Case and the Dreamer (23 page)

“Will you come with us?”

“Oh my no,” I said. “I have something to do at home. Will,” I said suddenly, because I couldn’t help myself, “You learned acceptance … almost … try learning it the rest of the way. Take your time. The little green light will wait.”

They stood looking into each other’s eyes for a long while, and I could see it happening: first his acceptance of what she felt, and the beginnings of his acceptance of what he felt. I called on the mindnet and went home. I had a story to tell.

He was sleek and he was furry; he was totally amphibious, and Althair the Adventurer was what he really was. However, he was known on his lovely planet Ceer, as Althair the Storyteller just because he did that better—better even than adventuring.

Story time was over. Slithering lithe, surfing, sliding, inchworming, cracklywhiskered, beady-bright, soft and smooth and shining, went the young, back to the ocean, back to sleepy-couches in the living living-places. I’ll be Althair! they would play tomorrow: I’ll be Jonna, I’ll be Will. This is myth aborning, this, what myth is for.

“Those bastards,” said Mr. Michaelmas, “will knuckle under or so help me, I’ll have their goddamn plant burned down to the ground.”

Joe Flagg looked nervously across the big boardroom, where the opposition was huddled around their accountant.

“They’ll hear us,” he cautioned unnecessarily; there were chances a man like Michaelmas just wouldn’t take. Then: “Why be so hard-nosed, Mike? We can carry them for a long time with the stock we already hold and never feel it … at least until they get their new line out. They have a hell of a process there.”

“I told you, don’t call me Mike. Hell of a process, yes, and they’re using it for what? Museum reproductions, for God’s sake! They will release that stock, they will give us control, we will shut them down, we will take that process, and we will make toilet seats. That is the way it will go, Mister Flagg, and if it doesn’t, we will blow them away.”

At his own peril, Joe Flagg ignored the “Mister”—a danger signal. “You’re costing a lot of good people a lot of jobs, you know.”

Mr. Michaelmas took a gold key out of his business pocket. “I’m going to take a piss, Flagg. Hold onto the thought that while I’m in there I am pissing on your bleeding heart.” Teeth closing on his lower lip, Joe Flagg watched the Chairman of the Board head for his personal private restroom.

Mr. Michaelmas always enjoyed the effect of the self-closing door of his restroom—silent, solid, certain, with the pulse of pressure in his eardrums accompanying the discrete click of the latch. It suited his taste for impregnability, just as it suited him to churn up as many noisy suds as he cared to with the conviction that nothing could be heard outside.

These very suds utterly concealed the faint whisper of a shower
curtain, so that his first knowledge that he was not alone came when a velvet-cool hand slipped up between his legs and enclosed his penis, and a cool, velvet voice said, “Nice. Very nice.”

Mr. Michaelmas stood transfixed for moment, watching a blaze of shock behind his eyes. The moment lasted long enough for two fondles and a squeeze from the little hand before he could turn around.

As he turned, she rose from her one knee and stood against him smiling—a long-eyed girl with a fine fall of hair.

He gasped,
“Who the hell are you?”

“Apricot,” she said; and her skin was peach, and she wore a yellow dress, but indeed her hair was apricot. She slid a hand up and around to the nape of his neck, and so great was the shock that he hardly felt the tiny scratch there; and she flung both arms tight around him and held him with his arms trapped against the sides. He tried to inhale to shout, but she anticipated him with a powerful squeeze, so that all that came out was a hoarse “What the hell is this?”

She tipped her head back so he could see her smiling face. “This is a kidnapping, Mr. Michaelmas.” He tried to struggle, whimpering, and found to his horror that his efforts were noticeably weaker. He began to feel the scratch on the back of his neck, and from it, increasing waves of nausea and weakness, matching his pounding pulse. With an enchanting quirk at one corner of her mouth, Apricot said, “You are about to experience two perfect snatches, Mr. Michaelmas: yours, and mine.”

She swung him around like an oversized doll, propped him against the wall and confidently released him. Holding his sagging body upright with one firm elbow in his solar plexus, she produced a plastic glove from her cleavage and worked it over her left hand. With this she reached over his head and turned the T-handle of the window latch.

