by Bruce Bethke
I gulped. “I’ll take that drink now,” I said.
She released my hand, walked lightly over to the small table on the other side of the room, and pulled the stopper from the mouth of an ornate crystal decanter. “I know, I should give you a choice,” she said over her shoulder, “but it seems to me you desperately need some cognac.” She sloshed a bit of tea-colored fluid from the decanter to a large snifter, capped the decanter, and returned to me. “Here you go,” she said as she lifted my right hand and gently guided it around the curvaceous bottom of the snifter.
“Thank you.” I put the glass to my lips, tilted my head I back, and tossed the whole thing down in one gulp.
And very nearly tossed it right back up just as quickly.
“What’s wrong?” The lady viewed my choking, gasping face with great alarm and gave me a sharp slap on the back “Max! Speak to me! What’s wrong?”
“Forgot,” I managed to cough out between gasps for all “Can taste now.” I fought down a dry heave, got my breathing under control, and blinked the tears from my eyes. “I don’t usually drink in real time,” I mumbled apologetically.
The newspaper in the wing chair across from me (funny, I hadn’t noticed it before), folded in on itself and moved aside in reveal a sour-faced old fart in a blue suit and sedate tie “Lovely,” the old fart said. “DON_MAC has sent us another kid with a SNID. Stop wasting your time, Diana.”
The long-haired woman—Diana, apparently—turned on him sharply. “Really, Devon. You were no better yourself when you first showed up.”
The old fart—Devon—sniffed and rustled his papers, “Well, at least I had to work to get here.”
Diana pursed her lips, shot him a quick glare, and turned to me and recovered her smile. “Pay him no mind, Max. He’s just an old crustacean who made it to superuser without neural induction and believes everyone else should have to suffer as he did.”
“It builds character!” Devon snorted as he pointedly went back to his paper.
“Superuser?” I blinked, and digested the word. “But I thought DON_MAC threw me—”
“Down to Hell?” Diana completed. She laughed slightly, and covered her mouth with her fingertips. “But of course. He’s done that to all of us, you see. Sort of an initiation thing. You know, so you can properly say you’ve been ‘cast out’ of Heaven?” She laughed again—it was a very pleasant sound—took the empty brandy snifter from me and set it on the table.
“No, my young friend,” Diana said, “you may relax. This is the next step up, and not the oubliette.”
Someone else shimmered into view in that moment, in the other red wing chair, opposite Devon. This fellow was dressed like an affluent nineteenth-century Texan: he wore a well-tailored natural leather sport coat, a black bolo tie with an ornate silver-and-turquoise clasp, and a broad but clearly authentic and expensive felt cowboy hat, decorated with a band of silver conchos. He was also sharpening a Bowie knife with a handheld whetstone; the gleaming blade moved in slow, even circles, with a faint grinding noise that set my teeth on edge.
And then it hit me. “Cowboy Bret?” I whispered, a trace of nervous awe in my voice. “The Cowboy Bret?” I turned to Diana, my eyes wide. “And Diana? Diana Von Babe?”
“Throw that boy a fish,” Devon muttered from behind his paper.
I blinked, and shook my head, and gulped a few times while I tried to think of something brilliant to say. Cowboy Bret and Diana Von Babe, in the same room! I just could not believe— “I’m Max Kool!” I blurted out. “And I’ve got to tell you, I’ve been hanging out in Heaven since I was twenty years old, and it is just the coolest—”
“I’m flattered,” Cowboy Bret said as he continued sharpening his knife. “But if y’all don’t shut up right now, I’ll boot yer ass back to Heaven and make sure you never find your way down here again.”
I shut up. Instantly.
“That’s better,” Bret said. “Now, I got just one thing to say lo you, kid. Y’all can listen to Diana all you want, but don’t relax too much. Remember, you’re still on probation.”
I looked at Diana. “Probation?” She parted her lips as if to say something.
Bret didn’t let her speak. “The rules are simple, kid. Y’all can do just about anything you want. After all, we are a pretty wild ‘n’ wooly—some might even say criminal—bunch.”
Devon snorted and rustled his papers loudly.
