And then it was over, Brother Michael’s hands lifting her head away from his lap to push his gown back into position. They stood after that, his hands on her shoulders as unsmiling eyes stared deep into her. Whatever he saw there he was satisfied.
Fear, probably, Rachel thought bitterly.
“Go with God.” He said it dismissively, fingers already flicking over the sofa’s data panel, closing down the ice-cold array of heaven. Brother Michael waited until Rachel had reached the door before calling her back, pointing to his juice flask. “Take that away. Oh...” He paused, watching her shoulders stiffen and seeing the tendons stand out at the back of her bowed head. There was, he had to admit, something about this one that brought out the worst in him.
“Bring me fresh juice before you go to your bed...”
-=*=-
Lars watched in disgust. Although it was disgust tinged with fascination. So this was Brother Michael, the new Noah. He smiled, not kindly, and shuffled backwards, then flipped himself round and ran on his hands and knees down an air vent. He loved being in zero G, it was even better than being on the Moon. But he was training himself to handle gravity, too. Originally he’d been assigned to the men’s dorm. But Brother Robert was the only man there and he didn’t want Lars around, not with the sandrat’s muttering and sour animal stink. So Lars bedded down in the goat pen.
Tomorrow the goats would be released into one of the Valleys — or so Rachel said — but tonight they provided him with warmth and company. And none of them complained when he unscrewed a panel and vanished for a few hours into the security of the tunnels.
The goat pen was all right, little more than ten paces by ten paces, but the dorm had horrified him, going on into the distance like a great circular emptiness. Nothing but echoing space and curved walls so big that the far side was almost a blur.
Lars didn’t know it and he wasn’t interested enough to find out, but the dorm was a roofed-off segment near the outer end of a four-kilometre spar, which gave the dorm its own gravity, though obviously not quite as much as in the ring itself. And it wasn’t real gravity, of course. But centrifugal force gave a good-enough illusion of gravity to be gratefully accepted by the human mind.
The doughnut ring didn’t need a central spindle. Why should it, when the ring just hung in space and there was nothing to stop it revolving around its own empty centre? In the same way, there was nothing to stop cargo shuttles docking alongside the ring instead of at the southern end of the spindle. At a speed of one revolution every twenty seconds, any decent pilot could dock without trouble; while to a semiAI or bio it would be less than nothing, a mere subset of a subroutine.
But Brother Michael had wanted a traditional wheel-of-life design. Or so Lars gathered, the way he gathered most news, by listening at grilles or hiding in air vents. The only problem for Lars was that the gravity on the station was fucked. Try as he might, Lars couldn’t get a mental fix on what was up and what counted as down, mainly because it kept changing.
When he was in the spindle, then “up” was North, towards the cathedral, and that was the way the lifts travelled. But if he was in one of the four spars that rotated around the spindle, then “up” was towards the spindle and “down” was towards the giant doughnut. At least, that was the way gravity worked, getting stronger the further down he went.
Lars hadn’t been out to the doughnut yet, because it wasn’t allowed. And besides, that was where the mad lady lived, except that Rachel’s friend Ruth said she was sleeping. When the doughnut was finished and the animals were all in place, it would be possible for them to start walking straight ahead and then keep going until they came back to where they’d started, two days later, having walked right round the whole Arc.
Lars wasn’t sure he believed it. In fact, he wasn’t going to believe it until he’d done it for himself. He didn’t tell Ruth that, though. He liked her too much. At first, before he’d seen Brother Michael praying over Rachel, Lars had thought Ruth must be upset not to get called to pray as often as the others: but when he suggested that, Ruth just smiled sourly and flashed him a lopsided grin.
“No,” she’d said, patting Lars on the arm. “I’m lousy at praying. My teeth are too big and I’m clumsy, very clumsy.” Lars wasn’t muddled by that any more. Not now, not any longer. He knew just what she was talking about. In fact, Lars reckoned that Brother Michael was a man who had his shit seriously together... To use the words of Ben, whose head was now probably just slop in a bucket of slime.
