Live Without a Net

by Lou Anders

  “—art in Heaven, hallowed be thy—”

  I turned away, retraced my steps to the entrance.

  There was nothing for me here.

  I used Thomas Cook’s, the real travel agency, to make the booking. The SOE department was long defunct; few people in MI6 now would recognize the term.

  Somehow, that made it seem even more appropriate.

  Sweltering heat, though it was not yet spring. Blazing sun in a cloudless azure sky. Hotter than New Mexico, and humid.

  I lay on straggly parched grass which struggled to grow through sandy ground. Using a soft cloth, I wiped the rifle’s scope before putting my eye to the lens once more. A jumble of people: military uniforms, civilian suits. Women in candy-colored frocks, wide hats, and short white gloves. No sign of the target.

  Too soon.

  I looked away, lay the rifle down, and lay back on the grass. No blimps or scanbats overhead: they were steering clear of the area. The one security hole I was able to exploit.

  Florida, and hot: it was over three years since Felix and I had fished here last—he took a giant tuna despite his hook-hand—and I had avoided all contact with him since then. But through him I had made interesting contacts, which was how I was lying here now with an airclaw-loaded rifle, waiting for the moment.

  Laura, my sweetest love …

  Later. Concentrate now.

  Huge and magnificent, the great silver hyperasaur stood waiting to lift: vastly bigger than any dragonflyer built before, pregnant with massive energies, poised to burst upward into sky, into space, to orbit our small planet with its brave lone pilot aboard.

  His courage, I saluted.

  Nearly time. Adjusting the scope …

  There.

  Among the dignitaries, on the official view-platform overlooking Cape Canaveral, was the one I was looking for. Dressed in a white linen suit, with the same white-blond hair—he had never bothered to have his appearance altered after the war—he took his place beside a five-star general.

  The general clapped him on the back and handed over a cigar.

  Riches, fame, and the chance to lead the free world into space. Ignoring his past: claiming that his wartime work was carried out in virtual captivity.

  A blare of distant tannoys.

  Countdown.

  Distant roar, as the great hyperdragon’s engines burst into life, poured white flames downward, blazing bright as the sun.

  Crosshairs …

  Ready to lift, mankind’s future rising to the stars, but my focus now was on a single white-blond head.

  Steady.

  No Piotr to help me this time: the responsibility was mine alone.

  Breathe in …

  Liftoff.

  Even from here, the roar was deafening. Onlookers’ cheers lost amid the hyperdragon’s thunderous rising.

  And hold.

  Centered.

  It was, I admit it, a triumph for humankind. The first step in our species’ fundamental destiny.

  Hold …

  Focus: face, hair, blond-white.

  No mistaking the features.

  And squeeze.

  For Laura.

  Turning away, as the speeding silver dragon arced higher, higher on its tail of fire, diminished in the azure sky, was gone.

  Acid bubbling: self-destruct dissolved the rifle.

  It’s over now, my love.

  I turned upon the sand-choked grass and walked away.

  John Grant is the author of about sixty books (some under other names), both fiction and nonfiction, among them The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (with John Clute). His most recent major nonfiction books are Masters of Animation, Perceptualistics: Art by Jael, and, with Elizabeth Humphrey, The Chesley Awards: A Retrospective. His novel The Far-Enough Window, “a fairy tale for grown-ups of all ages,” was published in fall 2002, as was his book-length words-and-pictures collaboration with Bob Eggleton, Dragonhenge. He has received the Hugo, the World Fantasy Award, the Locus Award, the Mythopoeic Society Scholarship Award, the J. Lloyd Eaton Award, and a rare British Science Fiction Association Special Award. Under another name he is Commissioning Editor of Paper Tiger, the world’s leading publisher of fantasy art books, and U.S. Reviews Editor of Infinity Plus; for his work with Paper Tiger, he received a 2002 Chesley Award. He is married to Pamela D. Scoville, Director of the Animation Art Guild.

