With her police module, of course, other traffic was shuttled aside for Eve's passage, countermanding whatever other ideas the drivers might have. That way Eve could whirl along at. absolute top speed and the hell with optimum energy trip plots.
The hoverbus drew on narrowcast power transmitters along the freeway until Eve passed Nephi. After that it would automatically receive LOS-line-of-sight-recharges from the transmitters that began to dot high points in the heartland of Zionized, Streamlined America. Those LOS recharges were frequent, for Eve's demands on everything she used were rarely less than the maximum. She had punched in the Nephi-Salina-Green River route, for example, instead of the more direct Provo-Price-Green River route because she did not enjoy the faint side-loads on her great bulk when the bus took a twisty course.
Her chosen route was longer and took more power. So what? Eve had power to burn. If Marengo-poor haunted, hairy, heavy-hung Marengo-was as good as his word, she'd have still more power soon. And he'd damned well better come through or she'd cut his dose of dreamstuff. She liked to think Marengo Chabrier enjoyed her sexuality as much as he enjoyed taking a nice long hit; and therefore that was what she did think.
At Salina she adjusted the lounge pneumatics, lit a filtertip joint, selected a porn cassette from her shoulder bag and lay back, her own vastness diminished by the room-sized insulated compartment. The fact that viewing such salacious stuff was now punishable, and ownership of it a felony, only heightened its charm for Eve. Since that stupid fiasco in Santa Fe she'd been horny as a rhino and not much easier to please. Her demand for sexual acceptance to counter that event was not entirely subliminal; with Chabrier, she knew, she could slake her thirsts. If it hadn't been so much trouble, she'd have plotted some revenge on that emerald-eyed young hit-man, Quantrill. But there was plenty of time. Sooner or later he would wander across her right-of-way, an ant on her freeway, and then.
The little holodrama unfolded before her, the voluptuous cowgirl, Patty, flirting with the wrangler but clearly more interested in the erection of her pony. Presently the heroine-for in a sense she had to be one-found a way to rig a sling under her little stallion.
Eve began to enjoy herself-more so when she perceived the vibration that rose under her bass-fiddle buttocks when she sat in the right position. She toyed with the pneumatics. The vibration toyed with Eve. Patty toyed with her trusty, lusty steed; and as the hoverbus neared the highway summit it occurred to Eve that a lot of summits were approaching simultaneously.
Eve reached down with tender sausage fingers; womanipulated herself, laughing at the holo and at the world. She flicked off the audio and, in a fit of whimsy, began to sing an ancient ballad, 'Always,' in her clear sweet soprano. In this context of purest narcissism, every phrase seemed funnier than the last and, once she'd sung ". need a helping hand." Eve rolled in her couch gasping with laughter and orgasmic release.
She flicked the pornodrama off then, suspecting fakery in the action. She wasn't sure it was possible to make it with a horse. Even if it was, she'd leave this little Cow Patty electronically stranded in mid-hump. It was a concept as silly, as willful, as tacky as the holoporn itself. Eve gloried in that because she could afford to do it when most citizens did not dare even watch such things. Pleasure without consequences: the goal and the province of power.
Eve had reached a pillowy mellow before the bus passed a road sign: NO SERVICES NEXT 170 KM., and whipped down the grass-obscured surface of an ancient ranching road near Green River, Utah. Five klicks South of that turnoff, a decrepit-looking gate of steel pipe accepted a signal from the trip plotter and swung open until the bus whooshed by flinging its broad flat wake of dust and weed seed.
It never occurred to Eve that the bus might someday have a breakdown, leaving her stranded. Her position in such matters was that no machine would dare risk such wrath as hers.
Forty klicks further, beyond the warning signs, Eve spied the P-beam obelisks that defined and protected IEE's San Rafael desert lab. The bus did not pause, or need to. Finally she saw the two-story chain-link fence and the earthen berm inside. The lab, dug into the desert floor, was perfectly placed, roughly midway between three geographic features. They were called Goblin Valley, Dirty Devil River, and Labyrinth Canyon. The names were old and apt. As Boren Mills had once drily remarked, it was no tourist trap.
