Comme tous les songe-creux, je confondis le désenchantement avec la vérité.
Jean-Paul Sartre

I emerge into my memories of life at the age of twenty. I was a soldier, recently released from boot camp, being marched by an escouade of black-cap military policemen to the naval compound in Jethra harbor. The war was approaching the end of its three thousandth year and I was serving in a conscript army.

I marched mechanically, staring at the back of the man's head in front of me. The sky was dark grey with cloud and a stiff cold wind streamed in from the sea. My awareness of life leapt into being around me. I knew my name, I knew where we had been ordered to march, I knew or could guess where we would be going after that. I could function as a soldier. This was my moment of birth into consciousness.

Marching uses no mental energy—the mind is free to wander, if you have a mind. I record these words some years later, looking back, trying to make sense of what happened. At the time, the moment of awareness, I could only react, stay in step.

Of my childhood, the years leading up to this moment of mental birth, little remains. I can piece together the fragments of a likely story: I was probably born in Jethra, university town and capital city on the southern coast of our country. Of my parents, brothers or sisters, my education, any history of childhood illnesses, friends, experiences, travels, I remember nothing. I grew to the age of twenty; only that is certain.

And one other thing, useless to a soldier. I knew I was an artist.

How could I be sure of that, trudging along with the other men, in a phalanx of dark uniforms, kitbags, clanking mess-tins, steel helmets, boots, stamping down a puddled road with a chill wind in our faces?

I knew that in the area of blankness behind me was a love of paintings, of beauty, of shape and form and color. How had I gained this passion? What had I done with it? Aesthetics were my obsession and fervor. What was I doing in the army? Somehow this totally unsuitable candidate must have passed medical and psychological tests. I had been drafted, sent to boot camp; somehow a drill sergeant had trained me to become a soldier.

Here I was, marching to war.

I was assigned to a mess-deck below the waterline, already hot and stinking when we boarded, soon crowded and noisy as well.

I withdrew into myself, while sensations of life coursed maddeningly through me. Who was I? How had I come to this place? Why could I not remember what I had been doing even the previous day?

But I was able to function, equipped with knowledge of the world, with working ability to use my equipment, I knew the other men in my escadron and I understood some of the aims and history of the war. It was only myself I could not remember. For the first day, as we waited in our deck for other detachments to board the ship, I listened in to the talk of the other men, hoping mainly for insights about myself, but when none of those was revealed I settled instead for finding out what concerned them. Their concerns would be mine.

Like all soldiers they were complaining, but in their case the complaints were tinged with real apprehension. It was the prospect of the three thousandth anniversary of the outbreak of war that was the problem. They were all convinced that they were going to be caught up in some major new offensive, an assault intended to resolve the dispute one way or another. Some of them thought that because there were still more than three years to go until the anniversary the war would be ended before then. Others pointed out cynically that our four-year term of conscription was due to end a few weeks after the millennium. If a big offensive was in progress we would never be allowed out until it was over.

Like them, I was too young for fatalism. The seed of wanting to escape from the army, to find some way to discharge myself, had been sown.

I barely slept that night, wondering about my past, worrying about my future.

Our ship passed them all, weaving a way between the clustering islands. I watched from the rail, enchanted by the view.

As the long shipboard days passed slowly I found myself drawn again and again to the upper deck, where I would find a place to stand and stare, usually alone. So close to home but beyond the blocking mass of Seevl, the islands slipped past, out of reach, this endless islandscape of vivid colors and glimpses of other places, distant and shrouded in haze. The ship ploughed on steadily through the calm water, the massed soldiery crammed noisily within, few of the men so much as even glancing away to see where we were.

The days went by and the weather grew noticeably warmer. The beaches I could see now were white and fringed with tall trees, tiny houses visible in the shade beyond. The reefs that protected many of the islands were brilliantly multicolored, jagged and encrusted with shells, breaking the sea-swell into spumes of white spray. We passed ingenious harbors and large coastal towns clinging to spectacular hillsides, saw pluming volcanoes and rambling, rock-strewn mountain pastures, skirted islands large and small, lagoons and bays and river estuaries.

