This story contains sexually explicit material.
Please e-mail comments to twalden4 at juno dot com with ASSTR in the subject line.
Copyright 2010. All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. No similarity to actual persons or events is intended.

Technical note: A gasp is a rapid intake of breath. In this story, it also means a rapid expelling of breath, since it is close to the sound I mean. Sigh, grunt, groan, pant, and scream don't work.

Kamau in America

Listen.

I was working one day, cleaning a rest room in a stadium, when, omigosh, Arsineo walked in. I was surprised, but I was sure it was him. When he was washing his hands I told him how much people in Kenya liked his show. The television station there broadcast old episodes. He seemed embarrassed and pleased. I said we found it fascinating and liked the music. We often didn't understand the things that made you go huh. He said well, hang in there, and left before the other people who were starting to look could start talking to him. It was amazing. Only in America, where the poor women are fat, the rich women are thin, and all the kids, by law, are undisciplined.

Since coming here I had worked at whatever jobs I could find, but mostly I played my drum on the street. There were more people and the buildings were bigger, but otherwise it looked about like it did on television. I found I could make more money if I wore a colorful dashiki, so I did, even though I had never worn one back home. I contributed what I could toward the rent. Before too long I could afford a drum of my own and returned the one I had borrowed.

I went to drum circles. Most people there didn't know how to play, but some did. One evening I was playing at a drum circle in the park when I noticed something strange happening. One by one, people who didn't know what they were doing started following the rhythm of someone who did. Some others adjusted their rhythms to actually fit in properly. People who couldn't play at all stopped and listened. The dancers adjusted their movements. It was western music, but it was done the way African music was. Two or three other people noticed what was going on but just accepted it. Others felt something but didn't know what it was. Most were oblivious. I looked around at the different people, searching. A master drummer can draw others in and support a group, but that's not what this was. Then I found her. She was standing at the back of the drummers and behind some of those watching. Although she was barely moving and no one else was aware of her, she was leading the entire drum circle. She was not supplying any of the rhythms. Her awareness of what each person was doing was somehow letting those who were paying attention follow the music in the same way that she was. As more people were drawn in, the effect grew, until it was impossible to ignore.

The piece ended. She started edging back into the crowd. I was on my feet immediately, with my drum, circling around, knowing she would be gone before I could get there. Someone started another rhythm. Others joined in, trying to recreate what had just happened and mostly failing. She was standing there, waiting for me, long dark blond hair, impossible eyes, and a knowing expression on her face. We had shared a rare intimacy. We had shared it with two hundred other people at the same time, but the two us were the ones who were aware of it. I said my name was Kamau. She said, in an eastern European accent, she was Eliska.

Americans would have called her fat. She wasn't. There are thin women and fat women in Africa and she was neither. She was sufficiently fed, which it takes a people who have lived with hunger to appreciate. She had a layer of fat that rounded out her hips and breasts. She had some muscle on her arms and legs. Her bones didn't stick out. She was tall like an African woman. I could see her in the jungle in a leopard skin bikini, like something out of Rider Haggard or Edgar Burroughs, instead of here in her khaki shorts and bulging red tank top. She smiled a little, glanced around and asked me to walk with her, so I did. She said she knew who I was through my music. I said I understood. In how a person moves and how he dances you can see how he relates to the world and to the people around him. It's the same with music. A good actor or storyteller can lie or become someone else with his movements, but no one could lie at the level at which she perceived music. We reached her car, and she took me home with her.

She fed me big Greek beans and pasta with onions, salsa, green olives and olive oil. When we finished, she asked me if I would listen to a piece of music and see what I could do with it. I agreed, so she got out her cello and started playing the third suite for solo cello by Sebastian Bach. There was a lot of melody and not much rhythm, as is typical of most western classical music. I sat and listened to all six movements, then picked up my drum. She started over.

The piece is in C major, but the prelude starts with a descending A minor scale that then skips down to to C with a broken A minor chord before pausing on A. After that it's sixteenth notes all the way until the closing chords. Falling fifths at the end of phrases do give it some dum dum's. I used these and set up a shoodump dada doo, shoodump dada doo rhythm. Scales wander up and down with some leaps and broken chords. I varied my rhythm with some shada shada dum, shada shada dum's to compliment the changing melody. At forty five seconds some repeated bass notes set up an off beat pulse. I anticipated them with my own off beats, paused for the pulse Bach had written, and followed them with my own again, setting up a call and response within the piece. I went back to my original rhythms and let the piece vary into a set of broken chords, then did another call and response with the next set of pulses. There are rests between chords at the end of the movement that I used. I held the same rhythm when he put phrases between the chords, and then double stops, but I let Bach have the repeat of the descending A minor scale from the beginning of the movement and the final chord to himself.

Eliska was pleased and said so. We continued with the allemande, which starts with a rhythmic figure that I played off of. The courante speeds up. Then the sarabande tries to slow down, but I put in a lot of my own stuff at double time using the cello as a ground. The bourree bounces around, and I bounced back. The gigue is a straightforward dance, better known as a jig, so I didn't have any problem with that. After we finished Eliska told me she had a rehearsal in the afternoon tomorrow and invited me to spend the night. I said I thought that would be good. She asked if I liked Riesling? I said yes but would prefer some tea if that was alright. She put some water on.

She said she liked how dark my skin was, darker than most other blacks in this country. I said there were no blacks in America, except those who came from somewhere else. People called black here were all mulattoes, a mixture, and were one eighth white, more or less. Most of the other seven eighths was west African, with very little from east Africa, where I was from. Of course, Arab traders had sailed up and down entire coast of east Africa and mixed, to some extent, with the peoples there, and that mixture spread inland. Traders from north African came south overland through the Sahara and mixed with the peoples of west Africa. The darkest Africans seemed to be from Senegal, which had been farthest away from outsiders until the Portuguese started sailing south along the coast of west Africa. But you couldn't really tell who was more pure than whom because the term Negro, like the term Caucasian, has no precise scientific definition and refers to many diverse peoples with different genetic makeups. She said that was true. Even most of people who had considered themselves Aryan didn't have blond hair.

When we finished our tea she took the mugs into the kitchen, came back, took my hand, and led me into the bedroom. She dropped her khaki shorts, and I saw that the red tank top was actually a bodysuit. I started undressing. When I was down to my dark blue bikini briefs, she pulled me down next to her on the cream colored sheets that lay open on the bed. It had an extra firm mattress on a queensize platform, so we didn't sink into it. As I kissed her she reached down and stroked my balls through my underwear. I nibbled her lower lip and slid my hand down to her breast. I felt the nipple harden under the thin cotton material as I stroked it with my thumb. I slid down and nuzzled her other breast. She moaned. My hand slid down and stroked the smoothness of her crotch, and her hips started pumping against it. She slid a strap off her shoulder and exposed the breast that had been freed up. I stared across at its stiff pink nipple and the way it wobbled on her chest as she moved, then I leaned over sucked it into my mouth. She groaned and continued writhing under my touch. When I came back up and kissed her again, her hand started stoking the shaft of my penis through my briefs, which were now slimy with the cum that was oozing out. The fabric covering her crotch was damp with her excitement. The smell of sex filled the room. She carefully hooked her thumb under the top of my briefs and uncovered my barely contained penis. She grabbed it and squeezed, slowly stroking up and down. I moaned.

She sat up with her legs together, lowered the top of her bodysuit, rocked on her buttocks to slide it over her hips, and pulled it off down her legs. Then she sat cross legged looking at me with my erection hanging out. I stared. White women look and move like dead fish. They can't help it, it's the paleness of their skin and the way they are brought up. But she didn't. She glowed in the dim light of the lamp, her golden brown hair spilling down her back to her shoulder blades. The long fine hair between her legs was the same color and stood out slightly against her lighter skin. As she sat on the bed with her breasts jutting out and her skin a smooth nearly uniform color, she looked like she had never worn a stitch of clothing in her life. But she still looked a lot more naked than any black person ever did. I sat up and bounced so I could pull my briefs the rest of the way off then lay back down. She leaned over without uncrossing her legs and sucked my black penis into her mouth while she cupped my balls with her hand. Her tongue swished around cleaning off all the goo and checking for more. It found some and seemed very happy.

She unrolled a condom over me and then lay back with one knee pointing toward the ceiling. I moved on top of her pale body. She spread her legs farther and lifted the other knee. My hand guided my penis into her waiting vagina that it was now encountering uncovered for the first time. I started moving in and out, and she matched me stroke for stroke. I leaned forward onto my elbows and her breasts and held her. I kissed her, and her tongue sought mine. I tasted that she had already swallowed everything that it had found on my penis. Her breathing didn't become ragged, it was rock steady. She was breathing with her hips. Her chest remained still except for the arching of her back with each stroke. The tempo began to gradually increase. She began grunting softly with each thrust of her hips. I held on and kept pace with her. And then her grunting got louder until she was spasming underneath me as she came and I pounded into her. I started to slow down, but she murmured keep going and only slowed a little, so I did. Soon her grunting got louder again and she had another orgasm. Still she wouldn't slow down. She came several more times but finally murmured okay, now, and I exploded inside of her with spurt after spurt, pounding away like there was no tomorrow, until I was drained. Even as I tapered off she kept milking me for all she could get.

Breakfast was toast and peanut butter. I told her I liked her finger savers, the plastic tongs she used for toast. I had had more than one run in with an uncooperative American toaster. When we finished, she asked would I like to listen to another piece of music? She wanted to try something different, wanted to see how I would fill in a missing part. This time she played the Brahms sonata for cello and piano in E minor, op 38. Part way into the first movement I interrupted her. I asked if she would mind starting over? I wanted to try something. She was puzzled and a little annoyed, which was understandable, but agreed. I picked up my drum.

The first movement starts with two slow rising notes on the cello, then a little skip, two more slow notes, some faster notes, three slow notes with a skip, a fast broken chord, four slow notes with leaps down and up and down, then another little skip up and one last long note. While the cello is doing all this, the piano is playing slow chords on the off beats. I took the piano part and played the chords as shadump on the drum. After this the cello moves up, then plays three long high notes before starting down in a long series of quarter notes. Somewhere in the middle of this the piano starts playing part of the cello's opening theme with the long notes and skips. It had a distinct enough rhythm that I could pick it up on the drum. Eliska must have noticed what I was doing, but if she was surprised, she didn't show it. After this the music gets mixed up for while, then the piano starts tinkling while the cello messes around with the theme. It goes on like this for quite some time. It gets faster for a while. It slows down again and the piano takes the lead while the cello shifts down to the bass. The cello moves back up. It gets mixed up again. The piano takes over. It drifts around for while. Then it slows and the cello's opening theme returns while the piano tinkles. The piano tries to take the theme and fails. It drifts around some more. It starts to sound like its going somewhere but can't pick a direction. Somehow a second theme got in here when we weren't looking. Finally it dies away and stops.

