So the habit riders have of fondling each other’s bums when they talk is a double entendre. Apart from the obvious, it’s also a professional compliment, not to say a wondering about each other’s ability. Anyway I couldn’t let Galilee steal my trade.
‘Tell you what,’ I said, hating myself for it, and letting my fingers slide down the sweaty fold between his cheeks just to seem more friendly, ‘there’s two hundred kudos in it for you and you don’t have to do anything. ‘ The threat began melting from his face and I added, ‘Except loan me some fuel rods to do the job.’
‘Two hundred up front?’
‘Well, no.’
‘Sure, then you fuck up and get lost in infinity.’
‘I’ll be all right. Would I go out if I wasn’t sure?’
‘Where are you going?’
‘Elivira. But look, I haven’t got that much time.’ I was having to palpate his bud with my middle fingertip, but he went for it. I went with him to his shack and collected four charge rods, then left to do a quick check on my rig. I was hauling it on its castors across the concrete by the towrope when my passenger returned. He jabbed his eyes at the raft, which must have looked to him something like a larger version of a kid’s go-cart, and I saw the fear returning.
‘It’s all up to you,’ I told him, and let the towrope go slack.
‘I’ve got to go,’ he gabbled. ‘I’ve got to go.’
Alongside the liner bays every phase port has a raft shack that uses exactly the same phase pusher as the big ships, like a kind of free ride, a minnow hitching a lift on a whale. I dragged the raft inside and set it on the rails.
‘I’ll need your identity card.’
‘Yes, of course.’ He dived into an inside pocket and fished out a honey-gold wallet. I had time to see plenty of kudos inside it before he came out with the card. I stepped to the terminal in the corner and slipped it in the slot, then gave the controller my registration number and destination.
‘Are we all set?’ my passenger asked as I handed the card back to him.
‘Yaw-Waw.’
A backraft is twelve feet long, five feet wide, and is cast in titanium-braced aluminium. There’s a charge-powered impeller motor, a navigator, and a cockpit-type passenger seat with safety belt and handgrips, which actually don’t do anything because you can’t fall out. The pilot sits on a silvery plate of mercury amalgam. He has a head-up display ‘grammed into his eyeballs, and a couple of joysticks, but all the fine control that makes backriding possible is by neural induction through the buttocks. That’s not only the best way, it’s the only way of rafting through backspace with a good chance of coming out alive; everything else has been tried, including neural induction directly from the brain through a headset. Praise be to the male bum!
‘How do we breathe?’ he asked.
‘There’s a bubble comes over once we’re phased.’
‘Oh. How long will the trip take?’
‘Half an hour at best, up to an hour if the currents are slow.’ I showed him where to put his carry-all in the luggage space behind his seat, then helped him on all courteous-like, even fastening the strap for him. His hands were trembling. I rubbed mine together in business-like fashion and spoke jovially. ‘Ready to go?’
‘Yes, er, Yaw-Yaw,’ he responded feebly. Creep.
I stepped aboard and set my butt down on the guidance plate. Lovely sensation. ‘Control,’ I announced into the air, ‘this is 2318. Push, please.’
You could hear the snap as the pusher charged up, thinning out the consistency of frontspace so it could shove us through. Behind me I heard the customer whimper and grind his teeth. He ain’t seen nuthin’ yet, as they say somewhere or other.
Then came the jolt that turns your stomach over. At the same instant, the liquid polymer bubble expanded to canopy the deck of the raft (you could feel it passing over your skin just like a soap bubble), and the pearly blue effulgence of midspace surrounded us. Midspace. Smooth, smooth, smooooth. For the record, midspace is a half-phase shift. The only reason it’s there is that if you’ve got a front and a back, then naturally there’s got to be something in between. The rigid structure of frontspace is left behind or at least attenuated, and there isn’t yet the chaotic connectivity of backspace. Consequently there’s no matter as such. And the physical constants ‘slip’ because there isn’t enough friction, so to speak, to make them stick, especially that big constant about the velocity of light. That’s why you can move faster there.
But not fast enough. The port pusher had given us the impetus to make the full phase shift of 180 degrees, turning us right round so as to experience existence from the other side. But the actual transition calls for a pilot’s skill. A lot of guys who want to be backjockeys do themselves a favour by never mastering that particular trick. I rotated the joysticks. I wiggled my bum. When you go through the curtain it’s like a blow in every somatic cell, a sweet shock to the nervous system. I made the phase shift and WHAM - we were on our way. Yow-Wow!
A fast current caught us right away and I was busy holding the raft steady; eddies were whirling on either side. I peered into the visor of the navigator, which I had previously calibrated to point the way to Elivira phase port, and at the same time I gunned the impeller on low power. There: I had the beckoning call of Elivira port. Now all I had to do was get there.
Everywhere around us backspace stretched to infinity. The polymer bubble does more than provide an air canopy; it also interprets what’s outside and adds false colour. Without it, if you had only an oxygen mask, you wouldn’t see anything: backlight doesn’t register on the human retina. Silver and gold predominate, then turquoise, indigo and red. We saw a limitless hell of canyons running with torrents and rapids, huge drowning splashes and falls tumbling in all directions. It’s the turbulence you have to watch for. If you’re riding on something with a direction, you can at least kid yourself you’re in control. Get caught in that crazy all-over-the-place stuff and you’ll get lost or smashed to smithereens, like as not.