It was common knowledge that it was the people of the Dream Archipelago who had caused the war, though as you passed through the Midway Sea the peaceful, even dreamy aspect of the islands undermined this certainty. The calm was only an impression, an illusion borne of the distance between ship and shore. To keep us alert on our long southerly voyage the army mounted many compulsory shipboard lectures. Some of these recounted the history of the struggle to achieve armed neutrality in which the islands had been engaged for most of the three millennia of the war.

Now they were by consent of all parties neutral, but their geographical location—the Midway Sea girdled the world, separating the warring countries of the northern continent from their chosen battlefields in the uninhabited southern polar land—ensured that military presence in the islands was perpetual.

I cared little for any of that. Whenever I was able to get away to the upper deck I would stare in rapt silence at the passing diorama of islands. I tracked the course of the ship with the help of a torn and probably out-dated map I had found in a ship's locker and the names of the islands chimed in my consciousness like a peal of bells: Paneron, Salay, Temmil, Mesterline, Prachous, Muriseay, Demmer, Piqay, the Aubracs, the Torquils, the Serques, the Reever Fast Shoals, and the Coast of Helvard's Passion.

Each of these names was evocative to me. Reading the names off the map, identifying the exotic coastlines from fragments of clues—a sudden rise of sheer cliffs, a distinctive headland, a particular bay—made me think that everywhere in the Dream Archipelago was already embedded in my consciousness, that somehow I derived from the islands, belonged in them, had dreamed of them all my life. In short, while I stared at the islands from the ship I felt my artistic sensibilities reviving. I was startled by the emotional impact on me of the names, so delicate and suggestive of unspecified sensual pleasures, out of key with the rest of the coarse and manly existence on the ship. As I stared out across the narrow stretches of water that lay between our passing ship and the beaches and reefs I would quietly recite the names to myself, as if trying to summon a spirit that would lift me up, raise me above the sea and carry me to those tide-swept strands.

Some of the islands were so large that the ship sailed along parallel with their coastlines for most of the day, while others were so small they were barely more than half-submerged reefs which threatened to rip at the hull of our elderly ship.

Small or large, all the islands had names. As we passed one I could identify on my map I circled the name, then later added it to an ever-growing list in my notebook. I wanted to record them, count them, note them down as an itinerary so that one day I might go back and explore them all. The view from the sea tempted me.

There was only one island stop for our ship during that long southward voyage.

My first awareness of the break in our journey was when I noticed that the ship was heading towards a large industrialized port, the installations closest to the sea seemingly bleached white by the cement dust spilling from an immense smoking factory that overlooked the bay. Beyond this industrial area was a long tract of undeveloped shoreline, the tangle of rainforest briefly blocking any further sight of civilization. Then, after rounding a hilly promontory and passing a high jetty wall, a large town built on a range of low hills came suddenly into sight, stretching away in all directions, my view of it distorted by the shimmering heat that spread out from the land across the busy waters of the harbor. We were of course forbidden from knowing the identity of our stop, but I had my map and I already knew the name.

The island was Muriseay, the largest of the islands in the Archipelago and one of the most important.

It would be hard to underestimate the impact this discovery had on me. Muriseay's name came swimming up out of the blank pool that was my memory.

At first it was just an identifying word on the map: a name printed in letters larger than the ones used for other islands. It puzzled me. Why should this word, this foreign name, mean something to me? I had been stirred by the sight of the other islands, but although the resonances were subtle I had felt no close identification with any of them.

Then we approached the island and the ship started to follow the long coastline. I had watched the distant land slip by, affected more and more, wondering why.

When we came to the bay, to the entrance to the harbor, and I felt the heat from the town drifting across the quiet water towards us, something at last became clear to me.

I knew about Muriseay. The knowledge came to me as a memory from the place where I had no memory.

