Glimmering

Something warm brushed against his knee. Trip looked down and saw the icon’s hand there, like a bird lighting upon his jeans. As he stared the hand began to move along the inside of his thigh until it reached his groin. He felt another hand stroking the taut fabric, watched in detached disbelief as the icon’s head, with its glittering sheaf of hair, nudged between his legs, its hands gently pulling them apart so that it could rub its cheek against his swollen crotch. Trip moved his own hands to his breast and crossed them there, gasping when he heard the soft shirr of his zipper and felt his shorts being tugged down, its hair spilling onto his exposed cock. He squeezed his eyes shut, but it was no good: he could see his own face as in a mirror, lips parted and sudden heat, its tongue flicking at his balls and then a shaft of molten pleasure as its mouth closed around him. With a groan he tried to push himself away from it, but it was too late, its hands slid behind him, shoving his jeans down farther as it grabbed his ass and pulled him roughly forward. He tried kicking, but there was nothing for his foot to connect with; only that ragged whorl of golden hair between his legs, the broken silhouette of a kneeling boy. Its fingers splayed across his ass, rough-edged nails and fingertips stroking then probing there. Tears flashed from Trip’s eyes as he abruptly came, a searing jolt that sent him arching backward as his double sucked greedily at his cock. Its hands tightened, slid upward, then fell away. Trip lay on his back, staring at the ceiling. There was the smell of semen, and smoke.

“Well now. I guess this just proves that the Lord really does work in mysterious ways.”

Trip sat up. The IZE’s wild glory had faded, and with it the room’s harlequin array. Instead he saw only the dark regiment of cameras and recording equipment and raised screens, now empty and lightless, and the shadowy figures of the two technicians beside their monitors. His jeans and underwear hung just above his knees. He had a glimpse of someone’s wrist bent across the fold of his waistband, a shimmer of luminous green as the wrist drew back and left a trail of gray smoke.

“But you know, I must be going,” said Leonard Thrope, and got to his feet.

Trip. He felt as though he had been clubbed: his ears rang and there was a sharp knocking in his skull, his own tiny voice saying, no no no. Leonard shook his hair back from his face. He pulled his trousers tight about his waist and zipped them, eyes still fixed on Trip. A shining seam spilled down one pant leg; absently Leonard rubbed until it disappeared into cracked black leather. “Experimentum crucis,” he said. He dropped his cigarette, left it burning as he stooped and swung a camera bag over his shoulder. He started across the room, stopped beside one of the technicians and picked up a computer disc. He pocketed it, then took another object, a flattened silvery cube slightly smaller than the computer disc: the IT recording.

“I’ll send someone for my things.” This to the technicians, who nodded as he strode toward the door. “Oh, and Trip—”

His gaze flitted across the boy’s face. Leonard smiled, not unkindly. “It’s been a slice. Believe me—this thing is going to make you.” The ruby placebit winked as he turned and left, the door shutting softly behind him.

For a moment Trip just stood there, hands hanging limply at his sides. Dimly he could hear the soft whir and tick of computer equipment, one technician asking his colleague a question. Someone had switched on a halogen lamp, so that dust motes ignited in a vivid parody of the IZE’s light show. Bright jots swirled, congealed into the mask of a grinning blue-eyed demon, blond hair aflame. Its mouth opened, showing a slit of scarlet and pearl, as Trip’s own reedy tenor pronounced,

“Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.”

Trip turned, stumbled for the door, and fled down the deserted corridor.

He did not return to the hostel. That door was closed to him forever as surely as if John Drinkwater had slammed it in his face. He staggered through the lobby, empty save for a few students huddled with their palmtops beneath a window. They looked up as Trip hurried past.

“Kata tataki,” one student murmured. A tap on the shoulder: that is, bad news.

“No—katoshil,” another said—death from overwork—and they all laughed.