King of the Worlds (18 page)

He knew her from a distance. She had considerably more clothes on this time, too many really, but not so many that he couldn't pick out her figure. The cab pulled up next to the curb. Dylan erased the door with a wave of his hand, got out and kissed her on the lips. Those devouring lips. He didn't even check to see if they were being watched. No doubt Omni was watching, but that was inevitable. Omni saw everything…except Jade Astrophil.

“Hello to you too,” she said.

“I missed you,” he said.

Wendy looked classy and altogether marvelous, like some New York City fashionista circa his childhood. She had on a tight white sweater, a black pleated skirt, and leather boots. A red chenille scarf was wrapped about her throat. He'd grown up seeing women in scarves—Philly winters were brutal by comparison—but he'd never seen one on New Taiwan until now.

“You look lovely,” he said.

She winked, fiercely, like some tiger that knew how to wink.

He helped her into the cab.

“It doesn't get that cold here,” he said.

“Dylan, I grew up on O‘ahu. Your definition of cold and mine are almost certainly not in the same ballpark.”

“Fair enough,” he said.

He ordered his newly appointed yes-man to proceed to Ascension Forest, and then asked Wendy if she didn't want to change drivers.

She looked puzzled. “Why would I?”

“It's an androcab. It can be anyone you like.”

She studied the driver more closely. “Really?”

“I kid you not. Don't you have these on Earth?”

She touched the neck. “I don't think so, but then I don't often take cabs.”

“So who will it be?”

“I can choose anyone?”

“Anyone.”

“Living or dead?”

“If Omni can see them, it can be them.”

“Well then how about a singer to serenade us?”

“Good idea.”

“Can it do Sinatra?”

“Driver, give us your best Frank Sinatra, would you?”

And—
shazam!
—James Cameron morphed into Ol' Blue Eyes. The likeness was uncanny.

“Any requests?” he asked.

“‘Fly Me to the Moon'?” Wendy suggested.

“Excellent,” Sinatra said. The music kicked in on the sound system and he began to sing:

Fly me to the moon
Let me swing among those stars
Let me see what spring is like
On Jupiter and Mars

Ha! Dylan had never noticed it before, but no doubt the real Frank Sinatra had sung those first two lines with a wink and a nod to the rest of the Loonies.

Wendy draped a leg over one of his and began to suck his face.

“I'll understand if you want to look out the window,” Dylan said. “I know it's your first time here and all.”

“Darling,” she said, “I only have eyes for you.”

He smiled, and they made out some more until she stopped to pull something out of her pocket. “Don't want him getting crushed,” she said, and she placed Cane atop her head. “Now I just hope he won't get crushed emotionally.”

“I'm surprised they let you bring him,” Dylan said, “what with all the concerns about invasive species.”

“You'd be surprised what you can get away with for religious reasons. Besides, there's only this one. It's not like they can start reproducing.”

“You have religious reasons for keeping a toad?”

“Ask me later.”

“Okay.”

So they went back to making out like teenagers, pausing only to make song requests. Wendy had an impressive knowledge of Sinatra, and it was clear to Dylan, insofar as he was paying attention to the lyrics, that she was ventriloquizing, speaking to him through this borrowed voice. To wit:

Around the world I've searched for you
I traveled on when hope was gone to keep a rendezvous
I knew somewhere, sometime, somehow
You'd look at me and I would see the smile you're smiling now

And this:

Love is lovelier
The second time around
Just as wonderful
With both feet on the ground
It's that second time you hear your love song sung
Makes you think perhaps that love like youth is wasted on the young

And maybe this too:

All or nothin' at all
Half a love never appealed to me
If your heart, it never could yield to me
Then I'd rather, rather have nothin' at all

That last made him a twinge nervous; nevertheless, for the first time in his life, Dylan recognized the greatness of Frank Sinatra. His dad had always been a fan, which all but guaranteed that Dylan wouldn't be, but here in this cab, wooing his mistress, he felt how deeply insightful these lyrics were, and how timeless the voice. It struck him, in what was probably an irresolvable paradox, that Sinatra's appeal was both universal and thoroughly American at once.