Muriseay was something or somewhere I had known, or it represented something I had done, or experienced, as a child. It was a whole memory, discrete, telling me nothing about the rest. It involved a painter who had lived on Muriseay and his name was Rascar Acizzone.

Rascar Acizzone? Who was that? Why did I suddenly remember the name of a Muriseayan painter when otherwise I was a hollow shell of amnesia?

I was able to explore this memory no further: without warning all troops were mustered to billets and with the other men who had drifted to the upper decks I was forced to return to the mess-decks. I descended to the bowels of the ship resentfully. We were kept below for the rest of the day and night, as well as for much of the day that followed.

Although I suffered in the airless, sweltering hold with all the others, it gave me time to think. I closed myself off, ignored the noise of the other men and silently explored this one memory that had returned.

When the larger memory is blank, anything that suddenly seems clear becomes sharp, evocative, heavy with meaning. I gradually remembered my interest in Muriseay without learning anything else about myself.

I was a boy, a teenager. Not long ago, in my short life. I learned somehow of a colony of artists who had gathered in Muriseay Town the previous century. I saw reproductions of their work somewhere, perhaps in books. I investigated further and found that several of the originals were kept in the city's art gallery. I went there to see them for myself. The leading painter, the eminence within the group, was the artist called Rascar Acizzone.

It was Acizzone's work which inspired me.

Details continued to clarify themselves. A coherent exactness emerged from the gloom of my forgotten past. Rascar Acizzone developed a painting technique he called tactilism. A tactilist work used a kind of pigment that had been developed some years before, not by artists but by researchers into ultrasound microcircuitry. A range of dazzling colors became available to artists when certain patents expired and for a brief period there had been a vogue for paintings that used the garish but exciting ultrasound primaries.

Most of these early works were little more than pure sensationalism: colors were blended synaesthetically with ultrasonics to shock, alarm or provoke the viewer. Acizzone's work began as the others lost interest, consigning themselves to the minor artistic school that soon became known as the Pre-Tactilists. Acizzone used the pigments to more disturbing effect than anyone before him. His glowing abstracts—large canvases or boards painted in one or two primary colors, with few shapes or images to be seen—appeared at a casual first look, or from a distance, or when seen as reproductions in books, to be little more than arrangements of colors. Closer up or, better still, if you made physical contact with the ultrasonic pigments used in the originals, it became apparent that the concealed images were of most profoundly and shockingly erotic nature. Detailed and astonishingly explicit scenes were mysteriously evoked in the mind of the viewer, inducing an intense charge of sexual excitement. I discovered a set of long-forgotten Acizzone abstracts in the vaults of the museum in Jethra and by the laying on of the palms of my hands I entered the world of vicarious carnal passion. The women depicted by Acizzone were the most beautiful and sensual I had ever seen, or known, or imagined. Each painting created its own vision in the mind of the viewer. The images were always exact and repeatable, but they were unique, being partially created as an individual response to the sensual longing of the observer.

Not much critical literature about Acizzone remained, but what little I could find seemed to suggest that everyone experienced each painting differently.

I discovered that Acizzone's career had ended in failure and ignominy: soon after his work was noticed he was rejected by the art establishment figures, the public notables, the moral guardians, of his time. He was hounded and execrated, forced to end his days in exile on the closed island of Cheoner. With most of his originals hidden, and a few more dispersed away from Muriseay to the archives of mainland galleries, Acizzone never worked again and sank into obscurity.

As a teenage aesthete I cared nothing about his scandalous reputation. All I understood was that the few paintings of his that were hidden away in the cellars of the Jethran gallery evoked such lustful images in my mind that I was left weak with unfocused desire and dizzy with amorous longings.

That was the whole bright clarity of my unlocated memory. Muriseay, Acizzone, tactilist masterpieces, concealed paintings of secret sex.

Who was I who had learned of this? The boy was gone, grown into a soldier. Where was I when it happened? There must have been a wider life I once lived, but none of those memories had survived.

Once I had been an aesthete; now I was a foot-soldier. What kind of life was that?

