Carnal Machines Read online

  Then it was her turn to explore. His lab coat’s texture was familiar to her fingers, because she wore one herself, but the cool cotton of a man’s shirt felt alien after so long. She could feel crisp hair underneath and shivered at the sensation. Percy had had blond hair as fine as a baby’s and no hair on his chest, but she thought she’d enjoy feeling Ben’s furriness against her bare skin.

  Her hand slipped down to his trouser fly, and before she had done more than touch the first button at his waistband, Ben groaned with pleasure and pressed forward against her hand. She could think of no reason not to run her hand along his length through the tweed. “Lovely,” she murmured. It didn’t seem right to compare him to Percy. But she couldn’t help thinking that he seemed thicker than Percy, if a bit shorter—and that such a shape would have merits.

  She began working on the buttons of his fly with fingers that eagerness and tension made thick and clumsy. “I could use your homunculus right now,” she joked, “with those little, agile hands.”

  “No,” Ben said through gritted teeth. “I want to be inside you so badly, but I wouldn’t hurry this. I’ve wanted you so long, Claire. So long.”

  “I think I must have wanted you without knowing it. Why else would I have come to you with a project that forced me to speak of sex?” Now that she let herself admit it, she’d always thought him attractive, but she’d loved Percy too much to let the thoughts go beyond aesthetic pleasure.

  But would she have put her prettiest drawers on under her sensible walking suit if in the back of her mind, she hadn’t dreamed of their meeting going like this; if she hadn’t wanted to release his prick from the confines of his trousers and test its weight and length in her hand, studying it as carefully as she might some curious artifact or arcane component?

  If she hadn’t wanted to sink to her knees on the chemicalscorched laboratory floor and pull his heated length into her mouth?

  If she hadn’t wanted to taste his musk, to savor that salty tang that hinted at how delicious his spunk would be, to feel him pull the combs from her hair and tangle his fingers in its liberated weight as she ran her tongue along the silky length of his cock, teased at the head, then took him deep into her mouth again?

  “God, it’s been too long…if you don’t…” She understood Ben’s broken words. She just wasn’t sure she cared. She ached to feel him deep inside her, his body moving against hers, but at the same time, she didn’t want to stop what she was doing. It had been a long time for her as well, too long. She’d willed herself to forget how good a man could taste and how powerful a woman could feel on her knees, were she on her knees willingly in order to drive a man to distraction.

  And she’d forgotten—if she’d even known, with gentle Percy—how good it felt when a man directed her sucking, or how insanely wonderful it felt when he lost patience and pulled her abruptly to her feet, reeling her in for another devastating kiss.

  Then Ben turned her around to lean against the table, his movements made rough by eagerness. He flipped up her skirt and stroked her sex through her silk drawers.

  His fingers, so clever at building inventions, were equally clever at teasing her. He circled her clit perfectly. Pressure built low in her belly. Her head swam with need. Without thinking about it, she began moving her hips, creating a rhythm along with his fingers.

  “Talk about…the energy of the human body,” she managed to say.

  Then she lost her ability for coherent speech. Her hips danced and bucked. She gripped the hard surface of the table. As the first orgasm not of her own furtive making she’d enjoyed since Percy died wracked her body, she bit into her own sleeve to stifle a scream.

  Then, and only then, did he pull her drawers down. She stepped out of them and kicked them aside.

  One finger slid into her.

  God, it felt huge. Huge and wonderful. “I think I’m as tight again as I was on my wedding night. Only I’m much wetter, because I know how glorious it will be.”

  “Wet, but not wet enough. Wait here.” She heard him rummaging in his desk. When he came back, he had a most curious object in his hand. One long tube of brass had a gear mechanism on its end, and connected to it, a ball of what appeared to be hard rubber. Gears and a small glass tube on the side of the second attached tube marked it as a clockwork, but she couldn’t figure out its purpose. More to the point, she couldn’t figure out why Ben had chosen this instant to show off a new invention. “I want to see your work, but later. Talking science in the afterglow is fine, but I can’t concentrate now.”

