They came to bracken and small twisted trees on spongy, moorland soil. There, Lear seemed to say, this is where I said I would take you. This is where you wanted to be. It waved its head up and down, and trotted away on deformed legs.
The man knelt and ate the grass. He tore up mouthfuls of it, flat inert and tasting only of chlorophyll and cellulose. It seemed to him to be as delicious as mint.
He walked into the water. It was stingingly cold, alien, clean. He gasped for breath—he always was such a coward about going into the water. He half ran, half swam across the pond and came up in the woodland on the opposite shore. Small, old oaks had moss instead of orchids. Rays of sunlight radiated from behind scurrying small clouds. The land was swept with light and shadow. Everything smelled of loam and leaf mold and whiplash hazel in shadow.
He sat down in a small clearing. There was a beech tree. Its trunk was smooth and sinuous, almost polished. The wind sighed up and down its length, and the tree moved with it. The soil moved, and out of it came his children, shapeless, formless, brushing his hand to be petted. “Home,” they mewed.
Everything moved. Everything was alive in a paradise of reciprocity. The man who was real had fathered the garden that had fathered him.
The woman came and sat next to him. She was smaller, flabbier, with the beginnings of a double chin. “I’m real now,” she said. They watched the trees dance until the four suns had set. All the stars began to sing.
A friend of mine nearly sold a story to
A few years later, I tried to do the same thing with a glossy, men-only-style magazine. It was a story about an interplanetary brothel in which the whores were nonhuman androids. It was clearly pornographic by the strict definition of the word (fiction about whores), except that it made plain the existence of such a place in any form was a tragedy. The story almost sold.
I feel friendlier toward sex now. In a way this story is a return to that brothel, except that the sexual feelings embrace the universe, and in some way transform the artificial relations into lasting, human ones. It is probably the most optimistic story I’ve written, and, I hope, the sexiest.
