The Man From Maybe Page 2

  The man ran.

  The gilded singer promptly pursued and finally overtook his quarry. Gripping one of the man’s arms, the no longer singing troubadour asked, “What’s your name?”

  No answer.

  “Hey, man you must have a name! They all had names. I remember that. What’s yours?”

  The naked man’s low moan was his only answer.

  “Hold it, friend. Let me check my memory transplant flow.” The golden figure scratched his head in an oddly angular fashion and then swiftly turned an almost invisible jewelled wheel set behind one of his drooping ear lobes.

  “Sam,” he said after a moment. “Dog, Evelyn, Cisco, Christ, Eris, Ed, Smith.” He gazed at his companion. “Do any of them sound familiar? No? Well, hell, then just pick one that sounds good to you. That’s what all we simulacra did for ourselves in the beginning.”

  The naked man looked away frowning. Then he gasped as he saw the figure splitting the skyline at the top of a nearby hill. It sat astride a blood-red horse bedecked with martial banners. In its hand a feathered lance thrust skyward. It wore brown leather garments bound by thongs and from its belt dangled a jawless skull. Its white face brought a chill of fear to the naked man as his eyes traced the jagged lines of the figure’s lips and met for one awful moment its dead black eyes.

  “Never mind him,” said the golden man when he noticed what had distracted his companion. “Pick yourself a name.” He waited a moment and then, when he received no response, impatiently squeezed the man’s arm.

  But it was not this squeeze that ultimately elicited an answer. It was instead the abrupt disappearance from the hillcrest of the watching warrior that freed the naked man’s tongue.

  “Su-Smith?”

  “Put it there, Smith!” exclaimed the simulacrum, seizing his companion’s right hand and covering it with his left. “Pleased to meet you, Smith. How the hell do you do? You getting much these days?”

  The handshaking, vigorous and prolonged, ended at last.

  The man who had so suddenly become Smith reached out to touch the shining suit of the simulacrum facing him.

  “You must have just been rousted,” said the simulacrum, “by a husband home too soon. Am I right? Is that why you’re running around like that with your balls all abounce?”

  “Me – I –”

  ‘I’ll fix you up. We philanderers have got to stick together. Which reminds me. As I was saying a moment ago, Smith, I have a proposition for you.”

  “Prop-o-sition.”

  “Right on! You can consider me a connoisseur of clever delights. You might call me a banker whose accounts have such lovely names as Lilith and Elizabeth and Deirdre. When you see me in action, my man, you will know me for a master of lithe revels where the music is soft and the dance never ends and incense alters ordinary air, transforming it into a stoning wine. Now that I know your name, let me introduce myself. I am Superstud!”

  Smith began to back away, his head moving almost involuntarily from side to side as he sought to comprehend the rapid flow of his mechanical companion’s words.

  “Hey, wait!” Superstud yelled after him. “You haven’t even heard my proposition.” When he had caught up with Smith and persuaded him to halt and at least listen, he continued, “I’m in the market for an assistant. You look like you could qualify.”

  Smith felt embarrassment at the glance Superstud shot at his groin.

  “Yes, Smith, you definitely do qualify. You’re young enough and lusty but not yet truly tested. I can tell. I can always tell. Now here’s what and who I’ve got in mind.”

  Smith listened warily.

  Superstud waved a hand in the direction of the lush vista of grass and trees stretching out before him and declared, “This garden may not be exactly or even entirely Edenesque but it is nevertheless a garden – a garden in which grow glorious girls and women alive with life. These females of which I speak – ah – they are the sweet flowers in a man’s bouquet, and you and I, Smith – you and I together – can buzz among them, eager and obliging bees. You do follow me, don’t you?”

  “Nu-no.”

  The sigh from Superstud was more condescending than melancholy. “Come along then. Let’s sit ourselves down here on the grass, and I’ll go over things step by easy step. Now,” he continued when they were seated facing each other in the faint gloom of the new evening, “I have a computer which –”

  “A computer?”