Now we were moored in Muriseay Town, just outside the harbor wall. We fretted and strained, wanting to escape from our sweltering holds. Then:

Shore leave.

The news circulated around us faster than the speed of sound. The ship was soon to leave its mooring outside the harbor and dock against the quay. We would have thirty-six hours ashore. I cheered with the others. I yearned to find my past and lose my innocence in Muriseay.

Four thousand men were released and we hurried ashore. Most of them rushed into Muriseay Town in search of whores.

I rushed along with them, in quest of Acizzone.

There in the dock area, after a fruitless quest that sent me dashing through the streets to find Acizzone's beautiful Muriseayan women, I finished up in a dancing club. I was unready for Muriseay, had no idea of how to find what I was seeking. I roamed about the remoter quarters of the town, lost in narrow streets, shunned by the people who lived there. They saw only my uniform. I was soon footsore and disillusioned by the foreignness of the town, so I felt relieved when I discovered that my wanderings had brought me back to the harbor.

Our troopship, floodlit in the night, loomed over the concrete aprons and wharves.

I noticed the dancing club when I came across the dozens of troops thronging around the entrance. Wondering what was attracting them, I pushed through the crowd and went inside.

The large interior was dark and hot, crammed to the walls with human bodies, filled with the endless throbbing beat of synthesized rock. My eyes were dazzled by the colored lasers and spotlights flashing intensely from positions close to the ceiling. No one was dancing. At points around the walls, young women stood on glinting metal platforms head-height above the crowds, their naked, oil-glossed bodies picked out by glaring white spotlights. Each of them held a microphone against her lips and was speaking unexcitedly into it, pointing down at certain of the men on the dance floor.

As I pushed my way into the central area I was spotted by them. At first, in my inexperience, I thought they were waving to me or greeting me in some other way. I was tired and disappointed after my long walk around the town and I raised a hand in weary response. The young woman on the platform closest to me had a voluptuous body: she stood with her feet wide apart and her pelvis thrust forward, glorying in the revelation of her nakedness by the intrusive light. When I waved she moved suddenly, leaning forward on the metal rail around her platform so that her huge breasts dangled temptingly towards the men below. The spotlight source instantly shifted—a new beam flashed up from behind and below her, garishly illuminating her large buttocks and casting her shadow brightly on the ceiling. She spoke more urgently into her microphone, jabbing her hand in my direction.

Alarmed by being paid special attention, I moved deeper into the press of uniformed male bodies, hoping to lose myself in the crowd. Within a few seconds, though, a number of women had converged on me from different sides, reaching out through the jam of bodies to take me by the arms. Each of them was wearing a radio headset, with a pin-mike suspended close in front of her lips. Soon I was surrounded by them. They led me irresistibly across to one side.

While they continued to press around me, one of them flicked her fingers in front of my face, her thumb rubbing acquisitively across her fingertips.

I shook my head, embarrassed and frightened.

"Money!" the woman said loudly.

"How much?"

I hoped that money would let me escape from them.

"Your leave pay." She rubbed her fingers again.

I found the thin fold of military banknotes the black-cap marshals had given me as I disembarked. As soon as I pulled them from my hip pocket she snatched them. With a swift motion she passed the money to one of the women I suddenly saw were sitting behind a long table in the shadowy recess by the edge of the dance floor. Each of them was noting down the amounts taken from every man in a kind of ledger, then slipping the banknotes out of sight.

It had all happened so quickly that I had barely taken in what they wanted. By now, though, because of the close and suggestive way the women were standing against me, there was little doubt what they were offering, even demanding. None of them was young, none of them was attractive to me. My thoughts for the last few hours had been with Acizzone's sirens. To be confronted by these aggressive and disagreeable women now was a shock to me.

"You want this?" one of them said, pulling at the loose front of her dress to reveal, fleetingly, a small sagging breast.

"You want this too?" The woman who had taken my money from my hand snatched at the front of her skirt, lifting it to show me what was beneath. In the harsh shadows created by the aggravating lights I could see nothing of her.

