Finisterra · Part 1 (1/2)
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Lewis didn’t get many visitors because he lived in a rural part of Manatee
County, Florida, at the tail end of a dirt road alongside a creek. Lewis didn’t mind. He was a writer who liked solitude. His idea of a good conversation was reading a book by a great historian.
Still, even a sage gets lonely, so when the doorbell rang he responded.
His caller was a young woman holding a clipboard. Short black hair.
Jiggly boobs. Wide hips. Cuban, probably, judging from the high-frequency personal intensity that Cubans radiated even when they were standing still.
Cubans made him feel inadequate. They were so intense. So vital!
"Hello," she smiled, a little shy. "My name is Sierra Velazquez. I’m with the Public Interest Research Group at USF Sarasota. We’re collecting signatures for a petition against building a nuclear power plant on Calypso
Key. You don’t want to see the bay polluted with radioactive waste, do you?"
She rattled on, blasting him with scary propaganda. Her alarmist spiel turned Lewis off. God, what he’d give for an intelligent argument. To get rid of her, he grabbed her clipboard and signed her stupid petition. Impishly he signed the pseudonym he used on his novels: Mandark Steele.
She smiled as he signed. Then she glanced down and read what he’d written, and her eyes narrowed. "Very funny," she huffed. "You know, the assholes in Tallahassee are itching for an excuse to void our petitions. If you don’t want to sign, you could just say so, instead of using a fake name."
"I beg your pardon."
"I need real names? Mandark Steele is the pen name of a sexist science-fiction author. We studied him in our Construction of Gender class."
"I’m honored," Lewis said, making an exaggerated bow.
Her mouth fell open in shock. "No way."
"Which one of my books did you read?"
"None of them. We read plot summaries prepared by the professor. That was nauseating enough, you sexist pig."
"Don’t you think you should know something first-hand before you condemn it? Have a fact or two to base your judgement on?"
She inched back, as if he might attack her at any moment.
"Just a minute."
Lewis had plenty of extra copies of his novels. He selected one from the bookshelf in the living room and handed it to Sierra. She took it gingerly, and her lip curled in scorn. Warrior of Finisterra was his second novel.
The cover showed a voluptuous woman, nude except for a loincloth, bound hand and foot. She lay at the feet of a warrior wielding a sword the size of an ironing board. His muscles bulged as if someone had packed his skin with avocados.
"Try this one. Read it with an open mind, and consider the subtext.
You feminists are big on deconstruction, right? Rip through the silly surface and expose the meta-narrative."
Sierra Velazquez grimaced, but she kept the book. She stomped back to her little Neon. Lewis savored the view of her big ass going boom-boom, boom-boom, down the walk. Then he shut the door and returned to staring at his computer.
The next time the doorbell rang, three days later, Lewis had already forgotten about the petitioner. But there she was again, perched on his doorstep, chewing her lip contritely.
"I wanted to return your book." She held it out with both hands, her face as solemn as a Jehovah’s Witness presenting a tract. Missionaries, however, didn’t wear short white shorts that exposed their delectable legs, and tight red halter tops that barely restrained their big boobs. No bra.
He had to struggle to keep his eyes on her face.
"Uh, thanks. That’s very kind of you. You didn’t have to go to all this trouble." He fumbled the book, distracted by her aggressive skin and big hoop earrings. "You could have mailed it back."
Having returned the book, Sierra should have left. But she just stood there. Her mouth worked as if struggling with something difficult. Finally she said, "It was very… interesting."
"Surely a college student can come up with a better word than that."
Sierra shrugged, pursed her lips, blushed. Still no sign of departure.
"Would you like to come in?" Lewis wondered.
She entered gingerly, and peered around. Being in a room with her made
Lewis nervous too, so he led her out back, to the patio overlooking the creek. He fetched two beers and they settled into lanai chairs in the shade of a water oak. Lewis had laid the stones of the patio himself. The pattern echoed the design on the floor of a Minoan temple he’d visited on Crete.
There was little chance Sierra would realize that. As they clinked bottles, he grumpily estimated that he was 25 years older than the coed and probably three times smarter. Which meant shit, given her youth, looks, vitality.
She was so hot it hurt to glance in her direction.
"Why do you write that stuff?" she burst out.
"To change the world," he replied.
Lewis’ novels were marketed as science fiction because they took place in an "alternative history" in which the European colonization of North
America had failed. In his novels, Florida was the site of Finisterra, a small nation founded by a rag-tag band of refugee Spaniards, Dutchmen, and Englishmen driven south by the fierce Iroquois Confederacy. In this world an industrial revolution had not occurred, so battles were fought with swords, longbows, pikes, and the occasional catapult. Finisterra depended on the marital prowess of its males to hold off the numerically superior native cultures to the north and west.
Despite the genre trappings, Lewis’ approach was intellectually rigorous as the history teacher he had once been. He had worked out the sociology and demographics of Finisterra, building it from the ground up instead of recycling barbarian cliches from Robert Howard and L. Sprague de Camp.
