Originally published on the ERWA Theme Gallery, 2004

"Some people say the universe was created by the gods in a moment of cataclysmic orgasm. Do you believe that?"

The question came from a woman wrapped in a clinging black gown that covered her from neck to toes and yet still managed to reveal every detail of her voluptuous figure. Although her face shone bright as a star, it was her nipples that caught my attention. I couldn't tear my eyes away those two points standing out like twin beacons against that night-colored fabric.

"Orgasm," I said, tracing the curve of her breast with my eyes. "Yeah, that sounds good."

We stood on the main terrace of the Perihelion Restaurant, the crowning jewel of the Ganymede Space Station and Tourist Resort. While the Perihelion was known for its interstellar cuisine, most sentient beings came here for the view. Transparent opti-screens covered all the walls and ceiling of the restaurant to display the nearby Pleiades nebula. Patrons ooh-ed and ah-ed at the sight of the glittering star cluster floating in a web of cobalt filaments of light. Only the floor remained opaque, on the basis that most customers became too queasy to eat if they couldn't tell up from down.

But no one was eating this evening.

Instead, the patrons of the Perihelion had formed a nebulous cluster of their own. On the main floor below us a group of Gr'avlox, Oonorns, humans, and other sentient beings convulsed together in a writhing orgy of arms, legs, and other limbs. Sweat and semen glistened over skin, scales, and feathers alike beneath the glow of the Seven Sisters. They all seemed to be enjoying themselves and I would have joined them, but I personally found the Oonorns a bit off-putting. Some people rave about the pleasures of tentacled genitalia, but I wouldn't fuck something like that even if the universe were about to end.

Which, unfortunately, it was.

I looked up as one of the stars, Alcyone I think, pulsed and flared on the opti-screen wall. Two other sister stars had already collapsed, unable to bear the strain of the gravitational forces emanating from a nearby rift in space. After countless eons the universe had finally worn itself out, stretched so thin by its own constant expansion that its very fabric began to unravel, and then tear. Rifts had appeared in the space-time continuum. The smaller ones destroyed planets and swallowed suns. The larger rifts shredded galaxies. A mid-size one appeared in the midst of the Milky Way two days earlier. Half the galaxy was gone now, including Earth. Ganymede Station hovered only a few light years from its frayed edge, just waiting to be sucked in. And in this midst of all this destruction I stood in some damned restaurant looking for one last bit of human tail. Wasn't there anything more important I could be doing with my final moments of existence?

Apparently not. I looked at the woman again, this time seeing her face. She smiled, and my cock stiffened.

"Do you believe in the big bang?" she asked.

"Well, the theory is sound," I replied, wondering if her question might be a come-on.

She gave a toss of her jet-black hair and laughed. "Theory shmeory! We're talking about the creation of the universe here. We're talking acts of God!"

I held a hand up and backed away. The last thing I wanted to do before the universe ended was to listen to some nutcase proselytize about the All Mighty and the sinful state of my immortal soul.

"Look," I said. "I'm glad you've got religion-"

"Oh, forget religion!" She held out her arms to me. I gravitated toward her without even thinking. "Religion is the pox of the sentient mind. It is a fakery and a deceit. It distorts true vision and interferes with our experience of the great Divine. And you know," she murmured slyly, "There's really only one way to experience the Divine."

She reached up and touched the throat of her gown. The clinging black fabric split open at the front and slipped away from her body. She stood before me, beautiful and naked. Her breasts were round and full, not the starlit points of a young girl but the twin moons of a goddess in her prime. I reached out and touched one. It burned with a cold fire.

"Oh yeah," I said, dumbfounded by this last bit of good luck at the end of all things. "I'm getting laid!"

"Oh, not just laid," she replied. "You're about to experience procreation on a cosmic scale!"

I stared at her. "Um, maybe you hadn't noticed, but now is not the best time to procreate. The universe is dying!"

As if to emphasize my point, Alcyone flared up again, bathing the restaurant in a wash of crimson light. Then the light contracted, suddenly seized back into the core of the star as it collapsed on itself.

The station shuddered, pulled closer to death by the nearby implosion. I shuddered too as I noticed how few stars were left on the opti-screens.

The woman held out her hand to me. "Life and death are all the same thing, you know."

I flinched. "Look, we don't have much time left. So can we dispense with the philosophy and just get on with the fucking?"

She raised an eyebrow at that and I blushed.

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to be rude. It's just that I really want to go out on a high note."

"You will," she said as she caressed my face. The touch of her hand burned with the same cold fire I had felt in her breast. "But there's no need to rush. We have all the time in the universe to make love."

Even I had to laugh at that. "Lady, you're crazy! What's your name?"

"Shiva," she said.

