When the house AI whispered, You have a visitor, Mr. du Cheyne, I felt my asshole clench. Tell her to go back... tell her to go away... tell her... I was on my feet, walking across the room, empty glass still clutched tight in my hand, when the door slid open, admitting harsh, institutional light from the hall.
A man and a woman. Woman slim, pale-haired, with dark blue, fathomless eyes, standing closer, closer than the man, man somehow lost in shadow. She turned to him and said, “All right, John. You can pick me up in the morning, at the usual time.”
Emerging from the shadows. “I... think I’ll wait for you, for just a while, down in the lobby...” Looking at me, mean faced, scowling, big, thick-necked man with a handgun holstered at his hip, not a stungun, something deadly, ID patch on his shoulder, branding him with the name of a licensed security agency.
She stepped across the lintel and the door slid shut behind her.
Silence.
Then a slow grin, secretive, letting me in on the secret, the grin of a friend. A very close friend, someone I’d known, perhaps, for...
She stepped closer, no more than a meter from me now, taking those deep blue eyes off mine, looking around at the apartment, then looking back, locking me in again. “So, Mr. du Cheyne. Someone die and leave you a bit of money did they?”
I swallowed past a long dry spot in my throat, tried to lift my empty glass toward my lips, forced myself to let it dangle. “Um. Sort of.” “Sort of...” She swept past me, into the rest of the apartment, turning round, looking at... things. Pirouetting. For me? I...
Not an astonishingly beautiful woman. That pale neutral-color silk dress, clinging just so to the curve of breast and hip and buttock... very flattering, supremely flattering, a thousand-livre dress, but... Garstang would’ve looked better in it, I...
Something about the scent of her as she brushed by me. As if she’d... touched me somehow. Not perfume, no. Nothing I could put my finger on, you see. Just...
She stepped closer, smiling into my eyes, looking at me. Only at me. As if there were nothing else, no one else, right now, in the entire universe, but me. Nothing in the universe but me, right now, maybe for ever. Nothing but me, until the end of time... That tremor in my chest must be the beating of my heart.
She took the empty glass out of my hand, brought it to her nose, sniffed delicately, smiled and made a tsk-tsk sound, put it aside, though there was nowhere to set it down, empty glass bouncing noiselessly on the carpet, rolling into a corner, forgotten.
Looking into my eyes. Looking into them as if she could...
Stepping closer, reaching out with one hand, touching me lightly on the chest. My God. Something about her breath, washing lightly over my face. Camilla. I remembered her name was Camilla.
She said, “It’s all right for you to be in a hurry.”
In a hurry. Desperation. That sense of tightness between my legs. Just like... just like... Oh, God. Nothing down there now. Tightness in my chest, a building sense of familiar horror. What if... what if...
Say something. Just say something.
Hard to swallow right now, throat so very dry. Christ, I need a drink, I... In the background, the drink mixer started to rattle... a flicker in Camilla’s eyes, a moment of distraction. The machinery suddenly fell silent.
Odd. As if the whole apartment had suddenly gone away.
As if she’d... commanded all of creation to leave us alone.
I whispered, “I... I...”
Blue eyes deepening, drawing me right in, her hand reaching up, feeling the paperiness of my cheek, fingers along the line of my jaw, a powerful tingle of... Oh, Christ. Of nothing. Nothing at all. Eyes telling me, it’s all right. Tell me. I said, “I’m sorry. I’m... sort of impotent. Sometimes.”
She smiled, sighed, warm exhalation on me, in me, the scent of her somehow coming right into my heart, and said, “I think not, Mr. du Cheyne.” She kissed me, standing on tiptoe... no, that’s not right, it... Our mouths welded together, her tongue extruding, seeming to fill my entire head.
And my erection deployed like a hydraulic ram at her command.
She pulled back, just a little, still breathing in my face, her teeth glittering, white and moist, so close to me, tongue visible, small pink creature, flexing behind her teeth, as if... She said, “You see, Mr. du Cheyne? It’s all right for you to be in a hurry.”
She kissed me again, any thought I might have had, might have wanted to have, disintegrating under the impact of her touch, arms around me, pulling me close, massaging the back of my neck, sweeping down the long panel of my back muscles, caressing the curve of my buttocks...