  Superstud patiently explained to Smith about computers. “The bouquet I’ve been speaking about – the flowers I mentioned earlier – they’re all computerized. I mean, they’re all taped. You can punch in your preferences. Do you like big boobs? Thin hips? A truly uninhibited head? Well, you put it all together and then you punch it all in and the computer will supply you with the magic name. Then –”

  “Then?”

  Superstud placed both hands between his legs, leaned and gave a moan of orgasmic ecstasy. “Then, Smith, let jester withdraw and the torches be doused, for it is then that the real revels begin.”

  “Girls,” Smith murmured, remembering, but not altogether clearly. “Women.”

  “This way. Follow me.” Superstud’s rising to his feet was a swaying, an unwinding of limbs until the virile sun of himself seemed to gild the darkening sky above Smith. He moved away, glancing back now and then and beckoning to Smith, who rose quickly but awkwardly to hurry after his nonhuman mentor.

  Superstud talked as they walked past thick trees and drooping bushes. “– and she is absolutely tireless. Tireless, I tell you! All night long and all day too will she twist and contort to your heart’s content. A cliché admittedly. But one that is appropriate to describe Jessamyn. Then there is Beth, who has been programmed to provide a vast catalogue of what some might primly call peculiar pleasures. Her wardrobe alone will prime values within you so that you will spurt magnificently before ever she places one of her fourteen fingers upon your body. Ah, you shall see! You will – it’s just a bit farther on, just around – Here!”

  As Smith followed Superstud around the corner of a wild hedge that bore red and purple berries, he saw the computer of which the simulacrum had spoken. It stood facing him at the end of a triangular lane lined with flowers that the now rising moon revealed as a waxen blue. The computer, at the apex of the triangular path, was glass-faced and electric eyed. With a starlike constancy, it winked and blinked in its mechanical silence. The blue flowers nodded, ignoring it. It stared at Smith and Superstud, turning its wheels and faintly ticking.

  Smith stared back at it.

  Superstud folded his arms and nodded, a mute acknowledgement of Smith’s evident awe. “The buttons there on the right are all labelled. March, my man! Choose the creature who will dim the moon tonight and give new meanings to words like love and desire.”

  Smith gave Superstud an uneasy glance.

  “He who hesitates is –” Superstud said but did not finish his remark.

  Lost.

  Somewhere in Smith’s brain memory stirred itself and tried to awaken, and the word resounded.

  Lost.

  The concept paralysed him, but Superstud reached out and placed a heavy golden hand upon his shoulder, shoved, and Smith found himself trotting down the triangular path toward the expressionless face of the computer.

  Superstud, laughing loudly, followed him. He gave Smith instructions. He told him how to operate the machine and read the names on the list behind the glass where wheels whirled. He read in a voice silken with enticements the descriptions that were linked to the names.

  Smith said, “One?”

  Superstud, roared his laughter into the night sky, and shouted, “There are no limits to human love. I know that. I remember it. One? If one is all you want, then choose just one. But if a dozen or a score are more to your taste then by all means – Yes, by all means. Pay no attention to mathematics or its complexities. In this game, any number can play, and one need not understand any equation other than that most intricat
e one that defines the fire blazing in the middle of every man’s and woman’s fleshy world.”

  Smith’s index finger reached out to the button above which letters spelled: S-E-R-E-N–A. He knew nothing of the meaning of the letters and little about what Superstud’s monologue had meant. But he did know enough. He knew what a girl was, what a woman looked like. As his finger made contact with the button’s redness, he remembered the young woman in the casket, the one it had pleased him to watch as she lay sleeping beneath his gaze. The memory made him turn away from the computer, but not before his finger had caused the button to sink deeply into the slick panel.

  He saw only the flat expanse of the path he had just traversed to reach the computer and the hedges, bushes, trees, and grass that grew everywhere in green abandon. Gone was the building in which he had just been reborn. Had it ever actually existed? Had he really encountered the black bird in the strange room where the little lights created cryptic messages on a huge screen?

  “His name is Smith!” Superstud declared.

  Smith spun around to find Superstud pointing at him.