The last automatic gate swung aside and then Eve's hoverbus settled on concrete, near the elevator platform atop the berm. Chabrier waited for her, alone on an electric cart, wearing his bright tragic smile that she knew so well.
A tongue of ramp slid from the side of the bus and Chabrier, familiar with Eve's desires, backed the cart up onto the deep pile carpet. Only then did he step down, making his slight continental bow. "You are early, madame," he murmured.
Eve warmed to the attentions of Marengo Chabrier. His deepset gray eyes were hooded by eyebrows so thick and black that they met in a ledge above the strong nose. His lashes were luxuriant, his cheekbones Scythian, his mouth sensuous and as small as Eve's own. The open collar of his beige IEE coverall revealed what seemed to be a tee-shirt of black fleece, but was body hair. The stocky Chabrier was marvelously endowed with hair except, as Eve knew, the top of his head and two bare islands flanking his backbone. Eve envied Cow Patty for her pony a bit less; she herself had access to a gentle ape with two doctorates and a tongue that could clean a mayonnaise jar.
"I couldn't wait to test your magic, curly," she vamped, letting him help her to her feet. "Let me see it."
The long lashes flickered over his sad sheep eyes. "Here?"
She nodded, chins aquiver, then emitted a volley of giggles as he reached for his coverall closure. "Not that, you fool," she said, staying his hand, rubbing the mat of curls over his sternum. "That I can see in your rooms-and I intend to." The pun-took on a hint of rasp: "Isn't the amulet ready?"
"Ah." His open palm indicated the cart seat. "That is in my rooms as well. M'sieur Mills has many devices to monitor and I should be sorry to be recorded aboveground with such a thing. You however are a law unto yourself, n'est ce pas?"
"C'est tout dire," she agreed, and vented a whoop as Chabrier sped his cart down the ramp. She clutched her bag in her lap. In it lay much of her charm: the drugs for which Chabrier, as lab administrator, was responsible.
Inside via the elevator to the first level, then down ramps between backlit walls, fat tires squalling on clean linoleum, the air cool and tasting faintly of sidewalks after summer rain. Once during the trip-Eve knew he was taking this route as an informal patrol when they could have gone directly to the lowest level by elevator-a lank mongol hesitated in the passage to let them pass. On his middle-aged face was no trace of recognition that they were anything but machinery. He might have been a machine himself.
"Don't you ever get cabin fever in this dump?"
"We are all well-ah, le reclusion," he said, tardy to catch her idiom, nodding when he did. "We suffer, each in his way."
"But you all take the same prescription."
"In a general way." Quickly he added, "For me it is not so bad; I have you twice a month, ma petite." He nearly strangled on that diminutive term under the circumstances, but knew she liked to hear it.
At last Chabrier reached the utmost depth of the lab and passed through the chuffing armored doors. Here was no receptionist, but a room with couches. Eve never got used to the jungle of potted greenery there, so many levels under the desert floor, fed with synthetic light and nutrients and even with subtle variations in the air-conditioning currents. Her arm laid on his, Eve swept into Chabrier's rooms to claim the chaise. "Compliments of Boren Mills," she smirked as always, handing him a package labeled PHOTOGRAPHIC FILM. It contained enough drugs to pacify Chabrier's minions for two weeks.
Chabrier tossed it aside as though it were not the most important single facet of his existence; offered her a drink. She accepted, noting the tiniest of tremors in his hands, choosing to think it was her humming sexuality and not something e
lse that provoked it.
"So how goes the scale-up?" She was only making small talk. For Eve, the synthesizer was only an abstract notion, an iffy means to power. Her specialty, media, was power. She could not fathom the logic by which Mills had let his early media expertise run to seed while he chased this technological enigma-and by proxy! She had never managed much interest in synthesizers of any size until one of her spaced-out discussions with Chabrier, two months before.
