The Wild. David Zindell

inside, he was ready to accept all the sorrow and suffering in the universe if only he could die with Tamara into a single moment of screaming, shuddering ecstasy. Many times before, on Neverness, lying before a blazing wood fire, they had found this blessed place together. Many times since then he had dreamed of kissing her neck as he moved in perfect rhythm with her. Only now, in the light of a different fire, even as she tore at his back and cried out in joy, he knew that on this night there would be no true merging. He knew there would be no oneness, no mystical union of their souls. He was not, at first, aware of where this knowledge came from. But he had a deep sense of being engulfed against his will, utterly consumed by Tamara’s fierce inner fire. He felt this burning all through himself. He felt it in her. He sensed that the temperature of her body was slightly too high, not as in the normal heating up of the flesh in the sexual yogas, but as in a fever. His body was the measure of hers, of her memory, of the true memory that lay deeper than her mind. Once a time they had joked that their lust for one another was so great that the very cells of his body loved the cells of hers. In his moment of orgasmic release there had always been a sense that his sex cells were returning home to a place of intimacy and utter love. All the cells of his body and hers: in the burning press of skin against skin, in the moisture of her lips, in her vulva’s hot silky clasp, he touched her deeply, cell to cell. He licked her neck and tasted the sweat glistening there; it was as salty as blood, and strangely, almost bittersweet like the remembrancer’s drug. He smelled the lovely musky scent of her body, which was redolent with strange hormones and some other bewildering essence of her metabolism that he could not quite identify. In this way, he sensed something about her. Perhaps it was a matter of tender tissues pulling at each other, touching, the life inside their cells sending out signals across thin walls of flesh. Perhaps the nuclei of his cells were somehow open to secret messages encoded in hers. Somehow he sensed this deep cellular consciousness of streaming plasma, energy pulsing through mitochondria, and vibrating DNA. She moved beneath him quickly, too quickly, and her whole body streamed with an intense consciousness of being. There was something wrong with her consciousness, he thought, something wrong with her soul. In the way she grasped at him with her burning hands, as if she were trying desperately to hold and keep her pleasure all to herself, she seemed intensely self-conscious as she had never been before. She seemed strangely alone with herself, watching herself. And watching him. Although her eyes were tightly closed, Danlo sensed that she was somehow watching him, even as he might study a butterfly delirious with a fireflower’s sweet nectar. For a moment, as she screamed in ecstasy and tore at him with her fingers, he stared down at her lovely face. Even as he moved and moved to the quickening rhythm of her hips, he stared at her and something strange, vast, and terrible stared back at him. It looked deeply inside him, drinking in the light of his eyes, devouring the tissues of his soul. And then he screamed, too, and they entered their moment together. Only there was no true togetherness, just two frantically rocking and thrusting human beings tearing a moment of feverish pleasure from each other’s bodies. They cried out simultaneously, not as one voice but as two separate selves alone with each other. They rocked and they rocked through an endless howling moment, and they writhed and they shuddered, and at last they collapsed in each other’s arms, exhausted and completely spent.

      Later, as they lay in silence before the dying fire, as Danlo watched the light of the flames reflecting from her sweat-streaked face, he remembered a saying that he had once been taught: The surfaces outside glitter with intelligible lies; the depths inside blaze with the unintelligible truths. He touched the scar on his pounding forehead, then. He rubbed the salt water from his burning eyes, and he marvelled that the search for the truth could leave him so empty and saddened and utterly alone.