reMix

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  -=*=-

  Fixx slid Shiori’s jeans and thong carefully down to her ankles, moving back to let her step lazily out of them. The Levis were lined with some kind of polymer micromesh bonded to the inner surface. It looked like the vat-grown fabric DuPont produced to bomb-proof hover windows.

  “Where’d you train?” Shiori’s question came out of nowhere. At least nowhere Fixx knew about.

  “Juilliard, Lincoln Center Plaza,” said Fixx, remembering the best six months of his life. Not that he’d thought that back then.

  It was Shiori’s turn to look blank.

  “Music school in New York.”

  “You’re not...”

  “Trained in all this?” Fixx nodded towards the lavatory door that had been shut on the tortured clone, “No,” said Fixx, “strictly fucking amateur.”

  Shiori was about to say something else but Fixx stepped in close to stop it and cupped his hand around her mons, his fingers closing over fine body hair. This was the point he loved most, always had done. The split second before his fingertips found her labia. He could feel Shiori go tense as she waited for his fingers to slide into her. She wanted to push forward, to hurry him, but wasn’t going to allow herself the indulgence.

  Leaning forward, Fixx gripped the back of Shiori’s head with his free hand and pulled her face roughly towards him. As she twisted her mouth away, Fixx let his fingers find her clit. Shiori arched backwards, mouth opening, and Fixx kissed her hard.

  That was when Shiori bit into his lower lip, breaking skin: blood and saliva mixing between them. It was enough to give any sexual-health assessor a heart attack, not that Fixx had health insurance these days: some risks were just not good.

  Fixx grinned and slicked his wet fingers up over her body, finding one breast. It was swollen like ripe fruit, the nipple gorged and purple, but it was still smaller and more elegant than even LizAlec’s breasts had been. Clutching Shiori’s nipple between his fingers, Fixx tugged gently, watching the dark circle around it pucker and tighten.

  There’d been a time when he’d been proud of his capacity for empty sex and pointless drugs, when staying wasted was an end in itself, something that required real ingenuity. And given the Sony-trained bodyguards, therapists and minders who had glued themselves to him like leeches, that wasn’t even an understatement. There’d been a period back there when getting the wherewithal to get wasted had turned into a full-time job.

  Fixx dipped his head, tugging again at Shiori’s left nipple and curling his tongue around it. Slick with her own juices, her nipple tasted tart and sour. Sliding his hand back between her legs, Fixx opened the Japanese woman’s swollen vulva with his fingers and then took his hand back to his mouth, sucking his fingers one after the other.

  Not quite up there with crystalMeth, but close enough.

  Fixx dropped his other hand and closed thumb and first finger over her full lips, squeezing until Shiori moaned through gritted teeth and closed her hand tight around his penis, so hard Fixx thought he’d burst.

  It was a straight stand-off.

  The girl was younger than he’d first thought. Fixx realized that as soon as he got close to her table. She was holding the bottle he’d sent over, looking doubtfully at a label etched into its bubble-blown green glass. Fixx didn’t blame her. The contents described on the label were cheap enough as it was, and the bar they were in was notorious for refilling empty bottles with crude ethanol brewed up by étudiants from the Sorbonne nearby. He wouldn’t have wanted to touch it at her age either.

  She drank all the same. Twisting off the top and swallowing two huge gulps before her throat closed in protest. By the bar, the rent boy was grinning. Phillipe didn’t like girls, especially not little rich ones who were out slumming.

  As he thumped the girl between her thin shoulder blades, Fixx tossed the words “rich” and “slumming” around in his head. And then he handed her his own glass.

  “Drink this.”

  “Water...” LizAlec sounded surprised, which marked her out as a newcomer to the bar. Everyone else knew Fixx’s routine, even if most of the younger ones didn’t know his name. Monday drunk, Tuesday hung-over, Wednesday sober, Thursday drunk, Friday hung-over, Saturday and Sunday sober. Fixx resented having to stay sober over the whole weekend, but when God designed the week he hadn’t allowed for drunks running a six-day cycle. Although maybe he had, when he let someone discover freebase...

  “Shit,” said Fixx as the Japanese woman dropped to her knees. Instinctively, Fixx tried to jerk backwards, remembered in time where Shiori was holding him and fell on top of her instead. They landed on the polyfoam in a tangle of limbs. Grabbing her wrist, Fixx slammed it hard against the floor, knocking free her blade which skittered out of reach.

  Fixx held tight to her wrist as she scrabbled in vain for the handle, slowly forcing her arms up over her head, until she was stretched naked beneath him. Fear was what he should have felt — but his brain was too busy being aroused by the way her tits pushed up towards him.

  He was out of his head, Fixx knew that, but she wasn’t just out of her skull on amyl, she was like some predator on heat.

  Gripping Shiori by the wrists — his bloody mouth pressed down hard on hers, not quite knowing who was doing the biting and who was being bit — Fixx eased himself into her twisting body, feeling her cunt open slowly around him. There was that tiny familiar jerk as his glans cleared the muscles at her entrance and then Fixx was into her, sliding slowly up inside. Pushing in only slightly and then pulling out.

