slid out of her arms. I was still anchored to her at the groin. I slipped between her breasts and across her smooth belly without a belly button. I tried to grab hold of the cascades of pubic hair that were suddenly as thick as tangles of heavy rope, but my hands kept sliding off and I tumbled down into the dark well I had been pumping so vigorously not long before.

  I fell into the Great Earth Mother. My shadow fell before me, and seemed to race away from me. I was losing my shadow, the way Peter Pan did, and that provided a focus for my panic.

  Light reflected in wet, glittering patches from the walls of the shaft. The walls receded, became barely visible in a growing distance, then disappeared completely.

  And I continued to fall.

  At first—a long first—I was totally caught up in the fear of falling. There was a moment of utter terror that extended beyond eternity. There was no room in my head for anything else, no sense of how impossible, how Freudian the entire scene was … or how appropriate it might be to go out like this. I’m sure I screamed, maybe a number of times, baring my fear, reducing my throat to a raw pain.

  The Hero was stripped of both form and substance, tumbling an inconceivable distance down a channel designed for conception.

  Jack fell down and broke his crown,

  And Jill came tumbling after.

  But the fall went on and on and my mind eventually grasped for some sort of crisis equilibrium. The fall went on and on?!? Trying to rank utter impossibilities is even more useless and confusing than trying to rank infinities. As near as I could tell—from everything that my terrified senses told me—I had already been falling for minutes, many of them, perhaps even an hour’s worth. I felt wind streaming past me, or rather (as a misplaced moment of logic informed me) I felt the air as I streamed through it, but I didn’t seem to be accelerating any longer. I had apparently reached terminal velocity, whatever that might be under the circumstances.

  I spread my arms and legs like a sky diver in free fall. There was enough air whipping around my naked body to make the tender parts ache again.

  Full extension of my extremities seemed to slow my descent, just a little. I knew that everything that I was experiencing was impossible. (There’s that line again.) There was no way I could really have fallen into a vagina, no way that such a fall—even if it had been possible by any stretch of the imagination or flesh—could have lasted so long. A bottomless pit? A black hole? Impossible. It was something to drive a psychiatrist to his psychiatrist. Compounded impossibilities finally softened my panic. Some semblance of rational thought struggled to regain control of my mind, even though the surroundings were completely irrational.

  The light at the top of the shaft was too far away to be more than the merest pinprick of light, a single distant star in the otherwise absolute void. Around me there was only the deepening darkness and the continued sense of falling.

  “In the beginning …” thundered through my head, but I ignored the litany and it went away.

  I rolled over to look back the way I had come, and I had to fight down a resurgence of panic at falling backward. I looked toward the distant point of light and another voice in my head urged me to wish upon a star to have my dreams come true. That seemed somehow more reasonable than the first proclamation. I had to consider this one for a moment before I let it drift away.

  “Twinkle, twinkle …”

  “Shut up!” I screamed. I twisted back around so that I would meet whatever might be coming head on—as if that made any difference when I couldn’t see anything, not even my hand in front of my face—not the slightest silhouette.

  Time. Time. Time.

  Seconds ticked and hours donged. My head throbbed in some nonphysical pulsing, an inner metronome. I passed in front of my whole life. Hallucinations were projected against the void I was falling through. But it all whizzed by too fast for me to grasp anything of what I saw.

  I have no doubt at all that enough time passed for me to have fallen all of the way to the center of the earth and beyond—if any of the laws of nature that I learned in school still held … which, apparently, they did not, I would have gone through the center, carried by my momentum, to eventually slow down as gravity caught up with me. There would have been an instant when I would have hung in equilibrium, and then I would have fallen back the other way.

  If any of this insanity had been possible in the first place, which it obviously wasn’t—even though it was actually happening.

  Or I thought it was.

  Of all the crazy ideas my father came up with for doing things together while I was growing up, I only flat refused one, when he suggested that we try skydiving. “I don’t see any sense in jumping out of a perfectly good airplane,” I told him, and no matter how many times he brought up the subject, I continued to refuse. Not long after that, I saw a feature on some news show about people tying themselves to bridges with long rubber bands and jumping off, aiming to stop themselves as close to disaster as they could. The reporter called it bungee jumping, or something like that. I knew that if Dad
saw that story he would want to try it. For months I worried, but Dad had just gone off on one of his vague “business trips” when the story aired, so he never saw it, as far as I know. Of course, I didn’t know then that his “business trips” took him to Varay, far from any television and all the spiffied-up reporters who went looking for crazy stories to fill airtime with.

  I’m fal

  l

  l

  l

  ling.”

  Gibraltar and the Rockies did their crumbling and tumbling, along with all the other clay that made up the world. It all broke down. The universe exploded like a balloon filled with too much air.

  Fall down, go BOOM!

  I became part of the extended void. There was nothing but me, my awareness, and the infinite hole I was falling through. A hole in a void. Even the point of light back at the entrance had disappeared—sometime. There was no light at all now. The only sound was the vague whistle of wind as I streamed through the air.

  Minutes, hours, days, months, years, centuries, millennia, eons—who could count? I fell through a time when there was no time, through a distance where there was no distance, no dimensions of any kind.

  I fell beyond that void into my memories.

  There was a sharp transition at that point, in my mind, in the pit, wherever, a boundary that I will never be able to adequately explain in mere words. There was an alteration of perception, a change in state, a cusp. At one point I was falling through this dimensionless void. At the next, I was walking on air, falling through my mind.

  Slower.

  Joy, Annick, Lesh, Aaron, Timon, Harkane. Parthet and my mother. Baron Kardeen. Even the Elflord of Xayber. Clear memories—something that seemed to match my notion of what the “Vulcan mind meld” was supposed to do in the original Star Trek series. I became them and they became me. And we were all together. Altogether. It felt like something a long way beyond mere memory. It was more a current, an ongoing communion. They were there, inside my mind, realities of this peculiar present, not relics of a now-vanished past. I could reach out and touch….