Thin elements probed the moist spaces of her cunt. Darling remained tentative here, teasing rather than abusing, worrying the clustered nerves with a few shimmering electrical shocks. He painted her labia with a colony of nanomachines, aggressive and acidic; an itch would begin to build there soon, slowly spreading until her entire groin would cry out for rougher measures.
He paused in his lovemaking for a moment, drank in the tremors and murmurs beneath him, the completeness of his control. The mesh of his radiant tongue on her forehead returned brainwaves like those of a violent dream: high-pitched and irregular, but riding the undercurrent of a low sine wave, as if they issued from a deep, hidden place. He tasted her blood: low sugar content except for a little alcohol, and the satisfying metal tang to remind Darling that frail humans had iron in their veins.
She began to struggle now, a soft, annoyed childhood noise gurgling in her throat. The itch in her cunt must be growing, needling and burning the sensitive flesh, but frustratingly tarrying at the threshold of real pain.
He initiated a host of other actions, all calculated to increase the thirst in her loins. A careful measure of pure oxygen began to trickle into her lungs, bringing her mind back sharply from its sensation-drowned state. He released the pressure on her nippies, and listened with feather-delicate strands as blood began to surge back into them. He stimulated the nervous bundles deep in her stomach, producing an unruly excitement like a mix of excess caffeine and a missed night of sleep. His filaments deep in her heart lashed it like a racing animal at the finish, pushing its rate dangerously high.
In moments she was screaming, adrenalin-blasted muscles straining at his steely grasp, fingernails tearing at her own palms. He unsheathed his penis, briefly paused to scale it to her small size. It was furred with minute sensory strands, with hard, unbending metal underneath.
He eased its full length into her vagina, and Mira thrashed so hard he had to tighten his grip, extending it to control knees, elbows. Her howl vibrated the throat-penetrating strand exquisitely; her teeth gnashed it with the sovereign strength of an animal jaw.
His penis stroked her slowly, igniting the dire itch into a torrent of sensations, which spread across the spectra of pain and pleasure like a pocket universe of burning nerves.
His own senses tuned to maximum, he let his other intrusions, penetrations, and abuses set up an aleatoric chorus, cycling mindlessly through the peaks and troughs of their parameters, and fucked her until he came…
… a great white-out of overloaded sensory input, sharp and featureless, dissolving into a glittering starfield of snow-crash, and finally the pleasing hum of residual harmonics, as if he were visualizing the pitches played by an orchestra tuning up: random and pointillistic at first, then coalescing around a single note of reference.
With a last act of will, he contracted the greasy muscle around her neck in a strangling grasp, shutting off her breathing at the height of hyperventilation, sending her mind reeling away to woundedly consume its hoarded glut of oxygen. He set that muscle and all his other intrusions to release her automatically in a few moments.
The seconds moved by like some slow watercraft of vast expanse and dignity.
Senses gradually returned to their workaday settings and tolerances. He was aware of the lightened mass of his penis; at his orgasm it had sloughed a layer of nanomachines to counter those in Mira's vagina. They had fought a short and microscopic war— the new machines against their abrasive, itching enemies—and victoriously set to work soothing the battered walls of her cunt, like a cube of ice pressed softly to a patch of burned skin.
Mira sighed with relief, a dry, open sound now that the member was removed from her throat. Her shaking hands moved tentatively across face, neck, breasts, and groin.
Finally, her eyes opened a centimeter and she rolled her neck carefully to face him. Her voice was ravaged.
"Bastard," she said softly.
He spent the next few silent minutes relishing the various uses and connotations of that word in several languages.
Chapter 5
MAKER (1)
Every planet has its own periods, seasons, patterns of measure. And its own signposts of great import—the births of saviors, the deaths of dictators—to which are aligned the double-zero celebrations of new centuries. Even the youngest worlds have their history. For Malvir, the Blast Event organizes time, even though it is only seven years past. Ask a Malvirian where he, she, or it was that day—shaving, fucking, or shaken awake from sleep, they all remember.
So, in a year now called Thirty Years Before the Blast, a new Maker arrives on Malvir.
It has always had a grasp on matter. Every level of it.
Deeply baked into its mind, of both axiomatic surety and religious fascination, is the tidy regiment of elements in their rows and columns. It takes pleasure in contemplating: the vast usefulness of this echelon's lowest footsoldiers, the endless call for the cannon-fodder of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon; the clever metals of the middle ranks, always surprising in new combinations, gloriously conductive; the theoretically infinite higher ranks, vainglorious and brief generals who brightly burn (most often uselessly) their vast armadas of electrons.
And then there is the level of artistry, of textile complexity: long polymer chains for strength and flexibility, carbon spheres with all their concentric eccentricities, the dependable architecture of CATGUT strings, stress-tested by a billion years of evolution. Here is where a Maker can make a name for itself, with wide-beam published essays, shortcuts, recipes, and mere confectionary compositions for other Makers to employ, rebut, improve, or simply contemplate.
But finally, and this will bring the Maker much woe, there is the intellectual desert of the highest level, the swamp of humanity's plebian appetites, the all-consuming macroworld of stuff. The making of shoes, aircars, smartwalls, sex-toys, furniture, head implants, soccer balls, dishes, cleaning nanos, edible starches with their sprawlingly variable cargos of flavor… and worst of all, the endless parade of demands for decoration: knick-knacks and geegaws and dolls and icons and the tedious algorithms for woodgrain and stucco and Persian flaws; reproductions pirated from the historical and cultural baggage of a hundred worlds, useless garbage necessary to fill corners and nooks and walls, to personalize armies of prefab houses, and all following the dreary cyclical logic of fads and fancies and the great god of Trend.
It is depressing.
That all the elegant structure and tear-jerkingly beautiful mathematics of quarks, atoms, and molecules should be squandered on crap. The Maker often feels like some vast, well-worshipped deity supported and sustained by a happy, thriving tribe which brings it whatever it needs to weave its exquisite creations. And yet all these adherents really want, really desire from their god is to eat its shit. Long rows of hungry mouths desiring nothing but to be crapped in.
The Maker supposes that it's different nearer the bright lights of the Home Cluster. Even there, of course, the burdens of a large crap-consuming population must be endured, but the inner systems also have access to the fruits of the Expansion: whole asteroid rings and iron planets of heavy matter sacrificed to make glorious things: starships, colony craft, even orbit-sized accelerators for the purpose of Pure Inquiry.