Universe 7 - [Anthology] Read online

  “The seven eyes of the Lamb,” she countered.

  “The Seven Spirits of God, another name for the Seven Angels, I think.”

  “All right. The seven sacraments.”

  “Does that include exorcism?” he wanted to know.

  “No, but it does include order, which ought to please your mathematical mind.”

  “Thanks. The Seven Gifts of the Holy Ghost. Say, I know tongues, prophecy, vision, and dreams, but what are the other three?”

  “Those are from Acts two—an interesting notion. But try Isaiah eleven—wisdom, understanding, counsel, might, knowledge, fear of the Lord, and righteousness.”

  Math said, “Whew, that’s quite a load.”

  “Yes. On with the Game! To the death! The seven steps going up to Ezekiel’s gate. Zeek forty twenty-six.”

  “Let’s change religions,” he said, beginning to feel snowed under by Christendom and the Bible. “The seven Japanese gods of luck.”

  “Or happiness. The seven major gods of Hinduism: Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, Varuna, Indra, Agni, and Surya. Rank male chauvinism! They didn’t even include Lakshmi, the goddess of luck.”

  Math said sweetly, “The Seven Mothers, meaning the seven wives of the Hindu gods.”

  “Chauvinism, I said! Wives indeed! Seven Daughters of the Theater, a book by Edward Wagenknecht.”

  “The seven ages of man,” Math announced, assuming a Shakespearean attitude. “At first the infant, mewling and puking—”

  “And then the whining schoolboy—”

  “And then the lover,” he cut in, in turn, “sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad made to his mistress’ eyebrow.”

  “Have you ever sighed like furnace, Matthew?”

  “No, but…” And raising a finger for silence, he scowled in thought.

  “What are you staring at?” she asked.

  “Your left eyebrow. Now listen…

  “Slimmest crescent of delight,

  Why set so dark in sky so light?

  My mistress’ brow is whitest far;

  Her eyebrow—the black evening star!”

  “But it’s not woeful,” she objected. “Besides, how can the moon be a star?”

  “As easily as it can be a planet—your ancients, madam. In any case, I invoke poetic license.”

  “But my eyebrow bends the wrong way for setting,” she persisted. “Its ends point at the earth instead of skyward.”

  “Not if you were standing on your head, madam,” he countered.

  “But then my skirt would set too, showing my stockings. Shocking. Sir, I refuse! The Seven Sisters, meaning the Pleiades, those little stars.”

  Matthew’s eyes lit up. He grinned excitedly. “Before I give you my next seven I want to show you yours,” he told her, standing up.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ll show you. Follow me,” he said mysteriously and led her into his bedroom.

  While she was ooh-ahing at the strangely glimmering black floor, walls, and ceiling, the huge white-fleeced bed, the scattered ivories which included the five regular solids of Pythagoras, the jet bedside lamps with their shades that were dodecahedrons of silver-joined pentagons of translucent ivory—and all the other outward signs of the U.S. Government’s coddling of Matthew—he moved toward the lamps and switched them off, so the only light was that which had followed them into the bedroom.

  Then he touched another switch and with the faintest whir and rustling the ceiling slowly parted like the Red Sea and moved aside, showing the desert night crusted with stars. The Coexistence Complex really catered to their mathematicians, and when Matthew had somewhat diffidently (for him) mentioned his fancy, they had seen no difficulty in removing the entire ceiling of his bedroom and the section of flat roof above and replacing them with a slightly domed plate-glass skylight, and masking it below with an opaque fabric matching the walls, which would move out of the way sidewise and gather in little folds at the urging of an electric motor.

  Severeign caught her breath.

  “Stars of the winter sky,” Matthew said with a sweep of his arm and then began to point. “Orion. Taurus the bull with his red-eye Aldebaran. And, almost overhead, your Pleiades, madam. While there to the north is my reply. The Big Dipper, madam, also called the Seven Sisters.”

  Their faces were pale in the splendid starlight and the glow seeping from the room they’d left. They were standing close. Severeign did not speak at once. Instead she lifted her hand, forefinger and middle finger spread and extended, slowly toward his eyes. He involuntarily closed them. He heard her say, “The seven senses. Sight. And hearing.” He felt the side of her hand lightly brush his neck. “Touch. No, keep your eyes closed.” She laid the back of her hand against his lips. He inhaled with a little gasp. “Smell,” came her voice. “That’s myrrh, sir.” His lips surprised him by opening and kissing her wrist. “And now you’ve added taste too, sir. Myrrh is bitter.” It was true.

  “But that’s all the senses,” he managed to say, “and you said seven. In common usage there are only five.”

  “Yes, that’s what Aristotle said,” she answered dryly. She pressed her warm palm against the curve of his jaw. “But there’s heat too.” He grasped her wrist and brought it down. She pulled her hand to free it and he automatically gripped it more tightly for a moment before letting go.

  “And kinesthesia,” she said. “You felt it in your muscles then. That makes seven.”

