6. Karen Carenson

Karen watched the green light from the digital screen turn The Art of the Queen's radio signal into the physical reality of the ship, invisible beneath the dark waters of the Atlantic.

The light from the cockpit, reflecting off the canopy, was backdropped by the blackness of the night sky.

After escaping the bullets from that deviate maniac Block, she hastily computed her course with respect to where the Queen would be at a point she could meet up with her.

She had fuel to spare, but not much.

Her high speed helicopter was skimming just above the waves. She hoped this tactic would confuse the heat sensors in the ubiquitous iridium satellites resting silently above her.

She was more than aware Block would have batteries of computers trying to pick out her flight path and a streak of heat close to the surface of the ocean reflecting different levels of heat with every ripple was, she hoped, confusing enough to keep them looking uselessly.

She continued to stare at the green screen getting stronger until she realized she wasn't staring at it, but staring into the past.

She awoke the morning after her meeting with the Commander General, some unanswered questions gnawing at the edges of her mind.

The Commander General wanted her badly and complied with her instructions to get on his back.

He'd been more than surprised when she got on top and took her pleasure from him.

She'd never forget the look on his face when he first entered her. His eyes widened in surprise, his mouth forming an "O." As she slowly moved down him, the surprise turned to pleasure. When she was down as far as she could go, his eyes were shut tight, his mouth open, his head thrown back, his moans filling the room.

Afterward, he kissed her feet, pleading he'd do anything for her, anything at all, even sacrifice his life for her.

She'd known Gako, and only Gako.

She knew Gako would do anything to get inside her.

And here was her second man willing to give up his life to get in her too.

Gako's life, of course, wasn't much, he didn't have that much to give up.

But the Commander General was in charge of the whole country.

He had everything to give up.

Why would he give it up to get in her?

He could have anybody he wanted just by arresting them.

Once he had them, he could do anything he wanted to them.

It wasn't her youth. He could get all the young girls he wanted from the state orphanage.

He'd have to return them in good shape, but he wasn't doing anything harmful to her.

What was it about her that made a thug-in-the-making like Gako, who was getting anything that came in front of his eyes, and the Commander General, who could get anything he could think of, willing to give up their lives to be inside her?

The question perplexed her and she decided to obtain an objective analysis of it.

"You want me to what?" her uncle asked incredulously.

"I want you to test out my vagina and tell me if there's anything special about it."

"I can't do that for heaven's sake, you're my niece. It'd be a crime!"

"I hadn't thought about that. Being illegal should make it even better. Now let's get at it."

Karen got up, pulled her pants down and went over behind the desk.

Her uncle stood up and went around to the other side of the desk.

Karen eyed him slowly, sitting down bare bottomed in his large leather chair.

"Do you know where I was yesterday?" she asked.

"You visited your mother. I think that was very nice of you. Did you give her the candy?"

"I visited with the Commander General."

"Oh. Was he there. too? He used to run that prison, didn't he?"

"He still does, or at least he can if he wants to. Do you know what he told me?"

"No."

Her uncle sat down tentatively on the chair Karen had been sitting in.

"He told me he'd do anything for me. He told me all I had to do was make a request, and he'd carry it out for me."

"That's nice. He must like you."

"Do you know what they can do to a person in that prison?"

"Well, they lock them up, don't they. That can be pretty horrible."

Karen proceeded to give her uncle a detailed description of what happened to people once they passed through the doors of the prison.

Her uncle's face grew ashen with each passing horror until, when she finished, it stared bloodless out into the silence.

"So you see, uncle, if you don't get over here and do what I tell you to do, I'll have my friend the Commander General give you a little invitation to visit with your sister, permanently.

"It's not as if I'm asking you to do something that's unpleasant. I'll help you. You just stay where you are. I'm sure your legs aren't too steady."

Karen got up, walked around the desk, reached between her uncle's legs, grabbed him under the scrotum, and lifted him, with the rapid response of his muscles, off the chair onto the floor.

She deftly had him out and up in seconds, and softly repeated the procedure she'd gone through with the Commander General.

Her uncle had the same reaction the Commander General had.

She left him panting on the floor to answer the door.

It was Gako with an extraordinary floral arrangement and a note from the Commander General asking for her company that night, or sooner, if possible.

"My dearest Karen," it began, "you're indeed an artist in all you do."

Karen told Gako to decline, that they had too much to do.

She then ushered him into her uncle's office.

Her uncle had regained his desk, where he was sitting, his eyes shut tight, a silly grin on his face.

"We're going to add a new product to our line," she said

"What's wrong with the product we have?" Gako asked.

"It seems pretty perfect to me," her uncle agreed, coming out of his revere in response to a discussion affecting earnings and profits. "Let's review the advantages. We deal in something illegal so people will pay a premium to get it. The same laws that make it illegal protect us so we can sell it. All we have to do is know the law.

"We can control our competitors because we can simply have them arrested and deny them the benefit of the laws because we can strip them of the money they need to protect themselves."

"And if that doesn't work, we can strip them of some of their body parts," Gako added.

"Selling pictures of children being abused is a great business. What product could be better?" her uncle finished.

"Selling the children themselves."

"But . . ." her uncle cried, jumping out of his chair. "Slavery is ille . . ."

"Illegal." Karen chimed in triumphantly. "Exactly. And a hell of a lot more illegal than selling the pictures. We can sell the product and let our customers make their own pictures."

"But what if the customers damage the children?"

"That's the whole purpose," Karen replied.

"It is?"

"Need I point out what the market would be for children who could be sold solely for the sexual use of the buyers, and the buyers wouldn't have any problems about what to do with whatever remained of their night of passion."

"You mean we'd have to get rid of their bodies? How?"

"That's what I wanted to talk to you about, Unk dear. What are the laws with respect to the operation of crematoriums?"

"They're kind of complex, I would say. I don't think you can start a crematorium and then start incinerating just anyone, even if they're children who wouldn't leave that much ash."

"So what's the best way to do it? How do we get around the law?"

"The best way I know to circumvent the law is to clothe your activities so the law can't concern itself with them."

Karen was getting impatient, but she knew the process of legal thought was so circular, arriving at a conclusion wasn't as easy as it seemed. There were so many factors to take into consideration, the truly brilliant legal mind couldn't be hurried. After all, she wouldn't expect a racecar driver to drive an obstacle course without getting a thorough picture of the layout and that was what law was, with the added benefit of the driver being able to put up unexpected obstacles during each heat.

After waiting a reasonable time, she finally spoke. "Just how do we get engaged in activities the law can't concern itself with? Come on, Unk. Wipe that silly grin off your face."

"Uh? Oh, yes. The law. Well, the best way to get around the law is to claim you're a religion, no, better than a religion, a church."

"A church? A church. I like that. You mean I could be a church? What is a church?"

"A church is a group of people who come together to express their worship."

"You mean it isn't something. Its a building at least, isn't it?"

"Most churches have buildings because they need a place for people to come together. But it doesn't have to have a building. It's not a requirement. There's no reason why you couldn't have a building, however."

"Is that all? There must be something else to it."

"Well, there's usually an organized set of beliefs set forth in some document giving the people coming together instructions on how to lead their lives."

"That certainly shouldn't be too hard to come by. Goodness knows there're enough belief systems around, a different one for every pocketbook. What else?"

"You should have a leader and an organized group of people supporting the leader in the pursuit of the faith."

"I've got Gako and his crew. They keep the faith or else. There must be more."

"Churches are generally supported by the munificence of their membership."

"You better believe it. Come on. This is too easy."

"There's usually a calendar of activities the faithful, the congregation, adhere to. Things like regular services in the building and days important in the context of the belief system."

"Done. What else?"

"Certain actions considered to be holy, sacraments blessing people's progression through life, things like conception, birth, menstruation, sexual maturity, marriage, death."

"That can be built into the belief system. Come on. Just what's the problem with this? I can't believe setting up a church is that easy."

"Now you mention it, it certainly seems easy. I guess there're some practical considerations."

"Like what?" Karen asked.

"A lot of nations will set up bogus religions in competitor countries to disrupt the internal operations of those countries when conflicts arise. The members of the church might think they're just going to another church, but the subtleties emanating from the pulpit may have a profound effect on how much blood flows in the streets."

"So? I'm not interested in politics, anyway, just in the politicians I can buy."

"And a lot of other churches are so off the wall, no one in their right mind would take them seriously. That may help when it comes to supervision, but it doesn't help if you're trying to operate with a high degree of invisibility, which I think is what you want to do."

"So if I make a sacrament the body has to be prepared in a certain way and then disposed of only in a manner revealed by God to our prophet, I could set up my crematorium and I would be in business."

"It never ceases to amaze me how fast you grasp the essence of things," her uncle replied.

"So how do we set this thing up?"

"We just have to come together with an agreement, make a legal entity out of it. To do that, all we need is a name."

Karen thought for a minute, the Commander General's comment fresh in her mind. "How about the Art of the Lord? That sounds pretty catchy. Do we have to file anything with the state?"

"Not a thing."

Karen shook her head. Her uncle was amazing, she owed him a lot, which was apparently what he thought, too. She'd finished a busy day laying the base for what would become the worldwide Art of the Lord Church and retired early to get some well-deserved sleep.

As she was dozing off, she felt a change in the air pressure as the door to her room opened. She waited silently as the edge of the bed tipped. Her uncle couldn't stay away from her.

This more than anything else was confirmation to her there were vaginas and then there were vaginas.

How, she'd wondered all day, could she find out how her vagina compared with other women's vaginas.