She said she hadn't realized I knew the piece so well when she picked it but liked how I had arranged the drum part, making it sound African and yet still fit in. I said I had never heard the piece before. She said right, I had just made up a drum part that happened to exactly match the piano part Brahms had written. I said no, it was weirder than that. It was like what she had done at the drum circle. As she played, her awareness of the music had let me hear the entire piece in her head, both parts at the same time and how they fit together, as if it was something I was seeing instead of something I was hearing. Which also explained why I could remember the Bach cello suite so well after hearing it just once. It wasn't my memory of it, it was hers. Now that I knew how she remembered it, I could hear that she was filled with music, although none of it was distinct. She just sat there considering. Then she said okay, and that I had been right when I said it was weird.

We began the next movement. The piano starts with a soft bouncy little theme in triple time and the cello joins in. We go back and forth. It gets more lyrical. Then it starts to get bigger but ends up back at the soft opening theme. We play around with it a bit. The central trio section is smoother and more serious. The bouncy theme comes back for the final section, the theme from the trio sneaks back in for a moment, and the movement ends. I had forgotten I wasn't playing a piano. I was hearing Eliska's awareness of the piano part and knew I was making decisions about how to change melody into rhythm, but it felt like I was playing the part as written. It was strange. The last movement starts like a fugue with the piano playing the fast powerful theme, which doesn't really make sense on the drum until the cello enters with same theme played low, and then everything fits. The other hand of the piano plays the theme again higher, which I could now approximate. We do some other stuff, and the piano tries to start the theme again and finally does, echoed by the cello. It's not exactly a fugue because the theme gets mixed up and we keep going off and doing other stuff. The theme comes and back and builds up before crashing down for a powerful ending. We liked our version, but Brahms would not have approved. It didn't sound the same. However, the cello part sounds good on its own, and the drum added to it. The drum does have the percussive quality of the piano.

We sat and talked a while longer. She said that a thousand years ago her people had sold each other as slaves to the Turks, the same as the Africans had. The word slave came from the collective name for the tribes of the region, Slav. I said for us it had started with salt. Life in Africa had been too hard to have wars. We had needed our weapons to hunt. People had only raided nearby villages for what they could carry or drive away. Captured slaves were used as household servants and generally treated well. We were too poor to have plantations. Early trading networks had been local. It wasn't economical to carry goods farther than half a day's walk. Salt had to be obtained from seawater or brine springs by evaporation or boiling. Long distant trading routes were first established to bring it across the desert from were it could be mined, in exchange for ivory and kola nuts. Muslims came along those routes and bought slaves. Still, they were considered valuable and not usually abused. The horror didn't start until the Portuguese and English came with their slave ships. Most of the people they took were convinced they would be eaten, and in fact many did die en route and were thrown overboard to the sharks and fishes, but by then selling slaves to foreigners was an established practice.

She asked me how I had learned so much about African history. I said from books written by Europeans, especially one by an English photojournalist named Reader that was a biography of the continent. I asked her about where she was from, and she told me about being Czech and living in Prague under the communists and what happened after. Then she asked to hear my story. So I told her.

Listen.

When I was growing up I lived in a house on the edge of the village in Kenya. Calling it a house gives the wrong idea of what it was like. It was a fine big house, but anyone from this country would have called it a tumbled down shack. Near the village there is a kopje, an isolated hill formed by a large outcrop of rock. When I was small I used to talk to the hyraxes, or pimbi, that lived there. A hyrax is an animal that looks like a stubby woodchuck, which may sound redundant but is more or less true. Their fur is mixed brown and black except lighter underneath and with a black spot on top near the rump. They evolved in Africa and used to come in a lot more different sizes and shapes, but when Africa rammed into Europe, grazers and other types of mammals migrated here and out competed them. Animals without competitors get bigger, animals with competitors get smaller. If the current hyrax evolved from a much larger ancestor, it would explain why their gestation period, six to seven months, is not typical for an animal of its size.

Children talking to animals isn't that strange. At first a few of the other kids came over to see what I was looking at, but they soon lost interest. It wasn't until much later that I realized none of the other children could hear the animals talk back. I couldn't hear the serval cats that sometimes hunted them or the gazelle that grazed on the plain, just the hyrax. The group would spread out in a circle on the plain, all facing outward from the center. They would bite off some grass with the side of their mouth and then look up. Their tusk like front teeth are used for defense, not eating. They looked like they were chewing their cud, but they weren't. All their digestion takes place in their various stomachs. They could eat some plants that were poisonous to others and go for extended periods without water. The male would stand guard over his females and young. They never ventured very far from the rocks and would scamper for cover whenever alarmed. They had black whiskers to feel their way through tight spaces and large foot pads with sweat glands and special muscles so they could cling to the rocks they clambered over. I could get closer to them than anyone else, but it didn't matter. When they hid, I could feel the rocks around them, and their breathing and their hearts beating, and through a dozen sets of eyes I could see myself standing alone on the plain in the sun. Since I knew where they were, I could sometimes spot one between the rocks. Whenever I did she would duck back. They could see through my eyes as well as I could see through theirs. Another set of eyes with a higher vantage point was why they tolerated me as well as they did.

I would climb the kopje alone and stay out later than my parents wanted me too. The hyrax always told me if there was a leopard or hyena about. Their body temperature varies somewhat, so they huddle together at night and bask in the sun in the morning, like lizards. They have nails that look like hooves, four on the front feet and two on the back, plus longer inside back nails they use for grooming. They make lots of sounds, different kinds of whistles, growls, shrieks and twitters. Before long our doctor, or shaman, noted my strange ways. He started telling me things about the animals and plants around us, more than what everyone else knows. I told him some of what I had learned but was careful not to tell him too much. He thought that was appropriate, though unusual in one so young.

One morning when I was a little older I saw an aardvark sunning herself on a rock. I knew of them but hadn't seen one before. Like humans, they are one of the few animals not densely covered with fur, feathers or scales. She was shaped something like a fat banana, with a tapering tail and a long snout that ended in a nose disk. She had powerful muscles in her arched back and short front legs, strong blunt claws for digging, and webbing between her toes for shoveling dirt. Her sparse bristles became darker on the legs and underside, turning them black, and she had long pointed ears. When I moved, she swiveled them and I could hear myself, so I stood still again. I realized I could feel the rock beneath her, the sun warming her, and her belly full of termites. I waited. When she stood up and moved off I could see where she was going even after she was out of sight. As she began to move out of range of whatever sense I was using, I followed. I was far enough away that she ignored me. She could tell where I was and that I wasn't a threat. We traveled over the plain through the high grass and bright sunlight. When she entered her burrow, I followed her movements down a long tunnel to a small chamber where she curled up in a ball and went to sleep.

That night I went back and waited at her burrow for the aardvark to awake. Soon she came to the entrance, unblocked the opening, and listened for a while. Suddenly she bounded out for some distance and stood up straight on her hind legs, bracing herself with her tail, turning her ears and head and listening intently in all directions. I had an urge to look around, so I did. When she was satisfied there was no one else here, she gave another bound and trotted off through the grass. I scrambled as quietly as I could to keep up. She zigzagged back and forth with her ears forward and her nose to the ground searching for termites. She avoided trees where there might be leopards. Eventually she paused, and then changed direction and soon came upon a tall termite mound. I came up to where I could see with my own eyes, but it was too dark and I was too far away to make out more than dim shapes. I had sometimes beaten on termite mounds with a stick and had little or no effect. I felt her tear this one open with her claws like it was a piece of rotten fruit. There were white squishy termites running around everywhere, and we lapped them up with our sticky whip like tongue faster than I could follow. They tasted surprisingly good. When she'd gotten what she wanted here, she turned around and trotted off, leaving behind enough termites to repair and rebuild the mound. When I started thinking I should get back to the village, she changed course and headed more or less in the right direction.

The next day I told the doctor about my experience with the aardvark, that as with the hyraxes, I could feel what it felt and hear what it heard. He walked across the room to get a bag and pulled out a very heavy book, much larger than the animal guides and bird books that departing tourists gave him. It was a recent edition of Campbell's Biology, a 1200 page university textbook he had gotten from a zoologist doing research at the national reserve. He opened it in front of us on the bed and showed me a diagram with different groups of mammals. In school we learned Swahili so we could talk to people from other places, and English so we could talk to people from the government. The book was in English and had a lot of the words I didn't know, but the doctor explained them to me. One large group of animals was made up of grazers, carnivores, moles and bats. The other included mice, rabbits and monkeys. There were three small groups mostly from other places. The last group came from Africa. These animals evolved here when Africa was not connected to any other lands, and now only four dissimilar types were left. These were the hyrax, aardvark, elephant, and one that lived in water. He told me I had a connection to this land and could talk to these beings. And he said I should start reading his book.

In the beginning he mostly read the book to me and explained the words and ideas, but I gradually understood more and more of it on my own. The words were difficult but the ideas were fascinating. I had heard about elements and molecules in school but didn't understand them. The doctor explained. He had been to secondary school and had talked to many people. There were sugars and fats and proteins. One time he took me to the nature reserve and a zoologist he knew let me look at both prepared and living cells under a microscope. Eventually I started learning about genes and evolution, and later about diversity and ecology. The doctor said they were some of the same things he had learned when he studied traditional medicine with the previous village doctor except looked at in a different way.

Not long after my special lessons started I went out looking for elephants. I wanted to be one but didn't find any. I talked to some of the men in the village, and they told me what to look for and where to find them. My mother didn't want me to go, but my father said I had enough experience to spend a few days by myself in the bush even though I hadn't been initiated. I took some figs and cooked dried yams but no meat that would attract hyenas. The doctor had taught me about herbs and how to find plants I could eat. I set out cross country, and the second day came upon some acacia trees with broken branches. Elephants had been here but there was no sign of where they were now. I continued on toward the mountains, which didn't look much closer than when I had started. Later I came to the top of a small rise and saw a large lake glittering in the distance, below the mountains. As I got closer, I could make out tiny gray shapes by the water's edge. I couldn't tell how many there were, but it looked like a small herd. I went on as twilight fell and darkness gathered. The stars shone as they always did when I was away from the lights of the village. Not long after I stopped for the night.

