Passing Through the Flame (78 page)

Behind her, Star began to hear a gentle murmuring of voices. Turning, she saw people sitting up in their sleeping bags, peering out of their tents, people gently shaking other people awake. She stretched out her arms as if to embrace them all, and shy smiles appeared on dozens of gentle faces. Bodies wriggled out of sleeping bags, crawled out of tents, some naked, some half-clothed, some male, some female; all of them opening themselves up to the morning, grinning in the fog, a glorious field of human flowers unfolding to her sun.

She began to walk toward the awakened people, feeling their glowing centers feeding her own light, tossing it back at them, and growing still brighter at the core as their own light fed back off their reflections in herself, and hers in turn off her reflection in them, until she was merged in a human sun, a phoenix fire of love.

And again, murmuring behind her. More of her people were awakening, baring their bodies to the mist, smiling at her, at each other, at the pearly glow of the sun through the fog, at being young and alive and
here.
She closed her eyes and stared sightlessly up into the drifting mist, stretching her arms up and out, arcing her breasts to the sky, dancing slowly, around and around and around in circles, feeling the cool caress of the moisture on her eyelids, the song of the blood beneath her skin, the sweet fire in her loins, the bright yellow sun inside her skull.

Dancing, dancing, dancing, with her eyes focused on that inner sun, her body glowing in the rain. She felt a soft hand on her breast, then another, then the press of a man’s hard body against her back, a woman’s breast against her side, a gentle hand on her thigh, a universe of loving flesh.

Opening her eyes, she found herself in the center of a human forest whose bounds she could not see for the trees. As her eyes opened, hands pulled away from her body, a circle of emptiness opened around her, faces blushed, eyes looked away.

“Ah, no, no, no,” she said. “It’s all right. Let’s love each other.”

She reached out an arm and touched a bare male chest. With the other, she hugged a boy in jeans and T-shirt to her. Shyly, a hand touched the tip of her breast; she laughed, and moved into the touch, and kissed a pair of rough lips. People pressed closer. A girl with short-cropped hair reached up and touched a palm to her cheek. Star rubbed against it; the girl’s eyes glowed, and she kissed her on the lips. People were touching each other, taking off their clothes, whirling and laughing in the fog.

The universe of flesh closed in on her again, and Star shuddered in delight, and gave herself joyfully over to it. Arms surrounded her, flesh pressed against her, lips touched her breasts, her face, her thighs. People embraced each other, kissing, exploring bodies with gentle fingers, and here and there melded into each other in the moans of love.

Star threw herself forward, laughing, leaping off her feet and trusting her body to the tenderness of the world, embracing muscular chests and soft breasts, kissing lips rough and lips tender, feeling hands caressing her thighs and loins even as her own hands reached out to touch pubes and arms and faces.

Lips and a loving tongue between her legs, mouths on her breasts, lips against hers, flesh of her flesh, and the I-thou interface parted, the veil of separateness was torn gently away, and there was no Star, no solitary bodies reaching for each other, but a single human organism, a creature of the pleasure interface, a feast of love with no ego center. Sighs and laughs, flesh against flesh, soul against soul, merging softly into each other, in the mist, in the hour of awakening, on the dewy grass.

“Bill, Bill, get your ass out of bed!”

Bill Horvath rolled over, blinked awake in full panic reaction, flailing at the hands that were shaking him. “What the fuck—”

It was Duke who was shaking him, and behind him were two security guards. “What’s going on? What is this?”

“It’s Susan.”

Horvath whirled around in the bed, and only then did he realize that the place beside him was empty.

“She’s out in the campgrounds bare-ass naked,” Duke said. “You have to see what’s happening to believe it. It’s incredible, she’s got them all balling in the rain!”

“Fuck!” Horvath grunted, bolting out of bed, pausing only long enough to step into yesterday’s rumpled pants, then dashing out of the dome with Duke and the rentacops on his heels.

