The Wanderer

“Yes, Paul…” she answered faintly. With a tiny dragging of elbow and knee against the warm transparency he drifted against her, and his arms met around her slim, brushy back and, while the tail-tip continued to caress, he felt her velvet pads resting lightly against his spine with only the ghosts of claws at their tips. He heard Miaow mewing plaintively. “She jealous…” Tigerishka breathed with the faintest chuckle as her cheek brushed against his, and he felt her harsh narrow tongue lightly touch his ear and begin to scrub against the back of his neck.

Up to this moment he had done everything quite gravely, as if his every gesture were part of a ritual that he must get just right and never be excited, but now safely welded to this fantastic feline Venus in Furs the excitement did come, and the images began to flood up into his mind, and he let go altogether, though strangely without losing control. For the images came with a queer orderliness, as when his mind had first been riffled through by Tigerishka, but now they came slowly enough so that he could see them all clearly, through and through. They were pictures of men, women, and beasts. They were pictures of erotic love, rape, torture, and death — but he realized that even the deaths and the tortures were only to underline the intensity of the contacts, the exquisite violation of all bodily taboos, the completeness of the togetherness; they were the inward decor for the actions of two bodies. These pictures alternated regularly with mind-filling symbols like elaborate jewels and patterned enamelings, or meaningful shapes in a richly bright kaleidoscope. After a long while the symbols began to dominate the pictures; they began to throb like great drums, to shiver and resound like great cymbals; there was a feeling of the universe around, of darting out toward it in all directions, of outspreading to totality in one great series of building and diminishing surges that went plunging through the stars to velvet darkness.

After a space he came slowly floating up out of the infinite softness of that bottomless black bed, and there were the stars again, and Tigerishka lifted up a little above him so that very faintly, by starlight, he saw the violet of her petaled irises and the bronzy green of her cheeks and her mulberry lips parted, careless that she showed her whitely-glinting fangs, and she recited:

Poor little ape, you’re sick again tonight. Has the shrill, fretful chatter fevered you? Was it a dream-lion gave you such a fright? And did the serpent Fear glide from the slough? You cough, you moan, I hear your small teeth grate.

What are those words you mutter as you toss? War, torture, guilt, revenge, crime, murder, hate? I’ll stroke your brow, poor little ape — you’re cross. Far wiser beasts under far older stars Have had your sickness, seen their hopes denied, Sought God, fought Fate, pounded against the bars, And like you, little ape, they some day died. The bough swings in the wind, the night is deep. Look at the stars, poor little ape, and sleep.

Tigerishka,” Paul wondered with a sleepy puzzlement, “I started to write that sonnet years ago, but I could get only three lines. Did you—”

“No,” she said softly, “you finished it by yourself. I found it, lying there in the dark behind your eyes, tossed in a corner. Rest now, Paul. Rest…”

Chapter Thirty-seven

When the saucer students reached the crossroads, the problem of which route to take was solved for Hunter by circumstances. The entry to Mulholland was blocked by three sleekly expensive though much-muddied cars of the fashionable dragon design. Their occupants had got out and were clustered together, probably to argue about which direction to take on Monica Montainway. Though somewhat muddied like their cars, they looked to be sleekly expensive people — probably Malibu folk.

So, to take Mulholland would take time, and Hunter felt that his little two-vehicle cavalcade had none of that to spare, for the pursuit from the Valley and inland 101, after hanging back for some while in an ominous chorus of revvings and honkings, was at last catching up.