‘Here y’are, buddy!’ I yelled. ‘You’re on the arse side of the universe!’ I’d hooked on to a fast current going roughly the way we needed, or not so far off, anyway, and I was getting high.
How often have you looked at somebody and decided you liked his arse better than his face? Particularly after you heard him speak? Well, I like backspace better. And I’ll tell you why.
If you can see light from a distant star, it’s because you and the star are connected in backspace. Everything is. Backspace is pure connectivity. If you artificially enter it - frontspace structures aren’t supposed to be there at all - it starts working on the connectivities of the brain, pretty much the same way hallucinogenic drugs do. The resistance of the synapses is lowered. The neurones fire faster. As a result you get intensified mood.
With me that mood is always the same: terror. The most utter, delicious terror you could ever imagine, terror so strong it becomes sexual. The adrenaline goes pling and my dick springs up like a striking cobra. That’s why I’m so good, that’s why I’m the best. Conscious of where I am, conscious of how hazardous it is, knowing I might not get out, makes my mind as concentrated as a razor’s edge. Only then, only then, do I really feel that I’m alive. After that, the rest of the time - all the time in frontspace - is like being half dead. So my attention was on it, was sharp and really on it, impelled by an endless surge of fear. I brought the power up on the motor as the current hit a flurry of rapids, the flow breaking up and twisting like a river pouring through a bed strewn with boulders. My bum was humming with the effort of tricking the raft through.
Behind me I could hear my passenger. He was coming in for mood enhancement too, of course - I wonder if he knew about that - but with him it had caused his fright to evaporate. Instead he was going mushy. He chortled, chuckled, cooed. We came through the canyon maze and into a region more like an expanse of immense ocean swells but spread in three dimensions, looking maybe like one of those geometry graphic
displays, with endless veils and curved surfaces you could sort of skate over, and he was going, ‘Coo, isn’t it pretty! Oooohh, it’s beautiful.’
Then he got weepy and soon was spouting about why he wanted to get to Elivira so quickly. Was he running for his life? Was there some compelling moral duty that demanded his immediate presence? Did a gigantic business deal hang on his arrival? Naw, it was some dreck about his boyfriend, who had left him and was on his way to Elivira on a midspace liner. I was checking the navigator, trying to get our bearings, but even so I couldn’t fail to catch some of it.
‘He’s not doing this to me,’ he blubbered. ‘I’m going to be there when he docks. I’ll have rented a nice condo for us and everything will be ready. I’ll fill it with antiques - he likes antiques, especially twenty-first century Earth. I’ll get some tubular aluminium kitchen chairs with floral plastic seat covers. And a genuine double-glazed window from an English council housing estate! There’s a dealer on Elivira guarantees they date no later than 2050! They cost the universe, of course, but it will be worth it. Oh, I’m so full of love!’
Suddenly he was kissing the nape of my neck, and that savage, professional fear transmuted itself - as happens - to unconstrained lust, and I lost all my caution. He was a lovely feller, really.
I turned round to give him a lingering look from beneath my long artificial eyelashes.
‘You wanna fu-u-u-ck?’
Of course he did. So there was I, zooming on one of those big swells with an idiot grin of delight all over my face, eyes lit up like searchlights, twirling the joysticks and looking for a sandbank.
~ * ~
Sandbanks are what we call them. Anomalous spots of solidity - near-solidity, rather - where backspace’s interminable motion congeals into stable - nearstable, rather - islands. You can dismount and walk around on one.
Just what features they correspond to in the front world is unknown. In truth it hasn’t been possible to map backspace to frontspace at all. For one thing there are too few points of reference. For some reason I don’t properly understand, phase transition can only be accomplished from frontspace. There has to be a phase pusher there both to punch you through, and to let you phase back again. Consequently phase ports can only be set up in places that initially have been reached the slow way, by frontspace ships travelling only a few times the velocity of light. Those ports are like beacons, sending out mid and backspace signals that your navigator picks up to guide you to your destination.
Without that you’re lost in chaos, because every time you phase through, even from the same port, the landscape is totally different. Backspace is never the same twice, and is without landmarks. The engineers can’t even say if distances and sizes relate in any way. That maze of canyons we went through - maybe it’s holding the galaxy together; or maybe it’s just a grain of salt. It’s possible our half hour’s journey would be spent traversing the equivalent of one millimetre, and we’d cover the rest of the thirty-two light-years to Elivira in the final microsecond. Why try to makes sense of it?
Before too long I’d found what I was looking for, a golden mound tapering indistinctly off for an indefinite distance all around. I drifted the raft on to it, powered off, then leaned back to unstrap my passenger. The bubble relaxed, spreading out as I stepped on to the sandbank so as to give us room to move around. The stuff of the bank yielded under my feet like the softest foam rubber. Offering my hand, I helped him courteously down.
‘What is this place?’ he wondered.
