Love in Backspace
If you can see light from a distant star, it’s because you and the star are connected in backspace. Everything is. Backspace is pure connectivity. If you artificially enter it—frontspace structures aren’t supposed to be there at all—it starts working on the connectivities of the brain, pretty much the same way neurons fire faster. As a result you get intensified mood.
With me that mood is always the same: terror. The most utter, delicious terror you could ever imagine, terror so strong it becomes sexual. The adrenaline goes pling and my dick springs up like a striking cobra. That’s why I’m so good, that’s why I’m the best. Conscious of where I am, conscious of how hazardous it is, knowing I might not get out, concentrates my mind like a razor’s edge. Only then, only then, do I really feel that I’m alive. After that, the rest of the time—all the time in frontspace—is like being half dead. So my attention was on it, was sharp and really on it, impelled by an endless surge of fear. I brought the power up on the motor as the current hit a flurry of rapids, the flow breaking up and twisting like a river pouring through a bed strewn with boulders. My bum was humming with the effort of tricking the raft through.
Behind me I could hear my passenger. He was coming in for mood enhancement too, of course—I wonder if he knew about that—but with him it had caused his fright to evaporate. Instead he was going mushy. He chortled, chuckled, cooed. We came through the canyon maze and into a region more like an expanse of immense ocean swells but spread in three dimensions, looking maybe like one of those geometry graphic displays, with endless veils and curved surfaces you could sort of skate over, and he was going, ‘Coo, isn’t it pretty? Oooohh, it’s beautiful.’
Then he got weepy and soon was spouting about why he wanted to get to Elivira so quickly. Was he running for his life? Was there some compelling moral duty that demanded his immediate presence? Did a gigantic business deal hang on his arrival? Naw, it was some dreck about his boyfriend, who had left him and was on his way to Elivira on a midspace liner. I was checking the navigator, trying to get our bearings, but even so I couldn’t fail to catch some of it.
‘He’s not doing this to me,’ he blubbered. ‘I’m going to be there when he docks. I’ll have rented a nice condo for us and everything will be ready. I’ll fill it with antiques—he likes antiques, especially twenty-first century Earth. I’ll get some tubular aluminium kitchen chairs with floral plastic seat covers. And a genuine double-glazed windows from an English council housing estate! There’s a dealer on Elivira guarantees they date no later then 2050! They cost the universe, of course, but it will be worth it. Oh, I’m so full of love!’
Suddenly he was kissing the nape of my neck, and that savage, professional fear transmuted itself—as happens—to unconstrained lust, and I lost all my caution. He was a lovely feller, really.
I turned round to give him a lingering look from beneath my long artificial eyelashes.
‘You wanna fu-u-u-ck?’
Of course he did. So there was I, zooming on one of those big swells with an idiot grin of delight all over my face, eyes lit up like searchlights, twirling the joysticks and looking for a sandbank.
Sandbanks are what we call them. Anomalous spots of solidity—near-solidity, rather—where backspace’s interminable motion congeals into stable—near-stable, rather—islands. You can dismount and walk around on one.
Just what features they correspond to in the front world is unknown. In truth it hasn’t been possible to map backspace to frontspace at all. For one thing there are too few points of reference. For some reason I don’t properly understand, phase transition can only be accomplished from frontspace. There has to be a phase pusher there both to punch you through, and to let you phase back again. Consequently phase ports can only be set up in places that initially have been reached the slow way, by frontspace ships travelling only a few times the velocity of light. Those ports are like beacons, sending out mid and backspace signals that your navigator picks up to guide you to your destination. Without that you’re lost in chaos, because every time you phase through, even from the same port, the landscape is totally different. Backspace is never the same twice, and is without landmarks. The engineers can’t even say if distances and sizes relate in any way. That maze of canyons we went through—maybe it’s holding the galaxy together; or maybe it’s just a grain of salt. It’s possible our half hour’s journey would be spent traversing the equivalent of one millimetre, and we’d cover the rest of the thirty-two light-years to Elivira in the final microsecond. Why try to make sense of it?
Before too long I’d found what I was looking for, a golden mound tapering indistinctly off for an indefinite distance all around. I drifted the raft on to it, powered off, then leaned back to unstrap my passenger. The bubble relaxed, spreading out as I stepped on to the sandbank so as to give us room to move around. The stuff of the bank yielded under my feet like the softest foam rubber. Offering my hand, I helped him courteously down.
‘What is this place?’ he wondered.
‘Somewhere to have fun.’
Is there a link between sexual fever and cosmic awareness? Us backriders think so. But then we’ve got something that doesn’t happen in the front world, where the erotic and the awesome don’t seem capable of occupying the mind at one and the same time. It’s that revamped brain connectivity again. Things that are divorced in frontspace here get wired together. Like, one thing that is a lure for me again and again is the sensation of vastness. In the front world that’s something you get only fleetingly. You see something really big and you think Yow-Wow, but you can’t sustain the impression and a minute later it’s gone, your personal world is very small; in backspace, on the other hand, the synapses are constantly tickled so the sense of immensity is there all the time. You can see what a light year is really like. If there were any planetary systems you would be able to see the distances between the planets and satellites, how far away the Sun was. So my customer was mooning up at the sandbank’s sky, at all those stupendous traceries and veils and curves, seeing infinity with the naked eyeball, and it was blowing his mind while I was fiddling with his clothing. He had said his boyfriend liked antique stuff, but he must have as well, because his costume was straight out of museum. Buttons and bows. Buttons everywhere. His trousers were held up by a kind of double strap thing that went over his shoulders and buttoned on to the waistband by little leather thongs. I unbuttoned those. There was also a row of buttons down the front of his crotch, hidden behind a flap! It was nice hot feeling sneaking my fingers down those buttons one by one, then teasing open the vent. I massaged his podgy belly. I unbuttoned his waistcoat and pushed up his shirt to nuzzle his hairy chest, snuffing up the smell of him while I fondled his cock and balls. He was so preoccupied with the overhead vision that is was some time before the old reflex got his blood engorging his member, but when it did I saw his eyes sparkle. I was breathing heavily, in urgent gasps. We wrestled and tussled for a bit as I pulled down his trousers and undergarment, then before you knew it I was beginning to snuggle my knob into that dual purpose orifice, already well lubricated, while continuing to pump his cock with my right hand, and he was going ‘_Oooohh_, give me some time.’
