Virtual Virgin dspi-5

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  I eyed the one slim chance I had. “Don’t worry, Madrigal. I have to break a limb, hopefully not one of mine, to get this piece of hard cold stone to drop. The chances of me connecting with it as it falls are a hundred to one. Just jump out of the way so no pieces of it contact you.”

  “I can see it well enough to concentrate my illusion over its surface. If my power is enough to make illusion real, you’ll have your free-falling smooth mirror. For now, hang back.”

  I scurried down a long branch, puncturing a thigh. Luckily, the proven power of sailcloth was hard for even mirror-world thorns to pierce deeply. I got a rip and a scratch instead of a stab wound.

  After checking my injury, I looked up.

  The faceted giant gemstone was changing, its edges and brilliancy softening. It elongated into a melting marshmallow of a surface, so I bent my knees, pushed back my arms like a skier heading down a steep snowy mountain, and sprung off my thorny perch.

  The familiar had stretched into heavy loops of climbing rope on my right wrist. I grabbed one cool coil, lifted my arm, and started big circling gestures until it was a looping silver blur.

  I wasn’t wearing my ruby red slippers from the Emerald City Hotel and casino today, so I had no magic heels to click together. Instead, I thought of losing myself in Ric’s one silver iris. And added his arms. My mirror mojo might respond to a kinder, gentler emotion than desperation.

  There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home, I heard Irma whispering hopefully in my mind. Like we’d ever had one. A home, not a mind.

  I’d have to count on the familiar being able to extend or shrink so I hit the diamond’s rounded central plane dead on. When I launched into what I hoped was a trapeze-style swing into and through the dangling gemstone mirror above me, I felt the dang sling-back shoes slip off my heels, and then off entirely.

  I had a second to hope they didn’t brain Madrigal as they fell, then everything around me exploded into an icy nova of light and cold. Hunched in an upright protective fetal position I felt the familiar release from the limb as it wrapped and coiled around my forearm again, its job done.

  For an instant my body hung in space before my stomach tightened as I passed through a smooth cool barrier like plunging through a swirl of soft ice cream.

  Yummy! Irma chortled. Home free with hot fudge on it.

  Madrigal’s magic eased my way for only an instant. Then I was breaking through transparent layers of spun-sugar-thin ice, my breath sucked out of my body by a plunge into coldness beyond arctic. I landed with a sickeningly audible crack on one side and hip.

  I had crashed into hard metal, stunned, and slid down a slick surface to an even harder floor. Looking around, I saw myself reflected in stainless steel. Was I up against the mirror backing of a giant rhinestone?

  Loretta would love to trap me in a cage as I had immobilized her, a bug in a blender.

  And I had done it to myself.

  Ric was still on his own against the vengeful ghost at large, thanks to me.

  Chapter Eight

  IT COST RIC a hundred bucks just to take an elevator down to the Seven Deadly Sins Dream-theme Park on the Nine Circles of Hell Limbo level.

  He was the only passenger at this late-morning hangover hour. The reflective stainless steel walls of the bullet-shaped car hosted silhouettes of writhing nude women, which made him feel he was starring in the opening credits to a James Bond movie. He even had the concealed weapon.

  A sudden turn, and he thought he saw . . . Delilah, like a swimmer viewed through a giant aquarium window, floating, brushing against the smeary glass, her lips almost touching the cold steel sides of the elevator capsule . . . car.

  Ric shook off the hallucinogenic vision. Who knew what delusions modern technology could hurl at suggestible tourists in Vegas these days . . . ?

  His forefinger hovered over seven different destination buttons, one for every deadly sin. Ric was crazy-curious how anyone could make Sloth entertaining, much less sinful, but pressed “Lust.”

  That was the most personal of sins. Employing chipped CinSims as exotic sex trade workers was as degrading as anything Ric could imagine, and he’d seen the worst results of human trafficking in women and children during his work in the Mexican-US Border Wars.

  Here, he imagined the reality of involuntary prostitution would be prettied up.

  Ironic that he was down here to settle a question of morality.