First off, she'd need a penis to find out what the vagina felt like. There must be all sorts of variables, the size of the penis, its shape, especially around the areas where it was most sensitive, the shape of the vagina, the angle it rested at with respect to the rest of the body, its tightness, its length, how it fit the particular penis, how and to what extent it was lubricated.

And, of course, there was the problem of what could objectively be considered to be a desirable vagina. Was it one that allowed a man to come quickly or was it better if it permitted a man to last a long time so he could obtain pleasure from his ego rather than his penis?

How were women, let alone a little girl like herself, to know exactly what the qualities and defects of their vaginas were?

Absent the possibility of her growing a penis so she could try out different vaginas, placed at a location allowing her try out her own, she was never going to factor all of these variables into an understandable equation. She was going to have to make a determination on the quality of her vagina on the basis of how badly a man who'd been in her wanted to get in her again, and what he'd do to satisfy that want.

"I appreciate your help today, Unk," she said quietly.

She heard his breath come up sharp as he became motionless.

"You appreciate what I did for you today, don't you?" she asked.

"Yes." His voice was trembling so much, she could barely understand him.

"I didn't understand you."

"Yes. Oh, yes." He was making every attempt to clear his throat.

"I was just asking you to test out how my vagina felt and you took advantage of the situation to use it to jack yourself off in it, didn't you."

"Yes. I mean, no. I mean, I'm sorry."

"You did do that though."

"I couldn't help myself."

"And now you want to do it again."

"Yes. Oh yes. I mean, well, no."

"You want to get in me, don't you?"

"Oh, yes, yes."

"And if you do, you're just going to jack yourself off again, aren't you?"

"No. No. Not if you don't want me to."

"I don't think I can trust you," she said.

"You can. Oh, yes, you can. I just want to feel it inside you again. I promise I won't move it back and forth at all."

"I don't know. That's not the way you were behaving earlier today."

"That's the way I'll behave. I promise."

"Well, okay, but just for a little while. You promise?"

"I promise."

"Come on then."

She felt him get up on top of her, harder than even the Commander General had been, and slip in her, slowly, in little jerks.

"Watch it. Just get in me and don't move."

"I don't think I can."

Karen felt his brow. Beads of sweat had broken out and were beginning to run together.

"If you move, you're going to have to get out."

She felt the muscles on his back. They were no longer flabby, but as taught as Gako's as he strained to hold himself still.

She moved herself a little.

"Watch it," she warned.

"That wasn't me," he cried in panic. "That wasn't me."

"Are you calling me a liar? If you are, you'll have to get out."

"No. No. No."

Karen felt drops of water on her cheeks and felt his brow again. The sweat was coming freely, but the drops were coming from the tears pouring out of his eyes. He was crying, but holding his muscles so taught, his sobs weren't being translated to his lower body.

Her first orgasm was strong. She controlled her anal convulsions so her contractions would only tease his penis. The knowledge she was making her uncle endure unbearable desire made her orgasms get stronger with each successive wave pouring over her body. She kept her uncle there, motionless, for over an hour, her mind reeling in the delicious feelings her body was producing.

After an hour, the sensations began to trail away and sleep became more desirable. She moved her hands down to her uncle's hips and quickly, without warning, rolled him over and out of the bed.

"Don't ever try anything like that again," she said sharply.

She fell asleep thinking about the delight she had in giving her mother the chocolate covered cherry.

When she awoke the next morning, her uncle was still lying on the floor where she'd deposited him the night before.

"What the hell are you still doing here?"

"I can't move."

"Why not?"

"I'm all cramped up."

Karen dressed and started to leave.

"You'd better be up and at 'em by the time I get back, or I'll call the Commander General to send someone over to give you a hand."

"Oh, I will be, I will be."

Karen paused, smiling.

"Would you like to do the same thing again tonight?"

"Oh, yes, yes, is it possible?"

"Maybe."

Maybe would never happen, she knew, but the tender morsel had been sampled, and once sampled, would never be forgotten, the thought of regaining the pleasure never more than just a hint away, together with the hopelessness that would inevitably follow.

She squinted closely at the red. She thought the screen was green.

She looked more closely. She was looking at the layered separation of the muscle covering a chest cavity. She was picking at it with two knives, separating it layer by layer as she worked her way down to the rib cage.

How'd she get here, she wondered. She'd been on the helicopter just a minute ago.

She was loosing continuity.

She stepped back to see what she was doing.

Gako hung on a hook in her Chamber of the Endless Palette on The Art of the Queen.

She thought to ask him how he got there, but he was no longer conscious.

She left him hanging and went out into her sitting room, closing the door behind her.

She poured herself a stiff shot of vodka, trying to get a hold on the reality around her.

She must've gotten here because she was here, but how long had she been here?

She checked the calendar.

Two days had passed since she made her retreat from the Art of the Lord Monastery.

She had a vague memory of Gako telling her the monastery, no all monasteries, had been declared forfeit to the Council of Representative World Governments.

She remembered having thought a second, why would she have to think about something like that for a second, she'd always been extremely fast on her feet, but it dawned on her to ask about her Mind Palace in De'Corvo Acores.

Gako said that if they could find it, they'd probably declare it forfeit also.

She must've gone into a rage that ended with Gako hung up in the next room. She must've been working on him for several days. After all, she'd been saving him for a special occasion, and this must've been it. But she had no memory of the pleasure it must've given her.

Now it'd be a waste if she couldn't remember it. From the looks of him, he still had some good bones to grind into powder, and a little more meat to lacerate, but she didn't have the rage.

She could remember the drive to rage that came so easily to her over the last twelve years.

It came easy in youth.

The day she left her uncle lying on the floor, she made sure he'd created a distinct legal entity for her church, and then spent the rest of the day revising the procedures of her work force. They fanned out into the slums taking pictures of potential merchandise. Places had to be found for qualified subjects to live between the time their pictures your circulated and the time they were delivered into the hands of their buyers.

If oil was the perfect medium of exchange today, being fungible, transportable, storable, and usable anywhere in the world, the fact slaves fit the same mold probably accounted for the endurance of that institution for the five thousand years of recorded history. In a world dominated by gold, slaves had intrinsic value and could work while they were stored awaiting delivery, were always exchangeable wherever they were, and provided the added pleasure of being capable of abuse. On the downside, they required the food neither gold nor oil did.

With oil doing most of the work in the modern world, slavery was a rarity, but the procedures had been established over thousands of years of successful operation and it didn't take Karen long to have efficient procedures for collection and storage in place. The raw material was abundant and there was no end to white elephants on the market, huge ancient stone structures no one could afford to pay the taxes on, which she, as a church, could purchase and use for storage tax-free.

It was only a hop, skip and a jump to turning these storage facilities into the monasteries providing the core structure for her church.

With the worldwide Art of the Lord church well underway, she could take the time to respond to the Commander General's note, flowers, and politely insistent requests, and favor him with an evening.

"I've been in agony," he cried, as he ushered her into his palatial estate on the edge of town. "Not a minute has gone by without every fiber of my being yearning to possess you, to be a part of you."

"Who've you told about us?" Karen asked.

"Why, nobody."

"Why not?"

"My heavens, you can't be more than twelve years old. How could I tell anybody?"

"Are you ashamed of telling anybody?"

"No. But they'd think I was just with another twelve year old."

"But if you told them what I was like, they wouldn't think I was just another twelve year old, would they?"

"If I told them what you were like, they'd want to . . ."

"Yes?"

"They'd want to . . ."

"To what?"

"I, I can't say it. It's too horrible to contemplate."

"What's too horrible to contemplate?" Karen insisted.

"Somebody else being inside of you."

"Why?"

"Because if somebody else is inside you, then I can't be inside you."

"Do you ever want to be inside me again?"

"Oh, heavens yes, yes, yes!"

"Then you'll tell your friends what I'm like."

"You make a horrible request, then create an alternative so much more horrible than the request, you make me glad to perform the horrible request."

"Are you going to make yourself glad?"

After the Commander General agreed, she assented to just one time, and only until he ejaculated. She then arched her back so he came before he was halfway in her.

"Damn," he cried, embarrassed and disappointed.

"It's your own fault," Karen replied. "I can't keep you from getting yourself off."

"Do your have any pictures yet?" he finally asked when he settled down.

Karen took out a bundle.

The Commander General hardly paid attention to them, picking the first slender young girl he came too.

"How soon can you get her here?"

"Within the hour."

"Hurry it up if you can, please. I don't want to rush you."

"We aim to please."

Later that day, after Gako picked up the remains and took them to their newly purchased and christened Painted Spirit Crematorium, he remarked on the violence that had been visited on the slender body.

"The Commander General must've gotten a lot of satisfaction out of this one."

"We'll have to raise our prices," Karen replied.

But other than an occasional check into internal procedures, she left the day-to-day operations of The Art of the Lord, and the quickly formed Save Our Children Foundation, to Gako's supervision.

She was concentrating on extending her web of contacts throughout the civilized world.

Business followed her social contacts. She met and had Gako supply President Denjens with his inexhaustible requirements for young children. When Gako told her that "Dennie" didn't like to kill them, but was returning them crippled, she remembered that was just the way Prime Minister Bourgesie liked them. She could get two uses out of one product. She even credited herself with stopping Bourgesie's ten-year war. If he could get all of the crippled children he needed from the Save Our Children Foundation, he didn't have to continue the conduct of a war in order to cripple the children of his own country.

As word got around about the special delights her body had to offer those she smiled upon, the showers of gold and precious gems, foreign bank accounts, unlimited shopping credit, cars, boats, planes rained down upon her.

The income from the church's charitable activities on behalf of the children of the world overflowed her coffers.