‘Somewhere to have fun.’
Is there a link between sexual fever and cosmic awareness? Us backriders think so. But then we’ve got something that doesn’t happen in the front world, where the erotic and the awesome don’t seem capable of occupying the mind at one and the same time. It’s that revamped brain connectivity again. Things that are divorced in frontspace here get wired together. Like, one thing that is a lure for me again and again is the sensation of vastness. In the front world that’s something you get only fleetingly. You see something really big and you think Yow-Wow, but you can’t sustain the impression and a minute later it’s gone, your personal world is very small; in backspace, on the other hand, the synapses are constantly tickled so the sense of immensity is there all the time. You can see what a light year is really like. If there were any planetary systems you would be able to see the distances between the planets and satellites, how far away the Sun was. So my customer was mooning up at the sandbank’s sky, at all those stupendous traceries and veils and curves, seeing infinity with the naked eyeball, and it was blowing his mind while I was fiddling with his clothing. He had said his boyfriend liked antique stuff, but he must have as well, because his costume was straight out of a museum. Buttons and bows. Buttons everywhere. His trousers were held up by a kind of double strap thing that went over his shoulders and buttoned on to the waistband by little leather thongs. I unbuttoned those. There was also a row of buttons down the front of his crotch, hidden behind a flap! It was a nice hot feeling sneaking my fingers down those buttons one by one, then teasing open the vent. I massaged his podgy belly. I unbuttoned his waistcoat and pushed up his shirt to nuzzle his hairy chest, snuffing up the smell of him while I fondled his cock and balls. He was so preoccupied with the overhead vision that it was some time before the old reflex got his blood engorging his member, but when it did I saw his eyes sparkle. I was breathing heavily, in urgent gasps. We wrestled and tussled for a bit as I pulled down his trousers and undergarment, then before you knew it I was beginning to snuggle my knob into that dual purpose orifice, already well lubricated, while continuing to pump his cock with my right hand, and he was going ‘Oooohh, give me some time.’
That was when things went wrong.
~ * ~
The sensation felt like the ground, the mushy bed beneath us, was melting into thin air. I pulled out of him and jumped up. The sandbank was breaking up, the landscape dissipating fast.
Was a supernova exploding? Was the centre of a galaxy on the point of squirting out those big gas jets? Or was a crystal of salt dissolving in somebody’s soup? I didn’t know and I didn’t care. I yelled to him to get aboard the raft. Already the liquid polymer bubble was contracting in response to external change. It was an early model, not all that smart, and I didn’t trust it not to collapse round us, leaving us outside hanging in nowhere, blind and without air.
We made it just in time, him with his trousers still stuck around his knees. I switched on the motor. We’d drifted and needed to find a fast current. I bent to peer at the visor of the navigator, tapping the fine-tune button.
As I did that, an ominous grinding noise came out of the box. I blinked, peered again. The display was blank. Like, I mean, blank.
Fear, the dead sickening type of fear this time, clutched at my stomach. I slapped the fine-tune button, banged the top of the unit, fiddled with the calibrator. Nothing worked.
A busted navigator is heavy-duty Yim-Bim. Like sort of lost, nowhere, dead dead dead. You can’t get back. Because you can’t find a phase port, which means you’re out in backspace for ever. Or rather the atoms of your stupid useless corpse are.
Not the sort of detail to bother a passenger with. I gunned the raft and headed out as if we were going somewhere, giving myself a little while to think at the same time. A navigator is a serious piece of equipment, needing serious kudos to buy or repair, not the sort of thing you can jury-rig or quick-fix, and it does more than locate distant phase signals, clever though that is. Backspace is too shifting and disordered for the human mind to find a route through it unaided, so the navigator does half the job, giving the pilot the cues he needs; it’s known as pointing the way. You’re double-lost if you haven’t got one.
I reminded myself that the fault had been intermittent up to now, as I had said to Boy Galilee. But the box had never made that queer grinding noise before, and it had never gone completely blank before. Intermittent had acquired a sort of permanent tag.
Was there
any other cause for hope? Well, yes. If you get close enough to a phase port you can actually see it on the polymer bubble as an orange glow. There are a hundred and ten phase ports, so might I find one by chance, racing all over as fast as I could? Well, let’s see, if you want to work it out, the odds against would be, er, approximately, more or less, infinity to one.
At any rate nobody’s ever done it, and a straight line from A to B in backspace might be a loop halfway round the universe in frontspace for all anyone knows; but I decided if I was done for I might as well go out in style. I latched on to a stream so rough and speedy that normally I wouldn’t have gone near it, not even me. Nerve induction currents surged through my posterior as I went for the rockiest ride ever. My customer was declaiming behind me again, unaware as yet of his shortened life expectancy, going through the mood-swing people in backspace for the first time are prone to; getting weepy, burbling about his deep love for all mankind, longing to have every human prick that had ever existed moving affectionately up his bum - well, I hadn’t supposed I was anything special - in what you might call a universal anal rhapsody. However would you find time for a crap, I thought. It crossed my mind that the best thing, after a while, might be to find another sandbank and screw each other brainless.
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