  The doors sliced open without sound, framing a shapely woman with long brunet hair wearing a really short sarong. Flowers bedecked her neck, hair, and the print of the sarong. Everything was in shades of gray accented by black, with a luminous brightness putting the, uh, subtleties of her figure into sharp focus.

  “Welcome, Ric” she crooned, lifting a lei over his head and picking up his left hand to lay her right-hand fingers on his. Her eyes closed. “The elevator scans reveal that I am your favored gender and physical type, but you need not choose me.”

  “How do you know my name?” he demanded. A credit card would record it but . . . he’d paid cash, not wanting to leave a record.

  She pressed his palm to her fulsome cleavage. “My heart tells me you find me comely.”

  Her skin felt warm, soft, moisturized. He jerked his hand away. He’d never touched a CinSim before.

  People tended not to, even in Las Vegas casinos, but he was in touchy-feely land now, a place of costly carnal knowledge, and it felt . . . creepy, not sexy. That probably was only because he knew a zombie underlay the Hollywood beauty queen’s likeness. She was the sarong film queen of the thirties and forties, Dorothy Lamour, who turned to lust object and comedy with Bob Hope and Bing Crosby on their popular “Road” pictures. Ric had seen enough old TV to glimpse those.

  “Come with me,” she said, turning and swaying away. “You can tell me your preferences while we approach our private getaway. Lagoon?” she asked, gazing over her naked shoulder.

  He didn’t know whether she meant an assignation site or another new blue cocktail.

  When she’d turned back he recognized a different face, more like Mexico, like home. Maria Montez, the name came to him. Must be a mental prod program active down here, so the customer knew what he was getting.

  Ric swallowed. Both CinSims were about Delilah’s height and build, curvier than today’s gaunt movie queens. How had the . . . program running this black-and-white bordello sucked his personal preferences out of him during the elevator ride? Maybe those shadowy female figures in the wall had been succubae gauging his subconscious sexual reaction to their various types.

  The woman’s figure walking before him lost her sarong. A millisecond of total nudity was covered by a slinky long silver gown with back bared to her waist, a favorite Delilah dress-up look. This outfit coyly offered long sleeves and wide, sequined shoulder pads. An elaborate updo bared her neck, definitely a personal turn-on of his. When she turned her head to look over that glittering shoulder she had the face of Gene Tierney from Laura.

  “Penthouse?” she asked.

  Ric felt like the infatuated detective in that classic film, who fell in love with the portrait of a dead woman. He almost stumbled over his feet in confusion. He’d have to be brain dead not to react to this parade of beautiful women changing over and over again before his eyes into everything his teen self had fixated on. “Laura” led him on a few steps, then stopped and turned to face him.

  “Will it be just us?” she asked.

  She had become Hedy Lamarr, the most exotic brunet beauty of all. He recognized her from late-night films because she was a favorite of Delilah’s for a bunch of reasons.

  First, she was the rare woman who’d rejected Howard Hughes. Delilah took glee in that. Second, she was the rare Hollywood glamour queen with mathematical gifts. She’d helped invent an early version of frequency hopping with a piano roll to change between eighty-eight frequencies. That musical-mathematical duet had helped crack codes in WWII and had led to Wi-Fi, among other modern marv
els. Delilah loved her digital-everything. It didn’t hurt that Lamarr’s title role in the sexy Biblical epic made Samson and Delilah the biggest-grossing film of its year.

  Brains and beauty, just like his Delilah.

  “Just us?” Hedy repeated. The most beautiful woman in the world in her day was even more exquisite in person.

  “Dios, sí.” He was feeling confused and . . . unfaithful. “Nothing kinky,” he added hoarsely, as if he was actually contemplating . . .

  She had stopped walking. Gliding, you’d really describe it. “A one-woman man. How refreshing for level L. My hair is caught in my necklace clasp.” She lifted it to bare her neck.

  He reached to touch it, experimentally. Warm. He fumbled with the clasp, tantalized by a virgin neck as white as Delilah’s, or was hers as white as the Hedy Lamarr CinSim’s? He wanted . . . needed to press a kiss on it, more than a kiss. He reached for the gown’s shimmering side . . . and it changed into black satin brocade in his palm, a slightly raised pattern over a shape a blind man would lust for.

