The Weapon - Passion - part 1 By Diana the Valkyrie All you need is love There's nothing you can do that can't be done Nothing you can sing that can't be sung Nothing you can say but you can learn how to play the game It's easy Nothing you can make that can't be made No one you can save that can't be saved Nothing you can do but you can learn how to be you in time It's easy All you need is love All you need is love All you need is love, love Love is all you need By the time Wendy and George got back from Melbourne, I was one disgruntled Duncan. There was absolutely no reason why they should have spent five days there after arriving. Well, there was a reason, and the grin on George's face said it all, but that wasn't a reason that I was happy with. It was obviously George's fault, because he's supposed to command, Wendy's supposed to obey. So, as soon as he wafted in through the door, I tore him off a strip. "And where do you think you've been?" "To Paradise and back, Dunc old fruit, eating the Lotus and having my brains fucked out by your wonderful Weapon." "And this is what you were supposed to be doing?" "Hey, we went through a hard time in Ramanmari, and I felt entitled to a bit of R&R." "OK, a day off I can understand, but nearly a week?" "I'd taken two weeks off work, so where and with who would I spend it, Southend? With Felicity?" "Humph," I grunted, "and what about me? And what if some emergency had come up?" "You would have phoned. Dunc, don't be such an old grumpyface." Wendy had been watching the argy-bargy, head turning from side to side like a Wimbledon umpire. Then she walked up to me and kissed me, one of those full-body-contact kisses where most of the action is below the neck and above the knee. "Did you miss me?" Well, damn it, of course I missed her! "Wendy, I missed you, I needed you, like sage needs onion, like chips need salt, like curry needs lhassi." "Don't be angry with George, love, it's all my fault," she said. "No it isn't, he's supposed to tell you what to do." "Has that ever worked for you, Dunc?" "Well. Sometimes. Humph." Then she picked me up, and as she flew towards the door, George yelled "Hey, how am I supposed to get home?" "Car keys on the mantlepiece" I shouted back as we swooped through the door and out, heading for the sky. As we headed up to get above the cloud layer, I thought about George driving back through the rain to his cold lonely flat, and I thought, serves him right. "Oh, Duncan, I'm sorry I left you alone for so long, but George was so exhausted and whacked out, he needed a good fluffing up, and, and, and it was nice in Melbourne. They remembered me from last time I was there, and everyone was so nice to us. I'll try to make it up to you now." We levelled off at eight thousand feet, she wrapped her cape around us to keep out the cold, stripped us both naked, and gave me a lengthy demonstration of exactly why I'd missed her so much. I don't remember all the details, but I do remember begging and pleading with her to stop several times, with the result that I got several examples of her not obeying me. And I remember at several points feeling that she had me surrounded three times, once with her vagina surrounding my penis, once with her arms and legs around my body, and once with her cape all around the two of us. Eventually, she let me fall asleep in her arms, which is in some ways the best part of it. Why? Partly because of the feeling of sexual exhaustion, and the knowledge that there was no milk left in your bottle. Partly because of the nearness of someone you love; the feel of her body against yours, her hair in your face and her smell in your nose. And partly the tremendous feeling of warmth, safety and security that you can get only with a lover like Wendy. When I woke up the next morning, we were in my bed. I opened my eyes, and saw Wendy looking down at me. She smiled, and said "Are you awake, Duncan?" I slammed my eyes shut and said "no". She wasn't fooled. "Shower time," she said brightly, and hauled me out of bed. I knew what was coming. "No, Wendy, I absolutely forbid AAAAAAAAAGGGHHH!" I screamed as the cold water hit my naked body, and fought to get loose. Which is pretty futile when it's Wendy that you're fighting with. After a minute or so, she changed the water to warm, soaped me up, rinsed me down, then pulled me out of the shower for a rub-down with a hot towel. "There, you enjoyed that, didn't you." "Uh. Some of it." She left me to get dressed while she did something nice with kippers. And over breakfast, she dropped her bomb on me. "I'm going to have a baby." It is actually dangerous to be given news like that when you're eating a kipper. Kippers have lots of little bones, and it's easy to get one stuck in your throat, like I did. I spent the next five minutes coughing and drinking