Cythera – Richard Calder

Then the pogrom begins. It replicates, targets the hypothalamus, and creates a hormonal imbalance, causing impotence in the male. In, say, three generations, your gene pool won’t fill a petri dish.’ And it was then that those same elements of irony, contempt and desire that I had earlier seen at war in his face, had reappeared to continue their struggle.

He had bent down to kiss me. Not merely the will to survive, not merely the bitterness of a jilted heart, but lust, thick and muddy, had prompted me to draw back my lips and bite deep, deep, my cruel dental work injecting customized protozoa, my mouth filling with blood and his scream.

He jerked backwards, as if shot by a high-powered rifle, and fell trembling and shivering by my side. Already, he had passed from a mild sweat to chronic dehydration. His mad, beautiful eyes—delirious with the last stages of malarial fever—had regarded me with puzzlement. ‘That, darling,’ I said, ‘is why they call me Mosquito.’ With a great effort I managed to sit up so that I was able to cradle his head in my arms.

His blood was thickening, turning his brain into a stew. He was so beautiful. One of the most beautiful men I had ever known. A fatal beauty. ‘Didn’t you even like me,’ I said, ‘a little?’ His face joined that of the automata, the faces of all the other catastrophes in my life.

They swirled, like soiled clothes in a washing machine, and then fell, discharged, beneath my feet, lost to the depths, a forlorn collection of missing socks. Above, I sensed air and sunshine. I struggled to open my eyes. ‘He’s conscious. I can tell he is.’ I forced my eyelids to fractionally unfurl. The two leaders of The Army of Revolutionary Flesh looked at each other; the doppelgänger of my murdered obsession—a double in flesh, but not, I hoped, in spirit—conceding that he had been mistaken. He was English, of course.

He’d have had to have been English.

CYTHERA. Copyright © 1998 by Richard Calder. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010. Jacket design by David Rotstein & Eugene Kuo Jacket Illustration by Brian Romero ISBN 0-312-18074-8 First published in Great Britain by Orbit, a division of Little, Brown and Company (UK) First U.S.

Edition: May 1998 OceanofPDF.com For Nik OceanofPDF.com ‘To do what is forbidden always has its charms, because we have an indistinct apprehension of something arbitrary and tyrannical in the prohibition.’ William Godwin, Caleb Williams OceanofPDF.com PART ONE THE EMBARKATION OceanofPDF.com R CHAPTER ONE ising from a shelf of permanent ice—a glass ocean surrounded by dawn-drenched glaciers—the city began to displace the horizon like a couchant sphinx readying itself to spring.

The neon-beaded highway snaked in and out of the Bentley’s lights, the prismatic sheen of the road inducing a slurry of tiredness in my eyes, the desolation of McMurdo Sound viewed as if through lashes sodden with gasoline. Dahlia leaned across the upholstery, swung a thigh over my own and put the Bentley into fourth, jarred, the glove compartment flapped open, spilling soiled underwear, make-up, a .22 auto, hypodermic, speculum and food-ration cards. Tall buildings rushed towards us—folds, waves and twists, the fractured planes and multiple trajectories of cosmogenic architecture that clung like monstrous, rococo vegetation to the more familiar overtures of the International Style—and then we were under the sphinx’s crystalline paws, thundering through the abandoned ruins of the city limits.

The car’s heaters were insolent; they were downright wanton; the air seemed alive, febrile with the contrapuntal buzzing of flies. Dahlia, unconsoled, pressed herself against me, greedy for the other-earthly warmth which the rising sun would soon rescind. I felt the gelid deliciousness of a breast through her furs. My loins hardened. Had fifteen years in His Majesty’s secure institutions proved sanative?

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

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• Unique ID: dbd4cb7f0ff844e6
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• Title: –
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• ISBN: 0312180748
• Pages: 223
• Language: English (en)

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• Estimated Reading Time: 412.16 minutes
• Total Words: 82,432
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