  Ric stumbled back. Had the elevator pumped an aphrodisiac or drug invisibly into the air? This woman’s black hair was coiled like a satin snake into a luxuriant sort of bun, her figure as willowy as the long narrow satin gown she wore, which was slit to the top of a white thigh.

  That’s what Chinese dragon ladies had worn for decades up to now. Ric recognized the gown, called a cheongsam. Law enforcement nowadays was attuned to global customs, but Delilah would know style . . . and Delilah would kill him if she knew what he’d walked into like any horny postadolescent guy.

  “Don’t stop now,” the CinSim whispered, her head turning over her shoulder. Her eyebrows and eye makeup were dark winged slashes on her white face. “Opium bed?”

  Ric’s dazed enchantment ended as he recognized the nose, chin, and cheekbones under the cinematic makeup.

  He stepped back, horrified.

  This was Myrna Loy in one of her Asian femme fatale roles.

  He’d been programmed to lust after Nick Charles’s film wife, Nora.

  That felt even creepier. No way could he tell himself she was Delilah in some other guise. He wasn’t a home-breaker, not even a CinSim home-breaker.

  “I . . . know you,” he said. “You’re about as Asian as I am.”

  Recognizing her seemed to disrupt the programming.

  The Myrna Loy CinSim blinked. “You haven’t been here before.”

  “No.”

  “It wasn’t anything I said or did?”

  “I found ‘opium bed’ highly inciting. Trust me.”

  “And you don’t want to . . . ?”

  “I won’t,” he answered honestly.

  “I’ve never had to entertain a . . . won’t.”

  “I’m . . . unentertainable.”

  Her original poise and film person were returning like gangbusters.

  “You look perfectly functional. In fact, you look perfect. A tasty Anglo adventurer in a world of opium, yellow peril, and sin.”

  “You’re charming, but politically incorrect down to your . . . metal fingernails.”

  “You’d be surprised what these can do in an opium bed.”

  “No, I wouldn’t be. Delilah would know who you’re playing—”

  “I am not ‘playing’ you. I deliver.”

  “Isn’t there something inside you that longs for a . . . kinder, gentler life than ‘entertaining’ any man who happens along?”

  The black lipsticked CinSim lips paused, then pursed. “Fu Manchu is something of a bore.”

  “He is . . . ?”

  “My . . . enforcer, I suppose you’d say. I have been schooled in current expressions.”

  “That’s ugly to hear. Do you have any choice about what you do here?”

  “Of course not. It’s a role.”

  “Don’t you long for a different one?”

  She considered. “I do it very well. It doesn’t seem out of the ordinary. I don’t often get customers who ask questions, as you do.”

  “Wouldn’t you give anything to escape this artificial atmosphere? To be a witty and devoted wife, for example?”

  “I am Fa Lo See, I take much personal . . . satisfaction in tormenting the helpless white man.”

  “I’m Latino.”

  She shrugged. “I do not care what language you scream in.” Her long metal nails extended toward his chest.

  Ric caught her wrists in an imprisoning grip. Delilah would know what breed of movie villainess this was, Myrna Loy underneath it or not.

  “Is this an S&M level? Why on earth would I end up here?” He looked around, encountering the same vague fog that had greeted him outside the elevator. “Why am I here?”

  “Perhaps merely because I require . . . customers.”

  Her exotic features had turned satanic. Did customers get what they wanted, or did they “serve” the CinSim characters? That was not what he’d come here to find out.

  One thing he’d learned: There was no Myrna/Nora here to save. Only his own skin.

  If he’d stuck with the other women’s images, he’d have been channeled into an island-girl or city-sophisticate setting. Recognizing and “picking” the Loy CinSim from a cheesy racist bent–sex film manifestation was going to get him pulp-fiction treatment. He knew what he should do, where he should be next.

  Outta here.