  NO SOLACE FOR THE SOUL IN DIGITOPIA

  John Grant

  My wife Xanthe was standing naked at the counter in the bathroom, brushing her teeth, when I woke up. Still lying in bed, I watched her back with a voyeuristic frisson for a few moments; then I climbed out quietly and padded across the bedroom to creep up behind her.

  Standing there, looking at her smiling eyes over her shoulder in the mirror, I ran the tips of my fingers softly down over her shoulder blades and then the length of her spine until I reached the lower curves of her buttocks. With my fingernails I repeatedly stroked gently outward from the fork of her legs along the twin creases beneath the smooth swells, all the while brushing her back with the soft hairs of my chest and nuzzling my nose in among the sleepy tousles of coppery red that fell over the back of her neck.

  She gave a sort of bubbling moan through the froth of toothpaste and relaxed her stance, moving her feet apart and bending at the waist, supporting herself with her left hand flat on the counter. I stopped my stroking and reached round her hips to let my fingers play among the tangles of her pubic hair, teasing the strands tenderly, then slid one forefinger down to the topmost fold of her sex.

  Xanthe’s a tall woman, taller than I am, so when my erection slipped between her thighs to find a harbor, it was only the ripe bell of my penis that lodged between her labia, cupped in moist warmth. She carried on brushing her teeth, though her steady rhythm was by now becoming disjointed; stuttering vibrations caressed the head of my penis and transmitted themselves softly down its shaft. The movements of my hands, too, were becoming uncoordinated as I alternately cradled her buttocks and rubbed the rounded ridges of her pelvic cradle, leaning against her once more as I kneaded the sides of her small breasts with the soft skin of my inner wrists, touching the taut raspberries of her nipples and gripping them fleetingly between paired fingers.

  She dropped the toothbrush into the basin and gulped, the gulp causing a muscular contraction that tweaked the top of my penis with a little kissing sound. Almost immediately afterwards, further delicate movements there told me that she was having a small orgasm.

  She put her other hand down on the counter and, with a long low gasp, bent her legs, easing outward and downward and backward so that the full length of my shaft was slowly engulfed by her hotness and she was almost sitting in my lap as I took part of her weight.

  “Good morning,” I said in her ear, looking at our faces smiling side by side in the mirror, casting my gaze down a little to where my hands had settled on her breasts. Her skin was pinkly flushed down one side of her neck and over her chest, the pale tint spreading across the top of one breast.

  “ ’Morning,” she sighed.

  She began to sway herself against me, up and down along my penis, also giving a small swivel to her hips. In the mirror her lips were still forming a contented smile and her eyes were still dancing, but through my own closing eyes I could see my mouth was pulling into an earnest grimace. I dipped my head and began to cover her shoulders with my kisses, my own hips beginning to move now in counterpoint to hers, feeling her smooth buttocks squeezing down onto my lower belly and then pulling themselves momentarily away again. Grunting a little, I ran a hand back down to her sex and found her clitoris with my fingers; the first touch drew a whooping cry from her, and the speed of her movements against me quickened. She shoved backwards, taking a small, uncontrolled step, making me nearly stumble, dropping her head so that now she was almost bent double, pushing me deeper and deeper and more and more forcefully into her, the wet sounds of us slapping the walls with muted echoes.

  It was as if th
ere were no longer two of us, just one single organism trembling and pulsing in a quest for unitary pleasure. I felt as if I were being absorbed entirely into her, so that her breath was my breath, her velvety morning skin-smell a warm cloud that embraced both of us, her twitching shoulder blades in front of my eyes a plain of flesh that was my own flesh.

  Each plunge of her buttocks against me was now almost like a punch. With each thrust she was yelling—incoherent sounds, wordless cries.

  “Shall? We?” I could hardly keep my mind together enough to form the words.

  “Do? This?” Someone else might not have recognized her noises as speech.

  “Together?” I gasped.

  An old joke between us. An affectionate little playful joke it had been at first, in the early days of our lovemaking, but now become so intimate that it was as erotically charged as anything else we did together.

  “Yes!” she shrieked.