  He opened his eyes. Her face was close to his. He said, “Seventh heaven. No, that’s an ordinal—”

  “It will do, sir,” she said. She knelt at his feet and looked up. In the desert starlight her face was solemn as a child’s. “For my next seven I must remove your handsome Turkish slippers,” she apologized.

  He nodded, feeling lost in a dream, and lifted first one foot, then the other, as she did it.

  As she rose, her hands went to his gold-worked black dressing gown. “And this too, sir,” she said softly. “Close your eyes once more.”

  He obeyed, feeling still more dream-lost. He heard the slithering hrush of his robe dropping to the floor, he felt the buttons of his handsome red silk pajama tops loosened one by one from the top down, as her little fingers worked busily, and then the drawstring of the bottoms loosened.

  He felt his ears lightly touched in their centers. She breathed, “The seven natural orifices of the male body, sir.” The fingers touched his nostrils, brushed his mouth. “That’s five, sir.” Next he was briefly touched where only he had ever touched himself before. There was an electric tingling, like last night’s kiss. The universe seemed to poise around him. Finally he was touched just as briefly where he’d only been touched by his doctor. His universe grew.

  He opened his eyes. Her face was still child-grave. The light shining past him from the front room was enough to show the green of her skirt, the salmon of her blouse, the ivory of her skin dancing with starlight. He felt electricity running all over his body. He swallowed with difficulty, then said harshly, “For my next seven, madam, you must undress.”

  There was a pause. Then, “Myself?” she asked. “You didn’t have to.” She closed her eyes and blushed, first delicately under her eyes, along her cheekbones, then richly over her whole face, down to the salmon ruffles around her neck. His hands shook badly as they moved out toward the coral buttons, but by the time he had undone the third, his strong fingers were working with their customary deftness. The jade buttons of her skirt yielded as readily. Matthew, who knew from his long studious perusals of magazine advertisements that all girls wore pantyhose, was amazed and then intrigued that she had separate stockings and a garter belt. He noted for future reference in the Game that that made seven separate articles of clothing, if you counted shoes. With some difficulty he recalled his main purpose in all this. His hands edged under her long black curving hair until his middle fingers touched her burning ears.

  He softly said, “The seven natural orifices of the female body, madam.”
/>   “What?” Her eyes blinked open wide and searched his face. Then a comic light flashed in them, though Matthew did not recognize it as such. Saying, “Oh, very well, sir. Go on,” she closed them and renewed her blush. Matthew delicately touched her neat nostrils and her lips, then his right hand moved down while his eyes paused, marveling in admiration, at the two coral-tipped crucial points of a girl embellished on Severeign’s chest.

  “Seven,” he finished triumphantly, amazed at his courage while lost in wonder at the newness of it all.

  Her hands lightly clasped his shoulders, she leaned her head against his and whispered in his ear, “No, eight. You missed one.” Her hand went down and her fingers instructed his. It was true! Matthew felt himself flushing furiously from intellectual shame. He’d known that about girls, of course, and yet he’d had a blind spot. There was a strange difference, he had to admit, between things read about in books of human physiology and things that were concretely there, so you could touch them. Severeign reminded him he still owed the Game a seven, and in his fluster he gave her the seven crucial points of a girl, which she was inclined to allow, though only by making an exception, for as she pointed out, they seemed very much Matthew’s private thing, though possibly others had hit on them independently.

  Still deeply mortified by his fundamental oversight, though continuing to be intensely interested in everything (the loose electricity lingered on him), Matthew would not accept the favor. “The Seven Wise Men of Greece—Solon, Thales, and so on,” he said loudly and somewhat angrily, betting himself that those old boys had made a lot of slips in their time.

  She nodded absently, and looking somewhat smugly down herself, said (quite fatuously, Matthew thought), “The seven seals on the Book of the Lamb.”

  He said more loudly, his strange anger growing, “In the Civil War, the Battle of Seven Pines, also called the Battle of Fair Oaks.”

  She looked at him, raised an eyebrow, and said, “The Seven Maxims of the Seven Wise Men of Greece.” She looked down herself again and then down and up him. Her eyes, merry, met his. “Such as Pittacus: Know thy opportunity.”

  Matthew said still more loudly, “The Seven Days Battles, also Civil War, June twenty-fifth to July first inclusive, 1862—Mechanicsville, et cetera!”

  She winced at the noise. “You’ve got to the fourth age now,” she told him.

  “What are you talking about?” he demanded.

  “You know, Shakespeare. You gave it: the Seven Ages of Man. Fourth: ‘Then a soldier, full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard, jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel, seeking the bubble reputation even in the cannon’s mouth.’ You haven’t got a beard, but you’re roaring like a cannon.”

  “I don’t care. You watch out. What’s your seven?”

  She continued to regard herself demurely, her eyes half closed. “Seven swans a-swimming,” she said liltingly and a dancing vibration seemed to move down her white body, like that which goes out from a swan across the still surface of a summer lake.

  Matthew roared, “The Seven Sisters, meaning the Scotch cannon at the Battle of Flodden!”

  She shrugged maddeningly and murmured, “Sweet Seventeen,” again giving herself the once-over.

