Lessingham set her on her feet.
“Tie me up.”
He was proffering a handful of blood-slicked leather thongs.
“What?”
“Tie me to the rock, mount me. It’s what I want.”
“The evil warriors tied you—?”
“And you come and rescue me.” He made an impatient gesture. “Whatever. Trust me. It’ll be good for you too.” He tugged at his bloodstained silk breeches, releasing a huge, iron-hard erection. “See, they tore my clothes. When you see that, you go crazy, you can’t resist…and I’m at your mercy. Tie me up!”
“Sonja” had heard that eighty per cent of the submissive partners in sadomasochist sex are male; but it is still the man who dominates his “dominatrix”: who says tie me tighter, beat me harder, you can stop now… Hey, she thought. Why all the stage-directions, suddenly? What happened to my zipless fuck? But what the hell. She wasn’t going to back out now, having come so far… There was a seamless shift, and Lessingham was bound to the rock. She straddled his cock. He groaned. “Don’t do this to me.” He thrust upwards, into her, moaning. “You savage, you utter savage, uuunnnh…” Sonja grasped the man’s wrists and rode him without mercy. He was right, it was just as good this way. His eyes were half closed. In the glimmer of blue under his lashes, a spirit of mockery trembled… She heard a laugh, and found her hands were no longer gripping Lessingham’s wrists. He had broken free from her bonds, he was laughing at her in triumph. He was wrestling her to the ground.
“No!” she cried, genuinely outraged. But he was the stronger.
It was night when he was done with her. He rolled away and slept, as far as she could tell, instantly. Her chief thought was that virtual sex didn’t entirely connect. She remembered now, that was something else people told you, as well as the “zipless fuck.” It’s like coming in your sleep, they said. It doesn’t quite make it. Maybe there was nothing virtuality could do to orgasm, to match the heightened richness of the rest of the experience. She wondered if he too had felt cheated.
She lay beside her hero, wondering, Where did I go wrong? Why did he have to treat me that way? Beside her, “Lessingham” cuddled a fragment of violet silk, torn from his own breeches. He whimpered in his sleep, nuzzling the soft fabric, “Mama…”
She told Dr Hamilton that “Lessingham” had raped her.
“And wasn’t that what you wanted?”
She lay on the couch in the mirrored office. The doctor sat beside her with his smart notebook on his knee. The couch collected “Sonja’s” physical responses as if she was an astronaut umbilicaled to ground control; and Dr Jim read the telltales popping up in his reassuring hornrims. She remembered the sneaking furtive thing that she had glimpsed in “Lessingham’s” eyes, the moment before he took over their lust-scene. How could she explain the difference? “He wasn’t playing. In the fantasy, anything’s allowed. But he wasn’t playing. He was outside it, laughing at me.”
“I warned you he would want to stay in control.”
“But there was no need! I wanted him to be in control. Why did he have to steal what I wanted to give him anyway?”
“You have to understand, ‘Sonja,’ that to many men it’s women who seem powerful. You women feel dominated, and try to achieve ‘equality.’ But the men don’t perceive the situation like that. They’re mortally afraid of you: and anything, just about anything they do to keep the upper hand, can seem like justified self-defence.”
She could have wept with frustration. “I know all that! That’s exactly what I was trying to get away from. I thought we were supposed to leave the damn baggage behind. I wanted something purely physical… Something innocent.”
“Sex is not innocent, ‘Sonja.’ I know you believe it is, or ‘should be.’ But it’s time you faced the truth. Any interaction with another person involves some kind of jockeying for power, dickering over control. Sex is no exception. Now that’s basic. You can’t escape from it in direct-cortical fantasy. It’s in our minds that relationships happen, and the mind, of course, is where virtuality happens too.” He sighed, and made an entry in her notes. “I want you to look on this as another step towards coping with the real. You’re not sick, ‘Sonja.’ You’re unhappy. Not even unusually so. Most adults are unhappy, to some degree—”
“Or else they’re in denial.”