  And began to come, this time not with one of the many little minor orgasms that had been tickling my penis all along but with full intensity, so that it felt as if firm hands were clutching at my shaft. Inside me a dam held momentarily against the rush of my own orgasm, then was breached by a final powerful thrust.

  For long seconds my entire universe was just a haze outside the brilliantly glowing focus of our conjoined sexes. I was the smell of her and the taste of her and the touch of her and the breath of her. Then slowly I became conscious that my cheek was nestling against her spine and that I was moaning softly. She was still coming, her orgasms tumbling one on top of each other, my penis lovingly buffeted by their strength, her buttocks moving in spasmic little jerks. The air was rich with the smell of our lovemaking.

  Finally she stilled.

  I held on to her with both arms around her belly, dizzy, needing her support. I was still hard within her, hard as stone, so hard I thought I would never, ever stop being hard like this, would never stop being in this embrace with her, would be making love with her for eternity and all the while be growing harder… .

  “I love you,” I said.

  “I love you,” she replied.

  Eternity is quite a lot shorter than you think it is, and so half an hour later I was showered and fully dressed and out on the street, walking to the bus stop where I could if I wanted to catch the number 264 bus to work. My whole body felt satisfied, as if it had been given an extensive internal massage complete with sweet-scented oils. I kissed Xanthe good-bye when she stopped at the car, and watched her, waving loosely, as she drove away to join the streams of traffic toward the other side of town, where she worked as a marine architect.

  Standing there in the warm morning sunshine, I was somewhat vague as to what precisely my own profession was, and so instead of carrying on toward the bus stop I turned up a small alley and was in bed with my wife Lyssa.

  Lyssa is small and blond and so petitely cute that it almost hurts the eyes to look at her, as if so much beauty shouldn’t have been crammed into such a small compass, and right at the moment she was coming drowsily awake with her face burrowing into my side. I pushed silky near-white hair back from her forehead and squirmed around so that I was facing her and could kiss her into full wakefulness. Even as her eyelids pulled slowly open, her eager little hand was tickling its way down over my belly to where my erection was slowly, then swiftly, mounting.

  She wrapped her hand around the shaft, pressing her thumb down on top of the tip, grinning through the increasingly fervent kisses I was placing on her lips. Gripping a little more tightly, she began moving the thick satiny skin of the shaft slowly up and down.

  “The kids are awake,” I whispered, pulling my face back from hers. “I heard them moving around a little while ago.”

  She pouted, half-mocking, half-serious. “Damn,” she said.

  When Lyssa and I make love, it tends to get noisy. The kids know better than to charge into our bedroom unannounced, of course, but they’d be bound to ask us later about all the creaking and yelling. We’ve tried making love silently, and it’s kind of fun because it feels as if we’re committing some sort of delicious naughtiness together; but at the same time inhibited lovemaking has its limitations.

  “Still and all … ,” I began, leaving the sentence unfinished as I rolled her onto her back.

  I kissed her again, harder this time, our tongues probing into each other’s mouths, caressing within, our breath becoming loud in each other’s ears. Then I ran the tip of my tongue around the edge of her cheekbone and down to her chin. She arched her head back as my tongue moved on to the crease of her neck, tasting her sweetly salty sleep-sweat there. In moments I was kissing her breasts, taking each of her small nipples in turn between my teeth, not biting, not even gently biting, rolling my lips over my teeth and pressing gently. She held my head in her hands, breathing more deeply now, her hips moving reflexively against my chest, her legs parting to either side of my torso, her furry little sex making small wet noises of its own against my abdomen. Between her legs, my erection against the sheets seemed heavier than it had any right to be, as if it were becoming larger than all the rest of me put together.

  I lingered at her breasts tantalizingly longer than I knew she wanted me to; then my mouth continued its downward exploration of her body, pausing once more when I reached her navel, probing the tiny folds with my tongue, tracing damp circles around the concavity. Her belly is flat and smooth, even though she has borne our two children; through its wall I could hear her blood rushing and her insides making modest gurgling noises. Often enough in the past I’d held my cheek here and listened to first my son and then my daughter moving in her womb, felt their diminutive kicks and punches. I knew I was smiling broadly as I kissed her here now, sensing the tension building up in her loins, remembering those other moments of intimacy… .