“You do what you want,” Bret repeated, “but if you fuck with the Network architecture, or blow permanent holes in virtual reality, or do anything that brings the NetCops down on the rest of us—” He stopped sharpening the knife, touched the point of the blade to the brim of his hat, and used it to push the hat back on his head so I could see his face. His mustache clearly did double-duty as a soup strainer, but what impressed me most about the man were his eyes. Honest, they were steely blue, just like the high-gloss cobalt finish on some of LeMat’s old guns.
“Y’all make things bad for the rest of us,” Bret said, “and we will deliver your body parts to the Federal Information Agency security office, neatly wrapped in white butcher paper. I ain’t talkin’ virtual; I’m talkin’ for real.” He emphasized that point by throwing the Bowie knife at me. It stuck, quivering, in the chair, scant inches from my head. “Got that?”
An hour earlier, MAX_KOOL would have signaled his getting it by throwing his monomolecular switchblade to stick, quivering in sympathetic resonance with the Bowie, in the back of Bret’s chair. Under the circumstances this didn’t seem like a real bright idea, though, so I fumbled for words.
Diana saved me. “Oh, Bret, control yourself! I’m certain this lad will do just fine. DON_MAC would not have sent him down if there was any question.” Cowboy Bret just tilted his hat back further and squinted, dubiously, at Diana.
“Hmph!” She turned to me, seized my hand, and dragged me up from my chair. “Come along, Max! We’ll get you away from these Neanderthal influences and get you started in your new life!” Striding so briskly I almost had to trot to keep up, Diana led me out of the drawing room, down the corridor, through some kind of chandelier-hung foyer… I really would have liked to slow down enough to let some detail fill in. The general impression I got was of a combination exclusive private club and four-star hotel.
We made a sharp right turn through a dining room that smelled delicious, trotted up a broad marble staircase, and turned the corner into another long corridor, this one lined with dark wooden doors. She stopped abruptly before one of the doors, touched the lock—it glowed briefly—then threw it open and led me in.
“This is my personal dataspace,” she said, as she slammed and locked the door. “I trust we can have some privacy here.” She snapped her fingers, and the curtains drew themselves aside to allow the light in and reveal—
Well, I don’t really have the words for it. The Imperial Bedroom Suite, I suppose. An enormous room, delicate antique furniture everywhere, white wainscotting on the lower walls, that sort of white-on-blue stuff that would be called cameo if it was jewelry on the upper walls, candelabras, chandeliers, floor-to-ceiling French windows in place of the outer wall, and in the exact center of the room, a large, canopied, four-poster bed.
Diana stepped back, put her hand to her chin, and gave me an appraising look. “Well, the first thing we have to do,” she said, “is get rid of all that cartoonish black clothing. You may have been able to get away with that in Heaven, but here in Hell, we have much higher standards.” She turned to the ornate antique wardrobe, pressed the door latch just so, and the door swung open to reveal an enormous closet that could not possibly exist in three-dimensional space. “A tuxedo, I think,” she muttered as she sorted through the clothing hanging there. She gave me a glance over her shoulder, and hazarded a guess. “Forty-six long?”
I didn’t have any idea. The last time I’d shopped for a sports coat it was off the rack at K-Mart.
Diana tched and grabbed a fistful of hangers off the rack. “Well, we’ll j
ust have to experiment until we see what fits.” She swept back over to me, threw the clothing on the bed, and tugged at the sleeve of my black leather jacket. “Come on. Off with it! Chop chop!” I peeled off my jacket, looked around for a place to hang it, and then just dropped it on the floor. “The shirt, too.” I unbuttoned my black silk shirt, marveled at the fact that in virtual reality I had chest hair and for that matter a chest, and tossed the shirt aside.
Diana looked at my feet and shook her head. “Oh, and those boots simply must go. Take them off.” Hopping on one foot and then the other, I unlaced my black engineer boots and kicked them off. The sudden sensation of bare feet on plush carpet was almost too ticklish to bear. “The pants as well,” Diana said, nodding. I undid my massive chrome belt buckle, popped the button and dropped the zipper, and slid out of my black jeans. And about then is when it finally hit me, that I was standing there in front of this woman I didn’t know at all, wearing nothing but my Rolex watch and my smiley-face boxer shorts.
