The Vorrh

ourselves.’
    Ishmael wanted to know more about pleasure and pressed Luluwa for a description. She said there were no words to explain it. ‘Your kindred have a connection between their breeding and their sweetness, a swelling of both that works like the magnets in Lesson 28. Their conception also follows the same construct.’
    He wanted more.
    ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It is time to show you. You are like the animals that we have seen – you must place your tube inside the pouch of the female to breed. The seeds then pass to fertilise the egg. This you know. But what you will learn is that its action is layered with pleasure.’
    Ishmael understood her words, but not their consequence.
    ‘When you release your seed,’ she said, ‘there is a great song of warmth.’
    He stared and spun inwardly. She coiled down closer to him. Her hard, gleaming hand stroked his thigh. The firmness of her shell drew an erection.
    ‘I will show you that I have been fashioned like your kind to explain these marvels to you. These lessons of humans have been clearly taught to me alone, for you.’
    She showed him a latch in the crease between her legs, normally hidden by its underside position. She asked him to move it and, with chattering fingers, he felt the mechanism of this secret thing. After a while she joined in, her nimble fingers sliding its notch down the entire length of her division, leaving the long cleft open.
    ‘Touch inside,’ she said.
    It was warm and soft. He looked closer, some of his hand now within her, fingers moving the folded layers.
    ‘Kelp,’ he said. ‘It’s made of kelp.’ Kelp had been in Lesson 17. Jars from the sea.
    If she could have smiled, she would have. Instead, she stroked his head and said, ‘No, but very like it. It’s a material you have not yet seen.’ She pushed the notched bulb in a little further and moisture flooded his touch.
    ‘You leak like me,’ he said. ‘Like me and the animals. You never did before.’
    ‘This is not the same. This is not the passing of waste fluid, but a special oil to let you move inside me without friction or hurt.’
    She guided him towards her, positioning her prone body, and with the same attentive concentration that she showed when peeling the animals apart, she drew him into her. An inner clasping made Ishmael flinch, but she rectified it with the pressure of her left hand in the small of his back and a series of whistling clicks that he knew were declarations of satisfaction, the same sounds she made when he understood her other lessons. A growing wave of succulent achievement overcame him, and he began to push deeper inside her. His hands gripped the hard perfection of her curved hips, making the contrast of her hot interior a wonderful benefaction.
    This was different from all the other things she had shown him. The understanding was in his whole body, churning with sugars that gave him a direct power he had never dreamt of before. He tasted might and dominance and the impossible joy of retreat as she fed his anxious childhood into the past. They rocked together while he cried, sobbing pleasure, locked in her arms, sensation boomeranging sensation with continual vigour. Suddenly she began to shake, every joint shuddering, her voice impaling itself on an imprecision of sound. This had never happened before, and she had no understanding of its purpose or meaning. Only Ishmael knew that one of her inner ventricles had been flushed directly to the shunt mechanism of her sleep and recharging mode, had switched into total response as he reverberated against her, causing her to flick in and out of sleep in a fast stutter of consciousness and oblivion, producing something like pleasure constructed of surprise in her old, servile body of juice and stringency. As long as the rule regarding her Kin was in place, she would never be able to comprehend her reaction. The mystery would be for Ishmael alone to understand.
    * * *

    It had been the angels that had caused the damage. The priest had spoken to the girl about them for a long time, on one occasion for more than an hour. He explained how they were not gods themselves, like the myriad clans of deities who had previously infested their beliefs, but winged servants who could interact between God and man. The mistake had come when he’d opened the pages of
Paradise Lost
, a large edition with Gustave Doré’s magnificent illustrations.
    He had shown her the angels; sometimes she saw the demons too.