David Russell writes

Spatial Dimensions

part2

She awoke in a dark chamber, a strobe light winking above her. In transit, Selene had been a universe – all energy, all matters – the prime explosion of existence. 

She looked to where her hands had been.   

      

She stepped out into a rocky, starlit landscape. The rocks were a blaze of all known colours, all degrees of transparency and translucency. The force of gravity seemed stronger than that on earth, as she recalled. Movement demanded more muscle power, but now she had more muscle power.

A figure waved to her: “I am Bel”, he called – originating from Sumeria, mused Selene. 

“You won’t have to wear armour, because you’ve got armour in your metabolism.” She could wear a supremely stylish outfit, matching the one she saw in the advert. 

“Your first task is to initiate one of our young acolytes; then you will be called to enter a higher fusion.” Firstly you will exert your physical being against the strong gravitational force of this planet. Then you will be transported again into outer space, beyond the gravitational field. Weightless, you will know the absolute power of your physical energy; you will reiterate and magnify your delicious experience in the flotation tank.” 

So to the next stage: He emerged from the inky flood, his skin the texture of fish scales. His breathtaking beauty swept her back to her quivering anticipation on that holiday beach back on earth. He fused the litheness of a merman with the duality of graceful legs. 

He waved.

"Hello", he said, in a deep, warm voice. So they had done an excellent job with him, programmed him with her language. And if he was using a speech synthesiser, there was no trace of the robotic; he sounded fully human.

"I am the chosen one, selected from the youth of my clan to train as its High Priest. I proved myself in all their stringent tests of physical endurance; I can withstand burial, burning and drowning. I have also proved myself to be a master mathematician, ordering the chaos of myriad digits. It is your destiny to set the seal on my progress. As we bond, we will expand, and reduce to positive and negative energy charges, hold the potential of earthquakes aeons before their inception.  

Selene would have loved to see his training, his ordeals, him being put into the midst of a line of youths, then struggling on to outshine them.

Her past thrills of negotiating layers of clothing, of manufactured fibre, were multiplied by the feeling of her having manifold chemical layers, astrally heightening the anticipation. Their touching skins almost scorched with pain, and were then swept back to euphoria by floods of soothing balms. 

They embraced the gamut of sensation, feeling craggy and rocky. She had clinched his growth, his coming of age. She felt deliciously reptilian, as if she had sloughed off several skins to reach her true tactile essence. She remembered Balzac’s words: "A woman knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea." Truly she had embraced totality: she was a woman and a sailor, an astronaut. The two of them gained all the power of the element in which they were immersed. She recalled the lyrics of La Mer, by Nine Inch Nails:

“And when the day arrives, I'll become the sky
And I'll become the sea

And the sea will come to kiss me
For I am going home

Nothing can stop me now.”

She was the one to whom it had really happened. But Selene was never one to be totally, naively taken in. She had read a little about what it would be like to make love in outer space, and the words came back to her:

Romantics will have to cope with some practical challenges:

• Sex in space would likely be "hotter and wetter" than on Earth because in zero-G there is no natural convection to carry away body heat. Also, scientists have found that people tend to perspire more in microgravity. The moisture associated with sexual congress could pool as floating droplets. 
• "You actually have to struggle to connect and stay connected. Partners would have to be anchored to the wall and/or to each other. To address that need, Bonta has come up with her own design for garments equipped with strategically placed Velcro strips and zippers.

"It's a pretty messy environment, when you think about it. And for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. However ... I can well imagine how compelling, inspiring, and quite frankly stimulating choreographed sex in zero-G might be in the hands of a skilled and talented cinematographer with appropriate lighting and music."

When the crowd tittered, Logan added, "I'm not kidding: Sex in zero-G is going to have to be more or less choreographed. Otherwise it's just going to be a wild flail."

 

Bonta suggested that a honeymoon space hotel could offer specially designed environments to enhance zero-G intimacy — for instance, "hydro rooms" filled with floating droplets of cool water or scented oil.

So she knew what to; she had another challenge to prove herself, and she was going to meet it. Was it her mind-power which made all the discomfiture evaporate, or had it all been perfected by powers beyond the earthly.

 

"Now you can embrace all levels of heat and cold; we shall bathe in the lava and the vapour."
 

Their embrace was a fusion of alien and earthly human. The black whole, the primal bang, the whole processes of fission and fusion ran their heady course. Just as Selene had taken the sea as her lover in her first expedition, so now she was ravished, according to her will, by outer space. Outer space was the ocean writ large. Perhaps outer space had been liquefied.

But in the midst of this transcendental euphoria, she had a flashback to her sublime beach encounter – as a fleshly, earthly mortal. Perhaps the was the true apex, and perhaps temporally circumscribed life spans are the most truly elevating. 

For all the sensory overwhelming, her mind felt incredibly lucid. She was enthralled, but was determined not to be entrapped. Between sessions, she persuaded him to show him the cockpit, let her have a kick by sitting in the pilot’s seat. Selene realised that an automatic pilot controlled the bulk of its journeys; with the key to that, she could make her escape. Next to the seat was his medicine chest. While he was not looking, she found some capsules there, and swallowed one. Instantly she felt herself electrically charged, and turned him to powder. Now she could head back to earth and wholesome landfall.

Normality and obscurity where thereafter quite congenial. Selene emerged as a writer who could not be enslaved by her script. Interesting to relate ones experience, real or imagined, to ones reading matter. It had taken her many years to realise that that the roots of mythology are infinitely expandable into the speculative future.

She had taken to heart a song called Sea of Lovers by Christina Perri. 

“A certain type of wind has swept me up
But till it's found each bone
I, I'm overcome
There is an icy breath that escapes my lips
And I am lost again
“In the sea of lovers without ships
And lovers without sign
You're the only way out of this
Sea of lovers losing time
And lovers losing hope
Will you let me follow you
Wherever you go
Bring me home”

A certain type of wind has swept me up
But till it's found each bone
I, I'm overcome
There is an icy breath that escapes my lips
And I am lost again.”

An extraordinarily perceptive lyric – but for Selene, things were different. Her sensory, tactile lovers did not simply lead her away from the great chasms to the confines of safety; they bore the essence of those chasms – her guides and stimuli into the greater being and non-being.

Selene began to speculate on what it must have felt like for Gods and Goddesses once galaxies were named after them. If the naming was posthumous, the action of naming would, in a way, confer everlasting life on the owner of that name. To some extent they must have felt diffused into the essence, the vast expanse of the galaxy in question, think in terms of light years. Or would they feel that they had become pawns of the astronomers. Would they have had some sense of loss of their true identities, and long to return to flesh, to finite spatial bounds? Surely there must be elemental power struggles – Gods and Goddesses with egos, which they all have, and great complexes of territoriality, wishing to dominate their galaxies, whilst in fact the galaxies might dominate them, while at the same time charging with cosmic energy. Who was doing whose will? 

Just another thought crossed Selene’s mind: there is such a mass of goddesses, all of them gorgeously seductive. Could she not, in her imagination, encompass all of them, assume and discard any one of their personae/identities at will? Might it not also be titillating to have endless altercations with her alter-egos?