The Great Lover (11 page)

“
This was an excellent opportunity to experiment with independent recapitulatory formation. The diffuse mechabolism will monitor material autostatus and supplement the loss of any element by synthesizing new molecules directly. In most cases, the prosthetic will not even have to provide itself with any matter for use as raw material. Whatever is ingested will be processed at above ninety-eight percent efficiency, and, when there is waste, it will be evacuated in atomized exhaust from the mouth. He should be completely self-sustaining, over any length of time. Nearly indestructible, even in cases of significant injury.”

“
It will outlive me? What will happen to it when I die?”

“
I don’t know,” he says offhandedly.

The Prosthetic Libido is my size and shape. When I die, it will go on. This thought strikes me with terrifying force as I look down at the table where it lies. I begin to imagine it has replaced me already.

“
Is it necessary to make it so independent?”

“
It must live!”

“
But that’s not what I wanted! I don’t want some living machine to be responsible for, I just want some relief—”

He bursts out laughing — It is sometimes shocking, his reckless laughter, as if any moment he will have no face — only a wild mouth and light reflecting in his eyes with no gaze.

“
Look, you want this or not? If you want this to work, you have to do it my way.”

“
I never wanted to make some life — that always was your idea! I think you are appropriating this experiment for your own purposes!”

“
Of course what did you expect? I’m doing this all for charity — for your sole benefit?” His smile is wide and fierce, his whole face livid like steel, as I see it through the crumbling shit mask. “Of course I’m going to make life! Why else dude?!”

*

Now it is time to bring the prosthetic to “half-start,” which is a special coma it will remain in until after the transplant of my libido into it. In order to establish protomechanostasis, the reactor must be idling, like a car engine. The Prosthetic Libido has a contact pad under the skin of its solar plexus. I begin the half-start procedure by connecting this pad to an external reactor monitor by means of an adhesive electrode.

The sewerman says, “It will not live without fire... tissue is solid fire, spirit is breath vibrating with word.” I don’t have any idea what he is getting at with that.

“
Can’t you be serious?” I ask.

He smiles at me and says nothing, going to examine the prosthetic. This he had left on the workbench, so that sunlight can shine on it through a kaleidoscope device he made and attached to the window. Rings containing colored glass slowly spin, and the rings all together also spin, not always in superimposition but moving in and out of different overlapping arrangements to create a variety of patterns, which are projected onto the prosthetic’s body. This steady stimulation is supposed to promote the development of the nervous system
in situ
. For the same reason, he has brought in a device modelled on a marimba, consisting of metal keys tuned to different notes, which are played by a machine that also generates random patterns.

“
Now I must give him the breath of life!” he says. His manner is becoming completely theatrical, and I am losing patience with him. He puts his face up to the prosthetic’s face. “Be ready to start the reactor.”

Though I begin to believe there is no point in putting such questions to him, I ask, “Shouldn’t the breath — assuming it is necessary at all, which is not something you have adequately shown me — should I be the one to breathe into it, and not you?”

“
My breath is cleaner,” he says in a final way. “Please be ready to start the reactor.”

(This is not an exaggeration; while the rest of me, I admit to my shame, stinks horribly, I do have odorless cold antiseptic breath, like an alpine blast. — GL)

He nicks his left wrist with a small knife. His blood has a strange appearance. I can’t see it well from here, but it looks nearly blue. He pinches his blood and holds it up to his mouth, drawing a long breath through it. Holding his breath, he carefully parts the Prosthetic Libido’s lips. He closes its nostrils with his right hand and holds the chin down with the first two fingers of his left, presses his lips to the Prosthetic Libido’s lips, and breathes out. The Prosthetic Libido’s throat and chest expand and his body takes on a pink appearance, like a pink flush. At this sign, I start the reactor of the Prosthetic Libido going. The activity of the reactor is registered by the position of a copper bead on a horizontal indicator I have in front of me. The equipment around us makes no sound, with the exception of a small fan inside my console. The sewerman is striking poses by the bench like he is shooting arrows from an imaginary bow at the Prosthetic Libido. He does this so persistently that I wonder exactly what he thinks he is doing.