It was late morning when I reached the elephants. The day was getting hot and they were flapping their huge ears to keep cool. An elephant's skin holds in heat since it is very thick. It has to be. A creature that size with thin skin would burst like an overfilled water balloon. The skin of their ears can be much thinner because it is near the top of their body. Waving them is an effective way to dissipate heat. I could feel them cooling in the breeze they generated. There were the matriarch and two other females, plus a mother and calf, a pregnant female, and an immature male. They had names that were all pronounced as low rumbles that only elephants could understand. I couldn't even hear them with my own ears. Soon the group started moving toward the lake. I followed behind at a respectful distance. They knew I was there and didn't particularly like me spying on them the way I was, but they tolerated me because I was young. The older of the two females accepted me better than the others so I paid most attention to her. She was learning the locations of water and food from the matriarch and would one day take her place.

Normally an elephant moves slowly to prevent overheating and because balance is very important. If they fall they could split like a dropped melon. They can't really run, but once they get up momentum they can move very fast in a straight line. Turns at speed are out of the question. Their size and their strength is their greatest protection, but size is also their greatest handicap. Their huge body is suspended from their great frame and supported by their thick straight legs. I felt their flat feet expand as they shifted their weight onto them and contract as they lifted them off the ground. This made it easier to pull them out of the mud at the water's edge, which they tended to sink into. I picked up their awareness of these things as they walked along with their stiff legged gait, moving mostly from their shoulders and hips.

In the water, I drank by sucking up large amounts of water into my trunk and spraying them into my mouth. Then I power sprayed water behind my ears, where parasites liked to hide, and along my sides, underneath, and over my head, while the others were doing the same. The calf was young and still learning how to manipulate water with its trunk. After this we all stepped off and swam out farther into the lake, paddling with all four legs and lifting our trunks to breathe. The cool water felt good and the buoyancy made breathing easier. Most animals have only a small amount of fluid between the two membranes surrounding the lungs. Elephants must have connecting tissue because their lungs are so large. The mother and younger female stayed on either side of the calf in the water to support and protect it if necessary. Nothing is large enough to bother a full grown elephant.

Back on land we sucked up large handfuls of dust and threw them over our bodies to shield us from the sun. Then we went back to eating, which is a full time occupation. I tore up clumps of new grass with my trunk and carried them to my mouth. My eyes were pointed down along my trunk so I could see what I was doing to some extent, but I couldn't look forward without straining my neck. To get where we are going we relied mostly on the memory of the matriarch. I saw mostly with my trunk and its amazing sense of touch and smell. It can move so well because it is formed not from the nose, but from a fusion of the nose and the upper lip. I chewed by grinding my jaw forward and backward. Besides our tusks, which are front teeth, elephants have only one pair of very large flat molars on each side, except that as this set is wearing out from our constant eating another set is moving forward into place. We use six sets over a lifetime, and the matriarch was on her last. This is retained much longer than the others. When it wore out she would be able to eat only soft foods and so would slowly starve to death.

Through the ground I heard a distant rumbling with my feet. I shifted slightly forward and lifted one foot off the ground so I could hear better, and some of the others did the same. It was a male in rut. I was interested. I set down my foot and rumbled a reply. Some time later I could hear him approaching. I lifted my trunk and smelled his musk. He was ready, and I started to become excited. He circled the herd looking for the female in heat. As with lions, related females made up the core of the group. Unlike lion prides, a group of outside males did not attach itself to the herd. Instead, some of the males were loosely associated with one or more of the interconnected herds, while others remained isolated or formed shifting herds of bachelors. He approached me and I felt his trunk on my backside tasting whether I was ready. When he laid his trunk along my back, I stood still. He moved forward, bent his legs, placed his tusks on my back, and levered himself up. Elephants mate very carefully. My opening was underneath instead of in back so I wouldn't have to support so much of his weight. He was considerably bigger than I was. It wasn't easy for him to squat behind me with his forelegs on my rump while his penis searched around for the right spot. Then he found it, straightened his legs, and shot himself home.

Behold now behemoth, which I made with thee;
he eateth grass as an ox.
Lo now, his strength is in his loins,
and his force is in the navel of his belly.
He extendeth his member like a cedar;
the sinews of his stones are wrapped together. (Job 40:15-17)

A bull elephant's testicles are secured deep inside his body instead of exposed in a scrotum, and his spiritual power is demonstrated by his virility. This power comes from a point of balance at his center, conducted from the earth through his hips. We are serene creatures with knowledge of our generations and the land that holds us. The male has an organ that plays by itself because his grandeur would make pelvic thrusting dangerous. I felt it thrusting and thrusting deep within me, deeper than in any other creature, as my excitement mounted and mounted until we both exploded in orgasms that would have killed lesser beings.

When I came back to myself I found I was lying on the ground still a good distance away from the herd. I was scared out my wits. That elephant had wanted to stick a penis inside me that was bigger that I was! And I had wanted him to do it! The front as my pants was filled with goo where I had come inside them. I started walking parallel to the lake until I was far enough away from the elephant herd to circle around to the shore. I took off my clothes and, as the elephants had done, swam and washed myself, and my pants. I floated free in the cool waters, not buoyed up nearly as well as the elephants and not having a built in snorkel I could stick up above the surface. I climbed out and lay on the bank. I felt the still hot sun on my naked dark skin. Soon I dressed and looked for a more secure spot to spend the night.

Going back the way I had come, I avoided roads and villages when I could and didn't speak to too many people. Sometimes I saw gazelle or a larger waterbuck. One time I saw three male impala a little way off. Each of their two horns had a distinctive spiral twist that gave them a lyre shape when seen from the front. There was a Grant's gazelle with them, whose horns had a simple curve. In the evening I came to an outcrop of rock and climbed up it to spend the night. There were some hyrax. As I sat looking down on the plain I could see a grazing herd of female Thomson's gazelle, without horns, guarded by a single male. When a female wandered off too far he would chase her back. There were a few young.

The hyrax saw something and became more alert, but didn't sound an alarm. There was a cheetah floating slowly and smoothly through the grass stems toward the gazelle, with his head down and his ears up, pausing at times and then continuing. When he got as close as he dared he sat and waited. I could see his head through the grass and the fading light because I knew where he was. He had a black line curving down from the inside corner of either eye and looked like a larger version of the serval, slim body, long legs, small head, but while the serval is built for jumping and pounces on its prey, the cheetah is built for speed. Always on the edge of starvation, he must be thin enough to run and not so hungry he can't. He was stalking a fawn, but when a doe came sufficiently into range instead, he waited until she was turned away and lit out after her. His acceleration was incredible. The doe took off immediately, but he had already closed part of the distance. He followed every turn, caught up, and batted her. It was over in seconds. He held her throat until she stopped struggling, then lay down and rested until he was able to eat. He finished her off quickly, so a larger predator wouldn't steal his kill. A cheetah is slender and graceful and deadly and fragile. They are not built for fighting. Black kites circled overhead and landed when he moved off. They are medium sized birds of prey related to eagles and hawks but eat carrion when they find it.

Humans originated here, in the great Rift Valley of Africa. Aside from a few sticks and twigs, their earliest tools were rocks used for pounding and throwing. A piece of broken rock could cut something, and flint broke more nicely than other rocks. Homo erectus used fire for protection and food preparation, which was more than I was doing right now. Women may have invented language in order to say dear, the fire is going out. Animals used sound to indicate danger, interest and other things, but humans attached labels to objects and classes of objects, then to actions, qualities, and relationships between these things. Labels for quantities enabled them to go beyond five. Some people didn't believe that humans evolved from monkeys, but they had no trouble believing that Africans did. Actually, humans originated in Africa twice. Homo erectus spread from here to other continents, and so did Homo sapiens.

My sister was worried about initiation. The teachers at school said it was dangerous and unnecessary, and that it would make her less of a woman. Most girls did it. It was expected. Some didn't. Since I had been talking to the village shaman, she asked me about it a few weeks after I got back. She could because I was not yet a man and was two years younger, but she was embarrassed. I pretended not to be and acted serious. She wanted to know if she could be a real woman without it. I said yes. Animals didn't have the kind of initiation we did. The differences between us and them were because of who we were and how we lived, not because of the magical rites we performed. She asked if it would make a difference when she got married. I said only because of what her husband thought, not because of what she could do. There were three levels of female genital mutilation, and some girls went to the hospital for them, but the only value any of them had was social. She asked why boys never refused initiation. I said that was different. She said no it wasn't, mutilation was mutilation in either case. I couldn't argue, but said it was less dangerous for boys. They rarely died from the operation, although they sometimes did from other parts of the process. She thought about it. She said she would only elect not to have circumcision if I didn't. I thought about it. It would mean I would never be an adult, but some people thought it would mean the same thing for her. I said okay, I won't.

My mother accepted her decision. Grandmother wouldn't have let her get away with it, but she was dead. My father didn't like it but had no say. He wanted to object when he found out about my decision but had no idea what to say. Although many boys were scared, none had ever refused before. The doctor approved but couldn't say so. Preserving tradition was part of his job. He said my refusal was part of who I was and what I needed to do. He didn't explain what he meant. He couldn't train me as a shaman as he had intended, but would continue my lessons and teach me what he could. The secret parts I would have to discover on my own.

A rattle made of a large gourd covered with a loose net of small cowrie shells was used in some of the rituals the doctor performed, and he had been teaching me basic rhythms that were different from those everyone knew. Now I sought out the master drummer and asked to study with him. He agreed. There was nothing secret about what he did, it was just a lot of hard work. There were many different rhythms for each dance, and they were different for each drum. Even more difficult was choosing, changing and combining rhythms based on the particular occasion and circumstances. Plus allowing the other drummers room and responding to what they did without anybody stopping. Plus accompanying and responding to the dancers, and the chanters. Plus the drums sometimes speak. The rhythms, dynamics and intonations match our language. Not everyone can understand all that they say, but some understand all of it, and all understand some of it.

The other boys my age went through initiation together. I didn't. I was still a child while they were men. I finished primary school and was able to start secondary school. Primary and secondary school in Kenya used to be free, until the International Monetary Fund made the government start charging fees as a condition for a loan. Which made sense. The purpose of the IMF is to keep poor countries dependent on foreign loans and aid. Kenya was threatening to become prosperous, so they needed to destroy the emerging educated class. School was one place where my status didn't matter, and I worked hard at it. The teachers and the doctor helped and encouraged me. My sister married and had children. For my people, mother's brother is an important relationship, and I fulfilled my responsibilities to the children as best I could. As time went on some of the boys my age got married. I couldn't get married because I didn't have any cows. If I had been initiated I might have found a girl who would take me anyway, but I wasn't and no family could accept me. So when I had sex I was careful not to get the girl pregnant. I learned patience and self control, along with drumming, biology, English, mathematics and history.

