center. I was feeling a little twitchy and getting an exuberant erection. The musicians had come into the courtyard outside. They slowed the downbeat to one out of four and took the drone chord up a third. Koh led her three attendants into the sweathouse and strewed geranium and bay-tree leaves over the floor while the girls poured resined water over the hot stones. My attendants unplugged my jewelry, unwound all my stuff, and untied my leg, storing it all on a wicker mannequin. The four women crouched out of the steaming door, their clothes dripping, and I crouched in. My valet undressed and followed me. I sat and sweated for four hundred beats. My hairdresser undid the big football of female hair from the top of my head. It was hard to sit still. I looked down at my tattooed glans poking out of the foreskin like the head of a killer whale through an ice floe. Whoa, that’s really something, I thought. I guess it sounds like I’m bragging. But it was Chacal’s body. My valet scraped me down. Since this morning I’d already developed another coat of sweat-goo. But it was cleaner goo. Finally they moved me back out into the main room and stood me up, balancing me on my meat leg. Cool air whisked over me. Koh was standing next to the sleeping shelf, facing me and Flipper the Self-Willed Dick. My dresser rubbed male-manatee oil into me and dusted me with metallic-green beetle-shell flakes. I watched the maids peel off Koh’s last layer of fabric. Her body was proportioned differently from the western canon, maybe something like one of Maillol’s young nudes. Or of course you can see a bit of the feeling of it in Classic Maya statues, like there’s a figurine of a weaving woman from Jaina Island-which was a sort of Isle of the Dead off the Yucatan, like the San Michele in Venice-in the Griffin collection at the Princeton Art Museum that has that same boneless strength. Koh was a bit taller and more willowy than the average Maya, and it made me feel a little runtish. I’d thought it was because she had Teotihuacanob ancestors but now I guessed it might be related to her polydactylity thing, chromosomal trisomy 13 or whatever it was. She had two smaller vestigial nipples, each about four finger-widths below her regular ones, and two more little moles each three finger-widths below those, each set of three strung on a subtle hint of a seam like the lateral lines on a fish. The dark patch on the right side of her face continued down her neck and over her right clavicle, slanting left over her left breast, leaving her stomach and hips light, and then looped back around over her right thigh and slanted left again, leaving her right leg light to just above her knee and throwing her entire left leg into darkness. On her right side the three dark nipples popped out of the light ground. It was like she was a spiral- extruded soft ice cream cone imperfectly dipped in chocolate coating. I guess it sounds maybe grotesque but it was incredibly beautiful, with her perfect wide face and perfectly rounded limbs. Her genitals appeared to be normal, although of course they were hairless like most Maya’s, with chocolate-dark labia peering out of her light pubis. Her dressers started oiling her with a mixture presumably from a female manatee.
The servants weren’t eyeballing us in the face, of course, but they were watching our every move to see whether we needed anything. Still, we were both so used to them and so dismissive of them as people that there was still a certain sense of privacy in the small room even though there were eleven people in it. Actually, On The Left was the only one here who made me feel a little uncomfortable. But he hadn’t moved from his post in front of the doorway and wasn’t going to. My flute player eased into a little rambling Lester Youngish solo theme I’d sort of written to go along with the sort of sad march they were playing outside, nothing that would make it sound like jazz or anything, but still a super novelty. I could see a little bit of surprise and maybe interest behind Koh’s blankness. Probably more about the music than about me.
Koh let them dust her. She moved to the sleeping shelf. She had a sort of geisha grace, but the style was less twitchy, without that white-silk stiffness. There was more flow, more gravity, I guess less yang and more yin. I’d only rarely seen any twenty-first-century Indians moving that way, like my mother, a little bit, when she was sewing. Maybe it was a little like Javanese ballet movement, but without the sort of apologetic gestures. But really, it’s silly to compare it to anything else, it was its own thing. Come here, my little Frigid Queen, I thought. Koh’s singer started improvising a listlike erotic prayer to my Mayaland swing theme. On The Left shifted as though he was about to say something, but didn’t. His deal was just to sit here and witness for both families that we didn’t pull any last-minute substitutions or anything. With royal marriages everyone really wanted to make sure of what they were getting.