Over Wendy's delicious neck, he watched the foliage thicken until they'd entered the forest. Between songs, Sinatra asked for more precise directions, and Dylan gave them. Within a few minutes they had arrived at a clearing. Except that the soil and air composition here gave the verdure a distinctly bluish tinge, it looked pretty much like any sylvan scene on Earth—hulking trees, hanging vines, not unlike the park behind Dylan's parents' house. At a glance anyway.

The doors vanished and they got out. Dylan instructed Sinatra to wait there until they came back, and he submitted to having his genome sequenced in order to hold the reservation (he didn't actually have to
do
anything, so much of him having already exfoliated onto the back seat). “Happy to be at your service,” Sinatra said, using words he would never use. “I hope you enjoy your time in Ascension Forest.”

Dylan tipped a hat he wasn't wearing.

“What's Ascension Forest?” Wendy asked.

“You don't know? Good. I thought perhaps you'd read about it, but all the better if you haven't. It's one of the few really unique features of this world.”

Dylan led them along a paved path that ran alongside a burbling creek. A stiff breeze whistled through a copse of the native bamboo, clacking the shoots together and sending the monkeygeese leaping and squawking into the boughs of the sturdier everblues.

Wendy looked around. “What's so unique about it?”

“Do you like plants?” Dylan asked.

She squinted. “Do some people
not
like plants?”

“Okay, well do you
love
them?”

“I don't do drugs if that's what you're asking.”

“No, no. I'm just asking whether you love plants is all. Pure and simple. No booby traps.”

“All right then. I guess I do. Sure.”

“Good. Because Ascension Forest is the only place I know where the plants love you back.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“I think I'll let you discover that for yourself.”

She blinked once and then not for a while.

They reached the end of the pavement and continued along a dirt path, which soon branched—they went left—and then branched again—they went right. Dylan knew exactly where he was leading them. He and Erin had spent a good deal of time here before the kids came along and they'd quickly established a favorite spot; they were reasonably certain, in fact, that they had this forest to thank for Arthur and Tavi's conceptions. Dylan might have felt it too great a betrayal to bring Wendy here had he and Erin sported in these parts at all recently, but the fact was they hadn't been here in something like four years, and even sacredness, it seemed to him, had a statute of limitations.

They were almost there.

“You ready?” he asked.

“You tell me.”

He took her hand and they turned into the thickly canopied trail.

They were barely a few paces into the shadows when the canopy abruptly lowered itself and purple tendrils shot out and seized them by their necks and arms. Wendy shrieked and curled into Dylan's embrace. He unwound a clutching vine from her throat and replaced it with the scarf from her jacket pocket. Cane was croaking at a new and higher pitch.

“I told you,” Dylan said, helplessly amused by her terror (he'd felt it too his first time here). “They just like to fondle us,” he explained. “They only touch bare areas, so the more you expose, the more they'll fondle.”

She looked at him with aye-aye eyes. “Are you seriously laughing at me right now?”

“I assure you no one has ever been injured here.” Despite being a little embarrassed at the shape he was in, he took off his shirt and gave it to her—it was nothing she hadn't already seen. “Here, you can cover your face with this until you get more comfortable. Meanwhile, I'll demonstrate.”

He had hardly gotten that last sentence out when the tendrils closed in on him full-bore, wrapping themselves around his face, neck, and torso in such profusion that a tourist could be forgiven for thinking he was being killed. In fact, the overriding sensation was of having his entire body worked by a very capable, octopoid masseuse. His only complaint was that it made it a little hard to walk.

“You okay in there?” Wendy asked.

“Rarely better,” he said. “Give it a try if you're ready. Safety guaranteed.”

“I'm trusting you on this one,” she said, and all at once she removed Dylan's shirt from her head and clutched it to her chest, keeping Cane wrapped up in it for his protection. A creeper shot out to massage her neck, and two others to lick at her ears. “This is
crazy
!” she shouted, and she proceeded to shriek some more, but in a more playful way this time.