In no more than a minute, the bead begins to move, and within another thirty seconds it has reached 6.22, which is the idling point.

I say, “Half-start.” The reactor of the Prosthetic Libido from this point is operating at the minimum level necessary to sustain its independent production of energy.

The Prosthetic Libido’s chest rises and falls, very gently. The skin has also changed; I have no other description for it but to say it acquires a life-like quality it did not formerly have. As expected, with the arrival at half-start, the total-loss surface lubrication system starts working, and the micropores of the skin begin to produce a layer of odorless mineral oil, making the entire body surface slick.

When the sewerman sighs, I think I see an orange flame against the roof of his mouth, and when he speaks he appears to spit small pieces of the fire. The impression lasts only a few moments.

“
This confluence of elements has already engendered a larval spirit.”

“
In that?”

“
Yes.”

“
How do you know this?”

“
The odor.”

He leaves the room without elaborating.

*

The recordings have been edited and the operating theatre — a lumber room — is ready. The Prosthetic Libido lies on a table, its brain exposed pink and grey like a cloud above the rising sun. A heavy black curtain divides the room into two sections. The stretcher on which Hulferde will rest is head-to-head with the table, on the other side of the curtain, and it stands on an enormous wooden spool of metal cable.

Now to bring the prosthetic up to full start. After several misconnections finally they throw the switches. For a moment there is total darkness and a silence in which everything stops. Now a dim glow can be seen. The light gradually returns, with a lazy stirring in its — his — genitals and extremities. Life always just trickles in at first.

The breathing deepens... an expression of dreamy relish creeps over his features, his eyes open to two fringed slits, and mineral oil perspiration sequins his sides steaming with musk. Life rises and ebbs, rises higher and ebbs higher, higher still each time, like the swelling breast of a symphony, the Prosthetic Libido’s life trembles on the verge and then spills over, becomes self-perpetuating. It draws deep and pleasurable breaths. The folds of its membranes soft as if they were just made of sky like silky wads of dusk about a disk of blue wands, spokes from an off-center opening in the base. They shiver, then it’s as if they’d never moved, shiver again. A ribbon of pressure comes into existence nearly encircling the aperture from the outside. Its shadow is faintly visible on the interior canopy. At roughly regular intervals more such ribbons appear until the canopy is striped with spinning shadows, and now the lighter bands between them become shiny, a pink lambence makes them sparkle with heat mounting in gentle intensity as the instants develop them. The ribbons tenderly squeeze the canopy from outside, without deforming it, and the wands flex as a formation bows them outward. The off-center opening is sealed with a brittle film of some mineral like abalone lining—

—
now it buckles before a gush of light, frothing in the wands and against aperture walls. In channels of soapy metal it sluices away into the body, bubbling up white and volatile where it touches the sides of the channels, shedding and reabsorbing thin shells of intense, pure hues on top, the color of the streams are pastels lit from inside that throw off striped fans and strobing marquees. The light thickens at the edges, then pulls apart in strings. The Prosthetic Libido sighs and shimmers a profusion of colors which, as I move to and fro, fitfully takes on the luster of sunlight — a hum of a hundred men I feel tremble in my throat and chest, then open out to a great and joyous cry I don’t hear but that runs a hot river down my body to the floor.

The Great Lover gets the machinery running while Hulferde attaches contacts to himself, unable to see the machine through the sable curtain. He lies down on the stretcher in his street clothes, face down; there’s a padded ring into which he inserts his head to keep his spine straight. The Great Lover dons rubber gloves and applies a topical anaesthetic to the skin at the base of Hulferde’s skull. With one expert shove he drives home the point of an awl-like cutting instrument with an adjustable barrier around the base to prevent it cutting too deep. A brief sound of surprise issues from Hulferde, he jerks once, then goes limp. Only a drop or two of blood.