Property and ownership are characteristic of humans. Competition for territory or nesting sites is common to many animals, and for mates and food to most, but they don't speculate in real estate, trade their daughters for cattle, or designate market days unless they are human. Lions show ownership of land, females, and food. Males defend the territory by chasing off other lions, even though it is a lineage of lionesses that maintains the integrity of the pride over the generations. The male lions come from outside and maintain possession for several years, but they are eventually driven off by a younger group of males. When male cubs get older they are driven out, and they become nomads until and unless they can establish a pride of their own or take over an existing one. Some of the female cubs are also driven out. A male lion's large shaggy mane protects him in battles with other males but makes hunting more difficult, so he will often steal a kill from the females. If it is large he might only tear off a haunch for himself. Lions don't share the pieces they claim, except a male will sometimes tolerate a cub. For lions, property and ownership is an immediate thing, consisting of what they can hold on to at any given time.

Humans have their own bit of land, but they do something different with it than lions, birds or insects. Instead of just taking what is there, they plant things. The early Africans planted sorghum. It has larger grains than other grasses, which make them easier to separate. It was the first plant encouraged on a large scale, by removing less useful plants so that it could flourish and spread. Because it comes from a dry region of Africa it tolerates drought and poor soil, so the labor spent on it is less likely to be wasted. Yams sprout easily, so sometime later humans tried planting them as well. Both these plants can be stored for use during the dry season. The dry ground of Africa is very hard, even after the rain. In some places it requires more people to till the ground than the resulting crops can support, and so agriculture there is not an option. Palm oil, from trees that don't have to be planted every year, is used in some places. Barley and wheat came from the Middle East, as did goats, sheep and cattle. Guinea hens were local. Pottery for cooking and storage came from Asia. Banana trees were introduced from east Asia. Once established, they provide much fruit for relatively little effort. And elephants have always been a major problem. There was no effective way to keep them from eating the crops before Africans had high powered rifles.

What used to be called the expansion of civilization is now called habitat loss. It was a good thing when Europeans did it, but is a bad thing when Africans do it. There is room for both humans and other animals. Maybe instead of complaining about the destruction of other people's forests, the Europeans should replant theirs. And the Americans, who are just another type of European, are even worse hypocrites. They know the consequences. They've studied endangered species and are still cutting down what is left of their forests. But the Belgians, whom Joseph Conrad wrote about and whose supposedly humanitarian efforts the Americans were the first to support, were the worst. The Heart of Darkness wasn't really about ivory, it was about rubber. The rubber boom caused by the invention of the inflatable tire started a few years after Conrad made his famous trip up the river but before he wrote the book. You can't eat rubber. Its only use for Africans was to keep the Belgians from cutting off their hands or killing their families. Look it up, and remember it when you admire the great buildings of Brussels built with African wealth. The current and former wars in the Congo, the worst in Africa, are a direct legacy of King Leopold of Belgium, except that now they are about minerals for electronics and bombs. Neither can we eat the coffee and flowers the World Bank has us growing instead of food, which we have to buy from the Europeans.

When I finished secondary school I left for Nairobi. There were no jobs, so I played my drum on the street for tips but didn't get much. All the good spots in the tourist areas were taken. I slept on the street where I could find space amongst all the other people who couldn't find work. One day a few of us were doing dance steps to some drummers playing where people who had been here longer had built more or less permanent shacks out of whatever they could find. Everybody can dance. No woman would marry a man who couldn't dance. A man who can't dance well is not able to please a woman in bed. At the end of one piece a man from another tribe who had been watching asked me how long I had been on the street. I said several months. He said he was looking for a drummer and asked if I was interested. He could tell by the way I moved that I played, and he thought I would be better than those we had been listening to. I said yes.

The next afternoon I went to the address he had given me. It was a hotel and restaurant in the Indian section of the city. The British brought workers from India here to build the railway, and now they were the middle class. There was a guitar player, a bass player, the man I had met and a white man playing some of the usual drums, and an Indian woman playing tabla, which consisted of two Indian drums, the smaller one played with the right hand and the larger with the left. None of them were much older than I was. We tried several numbers together. Afterward, they told me they liked my playing but were not sure if I was the right person for the group. While the others were trying to decide, the white man asked me where I was from. I could tell he was American, and he was surprised when I answered in English. When he asked how I had learned to speak it so well, I told him about reading the biology text and other books. He wanted to know if I could sing. I told him I had never tried. After attempting a couple popular songs with the group, it turned out I couldn't, but they thought my language skills would be useful and invited me to join.

We played at the bar seven nights a week, with an additional show on saturday afternoon. The other drummer had studied with a man from Ghana and taught me different rhythms. The American was here to study drumming, and I became his instructor. The tabla player was the owner's daughter. Women didn't usually play tabla, but she was quite good. Her name was Mira. It turned out the other drummer had been having sex with her but was losing interest, and so had recruited me partly to distract her. One night during the break she asked me could I dance as well as I drummed? I said I thought I did okay, but she would have to judge for herself.

After the show she took me up to one of empty rooms and spread a sheet she had taken from the laundry over the made up bed. She sat on the bed and told me to pretend that I was Krishna and she was a milkmaid, and that I should dance for her. I didn't have a flute, or a drum, and I wasn't blue, but I started a rhythm in my head. There were pictures of Krishna and other deities on the walls of the restaurant. Some of them had many arms, so I started moving my arms into different positions that, taken together, formed a circle from my knees to above my head, all the time following the rhythm that I was imagining. It was late and I couldn't make any noise, so I had to make her hear the rhythm through my movements. I kept up the hand movements and started stepping gently from side to side in a counter rhythm. I used what I knew, but when I added some of the Indian rhythm I had heard in her tabla playing, her eyes got wide. Her breathing was following my rhythm, and as I increased in speed, so did her breath. I started approaching her, and backing away, and approaching her again. I had to do most of my dancing with my hands, which was a new experience for me, since I couldn't afford to make any noise. She was moving with me where she sat on the bed, and as the tempo increased, I could smell the scent of her growing arousal.

I started gently touching and caressing her when I came near, her arms, her hair, her face. Gradually I spent more time touching her when I drew near, until it was a dance of my hands fluttering over over her body. By now she was breathing heavily. I started removing parts of her clothing. She stood up so I could finish. I spun out of my own. I danced slightly away and caressed her with my eyes, as my hands continued to move, and my arms returned to the circle around me they had started with. She was tall for an Indian woman, nearly as tall as a regular woman. Her hips were wide, her waist was narrow, and her breasts hung like juicy, juicy mangos. Her straight hair hung all about her, and her skin was not as dark as mine.

I pushed her back onto the bed. She swiveled around, scooted over, and lay down full length. I slid down beside her, my hand dancing over her opposite hip, and sucked one of her ripe rich fruit into my mouth. She gasped very softly, and I swirled my tongue around her large bumpy nipple. My hand moved over slightly from her hip and started playing with her thick curly hair. When it moved a bit lower, she parted her legs, and I found she was just as juicy on the inside. My fingers moved through the folds of her flesh, and I felt her buttocks tighten as her hips pressed forward to meet them. I reached down to my clothes, and she frowned when she saw my hand come back with a condom but didn't say anything. I unrolled it over myself, moved onto her, and slid inside, all the time continuing the rhythm of the dance. She murmured that I was Krishna breaking her butter pot and stealing her butter, or maybe I was Ganesha, the elephant headed god, lord of success and destroyer of obstacles, and she was his little mouse, like in the Disney circus movie. I knew from experience that I was no elephant, and she had breasts like no mouse that I had ever seen, but I didn't argue. She looked up into my eyes, our constantly changing rhythms complementing each other and spanning two continents, very gradually speeding up and getting less complicated, until she was pounding desperately against me and grunting softly with each stroke, hovering just on the edge with consummate skill for what seemed like eternity, and just when I didn't think I could hold out any longer, she plunged over the edge and into the abyss, dragging me with her, as wave after wave washed over us in the dance, drowning us in her silent scream.

Mira could only talk to me during the break or, on nights she thought her parents would be asleep, after the show. She pointed out that in the Disney movie it had been the African elephant, the one with the big ears, who had become an outcast, and his mother, because she objected to his treatment, who had been locked up. He was befriended by a mouse with a Brooklyn accent, which was another low class group but still superior, who led him around and told him what to do. The mouse dressed as part or the circus but didn't seem to have any specific role within it. The young African elephant was shown getting drunk, associating with other Africans in the form of crows, and taking part in a magic ritual that was supposed to be fake but nevertheless worked. His status was elevated when the owners discovered they could make money off of him. I said I hadn't thought of it that way before.

Her parents may or may not have suspected what was going on. Maybe they thought she should start looking for a nice Indian boy, or maybe it was her own idea. In any case, her father told us that he had hired another band but, if we wanted, could try to find a gig for us through his contacts in Dar es Salaam, without Mira. He offered to pay our bus fare. It wouldn't be easy for us to find something on our own. We were only known in the Indian quarter, and since that seemed to be closed to us now, we accepted.

It was a long bus ride, down from the highlands, through the foothills, across the plains, to Mombasa on the coast, and then across the border into Tanzania, south along the coast, past Zanzibar, to the port city of Das es Salaam. It was supposed to be slightly smaller than Nairobi, but I couldn't tell the difference. It was hotter. It didn't seem much more foreign to me than Nairobi did. The hotel and bar where we worked was smaller. It served both Indian and Chinese food and had a more diverse clientele, including some white tourists looking for local color. It was okay during the busy season, but when things slowed down the owner cut our pay. The band decided they could do with one less drummer. They chipped in on part of my bus fair back and wished me well. I waited until the rains stopped, then headed north.

I stopped at Tanga, before the border with Kenya. I wanted to try something. The city had a large population but no modern buildings. It used to be a busy port. I slept on the street that evening. I didn't have much money and nothing worth stealing. I had sold my drum and been using a better one that belonged to the other drummer. In the early morning I started walking along the beach, trying to get away from the populated areas. By late afternoon the next day I had found a likely looking spot. There was a large shallow area with sea grass growing under the surface. I ate a little of my food and sat down to wait. I looked for paths through the vegetation where it had been eaten. I couldn't see anything, but maybe the tide wasn't low enough. When it got dark the tide was falling and too low for me to find what I was looking for, so I went to sleep.