  Half-kneeling, I pushed her legs gently yet farther apart and sank my head to rub my nose over the silky skin of the inside of first one thigh and then the other, breathing deeply the warm muskiness of her pinkly unfolding sex. Her fingers began clawing the sides of my head as she tried to force my face closer, but I deliberately resisted her just a little while longer, continuing to rub and kiss her inner thighs as her behind squirmed frenziedly against the sheets.

  At last I relented, first placing a broad warm kiss over her wet opening, sucking slightly, tasting the juices; then I puckered my lips and very daintily kissed her clitoris. She jerked against me, even that brief and inconsequential contact bringing her to the brink of orgasm. Once more I kissed the little nub of her clitoris, and then I pushed my tongue between her warm folds, blowing gently.

  Her hands scrabbled over my scalp. Her hips jolted upward, clear of the bedding, and despite any resolves to keep silent she let out a long, soft cry as she came, her thighs juddering against my ears, the muscles of her belly writhing and tautening.

  When she was at last done, I pulled myself up alongside her, my penis, though somewhat smaller here than usual, still a dominating presence in my mind. I gazed at her reddened face, at the beloved crinkles of her ears, at those pale blue eyes still half-closed, at the parted pink lips, at the corner of her mouth where a trickle of saliva glistened, at the darling curls of damp-darkened blondness flattened against her scalp around the back of her ears. I truly love this woman of mine—love every part of her, both spiritually and carnally. I caressed her cheek and jaw with my hand, feeling her heat and her perspiration, and, despite the throbbing of my erection, began to drift into a half-doze, cradling her in my arms against me.

  But then her hand walked its way down to my erection again and clasped it.

  “Wait here,” she breathed.

  Pushing back her hair with her other hand, she wormed her way slowly down the bed and kissed the underside of my penis, working slowly up from root to tip, where she tickled with her tongue tip the tight cord of folded flesh.

  I shut my eyes and saw visions of rushing through space among the stars, my consciousness ebbing toward the tingle of her ton
gue tip’s touch and the warmth of her breath.

  The movements of her tongue grew broader, and then she was taking me into her mouth, almost coyly at first, as if her mouth were experimenting demurely; then more fully, her lips gripping the skin and sliding it backward and forward, a finger and thumb gripping the base of the shaft to steady it.

  Within just a few seconds I felt myself beginning to come. Lyssa felt it as well, starting to press rhythmically with her thumb at the throbbing area near the base of my erection’s underface. She speeded up the motion of her head, clamping my penis more firmly between her lips, her tongue dashing hither and thither.

  I craned my neck and looked down along the planes of my body at her. Just at that moment she glanced up at me, paused for a fraction of a second, her blue eyes alight with mischief, her cheeks puffed out. Her lips moved in a languorous grin, and I felt every last adjustment of her flesh against mine. And then I flung my head backwards on the pillow, arching my back, staring at the gray ceiling, groping with my hands for her head, for her hair, running my fingers through it, feeling the play of her facial muscles and the subtler tectonics of her scalp, putting a palm to her bulging cheek and …

  The breath rushed out of my lungs in a huge gust as I came, feeling her swallow once, twice, her head now stilled as she accepted my semen.

  Once she had satisfied herself that she’d drained me entirely, she fastidiously licked me clean, touching me gently with her lips and her tongue because she knew how close to pain any rough contact would be. Then, holding her body against mine, she slithered up the front of me until our mouths were together and I could kiss her deeply, tasting myself on her teeth and tongue.

  “I love you,” I said at last.

  “No more than I love you,” she said, her voice hoarse, hardly more than a whisper. “Hold me tight, darling. Hold me tight.”

  I held her tight, pulling a sheet up over us in case the kids came bouncing in.