Off Limits: Tales of Alien Sex

Ursus Triad, Later KATHE KOJA AND BARRY N. MALZBERG

NOW THE DOOR, THE knob on the door, the small sliver of light dense, concentrated, aiming from the room behind: where the bears nested. The splinters of the floor, the brutal surfaces upon which she had rolled, scrambled, been pawed and lumbered over, half-suffocated between fur and ragged blanket and fear of the splinters, pointed always but always somehow missing puncture: of her eyes, the worn but tender skin beneath; her suffering lips. Once her perspective had been larger, once—she thought, or believed she had thought—she had seen the house entire, light everywhere: the gleam of glass and porcelain, the glimpse of cages through transparent walls, but that must have been a long time ago or perhaps some trick of perspective, some dull accident of sensibility, for now she could see only that door, that knob, the light, the floor from the position to which she had sunk: the dainty ordnance of paws, the heavy intake of the bears’ breath somehow framing conditions without providing illumination. The cages had come open some time ago, were never closed now; the keeper—if there had been a keeper, a jailer, some master who had schooled them (and if so for what extravagant enjoyment, who under God’s sun could train animals to purposes like these?)—now fled, the house the bears’ alone, she the intruder, she the peeping, curious, external force crushed now to this sullen, sunken wood and the creaking sound of their inhalations as one by one, solemnly, they played with her: over and over, opening her up like a wound, their paws and fur the ancient sutures drawn by that wound, bleached and stanched and then somehow magnified by their withdrawal as one by one, each by each they left her on the floor: to gather her own breath and breathing wounds together before another one returned to rend her now anew.

Somewhere through all of this she must have eaten, drunk, found a way to eliminate; slid into coma and emerged; there must have been some kind of passage in which the common tasks of consciousness were conducted but she knew—and it was all that she knew—that she had no knowledge of those times, could remember it as little as her initial swim in the womb: it was literally some other life because now everything was the bears, the tumbling conjoinment, the snaffle from their muzzles and the cascading, indifferent light which at odd angles swooped over, swooped through her; the dazed and cavernous surfaces of her sensibility sometimes roused briefly by that light, only to plunge again in the tumble and harsh necessity of their breath. She had become emptiness, and they filled her again and again.

Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms: her names for them, her three assailants, masters and dumb slaves as she herself was a slave. Dumb and sullen, beneath or beyond language, but she had to try to assign some meaning to the situation, had given them names to suit what she took to be their personalities in that time before this time when she must have come here, must have had reasons—what were they?—to enter this strange and damaged cloister, this space beyond redemption, to emerge as if from death or fever into the circling stare of the bears: eyes dull and compliant, slow struggle of limbs as they balanced on hind legs, ready to begin the dance anew; and she their silent partner, pink and breathing on the wood.

There was no real communication amongst them; they seemed to her to work within circumscription, intersecting only to bump as one left, another came to snort and root around her stricken body. She had known from the first that appeals, cries, struggles, resistance of any kind would only have attenuated her situation; the animals were beyond command, beyond whatever powers of humanity she had then been still able to summon and so: the splinters: the fur: the paws and the breathy stink. Her agony. Their arabesques. Submitting to them, over and over, submitting to Bach now, the largest of them and the most regular, the most rhythmic, the most metronomic: Bach because this B seemed to believe in order, in a kind of regulation of movement which rattled and thrust in clearly identifiable rhythms, rhythms as solid and inescapable as Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, as the distorted perspective of this floor, this light, this distance inside and out.

Now Bach yawed and steamed against her, the smell of the beast in her head, on her lips like some dry unguent, his huge body seeking, seeking, humped and breathing, gigue and largo and then subsiding, guiding himself away from her, the turgid genitals of the metronomic bear refracted in the shadows, those shadows already diminishing as Bach moved slowly from her in an odd, abbreviated limp, humping his way into the darkness. The shadows seemed lifeless even in motion, even as she seemed lifeless there on the wood of the floor.