The scale-up program, Chabrier admitted with the shrug of a much thinner man, was still in Phase Two. Phase One, design analysis of the unit Mills had committed murder to obtain, had been complete for over a year. Phase Three, if it ever arrived, would be a big unit, one for which Mills would cheerfully kill millions. But Phase Two was that crucial interval between analysis and synthesis, without which Phase Three could not begin.
Some philosophers of science virtually ignored this transition phase because, bluntly, it eluded them. Mills revealed his partial understanding-and mistrust-of it by calling it 'interphase brainstorming'. Marengo Chabrier understood the creative process better; it was he who termed it the 'gestation' phase.
An organism recapitulates the development of its race, as a human fetus will reveal gill slits in its early growth. But the organism does more, when it mutates beyond. The change is made real, not merely potential, during gestation. A plan gestates; ideas gestate; earth-shaking social movements gestate-sometimes useful mutations, oftener not.
Marengo Chabrier understood that few mutations become dominant, that ideas are rarely more than the sums of their parts. He also understood that IEE's chief exec was demanding a useful, dominant mutation tailored to fit. More worrisome still, Chabrier understood that short-term success, measured in these terms, was damned unlikely. It was a remnant of intellectual honesty that made him use the term 'gestation', for it promised nothing beyond recapitulation.
Most worrisome of all, Chabrier knew that Mills was very unlikely to let a lab full of addicts flush various expensive shits through their systems forever.
One way or another, the synthesizer scale-up program would be terminated someday and, like as not, Mills would reveal it with a handful of permanent personnel terminations. Slow poisons in the drugs? That was why Chabrier had them chemically analyzed before he dispensed them to his lab staff. He would, in any case, dispense them-though his friendship with Sun and Ming would make that act painful. But Chabrier himself would then turn to his clean stash, and would either escape or plead for his life.
He knew he had no hope of crossing the San Rafael desert without help. That was why he hoped to infatuate this great sow, Eve Simpson. And if sexual bonds alone were tenuous, he might further ensure her help by making her party to a deception that would drive a wedge between the woman and Boren Mills. C'est le premier pas qui coute, he knew; that first step which required so much resolve. But Chabrier had taken that step two months before, and Eve had cavorted like a Disney hippo at the idea. It had been her own idea, in fact, to disguise the thing as an outsized amulet-for she owned a jewel large enough, unique enough, to account for its size and whatever security precautions she might arrange.
As Chabrier was bemoaning his most recent failures to scale up the Chinese synthesizer, Eve cut in. "Well then, how about our little scale down?" Her face was alight with mischief.
He paused, switching mental tracks. "It functions," he said.
"Omigod, does it? I mean-what won't it make? How much at a time? What do I feed it? Any batteries to change? Give, goddammit!"
His last shred of suspicion-that she was baiting him on behalf of Mills-evaporated with her outburst. He winked, walked to his safe, spent his own good time opening it, and withdrew a folded kerchief. With a flourish, he shook something from its folds, dangled it from a chain of brushed stainless steel. Eve's mouth was a small 'o' as she tracked its pendulum swing.
"It looks naked," she said. "Can you put the Ember in the thingummy now?"
"The bezel? Yes, if you have it with you."
She ripped open her bag, tore its inner lining, and pulled out a tiny velour bag. The Ember of Venus slid into her palm; and now it was Chabrier's turn to gawk.
The automated Venus sampler craft had found no true life on Venus. Mineral and gas samples, scooped up for physical return to Earth orbit, had mostly confirmed earlier data. The surface temperature of the shrouded planet was, after all, nearly five hundred degrees Celsius.
But one mineral specimen, taken from an arroyo at the lip of Venus's Ishtar highlands, became wedged at one side of the container which was to maintain Venus-normal temperature during the long voyage back. The specimen gradually cooled in space and was quickly discovered by the sampler recovery team. The exact mechanism by which a mineral specimen became the Ember of Venus was still argued in learned journals, but its existence was unarguable fact.