Outside, the compound was in an uproar. People were crowding against the fence, and four guards blocked the south gate. More people, most of them half-dressed like himself, were rushing out of their domes. A helicopter took off and headed south in the gray foggy rain, sending a sheet of driven mist against Horvath’s naked chest. Dozens of rentacops in their brown uniforms were running around like chickens with their heads cut off. Jango Beck and Mike Taub were shouting at each other over the roar of the departing helicopter, surrounded by four security guards who were waving their arms like windmills. Jango motioned to Horvath as he spotted him. Unlike everyone else, he moved calmly, almost languidly, and actually seemed to be enjoying himself.

Horvath ran toward Beck and Taub, slipping three times in the wet grass. “What the hell’s going on?” he shouted at Beck.

“What’s going on!” Taub shrieked. “Your goddamn old lady’s freaking out, that’s what’s going on! She’s started a fucking
orgy!”

“
Oh, shut up, Mike!” Jango snapped. “Do you know any
other
kind of orgy?” He turned to Horvath and, pointing south across the melee inside the compound, said, “It looks like Star has created her own event.”

Beyond the fence, Horvath saw people moving in the nearest section of campgrounds, wispy figures in the fog, flashes of what looked like naked flesh, scores, perhaps hundreds, of bodies dancing like wood spirits in the mist. The area of movement was roughly circular, expanding around its circumference as people at its periphery awoke and joined in. At the same time, the growing circle of movement seemed to be drifting roughly southeast, as if its center was moving slowly toward the People’s World’s Fair. Horvath had no doubt what, who, that epicenter of the human earthquake was.

“She’s starting a goddamn riot!” Taub shouted. “You’ll have to send in security guards to stop it before it gets out of hand.”

“That doesn’t look like a riot to me,” Beck said. “Just a bunch of naked people having fun in the fog. If I were stupid enough to send in guards to break it up,
then
we’d have a riot.”

“Look, I don’t want to be responsible for a mass orgy!”

Jango shrugged. “Bill, maybe you’d better go down there and bring her out,” he said. “Real gentlelike, right? With good vibes. Can you do that?”

Horvath watched the people frolicking in the mist, and a sliver of dread pierced his heart; at the same time, something within him longed to join them. The magic drew him, but he feared for the sorceress. “Maybe I’d better,” he said.

Jango nodded, and escorted him to the gate, where the guards too were mesmerized by what they saw in the fog, looking horny and uptight, an evil combination. Magic does different things to different people, Horvath thought. It ain’t all black, and it ain’t all white, it ain’t all day, and it ain’t all night....

He passed through the gate and began walking south, into the fog. The grass was cold and wet under his bare feet, and the mist closed in, obscuring his vision and coating his chest and face with a sheen of microscopic drops. A few dozen yards, and the performers’ compound was a place and a state of being as vague and unreal in his mind as its image through the fog was in his eyes when he glanced behind him.

What was real was the cool gray mist, the wetness of his bare skin, the coldness of the grass underfoot. The fog enfolded him in a timeless tranquillity, as if he were the only man on the surface of a beautiful virgin planet; as if time, space, and perspective had lost their meaning. I feel so much calmer than I have a right to feel, he thought, moving deliberately forward, a man walking through clouds.

He began to hear sounds—soft laughter, gentle murmuring, the slap-slap of feet on the ground, the subtle brushing of flesh on flesh—and figures appeared before him in the mist, soft-edged and wispy, visual counterpoint to the gentle music of their movement. People were dancing in a circle in the open space between two tents: two naked men and a naked woman, a fully clothed couple, and a girl wearing only jeans, her bare nipples moist with the dew, turned to the sky. Nearby, a couple was balling in the wet green grass, and it seemed the most natural thing in the world.

Horvath moved on past the dancing circle, sidestepped the lovers, and soon was absorbed into a tapestry of human flesh. A strikingly beautiful blond girl stood naked, her arms outstretched, tasting the mist on her lips. A balding dude with a big red beard was kissing everyone within reach—male, female, or indifferent. People were making love on the grass, or even standing, body to body, while humanity surged and laughed around them.

Horvath blinked at the unreality of it all, and yet it was realer than real; it was something out of his own mind, out of his songs, out of where he had been at in the golden days of the Summer of Love, his dream made flesh. The gentleness of it all was overwhelming, the lovingness, the sheer human joy. Horvath’s step became lighter, and clouds drifted away from his mind.