The nearly full moon was part way down the sky behind me when I woke up in the early morning, and the tide was all the way up the beach. There were some lights from buildings farther along. I sat up, took a deep breath, and stilled my breathing. I could hear the waves rolling up onto the shore in the moonlight. I thought of the hyraxes and aardvark and elephants. I let my mind drift, looking for what I could not see. I waited. Nothing. I kept waiting.

I was floating, drifting above a waving moonlit grassy plain. I was grazing, moving the grass toward my mouth with my prehensile muzzle, digging out the tough interconnected roots, leaving a path through the sea grass that would slowly fill in from the side. I walked along the bottom with two flippers, not using my flukes. Every couple minutes I drifted upward to the surface to breath. I had two nostrils at the tip of my muzzle which I could open. I didn't move very fast but had nothing to run away from.

Now that I knew where and when to look, I could see their noses amid the swells in the dim light when they came up to breath. There were six in this group. A few decades ago there were thousands of dugongs here along the coast in small groups and larger gatherings. Now they were rarely seen because there were so few, and also because they now foraged at night instead of during the day. They are related to elephants and hyraxes and live as long as humans. One in this group was old enough to remember the large herds.

It was late when I got back to Tanga the next day. There was a large noisy gathering of young people behind a church, so I went there to see if they had any free food. They didn't. There was much drumming and dancing. I hung back and watched. After a while a girl who had been trying not too successfully to follow along in one of the women's dances ended up standing next to me. She asked why I wasn't dancing. I said I didn't know anyone here and didn't want to intrude. She said she didn't either, but it had been okay. So a little later I edged forward and joined in one of the men's dances. I just followed along and didn't try to show off too much. Everyone seemed friendly. Afterward she was still standing where I had left her, so I went back over and thanked her for encouraging me. She said she thought I had danced well. I didn't know what to say. She asked where I was from. I said was returning to Nairobi from working in Dar es Salaam. She led me over to the next street, away from the noise, so we could hear each other better. We found our way onto the rooftop of a store that was closed. It was overlooked by a building on one side, but only one window was lit, and it had the blind down. Anyway, once we took our clothes off, we wouldn't show up very well against the dark roof. We sat there in the moonlight listening to the drums and the waves breaking.

She said she wasn't Christian, she was Muslim. She had told her brother was going to visit her friend and then gone to the dance at the church instead. She was from Somalia. Her people had been taken there as slaves hundreds of years ago by the Arabs, the people who had taken most of the slaves from Africa as well as many from Europe. Due to the war her people were now returning slowly as refugees to the land from which they had originally come. She was living in one of the settlements that had been set up by the government. I told her that my people had migrated east to escape being captured and sold as slaves to the Portuguese. Much earlier, both our peoples had migrated from west African as part of the great Bantu migration, which had spread their cropping, hunting and iron culture eastward and southward. Now the various Bantu languages were spoken all across the continent. It was like the so called barbarian invasions that spread the Indo European culture and languages across Europe.

She didn't seem impressed by my knowledge. Maybe she already knew. Maybe she had other things on her mind. She still seemed to be looking at me expectantly, so I kissed her. She pushed me back and climbed on top of me. She spread her legs and ground her crotch against my expectant penis. I reached up and put my arms tightly around her, trying to hold her still. I didn't want to make too much noise. When she had calmed down somewhat, I relaxed my grip and kept kissing her. I rubbed her back through her orange print dress from where I was underneath her and felt the muscles along either side of her spine gradually relax. At the bottom of her spine I felt the muscles of her buttocks contracting and relaxing as she kept up her movements. I reached around farther, under her dress, seeking her clitoris. There wasn't one. I felt all up and down her slit as our tongues wrestled with each other. She was missing her clitoris, its covering, and the inner lips of her vagina. She was smooth from her soft pubic hair all the way down to her anus, with just the openings of her urethra and vagina between her outer lips. It was worse than some types of female genital cutting, not as bad as others.

I had never been with a girl who was circumcised before. When I was younger I had been with girls before they were initiated, and since then only with girls from school and others who had somehow avoided it. It was done to prevent women from having pleasure during sex and so be easier to control. It didn't seem to be working. I pushed her up so I could take off my shirt. She undid her yellow head covering and pulled off her dress, then stood up so I could wriggle out of my shorts and put them under me. She was tall and fairly thin with small breasts. She kept her hair short. I put on the condom I had palmed. When I lay back again, she squatted on my chest and leaned forward, presenting me with her breast. I sucked the hard nipple into my mouth and nibbled it. This drove her wild. Her breast was much more sensitive than her abused genitals. She sat up again and impaled herself on my attentive penis. She was hot and wet and tight and totally deserving of attention. She moved slowly up and down on her powerful legs, her feet firmly planted on either side of me. She glistened in the moonlight as she gasped for breath. She gradually increased her speed, and her dark nipples started bobbing. She shifted her feet and leaned forward onto me. I thrust my tongue into the corner of her jaw, and she gasped with pleasure, holding me tighter and pressing her hands into my back. I thrust upward against her pumping hips. My penis squished loudly into her. She gasped with each shared stoke. I bit her ear, and she exploded. I went off like a skyrocket, filling her with burst after burst, until I was spent and glittering sparkles drifted slowly downward.

She had to get home before it got too late, and I had to find a more sheltered spot to sleep. The next day I caught the bus for Mombasa and made my way back to Nairobi. I still couldn't find a job, but my drumming had improved, and I did well enough on the street that I was invited to join a group that had a decent location just a couple blocks outside one of the tourist areas. They let me borrow an actual drum instead using of the white plastic yogurt bucket I had scrounged. Things went well for a while until the Muslim girl's brother showed up from Tanga. He found me on the street and said I had stolen his sister. She had disappeared, and he thought she had come here. The people around kept him from getting to me. He eventually left. I knew he would be back, so I thanked the group for the loan of the drum and left.

On the street there really wasn't anywhere he wouldn't be able to find me. There were enough people who knew where I was from that he would be able to find my village if I went back there. I didn't want to bring them trouble. There was one person who I thought could help me, but I didn't know where to find him. I went back the Indian restaurant and asked one of the people I knew there to take a message to Mira. She sent back a note telling me how the find the brother of the drummer who had found me on the street. I had only seen him a few times, but he was willing to help me. I didn't know much about his people except that they spoke a language I couldn't understand and were noted for their runners. He had a cousin he was close to who ran in marathons in America. I knew enough traditional medicine and western biology that he was willing to take me with him on his next trip. I found ways to make myself useful in his village until it was time for us to go. I helped take care of him while he was in America and then stayed behind with some other Kenyans who were living here when he went home. I played a borrowed drum on the street, gave some lessons, and worked at whatever jobs I could find.

Enough.

When I finished Eliska had tears in her eyes. She said it was beautiful. I was a born storyteller. She said I should sing. I said I couldn't. She said nonsense, I had a good voice, and she had heard me chanting in my mind at the drum circle. I said in Kenya everybody chanted, but I would think about it. She said there were some people she'd like me to meet. I hesitated, but she said she thought it was important, so I agreed. We had some chicken salad sandwiches with green peppers and onions for lunch, and she dropped me off downtown on her way to rehearsal. Maybe I could try singing an African chant. It would be different from what other people did. I could try writing something that sounded sort of like a chant. It didn't have to be good, it just had to be interesting. If people were interested, they would stop and listen. If they stopped, they were more likely to throw some money into my drum bag.

It was evening several days later when I went with Eliska and her cello to her chamber music group. It was at a large apartment with an upright grand piano and a loveseat in the living room and not much else, just some big pillows on the floor and two chairs from the kitchen with music stands in front of them. I met Paul, who sounded vaguely Caribbean, Judy, a tall Chinese American, Mark, who was white, Linda, who was short with short red hair that looked natural and pale blue eyes, and Jose, who was from Brazil. I could tell because his name was pronounced with a J instead of an H sound. These five shared the apartment. Eliska's friends Thom and Owl were also there. Owl was small, and dark skinned for a white person, with brown hair, and Thom was noticeably younger than the others, about my age. Everyone was surprised when I went over and shook hands with the other person there. They tried to hide it, so I didn't say anything. He said his name was Max. Owl sat on the loveseat between Thom and Linda, who had light brown freckles over much of her fair and somewhat ample flesh. I sat on the floor with Max, Jose and Mark. Paul sat down at the piano. Eliska got out her cello, and Judy sat in the other chair and tuned her violin.

They started with the second trio for violin, cello and piano by Shostakovich, op 67. A slow theme starts out very high on the violin, and then goes up. The cello enters playing the same theme, also in a high register, and then the piano enters playing it underneath them. The fugue goes on for a while, then it gets faster as the cello and violin start playing repeated notes while the piano does stuff with the theme. The piano starts playing repeated notes, the theme moves to the violin, and the cello starts playing pizzicato. Things get mixed and faster. Everybody starts doing different stuff. Then both strings play pizzicato. The piano makes a comment. The strings play the theme together and the piano supports them. Fragments of the theme are tossed around. The movement winds down and closes.

I knew what the piece sounded like because Eliska did, but that's not the same as actually hearing it played. They talked about what they had done and what should be done and went over bits of it. The second movement is faster and shorter, in triple time, with a theme based on repeated notes that move around.

The third movement starts with the piano slowly banging out chords until the violin enters with a lyrical theme that wanders around. The cello enters with the theme. By the time it finishes we're halfway through the movement. They play around with the theme, the piano doesn't do much, and they head into the last movement without stopping, which is a rather disturbing dance of death that starts out slowly and gets faster. The strings start playing pizzicato, which changes into the cello plucking repeated chords on the beat and the violin plucking chords on the offbeat while the piano plays just the melody line louder and softer. The violin picks up theme while the cello keeps going back and forth on the beat. Things get wilder. It quiets down. It gets louder. Things start swirling around. There's a big climax but they keep going softly with what sounds like a fugue on the dance theme. Stuff from the beginning comes back. By now everyone's getting tired. It ends with slow chords on the piano and echoes of the theme high on the violin and on the cello.

It was time for a break. Everyone had tea and biscuits. The rest of us listened while the players discussed the piece. Then Paul got a rest while Eliska and I played them the prelude and fugue from the Bach and Brahms pieces, respectively, that we had played together previously. I had brought my drum. We got kind words from everyone. Eliska told them how I had picked up the music from her mind. No one seemed surprised. Then Thom asked me how many biscuits had been on the plate. It seemed a strange question. I said ten, we had each had one. He asked me to think about it. I did. Mark had brought in the plate and offered it to me first. There had been three in the center and six around the outside. There had been nine biscuits on it. I must have been mistaken about everyone having one. He said no, I had been correct. It had to do with Max. I looked at Max. He was smiling. Thom was serious. The others looked concerned or sat poker faced. Everyone was paying attention. This seemed to be important.