Somehow, we were on the floor, the front of that no-color silk dress pulled up, my trousers undone, slid halfway down, down around my knees perhaps, no sense at all of where they’d gone or how, Camilla still holding me with her lips, me on top of her, her body miraculously ready, hot and wet, the hard grip of her inner muscles as she took me in...
Delirium. Like I was having some grand hallucination.
And it was done.
Somehow.
o0o
Lying on my back on the floor beside her, gasping for breath. My God. I had forgotten, so completely forgotten, what it could be like. Lying there with my lips swollen, my teeth feeling like they were starting from their sockets. Like my nose, somehow, had gotten bigger, was subsiding now. Wet prick draping itself across the top of my thigh. Conditioned apartment air cool on damp pubic hair.
Yes. Those are the realities, aren’t they?
But the magic. The magic that preceded this pleasantly icky aftermath...
Shadow falling over me. Camilla standing now, stretching, clutching my eyes with the splendid curve of her back, arms reaching up, crossing over, drawing the expensive no-color silk dress off over her head in one long, fantastically liquid motion, leaving her naked.
Not the most beautiful girl I ever saw. Not by a long shot. Not even the most beautiful girl I ever screwed, though by not so very long a shot. Better than average, that’s all. She turned, stood still while I looked at her, smiling down at me, eyes so deep and blue and...
I looked away for a minute, catching my breath, then looked back, careful to stay focused on her body. So. Belly. Breasts. Hips. Inner sides of long thighs shining wet with the residue of me. Lightly furred blond snatch, standard-issue mons and standard vulval divide.
Nothing I hadn’t seen a thousand times before.
How many women in my lifetime? Real ones, real in my bed, for me to touch and taste and fuck? No so many. A couple of dozen, maybe. Enough.
I looked at her face, at the eyes behind that rich, inviting, friend’s smile, felt those eyes reach out and start fingering the stuff of my soul. Jesus. She was coming closer, standing beside me, and I could smell my scent on her, her own far richer, magical scent beyond that, demanding, demanding...
I swallowed past renewed dryness, and said, “How’re you doing this?”
Her head cocked to one side, a momentary intent look, as if she were puzzling something out. “You really want to know?” Then a long look around, at certain things in the apartment, the spacesuit hanging in the open closet, the toolbox in the corner, which, come to think of it, had stopped its ceaseless, restless stirrings the moment she... A smile, looking at me again. “I guess maybe you do.”
She sat down on the carpet beside me. “Some of it’s relatively simple, of course. Enhanced biochemistry. Special receptors attached to my vomeronasal organ so I can sample your pheromones. Modifications to my salivary and apocrine glands so I can manufacture pheromones of my own, specially tailored to... affect you. And my vagina’s been fixed to make a number of interesting hormones, too.”
Easy to guess, if I’d been able to think. They make fuck dolls that work just that way. I could have bought one for the price of two nights with Miss Camilla Seldane here.
She said, “That’s not the half of it, of course. You know how your suit and appliances know what you’re thinking? H
ow they can... talk to you?”
Ignorant people, technically unsophisticated folk call it “machine telepathy,” like something from an old fantasy story. Nothing magical about it. Human bodies are infused with nanometer-scale medical symbiotes, things which have augmented and in some sense displaced the natural systems evolution gave us. Artificial infusions, symbiotes injected centuries ago, now a natural part of us, passed on from generation to generation, carried in the germ plasm of the female line, as much a part of us as, say, our mitochondria.
AI machinery uses magnetic induction to read the whereabouts of these artificial organs in our blood, our bodies, uses them to detect the firing of our neurons, read what’s going on in our bodies and brains, and uses a rule sieve, the nature of the human soul long ago worked out, to figure out what we’re thinking. To, quite literally, read our minds.
And those same AIs can then induce electrical fields in the symbiotes, command them to move hither and yon, cause blood to flow, cause our neurons to fire, cause new connections to be made, can, in fact, cause our brains to think new thoughts. As simple as that.