  The female simulacrum standing beside Superstud wore a tunic of some sleek yellow fabric. Her hair was the colour of woodsmoke. Her eyes sparked in the finely boned beauty of her young face. Her flesh was pale, as if powdered, and she stood in a way that lent a voluptuous topsy-turviness to the citadel of herself.

  “Smith,” she said, her voice the sound of a small animal emerging from hibernation. She stepped toward him, holding out one hand, its palm turned upward toward the stars.

  Smith stood transfixed in the path.

  She came toward him, moving through the night as if it were an essence she emanated, and took Smith in her slender arms. As her hands moved up and down the line of his spine, Superstud’s laughter rollicked around them.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Suddenly, splintering the sound of Superstud’s raucous joy, came a cry that caused Smith to pull away from Serena. He looked about in the darkness as she reached for him again, and Superstud’s laughter that had been a dam bursting became the faintly fluting sound of ripe grapes being pinched.

  Smith saw the simulacrum who had cried out careening wildly down the side of the hill, in and out of the geometrically sharded moonlight, toward him and his two companions. He felt his skin grow taut as he stepped backward, his hands reaching behind him as if to clear his path, preparing for flight from the apparition that was swiftly bearing down upon him.

  But Superstud stepped behind him and placed cold, golden hands on his shoulders, preventing further movement. Smith stood his ground as Superstud muttered, “It’s Marsman. You saw him before – on the hilltop. He stalks the nights and hunts his enemies down the aisles of all the days. Pay no attention to him. Serena is waiting for you, my man. Already the hot juices of her body are flowing as she –”

  “Stand and say!” bellowed Marsman as he reined his horse, and the white froth that roped along its black lips flew out to spatter Smith’s face. “Say you, soldier! Be you friend or foe?”

  Smith wiped the wet foam from his face as he stared up at Marsman’s twisted mouth and gaunt cheeks.

  “Speak!” Marsman shouted and slapped the flat of his feathered lance against Smith’s ribs.

  “I am Smith!”

  “No ribbons on your brawny chest,” Marsman observed in a voice that might have belonged to the skull swinging bluntly from the leather thong tied around his waist. “What campaigns have you planned? What conquests made?”

  “I have no horse and no ribbons,” Smith replied. “I awoke a little while ago and came out of the house where I had been sleeping –” His words, as he thoughtfully uttered them, had spaces between them. They dropped with his glance to the ground.

  “What are your loyalties?” Marsman demanded. “What your allegiances?”

  Superstud strode forward to confront Marsman. “Let him alone. Can’t you see he isn’t one of us?”

  “He’s one of them?”

  “Obviously. Notice how he moves – like a perfectly designed and carefully engineered invention, not like us at all. Yes, he’s definitely one of them and not a simulacrum.”

  Marsman’s eyes flickered, two black fires in the roiling lava of his furious face.

  Smith reached out a tentative hand, and the horse’s rubine shoulder shivered violently at his touch, as it might at the sudden but delicate fall of a fly’s feet on its sweating hide. He whispered something in the animal’s erect ear.

  “This, my horse,” snarled Marsman, “has taken steel in its flanks and felt the fire of battle sear its forelocks. A worthy beast. Fit to bear a fighter but not for much else.”

  “Its eyes –.” Smith stood gazing into the moist brown pools.

  “It’s eyes? What about its eyes?” Marsman leaned over his saddle horn.

  “So full of pain,” Smith said to the horse, surprising himself.

  A snort and a tossing of its head was the animal’s answer.

  “Smith!” Serena’s cry was a counterpoint to the horse’s sudden wild whinnying.

  He turned as she allowed her tunic to slip to the ground. He watched her step out of the folds of cloth that shrouded both her ankles. He stared…

  “Move on, Marsman!” Superstud shouted in glee. “The battle that is about to begin here is no concern of yours. It requires no courting of your consort, Death, nor does it seek to let blood loose to stain the soil. Beyond the next hill you may find what you need, Marsman. Perhaps there among scented clover you will find the enemy you require.”

  “Beware!” Marsman bellowed. “Do not mock war and its makers! Were it not for such as us you and all like you would perish with fire eating your lungs and the screams of your children your only dirge.”