I looked at Max again where he sat on the floor next to me. He was dressed in a white tee shirt, gray pants, and bare feet, more plainly than the others were. It could have been some kind of uniform. I didn't see anything else out of the ordinary. I did sense power in the room, more than came from Eliska and me with our talents, but I felt no menace. I tried to look with the vision the shaman in my village had tried to teach me. Max looked a little like a spirit, but he wasn't. I could tell he was a real person and alive. I reached out my hand and waved it through the space that he occupied. There was nothing there. I heard a couple gasps. He looked surprised and wavered or shimmered for an instant, as if he were about to disappear, then he was just sitting there next to me again, with a bigger smile. I reached out and touched his shoulder. He felt normal, as he had when I shook his hand earlier. I said that Max was here only in spirit. His body was somewhere else. He didn't really take a biscuit or eat it, he only appeared to. I could see him sleeping on a bed in a room. There were others sleeping there too. In this country the bed would be considered narrow and the room small. There were bars on the door and window, and there was an open metal toilet. He was in prison.

Thom said yes, exactly, and everyone was pleased. They hadn't thought I would be able to see Max. Thom could, and Owl could when she was dreaming, but no one else ever had without Thom's help, except for Linda. That was why they hadn't introduced him. They would be happy to explain it all to me some other time, but now there was another piece of music to work on. It turned out to be a strange piece by George Crumb, with mark playing flute this time in place of Judy on violin and Jose doing something inside the piano. Afterward, Paul suggested I come back the next week and play something with them. Everyone thought this was a fine idea, so I agreed. We chose a piece, and Eliska said she would practice it with me, although it didn't seem like I needed to practice. She also said there was something else she wanted to try, and she just blurted it out. I was the only one who was shocked. The others were willing, so I agreed to that too.

On the appointed day I took the bus to Eliska's apartment. We went over the music. Paul arrived, and I talked with him at the kitchen table while Eliska made dinner. Eliska had gotten out the Riesling because Paul liked it, and I had a glass with him. He said he and his housemates had a group marriage that seemed to work. Eliska had joined a group that Owl and Max and Thom were trying to start and seemed to have me in mind as the fifth member. I said oh and looked at her. She pretended to ignore us. I asked about people's special abilities. He said it was just the four of them. I knew about Eliska. He said Thom could read minds. It wasn't like it sounded, because when he merged minds with someone they could also see into his. If he kept his thoughts still and wasn't obvious about it no one noticed, because everyone had the ability to some extent and did it all the time without realizing it. They called it body language or intuition. Nobody knew and few cared where their ideas came from.

Owl could talk to plants and travel through the green, which was how she visited Max in prison. She could also sense insects and other invertebrates. Max was the most unusual. He could directly sense nearby objects and matter down to the atomic level. He could see inside of things, although he described it as being more like taste than like sight. I was past being amazed. I had long accepted what I could do, and now what Eliska could do with music, so now I just thought okay, this is interesting. Paul said they could combine their powers, such as Max being able to sense distant objects when he traveled to them in the dream state with Owl. He asked what my ability was. I told him about my experiences with the hyraxes, aardvark, elephants and dugongs. It didn't seem like much compared to the others. Paul said he thought what I had sensed and figured out about Max was amazing. Maybe I had a better understanding of what I was doing than the others.

Eliska served dinner. She had made a big Czech dumpling, boiled cabbage, and roasted carrots, turnips, onions and peppers. I declined another glass of wine, so she and Paul finished the bottle. I mentioned that carrots were more like the real yams that we had in Kenya than what they called yams in this country, which were really sweet potatoes. Paul asked about tribes. I said there was no tribalism in Africa until white men invented it. It is a vestige of colonialism. Language and culture were used as a means to unite villages, not as a means to make them separate from other villages. Ancestry and descent were not used either. They could not be used, since people from different language and cultural groups intermarried with each other.

The Europeans decided every African must belong to a tribe and every tribe must have a chief, neither of which were true. Different age groups were responsible for different aspects of village life. Anyone who lived long enough became an elder. Leadership within the age groups was informal and based on demonstrated ability, not on parentage or popularity. It had to be, otherwise the group wouldn't survive in the difficult conditions that existed. The Europeans needed there to be chiefs who could be bribed and subverted, so they chose and and supported them. There are always people who want to be in charge. The Europeans destroyed the existing social systems, so the Africans embraced the new system of separate tribes. They needed something. Some different groups had fairly distinct physical types, but even there most people had features that fell somewhere in between. The Europeans arbitrarily assigned everyone to a particular tribe, and then they gave preference to one or more of the tribes so that the people would fight amongst themselves. It worked well and the people are still fighting.

After dinner Thom, Owl and Max blinked into the living room. One minute they weren't there and the next they were. It didn't look like they appeared out of nowhere even though that was what happened, it was more as if they had been there all the time and we were just now noticing them. Eliska said she and Thom had developed a permanent link since they had started having sex. They could contact each other whenever they wanted, and she had just told him we were ready. Owl had had to wait until lights out at the prison before she could fetch Max. Eliska used shared music in our minds to enable Paul and herself to see Max after Owl and Thom had left. It was the Shostakovich trio.

Eliska sat on the sofa and had Max and me sit on either side of her. Paul sat on the floor and started massaging her feet. She had on her red top and shorts again. When she turned slightly to kiss me, Max started rubbing her back and shoulders. She had to move her feet when she turned, and Paul moved with them. It was a bit awkward, but maybe that was part of the point. Her tongue and mine caressed each other. I put my hand on her stomach. She sucked my lower lip into her mouth and nibbled it. My hand slid upward. Max kissed the back or her neck. Paul moved to her ankles. My hand reached her fabric covered breast. I felt it yield to the pressure of my fingers. The nipple was a soft lump. Max reached around with one hand and undid the button of her shorts. He tried to pull the zipper down and couldn't. Eliska reached down and pulled up on the top of her shorts so he could. He slipped his hand inside. I felt her nipple harden under my fingers. Paul shifted from one of her shins to the other. I felt her hips start moving. I squeezed her nipple. Her breathing got faster, and she broke from our kiss. I forced my tongue into the soft spot at the corner of her jaw. Paul was kissing and nuzzling her creamy thighs. She pumped harder against Max's fingers inside her shorts and then came with several loud gasps. We eased up the pressure as she went limp.

She turned the other way and kissed Max. Paul grinned up from where he sat between her legs. I had to move my arm. She leaned forward, put her arms around Paul's neck, and kissed him. When she was finished she stood up, stepped out of her shorts, pulled Max and me up off the sofa, and led us both into the bedroom. Paul followed. She waited until the three of us were undressed and sitting on the bed looking at her with our erections sticking out, then started shifting her weight from one foot the other in a rhythm that matched the music in our heads. The crotch of her red bodysuit was soaked. She slowly lifted her hands as she swayed until they were over her head. Her arms twined together as she slowly spun around. I could see the muscles of her buttocks contracting as her hips swayed and danced. When she was facing us again she lowered one hand and slid a strap off her shoulder as she continued dancing. She lowered the other hand and slid a strap off her other shoulder. She pulled the top of her bodysuit down and let her breasts swing free. She put a thumb under each side of the suit and slowly wriggled her hips out of it, exposing herself to our stares. She lowered it to the floor and stepped out of it. She climbed onto the bed between Paul and me and wriggled into the center. She unrolled a condom over him and pulled his dark glistening body on top of her paleness, spreading her legs wide as she guided his penis into her body.

He enters her and starts slowly banging in and out. I watch from one side and Max from the other. He seemed to find it as fascinating as I did. I suspected he had seen this before. It was not the sort of thing you get tired of quickly. Paul is nearly as dark as I am. Max is a bit lighter though still dark. He is also a bit shorter and heftier than Paul, while I am a bit more wiry. Paul and Eliska play around, Max and I don't do much, and they head into a new movement, which is a rather amazing dance of life that starts out slowly and gets faster. Max and I start playing with ourselves, Max on the beat and me on the offbeat, while Paul plays Eliska louder and softer. My excitement picks up, while Max keeps beating back and forth. Things get wilder. It quiets down. It gets louder. Things start swirling around. There's a big climax but they keep going softly with what seems like a fugue on the dance theme. Stuff from the beginning comes back. By now everyone's getting tired. It ends with slow thrusts by Paul and echoes of a sigh by Eliska.

Paul slid out of her, and she pushed his dark sweating body off her pale one. Max climbed over him to get to Eliska. It didn't seem to be my turn yet. I kept watching. Max entered with new material. She smiled up at him beautifully and pulled him down to her, raising her knees. He kissed her. I felt their tongues squirming around inside their collective mouth. I realized that I had been feeling other people's sensations since sometime earlier in the evening. It was strange, but not as strange as I would have imagined. I was something like with the animals. It wasn't that different from being able to see or hear someone else, and when sex is done properly an orgasm is always shared. Those who don't think sex is ever proper are missing a great deal. I felt Max's penis sliding deeply into Eliska. I felt my own hand cradling my balls. I heard Paul begin to snore softly. I felt Eliska being filled by Max's penis each time it slid into her. She was skimming. After her orgasm with Paul she had quickly come again with Max, and now she was staying at or near orgasm, although her repeated orgasms were mild ones, as Max continued to thrust into her. Max hadn't come yet tonight. He had gotten over his initial excitement while he was watching Eliska and Paul, and now he just kept going and going. I felt it every time the excitement started to build inside his balls, but each time he slowed down slightly. I felt the rhythmic contractions of Eliska's vagina each time she came. I had looked at the bedside clock soon after I realized she wasn't coming down, and it was eighteen minutes before she finally murmured to Max okay, now, and he exploded inside of her.

It was very strange to feel Max's orgasm as if it were my own and yet feel no lessening of the sexual tension that had built up inside me. Eliska pushed his dark sweating body off her pale one, and I had to climb over him to get to her. She said hello and smiled radiantly at me. I slid against her and kissed her. She returned the kiss. I had had the presence of mind to put on a condom while I was waiting my turn. Our hands met on my penis, and we both guided it into her. I looked down into her soft brown eyes. She bit her lip and held my gaze as I began stroking gently in and out of her. Soon she was grunting softly and her breasts bobbled, but she wouldn't let herself come. Her eyes closed briefly and then opened again and continued to stare into mine. She held herself on the edge. I didn't know whether I was tired out or over stimulated. Paul had woken up, and both he and Max were playing with themselves as they watched us. It was seven minutes, an eternal instant, before Eliska let her thrusting increase and quicken. I felt the cum curl up through my abdomen. Her face and chest flushed bright scarlet and she started gasping as a monster orgasm seized her. I splashed into her while she spasmed violently against me, and I felt both Max and Paul shoot out streams of hot cum as they each came once again at the same time she did.