  He chuckled in a way that caressed her sex as much as his hands had earlier. Then he whispered a word she couldn’t quite make out, but it was definitely Latin.

  One of those devices then, the kind with clockworks powered not by electricity or simple mechanics, but by a tiny animus or spirit who provided the energy in exchange for the chance to observe the human world. Despite her arousal, her engineer’s curiosity was also aroused. “A spirit drive? Have you found a way to make the creature stay? They’re not the most reliable power source. Spirits get bored too easily.”

  “I’ve summoned a minor incubus. I can guarantee he won’t be bored, not with you open and slick and needy before him.”

  She thought he was joking. Arcane engineers didn’t work with incubi, as a rule, since the creatures were not only flighty, but prone to escaping the devices and provoking any female in the area.

  Then he touched the device to her clit.

  He hadn’t been joking. Only an incubus could power a device that spun and whirred and teased like this one did—and oh, god, had an appendage that thrust out from the second tube and into her, into her like she hoped Ben would do himself very, very soon.

  Only an incubus could power such a device. And only a twisted genius could invent it in the first place.

  “Percy and I designed this together as a lark,” he said.

  Make that two twisted geniuses.

  “I always told him he should take it home and try it on you, but he feared you’d be offended he’d invent such a thing and even more offended that we’d worked on it together.”

  “I’ll be offended,” she managed to say, “if you turn it off.”

  Then she stopped talking and started screaming, “Oh, god, oh, god. Ben…this thing…oh, god.”

  The orgasm, when it came, ripped through her entire body and lasted longer than she dreamed possible.

  But it still wasn’t enough. Her need for release was sated, but the orgasm-by-device only heightened her need for physical contact.

  “Please,” she said, pushing her bottom back at Ben. “Please.”

  “Should I call the incubus back?” he asked, even while he ran the head of his prick over her needy sex. “Get the device powered up again?”

  “No…you. Please, I need you.”

  “I thought you’d never ask.”

  He gripped her hips hard, hard enough that she imagined the bruises and the way they’d bring back memories of this day, and drove into her with a force that slammed her into the table.

  This meant more bruises, but she didn’t care. She pushed back against him, gave as good as she took, let loose five years of constrained desire.

  And maybe longer than that, because now that she was fucking in a laboratory bent over a table and not particularly caring if someone walked in, now that she had been pushed to climax by a brilliant incubus-driven clockwork, all of Claire’s inhibitions shattered. Sex and science mingled too perfectly to resist.

  She screamed, she beat on the table with her fist, she begged for more, she moved any way she could think of to get that fine, fat prick deeper inside her.

  She came more often than she’d ever imagined she could.

  It couldn’t last long, not at that pace, but by the time Ben let out a great cry and surged into her, Claire could barely hold herself up.

  “Grab your things,” he muttered.

  “Don’t want to move.”

  “My lodgings aren’t f
ar from here, and my bed is far more comfortable than this table. Do you need to get back to Wellesley tonight, my dear?”

  “No classes until Monday.” She was moving in a daze, picking up her papers and tucking them back into their leather notebook, finding her drawers and stuffing them into the reticule along with the notebook since putting them back on seemed like far too much trouble. She set the reticule to follow after her. She wanted to hold hands with Ben without either of them struggling with the reticule.

  “Good. I don’t intend to let you out of my bed until Sunday. Although perhaps we should look for a justice of the peace.”

  She stopped in her tracks.

  Ben circled the desk and embraced her again. “Neither of us may care about convention, but colleges tend to fire you if you’re unmarried and living together. And I want you to have access to the laboratory here, which you could as my wife. I bet we could get your device…”

  He glanced at the desk and his voice filled with awe. “Claire, your device is working now. The battery is full.” He unplugged his electric lamp and plugged it into the socket on the device. It lit up. “It needed fulfillment and pleasure to power it, not frustration.”

  She threw her arms around him. “I’ll marry you, if only to stop paying the power company. I’m sure we can light up the whole of Cambridge, let alone one home. But I have to figure out where the calculations are awry. We could never sell something like this; it’s far too risqué. Besides there are far more lonely people than fulfilled ones.”