They were laughing at me.

"You"ve taken my money," I said. "Now leave me."

"Do you know where you are and what men do in here?"

"Of course."

I managed to struggle away from them and headed back immediately towards the entrance. I was feeling angry and humiliated. I had spent the last few hours dreaming of meeting, or even of simply seeing, Acizzone's wanton beauties. Instead, these hags tormented me with their withered, experienced bodies.

A group of four black-caps had entered the building while this had been going on. I could see them standing in pairs on each side of the entrance. They had withdrawn their synaptic batons and were holding them in the strike position. While aboard the ship I had already seen what happened to the victim if one of those evil sticks was used in anger. I faltered in my step, not wanting to have to push past the men to leave.

As I did so, another whore forced her way through the crowd and took my arm. I glanced at her in a distracted way, fearing the black-caps more than anything.

I was surprised to see her: this one was much younger than the others. She was wearing hardly any clothes to speak of: a tiny pair of shorts and a T-shirt with a torn neckline that hung low across one shoulder, revealing the upper curve of a breast. Her arms were thin. She was not wearing a radio headset. She was smiling towards me and as soon as I looked at her she spoke.

"Don't leave without discovering what we can do," she said, tilting her face to speak against my ear.

"I don't need to know," I shouted.

"This place is the cathedral of your dreams."

"What did you say?"

"Your dreams. Whatever you seek, they are here."

"No, I've had enough."

"Just try what we offer," she said, pressing her face so close to me that her curly hair lightly teased my cheek. "We are here for you, eager to please you. One day you will need what whores provide."

"Never."

The black-caps had moved to block the doorway. I could see that beyond them, in the wide passageway that led back to the street, more of their escouade were arriving. I wondered why they had suddenly appeared at the club, what they were doing. Our leave was not officially over for many more hours. Was there some emergency for which we had to return to the ship? Was this club, so prominently close to where the ship had berthed, off-limits for some perverse reason? Nothing was clear. I was suddenly frightened of the situation in which I had found myself.

Yet around me the hundreds of other men, all presumably from the same troopship as mine, appeared to show no concern. The racket of the over-amplified music went on, drilling into the mind.

"You can leave this way," the girl said, touching my arm. She pointed towards a dark doorway placed low, beneath a stage area, away from the main entrance.

The black-caps were now moving into the crowd of men, pushing people aside with rough movements of their arms. The synaptic batons wavered threateningly. The young whore had already run down the short flight of steps to the door and was holding it open for me. She beckoned urgently to me. I went quickly to her and through the door. She closed it behind me.

I was in humid semi-darkness and I stumbled on an uneven floor. The air was thick with powerful scents and although I could still hear the pulsating throb of the bass notes of the music there were many other sounds around me. Notably I could hear the voices of other men: shouting, laughing, complaining. Every voice was raised: in anger, excitement, urgency. At odd moments something on the other side of the corridor wall would bash heavily against it.

I gained a sense of chaos, of events being out of control.

We came to a door a short distance along the corridor—she opened it and led me through. I expected to find a bed of some sort, but there was nothing remotely of the boudoir about the room. There was not even a couch, or cushions on the floor. Three wooden chairs stood in a demure line against one wall, but that was all.

She said, "You wait now."

"Wait? What for? And for how long?"

"How long you want for your dreams?"

"Nothing! No time."

"You are so impatient. One minute more, then follow me!"

She indicated yet another door which until that moment I had not noticed, because it had been painted in the same dull-red color as the walls. The weak light from the room's only bulb had helped disguise it further. She went across to it and walked through. As she did so I saw her reach backwards over her head with both arms and remove the torn T-shirt.

I glimpsed her bare, curving back, the small knobs of her vertebrae, then she was gone.

Alone, I paced to and fro. By telling me to wait for one minute had she meant it literally? That I should check my wristwatch or count to sixty? She had thrown me into a state of nervous tension. What more had she to do in that further sanctum beyond, other than remove those shorts and prepare herself for me?

