Part 16 (1/2)

She smelled herself on the gigantic phallus, tasted herself a moment later. Opened wide, wider, could scarcely accommodate a few inches without her jaw cracking. What WAS it?, and she raised one hand, wrapped her fingers around it, felt firm flesh, muscle ...

And it slowly withdrew, teasingly, before she could identify what seemed so familiar, so alien, so tantalizing. Around her, far and near, came soft murmurs of approval, appreciation, acceptance.

Adam's hands were at the back of her head, gently undoing the knot, and when the blindfold was drawn away she blinked into the light, forgot to breathe. Whatever she'd expected, it wasn't this.

She found herself in the center of the old sanctuary, beneath soaring ceilings and the watchful eyes of suffering figures in the stained gla.s.s windows, some pocked with vandals' holes. Pews and pulpit were gone, in their place a cus.h.i.+oned playground for these thirty-plus members who had welcomed her, even though she wasn't at all like them.

Elle looked straight into the eyes of the young woman sitting in the V of her outstretched legs. So this was her lover? There was a thin, wanton quality to her as she reclined on her haunches, meeting Elle's gaze with a hunger almost masculine. It was a role she played well. Elle followed the contours of her body, from the small b.r.e.a.s.t.s to the slim hips, to the tapering length of her left leg. There was no foot, just the smooth bony head formed by her ankle.

At the moment, quite wet.

And she had no right leg at all.

Elle whirled, met Adam's smile. His pride. And let herself be taken into his arms. At least he had them.

Not so, many of those around her. They were all missing bits and pieces, some more than others. Feet, lower legs, or the entire limb. A few, like Adam, had neither. Others had sacrificed arms along the way. A couple, she saw, were but heads and a single arm attached to naked trunks. They were smooth and they were sculpted, every one of them, and if they looked upon her with anything, it was with longing. Not to be like her again ... but to make her one of them.

”You do it to yourselves, don't you?” she whispered to Adam. ”These weren't accidents.”

He grinned, got Freudian on her. ”There are no accidents.”

”I don't understand,” but then, in looking around at them, an entire roomful of broken statuary, she couldn't say she didn't like it. Whatever their reasons, this was commitment, so far beyond the Inner Circle that she could never go back there.

”You will,” Adam told her, then scooted off to new partners, as did the others. Recombinant pairs, trios, groups.

And she watched, a privileged witness.

They could do the most astonis.h.i.+ng things.

Adam explained later, after the two of them had returned to his apartment. She was very quiet, cataloguing everything she'd experienced but finding that even in her vast erotic repertoire there was no place for this.

She drew herself together on the sofa, hands around a mug of coffee. Feeling loose inside, liquid, where muscles had stretched.

”How did it start?” she asked.

”How does anything start?” Adam said, then laughed softly to himself. ”Transcendence. That's what anyone wants out of life, isn't it? Some way of getting past it. Or getting more out of it.” He paused, changed gears. ”Ever hear of the Gnostics?”

She seesawed her hand.

”They were several splinter groups from the early Church, a couple thousand years ago. Didn't last long, by comparison. The party line condemned them as heretics. Progressive in their day, in a lot of ways. But then they had this self-loathing kick they were on. Since the material world fell short of the spirit, it was bad, themselves included. So, automatically, anything that created them had to be bad too, so their lives were spent showing contempt for it all, until they could return to the spirit. Each branch had its ways. The ascetics denied themselves everything. The libertines, they pleasured themselves and f.u.c.ked each other left and right. Overindulgence as the way to paradise ... people after my own heart.” Adam winked. ”And yours too, ma cherie?”

Elle smiled weakly; felt rubbery inside and out. ”I don't think my goals were that lofty.”

”Oh mine neither, h.e.l.l no,” he said, laughing. ”Anyway. Even among the Gnostics there was a lunatic fringe. Most all of them had the idea that the body was a prison that kept the spirit shackled, but this fringe, they did something about it. Had a habit of cutting parts of themselves away to reduce the size of the prison.”

She began to piece it together then, amputation in an erotic context: The less body one has to dilute pleasure, the greater must be its concentration in the flesh that remains.

”And so the two of those approaches got combined, over time?”

”I don't know. Probably.” Adam looked dumbfounded. ”Who knows how anything really happens? It's not like we trace ourselves back for centuries, nothing like that. It's just something that someone stumbled onto awhile back, and found out ... works.”

Languidly, Elle slipped from the sofa, wandered to a window, stared into the night. A sickly glow of sodium lights cast pools amid the blackened hulks of brick and steel, withered hives of isolation. How she hated it out there, its cold hard rot.

”Everything revives,” she said, ”if you give it enough time.”

Their procedures were strictly of a back room variety, the amputations performed by a surgeon no longer allowed by law to practice his craft. Who still liked to keep his hands active. It was an ideal arrangement, and the discarded parts were safely burned in an industrial incinerator.

Elle had him begin with her foot.

She found that phantom pains were scarcely a problem when you had done away with something voluntarily. She grew new skin, and beneath it, it seemed, new nerves. It was an awakening, and while the world slept beneath snow, she was healed enough to give this new s.e.xual organ its first workout. Found she could come without a single touch between her legs.

At the bookstore sympathy flowed freely, especially from Jude, and they all remarked what a wonderful att.i.tude Ellen had in spite of her accident. She was deliberately vague on particulars, felt touched by Jude's concern that it might now be more difficult for her to find a man, one who would overlook her handicap.

”If you have one tiny flaw,” Jude said, ”they can turn around and be such cold-hearted b.a.s.t.a.r.ds,” and then she smiled nervously and checked herself in a compact mirror. Ellen a.s.sumed it was time for another nip or tuck.

And Elle, with her mind already made up to proceed, wondered how she would ever be able to explain away the rest of her leg.

She was up and around again by spring, the itch of healing and new growth mostly behind her. Spending most of her free hours at the former church, crutching her way about as she explored both edifice and companions. They were an insular group, came to be with each other even when they left their clothes on. Of course-who else could they talk to? They'd cut themselves apart in more ways than one.

She often lay with Adam in the dying light of afternoon, both of them washed in colors the sun picked up as it streamed through stained gla.s.s. Overhead, the Virgin Mary held a little lamb; its fleece was dark with soot.

”You b.a.s.t.a.r.d,” she said, ”you didn't wait for me.” But there was no anger in it, and it made Adam smile, made him laugh.

He touched her face with his sole remaining hand, an act she would relish for however long it might last. Not forever. Elle curled in closer, pressed her mouth over the smooth pink stub that jutted from his left shoulder, flus.h.i.+ng in pleasure as he gasped.

”Has anybody ever gone all the way?” she wondered. ”Cut off everything?”

Adam nodded. ”There've been a few.”

She groaned, murmuring wordlessly with fantasies of narrowing herself to a focused bundle of overloaded nerves, a single vast erogenous zone. ”I wonder what it's like.”

”I don't know. But I get the idea that ... that it's like being a G.o.d.” Adam stirred, flexed; seemed to ripple with each caress of hand and mouth, breeze and dust mote. ”By that time, you know, it's up to everybody else to care for you. Take care of your needs. You're mostly a receptacle by then.”

”What did the others say about it? And where are they now?”

”They quit talking,” he said. ”And pretty soon ... they quit eating. But they still smiled.”