The Great Lover (9 page)

“
Yes, I’ll help you,” and that yes is squeezed out of me. Am I sleeping? “Where do you live?”

Hulferde immediately steps forward extending his card. I take it in thumb and forefinger and crush it into his pocket, turning to go.

“
I’ll be at your home in two days’ time,” the demon in me says.

*

That night, Hulferde dreams: “I am levitating over a city at night. Also a black carpet covered with flowers in pale colors. The lights and blossoms mingle on a dark field, then pour down in two opposed parabolas behind the face of the sewerman. I am seeing this face from an angle, just above and to the left of the left temple. The lips of the mask open and a dense brown fluid gushes out.”

Ding-dong. Hulferde opens his front door and immediately locks eyes with the sewerman.

“
Come in.”

He doesn’t move. My home is a converted stone coach house with a deeply-recessed front alcove. The sewerman stands in dazzling sunlight, reflecting from the wet street behind him.

“
I’ve come for our appointment,” he says.

“
Yes. Well, come in,” I say, a little nervous. The sewerman doesn’t move. The sun reflecting from the wet street shines into my eyes, which are not adjusted, my having only just come from the gloom of the interior of the house, and so he is partially obscured by a sort of a blot.

“
Why don’t you come in?” I ask.

“
You must ask me three times.”

“
Why?”

He doesn’t answer me.

“
Come in, then.”

He enters. I notice no smell coming from him, despite his filthy appearance, and there are suds clinging to his clothes.

“
Happy Valentine’s Day,” he groans.

I hadn’t realized that.

(Hulferde’s house is neatly organized, but dingy, with dust piled in the corners and a sort of rabbit-cage odor. Passing the open bathroom door, even from the hallway I could smell the towels. — GL)

We spend the first day taking some rather embarrassing and intrusive measurements; the sewerman handles me as callously as he would a piece of pig meat, but his manner satisfies me he knows what he’s doing. After the measurements are taken, we must make a precise map showing exactly where all of my nerve centers are in my body, as these will be the positions for the electrical “joints” of the armature of the Prosthetic Libido.

Into the early morning we work to create a full-scale drawing on butcher’s paper, which we tape to a table. Glass eggs are laid on the schematic to show where the most important systems will be placed. The most important of all will be the lumbar-area fusion pile, which I have already started to design; the Prosthetic Libido’s mechalogical processes are to be powered by a device that will produce and decay enormously heavy artificial particles. While this will be very expensive, I do not anticipate any difficulty in financing this project, because I hold numerous patents and military contracts, and I supplement this with money from clients who are addicted to my nerve gases, which they use in small doses recreationally.

“
Your consciousness is an expression of your entire nervous system and not this or that part of it. I should have thought that would be obvious.”

He is showing me a schematic of nerve tissue, made in three layers and spun out into filaments and fine membranes. I notice his voice changes depending on what kind of thing he is saying. For example, his manner is now very clinical.

“
Any part of the body can be erogenized. Here we must do even more than reproduce exactly the distribution of your coordinate nerve points in space; we must give them far more sensitivity, both to the usual sort of stimuli and to altogether new stimuli, and make sure there is no interference.”

“
What interference?”

“
If they are not well aligned with each other, the nerve centers may jam each other. They must also be shielded against environmental interferences.”

“
Do you mean electric fields?”

“
All manner of interferences. The human nervous system is vulnerable at many points, especially to confusion of signals as a consequence of overlapping, contradiction, and vague multi-registration; with the Prosthetic Libido, we have the opportunity to introduce a new and superior efficiency. Its experiences will be totally lucid. This will permit near-perfect concentration, for both of you.”

“
Wait — you, you say it will think?”

The sewerman looks intently at me, “You said you wanted something that would have your sexual thoughts for you.”

“
I meant a receptacle for my thoughts, not a distinct thinking mind.”

“
I have already explained to you that no such receptacle is possible. The Prosthetic Libido has to have consciousness, and a personality, because otherwise it will not be able to suppress the sexual energy it embodies. Otherwise, suppression would remain your responsibility, and you would gain nothing by the transference but a complicated extension. I am sure you will be able to control the behavior of the device — we need only build in certain safeguards.”

“
I’ll get to work on them at once,” I say, with misgivings.

*

The sewerman puts on his rubber gloves and injects me with a local anaesthetic, then he makes an incision, exposing one of the nerves in my arm.

Applying a compound we have prepared to the nerve, he leans over it and I think mumbles some incantation, which did not at all please me. He places the end of a narrow tube against the treated nerve and closes the wound, leaving the other end of the tube exposed. The exposed end is pressed to an adhesive patch on the skin. This he now covers with a very flat plastic cup, firmly taped to my arm.

After a few hours, a small white dot can be seen just starting to emerge from the tube end. Within twenty-four hours, the dome is completely filled with an opaque white substance, roughly a gram. The sewerman takes off the dome and pulls the tube out. I find I can’t resist the temptation to touch the white material.

“
It feels like a fingernail.”

“
It’s human plastic, nerve-resin.”

From this sample the entire nervous system of the Prosthetic Libido will be cultured. The nerves are cultivated like vines, on frames made of amber and suspended in a solution of electrolytes and some other chemicals.

The brain itself must be grown like a plant also, very slowly, a single micro-layer at a time, and, as he insists, completely in the dark.

“
Memory endless and integral, accumulating its own things.”