I opened the door impatiently, pushing against the pressure of a spring. It was dark beyond. The dim glow from the room behind me was not strong enough to help me see. I gained the impression of something large in the room but I could not make out its shape. I felt around with my hands, nervous in the darkness, trying to extend my senses against the cloying perfumes and the endlessly throbbing music, muffled but loud. As far as I could tell I had come into a room, not another corridor.

I went further in, groping forward. Behind me, the door swung closed on its spring. Immediately, bright spotlights came on from the corners of the ceiling.

I was in a boudoir. An ornate bed—with a large, carved wooden headboard, immense bulging pillows and a profusion of shining satin sheets—filled most of the room. A woman, not the young whore who had led me here, but another, lay on the bed in a pose of sexual abandonment and availability.

She was naked, lying on her back with one arm raised to curl behind her head. Her face was turned to the side and her mouth was open. Her eyes were closed, her lips were moist. Her large breasts bulged across her chest, the nipples lying flatly and pointing outwards. She had raised one knee, holding it at a slight angle, exposing herself. Her fingers rested on her sex, the tips curving down to bury themselves shallowly in the cleft. The spotlights radiated her and the bed in a brilliant focus of glaring white light.

The sight of her froze me. What I was seeing was impossible. I stared at her in disbelief.

She had arranged herself in a tableau-vivant that was identical, not close but identical, to one I had seen in my mind's eye before.

It was there in that sole fragment of my past: I remembered the first day I was in the cool semi-darkness of the vault of the gallery in Jethra. I had pressed my trembling teenage fingers, my palms, my perspiring forehead, many times to one of Acizzone's most notorious tactilist works: Ste-Augustinia Abandonai.

(I remembered the title! How?)

This woman was Ste-Augustinia. The reproduction she was fashioning was perfect. Not only was she an exact replica but also the arrangement she had made of the sheets and pillows—there were folds of satin glinting in the harsh light that exactly matched those in the painting. The long gleam of perspiration running between her exposed breasts was one my lustful imaginings had drooled over a dozen times before.

I was so astonished by this discovery that for a moment I forgot why I was there. Much was immediately and trivially clear to me: that she was not, for instance, the young woman I had seen removing the torn T-shirt; nor was she any of the gaunt women in headsets who had seized me on the dance floor. She was more maturely developed than the skinny girl in the T-shirt and to my eyes many times more beautiful than any of the others. Also, but most confusingly, the deliberate way she had spread herself on the smooth sheets of the bed was a conscious reference to an imagining only I had ever experienced. Or that I remembered in isolation! This was a connection I could not explain or escape from. Was her pose just a coincidence? Had they somehow read my mind?

A cathedral of dreams, the girl had said. That was impossible!

Surely it was impossible?

It was madness to think that this had been contrived. But the resemblance to the painting, whose details were clear in my mind, was remarkable. Even so, the woman's real purpose was plain. She was yet a whore.

I gazed at her in silence, trying to find out what I should think.

Then, without opening her eyes, the whore said, "If you only stand there to look, you must leave."

"I—I was searching for someone." She said nothing, so I added, "A young woman, like you."

"Take me now, or leave. I am not to be watched, not to be stared at. I am here to be ravished by you."

As far as I could tell she had not shifted position when she spoke to me. Even her lips had hardly moved.

I gazed at her for a few more seconds, thinking that this was the time and this was the place where my fantasies and my real life could meet, but finally I moved back from her. I was, in truth, frightened of her. I was hardly more than an adolescent, almost completely inexperienced in sex. Not only that, though: in a single unexpected instant I had been confronted in the flesh by one of Acizzone's temptresses.

Lamely, I did as she had told me and left.

There was little choice about where I should go. Two doors led into and out of the room: the one I had entered by and another in the wall opposite. I stepped round the end of the huge bed and went to the second door. "Ste-Augustinia" did not stir to watch me leave. As far as I could tell she had not so much as glanced at me while I was there. I kept my face lowered, not wanting her to look at me, even as I was leaving.