milk before I finally decided that I would probably survive. "A what?" Unexpected? When you've been shacked up with a woman for two years and she suddenly announces that she's pregnant, that's "unexpected". When you've known a woman for a few months and she makes the same announcement, then you can use words like "astounded". But Wendy wasn't actually a woman, it had only been weeks, and she didn't have the, uh, equipment, so the appropriate word was "gobsmacked". "Uh, Wendy," I started, about to explain to her that this was impossible, but then I remembered that my concept of impossible and hers was considerably disjoint, "how?" "Well, I don't know. That's step two. Step one is decide what you want, step two is work out how to get it. Oh, Duncan, it's hard to explain." "Go on, try." "I'm different from you," she said. I'll say. She isn't actually organic, she just does a good imitation. Four black holes and a few fields of force, with suitable stress-strain tensors to give the feel that she wants at each layer. So the cape, for example, felt strong but silky because it had a high stress-strain coefficient in the Z-vector, but very low coefficients in the X and Y vectors. Whereas the skin felt soft and yielding because of the low stress-strain coefficient in the Z-vector. And so on, I'm sure it's all pretty obvious really. But, a baby? "I mean, inside," she continued. "Well, you can't get much more different than four black holes," I answered. "No, I mean, uh, in the way I think, in the, oh hell, I don't know the words for this. Instincts? No. Lower than that. Emotions, reactions. The stuff that drives you even when you think you're in control. Duncan, I'm talking about love here. It isn't the same for me as it is for you." "Love is different? Surely love is a universal?" "No, you're anthropomorphising here. You're thinking that everything works the way you do and there's no other way it can work." "But you said you love me?" "Yes, and I do, I do, but, look, you have to understand where love comes from, what drives it, how it works" "Aren't you dissecting the rainbow here?" "Yes, but understanding how a rainbow happens doesn't make it any the less glorious; in fact, it increases your appreciation for it, because it adds a whole new area to what you can already see." "OK, so how does love work?" "The big question you should always ask about any animal characteristic is, what evolutionary advantage does the animal get from it?" "We aren't animals." "Oh Duncan, get off your pedestal, of course we are." Huh. Well, I suppose technically I am. But she thinks she is too? I suppose that depends on your definition of "animal". "So what's love got to do with it?" "It's like this," she said. "Human babies are absolutely helpless for a very long time, and have to be taken care of by their parents. It's the price you paid for the big brain and high intelligence that are such a huge evolutionary advantage that you pretty much wiped out any other large animals. And the mother is very encumbered by the baby for a long time; the father is needed to find food, to give protection; for survival. So, the human family has to be bound closely together, man and woman. If that binding isn't strong enough, the babies don't survive, so only where the binding is strong do the genes propagate. And the purpose of sex is to reinforce that binding, most animals don't do sex for fun, just for baby-making. Humans do it for the pleasure of sex, even when there's no baby-making possible. And you call that binding "love", and it isn't as strong as the mother/baby love, because the baby is very soon dead without that love, but it's very strong." I grunted. "Well, it isn't the same with us. We don't reproduce via sex. What happens, is the four black holes are joined by a monopole, a single black hole, there's still loads just floating around the universe, relics of the original big bang. And then a sixth, seventh and eighth. You can help that process along by going looking for them, or you might come across someone who's willing to give you one they've already captured, but it's essentially a lonely process. There's no sex-binding between two of us, and so we don't have the sexual love-thing like you have it." "But you still have love?" "Yes. At the time of fission, there's suddenly two individuals where before there was one who was, er, pregnant I suppose is as good a word as any, and one of those two has all the memories of the original individual, encoded as a set of quantum states in an electromagnetic field. Call that the mother. And the mother then downloads, er, teaches, a copy of the quantum states, except that obviously it can't be an exact copy, because of quantum uncertainty, to the, uh, baby. And that's a pretty painful process, and it takes a long time, several thousand