The heavy steel-framed window, hinged at the top, swung open a little; she caught it and drew toward her, and immediately two leather loops fell into the room and dangled. On one of these hung a broad leather belt. This she removed and draped over her shoulder. She put one of Mr. Michaelmas’s now flaccid arms through a
leather loop, then the other. Then she passed the belt behind him and cinched it tight around his body and upper arms. She gave two sharp tugs to one of the loops, and Mr. Michaelmas instantly began to rise. Apricot with one hand considerately held the window wide as he passed up through it. With her other hand, and with equal consideration, she zipped up his fly as it went by.

In a moment one of the leather slings fell back into the room. Apricot took a turn around her left wrist and let herself be drawn up and out through the window, which she lofted with her foot as she emerged. It swung up and then down, latching with the same solid click as that which Mr. Michaelmas had so much admired.

In a strange place a concentric Mr. Michaelmas was afloat.

The licking began almost immediately. It was part of everything, underlay everything; it was the ambience of being there asleep and awake (as much awake as he was permitted, at first, to be). A long froth of gold across his chest and stomach. A soft rope of brown, a sentient halo of auburn, and again the gold, again the brown, and from time to time the apricot. How count the hours of a dream—and why?

Murmurs, in and out. “Load him with the C—six thousand or better. Time release.” “Twelve patches should cover the spectrum for now.” “It’s a good one. How can a man let himself dry up like that? Erectile response not twenty percent of norm!” “Blood sugar too low. Blood pressure too high. No wonder.” “Increased niacin 20 migs twice a day until you get a rush. Talk about deficiency …!”

Hours and hours, asleep and a little awake, the licking went on. It felt good.

Visuals. In a dream one could ignore bare breasts and soft female laughter and a sense of caring in mysterious utterances like “Up the E four hundred IU and pack in that ginseng.” The frequent tender face framed in apricot, cool hand on stubbled cheek. Bright attentive eyes, close and closer, sometimes brown, often green, huge finally and lost in a presbyotic haze as they fall half-hooded and become tactile instead of visual: soft lips against his lips, smooth cheek against his growing stubble.

Growing stubble. How long? Who knows? Who cares! Oh, but it feels good.…

Murmur murmur. “Wasserman neg. Gonococci neg. Anaphylaxis neg, except guess what? He’s mildly allergic to horses.” “So guess what? We’re fresh out of horses around here.” “Did you say ‘horse’ or ‘whores’?” Tickle of laughter: female, four, five.

Head lifted and cradled; woman-smell. Thick warm soup, delicious, overtone of something … medicine? Thiamine? She wiped his lips with a nipple.…

Night. The sleep had been different somehow; unforced. There was a long, soft body beside him in the bed. Over them in a warm room, only a sheet. Soft fingers holding his genitals, gentle, firm, barely pulsating. Cool, velvet voice calling quietly: “Pam …”

Half awake. Two thirds awake. Sheet drawn aside, a gentle cloud of dark, soft silk descending on his stomach and chest, and, oh, lips enclosing the head of his penis while the hand slid downward, a knowing finger pressing on the firm flesh underneath his scrotum, pressing, pressing, while the lips and tongue, the tongue, the lips and tongue …

It came up like pain. It wasn’t pain, but it was like that; a flood with a bead leading it, a seed pushed up through a slender pipe. The lips, the tongue, sucked and flicked; warm arms slipped tight around him; other lips surrounded his, and another tongue slipped into his mouth and battled his. The traveling bead approached, exploded outward, and Michaelmas uttered a succession of barks, gasping barks, while coruscations of light sprinkled the inside of his eyes. Then everything began comfortably to fade. The lips around his penis stilled, held for a while (thank God they had stopped moving; he could not have borne the intensity) and slipped away. The arms around him became gentle; the tongue withdrew from his mouth, though the lips remained on his until his breath quieted, matched the warm currents of the woman who held him.

His vision cleared. He lay on a broad, firm bed, and the woman beside him was Apricot. He didn’t have enough tonus left in his drained body to react or to move. All he could do was speak; all he could say was, “Where am I?”

“You are in the Country of Afterward. The very best place in all the world. How do you feel?”

He closed his eyes to consider this, and felt himself rushing so swiftly into total sleep that he snapped them open again. “Who are you?”

“You remember me. Apricot. And this is Pam. She just made you come.”