Her sarcasm fell flat. “Right. A good place to be, at least some of the time. What we’re trying to achieve here — if we’re trying to achieve anything at all — is to raise your pain threshold to somewhere near average. I want you to walk away from therapy with lowered expectations: I guess that would be success.”
“Great, “she said, desolate. “That’s just great.”
Suddenly he laughed. “Oh, you guys! You are so weird. It’s always the same story. Can’t live with you, can’t live without you… You can’t go on this way, you know. Its getting ridiculous. You want some real advice, ‘Sonja’? Go home. Change your attitudes, and start some hard peace talks with that husband of yours.”
“I don’t want to change,” she said coldly, staring with open distaste at his smooth profile, his soft effeminate hands. Who was he to call her abnormal? “I like my sexuality just the way it is.”
Dr Hamilton returned her look, a glint of human malice breaking through his doctor-act. “Listen. I’ll tell you something for free.” A weird sensation jumped in her crotch. For a moment she had a prick: a hand lifted and cradled the warm weight of her balls. She stifled a yelp of shock. He grinned. “I’ve been looking for a long time, and I know. There is no tall, dark man…”
He returned to her notes. “You say you were ‘raped,’ ” he continued, as if nothing had happened. “Yet you chose to continue the virtual session. Can you explain that?”
She thought of the haunted darkness, the cold air on her naked body; the soreness of her bruises; a rag of flesh used and tossed away. How it had felt to lie there: intensely alive, tasting the dregs, beaten back at the gates of the fortunate land. In dreamland, even betrayal had such rich depth and fascination. And she was free to enjoy, because it didn’t matter.
“You wouldn’t understand.”
Out in the lobby there were people coming and going. It was lunchtime, the lifts were busy. “Sonja” noticed a round-shouldered geek of a little man making for the entrance to the clinic. She wondered idly if that could be “Lessingham.”
She would drop out of the group. The adventure with “Lessingham” was over, and there was no one else for her. She needed to start again. The doctor knew he’d lost a customer, that was why he’d been so open with her today. He certainly guessed, too, that she’d lose no time in signing on somewhere else on the semi-medical fringe. What a fraud all that therapy-talk was! He’d never have dared to play the sex-change trick on her, except that he knew she was an addict. She wasn’t likely to go accusing him of unprofessional conduct. Oh, he knew it all. But his contempt didn’t trouble her.
So, she had joined the inner circle. She could trust Dr Hamilton’s judgment. He had the telltales: he would know. She recognised with a feeling of mild surprise that she had become a statistic, an element in a fashionable social concern: an epidemic flight into fantasy, inadequate personalities, unable to deal with the reality of normal human sexual relations… But that’s crazy, she thought. I don’t hate men, and I don’t believe “Lessingham” hates women. There’s nothing psychotic about what we’re doing. We’re making a consumer choice. Virtual sex is easier, that’s all. Okay, it’s convenience food. It has too much sugar, and a certain blandness. But when a product comes along, that is cheaper, easier and more fun to use than the original version, of course people are going to buy it.
The lift was full. She stood, drab bodies packed around her, breathing the stale air. Every face was a mask of dull endurance. She closed her eyes. The caravanserai walls rose strangely from the empty plain…
Sterling to Kessel, 7 April 1985:
“I once read some remark of F. Scott
Fitzgerald’s in which he spoke of wrenching his stories from his emotional wounds — in this case, it was some busted affair from which he was ‘still bleeding like a haemophiliac.’ It was from a letter he sent to some writing hopeful, a young woman begging him for advice, and one suspects he laid it on a bit thick with the Ever-Popular Tortured Artist Effect.
But this sort of ‘writer’s paradigm’ has stuck with me and caused me many moments of doubt. It makes me wonder to what extent science fiction is ‘fiction’ at all. Perhaps it is based on emotion, and the central emotion is wonder. But wonder is such a pale and nebulous thing, and shades off into intellectual curiosity, or even just an abstract admiration for imaginative cleverness….