  Ignoring Shiori’s protest and the lurch of her hips as she thrust up towards him, Fixx rested just outside her swollen vulva. And then he slid back in, a little further, feeling her tighten around him, hot and ready.

  Indescribable.

  Very slowly, Fixx released her wrists, his eyes watching Shiori’s face, seeing her bruised mouth twist into a slight smile. Balancing himself over her, Fixx smiled back and then drove into her, as hard as he could. Shiori gasped, half in surprise and half from having the breath knocked from her body; and then her legs locked over his ankles.

  “LizAlec,” Lady Elizabeth Alexandra said, taking his offered hand. Fixx shook politely as behind LizAlec the rent boy sneered on his way to the restroom and a hooker with bleached-blonde hair slid off her barstool and hit the floor kneeling, ideally placed to vomit.

  LizAlec looked bemused and a little sick herself. It might have been the marc, but most probably it was his handshake. She’d drunk from his water glass and now she’d touched his skin, unshielded. Another kid might have hit the restroom in search of a viralwipe, but LizAlec didn’t. There was a price to being cool and LizAlec was just learning it.

  Gently, incredibly gently Shiori raised her head to kiss his neck and Fixx shivered. Except that when she kissed his neck again he realized she wasn’t kissing him at all, she was very gently lapping the blood that flowed from a bite in his throat he didn’t even remember happening.

  She kissed, he shivered. He shivered, she kissed and then her grey eyes flicked open just as orgasm hit, her pupils expanded with nitrate and blind as a kitten. “Fuck... fuck... fuck...”

  Fixx didn’t know if she was pleading or swearing, but from the ferocious intensity of her face she was some place he’d never get to, not even wired right out of his skull.

  Sixtieth woman he’d fucked, six hundredth? Fixx had lost count of the number of women he’d slept with. Not because it was so high... Well, not for a superannuated rock git with a bad ice habit, but because he’d finally got old enough to think that keeping count was kind of childish. Though that could just have been because his memory wasn’t what it was.

  “Beautiful,” Fixx muttered, looking down at Shiori’s head on the pillow. He was still marvelling at how defenceless she looked sprawling back in the afterglow of sex when he noticed the blade, back in her hand and resting lightly between loose fingers.

  All the time she’d been clutching him tight, like a sloth hung from a tree, she’d h
ad that blade in her hand, Fixx just knew it. The very thought made his balls shrivel. Gently, so Shiori wouldn’t take offence, Fixx lent forward and lifted the knife from her grip. She moued in protest but let Fixx skitter the blade right across the pod, towards the far corner this time. And without giving Shiori time to change her mind, Fixx kissed his way down the Japanese woman’s body, between her slight breasts, over her perfect stomach and on down.

  Fixx used his teeth to tug gently at the narrow strip of her pubic hair, just enough to make Shiori shudder and then, as his foot found her discarded blade and pushed it even further into the pod’s corner, he buried his face gently between her waiting thighs.

  Her eyes were violet, hidden under a mask of heavy makeup, her curling black hair was scraped tightly back flat to her head, as if she’d wanted to go for a crop and hadn’t quite had the nerve. Not that the heavy black plait which disappeared under the collar of her velvet coat didn’t look good. It did.

  As for her body... Fixx knew the math, one human produces Xw of heat, cram twenty people into a small space and you get 20xXw — and no one could accuse the Crash&Burn of being over-large. But still the kid kept herself under wraps. Which meant she’d been infected in one of the recent anorexia pandemics.

  “He said you’re famous...” The girl nodded towards the rent boy who was sulking at the bar, wiping his nose on his sleeve. “You recognize me?” Fixx asked her. LizAlec shook her head. Fixx shrugged. “Then how can I be...?”

  Shiori tasted of truffle, the expensive kind people like Lady Clare grated over the top of their game soup. Dark and rich, like wet earth. Fixx ran his mouth up the woman’s perineum and pushed his tongue into her cunt, feeling Shiori push back against him. And then before she had a chance to grip him again with her thighs, Fixx slid up slightly, fastening his teeth gently over the hood of her clitoris. Shiori bucked against him, crushing his bruised lips, and Fixx dug his hands into her hips to hold the woman still, flicking his tongue over the pink nakedness of her clit.

  “Enough,” Shiori said.

  “No, said Fixx, “not nearly.” But he moved his mouth all the same.

  “You got a home to go to?” Fixx asked, looking at the kid. LizAlec just stared back blankly and Fixx cursed himself for sounding so old. He couldn’t help it, though, he was late thirties going on forever. And she... hell, he’d probably been twice as old as this kid was when he was still only half her age.

  She didn’t answer his first question, the one about having a home. So Fixx ran down his list of usual questions: did she fancy coming back to his studio? (No). What did she think of Herbert Marcuse? (Herbert who?) Did she prefer crystalMeth to sulphate? (She just looked blank.)