The Great Lover presses a release at the end of the cutter’s handle; he extracts the device from the wound, leaving behind a small metal tube, angling up through the spinal aperture at the skull’s base. Through this tube, the Great Lover introduces a number of wires one at a time, expertly twisting them so as to position the end of each wire in the proper brain area, finishing with the spinal cord. The other nerve impulses will be drawn out through the skin contacts, which are rounded domes, modifications of the cupping method. There will be a feedback arrangement, employing the recordings made earlier, which will be played back on Hulferde’s nervous system and the Prosthetic Libido’s in exact sync, reproducing the arousal state and greatly augmenting it. When fully engaged, the faculty of arousal will commit itself completely, and may then be extracted
in toto
with the application of an external vacuum. The principle is to induce flow by creating adjacent zones of high and low pressure.

In response to a question from the Great Lover, Hulferde mumbles he is ready to proceed. The Great Lover takes up a position perpendicular to the curtain, from which he is able to observe both Hulferde and the prosthetic. The machine controls, for the most part large iron wheels with protruding metal handles, surround him. At once, the Great Lover is setting gauges and turning cranks. The recorded wires emerge from a spindle box bolted to the floor and pass like harp strings through holes in a steel ring around Hulferde’s head. From there they are drawn eight feet up to pulleys hanging from the ceiling, and go down again on the other side of the curtain. They feed, one by one, into the resinous apertures in the Prosthetic Libido’s exposed brain.

As Hulferde responds to the recordings, the spool beneath his stretcher turns counterclockwise and the three-inch-thick cable unwinds, pulled into the Heavy Recorder against the wall opposite the Great Lover. The HR is triggered with a terrible sound, engraving Hulferde’s libido itself on the cable with massive hydraulic rams that thunder like locomotive pistons, deafening in this not over-large room. A smell of motor oil issues from the machine. The erections of the two subjects rise in sync.

The cable runs parallel to the floor and enters a second machine which thrusts the end of the cable against a bore-headed bladed drill bit. The bit pares the cable’s individual metal threads apart neatly like a slow-turning star, and each thread is drawn into the Prosthetic Libido’s brain. Hidden wheels deep in its head draw the wires and respool them in that intimately dark spot; the wires are drawn at different rates and, after editing, are different lengths — one after another they suddenly pull loose from the spindlebox and with a violent spin of the prosthetic’s wheels the wires snap free and whip through the room, whizzing into the Prosthetic Libido’s brain with a sharp whine. Click — the wire vanishes — the resinous aperture closes; the Prosthetic Libido’s brain begins to hum, a tone which is modified with each closure. He will be animated in Virgo. A distant music is audible, like harp notes scattered in a cave.

Now the gauges, which have been edging over steadily and at different times, all swerve at once to the line: transfer instant. The Great Lover spins his wheels and pulls levers. The cup-contacts attached to Hulferde’s body all puff and sigh at once, like cloud chambers; wisps of white vapor appear in them. The hydraulic rams batter at the cable like the pistons of a gargantuan engine and then with a single abrupt motion the cable spool stops rotating and the HR’s chopper severs the cable. The tail end feeds through the rams, and they fall silent as it is drawn into the separator drill. As the wires drop from the pulleys and slither across the floor into the prosthetic’s brain, Hulferde begins to laugh — a giddy bubbling mirth spilling from his mouth — the Great Lover catches it, begins chuckling horribly, his sharky mouth stretches and smuts of fire jet out... and now the Prosthetic Libido is laughing too, a high clear fluting note. A laughing chorus billows around the room and chimes ring out.

Hulferde confusedly thinks the sewerman is ringing a bell — I can’t see where he has it.

(Unlike me, Hulferde is unable to see that a small liberty bell has appeared just above the Great Lover’s head, masturbating crazily its clapper whanging the inner surface of... The Prosthetic Libido hears it clearly. —The Author.)