It also strikes me that each of your examples: Hamlet, The Glass Key, Persuasion, The Secret Agent, fulfills its genre rather than distorting it. Each of them delivers the pop genre elements that the audience expects. The Glass Key, for instance, is not a mainstream piece shoehorned into the restrictions of genre, but a genre piece elevated to the status of literature….
I don’t think anyone can really understand SF who does not have a solid understanding of Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker. Here is a story without characters, almost without plot, and markedly devoid of humanistic values. And by any meaningful standard of definition this book is great science fiction.”
Kessel to Sterling, 1 March 1987:
“I just taught Stapledon’s Star Maker. It’s some kind of crazy great book, but it’s not all there is to sf, and certainly not all there is to fantastic literature. And Bruce, I hate to break this to you, but to people of a certain disposition it’s boring as three-day-old shit. I’m talking about normal in-the-street readers, not English majors. I think such people are missing something, but they’ve got a case. I suspect that what you think makes Star Maker a great book is also what you consider to be the central virtue of sf: its speculative content. There are other views. I don’t buy into a set of standards that makes only such work the best of the genre….
I could be wrong. I don’t expect us to agree. The most cogent statement I found in your letter was your handwritten note at the end of page one where you suggest, ‘let’s wait until we’re both dead, O.K.?’ I’m ready to declare a truce on the basis of that statement.”
How We Got in Town and out Again
Jonathan Lethem
Jonathan Lethem, in a series of stories in the early to mid-1990s challenged the pieties of CP, seeing the promises of freedom and power offered by such staples as virtual reality as a new realm for hucksters and scam artists. As in so much of his fiction, here Lethem finds a literary ancestor, in this case Horace McCoy’s 1930s novel of dance marathons in the Great Depression, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? The result is a vision of desperate humans in a broken economy imagining VR as a way out.
When we first saw somebody near the mall Gloria and I looked around for sticks. We were going to rob them if they were few enough. The mall was about five miles out of the town we were headed for, so nobody would know. But when we got closer Gloria saw their vans and said they were scapers. I didn’t know what that was, but she told me.
It was summer. Two days before this Gloria and I had broken out of a pack of people that had food but we couldn’t stand their religious chanting anymore. We hadn’t eaten since then.
“So what do we do?” I said.
“You let me talk,” said Gloria.
“You think we could get into town with them?”
“Better than that,” she said. “Just keep quiet.”
I dropped the piece of pipe I’d found and we walked in across the parking lot. This mall was long past being good for finding food anymore but the scapers were taking out folding chairs from a store and strapping them on top of their vans. There were four men and one woman.
“Hey,” said Gloria.
Two guys were just lugs and they ignored us and kept lugging. The woman was sitting in the front of the van. She was smoking a cigarette.
The other two guys turned. This was Kromer and Fearing, but I didn’t know their names yet.
“Beat it,” said Kromer. He was a tall squinty guy with a gold tooth. He was kind of worn but the tooth said he’d never lost a fight or slept in a flop. “We’re busy,” he said.
He was being reasonable. If you weren’t in a town you were nowhere. Why talk to someone you met nowhere?
But the other guy smiled at Gloria. He had a thin face and a little mustache. “Who are you?” he said. He didn’t look at me.
“I know what you guys do,” Gloria said. “I was in one before.”
“Oh?” said the guy, still smiling.
“You’re going to need contestants,” she said.
“She’s a fast one,” this guy said to the other guy. “I’m Fearing,” he said to Gloria.
“Fearing what?” said Gloria.
“Just Fearing.”
“Well, I’m just Gloria.”
“That’s fine,” said Fearing. “This is Tommy Kromer. We run this thing. What’s your little friend’s name?”
“I can say my own name,” I said. “I’m Lewis.”
“Are you from the lovely town up ahead?”
“Nope,” said Gloria. ‘We’re headed there.”