I passed through into a second narrow corridor, unlit at my end but with a low-power light bulb glimmering at the other. The encounter had produced a familiar physical effect on me—in spite of my apprehension I was tingling with sexual intrigue. Lustfulness was rising. I walked towards the light, the door of the room I had just left swinging closed behind me. At the far end, just beyond the light bulb, a kind of archway had been formed, with a small alcove behind it.

I came across no doors anywhere along the corridor so I assumed I would find some kind of exit in the alcove. As I lowered my head to pass through the archway I stumbled, tripping over the entangled legs of a man and woman apparently making love on the floor. In the gloom I had not seen them there. I staggered as I tried to keep my balance, uttering an apology, steadying myself by pressing a hand against the wall.

I moved on, away from the couple, but the alcove was a dead end. I felt around in the dim light, trying to find some sign of a door, but the only way in or out was through the archway.

The couple on the floor continued what they were doing, their naked bodies pumping rhythmically and energetically against each other.

I tried to step over them but I was unbalanced by the lack of room in which to stand and I kicked against them again. I murmured another embarrassed apology, but to my surprise the woman extricated herself quickly from beneath the man and stood up in an agile, untroubled movement. Her long hair was falling across her face and she tossed her head to sweep it back from her eyes. Perspiration rolled from her face, dripping down on her chest. The man rolled briefly over. Because of his nakedness I was able to see, with surprise, that he was not at all sexually aroused. Their act of physical love had been a simulation.

The woman said to me, "Wait! I'll come with you instead."

She laid a warm hand on mine and smiled invitingly. She was breathing excitedly. A sheen of sweat lay over her breasts; her nipples pointed erectly. I felt a new erotic charge from the light touch of her fingers, but also a surge of guilt. The man lay there passively at my feet, staring up at me. I was confused by everything I was seeing.

I backed away from them, through the archway, back to the long, unlit corridor. The naked whore followed quickly behind me, seizing hold of my upper arm as I blundered along. At the far end of this corridor, past the door which I knew led back into Ste-Augustinia's boudoir, I had noticed yet another door, leading somewhere. I reached it, put my weight against it and forced it open. It moved stiffly. Inside the room that was beyond, the endless throbbing beat of the synthesized music was louder but it appeared to be empty of all people. The musky perfume was intense. I felt sensual, aroused, eager to do the bidding of the young woman who had attached herself to me—but even so I was frightened, disorientated, overcome by the rush of sensations and thoughts coursing through me.

The young woman had followed me in, still holding my arm. The door closed firmly behind us, causing a decompression sensation in one of my ears. I swallowed to clear it. I turned to speak to this whore but as I did so two other young women appeared as if from nowhere, stepping out of the deeper shadows on the side of the room away from the door.

I was alone with them. All three were naked. They were looking at me with what I took to be great eagerness. I was in a state of acute sexual readiness.

Even so, I stepped back from them, still nervous because of my inexperience, but by this time in such a state of excitement that I wondered how much longer I might contain it. I felt the edge of something soft pressing against the back of my lower leg. When I glanced behind me I saw in the pale light that a large bed was there, a bare mattress of some kind, an expanse of yielding material ready for use.

The three naked women were beside me now, their lustful scents rising around me. With gentle pressure of their hands they indicated I should lower myself to the bed. I sat down, but then one of them pushed lightly on my shoulders and I leaned back compliantly. The mattress, the palliasse, whatever was there, was soft beneath my weight. One of the women bent down and lifted my legs around so that I might lie flat.

When I was prone they began to unbutton and remove my uniform, working deftly and quickly, letting me feel the light tattoo of their fingertips. Nothing happened by accident: they were deliberately provoking and teasing my physical response. I was straining with the effort of controlling myself, so close was I to letting go. The girl closest to my head was staring down into my eyes as her fingers worked to slide my shirt from my chest and down my arms. Whenever she leaned across me, or stretched to free my hand from the cuff of a sleeve, she did so in such a way that she lowered one of her bare breasts towards me and brushed the hard little nipple lightly against my lips.

