John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

He nodded. Still feeling a little revulsion at himself, but some relief, too.

Jerome-X lay in Bettina’s arms, serenely reposing in her great soft damp fullness. She stroked his hair soothingly, muttered sweet endearments, and he was happy. But something chewed a fusty little tunnel under the skin of his happiness.

Was he sick? He’d never done it this way before, and he’d been amazed at his own response. How had Bettina known he’d be complementary to her own dominatrix inclinations? Did he radiate some kind of sexual wimpiness? Doubtful. It had to be subtler than that.

He not only got off on being dominated by her—he got off on her obesity. Sexually, for Jerome, she was the Earth Mother, the Venus of Willendorf, the very incarnation of the fertility goddess, and she was a refuge he could explore for hours. He could sort of understand if someone found all that extra flesh unattractive but it hit him right in the basal ganglia—right in his sex. The more of her there was, the more lust it evoked in him. Bizarre.

Where did it originate in him? Was it Oedipal? Freud had been discredited, but still… Jerome had been alienated from his mother—no, that seemed too simpleminded an interpretation.

He shrugged. Probably he’d never know. He reflected that, in some strange way, he was in control when they made love. There was comfort in that.

“Dis time,” she said huskily, “we gone switch on our chips, and get on de same frequency. I got a frequency no one listen on to. And we gone use a little augments for it, and I show you some stuff.”

And in minutes, they were frequency-wired together, fucking electronically and somatically, and he saw the beauty and horror of her, saw her expanding in his mind’s eye like a mandala from hell.

With the flick of a nanotech switch, Jerome was in love.

Steinfeld’s palms were sweating, though the room was almost painfully air-conditioned. Abu Badoit, seated across the low comma-shaped table from him on the confoam swivel chair, seemed centered and at ease, patiently watching the video on the table’s fold-out screen: a vid of Second Alliance atrocities, and interviews with European apartheid victims. He watched it almost as if he were sitting through someone else’s tedious home movie.

Why shouldn’t Badoit be at ease? He was sitting in the center of his power base.

Steinfeld had just met Badoit for the first time; he wasn’t sure the Arab leader was as unperturbed as he seemed. But his expression was as composed as his grooming. Badoit wore an immaculate real-cloth flat-black silk suit from Broad Street in London. He had been schooled at Harrow, which seemed to impart its gloss to his short, sculptured black beard, his impeccably clipped hair, and his onyx eyes. There were several platinum rings on the fingers of his right hand, one of them glowing with a big smoky diamond, and a rather incongruous gold-chain choker in his high collar. His was a dark, boyish face, but he was at least fifty, Steinfeld knew.

What did he know about Badoit? That Badoit was a mutakallim to some, an embodiment of the Sanna of the Prophets to others: Not thought to be divine but a man with a direct line to God.

Badoit, a good host, poured tea for them both, only flickeringly taking his eyes from the digi-viddy…

Steinfeld let his gaze wander out the polarized window of the Egyptian’s office to the vast, fully illuminated, cluttered recesses of the underground Badoit Arcological Complex. A refuge from war, Jihad, and the ravages of global warming, the complex was one hundred seventy-five square miles of subterranean city, residence, clean industry, and hydroponic farming. It was built partly in a vast system of caverns underlying the lowlands of the Western Desert, and extending into man-made caverns carved into the bedrock. It was all lit by a mellow blend of electricity and reflected-sunlight shafts. Solar power, gathered on the Saharan surface, provided energy, driving toylike electric trams winding, underground, between the hulking blocks and opaque-glass pyramids of the complex; in two places the minarets of mosques broke the stark angularity with their ceremonious curves, spires, and intricate ornamentation. Nearer were swooping yellow-and-black banners with Islamic slogans declared in Classic Arabic lettering. The metal reinforced ceiling was just a hundred and fifty feet over the tops of the highest buildings. Now it looked like a mythical city under a metal sky that shone with a hundred small, strangely geometrical suns; in the evening, when they turned down the lights, it was a netherworld metropolis glowing softly under a perpetual lid of lowering cloud. Only, look close and the cloud became granite and plastic and metal. Huge, gleaming steel columns that were also elevator housings to the upper world stood at intervals for stability; the ceiling was triply reinforced against earthquake with a groinwork of high-tensility plastech girders.

When he’d first read about the Badoit Complex, it had made Steinfeld think of the Space Colony, FirStep. But now he thought Giza; of the sphinx, of the great tombs of the pharaohs, of the wonders of the ancient world. He was a little in awe of Badoit, who had created a quasi-secessionist Islamic state in the midst of the Arab Republic of Egypt—a masterpiece of quiet diplomacy, brilliant engineering, and relentless necessity. Egypt had been threatened with civil war between the Islamic extremists and the moderates; between the isolationists and the internationalists.

The political wisdom of creating a sacrosanct enclave for Badoit’s brand of moderate-to-fundamentalist Islam had been obvious; the wisdom of spending billions developing the underground Arcological Complex had been more elusive for many.

But Badoit had insisted the Arcological Complex could not maintain true spiritual integrity without economic and military self-sufficiency. True economic self-sufficiency required agricultural self-sufficiency; but in North Africa, a land of droughts and desert, the only agricultural surety was in a greenhouse. And the only military surety, in a land of coups and factions and extremists, was in a bunker. And the only economic surety, in a land of struggle over oil sources, was energy self-sufficiency. And as for cultural integrity—it was hard to achieve in a world suffused with transmissions and travelers.

Badoit envisioned a grand solution: a combination greenhouse and bunker. The complex’s location underground made television and radio transmissions highly controllable; the complex received only what it wanted to receive. Badoit’s commission of cultural censors allowed more than Jamaat-I-Islami law would—Badoit did not forbid vids or lectures where women showed independence and dressed untraditionally, and, within the limits of decency, much “western” clothing was allowed—but the arcology disallowed excessive violence in media, explicit sexuality, homosexual imagery, and non-Muslim theology: Islam was taught as an inarguable fact in schools, and Mosques throughout the arcology proclaimed the salat. Badoit strictly forbade so-called “female circumcision” or violence against women on the basis of non-traditional behavior. Yet theft was still punished with hand-amputation, and traditional dietary restrictions, including a fixed prohibition against alcohol, were in effect.

Here, too, travelers could be restricted in a way that was impossible on the open borders of an overground city, preventing entry by terrorists from rival factions, as well as inhibiting the cultural terrorism of those who carried the decadent ideas of the corrupt West with them.

The underground deep-water sources were not quite enough, but Badoit had recently begun piping seawater to a desalination plant, and water perfusion was at last adequate and he was able to sell clean water to other states; Saharan solar energy seemed eternal; the hydroponic greenhouses, thriving on reflected and artificial light, never suffered drought or pestilence.