I didn't get pushed off as quickly as Paul and Max had. Max reached for a handy towel and cleaned off himself and the bed and Eliska and me before passing it over to Paul. The bed was reasonably dry when Eliska did push me off next to Max. We lay contemplating. I asked about feeling each others sensations. Max explained that Thom had set up a mind link that enabled us to see him while he was here in the dream state, or at least it was needed for Eliska and Paul to see him. Eliska was able to sustain the link with her music once it was set up. We could mostly control what thoughts we shared or didn't share through the link, but we could only tell the truth as we saw it. It was surprising how many misunderstandings that prevented, and how many it didn't. By sharing perceptions we could also merge our minds to a greater or lesser extent into a group mind. That required some care and emotional maturity to keep from getting lost. I asked why all four of us couldn't share perceptions at the same time? He asked what I was talking about. I said that I could sometimes feel or see what Eliska and Max were feeling or seeing. Perceiving sex from three different viewpoints was surreal, or maybe cubist. But it was intermittent and had only stabilized after Paul had fallen asleep. Now it was gone again.

Max didn't understand. He checked the link he had with me. Paul, who had been watching and listening from over on the other side of Eliska, now said he could no longer see Max. When Max added Paul back into the link, I popped out. We seemed to be back where we started, but I wasn't sharing any thoughts or perceptions. I could still see Max, but I was able to see him anyway. We all thought about it. Paul said he wanted to try something. Suddenly I could pick up Max's and Eliska's thoughts again. Paul said he had stopped listening to the Shostakovich trio in his head and could no longer see Max. He thought I had been in the link earlier only when his concentration wavered while he was paying attention to Eliska. When Max wasn't there he hadn't noticed because he had just assumed that he was. It didn't matter if what he saw was an empty spot on the sofa or bed. When he reappeared it felt like he had been there all the time.

Eliska sat up on the bed and tried linking to me and Paul at the same time, and Max popped out. Now only I could see him, but Paul and I could share thoughts. Eliska said she had had an awareness of Max through his music even before Thom had shown him to her through the mind link. Now she wanted to try something. She closed her eyes, and I felt her listening for his music while holding on to the links with Paul and me. When she opened them again, she gave a little scream and climbed over me and hugged him, knocking him off the bed. I peered over the edge. They had landed in a tangled heap of naked limbs but seemed okay. It wasn't far and the carpet was padded. After a moment they disengaged and climbed back up. I scooted back over to make room. Paul still couldn't see Max, so I dropped out of the link again. They were all surprised no one had noticed this before. Was it just me? Eliska wanted to contact Thom through their permanent link and ask him about it but decided to wait until he and Owl were finished doing what they were doing. Before they were, she changed her mind and decided to wait until later, which was just as well since it was already pretty crowded on the bed. It seemed that Thom had also been excited and inspired by what Eliska had experienced with me. Paul, Eliska and I got ready for sleep. Sometime during the night, Max faded away.

A few days later, ten of us gathered once again in Paul and Judy's apartment for music. This time they started with the trio by George Crumb. It was called Vox Balaenae, voice of the whale. Crumb had specified that the musicians should wear black half masks and suggested deep blue stage lighting. Since they weren't going to perform the piece in public, they wore the masks when they practiced together and had put a blue light bulb in the floor lamp. The individual music stands had separate lighting so the players could see the music. The masks were supposed to depersonalize the performers. It didn't work. It made them stand out more. They looked like three Lone Rangers, which didn't make any sense. Jose and Linda were assisting and didn't wear masks. Crumb also specified that all three instruments should be amplified, which is rarely done in classical music, and which they didn't do since they were playing in a living room, not a concert hall.

The first section is labeled Vocalise for the beginning of time. It starts off with Mark sort of singing, humming or howling into his flute as he plays it in the dim blue light. Sometimes he moans one note into it while fluttering the keys. Other times he plays normally. This went on for three and half minutes. His masked face glowed in the light from his music stand. The piano enters. The pianist is at times supposed to reach into the piano and muffle or strum the stings. Paul couldn't do this on an upright, so Jose stood on a chair next to the piano and reached into the open top to do it for him. He was lit from below by the light that had been placed inside the piano so he could see what he was doing.

The second section is labeled Variations on Sea Time and has six parts. The first is called Sea Theme, and the variations have the names of geological eons or eras. The theme has the cello playing a lyrical melody very high using harmonics, with some strumming on the piano strings while certain keys are depressed but not played. Archeozoic has the cello being bowed or plucked while the other hand slides up or down the fingerboard. Proterozoic has piano keys being played and then the strings touched to produce a buzzing sound, with flute and pizzicato cello. Paleozoic has the piano tinkling and the flute and cello rocking back and forth on different notes. Mesozoic is supposed to have a glass rod placed on the piano strings so that it makes a rattling sound. They couldn't do this on an upright. Jose held a glass rod against the strings, but it wasn't the same. The flute and cello play in unison. Cenozoic has the three instruments doing different things.

The last section is labeled Sea Nocturne for the end of time and is supposed to have four antique cymbals that sound like bells. They are played by the cellist or flautist and start before the end of the previous section. They didn't have these, so Linda played bell sounds on a small synthesizer. The section starts with the cello playing high harmonics and with thumps on piano strings. It has beautiful lyrical passages for all the players. It ends with a very high fading cello note, soft tinkling on the piano, bell chimes, and a few quiet thumps from the cello. The piece made me think of the elephants and their long distance communication using low frequency rumbles through the earth.

It was a complicated piece, and the coordination between Paul and Jose was tricky. They went over some passages again. During the break I watched as Max took a biscuit that also remained on the plate. I picked it up and also asked if I could have a bite of his, to see what would happen. He said no. Thom said Eliska had told him about our inability to have four people in a mind link, but it had seemed to work when they had tried it with Owl and Max. He formed a link with just himself, me and Max, and then added Eliska to it. It did seem to work, but then I saw that Thom wasn't always directly linked to me. He kept shifting around. Sometimes he was linked to Max or Eliska instead, although I could still see him indirectly since I was linked to both of them. It was Eliska who was holding three of us together with the Crumb music we still had in our heads. Thom was on the outside looking in. He agreed that this was the case when I pointed it out to him.

He tried another group of four, using Owl instead of Eliska. Again it seemed to work. I said that this time it was Owl who wasn't really in the link. She said yes she was. She didn't see Max in the dream state without Thom's help unless she was asleep or meditating. I said she did now. She must have picked it up from Thom. She looked at Max. Then she put her arm around him and told me I was right. Since it now seemed that the link didn't work with four people, but did with a larger group, Max tried it with five. That worked. I couldn't find any problems. Six didn't. We backed up and looked more closely at how Thom created a group of five. He started by linking to one person, then added a third. He couldn't add a fourth. By watching carefully, he discovered that what he was doing was reaching out from within the group of three and individually linking to one more person. He tried stopping at that point, but the extra link was unstable and collapsed after fifteen or twenty seconds, like a soap bubble. When he pulled in a fifth person, that person formed a group of two with the fourth person, and that group of two spontaneously merged with the group of three.

Thom tried six again. He formed a group of three, reached out and formed another group of three, but they wouldn't merge. He said they were too evenly balanced and kept sliding off each other. After fifteen seconds or so the second group of three fell apart, or if Eliska was holding it together, Thom lost contact with it. Seven didn't work. Eight did, groups of five and three would merge. Nine and ten didn't. Mark pointed out that it was Fibonacci numbers that worked. These are from the Fibonacci sequence, which is 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 etc, in which each term is formed by adding together the previous two. The ratio between adjacent numbers approaches the golden mean. Apparently, groups wouldn't merge if they were too different in size or too close in size. Thom said that felt right. One and one only worked because the energy involved was so low, and it was the hardest link to set up. Groups of five and three couldn't be held apart for long if they were being maintained by the same person.

Why had Thom not noticed any of this before? He said at first he had only formed groups of two or three. The first time he had shown Max to anyone, there had been five people. The next night at dinner, there had been thirteen. He hadn't tried four until recently when Eliska joined his group. That must really have been shifting groups of three or of two and two, but no one had noticed. There had been nine people sometimes when Eliska came to play chamber music. That could have been only eight in the link at any one time. He, Owl, Linda, and now Eliska could see Max on their own. The others tended not to notice when they couldn't see him. The whole thing was strange.

We decided we had spent enough time on this for now and got ready for the next piece of music. It was Haydn's string quartet op 33 no 3 in C, except we were playing it on kalimba, flute, drum and cello. Mark's flute on the second violin part didn't have the proper range, but neither did the kalimba or drum, and we thought it would fit in better with the African instruments. The kalimba or likembe is a thumb piano, and Max's was tuned to a western musical scale of G. We could have tried op 33 no 5 in G, but it had a lot of repeated notes which wouldn't work well on the kalimba. Max would have to work around the F's in the C scale, which he couldn't play, and the many C's in the piece that were sharped, but it also had a lot of F sharps which he could play.

The quartet starts with the flute and drum playing fast repeated notes, which sound sort of like birds and which was easy for me, then the kalimba comes in with a falling melody and the cello with a rising base line. The repeated notes keep coming back. The kalimba has some descending notes with the cello, then a descending figure. Later it trades repeated notes in half time with the flute and drum. I embellished the rhythm of the viola part on my drum in ways suggested by the melody, which I couldn't play. The movement continues like this and ends with the falling melody on the kalimba and chords which Mark had to break up to play on the flute, which was okay since the cello is playing broken chords anyway. The scherzo is short. The adagio is in F so Mark moved up to the first violin part. Max moved back up for the fast rondo, which bounces around using repeated notes and alternating notes. I could do repeated notes and alternating notes on my drum. Not the right ones, but close enough. Rhythm is the most important part of music. If you have rhythm and leave out the melody, you still have music. If you keep the notes of the melody and leave out the rhythm, you just have noise.

