Three men had him in an alley. They were tall and heavy and very dark, bestial, a rough gutter argot their only tongue. They laughed as they stripped him and smiled as they fingered his slim, brown flesh. " Ce putanne, trop de ant-zaftig!" said one, running rough fingers over his hairless chest, pinching sharply at his nipples. "Il-y-estparfait, ma soeur ," said another, cupping a broad palm across one slim buttock. They turned him over then and set him across the edge of some concrete stairs. They were about to begin their complex deed. Achmet gasped finally and said, "Wait. . . ." Unaccountably, they waited. "Not this way." He knelt before one of the men and began fumbling at the front of his trousers.
The man laughed and said, "Ca c'est maricon !" The others giggled. He was unclean. It was a great, sticky thing that burst out at him, but he did it anyway, trying to preserve himself. The man smiled mindlessly and was clean when he was done. The creature patted him on the head and moved away. The others seized him then and threw him back across the stairs, despite his cries of protest, and used him as they would, one at each end. When they were done, they left him in the darkness and he wandered off, burning.
Not the first time, not the last. Usually he sought them out, nicer denizens of the better-lighted places, but sometimes they caught him like this. Forces impelled him to go on. He could not remain in the safe sterility of the Home.
He walked on.
Two years older, he sat in his studio, staring at a half-finished canvas. Sleet drizzled out of a gray November sky, splashing, freezing in strata on the dirty-paned skylight, an artifact put there for men who pretended to a filthy grandeur almost two centuries gone. They recovered the past, pretension their game, goal, and reward.
The painting waited, castles and sky in the background, green forest to the sides, animal in the foreground. It was not the stuff of great art, by any means, but it satisfied him to try to create a scenario from his fantasies. Before him, on a green-carpeted floor, sat a stuffed tiger. He muttered to himself. Alia was, as usual, quite late.
The door opened and she came in, clad in white linen pajamas. She undressed quickly, long blond hair flashing to her moves, and, slim-hipped, went to sprawl on the tiger. She said nothing and was not apologetic. Models do as they please and the world lives up to their expectations. Achmet sighed. Her hair was matted again. He picked up a little soft-bristled hairbrush that he kept just for her and came forward. He teased the hair, pulling out the knots with care, casting away the white dandruff encrustations. Was it acoincidence that someone so beautiful should be so unconcerned for her appearance? Women could be such disgusting creatures.
She cuffed at his hand, giggling, and, when he continued to brush at her, moved her hips suggestively. He coughed and went back to his easel suddenly. She continued to titter long after he had set the carburetor on the brush and begun to paint.
Two years older, he lay in the semidark of his midnight bedroom, reading about the Peloponnesian Wars. His nameless lover slept at his side, snoring through half-open soiled lips. The face looked bruised with the summation of prolonged lust. The boy, whoever he was, looked like an injured child, his soft blond hair curling about his nape in tiny wisps and strands. He felt a renewed stirring, somewhere deep within, but ignored it. Enough was, he supposed, enough.
He turned the page of the book and a name jumped off at him out of context: Demogorgon. Ah! It was evocative and moved into him instantly, nestling deep within his psyche. Now that was more like it!
He'd been casting about for a name for years and never found a satisfactory one. His generation put classical Greek cognomens in vogue and their subculture moved throughout the free cities of the world at a constant level. They were a world society, almost strangled under the growing weight of the rules, but surviving handily in these little pockets of antiquity.
He had a name. Now he needed a design.
Sighing, he put down the book and turned to sprawl across the boy, who continued to snore gently. No sense waking him up.
He turned him carefully over onto his stomach and parted his legs, felt the soft flesh of his buttocks, and found his place, still ready. He eased within and paused, feeling the dark heat with gratitude. He moved, and fell away into mindlessness.
Demogorgon.
It fitted.
Two years older, he put on a circlet for the first time and began his sublimation to Comnet. Dreams within dreams he cycled down and around. It surprised him with pleasure. His mind went into the wires on other people's wings and he flew, seeing the possibilities. He tried to learn the way but it was beyond him, frustrating him. He looked for assistance as the ideas grew into grandeur. When he found it, the new art form was born. It was a long gestation. Hundreds of cascading experiences, small in themselves, built into a framework of desire, a mature, full-blown version of his childish desire to create. Without warning this house of cards tipped and fell, sliding memories breaking into the cloud-rimmed sky of the Illimitor World.
Dumbfounded, his original turning continued. Ariane was there, and Tem, and the rest. Confusion that he knew must mirror his own showed on their faces. "We were with you," said Vana.
"I know," he said.
Centrum began to feel the invaders, multiplying like a disease through its subsystems. It was an alien program moving through its circuits, stronger than any taken in before. Demanding action, it cast about for the ancient means of its defenses.
Circle back through the memories. There must have been a way, though in the beginning there had been nothing to fear, no other life. The Starseeders thought of everything. Their successors developed what was needed.
The years began to reverse themselves as the stack pointers moved back through the files, activating search commands. It was located.
Though its physical sensorium was frozen and meaningless, it was as yet unnecessary. There were no physical invaders. That did not make them less dangerous . . . rather more so. Deep within its memory, work vacuoles began to stir, to form themselves in a composite conceptual being, set to goabout their tasks after an agelong silence, after a time of nonbeing. The first primitive intelligences began to awake, too simple to wonder who or where they were. It went on.
To Ariane, this was not at all like a dream. A hard, sharp reality composed of a world, her friends, and the improbable thers. But in the moments after reliving sections of Demogorgon's past, which had seemed just as real, there was a strong sense of disbelief which could find no handhold in the realism around her. The camp chair bit into her thighs. "How," she said, "do memories function within this program?" She started to stand and, perhaps not surprised, became incorporeal. It ran like a film. . . . She flew on the wire without imagery, an electronic ghost of herself cruising the circuits of Globo Entertainment Net in search of the glitches that bedeviled the commercial paradise. The world was without form, and void, save for when she stepped into the comlines of others, checking to see if a sensed power surging had disturbed anything.
A bright spark up ahead . . .
. . . and a bulbous sheik sat in the midst of his harem in a gorgeous turquoise-encrusted canvas pavilion that rustled in the gentle, dry breezes blowing in off the blindingly bright silver desert. Enormous turbaned eunuchs (mostly black but with a few token Caucasians to avoid a lawsuit) stood silhouetted at every entry point, heavy-bladed falchions at the ready. There were a hundred women here, every one of them slim and dark and willing. They rubbed his hands and feet, fed him and sucked at him as he sighed, mindless ...
. . . she dropped out of the circuit, smirking somehow within. Why did they do it? People took from the wires something that was readily available in the real world. Why bother? Especially considering that they were powerless to affect the outcome, could only feel and not do ... yes, for a certain kind of person, perhaps that was a reason in itself. A spark flared ugly red nearby and she drove swiftly toward it, rescuing superheroine . . .