She started to dabble in causes, working hard to promote the growth of world population. She coined the phrase "a born soul is a saved soul" and had it plastered on millions of trashcans, telephone poles, and broken brick buildings around the world.

Her worldwide network scoured the slums of the filthiest smog ridden cities looking for that special quality, a combination of looks and submissiveness, that would provide her both with raw material for her sales operation and for her church activities. She felt each and every child should be good monastery material, capable of living up to the high standards of obedience promiscuous begging required.

All candidates were photographed, and their pictures included in the files of children circulated worldwide for the private delectation of her growing number of customers, the rich, politically powerful, or just dabblers in new experiences.

When a candidate ended up dead, his or her purpose in the eyes of the church was duly recorded and the child was given a ceremonial cremation free of charge.

If they didn't sell within a short time, they were penned up with each other, starved so they'd turn against one another for the smallest of morsels, and only the survivors, the ones who came through unscathed, took their position of submission within the church structure. Their average life there was three years before they were turned back out onto the streets, penniless, to survive at the expense of the general population.

Karen frequently took a nostalgic trip through the slums, delighting in the crippled, starving, disease ridden wretches that eked out their hopeless lives in abject misery.

It was after one such ennobling experience she met the Prince.

No one knew who the Prince was or where he came from. They only knew he was fabulously wealthy, living on a huge ship plying the seaways of the world, picking up partygoers at one place and dropping them off at another, not infrequently in between places if the results of the party became too messy.

Karen and the Prince hit it off right away, finding in each other kindred souls. He did prove to be a trial to Karen, however, as he practiced the ancient art of Tantric sex. Once he got in her, he became stationary, believing he could instill the essence of his spirit in the head of his penis.

Karen spent several hours on the Internet and learned about kegel exercises, the ability to independently move her vaginal muscles, and without the Prince even being aware of it, she jacked him off right smartly.

His failure to make his science of sex work on her only made him want to practice all the more in her.

As soon as this situation arose, however, she had him where she wanted him.

And where she wanted him was to produce a boat that would rival his own magnificent vessel. She told him she needed it for church business, so its existence should be kept a secret. She told him it should also be as undetectable as possible, perhaps, she said as a lark, traveling underneath the sea like a submarine.

He hadn't been anxious to undertake the project, so she allowed him to stay in her for a full five minutes before she ejaculated him.

He was so pleased he was making headway with his scientific practice, he finally agreed.

He estimated the project to take a year and Karen assigned Gako to keep track not only of the project, but of the Prince throughout the project.

Reading the progress reports on the building of the ship, which was being done entirely as a tax-deductible activity by the Prince and his related businesses, she noted that the Prince periodically disappeared.

It wasn't like he was taking a vacation or dropping out of site for a short time. He was making regular disappearances, and while they didn't appear to affect the steady progress of the ship's construction, the disappearances intrigued her.

The next time he sent a little note asking if it'd be appropriate for her to pleasure his penis in the near future, she didn't respond.

When a second note came, more pleading, she let it pass.

And a third and a fourth.

She then refused his calls.

Gako reported what had been up until then infrequent absences increased in number and duration.

"Have his purchases increased?" Karen wanted to know.

"They've dropped. He used to take thirty each, boys and girls, now he's down to ten. And these are low cost, we don't even have to do the disposals. He feeds them to the sharks."

"Strange," Karen mumbled.

But there was nothing for it but wait. When it came to a battle between a man's will and her vagina, she knew time was on the side of her vagina.

Finally, the Prince could take no more and showed up literally prick in hand.

"I have to get in you. You're destroying my years of scientific training. Before I met you, I was able to keep it in a woman for almost two hours. Now all I have to do is think about you, and I start to come.

"You have to let me practice some more in you."

"Gako tells me you've been taking frequent trips, disappearing no one knows where. Do you want to tell me where you've been going?"

"Oh, just an out-of-the-way place I have where I can recharge my batteries. Nothing complicated."

"I frequently need my batteries recharged," Karen replied, agreeably. "Why don't you show me where this out of the way place is?"

"Oh, I couldn't do that. I'm the only one who knows where it is. If anyone else found out, it wouldn't be so out of the way."

"Are you calling my just anyone?"

"Oh, no, I'm sorry. I would never do that. No. You're definitely anything but ordinary."

"Then take me to this place of yours."

"I don't know. I really shouldn't."

"Then you can get the hell out of here."

"But I can't do that."

"If you ever hope to get inside me again, you'll come across."

"Oh dear me," the Prince whined, "it's so important to my science I find out what you do that makes it feel like a million tongues licking my penis. I have to get back in you to conduct my research."

"I tell you what. You take me to your out-of-the-way place and I'll let you conduct all the scientific research on me you want."

"Really? You'd do that? How kind of you. When do you want to go?"

"Right now."

"Oh. I'm anxious too. Shall we? We have to take my private plane. It's a swivel wing. The only way I can land is if I drop directly on the top of the rock."

"Sounds good to me. Shall we get at it? I have to tell Gako I'll be gone for awhile. How long do you think?"

"You said I could conduct all of the scientific research I wanted."

"Certainly. A deal's a deal."

"Well, I guess it'll be as long as it takes to insure that I don't get results."

"Let me tell Gako."

She went into a back room and picked up a directional finder from Gako.

"You keep an exact fix on me, understand?"

"It will be." Gako said.

Within the hour, she was traveling at fifteen hundred miles an hour in the Prince's sporty jetprop convertible over the Indian Ocean, then the Mediterranean, then out into the Atlantic.

"Are you the only person who knows about this place?" she asked.

"Yes."

"Who else might know about it? Don't the people that service the plane know how far it's traveled?"

"I'm usually in such a good mood when I come back, I fly all over the place."

"How about teaching me how to fly this thing?"

The Prince did. It wasn't hard.

Eventually the Prince took back the controls and entered coordinates into the automatic pilot.

"This place is impossible to spot from the air even when you know it's there. I have to let the autopilot do the finding for me."

Karen memorized the sequence of numbers he input.

Eventually she felt the plane slow and watched out the window as the wings turned ninety degrees in their sockets and directed their thrust down toward the ground.

The Prince expertly guided the plane against the thrust into a firm landing on the top of a rock Karen hadn't even seen until they came to rest.

"This is it," the Prince exclaimed.

"This is what?" Karen wanted to know.

"You'll see. I really don't know how to describe it." He unhooked himself from his seat straps, slid the cockpit cover back, and jumped over the side of the plane onto the deboarding platform, turning to help Karen down.

On the ground, she looked around. The top of the rock, worn thin by the constant erosion of weather, slopped gently down toward the grey waters of the Atlantic. Only on closer inspection did she see those waters were mostly a dark, almost black sandy beach the wave's motions kept perpetually wet.

The Prince signaled her to follow him around a rock facing and down into a crevice. She caught up with him just as she saw him turn into a shimmering field of light.

She drew back to study the phenomena. The newness of the situation and the Prince's constant cheerfulness was taking its toll on her nerves and she was becoming irritable.

A hand and his voice emerged from the light sheet. "Come on. It won't hurt you."

She let her hand follow his in and then pulled it back out, examining it for any possible effect, ready to jump on him for the slightest misdemeanor.

Seeing none and frustrated because she couldn't get voluble about the discontent playing at the fringes of her mind, she dived into the sheet of light.

The effect was breathtaking. It was like their bodies turned into fire spirits and were reduced to the shimmering contours of the light their surfaces created.

All of a sudden she saw the Prince turn solid in front of her and, as she followed him, saw her own body emerge within the sphere enclosed by the light.

It was like someone slapped her in the face, the beauty of the trip lost on the drabness of the rock floor and the Prince in his body.

She could feel her anger rising and she started to feed it, cycling in images of the Prince having kept this thing a secret from her, calling on her youthful body to work her mind into a rage against him.

He reached out and took her by the arm, leading her over to the large throne-like seat in the middle of the cave of light.

"Sit here and I'll show you what it does."

"She recoiled at the softness of the seat, its unfamiliarity feeding her rising gore.

The Prince adjusted some controls on the side of the chair and all of a sudden the globe of light surrounding them changed its texture and form. The almost unbroken glow broke up into single dots of light evenly distributed all around them.

Karen instantly felt her anger disappear.

For the first time she could remember, she felt at peace with the way things were, exactly with the way things were.

She closed her eyes and let the unfamiliar sensation rush over her.

"See," the Prince said. "Didn't I tell you?"

Karen didn't know what he'd told her, but she knew this place was just what she needed to escape the increasingly incessant demands her mind was putting on her body.

It seemed the place de-wired her, broke all of the connections that drove her body in an increasing cycle of self-satisfaction.

She lay back and let the peacefulness overflow her. She didn't even pay attention to the Prince as he gently removed her clothes, climbed up on her lap, lifted her hips, and entered her, his body at a forty-five degree angle over the edge of the chair, his hands braced over her head on the back.

He stayed motionless in her as she drifted off into a deep sleep, her first undisturbed sleep in a long time.

When she woke, the dots of light had vanished and she was bathed in a yellowish green glow that seemed to emanate from the surface of the walls. It allowed her to comprehend the dimensions of the cave for the first time.

Looking around, she spotted the Prince sound asleep on the floor about five feet in front of the chair she was sitting in.

She touched the material of the chair. What looked like rock felt like silk.

She got up, dropped to the side where the Prince had manipulated the controls, and began to experiment with them. It didn't take her long to figure out how to bring back the dots, manipulate the their number and positions, shoot beams through them so they danced around their points in space, and make them disappear altogether.

Additional experimentation revealed the method the chair slid back to reveal a depression that could serve as a bed, or a sacrificial alter, and the storage section with the pillows and the very interesting straps.