All the same, as Lars scuttled rat-like down the air vent back to the warmth and friendship of the goat pen he wondered what LizAlec would do when Brother Michael called on her to pray.
Chapter Twenty-One
Identity/Crisis
Letting the self-cleaning neoprene hose slide back into its mounting, Brother Michael adjusted his cassock and pulled down the panel that launched his office. He’d taken the Sunday-morning communion, presided at breakfast and confessed two of the handmaidens. He was exhausted.
Diodes winked as the flatscreen picked up where he’d left off the night before, pulling up a visual link to the now-empty women’s dormitory. Angrily, the priest hit a key and broke the link. The whole Arc was wired for sight, both infrared and m/wave, but he didn’t want the distraction.
Built into the flap was a neat fold-up keyboard. It had touch-sensitive keys, floating track ball and an input socket for Zeiss wraprounds in case the user was working on something too confidential to be accessed on open screen. The office had tri-D capacity, too — as well as a Sony neural link — and the whole thing had been bought by mail order from a Virgin MegaStore: only Brother Michael didn’t approve of bioClay implants and unfortunately he’d never learned to use a deck, at least not properly. But this wasn’t a message one of the girls could key-up for him.
He couldn’t trust them not to talk.
The screen cleared and a tiny smiling bot asked Brother Michael if he wanted to create a new visual of himself or use the vActor file already in memory. He chose the file. An ex-MGM/UA programmer in Burbank had coded it for him — and it had to be one of the few vActors around that showed its proprietor as less attractive than he really was.
Early on, Brother Michael had discovered that while Central Asian zaibatsu khans liked ostentation, most Chinese zaibatsu grandees considered the West’s obsession with mere surface to be shallow, which it was. (Bizarre as it seemed, face was actually about what went on under the skin.) He’d also realized that many West Coast Americans were only happy if they were physically the most attractive party in any deal. And so Brother Michael looked less good on screen than he did in life.
It saved him millions. For a start it meant the Californians he went up against weren’t trying to screw him because of his good looks, and the Japanese and East Coast Chinese regarded him as more than a mere lightweight.
Which was good policy. At least, Brother Michael thought so. Not least because it had given rise to the myth of his personal magnetism. Every C3N journalist, every CySat power suit he’d come into direct contact with had gone away to spread stories about how magnetic, attractive and spiritually powerful Brother Michael was when you met him face to face.
Excellent surgery, a basic knowledge of the human psyche, Sister Aaron’s side interest in pheromones and an understanding that to err might be human but that most people wanted someone to admire had taken Brother Michael from a forty-three-second picture grab to a role as the new Messiah.
Whether or not Sister Aaron and he would actually go with The Arc to act as angels was a question exercising every station from CySat’s award-winning MyGod to the pirate evangelists of Mongolia. And Brother Michael had to say, quite honestly, that the real answer was — he hadn’t the faintest... What he did know was that Sister Aaron was determined to travel with The Arc and letting her leave would be like losing part of himself. Besides, part of him wanted to leave behind the corrupted cities and launch into the cleansing vastness of space.
&nb
sp; The priest smiled, watching his reflection in the screen like an overlay on the more homely vActor beneath. Corrupted cities, the cleansing vastness of space... He couldn’t help it. The simple sentence constructions, the dramatic cadences of speech he’d once found so difficult now came to him like second nature.
There’d been a voice coach in Des Moines, but he was dead now. Come to that, so was the MGM coder who’d constructed the vActor. The guards who’d held him in lock-down at Rikers were also gone, those who’d survived the riot. Doing the Lord’s work was sometimes a bloody and frightening business, but then, even the simplest reading of the Old Testament told you that.
Brother Michael couldn’t say he liked the new girl. There was a darkness behind her violet eyes and she held her body awkwardly, as if she was unhappy with who she was. The way she hunched forward suggested her changing body made her uncomfortable, and not just physically. And as for that hand she kept folded across her stomach... There was a violence about her too, an ungodliness.
All in all, decided Brother Michael, she’d be difficult to integrate with the other handmaidens. Which left him with two choices: to drop her quietly into space, or return her to a sender who might or might not be pleased to get her back.