“There's a bed of moss up here a little ways that, when you lie on it, it sort of tickles you all over. What do you say?”

She took his hand and he led the way.

As they walked, he cleared his mouth of vines and explained to Wendy that the name “Ascension Forest” had its roots in a malapropism. The First Expedition, reporting to Earth on their visit to this magical place, made reference to “a sentient forest.” The minutes-keeper, however, recorded this as “Ascension Forest,” which brought with it overtones of transcendence and religious experience, that latter being a phrase a member of the expedition actually happened to use in describing his sojourn there. “Ascension Forest” also had the advantage of being significantly easier on the tongue, not to mention less crude, than the indigenous name for the place,
Alobaz'ñashahilmukdan'nabai
(“the garden that rapes you”), so that even when it came to light that the name was an eggcorn, Terrans obstinately clung to it.

He also explained that no one, human or native, definitively understood the science of what went on here. The majority view held that the plants had a taste for the trillion microorganisms living on the hominid dermis at any one time, and while experiments had shown that these plants were indeed stripping some of the microbiome from its symbiotic hominid partners, albeit not so much as to compromise their health in any way, it was difficult to show that this was not just a fringe benefit (or “spandrel”) of some more essential and inscrutable process. Another intriguing theory, dubbed phonosynthesis, held that these plants, having co-evolved with hominids, metabolized the
sounds
produced by the hominid larynx, and the fondling was an evolutionary strategy they'd developed to coax and prolong their “feeding sessions”; here, too, there was some experimental data to corroborate this, though not nearly enough to draw any certain conclusions. It could be that both theories were correct in some measure, or that neither was. In any case, it was no wonder that the forest was a popular destination for lovers. Fortunately, the forest was nearly a square marathon in extent, so you only very rarely encountered another hominid.

Dylan halted. “Here we are,” he said, signaling the bed of moss before them. “We should take off our shoes.”

“Okay,” she said.

He pretended to struggle with a knot—bona fide shoelaces were one of his old-world affectations (print books and his non-implanted omni being two others)—while she unzipped and stepped out of her boots and knee-high fishnets.

“It occurs to me you might want to leave Cane here, for his own safety.”

She shrugged and placed the toad down gently in her boot.

“Now you go ahead,” he said.

“Oh, I think I'll wait for you.”

“But I insist,” he said, making that
shoo
gesture with his hand.

She looked down hesitantly and raised a foot. He did not need to egg her on any further, because no sooner had she dangled that foot over the moss than a sprig of it leapt up, seized her big toe and pulled it down. She resisted as best she could, but other sprigs crowded in and tugged at the whole of the foot and ankle until inevitably she capsized onto the mat and lay helpless and supine, convulsing and laughing so hard that her larynx produced no sound whatsoever. The moss took it down a notch until her laughter was merely hysterical and rolling.

“I think it likes you!” Dylan said.

Wendy shrieked and howled, howled and shrieked.

He took off his shoes and socks for real now and joined her. Despite having done this dozens of times before, he was no more inured to these sensations than she was. She wrapped her arms around his abdomen like he was some kind of life preserver, but by this time he too was at the mercy of the moss and clinging to her as fervently as she to him. They held on tight as tears streamed down their cheeks, as the moss groped and prodded, as vines from on high insinuated their warm tendrils beneath their clothing to stroke every inch of their erogenous, bacteria-ridden flesh. Dylan always marveled that these plants somehow knew not to obstruct the sense organs of their symbiotic partners; co-evolution was good that way.

After an hour or so, the vines had had their fill of whatever it was they were getting and began to retreat. The moss's rude acupressure eased into a gentler and more sustainable kind of kneading. It was none too soon either. Dylan and Wendy lay side-by-side, face-up, absorbing the single shaft of light that managed to penetrate the thick foliage overhead and contagiously yawning. They hadn't had sex yet, but at least now they had been raped by a forest together.