He had even written spreadsheets to help him understand the Finisterran economy. A reader couldn’t help absorbing a searing critique of the Industrial
Revolution, as well as sly commentary on issues such as increasing income stratification in America.
Or so he hoped. To be honest, Lewis understood that his novels were published while those of other political philosophers were rejected because he wrote vivid depictions of female slavery. Women in Finisterra were commodities to be bought, sold, stolen, collected, etc. While he drew the line at spilling blood, Lewis devoted a substantial percentage of the words in each novel to describing elaborate bondage scenarios and humiliating slave training.
Since these were fetishes he enjoyed thinking about, he didn’t feel he was selling out. On the other hand, it was embarrassing to have to take the low road. Every time he planned a new Finisterra novel he tried to think of an alternative, but he couldn’t come up with a better way to get his political ideas into circulation. And circulate they did. Though serious reviewers ignored them, each novel sold hundreds of thousands of copies.
People even went to SF conventions dressed as his characters.
Sierra was skeptical of his approach.
"I noticed the lectures," she sniffed. "I skipped them to get to the good stuff. Are you serious about trying to influence public opinion?"
"Absolutely. I know most people buy my books for the sex, but I hope that a few of them will think about social issues."
"So Joe Jack-off is supposed to read one of your books, slap himself on the forehead, and say, ‘My god, the Industrial Revolution was a mistake!’?"
"Well, a few people might reexamine their political views."
She shook her head. "You should get out more, Lewis. Talk to some real human beings instead of your navel."
He glowered at her. "Can you suggest a better course of action?"
"You used to be a professor, right?"
"Yale."
"Couldn’t you use your connections to publish some serious stuff?"
"I have. Monographs in serious academic journals. At first I was thrilled.
Gradually I realized that the only subscribers to those journals were a few hundred scholars like myself. What was the point? I was pouring my soul down ratholes."
She shrugged and sipped her beer. At close range he could see a bit of dark fuzz on her upper lip. Otherwise, her face was childlike. Unwrinkled skin, big forehead, little eyes. The boobs and hips made her seem mature, but in other ways she was young. When she wanted to seem serious she used a deeper voice, but when she relaxed her control and spoke spontaneously, her voice became high-pitched and girlish. Gloomily he lowered his estimate of her age, widening the gulf between them.
Sierra slipped her feet out of her sandals and curled her short legs under her delectable ass. "You seem to be big on analytical stuff. Did you ever study psychology?"
"Some. Why?"
"My professor says men buy into that slave stuff because they can’t handle real women. They need submissive women in fantasy because we won’t do that in reality any more."
"She has a point," Lewis conceded amiably. "Women can be very intimidating."
"So what? I believe in my ideas. If I have to use sex to get them out, I’ll use sex."
"And you just happened to select bondage to spice up the story?"
"Yes."
"You have no interest in it yourself?"
"So what if I do? It’s a free country."
"Just trying to clarify some stuff. Does your girlfriend let you tie her up?"
"I’m between girlfriends at the moment," he said with dignity.
"Yeah. Way between I bet."
Arguing with Sierra, Lewis was annoyed to find himself stuttering. He wasn’t inarticulate. He had lectured to classrooms where everyone had a combined SAT of 1600 and held them spellbound. It was just that he was out of practice in talking to live human beings. He wasn’t sure how much was getting through, but it was pleasant to have a pretty girl listening.
Gauging her intelligence was difficult. Her diction and vocabulary were abysmal. Was there any noun that could not be replaced with the ubiquitous "stuff"? Still, at least she had ideas, no matter how inarticulately she expressed them.
Sierra was a drama major at USF Sarasota. Her father (a Cuban refugee, of course) was a pharmacist. Her mother made wreaths for a florist in Bradenton.
One brother was in the Marines. Another died in a drag-race on State Road
64. He questioned her about them and her life at the university. Lewis had no social life (unless you counted Internet chat rooms) so he was fascinated with her tales. He hoped he didn’t seem nosy.
The conversation lagged. They lolled in their chairs, nursing a pleasant buzz, silently enjoying the sight of a heron picking its way through the slough. Lewis kept waiting for her to make an excuse and bolt, but the coed seemed content to enjoy the hospitality of his patio. Was she waiting for him to make a move? Lord.
Sierra’s boldness and self-confidence reminded him of Gloria, the heroine of Raiders of Finisterra. Gloria was kidnapped by Indios, who tied her hand and foot with rawhide straps, gagged her with her own clothing, slung her from a pole like a deer, and bore her across the border. The raiding party found a meadow and staked her out. Subjected to outlandish heathen sexual torture, nice-girl Gloria discovered she liked it. She egged them on, challenging them to bind her tighter, fuck her rougher. One by one she drained the raiders, until the leader was so impressed he took her as his personal slave. Sierra had that kind of dare-you-to-fuck-me body.
Lots of flesh, loose on her bones, that could absorb a pounding. If he could have her tied to his bed for an hour he’d go to his grave a happy man.