The bracelet was real enough, though. The five-clawed celestial dragon circling a poppy mon had been on the battle flags of the General’s army. And now the bracelet circled Brother Michael’s wrist, dark and ancient. It was too big, too heavy and it hit against the keyboard when Brother Michael tried to key in instructions, but he was still reluctant to take it off.
He would have to, though, and sooner than he wanted. Sister Aaron had woken up from one of her periodic beauty-enhancing naps in cryo and found out about the bracelet from The Arc’s AI. Now she wanted it for herself. He’d give it to Sister Aaron, too. At a price... And the price would be her. It always was.
Brother Michael pulled the heavy silver circle off his wrist and put it by the keyboard. He might be tired, but he was never too tired to take what Sister Aaron only ever offered reluctantly. All the same, he made a mental note to swallow L’Argenine, sildenafil citrate and yohimbe before taking Sister Aaron the silver bracelet.
On Brother Michael’s screen was a grab of Anchee Que’s father, dressed in khaki uniform and staring hard at the cameraman, an Ishie probably. No one else would be insane enough to go after General Que. Brother Michael stared at the man’s face but there was nothing there to indicate anything but fury at being caught on camera. Still, contacting him had to be worth a try.
Brother Michael would keep the mutant boy, though. It hadn’t escaped Brother Michael’s notice how well Lars handled the animals and how much better natured Rachel was when the boy was around. Rachel and a sandrat... Sweet Jesus, it hurt just to imagine what their offspring would look like. So much so, it was almost worth breeding them to find out.
In the end, Brother Michael cancelled his vActor and sent the message as ASCII text, pure and simple, tagging on a videograb of himself as a file attachment. He didn’t bother to crypt the message, since there was no need to disguise where it came from. And he didn’t bother to make himself less attractive. Let the old bastard realize the temptations his precious daughter faced. From what Brother Michael had heard about the grand Shanghai families he’d feel obliged to have her returned, even if he then stripped the skin off her back with a whip.
Brother Michael would have liked to have kept the girl himself. But she was too big, too dangerous a prize even for him. This way was better.
Besides, it wasn’t a kidnapping and Brother Michael wasn’t demanding a ransom for her return, merely suggesting a donation to the Brotherhood might be in order for the trouble they’d taken to ensure the girl’s well-being.
-=*=-
It didn’t reach the desk of Anchee’s father, not at first and not for a while. Nothing did without first being filtered. And the semiTuring that plucked Brother Michael’s message from the in-basket would tie up its not-too-sophisticated MS OfficeSoft neural net for half a day, trying to balance the contents of Brother Michael’s message against St Lucius’s weekly update that reported Anchee happy and healthy. At the end of twelve hours it passed the problem up one Turing level to Mencius, the General’s house AI, and promptly forgot about the problem. The AI put out an all-points call for the General’s pet ballerina and then promptly did the same.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Nerves of Steel
Jude stank of dried sweat. Mind you, Fixx probably smelt too, the erstwhile media star reminded himself. Ghost certainly did, of God knew what but Fixx could smell the kitten from where he stood at a half-shuttered window, staring intently through its gap into the narrow dusty street beyond. On the house opposite a fat iridescent gecko was glued to the whitewashed wall, half in daylight, half hidden in shade. Every so often the lizard leant forward and tongue-whipped a fly stupid enough to get too close.
The kitten wanted the gecko: it just couldn’t work out how to spring the trap.
“Handy for every occasion,” announced the box as Fixx grabbed another tissue. He tossed box and tissue into the bin. It had been two days since he’d last had a pressure shower and body wipes just didn’t do the job, whatever they told you. What Fixx really wanted to do was clean himself off, but he didn’t want to ask in case Jude couldn’t spare the water.
Fixx smiled and stretched lazily. It was amazing what sex could do to improve a situation. He’d come into the CasaNegro prepared to nanchuk it up, if that’s what it took to get the information he needed. Now he didn’t even want to waste the woman’s water. Not without paying, anyway.