She wrapped one around her wrist and found the more pressure she exerted to get it off, the harder it was to get off. If she just relaxed, it fell off by itself.

It was similar in effect to the Chinese finger cuffs she'd played with as a child, but the material that made up the straps was almost skin-like.

Her practiced eyes combined the straps with the golden pillars at the corners of the depression with instinctive deductive ability.

She began to fiddle with the controls of the chair again, this time making irregular patterns in the points of light that made up the sheet.

As soon as the pattern became irregular, she felt herself become irritable. When she evened out the lattice of light, her fidgetiness declined.

The condition of her mind was directly related to the regularity of the points of light.

With a little practice, she found she could make herself feel relaxed, afraid, and most important, angry. She also found that, except for times the patterns were even and provided pleasurable relaxation, it was impossible to close her eyes to shut out their effect. When the patterns inspired fear or anger, she could keep her eyes shut for a short time, but inevitably, she was drawn to open them, and once open, her mind began to fully participate in the effects the lights provided her with.

With further practice, she found she could record a series of patterns for continuous playback.

Familiar with the workings of what she'd become to call her Mind Palace, she proceeded with a program to make it her Mind Palace.

She went over and shook the Prince awake.

He wasn't willing, having exhausted all his energies in attempting not to gum up her vagina with his precious fluids.

She rolled him over to the depression and staked him out face up, fascinated with how the straps melded into his flesh.

She tightened the golden straps so that the Prince had very little wiggle room.

She then went out to the Prince's speedster. She clicked on the communicator she'd obtained from Gako.

"Yes?" Gako's response was immediate.

"Where am I?"

"On a little islet in Acores."

"Acores?"

"It's a group of islands off the coast of Portugal."

"Where are you?"

"On De'Corvo. It's about a kilometer southeast of your position."

"I want you to contact the Prince's attorney. She's the same one that set up the ship building corporation."

"Yes."

"Tell her the Prince has had a mental breakdown and his recovery is remote. Tell her she can take charge of the Prince's estate if she makes good on the ship contract."

"Is the Prince mentally incapacitated?"

"He will be. Draw her out. Find out if she knows anything about this place. If she does, kill her. If she doesn't, invite her to a few parties. We can seduce her and get control of the Prince's assets through her."

"It will be."

"Come back for me personally in twenty-four hours. I don't want anybody but you and myself to know about this place's existence."

"Of course."

Karen closed communications and re-entered what, in hours, would be her mind palace.

The Prince was awake, but was still groggy enough, he didn't know yet he was bound to the golden stakes.

Karen manipulated the light pattern so it was at its most relaxing and waited for him to regain full consciousness.

It wasn't long. He opened his eyes with a smile on his face.

"Isn't it wonderful?" he asked. "Aren't you glad I brought you here? You'll surely give me a lot of research time now, won't you?"

"Why don't you tell me a little about this place? Where did it come from? Did you build it, or find it, or what?"

"Oh, I couldn't do that. I just brought you here to advance the cause of science."

"Do you mean you were going to treat me like some lab animal, use me for experimental purposes."

"Oh, no, not at all." The Prince tried to sit up and found himself back flat on his back. "What the . . ."

"Then what were you planning for me?"

"Why, to take you back, of course."

"If you can't tell me the history of this place, if it's so secret only you know it, how can you let me go back? Aren't you worried I'll tell someone?"

"No. You're not that kind of girl."

"What kind of girl am I?"

"A very desirable girl. A girl anyone would be proud to be seen with."

"Desirable? How so? I'm just a slip of a girl really, barely sixteen. I don't have any hips, no breasts to speak of, and a nose that reminds me of a beak. What makes me so desirable?"

"Well . . ."

"Let me ask you this. At some point you decided you had to be seen with me. At what point was that?"

"After I was in you, of course."

"And what was it about being in me that made you want to be seen with me?"

"You're vagina, of course. Being in you is like being licked by a million little tongues."

"But anybody looking at us wouldn't know that."

"I don't care about anybody. The people I think are important know, and knowing, they envy me your presence."

"So it'd make you feel good if people, no, not just people, but the few people whose opinion you think is important, thought you had control over me."

"I don't know if I think just like that or not."

"Where were you planning to get a fresh source of young ladies and gentlemen to entertain you and your friends if you came back without me?"

"I wasn't planning to come back without you. I don't understand what you mean. What boys and girls? We host some children from The Save Our Children Foundation, but I deal with Anatol on that. How do you know about that? Your just a new fucking cunt on the scene . . ."

The Prince caught his tongue too late.

Karen, who'd been perpetually interested in the difference between herself and the perception of herself, was so fascinated, she didn't get the slightest upset with the Prince's remark.

But then, she'd the lights arranged so she wouldn't get upset, didn't she?

She was enjoying this chat, knowing the Prince would have every reason to fully regret his slur in the coming hours.

"You didn't know The Save Our Children Foundation was run out of the worldwide Art of the Lord church?"

"No," the Prince replied, surprised. "How could I? It's just another charitable organization. What's the Art of the Lord church?"

"And you didn't know I run the worldwide Art of the Lord church?"

"I never even heard about it until you just brought it up."

"So you only love me for my cunt."

"No. Your body is very unusual, I mean the internal structure of your body. It's of the utmost importance to analyze it, come up with hypotheses concerning why it exists, and then test those hypotheses. It's the advancement of knowledge."

"I'll tell you what will be an advancement of knowledge. When you tell me all you know about this place, my knowledge will have been advanced."

He tried to sit up again only to be forced back down by the straps. "I can't do that. Now quit fucking around and let me the hell up, you bitch."

The words rolled of Karen's mental stability. She was tired of the peace her mind was being molded into. She could feel her body trying to break through, trying to provoke some action that would provide it with stimulation.

She manipulated the controls so the evenly spaced points of light in the room turned into a nightmare of jagged edges and shadows.

The effect on her was immediate and welcome. Rage flooded her mind, washing over her body, exciting every nerve, every fiber, every muscle.

The effect on the Prince was also immediate. He came horizontally off the floor, seemingly floating over the restraints of the straps.

"Bitch," he screamed, his eyes bulging out of their sockets, the muscles of his neck standing out, attempting to break through his skin.

"Bitch. Bitch. Bitch." he screamed over and over, bringing Karen to the verge of an orgasm.

She neutralized the lights, letting her desire linger as the Prince fell back on the bed, sweat draining down his forehead, his arms and legs trembling.

"How . . ." he said, his voice cracking. He licked his lips and tried again. "What did you do?"

"My, my, my. You own this place and you don't even know its potential. Shame on you."

She turned the lights jagged again, watching the Prince go berserk in his anger, thrashing back and forth, grinding his teeth, growling, his lips foaming until her orgasm was complete.

"That was nice," she said, returning the lights to neutral. "Now, how about telling me what you do know about this place."

"Will you let me go if I do?"

"What I do with you, for you, or to you depends totally on what my pleasure dictates at the time. And right now my pleasure is inclining toward giving you another light show."

"Okay. Okay. It's no big deal. We'd been cruising the Indian Ocean and someone mentioned there was a Chinese temple in Indonesia with some delightfully explicit murals that could provide us some new ideas, you know, in our sex play and what not. It was known as the Kama Sutra of torture. Well, we anchored off Tanjungpinag in Sumatra and took a junk up the Snake River. I'll tell you one thing the murals didn't picture was the damn mosquitoes, although they seemed to have thought of everything else to torment a human."

He looked down at his straps.

"Maybe not everything. Anyway, I'd heard they had some very old and rare charts at the Ria Kandil Museum in Tanjungpinag, so I stopped there on the way back to the boat to see what I could see.

"And they were really quite extraordinary. But there was this one, perhaps a copy of something a lot older, but old nonetheless, perhaps two thousand years, the card said it depicted Samosir Island in Lake Toba at the end of the last ice age. I'd been on Samosir a number of times and flown over it a few times more and I can tell you there was no way that chart depicted Samosir.

"A lot of times, because a map is found locally, they'll look around for the nearest thing that it might represent, and then that's what it becomes. Who's going to come along and disprove it? That's the whole object, isn't it? To come up with something that's not disprovable. If it's not disprovable, then its got to be true, right?

"So I'm looking at this chart and I'm thinking Samosir, like it says, and all I'm getting is the chart room, the place I keep my charts on the boat.

"So I say, what the heck, and make an overlay of the chart to take back with me. When we head back to sea, and I get a little time to myself, I start wondering where I'd seen that particular chart before.

"I go through all my charts and come up with nothing.

"It's a puzzle, one I wasn't getting any solution to.

"So we continue on, working our way across the Pacific, I wanted to spend a little time at Panope, and then head on over to Easter Island before we passed through Panama into the Atlantic. Once there, I decided to get out the sonar map of the Atlantic to study the shape of the trench that splits it north to south and wham, there was the chart."

"You mean the chart had been drawn from an underwater map of the Atlantic Ocean."

"No. I mean the chart was like the bottom of the Atlantic would've been if it hadn't been at the bottom of the Atlantic. Here I had a chart made of the Atlantic before it'd been covered with water, however that might have happened.

"Once I had that coordinated, something that wasn't strange about the chart all of a sudden became really strange. The latitude and longitude lines had been more or less acceptable as long as I didn't know what the chart was depicting, but as soon as I knew what it was depicting, they didn't make any sense at all. They were all centered at a point slightly off center in Acores.

"I looked on the geological surveys and there was nothing at the center. It wasn't on the sonar maps, either. But satellite reconstructions of the Atlantic showed an underwater mountain right where the Ria Kandil chart centered its longitude and latitude.