Diana took a step back, put her hand on her chin again, gave me another appraising look, and nodded. “You know?” she said, as she took a glance over her shoulder at the heap of tuxedos and expensive tailored suits on the bed, “I think perhaps we should skip the preliminaries, and get right to the oral sex.” And before I could react to that she dropped to her knees before me, yanked my boxer shorts down to my ankles, and opened wide—
BAM! The hallway door exploded inward. “Get away from him, bitch!” some woman shrieked. “He’s mine!” Diana sprang to her feet, fangs bared, fingers curved like talons, and let out a feral hiss at the intruder. Me, I just about lost control of my sphincter.
“Eliza?” I whispered, luckily too soft for anyone to hear.
The new woman advanced into the room like a kickboxer in top fighting form; assertively, yet cautiously, walking on the halls of her feet with almost feline grace. Diana slithered away from me, hissing. The newcomer circled the other way; a priceless antique Louis XIV armchair got in her way and she kicked it to splinters. I stood between the two of them, petrified. I’d once tried to extract Psycho Kitty from a fight with a neighbor’s cat, and was not looking forward to what was coming next. For a moment, the newcomer passed into clear silhouette, and in the light from the windows I could see she had a marvelous figure.
Well, that ruled out Eliza.
The two of them had almost completed a one-eighty around me. The newcomer was over by the French windows; Diana had her back to the open door. Diana arched her back, slashed the air with her claws, hissed and spat—
Then turned tail and ran out into the hallway, slamming the door shut behind her.
Whew.
Until I heard the soft padding of high heels across the carpet behind me. Sharp fingernails dug into my left shoulder and dragged slowly down to the small of my back. Swallowing hard, I gritted my teeth, forced myself into a smile, and turned around.
“Hello, darling,” Amber said gently. “Sorry for not getting here sooner. Thorvold had a hard time finding me and telling me you’d gone super.” Her long fingers touched and caressed my cheek, and slipped gently into the hair on the back of my head. Then she grabbed me fiercely and kissed me hard on the mouth and thrust her probing tongue halfway down to my tonsils.
“Don’t,” I gasped weakly, when she let me come up for air. “Stop.” She kissed me again, longer, harder. “Don’t. Please. Stop.” She kissed me a third time; slowly, gently, a long, lingering kiss that left me weak in the knees and seeing blue spots from anoxia. “Please, don’t stop,” I begged her softly. “Take me now.” She kissed me again, and I was like melting butter in her strong but slender and sensitive hands.
“I’m sorry I let you come here alone,” she whispered in my ear, between delicate licks and bites on my earlobe. “I should have known that old witch Diana would try to get her meathooks into you. You’re so innocent, and so vulnerable.” She wrapped her arms around me, and held me tight, and suddenly made me excruciatingly aware that I was standing there buck naked with my boxer shorts around my ankles. I could only shudder and moan.
“My poor darling,” Amber whispered in my ear. “I’d better make sure that nasty old Diana didn’t hurt you.” She gave me a long kiss on the neck that made me understand why some people think vampires are erotic.
“No damage there,” she whispered. She shifted her grip and kissed me all across the chest, to finish with a flourish of tongue and teeth on my excruciatingly sensitive right nipple. “And that seems to be working.” She crouched slightly, to trace the edge of my flat, well-defined belly muscles with her tongue. I writhed with pleasure. “No problems there.” Dropping to her knees, she kissed her way across my appendix and down my right thigh to my kneecap, then—slowly—back up again, moving more towards the inside.
“And now,” Amber whispered, “the real test.” Wrapping her left arm around my butt so I couldn’t squirm away from her, and gripping the family jewels and the base of my You Know What firmly with her right hand, she took a long, slow, lascivious lick from base to tip, then traced ever-faster circles with her tongue around the business end, reared back for a moment to take a deep breath, and—
“OH MY GOD!”
Fifteen milliseconds later I was back in reality. When I realized what had happened, I tore off my videoshades, threw them on the floor, and screamed at the top of my lungs.
“LeMat!”
He was beside me in a flash. “Jack! Jack! What the hell happened to you in there?”
