longeridentified with the desire. Perhaps that is why desire causes men calamity. By identifying with our desires and taking them too seriously, we not only increase our susceptibility to disappointment, we actually create a climate inhospitable to the free and easy fulfillment of those desires." "Maybe," mumbled Kudra, stretching her sun-warmed muscles until the elastic shuddered pleasurably and a mindless animal happiness collected in a pool at the base of her skull.Alobar is a glorious man, she thought lazily,but this constant prattle about the meaning of things can make a person tired. Mistaking her reticence for incredulity, Alobar said, "I suppose you think I made it all up. About the Bandaloop, I mean." In tandem, they turned their heads to stare into the cave, where rock was as raw as a lump in the throat and bats orbited the dead star of a dank ether. "I believe you." "You do?" "Much incense has been burned in these caves. The traces are faint, but I can smell it." "I cannot tell you how happy it makes me to hear you say that. But where—" "It no longer matters," Kudra said firmly. She retrieved a pine bough and, favoring her sore knee, began to sweep the entrance way. "The immortals are gone. Now we are the immortals."
That night they made love on a bed of bhabar grass, the twisting of her hips nearly weaving it into rope. She progressed from orgasm into dream without skipping a beat, but Alobar did not so quickly sleep. His arms pillowing his head, he lay beneath the echo circles of the bats and wondered about the former occupants of the caves. In certain ways, he was relieved that they were missing, yet in the velvet shadows of his heart, he sensed that he must someday deal with them, or others equally disturbing: infinity, apparently, did not travel safe highways or join in polite company. But those strange, strange words of Fosco s, what could they possibly have meant? Fosco, the plump little poem painter, had looked into Alobar's uncomprehending eyes and said: "The next time you encounter Bandaloop, it will be a dance craze sweeping Argentina in 1986."
SEATTLE
HERE IT COMES,across the stars, eating worlds, sucking the energy out of atoms and suns; here it comes, bullets can't kill it, dogs can't bite it, it refuses to listen to reason; here it comes, it just ate a hydrogen bomb. Oh, my Lord, here it comes, heading our way! nightmare asteroid, maniac vacuum, transcosmic pig-out; can't stop it, drunk on photons, burping pizzas of poisoned plutonium. It wants our oil, it wants our beautiful lumps of coal, it wants Air Force One,