In this silence, in this momentary partition, she thought she might be spared for a while, that Bach had now had his ceremonial fill and that Beethoven and Brahms were in the upper room, casting circles of darkness, silent beyond bearish grunts and small explosions of fathomless feeling, but even as she turned in this moment’s relief, moved to gather the ragged blankets, to press that sleeve of insubstantial protection against herself, she felt them eased from her grasp and then Brahms, a huge, sordid mass was settling himself against her. Brahms: the autumnal bear, the bear of sneezes and sighs and small, absent groans, passion expended, fallen desire and she, too, groaned with the futility, the hopelessness of the bear’s attributed despair as on her stomach he cast circles with a paw, then clumsy in wintry desire straddled her at last. Sinking slightly beneath the bear, resigned to assist as much as possible; unlike the others Brahms seemed to her to appreciate some kind of gesture, to have a sense of her presence and collaboration whereas the others, so locked into their own spasms and black rhythms, gave no sense of recognition or response at all. Snorts, sighs, the press of fur against her as she raised her hands, grasped the bear to draw him to a kind of crooning concentration as deep underneath the fur the small shudders, foreshadowed expenditure and then the bear’s yelp, a human sound, a high, girlish shriek as he rolled away from her to lie, streaked by light, a wheezing heap: damp fur, sweat, soot, and for her again that dim shudder within her thighs, sensibility risen and draining from her just as she had drained from this house that which she had found before her.

She must have found something before her, must have been outside this house at one time, brought into it by accident of desire or curiosity now denied recollection: there was a past beyond and before this house, that smell, those shudders creeping like insects up and down her helpless legs, thighs, spread and spraddled, and she would have wept, great groaning tears against the wood, wood pressed to her lips, splinters like the wafer of God himself between her teeth, but here there was if not godlessness then the orbit of no salvation, here was the constellation, the great cross of heat, sour stink, black upon black upon fur upon flesh; nothing and everything, here in this room. Reeking, aseptic cavern, drawn and enthralled and diminished like the vessel that drains but is not emptied, there must have been something prior to this but it was closed to her now, closed forever like the doors of nascence, slammed like the gates of death on the yearning faces of the living: there is no going forward nor back, there is nothing. This is what is: this floor, these animals, the faint metallic scent of her own fluid, her body pinned in rags and speckled with old blood; and the door; and the light.

Brahms sobbed in a corner, again she reached for the blankets but the great sounds of imminence flooded the room and she knew before the collision that Beethoven,, the most jolting and demoniac of the three, had come to seek in her his own fulfillment; Beethoven of the sudden, shuddering strokes, the silences, the storms, the great uneven swings of the body: the one she feared most in those broken unleashings of spine and heat grabbing her, grabbing her, the alternating cycles of some unknowable need seizing the hammer and tongs of the bear’s body as it rammed against her and this, now, was the present, the animal against her, great in its need but curiously empty and tentative for all that; at the core the same uncertainty and brokenheartedness of Brahms but the shell was hard, hard, and she felt Beethoven pass through, over, above her like a storm, his hoarse grunts of emission, and she thought, eyes closed, no more, no more as she sank beneath fur, paws, breath, spasm, eaves, and darkness of the house collapsing around her and all around the darkening trot of the beasts as at some time later or perhaps this was earlier—smashed chronology, chronology smashed—they gathered to confer.

It was the feast she remembered, if memory gave her any gifts at all: some telescoping of circumstance found her seated high in the room, a table of fruits and desserts before her, all of the spices and jellied treats and cakes smeared lascivious with icing spread on a table the size of an altar, a table larger than any she had ever seen and she leaned toward that feast, thinking I want this, the food enormous in her hand, her hand spreading to encompass the feast entire: and in the moment before enjoyment, before even its possibility she heard them: there at the far side of the room, their small, luminescent eyes fixed upon her, the shaggy blackness of their fur not harbinger but frankest truth: and the seizure of breath, the cakes toppled, the fruit rolling and smashing as she rolled and smashed, pulped and tore, juices everywhere as in that new posture of dreadful and fixed attention they came, one by one, upon her, for the first of an endlessness of times.