Man, this isn’t an
orgy
, and it’s sure no riot, he thought. A riot’s what happens when this many people get squeezed together in the same place without this openness, without this love. If it seems unreal, that just shows how fucked up we all are, if all the downer shit in the world seems realer than naked people touching each other in a fog. Let me take you on a trip back to yourselves again, oh, yeah!

Faces smiled at him and he found himself smiling back. Hands touched his body, and there was no sense of violation. A girl kissed him on the lips, and he kissed her back. A hand stroked his ass, and he didn’t even bother to turn to check its sex. The rules were suspended, everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt. Man, Jango understood, he actually understood.

Horvath walked onward, deeper into the awakening campgrounds, moving faster now, the intertwined bodies fleeting images in the fog, the touch of hands like tendrils of vegetation brushing his skin as he moved on into the depths of the human forest. He longed to be with Susan now, no longer fearing for her physical safety in this gentle carnival of love, but fearing the Susan he would meet. No, not Susan, but Star. Star’s presence was everywhere here, the spirit in the flesh, the music in the air.

He stepped carefully over a couple making love in the grass, brushed against a naked breast, gently pressing his way through a wall of intertwining bodies, rounded a large brown tent, and finally saw her, there in the mist, her naked body glistening with moisture, her long black hair falling to her shoulders in a sodden tangle.

She stood in the center of a small arc of people, a dozen or so, male and female, naked and partially clothed, all of them with their arms tightly wrapped around each other, their bodies pressed together, the whole group swaying in unison to some unheard music. Arms encircled her waist; hands cupped her breasts and gently stroked the triangle of her loins. Her own arms were spread-eagled across the naked shoulders of a thin pimply boy and a chubby dark-haired girl. She was giving her body to the world, her head thrown back, her face turned to the sky, slowly rolling in ecstasy.

Horvath stood there transfixed. Seeing Susan, his lover, freaked out and a plaything for strangers. Seeing Star, his creation, living the myth he had created. Lust throbbed in his loins. Anger flashed bright red in his brain. Guilt gnawed at his heart. Joy burned softly in his soul. Confusion paralyzed his will. What was real, and what was not? Was he watching the rape of his old lady or something that utterly transcended what he felt as Susan’s lover?

Then her head rolled forward, and he saw those huge green eyes burning through the fog, eyes that dimmed the rest of the world with their radiance, eyes that reached inside and touched his soul with love, eyes that Susan never wore.

Star’s eyes.

“Bill!” she called in a throaty voice. “Bill...”

Through the gray mist, past the bodies of strangers, Horvath’s eyes met hers and locked onto them. Waves of energy seemed to warp the intervening space. He was looking into the eyes of Star, beacons of love for the wide world, and he was looking into the eyes of Susan, a private love for him alone. He was the loved and the lover, the creator and the creature of his own creation. He was looking into the eyes of madness and eyes of transcendent beauty. He was Bill, and she was Susan. He was Bill Horvath, and she was Star. He was looking at the child of his own mind, and he was looking at something beyond his comprehension.

The people between them seemed to drift out of his path like the mist as he walked toward her, as if they too could sense the bridge of energy that connected them, as if it were a bridge of fire too bright to bear. As he walked across the wet grass, they paid him subtle deferences of posture. He felt his back straightening, he felt larger than himself, his being magnified in his own eyes by his reflection in the eyes of those that surrounded him. He and Star were two polar light sources coming together, each enhancing the brilliance of the other.

She reached out her hands to him, and as they touched, the orange ball of the sun burned through the fog in the eastern sky, brightening the world with a sudden wash of golden early morning light. There was a huge collective sigh. Horvath shivered as she threw herself into his arms. They were Bill and Susan holding each other in the fog.

But they were also the Velvet Cloud.

The golden light slowly faded as the sun disappeared again into the mist. Horvath ran his hand through her sopping hair, felt her body begin to shudder against him, shivering with the damp, with the letdown from an energy level that how seemed totally unreal.

He lifted her head away from him. Her lips were trembling, and her eyes were Susan’s, feverish with adrenalin afterglow, wild with half-controlled fear. She looked around her like a sleepwalker awakening nude on a crowded street.