  Marsman drew tight the reins in his hands, and the forelegs of his horse arced into the air. Blood freed by the rasping bit in the animal’s mouth pinked the saliva drowning its great teeth. Down came its two hooves to crush the ground, and then it and its rider roared away up the side of a hill that seemed to tremble as it marked their passage.

  “Forget him,” said Superstud. “That,” he pointed to Smith’s erection, “is the only sword you will need here… Serena!”

  She moved slowly forward, stretching out her arms to Smith. His own arms rose slowly, and when his fingertips met Serena’s, they both paused. A moment later there seemed to be but one body beneath Superstud’s and the star’s eyes.’

  “Wait!” shouted Superstud suddenly. “Let others join their joy to yours!” He ran to the computer and pressed buttons at random, calling back names to Smith. “Gloria of the burnt butter skin. Beverly, come and bring your love that is a healing balm in Gilead. Tania! Jessamyn!”

  From behind the computer they came, the swaying flowers, simulacra all, of which Superstud had spoken earlier with such enthusiasm. They glided into Smith’s sight surrounded by soft orange clouds that stained the air with the scent of myrrh. They rode upon the backs of prancing pneumatic ponies and descended gracefully from the top of the computer on neatly knotted ropes of pastel polymers. Perfume came with them, drifting about their bodies and making sweet the deep night air. Amber rings flashed on their fingers, rich fireflies glittering gaily at Smith. Miniature bells rang non-canonical hours as they bounced above breasts both rouged and powdered, melodious chroniclers of the pleasures to come.

  Superstud moved among them, a virile needle stitching an erotic fabric of loveliness, weaving a tapestry of sensual promises. Whispering first to one and then to another of the girls, so languid and yet so eager as they gazed at Smith, Superstud stoked their banked fires and fanned young flames into red and blazing life. Speaking happily to Smith, he called attention to the curve of a thigh, the thrust of a nippled mound of flesh. He shouted words and phrases as he patted buttocks and ran his golden fingers from the hill of a navel toward the feminine valley nestled between tense thighs.

  Smith found himself drawn towards a girl whose slim body willowed in the moon
light spilling down upon it. She had the face of a wise child, all wide eyes – green – and a mouth that hinted faintly of decadence. Her light laughter was the sound of clouds colliding. Smith placed both of his hands against the flatness of his belly for a moment as if to prevent himself from escaping from himself, and then he was moving toward her as the other girls, aware that he had chosen, swirled about him, their fingers flicking against his skin, their eager words of encouragement a swarm of tantalizing butterflies softly assaulting his ears and arousing sleeping dreams within him.

  As his body touched the girl’s, he found he could not speak. He shuddered once as if a delicate whip had touched him – but all the girl had done was to rise up on her toes to place her lips on his while her legs parted slightly to admit him.

  A moment later she was gone, running across the silvered grass, her companions urging her on and simultaneously calling out to Smith, telling him that he must pursue her, that nothing of value was won by the passive. Buffeted by the girls’ warm words, he too ran. Behind him came the lovely pack, rippling with laughter, shepherded by Superstud whose cries of encouragement soon silenced all else.

  “Wait!” Smith shouted, the word a loud insect seeking the bright light of the girl who was by now so far ahead of him.

  “Jessamyn!” she called back to him.

  “Jessamyn!” he cried, circling to one side as he sensed that she was about to turn.

  Turn she did, and found herself captured by Smith in the way of an animal who knows that flight is useless and prefers capture to the hot bullets of its hunters.

  When their kiss ended after scores of seconds, Jessamyn took Smith’s hand in hers and led him farther into the bower surrounding them. Garlands of flowers hung above their heads. She reached up and plucked two buds. She tossed them to Smith who caught them and raised them to his lips. Then, reaching out to Jessamyn, he placed the two fragrant blooms in her blond hair, where they remained poised for an instant before falling gently to the ground at her feet.

  “Smith,” she murmured. “Love is loose in the night. Can you hear it mewing? Can you see its haunted face out there among the sheltering trees?”