She said, “I’ve got a headreader wired into my nervous system.” A gesture at my spacesuit. “About as good as that one, I guess.” A friendly smile, a sly grin, letting me in on the secret. “I tried to get a police-grade unit, what they call a lie detector. Couldn’t.”
Christ. Knowing eyes on me. Knowing what I was thinking, even now. A sudden feeling of warmth. A drawing toward this woman. Something very much the way I imagine true love must feel, I...
Her grin broadened. Eyes on me.
I said, “You could do a lot more than be a callgirl with a setup like that.”
She said, “Superintendent of Whores would pull my license. They’d take my rig away and I’d be spreading my legs for dismes again.”
Right. And she was probably still paying off the surgical fees and hardware loans, too.
She laughed, stood up, straddled me and let me look up at her for a minute, let me look up at her face, at her crotch, both in a line somehow, dominating my field of view. Was she expecting... yes. Of course. I said, “I... don’t think I can...” Well, no. Erection already established and waiting, down at the bottom of my belly.
She laughed, merry, witty, inviting, happy somehow. Kneeled, took my solid prick in her hand and guided it inside, slid down the length of me until she was sitting on my pubis bone, massaging me with ridiculously supple internal muscles.
She said, “We’ve got all night, you know?”
I nodded. Helpless.
Soft laughter. “By the time I’m through with you, Mr. du Cheyne, you’ll be frisky for weeks.”
o0o
I woke up, some time the next afternoon, sitting naked in my chair, legs splayed out, bare heels on the carpet, head thrown back, mouth hanging open, in the silence of my empty apartment. Throat so very dry. Thirsty as hell. Atmosphere in here almost... steamy. Air still full of pheromones the apartment would have a struggle filtering out.
Something stirred, very softly, in my toolbox. One delicate clink, as of ice, from the drink mixer. Right. Aloud, in a rusty-sounding voice, I said, “Sure. I’d like a nice, tall, cold glass of orange juice, please.”
A moment of silence; the apartment stunned? What could it be thinking? Does it visualize Gaetan the Drunken Slob, somehow revitalized, somehow redeemed, by one great big hearty dose of superenhanced almighty goddam technopussy? Talk about amazing grace... Fucking God, am I thirsty, though!
Rosy-fingered dawn blushed on the far wall, then the vidnet connection swirled out into the room, house AI already threading its way, oh so carefully, down my usual roads, surfing past this scene and that, no sign at all, mind you, of the pornode.
Headline News Service.
Familiar scene of the B-VEI landing field, somewhere on Callisto, orange Jupiter hanging in a matte black sky over a bright ice horizon, ice bright only by contrast to the black sky. Vacuum-sealed buildings in the foreground, insulated landing stage, spacecraft here and there, designs familiar and strange.
Closeup, one of those little B-VEI disk-ships, this one clustered round by emergency vehicles, surrounded by hundreds of men and women in sparkly silver spacesuits, the familiar suits of technical workers, just like the suit hanging silent in my closet.
My God, look at that.
Flying saucer, once featureless, silvery, like something from a medieval dream, now twisted, skin broken open here and there, riven by long, lightning-bolt cracks, skin dented in, blackened...
The voice-over: “...experimental faster-than-light spacecraft Torus X-4, just returned from a test flight to the prominent blue-white star Regulus, some 83 light-years from Earth, a round-trip voyage of approximately twenty weeks, reports having been attacked by a spacecraft of unknown design and origin...”
Blue Regulus flaring out there, like an infinitely deep white hole poked through the flat black sky, letting the energies of deSitter space in to consume us, dry voice of X-4’s captain narrating the vid for us, Regulus without a regular planetary system, surrounded by a fine planetesimal field, like an immense Kuiper Belt, rich, so very rich, you see, in metals and minerals of every sort, including a number of unusual...
Then the voice of some other crewman: Captain? Captain? I’m getting a reading on the mass proximity indicator. No. No sir, it’s not an asteroid. Sir, it’s vectoring toward us at nearly point-three cee! It’s...
Something crossing the exterior view, transiting the camera field at high velocity, an eight-armed starfish trailing a sparkly silver plasma cone, background stars whipping behind it as the camera struggled to track it across the sky.