I am required to sleep in the room with the brain incubator, because my proximity will sensitize the tissue and make it more receptive to my nerve patterns. The sewerman insists that my unconscious brain activity will produce this telepathic harmony on its own.

Questions over the skeleton caused us nearly to fall out with each other. It had to be made out of a metal, but whenever I brought samples to him, he always found some pretext to reject each one.

“
None of these is shiny enough.”

“
What does it matter how shiny they are?!” I cry in exasperation, after many attempts. “They are metal, and strong — so what if they aren’t shiny?”

He would simply repeat himself until I left to find another sample. This kind of behavior raises serious doubts in me about him. I have noticed he seems to suppress himself, and he especially seems to struggle to keep a straight face when he talks with me. Despite this, we are making real progress, and his ideas always seem to be right.

Finally he is satisfied with a titanium-platinum alloy, which will be reinforced with microfilaments of carbon. This reinforcement was extremely difficult, since it could only be accomplished in a furnace capable of producing extraordinarily great heat.

Assembling the remainder of the body is easier, since I have been synthesizing artificial gem stones in my own lab for many years. The Prosthetic Libido will have muscles made from flexible diamond, the skin and the soft tissues will be made of flexible opal, and the entire body will be given a clear enamel casing designed by me to be as durable as possible. The connective tissues will be made from petroleum colloids.

While I prepare these elements, the sewerman sculpts the face. First, he asks me whether I want the Prosthetic Libido to have a likeness of my own face or not, and, when he assures me that the appearance of the face would have no bearing on the efficiency of the machine, I say, “No, in that case. I would rather it looked nothing at all like me.”

He seems to be basing it on an unrealistic portrait etching of Percy Shelley; I think the face is too feminine, but this is plainly the way he intended it to look all along. Again, I wonder if this machine is going to do anything for me, or if he is simply using me to advance a project entirely for himself. I study the material we have assembled once again with a fresh eye, and I can find no reason to believe he is deceiving me.

Following his directions, the tongue of the Prosthetic Libido is woven of strong silk, with glands that produce a saliva infused with cocaine and a slight fragrance at either side of its base. The eyes are meteoric glass with irises of emerald; I bleach clear spots in the center of each iris to form the pupils. While I am occupied with this, he starts to create the hair. Although by now I know it is pointless to argue with him, I can’t keep silent about this. I tell him there is absolutely no reason to go to the considerable difficulty and expense of providing the machine with hair, but as usual he overrules me.

“
I assure you,” he says, and again, even though he is completely serious, I get the feeling he may explode at any moment, perhaps laughing wildly in my face, “the hair is crucial for sexual innocence, the absence of which will strangle the libido as the transplant takes place. The Prosthetic must be wide open, at least to begin with.”

After several trials, he decided to give it a scalp of thick copal wires and pearl fibres. The copal is a pale orange color I dislike. In fact, I find this hair the least pleasing aspect of the Prosthetic Libido.

Because he is always talking in riddles, or performing as I have described, communication is strained between us, with the result that much time is wasted and I am constantly confused. For example, with considerable effort I produce a suite of artificial organs made from dense clay, exactly the size and weight of the organs they duplicate. When I show them to the sewerman, he sweeps them angrily to the floor, seizes me by my collar, and screams,

“
Simulations and make-weights will not do — the heart must beat the lungs must breathe —
it must live!
”

Then he releases me, points at my table and says, “Start over.”

“
This is how you help me?!”

He looks back at me from the door with an enormous smile, and then, without a word, runs away down the hall, laughing like a madman.

I restrict myself to developing the systems and the mechanical infrastructure, while he does the modelling. The genitals of course had to be put together thoughtfully and with a great deal of care. The glans is made of enamel; the shaft has three collapsing chambers which can be erected by an inflow of silica beads that are finer than sand. These three chambers surround the pseudourethra like the points of an inverted triangle, giving the entire structure a broad flat upper surface and tapering sides. The entire structure is wrapped in a web of nerves, twice as dense at the tip and along the ante-dorsal ridge; then it is sheathed in a sensitive integuement of overlapping rings made from fossil beeswax, reinforced with flexible loops of diamond wire. There are two layers of these rings, one within another. As the member grows erect, the upper ring segments are pulled apart, and the lower segments rise up between them.

The scrotum is a pouch of flexible opal lined with silk floss. I had thought that a pair of glass eggs would be good enough substitutes for testicles, but he vehemently disagrees with me and says the testes must have “functionality.” This term he has tried to explain to me many times but I still fail to understand at all what he means by it. The Prosthetic Libido will not be able to reproduce and there is no allowance in its mechanology for hormones, so what function is there for the testes to have?

He makes them by himself, in his own lab, and then brings them to my home in a plastic bag full of almond oil. They resemble small brains the size of turtle eggs. When I look at them closely, I see miniature gold cogs and gears between the folds, and once briefly I caught a glimpse of a light, like a star, deep inside one of them.

I try once more to oppose the sewerman when he says the Prosthetic Libido must have an anus.

“
There must be digital access to the pneumatoprostate.”

He holds in his hand, already made, the glands that will produce cocainated lubricants.

“
All right, but why can’t we do that with a pad at the base of the spine, for example? It will not evacuate. Digital access to the pneumatoprostate does not seem like a sufficient reason to create an entirely new structure.”

“
No, in this case the anus will be exclusively a pleasure organ.”

“
I don’t see the need.”

“
Anal stage critical to repression.”

He is screwing his face around trying not to mock me to my face. I become fed up.

“
You may dislike me or find me ridiculous—”