“Hey,” said Fixx, turning back from the window to stare at Jude. “You got a water shower that works?”
Jude rolled over and smiled, half happy, half mocking. “Oh sweet honey. You t’k you finished...?”
Fixx grinned and moved back to the wooden bed, hand reaching for a full breast, resting metal fingers softly on its dark nipple, feeling it swell and grow taut. Electric sensors beneath his organic polymer skin relayed sensations of softness back to his brain.
He rolled on top of her, and then laughed as she rolled on top of him. Her full breasts felt good to Fixx so he kept on caressing them and playing with her nipples, and then he did it some more.
“Hey,” Jude said sulkily, “You going t’roll that between your fingers all day?” She took Fixx’s wrist and moved his hand down her body until he could reach between her legs. She was big. Not fat, just big. Nipples thick as thumbs, heavy breasts that one hand alone had no hope of cupping. Strong arms and heavy fists that looked like they could crack heads the way other people opened eggs.
Her thighs and legs he knew all about. When they’d reached round him earlier it had been like being gripped by steel.
“Geneered,” said Jude as she watched him examine her body. “Class geneering and a good full-gravity gym.”
Fixx nodded, looking up at her. Since he’d done aTetsuo, he’d got so used to dwarfing his partners that it felt good to be fucking someone his own size, like he didn’t have to hold back. Fixx slid his hand out from beneath Jude’s legs and reached for a can of Electric Soup.
Jude laughed. But then she’d laughed back at the beginning when Fixx had pulled a can out of her fridge and began to check its label. And she’d laughed again when he had loaded twenty neon-hued tubes into a crate and lugged it to her bedroom at the back of the bar.
She’d listed the ingredients for Fixx. Not that he’d believed her, at least not to start with. He did now, though. One look at the luminous edges to her velvet breasts told Fixx that it wasn’t just ethanol wreaking havoc with his synapses. And the problem was, stripped naked she looked like some vast Greek statue while he looked like some bit-part Tetsuo. Two false legs and one false arm grafted onto a body minced to gristle by a car bomb. Which all seemed cool with Jude, but didn’t change the fact the Fixx had started to hate his own reflection.
She didn’t mind that he was a patchwork q
uilt of hues and textures. That his legs and right arm were obviously, intentionally synthetic. That the black of their wafer-thin vat-grown skin clashed with the pale white of his chest and belly. In remaking himself to be seen on stage, dressed up in a cloak and surrounded by a swirling sublimating fog of liquid nitrogen, he’d been concentrating on what looked good on vid. And what looked slick as all shit on screen didn’t necessarily look that hot up close.
Hell, he should have got clone-grown new limbs and had a traditional transplant, or just Soul Chipped himself and risked a total redone. He could have afforded it, even without his 1stVirtual insurance policy. It was time he fucking faced facts. Getting Tetsuoed up had been a lousy long-term call.
Rolling himself on top, Fixx forgot all about clinics and bad decisions, letting one hand trail gently down her body. Jude was swollen, wet and beginning to get sore: after three bouts of full-on fucking she couldn’t really be much else. Taking care, Fixx eased his index finger into her, curling his hand so that it cupped the top of her vulva, its heel pressing onto her hooded clitoris. He could feel it like a small bead, rolling beneath his touch. Slowly, very slowly, he moved the finger buried inside her, not in and out like some schoolboy, but side to side in slow rolls that pressed first one side and then the other.
Jude shut her eyes and groaned.
Fixx smiled to himself. At thirty-six it was ridiculous to still be so pleased when things worked out in bed, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t. Pulling back his hand, Fixx swapped wet finger for thumb, sliding that deep into Jude instead, feeling her muscles close tight around its base.
And then, with the freed finger, he reached down between Jude’s buttocks. The woman’s eyes opened wide as Fixx found the swollen starfish of her anus. But Fixx just grinned and Jude shifted her hips to let his damp finger reach the ring of puckered muscle. Round and then stop, round and then stop, his thumb moving gently inside her all the time, feeling the puffy, sticky, swollen floor of her vagina.
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