"What, I wondered, could be in an underwater mountain that was so important it was used as the center of some ancient world?

"And here you have it."

He tried to gesture, forgetting for a moment his bonds as he visualized the pleasure of discovery.

"Doesn't every one on your ship know about this place, then?"

"I came ashore with the navigator and came back alone. I had the captain murdered during one of the on-board games so no one was the wiser for my find."

"What if you'd died?"

"Then someone else would just have to find it."

"Well, that's certainly an interesting story. I believe you. What happened to the chart?"

"The original in Tanjungpinag was stolen from the museum. I destroyed it along with the overlay I made."

He looked up. "How about it?"

"How about what?"

"You'll let me go, won't you?"

"We'll see."

The idea the same effect could produce the rage that provided her with the ultimate relief was the same effect that tormented the Prince was intriguing, almost as intriguing as experiencing the effect together with him.

She manipulated the controls so the jagged lights came in such a disconcerting manner, what had been prologue seemed benign to the present.

Several hours later, her body drained from the repetitive orgasms she'd been experiencing, she shut the system down and slipped into sleep in the womb of the yellowish green glow of the cave walls.

She awoke to the groans of the Prince.

She walked over to take a closer look at him. His body was askew, seeming to be going in different ways than it should be going.

Looking closer, she noted he'd pulled both his arms and legs out of their sockets with his struggles against the straps.

He was lying there, half delirious, moaning and groaning. She wondered idly how to make a person disjoint their own fingers. There must be some sort of way to rig up a contraption . . .

But that was for the future. This was the here and now, and she had a job to do.

She went back over to the control panel and turned on the evenly spaced beams of light, feeling the soothing effect on her mind immediately.

So did the Prince, who's moaning stopped. His delirium seemed to evaporate. The moaning returned when he tried to get up and his disjointed sockets ground against each other.

"Good grief," he cried through clenched teeth.

"It's your own fault. You're the one who's thrashing around. Just relax. Feel how pleasant it is."

The Prince lay back. "Yes. It is pleasant. What happened?"

"It's not what happened. It's what's going to happen. I've recorded a little program for you. You're really going to enjoy it. It runs in five-minute cycles. I'll stay with you through the first few so you'll know I care what happens to you. Are you ready? Good. Then we'll get started."

She felt the fear like a blast as she activated the program. She actually backed across the cave to a wall before she knew what she was doing, but by the time she regained her senses, the fear was eating away at her gut, keeping her pinned to the wall.

Through the irregular lights, she could see the Prince trying to cower in his depression in the floor, trying to back away from the unseen fear the lights created in his mind.

She'd set the timer for five minutes, but it seemed like a lifetime. Every misapprehension, every fear she'd ever had, and they were few and far between, was magnified to unmanageable proportions. She didn't think she was going to make it through.

She was just about to change the sequence when the pattern shifted and she went into a storm of rage.

She flew back across the cavern floor to see the Prince stop trying to crawl into a fetal position and try to thrash out at her, screaming obscenities at the top of his lungs.

She kept her rising pleasure at reasonable levels, knowing the best was yet to come.

After the prescribed five minutes, peace filled the cave.

A puzzled look came over the Prince's face.

"Enjoy your five minutes of peace," Karen told him.

The puzzled expression dissolved into a pleading, slobbering demeanor as understanding overtook him.

"No," he cried. "Please. I'd rather have you keep me in fear or a rage. I don't have to think then."

"But that's just what I want you to do. By the way, there's one more cycle, total darkness, during which you can enjoy the music of your disjointed joints filling your mind with pain. Enjoy yourself. My thoughts are with you."

She made her way over to the exit, his cries and pleading a soothing tingle between her legs.

Back at the speedster, she opened the communications channel.

"Yes?" Gako's response was immediate.

"Where can I take this speedster? The Prince is going to need another twenty-four hours."

"We can meet at Lajas Airport.

"How did it go with his attorney?"

"She was totally amenable as long as he was still alive. She said she can seize complete control if he's mentally incapacitated, but dead, the vultures will descend."

"He'll be capable of registering life signs. She didn't know about this island?"

"Not a clue. Once I mentioned your name, she was very open. She is quite anxious to meet you and get involved in your activities."

"Good. I'll see you in twenty-four hours at Lajas. Clear me from Portugal or Spain. I'll swing around."

She closed the channel and looked at her watch.

The Prince was just beginning his quiet time so she thought she'd slip in and see how he was doing.

She ducked down through the opening and into the cavern.

She found him staring, mouth open, at a point that wasn't discernible. His head was tilted back. He was mechanically citing numbers. Karen listened closely. They were all different, but she realized they were map coordinates, mathematical designations of places on the globe, probably places where he'd sailed.

She went over behind him and looked closely at his eyes.

It looked like there was nothing there, nobody home, empty.

She waited patiently for the next cycle to begin, bracing herself against the onslaught of fear she knew it'd bring her.

When it hit, she recoiled, backing away from the Prince as if physically assaulted.

When she regained her perspective, she saw the Prince, saw he had no fear, saw the system no longer affected him.

She broke the cycle and switched it to the rage-producing pattern.

That had no effect on him either, and she turned it off quickly before it aroused her. There was nothing more she could do to him that would produce a response and there was no reason to summon the genie if she couldn't satisfy herself.

It wasn't soon enough however and her mind started cycling her body into the urges that pushed her mind to create images that increased her body's need for satisfaction.

The sound of his voice rattling out the coordinates made her realize her Mind Palace must be among them. She made a mental note to detour to one of her monasteries where she'd sever his spinal nerves, turning him into a paraplegic, cut his tongue out at the base, destroy his hearing, and blind him. It'd cost her a little more for care, but it wouldn't take long before she drained his wealth and then he could look to the gutter for support.

The thought increased her unquenchable urges.

It dawned on her, through her increasing desire, that she could put her body and mind to rest by using her Mind Palace to sooth them. She could put her Mind Palace to a use opposite the use for which it was intended.

She cycled in the even dots of light throughout the cavern and immediately felt peace fill her mind, allowing her body to slowly release the buildup of pressure that had been driving her muscles to seek relief.

She wondered idly how the light could work so efficiently on her mind.

As her body relaxed, she drifted off into what seemed to be another world, a dream really.

She wondered whether it was how the light was structured that caused the effect, but no one knew how light was structured and besides, it was structured the same no matter what she did with the switches.

No, it was more the way the light appeared. If it was even, if she manipulated it so it displayed uniformity, the uniformity was reflected in her mind, creating a peace that could only come from being at rest.

It was only when the shape of the light, its presentation, ceased being uniform that it began to create problems in her mind.

One display could create one emotion, another, another emotion.

Or maybe it was all degrees. Perhaps fear was just another face of anger, the pattern of disunity changing slightly to accommodate the change in emotion.

It wasn't the structure of light, then, but rather the structure of the lighting that caused the emotion.

It must, she dreamed, reflect the structure of the mind itself.

And what is the mind?

Could it be structured like the light?

Was the mind, the thing that made her think, that created the images that drove her body, a part of the physical process, the chemistry that made up her brain.

Did the brain somehow evolve so it lit up like a Christmas tree with blinking lights, the pattern formed at any one moment being the result of the total number of lights that were lit up and their position on the tree?

Was memory, the pictures of the world she formed and acted on, simply the result of certain cells of her brain being marked in a certain way so they produced the information a computer produces with two states of matter, one on and one off?

If it did, then what was it about her brain that was able to recognize the patterns?

Having the brain create patterns just put the real question one thought removed from reality. It was like putting a beginning to the universe: Once you put a beginning, then you had to deal with what came before the beginning. Or the question of the origin of life. The learned said it came from meteors, ignoring the fact that meteors didn't answer the question because if life came from other places, how did it come to be in those other places to start with.

If you tried to answer the question of what consciousness was, how did she know what she knew and how did she know she knew it, by claiming it was caused by units of the brain alternating between a state of charge and no charge, on and off, plus and minus, one and zero, or any other designation she could think of to describe machine logic, it removed the question of what was consciousness from the consciousness, removed the question one step from thought.

It answered the question by appearing to answer it but actually ignored the question by dazzling the mind with the answer.

Karen rubbed her forehead.

Her mind seemed to expand to encompass the points of light around her.

If the mind, the process that allowed her to think, wasn't a part of the chemical process of her mind, a result of those chemical processes working together, could it be something that was even less perceptible?

She knew there was a world around her, a measurable world made up of elements and combinations of elements that interacted on a chemical basis. And she knew there was a whole other world, a world made up of the bits and pieces of matter that made up the elements and the combinations of elements.

This was the world of atoms, of things too small to measure directly, things that could only be measured indirectly by their effect on the matter that could be measured directly.

If her mind, the entity or structure that provided her with the ability to recognize reality, was not to be found in the chemical world, if the creation of thought processes out of the chemical building blocks defied both reason and evidentiary existence, could her mind be found in the atomic world, the world where matter was too small to be measured directly?

Did her mind exist independent of her chemical brain, like the points of light existed in the space around her, but their existence was really not measurable other than by their effect on the atoms of air in which they existed? The mind certainly existed because it produced acts in physical reality, left changes in reality that were markers to show it existed.

And, she thought with a chill, if it existed, what happened when the brain to which it was attached ceased to operate on a chemical basis?

She thought of the Prince.

He had a mind no more than an hour ago. He was able to think, to form ideas, to cause his body to move in physical reality in response to those ideas.

If his mind was simply a concatenation of brain cells, whatever happened to him caused the chemical basis for that concatenation to break down, to cease to function.

If the ideas that led to his actions in physical reality were really the result of chemical interactions within his brain, whatever stress she'd put him through simply caused the chemicals to change, to interact in a way that changed the wiring so the Christmas tree no longer lit up.