  “But imagine what we could do if we packaged your generator and my toy together and sold them as wedding gifts? Plenty of bright, warm, happy homes. The coal barons would be out of business in no time.”

  He kissed her again, tenderly this time.

  THE SERVANT QUESTION

  Janine Ashbless

  Picture, if you will, a room that looks rather like the salon of a high-class dressmaker’s or milliner’s establishment. There are tall windows to allow the best possible light to fall upon the merchandise being displayed; there is a low stage; there are drapes and Grecian columns and a large potted fern. Picture, too, a lady of the most respectable class seated in an armchair before the dais, and standing beside her the figure of Mr. Edward Tulliver, sporting a neatly trimmed moustache, a finely tailored suit and the forthright air of a man at the pinnacle of his profession. This is the showroom of Tulliver’s Mechanical Servants.

  “It is such a problem keeping good staff,” complained Mrs. Petherton, whose husband was a rising star in the Foreign and Extratellurian Office. Having seen the apparatus Mr. Tulliver had on offer and witnessed an impressive demonstration of it at work, she was in a mood to confide. “We had a very reasonable scullery maid—a mousey little thing, wouldn’t say ‘Boo’ to a goose, you would have thought—and only last month she left to become, of all things, a hostess on the P&O Mars Dirigible. I understand she appears nightly in the most alarming feather headdress. It’s almost beyond comprehension.”

  “Quite,” said Mr. Tulliver, who could only aspire to Mrs. Petherton’s social status and, having built his own enterprise from the foundations of his father’s watch-making business, might have had rather more empathy with a scullery maid’s stifled ambition than her erstwhile employer did. He did not see it as his place to argue, however: Mrs. Petherton was a valued customer. Moreover she was still, despite the imminent arrival of her middle years, a most handsome and well-proportioned woman whose personal charm was considerable. As susceptible as any of his gender, he felt no desire to dismay in any way the possessor of such a fine figure, or such bright eyes. So he said soothingly; “I hear complaints such as yours from every quarter, madam. The civilized world is crying out for hard-working, diligent and above all reliable domestics. Which is precisely why we offer such a service, here at Tulliver’s Mechanical Servants.”

  “And then there was Mrs. Leatherby,” she continued, unstoppable, flashing those brilliant eyes as she blinked in disbelief at the recollection. “I mean… Really! French trained, and quite the best cook we’d had. My husband always said he had never tasted a better mutton joint than hers. She went off to work for the director of the Sub-Atlantic Rail Project. I mean to say…an American! What do they know of dining? It will be only steak and chipped potatoes with him, I don’t doubt.”

  Her magnificent bosom heaved under its white lawn blouson, and she dabbed at her upper lip with a lace handkerchief. Mr. Tulliver decided it was politic to move the conversation in a more positive direction.

  “But you are quite content with your Tulliver Automated Chef, are you not, madam?”

  Mrs. Petherton inclined her head. “Yes, indeed. Very content. I had my doubts, Mr. Tulliver, when you first installed it. I don’t mind telling you that.”

  “Madam, an attitude of proper caution can only be to your credit. Yet I hope we have earned your trust now?”

  “Certainly, six months without being pestered for a rise in wages is quite a novelty. My husband grumbles that the food has not the same flare as Cook brought to it, but I daresay it is only bluster. He certainly always has second helpings.”

  Mr. Tulliver waved a hand at the figure that stood motionless upon the dais. “And I am sure that you will find the Tulliver Tireless Housemaid of equal value in the domestic realm, madam, should you choose to make a purchase. As the notices in the newspapers say: ‘Every home should have a Tulliver!’”

  The object of his praise, which had already demonstrated its capacity for dusting an armoire full of Dresden crockery and folding a pile of bed linen, was decidedly feminine in form but no more organic in nature than a grandfather clock. Dressed in housemaid’s black and white, it had a pretty porcelain face and jointed enamel fingers. Under its little white cap its hair was a solid piece of molded brass. Even at rest, the whir of its complex clockwork innards was faintly audible, like the purr of a cat.