years, and all that time, the mother has to help the baby with how to do things, and that's like, a billion tons you have following you around and getting into trouble all the time. But if it isn't done, then the baby doesn't know how to survive, what to eat, how to move, and it won't be able to function properly. So the exact same evolutionary forces that create the baby-love-bond in humans, also create a baby-love-bond in the Black Hole Folk. But you can see it's a very different sort of love." "Yes, there's no quantum mechanics in our sort of love." "Oh Duncan, you've missed the point totally. The point isn't the mechanism, it doesn't matter if it's quantum mechanical or electrochemical like it is for you. The point is that with you, there's the two types of love, mother/baby and man/woman. With us, there's a single kind of love, mother/baby. And for you personally, Duncan, since you cannot be a mother, the only type of love you can know is the man/woman type. So when it comes to love, we have two completely different models." "OK, you've explained why I love you, sort of. My eyes and ears tell me you're a woman, and the theoretical knowledge that you aren't doesn't impact on the low-level thing inside me that does love-bonding. And you are a rattling good fuck, and that certainly helps. But you haven't explained about you loving me. If you don't have the man/woman thing, why do you, how do you, oh. Oh, I see. Oh. The mother/baby thing." She nodded. "You see me as your baby?" "No, not quite," she said, "I mean, you're weak and helpless ..." "Thanks!" "Well, you are, want me to show you?" "No, all right, compared to you I am ..." "Right. So there's something deep inside me that wants to protect and, well, nurture you. Look after you. Feed you, keep you warm, make you happy, teach you things. Or, to sum it up in one word, love you." Well, I suppose I shouldn't complain, she certainly didn't treat me like a baby. Well, not in some ways, anyway. I munched on my toast and marmite, and said "So, about this baby?" "Mmm?" "Well, is that, ah, what you're supposed to do? Within the rules? I mean, are Weapons allowed to have babies?" She looked thoughtful. "I think so. At least, I can if you say it's OK; you're my Wielder, you command and I obey." "When you feel like it." She laughed. "Come on, Duncan, when did I last disobey you?" "About ten minutes ago." "Oh, that. Well. You know you enjoy it really. Anyway, all I need is the nod from you." She got up and came round the table, dumped herself in my lap, and put her arms round my neck. "So, can I? Huh? Please, Duncan?" With a billion tons of Weapon in my lap, I struggled to get free, but she put her mouth over mine and kissed me. "Mmmph, mmf." She let me breathe for a second. "Huh? Huh? Can I?" "Wend...mmf, MMMMmmmph." I tried to throw her off my lap, but it was like trying to shift a billion ton weight. Come to think of it, that's what she was. Then she put her hands under my armpits and started tickling me, but at least she was letting me breathe. Sometimes it's difficult to tell the difference between torture and loveplay. I mean, difficult for someone who is just watching. It's easy when you're the victim; torture hurts a lot and you want it to stop, loveplay doesn't hurt and you don't want it to stop. But anyone who might have been watching us for the next ten minutes would have sworn that Wendy was torturing me, and anyone hearing my muffled screams would have agreed. I knew differently, though, and so did she. Another problem our putative watcher would have had, would have been in following the action, unless they were able to stay with us as Wendy zoomed out of the window with me and up to several thousand feet, where she could unmuffle my mouth and let my unbridled screaming startle a few birds as we passed them going up. The screaming might have misled this theoretical onlooker too, unless they were familiar with the kinds of noises that a human makes when in the grip of a powerful Weapon who has brought him to the edge of climax and is now holding him on the edge and waiting for his begging for release to die down to a whimper before unleashing the explosion of orgasm that he's abandoned hope of. If you follow me. And then she put her warm arms round me, wrapped us both in her silky cape, and rocked me to sleep, while singing a lullaby to me. "I give him all my love, that's all I do. And if you saw my love you'd love him too, I love him. He gives me everything, and tenderly. The kiss my lover brings he brings to me. And I love him. A love like ours could never die, as long as I have you near me. Bright are the stars that shine, dark is the sky. I know this love of mine will never die. And I love him." I never did actually say whether she could have a baby. I think we both assumed I said she could.