“What?” I didn’t know whether to strangle him or start sobbing uncontrollably, or both.
“We cut the audio and video feeds, remember? All I could watch was your biotelemetry!”
“AUGH!” I dropped to my knees on the floor and started whimpering.
LeMat dropped beside me and started yanking out optic libers by the fistful. “Man, your bioindicators were going through the roof! Heart rate, respiration, blood pressure; I thought, my God, you were gonna explode!” He finished disconnecting the transceiver belt and unhooked it.
I could only blubber like a child.
“And then when you screamed,” LeMat said, shaking his head, “well, I figured it was time to hit the panic button and bring you out of it.”
I looked up at him, through red-rimmed eyes, and imagined how his head would look on the end of a bloody pikestaff.
“So tell me,” LeMat said. “What happened to you in there?”
“Pinky?” I said, struggling to keep my voice calm. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to hurt you.”
15: THE EXPOSITION HAD TO GO SOMEWHERE
LeMat went back to Heaven later that night. I couldn’t bring myself to use the neural interface again so soon, and he wasn’t feeling secure enough in his masculinity to deal with the ProctoProd, so he strapped on his conventional VR gear and did it the old-fashioned way while I lay on the futon, on my stomach, and sulked.
Amber…
About a quarter to midnight, LeMat surfaced and peeled off his VR goggles. “Jack?” he said. His voice was a hoarse croak.
I roused myself and sat up on the futon. “Yeah?”
“Beer,” LeMat said. “Need beer.”
“Okay.” I lurched to my feet, shuffled over to my old half-height refrigerator, and pulled the door open. Refrigerated light spilled out into the room. “You got a choice,” I said. “Summit, James Paige, Sam Adams, or Pig’s Eye.” LeMat, I might add, was the one responsible for stocking the fridge.
LeMat processed the information I’d given him. “Swill,” he decided. “Need swill.” I snagged a can of Pig’s Eye Pilsner and carried it over to the workstation.
LeMat was still struggling to pull off his bulky datagloves, so I yanked the pop-top for him. “How’d it go?” I asked.
“Good.” He took the can from me, tilted his head back, and poured a large slosh down his throat. For a moment, I was afraid he was going to gargle with it. “Better than I expected,” he said, when he came up for air. He belched. “
‘Scuse me.”
“Did you find the door to Hell? Or Amber?”
“No, and no.” He took another gulp of the beer, wiped some condensation off the can, and rubbed it across his forehead. “Whatever they’re doing to hide the door, it’s way beyond what I can penetrate with this.” He tapped the plate of his VR goggles for emphasis. “I couldn’t even find the doors to those other live-traps you talked about.”
“Did you try the apartment in ToxicTown?”
LeMat took a long, slow pull on his beer and set the can down. “Didn’t need to,” he said. “I went back to Heaven, to try to hunt up either DON_MAC or Don Vermicelli.” He smiled, in a sort of lopsided way, and tapped his old VR goggles again. “Just for the record, it still looks the same to me. Doesn’t feel the same, though; not after what you’ve told me you can see.” He sighed and went for that beer can again.
“DON_MAC?” I prompted. “Did you find DON_MAC?”
“Nope.” LeMat shook his head. “But that damned dwarf—what’s his name?”
“Thorvold.”
“Yeah, well, Thorvold found me. Suckered me right in. Clapped a message chip in my hand and vanished in a puff of smoke before I hardly said howdy. I thought I was going to have to machine-gun the bar just to save face.” LeMat sighed again and fastened his mouth on the beer can.
“Really?” I said, simulating ignorance. “I can’t imagine how Thorvold got the drop on you. You must be slipping.”
“Yeah.” The beer can was empty. LeMat crushed it like the empty aluminum shell it was and gestured for me to bring him another. This time, I also fetched a root beer for myself.
“So,” I said, when I got back from the fridge, “you got a message. What does it say?”
“Don’t know,” LeMat said. “It’s encrypted for you.” He pushed his chair back from the workstation, stood up, and lurched away from the console. “Therefore, if you’d be so kind.” He gestured for me to take his place. “It’s on the clip board.”