That was the position she'd always taken. Once the body died, the lights went out.

She had free will, total free will. She could create images in her mind of her doing something, then she could go out and do it, turn the images into reality.

She'd yearned to do so from her earliest memory and when she found she could do it, she'd gone out and done it with abandon.

What use was life if you couldn't do exactly what you wanted to do?

And if no one could stop you from doing exactly what you wanted to do, which was the whole purpose, then, when it was all over, when you'd conducted your life to maximize your pleasure, that was just it, it was over, there was no more.

The brain died and the thought processes died with it.

Simple.

But what if that wasn't the way it worked?

What if there was a physical structure that existed within the brain but wasn't dependent on the brain for its existence, just as the points of light existed independent of the molecules of air.

Was the mind similar, with the brain and body it controlled apparent in the real world but existing independently of the brain it was attached to and the body it operated? When the brain ceased to operate chemically, could the mind continue to exist?

If her mind could exist after her brain died, could her acts endanger its continued existence?

To have a mind and not believe it would continue to exist after death was one thing.

But to have a mind and know it could exist after death but for the way you treated it during life, that was quite another thing.

The thought chilled her to the marrow of her bones.

Had she been systematically destroying something with an existence more profound and durable than she herself was?

Had she been systematically destroying her essence?

She focused again on the Prince, or what was left of the Prince.

He was clearly alive. His body was whole. His brains weren't oozing out of his ears and nose, so they were probably intact.

Exactly what had she done to him?

If his chemistry hadn't been altered so his internal lighting system no longer functioned, a possibility which if true, she supposed, would've been detectible a long time ago and because it wasn't detectible was just as speculative as the proposition the mind was a subatomic structure of some sort, the possibility of there being a subatomic structure that reacted in some fashion in order to translate external reality into a recognizable pattern within the structure itself became very real.

Under this conceptualization, she reasoned, the Prince's mind, the structure he'd used to perceive reality, just departed from the moorings in his brain. It just up and drifted off, the impact of the bodily reactions caused by her little show being more than it could take.

Or perhaps, and the thought caused the chill in her marrow to move outward into the solid calcium of her bones, it'd just dissipated, evanesced, the particles moving back into the inanimate subatomic world.

In that case, the destruction would be independent of the brain because the Prince's brain was certainly still intact.

Whatever had been the Prince was no longer a part of the Prince.

Whatever had been the Prince had either departed or had been destroyed.

And if it hadn't been the result of a change in the chemical composition of his brain, she hadn't committed an act having any physical effect on the Prince.

If the structure that was the essence of the Prince had survived, then it'd just left his body in response to the lack of a hospitable environment within that body.

If the structure that was the essence had dissipated, it'd done so not because of what she'd done, but because of what the Prince had done with his life in the past.

She may be able to batter and bruise the bodies of living things, but she could have no effect on the existence of any structure that made up the essence of the living thing.

If her actions didn't harm the essence of others, did they go without harm?

And here her bones became so cold, they felt brittle under the flesh of her skinny body.

Did the acts she engaged in have a direct effect on the structure that made up her essence?

Acts that were in harmony with existence would rebound to the essence, the mind that gave rise to the acts.

Acts that weren't in harmony with existence would create a change in nature. The change would be a constant reminder to the mind that gave rise to the acts, either through the scars the acts inflicted on the physical world or through the memory of the performance of those acts which were in disharmony with existence and thus the mind's own existence.

She could destroy his body but she couldn't destroy the essence of his body. She could destroy her own body but she could also destroy her own essence by engaging in actions that were in disharmony with nature.

The Prince's continued existence depended solely on what he'd done and what he might do in the future if he had a future outside his brain.

Her continued existence, however, depended on what she'd done with the Prince and the thousands of others she'd come into direct contact with, and the millions, perhaps billions she'd affected by her actions.

But she didn't care about the consequences of her actions. She never had and she never would. She did exactly as she pleased and would continue to do so.

It felt good.

How could disharmony affect you if it wasn't your disharmony?

The word disharmony floated away from her floating mind. Did living in constant disharmony and mistaking it for harmony exempt her from the evolutionary process of selecting out minds not in harmony with existence?

The sentence, the words that made it up, appeared as clear as the light around her and then abruptly vanished as the walls took on their peculiar yellow greenish glow. It was a memory that wasn't because while she remembered it, it disappeared from her mind, became unrecallable.

Where was she, she wondered, her mind attempting to come focus?

"What was I thinking of? It was something important, something that I need to know," she said out loud.

But she couldn't regrasp it and now she couldn't even figure out how she got to the deck watch bubble, the spray of the bow whipping by on both sides, bottle of vodka, three quarters empty, firmly in hand.

Her slight body trembled although she didn't feel cold.

Her surroundings came into sharper focus. She was under the plastic canopy she'd built in the prow of The Queen as a refuge from the bowels of the ship.

How did she come to be there?

She had no recollection of her movements between her suite of rooms where she last recalled seeing herself and the chair in the bubble looking at the darkening blue sky.

She'd never experienced such a lack of continuity. If nothing else, she knew where she was at all times and she knew what she was doing.

How else could she do exactly what she wanted to do?

She shrugged, sighed mentally, and took another deep drink of the clear fluid.

As her head came down with the bottle, she saw a speck on the horizon.

It was just a dot and she fully expected it to move one way or the other. The chances of an aircraft of any type directly overflying The Queen were too remote to even consider.

But here, as she watched, was a craft that didn't veer to the left or the right, it just kept becoming a larger and larger spec in the blue sky.

She checked the sun and mentally registered it was going down behind her, away from The Queen's direction of travel, while the speck was coming from the same direction, from the east.

She was going to her Mind Palace, the thought crept in, the speck was coming from her Mind Palace.

She sat bolt upright.

It was Block.

She opened the intercom immediately. "Stick a wire up and see if you can get a make on an incoming object due east."

"It will be," the Captain replied.

Because The Queen was blind to external surveillance, and wanted to remain so, she didn't want an antennae sticking up sending out traceable signals.

She waited patiently for the Captain to get a fix on the spec.

"It's coming directly for us, whatever it is. Shall we surface and try to intercept."

"No. Just surface."

Karen watched as the water surrounding the bubble started to wash off the deck as it rose above the surface.

If it wasn't Block, she thought, whoever it was probably wouldn't even notice them.

If it was Block, then he knew they were there and it didn't make any difference whether they were on the surface or a foot below the surface.

"Its a single-seater Stratodart," the Captain's voice cut through the sound of water swishing off the deck. "It's about fifty meters off the deck. Should we prepare for impact?"

"If he's going to blow us out of the water, do you think you can prepare?"

"Not any more."

Karen watched as a paracapsule blew out the top of the Stratodart. The Stratodart, apparently under automatic control, banked and climbed away.

The paracapsule blossomed into a hang glider with a small figure beneath it steering toward the deck.

What incredible arrogance, she thought, realizing she was feeling admiration rather than scorn.

"When he lands, have him sent directly to my suite."

"It will be."

Karen ducked under and out of the bubble onto the catwalk, moving swiftly toward the back of the ship and her command suite.

She felt a strange feeling, then realized she was actually excited.

Imagine, me being excited, she thought, her mind drifting back to her first days of school, her initial discoveries, her life, the excitement of Gako throwing her down on the floor and trying repeatedly to penetrate her.

Excitement seemed to be a diminishing quality as she progressed down the road of life.

It was fun to have it back.

Did Block represent an element of danger that had faded as her power increased?

She shed her clothes and stepped into the shower, lathering herself down thoroughly, her slender body feeling lithe under her fingers.

She toweled off, examining herself in front of the mirror, noticing her boyish hips, her flat chest, her pinched nose held high.

She could be attractive if she wanted to be.

She went to work on her hair, used just the right amount of makeup, put herself in a dress that hinted at every curve her body didn't have and, taking a final look, entered the living area of the suite.

She caught her reflection in a hall mirror as she moved. She looked good. More important, she felt good.

"We meet again," she said, moving with energy into the room.

Block was by the fireplace popping the remainder of a chocolate covered cherry into his mouth, examining a plaque on the wall.

"I'm looking at this award. What's the Art of Karenation?" he asked.

"It's a sort of macramé."

Block walked back over to the table and picked out another chocolate covered cherry from the oversized bowl on the table. He popped it into his mouth and stood looking at her.

"Indeed, we do meet again. Am I going to have to examine you for hidden weapons?"

"If I'd known it was the famous Ronald Block I had in Miami, I'd have taken some time to get to know you. I was just after some impersonal sex and I don't mind admitting, I really got my fill with you."

"And that little device you hooked me up to?"

"Just an after-thought, a sort of reward. I knew with the drug in you, you wouldn't be getting much fun out of being in me."

"You didn't know how painful it'd be?"

"Painful? How could pleasure be painful? Again, I didn't know it was you. I was just attempting to pay back some faceless pleasure with some more faceless pleasure.

"And to answer your question, no, you don't have to search me for weapons, although you're free to do so. I could've had you shot out of the hang glider as you could've blown me out of the water. I think we both want something else here. I know I do."

"The consequences to anyone harming me are dire," he said.

"If I'd wanted you shot, really," she replied, "I'd have done it myself. I'm already on the block for my attempt on The Chairman. Nothing to lose. I found the attack on The Chairman rather exciting. I'm finding this exciting."

Block didn't reply immediately.

"What would you like to drink?" she asked. "I'm having white wine."

"That's fine," he said, finally finding his voice. "You think murdering someone who's spent his life trying to bring the peoples of the world together so they'll quit murdering each other exciting?"