“Getting in exactly how?” said Fearing.
“Anyhow,” said Gloria, like it was an answer. “With you, now.”
“That’s assuming something pretty quick.”
“Or we could go and say how you ripped off the last town and they sent us to warn about you,” said Gloria.
“Fast,” said Fearing again, grinning, and Kromer shook his head. They didn’t look too worried.
“You ought to want me along,” said Gloria. “I’m an attraction.”
“Can’t hurt,” said Fearing.
Kromer shrugged, and said, “Skinny, for an attraction.”
“Sure, I’m skinny,” she said. “That’s why me and Lewis ought to get something to eat.”
Fearing stared at her. Kromer was back to the van with the other guys.
“Or if you can’t feed us — ” started Gloria.
“Hold it, sweetheart. No more threats.”
“We need a meal.”
“We’ll eat something when we get in,” Fearing said. “You and Lewis can get a meal if you’re both planning to enter.”
“Sure,” she said. “We’re gonna enter—right, Lewis?”
I knew to say right.
The town militia came out to meet the vans, of course. But they seemed to know the scapers were coming, and after Fearing talked to them for a couple of minutes they opened up the doors and had a quick look then waved us through. Gloria and I were in the back of a van with a bunch of equipment and one of the lugs, named Ed. Kromer drove. Fearing drove the van with the woman in it. The other lug drove the last one alone.
I’d never gotten into a town in a van before, but I’d only gotten in two times before this anyway. The first time by myself, just by creeping in, the second because Gloria went with a militia guy.
Towns weren’t so great anyway. Maybe this would be different.
We drove a few blocks and a guy flagged Fearing down. He came up to the window of the van and they talked, then went back to his car, waving at Kromer on his way. Then we followed him.
“What’s that about?” said Gloria.
“Gilmartin’s the advance man,” said Kromer. “I thought you knew everything.”
Gloria didn’t talk. I said, “What’s an advance man?”
“Gets us a place, and the juice we need,” said Kromer. “Softens the town up. Gets people excited.”
It was getting dark. I was pretty hungry, but I didn’t say anything. Gilmartin’s car led us to this big building shaped like a boathouse only it wasn’t near any water. Kromer said it used to be a bowling alley.
The lugs started moving stuff and Kromer made me help. The building was dusty and empty inside, and some of the lights didn’t work. Kromer said just to get things inside f
or now. He drove away one of the vans and came back and we unloaded a bunch of little cots that Gilmartin the advance man had rented, so I had an idea where I was going to be sleeping. Apart from that it was stuff for the contest. Computer cables and plastic spacesuits, and loads of televisions.
Fearing took Gloria and they came back with food, fried chicken and potato salad, and we all ate. I couldn’t stop going back for more but nobody said anything. Then I went to sleep on a cot. No one was talking to me. Gloria wasn’t sleeping on a cot. I think she was with Fearing.
Gilmartin the advance man had really done his work. The town was sniffing around first thing in the morning. Fearing was out talking to them when I woke up. “Registration begins at noon, not a minute sooner,” he was saying. “Beat the lines and stick around. We’ll be serving coffee. Be warned, only the fit need apply—our doctor will be examining you, and he’s never been fooled once. It’s Darwinian logic, people. The future is for the strong. The meek will have to inherit the here and now.”
Inside, Ed and the other guy were setting up the gear. They had about thirty of those wired-up plastic suits stretched out in the middle of the place, and so tangled up with cable and little wires that they were like husks of fly bodies in a spiderweb.
Under each of the suits was a light metal frame, sort of like a bicycle with a seat but no wheels, but with a headrest too. Around the web they were setting up the televisions in an arc facing the seats. The suits each had a number on the back, and the televisions had numbers on top that matched.
When Gloria turned up she didn’t say anything to me but she handed me some donuts and coffee.
“This is just the start,” she said, when she saw my eyes get big. “We’re in for three squares a day as long as this thing lasts. As long as we last, anyway.”
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