Reaching for Brahms’ tail as he rooted and muttered around her, lifting herself to some less strenuous accommodation, she felt that she in some way was sinking toward some kind of new, ursine splendor, had somehow—by pain, by terror, by the pink pity of her ravaged limbs—dissolved the barrier between herself and the beast atop her. Picking and poking at the secret heart of the great animal she found herself served as well as serving, become more than sheer receptacle: it was a kind of way out, perhaps: it was the method of escape that sinks one more fully into the pit, and as the bear commenced its familiar, groaning adumbration of expenditure she shouted something, hoarse and guttural, caw like the bark of an animal, something before language which was itself language and gripping that fur tried to come up with Brahms even in the bear’s descent: and the long, pivoting drop which in its suspension and calamitous nature seemed in some way to mimic her confused ideas of escape, to be escape: go farther in: become: belong. Sunk into slivers, vaulted into light, she felt herself as one with Brahms even as the seizure squirted to the expected silence and the bear shambled away as if she did not exist at all.

In the rapid metronomic shudderings of Bach, she now found—earlier or later, but now—that some deepened surge of her own entrails, her own wordless wants was smoothed, engaged to rhythmic response by the motions of the bear and so it was no surprise at all when, yielding in sudden spasm, Bach broke from that complex rhythm and, balancing perilously on one paw, began a fragmented, syncopated movement which she first accommodated and then seemed to pass through, as light passes through a window, as semen passes through the tubing flesh and in that passing she ascended, risen as Bach, like Brahms, fell to snuffling and somehow troubled silence beside her, before himself rising to shamble away in unaccustomed ursine muttering.

And now she, beyond language but not gesture, beckoned from the floor to Beethoven, beckoned in the light: Come on, she said to the beast, come on then, you too and again the clasp, the enclosure, the idea bursting in her mind: becoming one with them, grunting and heaving as Beethoven grunted and heaved, her own fur rising in small shreds and hackles as she rotated her knees, her long scarred open legs against the spiteful silence of the bear against her, the gigantic hammer of the bear against her, and this time she took it without a cry, without sound at all until Beethoven’s own grunt of sudden and arrhythmic expenditure from which he fell as the others had fallen, shambled as they had shambled, sat now as they sat: staring at her, clumps of soot and sweat, muzzles uplifted as if to scent on the air the smell of her change and she watched them back, watched those brooding and immobile shapes as if she were in control of this situation, which in no real sense could ever be the case. She had abdicated all control in her greed for the feast: very well. Let greed be her master, then; let escape be entrance; let in be furthest in of all.

She had entered in curiosity and hunger, bedazzled by that unexpected house in the shattered woods, untroubled by the warnings of those with whom she had traveled before she had embarked, alone, on this more rigorous journey; and in what measure had they cared, to allow her the journey at all? And so the door, the house, the feast on the table one soaring poem of satiation: this: here: take: eat: and reaching beyond the sweetmeats, reaching toward some gorging fulmination which would have been, she knew, as close to ecstasy as she would ever come in the lonely and desperate life which was all that had been granted her, in that reach and grasp she had heard only the marveling thunder of her heart, that aching engine of greed in the presence of fulfillment: but she had not gone far enough, it seemed, had wanted but not fully, had reached but not taken, grasped, eaten, become: had only raised her eyes to see their eyes, little and bright, empty and full, to hear above the bewildered crooning of her own empty breath their breath murmurous, the sour and tangible entry into the world of the door, the floor, the light, the slivers, the odd varying rhythms of the beasts. You wanted to be filled? their postures asked her as they came upon her. Then be filled. To bursting.

But that was the secret, was it not? after all? The floor, yes, the slivers and the pains, yes, but yes, too, her own new knowledge, sieved from degradation, obtained from going all the way in: take the bears, receive them, be a bear, the Queen of the Bears, the queen of the magic forest and the empty house, daughter of the night born to gambol in stricken and ecstatic pleasure with those three refracted selves restored to her through pain: the autumn, the pedant, and the hammer, all three dense with need, her own need, her own greed as she raised herself on her elbows, there on the floor, there at the feast, and she bared her stained and filthy teeth to say Come: come to me now, and as if in their first true moment of attention came the hawking groans, the motions of the bears: turning, first toward one another, then to form a circle, a unit, one lumbering and dreadful mass as all three, as one, advanced upon her: to receive her benediction: to pour and fill and to become.