Almost a centimeter thick after slices had been taken from it, the Ember was an ovoid the breadth of a hen's egg. It was under great internal stress. Despite the most careful progress of the diamond saw, one chip had flown from the side of the jewel.
Otherwise it was perfect, its surface smooth as a soap bubble but with voluptuous prominences on its face. The Ember of Venus compared to an Aussie fire opal as the opal compared to a gallstone. It had been presented to Eve by the CEO of LockLever as inducement for certain favorable media reports in 1998, when her body was merely lush and not yet obese. Eve had performed those services while passing sensitive data on to LockLever's competitor, Mills-which assured her position at IEE.
Thus Eve's possession of the Ember was irregular, but not illegal. She had often thought of wearing it. Now, to decoy attention from the device it covered, it would find employment at Eve's throat.
"Incroyable," Chabrier whispered. "May I?" He took the stone between thumb and middle finger, intending to check its fit into the bezel he had prepared, but paused again as if thunderstruck. The translucent flickering depth of the gem seemed bottomless; iridescent hues of every color intersected, shifted, moved as if impelled by some viscous liquid.
Chabrier shook off the urge to snarl, 'mine, mine,' chuckling at himself. He laid the Ember into the bezel of the device in his other hand. Then he smiled at the irony. For the Ember of Venus was only facade for something of far greater value, a device more significant than any jewel: a tiny version of the Chinese synthesizer.
"Come, we shall imprison your Ember," he said, and she came out of the couch as if scalded by it. Together, for Eve would not let the jewel out of her sight, they moved to his littered desk. He cemented the Ember in place, then arranged the tiny padded metal fingers to clasp its edge while she looked on. Wordlessly he lifted the chain, spread it with both hands, smiled into the eyes of Eve as he hung it around her neck.
"Let me imprison your ember," she drawled. She was smiling, breathing deeply; and without taking her gaze from his she began to open the beige coverall.
Presently, after she had consumed his first orgasm, she lifted the amulet and licked that, too, as if by wetting it she could bring out still more lustre. Murmuring: "Now that you've taken advantage of me, you dirty old monkey, tell me how this fucking thing works!"
Rubber-legged, Chabrier walked with her to the chaise and began to instruct her. Set into small bezels in an oval pattern around the Ember were fifteen opaque black diamonds, cabochon cut, surely the zenith of understatement since they functioned as studs for the tiny integral computer terminal.
At the top and bottom of the bezel were globes of brushed stainless, the size of a child's marble. A grid in the upper globe was the air intake; the synthesizer did not create mass, but converted it-in this case, from nitrogen. The lower globe was the yield chamber, and a hidden detent allowed it to split apart. Isotope powered, the minuscule device had a yield measured in grams per hour.
Eve's amulet could not synthesize living tissue, of course, nor materials requiring great heat and pressure, e.g., diamonds. But using her access code to CenCom, Eve could request
the chemical composition of many substances; punch the memory stud to place CenCom's response in the memory circuits; and then request a sample of that substance in the yield chamber. Chabrier had arbitrarily placed a one-gram maximum on a given yield as a safety precaution.
The readout display was hidden; Chabrier had put it inside the false back of the amulet, fearing that an overt display might reveal too much to any admirer of the Ember.
"So I memorize the functions of the diamond studs," she repeated, "and use the first thirteen for alphanumerics with the 'change function' stud." She saw his nod, then made a pouty-mouth: "But it won't make a kittycat?"
He laughed outright. "Mais non, it can only give you inanimate joys." He saw her puzzlement. "Gold dust, tetrahydrocannabinol."
She turned it over, weighed it in her hand. Very quietly: "I don't think I'll use it for anything more than a toy."
Dean Ing - Quantrill 2 Page 9