And for some inexplicable reason Sierra seemed interested in him. It had been a long while since a woman flirted with him, but the rhythm of her patter was unforgettable. Since she couldn’t be attracted by his looks or social status or money, he became suspicious. Three days ago she hated his work. He knew he was a good writer, but could one novel truly turn her around? Perhaps this was a plot schemed up by his enemies. Perhaps those feminists who tried to get his publisher to cancel the Finisterra series were baiting a trap.
He glanced at his watch ostentatiously. "This has been fun, but I have to get back to work," he announced.
"I thought writers set their own hours," she pouted.
"Well, this writer has a deadline to meet." He stood.
Sierra reluctantly rose. "Do you have any more books I could borrow?"
she asked, eyelashes fluttering.
Despite his paranoia, Lewis was flattered. He led her to the living room. As he stood at the bookshelf, selecting a title, she stood so close her hip brushed his. She smelled like a tropical greenhouse. Even when she selected a book she lingered, shifting her weight from leg to leg, rocking her hips like a woman slowly dancing. When he finally coaxed her out the door his heart was pounding and his nerves completely shot. So tempting! So dangerous!!
His statement about being on a deadline wasn’t a lie. His contract required him to submit a 60,000-word manuscript to his publisher by August 30. Since he typically knocked them out in three months, that was time aplenty. If he worked five days a week, all he had to produce was 1,000 words a day.
Just four double-spaced pages! But he was blocked.
The problem wasn’t the political and economic plot. He knew what issues he wanted to address. The holdup was the sexual plot they were woven into.
Every idea he came up with was one he’d done before. He couldn’t think of anything new, and the old material bored him. He dared not repeat himself; he’d done that in the spring, and the publisher had reamed him out. It was humiliating to admit that he couldn’t think of a new excuse to tie up a goddamn woman and fuck her, but that was the sorry truth.
The words wouldn’t come. Each day that passed increased the number of words he had to write in the remaining days, and increased the pressure, so the task became harder. He used the old writer’s trick of retyping things he’d written before, to get the juices flowing, but he just couldn’t get going.
In his darker moods, Lewis wondered if Finisterra was over. It had been an interesting experiment, but as far as he could tell he his readers were becoming wankers, not revolutionaries. Maybe he should call it quits. What he’d do next he had no idea. The future was too scary. Paralyzed, he frittered away time by reading histories of the Sellucid dynasty and birdwatching.
Sierra returned in two days. "It was awesome," she pronounced, returning his novel. "Where do you get your ideas?"
"The muses sometimes favor me."
"The who?"
Lewis winced. "Thanks for dropping this off. It was good to see you again."
She made an adorable pouty face. "Aren’t you going to invite me in?"
"I’d love to, but I’m really busy today."
Sierra looked at him appraisingly. "You don’t trust me, do you?"
"No! Don’t be silly. It’s just that I’m really busy."
"Look, I’m sorry I dissed your writing when we met. It was stupid of me. I was just repeating what my professor said. Actually, even the summaries we read in class were pretty good. They turned me on. I couldn’t admit that. She would have flunked me in a second."
Lewis wanted to believe her. Still, the risk! He glanced up and down the road, to see if anyone was hiding there, taking pictures with a telephoto lens. He ran his hand through what remained of his hair and sighed.
"You’re right. I don’t trust you."
She looked sad. And mad.
"However, there is a way you can convince me."
Sierra perked up.
"I’m going to give you some homework," he announced.
She arched her black eyebrows skeptically. He wished she didn’t wear so much makeup.
"I’m going to give you another novel. I want you to read it, absorb the worldview, and then write a story set in Finisterra. Write from the point of view of a young woman. Two thousand words should suffice."
"It’s summer, Lewis. Have you ever heard of a concept called vacation?"
"Think of it as an extra credit assignment."
"I’m not a professional writer."
"It doesn’t have to be polished. Just write up your ideas. It doesn’t even have to be 2,000 words. Just write me a little scene, OK? Any length will do."
Skeptical, she finally took the book and left.
Days passed. Lewis fretted. Had he been too harsh? Yes, he was an idiot.
He didn’t even have her phone number! He looked in the phone book and found dozens of Velazquezes. None that said Sierra or S. He supposed he could call everyone until he located her parents, but then what? He could imagine the conversation. Hola, Senor Velazquez. I’m sexually obsessed with your daughter. Could you give her phone number, por favor? They’d probably send the Marine brother to shoot him.
He wasted three days trying to outline a novel about a prissy schoolteacher, a glasses-and-long-skirt type, who was kidnapped by slavers. It was so puerile, so derivative, that even he was bored.
A few days later his mailbox yielded a 9×12 yellow envelope from Sierra, addressed with a blue magic marker. He opened it with trembling hands.
It was a story. The tale of Sondra Rojas, an explorer from Europa, whose dirigible was blown off course by a hurricane and crashed in Finisterra.
She survived the wreck only to be captured by a Grande and trained as a pleasure slave. Grammar came and went, and her grasp of punctuation left much to be desired, but the sex scene she imagined made him hard. She described being sold at auction, bought by a supercilious intellectual (Lewis winced at the resemblance), lashed to his bed, and forced to give head. Since he often wrote from a female POV, Lewis had lo
Finisterra · Part 1 (1/2)
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