We were all satisfied with the results. The piece had enough rhythm for me to work off of and create something that fit in. Max had just played most of the F naturals as F sharps and the C sharps as C naturals without the effect being too jarring. Mark and Paul couldn't decide whether it made the work less interesting or more edgy. Linda liked my drumming. Jose said it made the piece sound more like popular music and competed less with the melody the others were playing. I noted that their rhythm wasn't steady, it wandered all over, like all western classical music, and not just in places where there were deliberate tempo changes. I said white people pay so much attention to melody that they don't develop a good sense of rhythm. For some reason they all found this funny. They explained it to me and it still didn't make any sense. Eliska and Mark wanted me to point out places where I thought there were problems, so we went over some sections and tightened them up. Max thought it sounded better, but Mark said something about metronome time and was undecided. In the time left, Judy, Eliska and Paul worked on the Shostakovich trio some more.

Before we broke up, Eliska said that she, Max, Thom and Owl had talked it over and would like to invite me to join their group. Owl said they didn't expect an answer until after I had had sex with her. In answer to my unspoken question she said she trusted Eliska's judgment. They were all very serious. I said I hadn't known them very long but respected them and believed them to be good and clear sighted people. I didn't need a test drive. I would be honored to accept. As with anything else, we would just have to do the best we could and see how things worked out. They acted like this was the best possible answer.

An hour later the five of us gathered in Owl and Thom's apartment. Cranberry juice may not have been other people's idea of the proper celebratory beverage, but there were no other people here. It suited us and looked pretty in the wine glasses. The apartment was on the top floor of an old four story brick walkup, and the full moon was shining in brightly through the large bay window. Owl smiled over the rim of her glass and asked the four of us to bring the mattress out and place it in the moonlight. So we stripped off the covers, each grabbed a corner, and maneuvered it into the living room. Then they finished their cranberry juice and took off their clothes, so I did too. Owl turned off the lights and lay down with Max and Thom. Eliska led me over to the side of the mattress where they had left room for us and pulled me down with her.

I asked about safety. Eliska said Owl and Max had examined all of us earlier with their special abilities and found we were okay. She hoped I didn't mind. I asked about contraception. She said she and Owl used diaphragms. Owl was kissing Thom and Max alternately, and their hands were busy on various parts of her. Lying on her back in the gentle and revealing moonlight, her small breasts had nearly disappeared. She might have looked boyish but for her large nipples, slightly swelling hips, and the smoothness between her legs, below a large patch of pubic hair. She became impatient and pulled Max's larger body on top of and into her. Actually, she sort of scooted under him, toward the edge of the bed. Thom stood up and walked around to sit on the floor beyond them, clearing my view. The muscles in Max's backside contracted as he slowly pumped into her. Hers did too as she rose to meet him.

Elisha had also been watching but now turned to look at me. Her fair skin glowed in the moonlight that caressed it. The head of the mattress was pushed into the bay of the window, and we could see out into the night on both sides over the low sills. We saw some stars in spite of the moon and the streetlights below us. I felt the air moving through the open windows. Tree crickets and katydids were loud in the tops of the linden trees. We heard an occasional car pass. I leaned down and kissed her. Our moist lips slid over each other. Our tongues met. I felt my body pressed along the contours of her side. My erection poked into her hip. I could smell her sex and Owl's. She pulled me on top of and into her. The muscles of my backside contracted as I slowly pumped into her. Hers did too as she rose to meet me. My penis slid over her inner surfaces. The moonlight moved slowly over us. I don't know how much time passed.

Owl and Max were moving faster next to us. Her breathing got louder. She wasn't screaming when her orgasm hit, but it lasted several seconds and anyone walking past on the sidewalk below would be able to tell what was going on. Max slowed a little and kept going. She came again. The theoretical listener waiting outside to see if anything else would happen was rewarded. Max slowed again, then sped up and came in breathy gasps. When he recovered, he climbed off Owl, then stood up and walked around to sit on the floor by Eliska and me. Thom crawled onto the bed next to Owl. My attention went back to the woman under me as she tighten her grip and had another orgasm. A short while later I was aware that the movements next to us had resumed.

Max had his erection back but seemed content to sit there forever watching us and the others. Even so, the next time I felt Eliska approaching orgasm I let the sensation well up inside of me and came soon after she did, gasping as I thrust into her. We lay holding on to each other for several moments, then I kissed her for another moment, before standing up and walking around to sit on the floor by the other side of the bed, which seemed to be the thing to do, while Max moved up onto the bed alongside Eliska. All five of our minds were linked together, and we were partially in the dreaming. The moonlight coming it through the windows cast leaf shadows from nonexistent acacia trees across Owl and Thom. The shadows shifted slowly in the breeze. His buttocks pressed into her as she squished. A thin sheen of sweat glittered on their bodies. She was making soft appreciative noises. I fingered my balls gently. The musky scent of sex was everywhere. I could feel Max inside of Eliska and their bodies moving together. I could feel Owl with Thom inside her and their weights shifting and their hips surging and their arms holding each other. Something welled up from deep inside of Owl, washed over her, and left her gasping. Thom was caught in the undertow and swept away.

Owl turned to look at me when Thom stood up and walked around to sit next to Eliska and Max. I was ready and moved up next to her diminutive body. She ran her fingers down along the outside of my arm and gazed up into my eyes. I studied her face. The leaf shadows were gone but now her ears looked somewhat pointed. I kissed her shoulder and tasted salt. She was still looking at me expectantly, so I put my hand on her breast. I massaged it and rolled the nipple between my fingers. That seemed to be enough for now. She closed her eyes. It felt soft and yielding like a breast although it was layer instead of a globe. I moved down and sucked the other stiff nipple into my mouth. She writhed. I moved back up and kissed the side of her neck, the corner of her jaw. I nibbled her earlobe, all the time tasting her salt and aware of her scent. I kissed her lips. She kissed me back and parted her legs farther. I climbed between them and guided myself into her. She sighed and smiled in the moonlight. I slid my penis slowly up her vagina until my pubic hair ground against hers. We kissed again and started our dance.

Sometime later Owl and I were aware of Eliska and Max gasping next to us on the bed as they both came. Sometime after that we were aware that Max had walked around to the foot of the bed for a different view and Thom was now on top of Eliska. Sometime after that I was aware of Owl gasping and thrusting under me as she came. Sometime after that I was aware of myself gasping and thrusting as the cum surged inside of me and I pumped it out into Owl. Sometime after that we all watched Eliska gasp and thrust as Thom made her come one more time, and then Thom gasped and thrust and we all felt him coming inside of her.

Each person is unique. Technically, sex is always between at least two persons. It is the only activity that involves all the senses, except possibly eating. With all the combinations of incoming information, persons, and circumstance, no two experiences of sex can ever be the same. However, there are only so many ways of saying gasping and thrusting, although there are more than you might think. So this description doesn't really describe anything. Unless you've been there, you have no idea what I'm talking about. And even so, without some special ability, how much do you actually remember? Each time, if you weren't so busy, you'd step back and say oh yeah, this is what it's like. The closest things to sex are shaking hands, as ritualized physical contact, sneezing, as a complex physical reflex, and, for men, peeing. But you can't use any of these to describe it. Do you keep track of how many people you've shaken hands with? Are you embarrassed if you've shaken hands with every person in the room?

I said she should have told me she was pregnant. Owl said I was right, she was sorry. She didn't even think of it. She tended to forget about it since she was only pregnant in the dreaming. I asked if she had been tricked by a demon disguised as a man? She said not exactly. It was Max's fault. Max didn't say anything. He didn't look angry or ashamed or surprised or amused, so I didn't know what to make of her statement. She said they had first had sex in the dreaming. It was in his cell while he and his cellmates were asleep. She hadn't thought to use any protection since she wasn't really there. His ability to see things that were really small and to see inside things had enabled her to watch the actual moment of conception. He had known about her ability to travel through the green and to inhabit plants and insects, but she hadn't known about his or that he had one. The embryo had stopped growing and hadn't started again until Thom became the second father. The same thing had happened with Eliska. They hadn't known whether to consider her a father or a mother until they had discovered that some of her mitochondria had been transfered to the embryo, along with her chromosomes. I said I didn't want to sound vain, but what about me? She said they had all better go and check.

She said we should relax and close our eyes. We had been sitting or leaning up on the bed, so we all lay back down. There wasn't room for the five of us on one queensize mattress, but we did it anyway. Thom held us in the mind link and merged our awareness. Max moved our shared awareness to a physical location above the bed. We could see ourselves scrunched together. He moved us over Owl's tangle of pubic hair. The others saw it as curly and black. I could tell it was wavy and brown. We started to descend. It became a field of grain, a thicket of brush, a tropical forest towering over us. Her legs were pressed together somewhere off in the distance, but it didn't matter. We sailed through her labia, vagina and uterus. There was a developing embryo implanted in the wall and an awful lot of sperm swimming around.

As we watched, one of the sperm butted into the embryo and was drawn into one of its cells. Inside the cell, the head opened up and, except for eight chromosomes, the entire sperm simply disappeared. The chromosomes moved by no mechanism toward the nucleus. As they penetrated the nuclear membrane, eight of the existing chromosomes just vanished. Owl and Max examined some other cells, and those cells also had copies of the new chromosomes. They asked permission and compared compared our chromosomes to those of the embryo. It had ten each from Owl, Max and Thom, eight from Eliska, and eight new ones from me. We watched as cells divided and suspended growth resumed. Owl said the embryo had stopped growing three times before. She hoped the waiting was over.

We returned to ourselves and sat up again. I said it was a god. Owl said what? I said it was a god, one of the powers of the earth and sky, but it wasn't any god I knew. She asked how did I know it was a god? I said during my uncompleted training as a shaman I had encountered powers. This was the same thing. She asked shouldn't it be a goddess? I said I didn't know, perhaps. She asked did it have something to do with the talents we each had? I said probably, but I didn't know in what way. She asked did she have any say in what was happening? I said it was connected to our gifts, and gifts could be refused or returned. She said that sounded dangerous. I said extremely. She asked the others what they thought. Thom said our abilities had a purpose, and the purpose had been positive so far. He thought that would continue to be true. Eliska said her music was who she was. She would be unable to give it up. Max said it was up to Owl. It affected all of us, but he would go along with whatever she decided. Owl looked at me. I said I would follow my path wherever it led. Choices are not always clear, but people make them whether they realize it or not. Owl said she didn't know whose choice it was, but for now she would continue to wait.

We brought in the covers and all slept for a while. At one point Eliska rolled over, and Thom and I, on the outside, fell out. We would need better coordination. A little later both she and Max left. At the beginning of the next month I moved my clothes, my drum, and a few books, everything I owned, into Owl and Thom's apartment. It was bigger but still cheaper than Eliska's nice apartment, and more of the group was there. I expected to spend time in both places.

Enough.

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