Another star collapsed on the opti-screen, casting a blazing halo around Shiva with its dying light. I blinked, trying to clear my eyes of the dazzling effect, and then blinked again. Either I had been mistaken about her species, or Shiva had suddenly acquired an extra pair of arms.

"Shiva, god of destruction," I murmured, transfixed by four graceful, swaying limbs. "I thought he was male."

"Shiva is what Shiva is," she replied.

One of her hands snaked around my waist and pulled me closer. Another unfastened my clothing, while the remaining pair pinched my nipples in time to the pulsing of the few stars remaining on the screens.

"Love making is the penultimate art," she explained. "A part of the never-ending choreography of creation and destruction. The individual dancers cease to exist as their essences merge to create something new and wonderful."

As Shiva spoke, her skin darkened, first becoming the grey of ashes and then the ebon color of death. On her forehead, a third eye appeared. It opened like a rift in space.

"Dance with me!" Shiva tore away the last of my clothing and twirled me around in her arms. "Be linga to my yoni!"

I swayed as she stroked my body. Every touch left a trail of fire. Her fingers continued to tease my nipples, tracing endless spirals around the hardened nubs. A hand combed my pubic hair, the gentle rhythmic movement coaxing my cock to its fullest length and girth.

Another implosion and the station shuddered again. My fear of extinction overwhelmed all reason. In that moment, I desperately wanted Shiva, extra arms and all. I grabbed her by the waist and thrust my hips toward her. But when she spread apart her sable thighs to receive me, I faltered. Nesting beneath the curls of her pubic hair was a ravenous darkness.

"What the hell is that?"

"The end of all things, beloved."

The restaurant began to spin. At first I thought the last implosion had knocked the station off its axis and sent it tumbling through space. The orgy soared off the floor. The opti-screens cracked and peeled away from the walls. Everything in the restaurant was caught up in a maelstrom. But though the Perihelion swirled around us, Shiva and I stayed fixed in our place, like the eye at the center of a terrestrial storm. I tried to break free, but Shiva wrapped all four arms around me and held me fast. My naked flesh pressed up a gainst hers, and everywhere she touched me, I burned.

"Don't go yet," she said. "Dance with me some more."

I looked down and gaped. The darkness between her legs had spread, twisting down and out of her like an inverted whirlpool. Bewildered, I could only watch as the orgy swung past us, caught in the gravitational pull of the black hole I had mistaken for a lover. Shiva opened her legs wider and the twisting blackness expanded. The orgy reached the periphery of that celestial tempest and disintegrated, too busy fucking to notice their own demise. The rest of the Perihelion Restaurant followed suit. In the blink of an eye, we were left floating in the cobalt light of the nebula. All the while, Shiva smiled and caressed me. I writhed in her arms, tormented by the burning pleasure of her touch. Her hands were everywhere, massaging my thighs and balls, sliding down my back to grab at my ass. As I stood there on the brink of destruction, Shiva grabbed my cock and stroked it. It was the beginning of the end for me. Not even light could escape from her grasp.

"I hold infinity in the palm of my hand," she said as she brought me to the verge of orgasm and kept me there.

I moaned, and the void swallowed the sound even as it escaped from my lips.

"Do not fear!" Shiva commanded. "Look at me. Feel me. Know me!"

We kissed. Shockwaves coursed through my body and out into the cosmos. The remains of the Pleiades nebula disintegrated beneath their force. We floated in the vacuum of space while the last of the Seven Sisters winked out of existence.

Shiva's hands continued teasing me. A single drop of semen welled up from the tip of my cock. It glowed like a seed of light.

"Shiva! I'm going to come!"

"Yes, come to me," she murmured. "All things do in the end."

She let go and I felt myself swept away by the tides of gravity that emanated from deep inside her. Those fatal currents pulled at me, like Shiva's caress, bringing me closer to ecstasy even as they threatened to sunder my very being. I collapsed into a pinprick of matter, my senses expanding as my body contracted. Life and death, creation and destruction, implosion and explosion - I felt the universe turned itself inside out around me. As I rushed toward the void between Shiva's legs, the words came unbidden to my mind. This is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends...

"This is the way the world ends," Shiva intoned. "Not with a whimper, but a bang!"

And with that, I came. The orgasm exploded from me in a final burst of cosmic fury as I passed through the event horizon. My seed sprayed into the void, a blazing comet tail issuing from my cock. It took with it the last shreds of my physical being.

"Shiva!"

"Beloved!" Her voice came from everywhere, soothing my scattered particles. "Look at what we have created!"

I opened eyes that no longer existed and peered beyond the event horizon, beyond the end of the universe. I looked into the void that was Shiva and cried out with joy.

Inside her, there were stars.