  “That’s Sixteen,” he shouted. “And it’s not a seven anyhow!”

  She wrinkled her nose at him, turned her back, and said smiling over her shoulder, “Chilon: Consider the end.” And she jounced her little rump.

  In his rage Matthew astonished himself by reaching her in a stride, picking her up like a feather, and dropping her in the middle of the bed, where she continued to smile self-infatuatedly as she bounced.

  He stood glaring down at her and taking deep breaths preparatory to roaring, but then he realized his anger had disappeared.

  “The Seven Hells,” he said anticlimactically.

  She noticed him, rolled over once and lay facing him on her side, chin in hand. “The seven virtues,” she said. “Prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude—those are Classical—and faith, hope and charity—those are Christian.”

  He lay down facing her. “The seven sins—”

  “We’ve had those,” she cut him off. “You gave them last night.”

  He at once remembered everything about the incident except the embarrassment.

  “Seven Footprints to Satan, a novel by Abraham Merritt,” he said, eyeing her with interest and idly throwing out an arm.

  “The Seven-Year Itch, a film with Marilyn Monroe,” she countered, doing likewise. Their fingers touched.

  He rolled over toward her, saying, “Seven Conquests, a book by Poul Anderson,” and ended up with his face above hers. He kissed her. She kissed him. In the starlight her face seemed to him that of a young goddess. And in the even, tranquil, shameless voice such a supernatural being would use, she said, “The seven stages of loving intercourse. First kissing. Then foreplay.” After a while, “Penetration,” and with a wicked starlit smile, “Bias: Most men are bad. Say a seven.”

  “Why?” Matthew asked, almost utterly lost in what they were doing, because it was endlessly new and heretofore utterly unimaginable to him—which was a very strange concept for a mathematician.

  “So I can say one, stupid.”

  “Oh, very well. The seven spots to kiss: ears, eyes, cheeks, mouth,” he said, suiting actions to words.

  “How very specialized a seven. Try eyebrow flutters too,” she suggested, demonstrating. “But it will do for an answer in the Game. The seven gaits in running the course you’re into. First the walk. Slowly, slowly. No, more slowly.” After a while, she said, “Now the amble, not much faster. Shakespeare made it the slowest gait of Time, when he moves at all. Leisurely, stretchingly. Yes, that’s right,” and after a while, “Now the pace. In a horse, which is where all this comes from, that means first the hoofs on the one side, then those on the other. Right, left, right, see?—only doubled. There’s a swing to it. Things are picking up.” After a while she said, “Now the trot. I’ll tell you who Time trots withal. Marry, he trots hard with a maid between the contract of her marriage and the day it is solemnized. A little harder. There, that’s right.” After a while she said, gasping slightly, “Now the canter. Just for each seventh instant we’ve all hoofs off the ground. Can you feel that? Yes, there it came again. Press on.” After a while she said, gasping, “And now the rack. That’s six gaits. Deep penetration too. Which makes five stages. Oh, press on.” Matthew felt he was being tortured on a rack, but the pain was wonderful, each frightening moment an utterly new revelation. After a while she gasped, “Now, sir, the gallop!”

  Matthew said, gasping too, “Is this wise, madam? Won’t we come apart? Where are you taking me? Recall Cleobulus: Avoid Excess!”

  But she cried ringingly, her face lobster-red, “No, it’s not sane, it’s mad! But we must run the risk. To the heights and above! To the ends of the earth and beyond! Press on, press on, the Game is all! Epimenides: Nothing is impossible to industry!” After a while he redded out.

  After another while he heard her say, remotely, tenderly, utterly without effort, “Last scene of all, that ends this strange, eventful history, is mere oblivion. Now Time stands still withal. After the climax—sixth stage—there is afterplay. What’s your seven?”

  He answered quite as dreamily, “The Seven Heavens, abodes of bliss to the Mohammedans and cabalists.”

  She said, “That’s allowable, although you gave it once before by inference. The seven syllables of the basic hymn line, as ‘Hark, the herald angels sing.’”

  He echoed with, “Join the triumph of the skies.”

  She said, “Look at the stars.” He did. She said, “Look how the floor of heaven is thick inlaid with patens of bright gold.” It was.

  He said, “There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st but in his motion like an angel sings. Hark.” She did.

  Math felt the stars were almost in his head. He felt they were the realm in which he’d lived in infancy and tha
t with a tiny effort he could at this very moment push across the border and live there again. What was so wrong about Pythagoreanism? Weren’t numbers real, if you could live among them? And wouldn’t they be alive and have personalities, if they were everything there was? Something most strange was happening.

  Severeign nodded, then pointed a finger straight up. “Look, the Pleiades. I always thought they were the Little Dipper. They’d hit us in our tummies if they fell.”

  He said, gazing at them, “You’ve already used that seven.”

  “Of course I have,” she said, still dreamily. “I was just making conversation. It’s your turn, anyway.”

  He said, “Of course. The Philosophical Pleiad, another name for the Seven Wise Men of Greece.”