Captain screaming, What the fucking Hell...
Starfish going flash-flicker-flash, just before it disappeared, exterior scene dissolving in purple fire...
Captain! Jesus Captain, it’s coming back!
Flash-flicker-flash.
Switch to an interior scene. Someone standing in the middle of a wrecked control room, man in a nice-looking company uniform. Man on fire, dancing and screaming and dancing as the flames licked around his face and crawled in his hair... Ship’s fire extinguishers going on, blanketing the room in airless fog, Captain blowing out in a puff of black smoke, falling down into the fog like a toppling corpse...
“...engineering officer Michiko Landry reports the ship’s AI system was able to make the transition to hyperspace and escape the attack by making a short-range jump to the other side of Regulus. The ship was apparently detected there by the assailant, which pursued in normal spacetime, giving the ship’s navigation systems the few minutes they needed to calculate an escape trajectory toward Earth...”
Trajectory toward Earth? Then won’t they know where we live? No. No, don’t be stupid. Hyperspace navigation wouldn’t be like cross-einsteinian geodesic pathways, for Christ’s sake...
Voice-over: “Captain Hamilton died from his burns en route and is now in Cedars Sinai hospital on Earth, undergoing full resurrection. Though a complete physical recovery is expected within days, medical technicians doubt a full memory-association chain can be established. Trade Regency representatives are expected to begin questioning Hamilton as soon as he can be awakened...”
I could feel my heart pounding. Jesus. Changes are coming. All this tawdry, ordinary bullshit going on here and now... while the whole universe comes down around our fucking ears. Meanwhile, I’ve got three days to find a new job, or else find a new place to live. Fucking Christ. I got up, started getting ready to go. Knowing, suddenly, just where I wanted to be.
o0o
It takes about nine hours to get from L1(SE) to Callisto, much of that time spent making your connections. At the corporate offices of Berens-Vataro Enterprises Interplanetary, cooling my heels, I listened to a nice young man, a receptionist, I suppose, say things along the lines of, “...I’m sorry, Mr. du Cheyne, we just hadn’t expected anyone to...” and “...yes, I appreciate that you own twelve thousand shares of B-VEI stock..
.” a keen look then, right in the eye: “You do understand the current stock issue exceeds three million shares?”
Who did I want to talk to? And why? Now that I’d gotten here, it was hard to put into words. A tour? Well, sure, I’d like that, but... Finally, they found my name in their records and I sat in a crummy little office, looking across a cheap desk at the same young woman who’d come by my office a few days ago, looking to buy my stock. Miss Tallentire.
“Xenia,” she said. “Call me Xenia.” Looking at me, quite puzzled. “I have to tell you, Mr. du Cheyne...”
“Gaetan.” Smiling at here, eying that sleek form speculatively, but remembering Camilla Seldane, who’d given me... something, at least.
She shrugged, “I have to tell you, we no longer have any interest in reacquiring your stock. B-VEI managed to secure an absolute majority share, with ERSIE taking most of the rest, other than a very few small holdouts like yourself. Now, you can sell it at parity on the open market, or ERSIE may still offer you a small premium...”
“That’s not why I’m here.”
Puzzled. “Then... Mr. du Cheyne, if you’d like a tour of the facility, I’m sure we could come up with something, but...”
I said, “What I’d like is a job.”
Startled look, eyebrows going up. Then she laughed, skin around her pretty eyes crinkling. “Whatever for? Mr. du Cheyne, you’re a rich man by anyone’s standard. Sell the stock. Then find something to do.”
“I’d like to work on the new starships. I, uh...”
She reached forward and touched the top of her desk, then squinted down at whatever image was forming in its depths, out of my line of sight. “I see.” She looked up at me. “Look, I’m sorry ERSIE fired you, Mr. du Cheyne. You did us a good turn by at least holding onto your shares when there was no certainty that...” a shrug. “I sympathize but...”
Sympathize. Isn’t that what they all say?
She said, “We’re not hiring just yet. We...”
“But you’ll need good people. Soon. I’ve got training, class ten certification, and twenty years’ experience as a metadynamic engineering technician. You...”
Acts of Conscience Page 7