“Finally,” said Pam; but she said it kindly, smiling. She patted and stroked his now shrunken penis affectionately, and then, as if reading the distress from his mind, drew the sheet over it. She pulled up her leg, placed one foot on the edge, rested her chin on the knee and smiled at him. She looked absolutely beautiful. He wrenched his gaze away from her and found that this made him look directly at Apricot, who had now withdrawn from him and was propped up on one elbow, her cascade of extraordinary hair flung back and to the side, not quite covering her breasts and permitting a firm little nipple to peer through its curtain. Mr. Michaelmas said, “You! You kidnapped me!”

“That we did,” she assured him cheerfully.

“You’re not to get away with it, you know.”

“Honey” (and it was said as a real endearment), “we
did
get away with it.”

“You know what I mean. These days there’s a thousand ways to track you down and nail you. The instant you demand the money, you’ve lost, don’t you know that?”

“Demand what money?”

“What else would you be kidnapping people for?”

“You’ll find out,” said Apricot sweetly.

Mr. Michaelmas tried to sit up, but the movement was met immediately by Apricot’s rolling toward him, her breasts against his chest. Mr. Michaelmas struggled weakly and uselessly and spit out, “Damn you bitches, you let me the hell out of—” and was then muzzled, muffled, silenced by the soft lips surrounding his.

“You know, Ape,” he heard the lovely Pam say, “that’s not the kind of talk we tolerate in the Country of Afterward.”

Apricot lifted her mouth away from his long enough to say,
“you’re right, Pam,” and came back to him again. He was appalled to find the sheet withdrawn from his lower body, to feel the soft, dark mist of hair flung across his belly, to feel Pam’s mouth around his limpness, drawing him in entire. He twisted away from Apricot, crying, “What are you doing? What are you doing?”

Holding him close, her voice soft and cool and fond as ever, she told him: “We’re making you come again.”

“You can’t!”

“Why ever not?”

“I just did!”

“So?”

“I’m fifty-eight years old!” he howled.

“So?”

Exasperated, he fell into a sullen silence. Apricot shifted her weight and got an arm under her shoulders. She lowered her head to his chest. “You’d be astonished,” she said conversationally, “how few women know and appreciate the fact that a man has nipples.” And she began to tongue them, one and then the other, nip them ever so gently, suck and stroke them. The sensation was amazing, unnerving, quite unlike anything he had experienced in all his life before; it was almost pain; it was enough, for a while to distract his attention from the expert application of Pam’s mouth down below. Left to its own devices, and temporarily freed from the attention of his inhibitions, his astonished penis found itself: too long to be swallowed whole.

His eyes closed, and this time there was no rush to sleep. He tried to speak, to think, and found both less possible with every breath he drew. And the breaths came more swiftly and deeper, and he became aware of something he had forgotten, oh, years ago … or had he only dreamed it? He couldn’t remember, but it was the knowledge that the woman with him was feeling his currents, his surges. What little sex he allowed himself in his later years—before he had given it up altogether—had been his concern, and not that of the female he happened to be penetrating; but there’d been a time … hadn’t there? Hadn’t there?… when he took joy, took pride in the knowledge that he was pleasuring a woman. Now, now, here and now and real, Apricot was trembling with him, sharing a rising current
with him, breathing as he deeply breathed, her breath now rustling, now becoming whispered moans.

And Pam, Pam now working hungrily, thirsting, faster and harder; Pam cried out with a call almost unheard from her busy mouth, but a cry sending its vibrations into and through him to his incredibly rigid, incredibly pulsing rod. Absolutely without his command, his pelvis began thrusting.

“Now!”
Apricot gasped, and as if choreographed, Pam withdrew and Apricot rolled completely on top of him, and he found himself plunged deep inside her. His thrusting would not stop, and hers matched and met his strongly; suddenly she reared up, her eyes closed and her mouth in a vertical oval, and she cried out hoarsely, a sound absolutely unlike any he had yet heard from her; and his penis was clutched, released and clutched, clutched again, powerful as a hand, smooth as a predawn lake; and he peaked, they cried out together, and again, and again, and, tenderly less, again, and once more, pleasant and light as the briefest smile, and then a long slide into panting quiet. The cords in his inner thighs thrummed with reaction; the calves of his leg would have knotted had they had the strength; even the soles of his feet tingled.