"Isn't that a matter of perspective?" Karen filled two wine glasses and brought them over to the couch with the uncorked bottle. "It seems to me what he's trying to do is take away my personal freedom of action."

"Your freedom of action can have some pretty bloody results."

"What? How so? I don't understand what you mean."

"I'm referring to that little mess at the fort on the Gaspé peninsula."

"I tried my best to prevent that bloody mess. The man who runs the Art of the Lord church, a worthy organization, one I believe in and have supported with monetary contributions since I began to believe in their truth, this Gako apparently was trying to take over its operation.

"When he saw me pick you up in Miami, he was concerned you were trying to infiltrate his operation."

"His operation?"

"His attempt to seize control of the church."

"How do you seize control of a church?"

"Put yourself in the office of the head and deny all other claimants access, I guess. At least, that's what this guy Gako must've figured.

"In any event, he was having me followed and when our paths crossed, you picked up a tail as well. When he saw you were heading for Gaspé, he panicked."

"Why would he panic?"

"He apparently had some sort of operation going on up there. Something to do with a scientist named Georges Lansdowne."

"Go on."

"When I got back from the failed attempt on The Chairman, my congratulations, by the way, you have superb reactions, I was reviewing my messages and accidentally came across one that Gako made from my command console. He was making plans to terminate the operation in Gaspé. He said it was successful, they'd all the information they needed and to keep it in operation was to risk discovery. He was therefore going up there and blow up Lansdowne's laboratory. You walked right into the middle of the operation."

"And you raced up there to save me?"

"Not really. I still didn't know who you were. I didn't find out until I got there and then I really got upset. Here I was a major contributor to a church running an operation that might eliminate Ronald Block."

"You try to save me and murder The Chairman."

"That was ideological. He must be stopped. You're just an employee. You can't be expected to understand the underlying issues of individual freedom involved."

"Out of curiosity, just what are those issues?"

"The Chairman is the embodiment of The Representative World Government. The Representative World Government is just a highfalutin name for the emerging world dictatorship.

"Even if The Chairman's motives, and yours on behalf of The Chairman, are the most noble in the world, what is being established are the procedures for the control of each and every human being's existence from cradle to grave.

"A person will have no individual freedom under a system that can identify what groceries he bought, what bedrooms he slept in, the totality of his background, his patterns of consumption, his very movements.

"The Representative World Government seeks to put the mark of the beast on mankind."

"What beast?"

"The devil."

"You believe in the devil?"

"Don't you? He's ever-present in our actions, a constant obstacle, a guide to direct us in the paths of decency and righteousness."

"And what is this mark?"

"The mark is the number the devil gives us to transact our business. Everybody has a number placed on them at birth and that number follows them through life and into the grave.

"The Representative World Government is the Beast, and its mark is the number it uses to keep track of its victims."

"Most numbers are assigned by local governments to their citizens as a convenience so everybody can keep track of the multiple transactions a person is involved in to make the maximum use of the multiple choices available in a complex and varied economy," Block replied.

"The number produces a record that can always be retrieved to the detriment of the individual's freedom," Karen replied.

"I'm no economic genius, but let's try and follow this from scratch." Block refilled his glass and did the same for Karen.

"If you start out with a farmer, and give the farmer a nice plot of land with rich soil and an environment producing enough variation in weather to favor the growth of crops, but not enough to destroy them, the farmer can plant seed in his plot of ground, harvest the product, and feed himself.

"That's pretty simple, isn't it? Does the farmer have individual freedom?"

"Sure he does."

"How so? He has to get up at the crack of dawn, he has to work, as the song goes, from sunup to sundown and then he goes to bed only to get up the next day to do the same thing. He can do anything he wants as long as it deals with keeping his farm in production because if he doesn't do that, he's going to starve, right?"

"I guess so. Yes."

"So our farmer doesn't really have any freedom. He's stuck to his farm. If he were living off wild animals, he'd have to move wherever they did. His freedom would be restricted to the presence of meat, so we didn't really start off with any freedom, did we?"

"But those conditions long since ceased to exist," Karen said.

"They ceased to exist because the farmer was smart enough to picture a world where he could create more crops than he could consume. If he could create more than he could consume, he could increase the time he had to do other things. What other things?"

"Whatever he chose to do, I guess."

"Then we can define freedom, or at least make a precondition to freedom, the existence of choices. The exercise of freedom, of an individual's freedom, is the exercise of the freedom of choice. You don't have to agree because there's no other conclusion.

"If a person has time and no choices, he has no freedom. If he has choices and no time, he has no freedom. It's only when he has both choices and time does he have freedom, and his freedom is the freedom to chose among his choices."

"I'll have to agree," Karen said softly.

"Then you'll agree the existence of choices is dependent on people the farmer might not even know doing things that'll create the farmer's freedom of choices. After all, if the farmer is growing food he doesn't consume, he's doing something for people he might not even know.

"What connects the people you do things for with the people who do things for you when you don't know each other?"

"The marketplace?" Karen sipped her wine contemplatively. She was becoming interested, being drawn into the discussion. Her desire to justify herself to Block was vanishing, the image of Gako hanging on a hook behind the door to Block's left disappearing as she tried to build the images Block was creating with words in her mind. She remembered fleetingly the first time she'd succumbed to the peace of her Mind Palace.

"Very good. The only place two people can deal with each other when they don't have knowledge of each other, and don't even know of each other's existence, is the marketplace.

"I don't want to get into a discussion about the inequities that can result from the marketplace when individual interests or groups of interests obtain undue influence over it. The examples are too numerous to cite, but I can point out with absolute certainly what the outcome will be when the marketplace starts to favor one class of participants over another."

"War?"

"Anywhere from civil unrest to outright nuclear destruction, which defines what the ideal marketplace should be for its participants."

"Let me guess," Karen interrupted. "All participants get out of the marketplace what they put into it."

"A situation that'll probably never be achieved, but a situation nonetheless. If we had a perfect marketplace, one that allowed all participants to get out of it what they put in it, what, besides private influence, could cause it to return to a state of disequilibrium?"

"Excuse me?"

"What could disbalance the marketplace if the ideal situation were ever achieved?"

"I don't know."

"What limits the marketplace? Go back to the farmer. What limits what he can produce?"

"The amount of land, the weather, the technology he can develop to farm the land."

"In short," Block agreed, "resources, technology and acts of nature limit the size of the marketplace. The Earth will only support so many participants."

"I can see that."

"When everybody produced for their own consumption, they could keep the balance between resources and resource consumers in balance. If the farmer could produce only enough food for himself and five children, he didn't, theoretically at least, produce ten children because he'd create a situation where five of his children would starve completely or they would all starve a little.

"When a person is hungry, he'll do things he wouldn't normally do if he weren't hungry. Starvation isn't conducive to harmony among people.

"When the marketplace becomes so large, the participants don't interact directly, there's no automatic control on the population produced. In times of plenty, children will multiply only to face lean times and starvation.

"The marketplace doesn't have a mechanism for controlling the number of people who're produced that'll be dependent on it, but it does have a limit imposed by the resources of the planet and the technology that can be developed to safely use those resources without using them up and endangering future generations.

"We have the untenable situation where the marketplace is absolutely necessary to ensure our survival but can't protect itself from its one major defect, its inability to regulate the number of its participants even though its limited by its resources and the technology available to harvest those resources.

"What happens when there're more people available to participate in the marketplace than there are resources to allow those people to participate?"

"The people die?" Karen asked.

"The marketplace has to attempt to support them to the extent possible and to the extent that it does, the amount of available participation in the marketplace is reduced. And what does available participation translate into?"

"I'm not sure."

"Choices. You do know what choice represents?"

"Freedom."

"Correct. Technology builds on top of resource availability a multiplicity of choices. When population exceeds the resources available, those multiplicity of choices begin to diminish.

"There's a point after which no amount of technology can multiply the available resources so they can support unbridled population growth.

"That's why there's no future in a world populated by Bourgesies who breed eaters who turn into fighters in order to obtain the resources to eat.

"History, with its uneven growth of population and resource availability, is simply the interaction of the two, with wars being the result of population growth outstripping resource availability.

"As horrible as that was, it was still not fatal to our survival so long as there were uncharted lands that could take up the burden of excess population growth.

"Society didn't, rather couldn't, take the responsibility of seeing human beings starve, so it just shipped excess eaters off to points unknown to starve out of sight.

"We no longer have that luxury. We no longer can produce human beings for the purpose of starvation because we no longer have any place to ship them.

"Nor would we want to. We've a responsibility to ensure all human beings are taken care of. Unfortunately, we don't have the cooperation of the human beings who're doing the starving and if the marketplace attempts to feed a population that far exceeds its resources, it'll break down and starve those who're participating in the marketplace legitimately, those who're putting in more than they're taking out.

"That's why someone like Rudolph Lang tries to come up with methods to allocate resources to limit population. You know Rudolph Lang, don't you?"

"Never heard of her."

Karen paused a second. Didn't she know someone named Rudolph Lang? The name sounded familiar, but . . .

"No, if I have, I can't recall under what circumstances," she concluded.

Block looked at Karen closely. She was telling the truth. Lanette's carefully constructed hypothesis, seemingly proved by Karen's presence at the fort in Gaspé, was now crumbling in Block's mind. Oh, well, he thought, what's done is done. He could only move forward.

"So you see, excess population can lead to the destruction of the marketplace, which in turn can lead to the destruction of life. The technology that allows us to produce too many people is always available for the ultimate destruction of everybody.

"No one is willing to take on the destruction of the people who already exist. If something isn't done, the destruction of those people and all other people will become inevitable.