  Nick Charles wouldn’t put up with playing pin cushion for a sexual sadist, even if she was enacted by the same actress who was his smart and sexy wife. Celebrity CinSims were a more morally confusing construction than he’d ever guessed.

  Chapter Nine

  A DRY MIST curled up from my body, like steam rising. Breath came back with a cough. I scrambled upright, my barefoot soles burning. Support. I needed something to grab onto. My searching hands found slick cool walls circling me along with a multitude of my reflections.

  I turned in a slow circle. My image turned with me, not Lilith this time, but distorted Easter Island heads of myself, familiar but . . . different.

  This glassy cool chamber felt like the inside of a bullet. Recognition made me forget my burning feet and freezing fingertips. Was this was some . . . upright cryogenic preservation chamber?

  No seam in the surface betrayed a door. I hadn’t “gone” anywhere. I was trapped in the slick steel heart of the mirror-world diamond pendant. And, for sure, I hadn’t reached my heart’s desire and wherever Ric was a target for the wrath of whatever Loretta Cicereau had become.

  I was more of a prisoner than ever.

  At first I just threw myself against every curved slick reflective surface.

  Reflective surfaces had been my friend since I’d come to Las Vegas in search of my roots. If it shone, glittered, and reflected, I’d always been able to pass through, even if I’d reach the other side bleary and confused. And Vegas had been built on shine, glitter, and glitz.

  I’d grabbed my new talent and run with it, expecting it always to be there, like my shadow.

  Not now.

  Now my efforts to escape stainless-steel custody were just bruising my pale skin until my blurred reflection looked like King Kong had impressed his fingerprints all over me. I wasn’t used to being simply human. I thought of Loretta Cicereau first sensing the fey twins’ webs all over her ghostly image.

  Someone . . . something . . . had made Loretta take physical form again.

  Someone . . . something . . . had wanted to undo my clever method to freeze a girl gone wild. That same force was bottling me on the inside of a giant . . . bullet.

  I would not go gently into that shining metal night, like Metropolis’s human heroine Maria went from lying comatose in a glass coffin in a mad scientist’s laboratory into the instant mummy case of a robot suit, no matter how glamorous. I pounded my fists against their distorted fuzzy reflections.

  I stopped, feeling like Superman confronting Kryptonite for the first time.

  Stainless steel was somewhat reflective and had a reflective chrome com
ponent, but contained not a bit of sterling silver or silver nitrate. It was not a friend of mine, and it had been chosen to entomb me, to torture me with what might be happening to Ric beyond my power to prevent it.

  Panting, I pushed my face and body tight against the curved side of my personal mummy case. I’d have to rely on Ric to save himself, and maybe me.

  Oops. I was kissing myself. I was so close to my blurry reflection that I couldn’t focus. My palms felt the metal warming against my touch. Was I sensing just a reflection, or was I contacting Lilith?

  Whatever I saw was just my height, and just my coloring, a pale face with a halo of cloudy dark hair.

  I brought the spread fingers of both hands up to my face, trying to push the image away. The silver familiar streaked across my shoulders and down my arms to my wrists, like a mitten string inside your heavy coat. Only kids who’d grown up in a climate with cold winters, as I had in Kansas, knew that feeling. Instead of mittens, though, the familiar encased my wrists and first knuckles in chain-mail workout gloves. Cool but . . . impractical.

  I spread my hands apart to study the effect, and the stainless steel wall in front of me split. The two halves of my reflection slid to the edges of my vision, and a 3-D version in living black-and-white, a knockout brunet Cinema Simulacrum, stood barring my way out.

  I was eager enough to escape to push right into her, which might feel bizarre. Humans up top avoided contact with the CinSims, very aware of the zombie body in possibly questionable condition beneath the attractive monotone surface.

  Dreading first contact was not necessary. Two hands in glorious living color grasped her off-white upper arms and shuffled her aside.

  “Get lost, chica de cine,” someone said.

  Chapter Ten

  THE MAN WHO stepped from behind the clawing glamour-puss looked confused, but unruffled as any man could who’d just fought off a sexy CinSim.