I was naked in a few seconds, in a state of full and agonizing arousal, yearning for release. The women slid my clothes out from underneath me, piled them up on the further side of the mattress. The one beside my face rested her soft fingertips on my chest. She leaned closer to me.

"You choose?" she said, whispering into my ear.

"Choose what?"

"You like me? You like my friends?"

"All of you!" I said without thinking. "I want you all!"

Nothing more was said or, as far as I could see, signalled between them. They moved into position smoothly and as if in a formation they had rehearsed many times.

I was made to remain lying on my back but one of them lifted my knee that was closest to the edge of the mattress, making a small triangular aperture. She lay down on her back across the mattress so that her shoulders rested on my horizontal leg, while her head went beneath my raised knee. She turned her face towards the space between my legs. I could feel her breath on my naked buttocks. She took hold of my erect penis with her hand, holding it perpendicular to my body.

In the same moment the second woman was astride me with a knee on each side of my chest, her legs wide apart, lowering herself so that her sex touched lightly against, but did not enfold, the tip of my member, which was being held in position by the other woman.

The third one also straddled me but placed herself above my face, lowering herself towards, but not actually against, my eager lips.

Breathing the woman's delicious bodily scents, I remembered Acizzone.

I thought about the most explicit of his paintings hidden away in the gallery cellar. It was called (another title, remembered how?): The Swain of Lethen in Godly Pleasures. This one was painted in bold pigment on a stiff wooden board.

All that could be seen of The Swain in reproduction, or from a distance, was what appeared to be a smooth field of uniform crimson paint, intriguingly plain and minimalist. One touch of a hand or a finger, though, or even (as I knew I had tried) the light press of a forehead, would induce a vivid mental image of sexual activity. For everyone it was supposed to be different. I myself saw, felt, experienced, a scene of multiple sexual activity, a young man naked on a bed, three beautiful naked women pleasuring him, one straddling his face, one his penis, the third reaching beneath his body to press her face against his buttocks. All was bathed, in this intense imagining, in a lubricious crimson light.

Now I had become the swain himself, in godly pleasures.

I was surrendering to the imminent passions the women aroused in me. A lust for physical release was rushing through me even as the extent of the enigma about Acizzone surrounded me. I felt myself hastening to the moment of completion.

Then it ended. As swiftly and deftly as they had taken up their position, the women lifted themselves away from me, deserted me. I tried to call out to them, but my labored breathing emitted only a series of excited gasps. They stepped quickly down from the bed, slipped away—the door opened and closed, leaving me alone.

I discharged my excitement at last, miserable and abandoned. I could still in one sense feel them, could detect the traces they had left behind of their exquisite and exciting perfumes, but I was alone in that dim-lit, sound-throbbing cell and I expelled my passion as a man alone.

I lay still to try to calm myself, all my senses tingling, my muscles twitching and straining. I sat up slowly, lowered my feet to the floor. My legs were trembling.

When I could I dressed quickly and carefully, attempting to make myself look as if nothing had just happened so that I could depart with at least an appearance of calmness.

As I tucked in my shirt I felt the residue of my discharge, cold and sticky on the skin of my belly.

I found my way out of the room, along the corridor, into a large sub-floor area, filled with music and the sound of overhead footsteps. I saw a glint of bright-red neon lighting, limned against ill-fitting doors. I struggled with iron handles, pulled the doors open, found a cobbled alley between two massive buildings under the tropical night, sensed the smells of cooking, perspiration, spices, grease, gasoline, night-scented flowers. Finally I emerged into the clamorous street by the waterfront. I saw none of the black-caps, none of the whores, none of my shipmates.

I was thankful the club was so close to the quay. I was soon able to reboard the troopship, check myself in with the marshals, then plunge into the lower decks and lose myself in the anonymous press of the other men who were there. I sought no one's company during my first hours back in the crowded decks. I lay on my bunk and pretended to sleep.

The next morning the ship sailed from Muriseay Town and once again we headed south towards the war.