They lifted me onto the shelf. Koh’s dresser fanned her. My dresser fanned me. Koh kneed over to me. I balanced myself while my valet held my knee stump. Her maid took my bursting penis and guided it clinico- choreographically into Koh. The instant I was enveloped by that ridged cylindrical tongue, what self-control I had over whatever aphrodisiac had been in that damn tamale just evaporated. My hips jerked back and forth involuntarily and I was basically just fucking away, which I guess is at least a good way to break the ice. Koh reciprocated. There was a lot of pressure and speed down there but I was still surprised that Koh had an orgasm almost immediately. She stifled it a bit but there wasn’t any doubt. It was like a teenager’s orgasm. First sex all over again. Koh had had plenty of sexy fun with her maids and women-in-waiting or whatever in the Star Rattler Society, but not with any men. So I guess maybe it was the novelty. Although it wasn’t a whole Buster Hymen thing. Virginity wasn’t such a big deal at this level, somebody as major as she was didn’t have to prove anything.
There was definitely something drive-in-movieish about it for me, though. Like I guess if you’re a guy, especially, and if you grew up dealing with primitive, superstitious peoples, like say the middle class in the U.S. in the 1970s, you might have been making out with someone and for whatever reason this person didn’t want to slide for home. So you staggered back home or out to the car or whatever and started masturbating and your testicles were so swollen like two Jiffy Pop bags, pebbles of cum overflowing and backing all the way up into your ductus deferens, so that it actually took minutes of near-pain to get into org-mode, and then when you got over the hump you just exploded in a total agony that submerged any more delicate pleasure sensations you might have gotten but which knocked you into such a long slide of incredible release-as you lay aching and groaning in this rain of semen- that you still might give quite a bit to reexperience that intensity. So, yeah, anyway, this was like that. When I could hear again, On The Left was giving the scene his little “well done” blessing. He left. The servants poured balche over the four pots of embers in the corners of the room and left, too, tying the door behind them. We had about nineteen minutes, which we had to spend together to keep our putative child from being polluted by Koh’s looking at any other person. I wondered whether I really would get her pregnant. It was an odd idea for me. Except if I had a kid with Koh it wouldn’t take after me anyway. It would be like Chacal. And of course, even if Koh and I didn’t conceive, she’d either have a kid with someone else or just commission one secretly and pretend it was hers.
Koh sort of slid out from under me and I sank prone on the olingo-skin cushions and looked at her. We were more or less in bed together and more or less alone in the twilight steam.
She started giggling and tied my hair back out of my face. As a rule, I can’t say the Maya were very cuddly, but there was definitely affection there. Although she didn’t seem into oral stuff. We messed around a little more and I was trying to get her to come again when she said she appreciated how I had a lot of different ideas but she thought she still basically preferred sex with women. She lay back and played with my penis, pulling the foreskin over it and then pushing it back. She said it reminded her of the ovipositor of one of her wasps because of the way it was striped. I bent down and tried kissing her again but it just wasn’t one of her tropes of demonstrating affection. Mouths around here were more for biting and chewing and getting yours near someone was like an attack. I said it was like when she’d put the drugs into my mouth seventy-four suns ago, but she still wasn’t into it. Cuddling was different too. I’d see something as a sexual preliminary and she would see it as juvenilizing. Like the way some people like baby talk and some people can’t stand it. I stroked her, though, from one nipple down to the next and back up the other side, over and over and as lightly as possible so that I was really just gliding over her almost nonexistent body hair, and she did like that. She sat up and started checking out my stump. I blew air over her to cool her.
I’d been thinking for a while about maybe getting Koh to come back with me. Back to my old overripe turn- of-the-century hood. I imagined myself bringing her around to meet the folks. Hey, dudes, this is my main squeeze, the Dragon Princess.
I asked her.
She laughed in a you-idiot way. She had dynasties to found and enemies to plunder and everything. Despite her natural curiosity she wasn’t even remotely intrigued by the notion of coming to Florida like an e-mail-order bride and trading in her growing rack of shrunken heads for Prada suits and publicity agents and dinners at the Delano. She’d seen a bit of the future and had decided it wasn’t much.
Which you couldn’t argue with, I thought. I’d been getting all bittersweet and misty and now I was starting to chuckle a bit myself. Watch the mood swings, I thought. Anyway, she was right. Anyway, even if I did get her in my casket with me I didn’t really know if it was even possible to upload her consciousness or whatever on the other end. You should have asked about that, you dwurk, I thought. And anyway, who was I going to get for a donor?