"The only thing that can be done is to use the technology to bring overpopulation growth to a halt so the world has time to bring the number of people available to participate in the marketplace into balance with the amount of resources available to the marketplace.

"Labeling identifying numbers as the mark of a beast, basically computer codes that allow market participants to make free choices, is counterproductive. They make the market more efficient and therefore allow it to accommodate more participants.

"Identifying market participants by code allows for more efficient movement of goods and services in the marketplace and thus increases the choices available to market participants."

"The mark of the Beast actually increases freedom rather than limits it?" Karen asked quietly. A tear formed under one of her eyes and she instinctively wiped it off.

"Not the mark of the Beast. An efficient method of matching participants within the marketplace.

"And that's exactly what it promotes, the individual freedom to pick and choose from the options available within the marketplace so a person can develop to the maximum and thus increase marketplace input."

"But, I thought . . ." Another tear formed, this one cascading down Karen's cheek. "I thought doing what I wanted to do constituted individual freedom." She looked confused. "Isn't doing what I want to do freedom of choice?"

"Only if the choice is freely available in the marketplace. Death and destruction can never be a part of the marketplace because the marketplace promotes the continuance of life, not its destruction.

"There are certain things that don't belong in the marketplace."

Tears were now streaming down Karen's cheeks.

"I never knew . . ."

She got up. She went over to Block, threw her arms around his neck, and buried her face on his shoulder, sobbing uncontrollably.

Dwarfing her slight figure, Block thought her more a little girl, but knew she was something more, a very desirable little girl regardless how deceptive her child-like body was, the body he felt pressed against his, slight, hardly perceptible but for the sobs.

He tried to think of the elements of the theory that Lanette used to make Karen the mastermind of the Lof boy's kidnapping and thus ultimately responsible for Lof's death.

The theory, whatever its foundations had been, was gone, so much rubbish.

This wasn't a girl faking sorrow. Her sobs were genuine. The tears soaking his shirt were real tears. The sobs racking her body had to be verging on the painful.

Block let her sob, stroking the back of her neck, fondling the silky black hair against the pale whiteness of her skin.

"I didn't know," she sobbed over and over. Block heard himself say no, no, in rhythm, senselessly.

He closed his eyes, wondering just how she fit in with the church, the foundation, the rock off De'Corvo and the treasure it contained, the treasure that converted his beloved Lanette into Lansdowne's Danette.

He felt her shift her slight weight on his lap and opened his eyes.

She'd shifted around so she was looking directly up into his face. The pinched features, the beak-like nose, disappeared into her face and re-emerged in an attractive array, more attractive than he thought possible.

She put her hand behind his neck, pulled him down and kissed him, her tongue darting expertly inside his mouth, instantly reducing the available space in his pants.

She felt the movement and moved away from his mouth, down his neck, opening the buttons on his shirt, allowing her lips to follow each opened button, moving down to the belt, the zipper, and then finally taking him full in her mouth.

He put his head back, waiting for the moist pleasure he knew would follow her expert ministrations, but her technique felt more like he'd caught a fish accidentally.

He reached down with one hand to help her and when that didn't work, used his other hand to try to guide her head.

It was no use. She was everywhere she shouldn't be and therefore nowhere she should be if she wanted to do it right.

"Ump," he said.

She stopped and looked up at him.

"I, ah, I'm sorry, I've never done this before."

It was confirmation of what Block suspected but couldn't believe. It was hard to reconcile this Karen with the women who'd raped him savagely just under a week before. Karen the vicious she-goddess was dissolving into Karen the vulnerable little girl in need of protection, and even more so, instruction.

She moved back up on Block and, putting her hands on each of his shoulders, leaned back and pulled him over on top of her.

"I'm much better at this," she said. "You're going to like this. I know you will."

Block rolled over on her and, with Karen's hands guiding him, penetrated her, coming to an almost instant halt.

Karen adjusted herself under him and then, holding him full in hand, facilitated his access.

The sensation struck him an incredible blow. His mind turned and tumbled as it attempted to focus on what was happening around his brainless head, the sensations exploding in disorientation.

He realized he'd inhaled so sharply, he'd forgotten to resume breathing. His back was arching so he could enter her completely.

He opened his eyes to orient himself and found himself looking directly into her dark pupils, the tears streaming out of them, pouring down her beautiful face.

He moved fast, as if on a boat caught in the currents of a waterfall, and before he could stop himself, he was actually in those dark pupils, moving past them, up her optic nerves and into the vast cavern of her mind.

He looked around, trying to get his bearings.

He could make out her mind, but something about it didn't appear right. It was composed of electrons, but they weren't evenly spaced. They were all out of kilter to one degree or another. They weren't uniform. They appeared to be in disequilibrium

Block watched as packets of digital information moved up her optic nerves and fired into her mind. Because the electrons making up her mind were out of position, they weren't as flexible as they'd have been if her mind were in balance.

As a result, instead of causing the electrons to shift position in response to the flow's presence to reflect reality, the flows passing through her mind were themselves being deflected.

As Block watched the continuous firing of the packets representing reality through her mind, he realized there was no way her mind could reconstruct an accurate picture of reality.

The picture it was reconstructing must be, Block knew, so far from reality, any actions taken in furtherance of reconstructed reality could never be in harmony with reality.

Being partially paralyzed, Karen's mind was receiving almost its entire input from the streams flowing up from her reactive center.

This input seemed to agree totally with the picture of reality the disbalanced electrons of her mind constructed, pictures Block could only catch bits and pieces of. The bits and pieces he could catch were so horrible, he didn't want to retain them.

And because the input from the reactive portion of Karen's brain was dictating the position of the electrons making up her mind, the reality being input from her optic nerves was being converted into memory packets conforming to those unpleasant pictures. Those memory packets in turn were traveling throughout the corridors of her brain, dredging up more of the same in an ever-increasing cycle of stimulation.

No matter how hard she tried, she could never dredge up pictures matching the deformity of her mind. The inability to match her picture of reality, as unreal as it was, with the pictures of reality her mind, in its disbalance, constantly attempted to reconstruct, resulted in constant flows into the reactive portion of her brain, signals the reactive portion hadn't requested, signals it had no idea what to do with. As a result, it sent unwanted messages back into Karen's body that only served to increase the downward spiral of the cycle even further.

Block turned his attention back to her mind just in time to see an amazing phenomenon.

A section of her mind, the electrons straining out of position within the web of forces holding it together, all of a sudden came together, collapsed into one another, forming a tiny unit of matter distinct from her mind but still caught up in the web of forces holding her mind together.

As soon as the unit was formed, Block saw it sag, gravity attempting to move it toward the bottom of her mind.

He realized a group of electrons making up her mind had collapsed into each other, the force attracting them to one another overcoming the force holding them apart.

He realized, in collapsing into a unit larger than the individual electrons that made up her mind, the resulting unit became subject to the attractive force.

Its sagging in the web of force was in response to its becoming unitized and therefore a particle just like the particles making up the nuclei of atoms and just as subject to being pulled toward the center of the Earth

The unitized particles didn't leave the area of her brain altogether because they were still embedded in the web of forces holding her mind together.

As he was understanding this, he saw another group of electrons become unitized, and then still another, the resulting units still embedded in her mind but attempting to pull it down toward the center of the Earth.

He looked around attempting to discover the source of the increase and realized the exchange of flows between her mind and the reactive portion of her brain was increasing rapidly.

He tried to look out Karen's eyes but they were shut tight.

He scrambled to understand what was happening and then felt the sensation himself. Karen was about to reach orgasm and she was carrying him into it with her.

He looked back at Karen's mind and realized the rate of unitization was increasing with every increase in the flows from the reactive portion of her brain.

Worse, he realized he was being drawn into her mind. He didn't know how, but it felt like his mind was being attracted into her mind.

The result, he knew, would be catastrophic for him.

First, he'd be privy to all of the degraded pictures he'd only glimpsed so far, but more to the point, the electrons making up his own mind would be drawn into the process of unitization Karen's structure was undergoing.

She was about to destroy him.

He looked around for a way out. Glancing at her optic nerves, he found her eyes shut tight as her body began convulsing in the throws of her orgasm.

He looked back.

Karen's mind was rapidly collapsing, the units of matter popping up throughout the structure, each one being dragged down by the attractive force. Soon the units would dictate the position of her mind and it'd be torn out of her physical brain and pulled down, down, down toward the center of the Earth to be destroyed in the raging furnace making up its center.

If Block didn't get out of there, he was going with it.

The fear that possibility produced, however, was being drowned out by the rising excitement his own body was pouring into his brain.

It was almost worth it, as it . . .

Block heard his own voice screaming at the top of his lungs while watching Karen's mind, the essence that was Karen, break away from the physical structure of her brain and plunge at an accelerating rate downward, toward the back of her skull.

Block braced himself as he felt himself falling. He hadn't made it. He was going with her.

He focused on his own body, attempting to feel what position it was in. He wasn't sure, but it didn't feel like he was participating in Karen's orgasm.

He tried to picture himself. She'd pulled him down on top of her on the couch. The couch was off the floor. If he could find the right muscles, he could . . .

And he did, rolling off the couch with Karen hanging on, landing in a heap on the floor, moving instinctively to avoid damaging her frail body.

He opened his eyes to get his bearings.

She was limp, her head back, her eyes open, staring vacantly at no point in the distance.

Block shook her to see if there was anything there.

"Completely gone," he mumbled. "No one home."

He started to get to his feet, but her voice stopped him cold. At first it seemed just a senseless mummer, a mindless mumble.

He listened closely.

"One times one is one. One times two is two. One times three is three. One times four is . . ."