  Mrs. Petherton stood up with a decisive action, smoothing down her skirt, and approached the maid. The expression on her face was one of cautious fascination. “You say she can take instruction?”

  “The Tireless Housemaid is designed to obey your voice and has a number of domestic routines already implanted. It is capable of adapting these to different room layouts and sizes.” The salesman’s words spilled smoothly off Tulliver’s tongue. “If there are specific tasks which you wish it to perform that are not already in its repertoire, you can call myself or one of my staff out at any time to adjust the mechanism and implant a new routine. We pride ourselves upon our unparalleled service to our customers.”

  “Can she talk?”

  “I confess, madam, that this model does not—beyond a simple vocal signal of ‘Yes, ma’am,’ or ‘Yes, sir,’ upon acknowledgement of your instructions. However, we hope to produce a fully conversant model next year, and if you should at that point like to change up to the new version, we would see to it at once.”

  Mrs. Petherton thrust her lower lip out most becomingly. “Actually, I believe I would prefer the silent version.” She looked the maid up and down, and her eyebrows arched as she took in the pinched waist and the swell of the hips. “Tell me…underneath…”

  “Madam?”

  “Beneath…her clothes. There’s nothing beastly, is there?”

  “Please, madam.” Mr. Tulliver drew himself upright, though he well remembered nights in the workshop molding those porcelain buttocks to aesthetically perfect curves. “Let me assure you, Tulliver’s Tireless Housemaids are sold only to lady customers. No aspersions may be cast upon our products. In fact, it is yet another advantage of having automated servants rather than the traditional variety. There are no inclinations to waywardness in the clockwork heart. ”

  Mrs. Petherton nodded. “Quite. Well.” She smiled and turned back to him, with an unconscious lift of her bosom that Mr. Tulliver found somewhat distracting. “I shall call her Eliza, I believe.”

  In the weeks that followed, Mr. Tulliver called at the Petherton town house in Grosvenor Squ
are several times. Each was the occasion of a small frisson of pride for him, for he remembered accompanying his father to just such exalted dwellings as a small boy, and in those days Tullivers senior and junior had been expected to present themselves at the servants’ door. Now, such were the times and such was Edward Tulliver’s rise in the world, that his customers regarded it as a positive cachet for him to be seen alighting at their front entrance. It put the Pethertons at the very vanguard of fashionable society to have a Tulliver Tireless Housemaid at their disposal, and the ladies of their social circle were eager to order their own versions of the indefatigable Eliza. The fact that such an apparatus had to be individually crafted to order made them eager to court his favor and dispense with the usual social formalities.

  From Mr. Tulliver’s point of view, then, the visits were not begrudged. Every time he breathed the air of the Pethertons’ drawing room he felt his heart thrill as with the promise of a spring morning. Despite his ordinary background, he had always longed for the day when he would be accepted among the higher echelons. How assiduously he had worked to delete the accent and manners of the artisan class, in preparation for this moment! How wonderful it was to take tea with ladies, who were, he felt, imbued by their delicate breeding with a special beauty and grace. He had always desired their admiration and now their social intercourse—the wide-eyed questions, the tinkling laughter—stiffened his resolve.

  He looked forward to the day when there would be a Tireless Housemaid in all the finest homes, and he would be just as familiar with all the grandames of society.

  Thus, every time he added a new routine to Eliza’s repertoire, he felt again the pride that Michelangelo must have felt at his labors upon the Sistine Chapel: the pride of the true artist who brings something unique and incomparable to a discerning and exalted employer. Eliza seemed more beautifully wrought each time he visited, both more lifelike and more inhumanly perfect. Perhaps this was because her new owner had had her dressed in a fine uniform, complete with all the layers of undergarments so necessary to the soft feminine form—and so unnecessary in Eliza’s case. To open the panel at her back involved Mr. Tulliver partially undressing her: undoing a myriad of buttons and loosening the tight stays and delving beneath the layers of lavender-scented frillies. The mannequin was so lifelike in form that this actually brought a blush to his cheek, as if he really were undressing a servant girl in front of her mistress. He was always sure to close the curtains before starting, in case some passerby should glimpse the operation and misunderstand.