  “How about a deck?” Fixx asked finally. He could just imagine her fingers flicking across the keys, writing code or snapping notes out of mid-air. She didn’t have a deck. He could tell that just by looking at her face. She was embarrassed, aware that somehow she’d disappointed him, and so was he.

  Fixx was many things but fair had never been one of them.

  Fixx had a problem and it wasn’t the clone bleeding noisily to death in the tiny restroom or the fact the woman rubbing her crotch into his face had tried to kill him less than forty-eight hours before. His problem was 230,000 miles away and a year in the past.

  Pulling his head from between Shiori’s legs, Fixx crawled up her body and hooked his arms behind her legs, forcing them up towards her head. Looking down, Fixx could no longer see the Japanese ballerina: the eyes staring up at him belonged to a young girl.

  Darkness swirled across the room as Fixx fought to focus his eyes and then decided not to bother, white light blazing as nitrate and orgasm combined. All the same, it wasn’t Shiori’s face on the pillow when his brain went overload. The face he saw belonged to a fifteen-year-old French schoolgirl he’d refused to sleep with, no matter how often she’d asked him. Fixx didn’t know what that said about him, but he knew it wouldn’t be good. Stuff like that never was.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Exit Music

  “Madame?”

  Lady Clare said nothing, did nothing and kept doing both. She was hoping that if she kept it up for long enough the voice would eventually go away.

  It was raining, which wasn’t unusual. Maybe if the roof slates hadn’t been drumming with raindrops the size of pigeons’ eggs, and maybe if the Seine hadn’t once again broken its banks to flood her courtyard, Lady Clare Fabio might have taken notice.

  As it was, she rolled over in her vast Third Empire bed and tried to pull the chenille cover up round her ears, protecting herself from the staccato crash of the rain.

  “Get up.” The voice that addressed her was insistent. Polite as all sin but irritating in its refusal to let her go back to sleep. Which was a pity, because Lady Clare could practically feel unmetabolized alcohol sloshing around in her veins. And she didn’t need to look at the Courvoisier bottle on the bedside cabinet to know how much she’d drunk. The time lapse in her head between movement and pain told her that.

  “Go away,” Clare muttered and pulled up the chenille throw over her head, curling herself up into a foetal ball.

  “Madame, you have to get up...”

  “There’s no ‘have to’ about it,” said Clare crossly. “You know who I am? I’m the Minister of—”

  “I know,” said the voice sadly. “Minister of the Interior, aide to His Highness...” The words trailed away into exasperated silence. Exasperated because he was too polite to state the truth, that she was turning into a prematurely aged, drunken, terrified woman.

  Surprised, Lady Clare poked her head over the edge of the covers. There couldn’t be too many men left in Paris who’d bother about being polite to one of the Prince Imperial’s disgraced lackeys.

  Because that’s what she was, or would be soon enough. The whole of the Third Empire to protect and she hadn’t even been able to look after her own daughter. No wonder the city was holding its breath, waiting for the Prince Imperial to surrender. Focusing her pale blue eyes, Lady Clare blinked. The guards officer looked twelve, swathed in the folds of a khaki greatcoat.

  Neatly cut soft brown hair flopped over a high forehead. He had the snub nose of a Gascon and clear brown eyes. He looked younger than LizAlec, which wasn’t surprising: practically everyone looked younger than LizAlec except her.

  “Turn around,” Lady Clare demanded.

  The boy looked blank.

  “I sleep naked,” Lady Clare announced flatly. “And I may be older than your mother but that’s not the point...”

  Stammering an apology, the boy swung about and stared at a point on the far wall, his whole body rigid with embarrassment.

  “I’m not offended,” said Lady Clare tiredly, climbing out of bed and looking round for her old Kenzo dressing gown. Giving up the search, Lady Clare pulled the chenille wrap around her shoulders and kicked open the French doors to the balcony of her bedroom, stepping out into the rain and tossing the wrap back inside.

  No one could see her. The balcony faced into the courtyard, which was deserted like the rest of the house. Apart from the young guards officer she was the only person there, and he was still staring hard at the wall. Lady Clare didn’t need to look behind her to tell that, she just knew. She recognized him now, from the shuttle launch the other night.

  He had one of those wide-open faces and a dog-like innocence in his eyes. He’d throw himself under the hooves of a Black Hundred Cossack if she ordered it and not even know why. And she would do it too, Lady Clare realized with a shudder, she would sacrifice him if she had to.

  Rain washed over her, freezing her body. God alone knew what was in the water but she was pretty much certain nanites would be there, tiny and invisible. Not that they could hurt her or the house. She was flesh and blood and nothing but, not a single implant. As for the Hotel Sabatini, the walls were sandstone and the roof was raftered with old oak and covered with dark Brittany slate.

  “What’s the hurry?” La
dy Clare shouted over her shoulder but could not make out the boy’s muttered answer. “Oh for God’s sake,” she said crossly. “Come here.” She pointed at a spot on the carpet, just inside the room and out of the splashing rain. “Keep your eyes shut if it makes you feel better...”

  She wasn’t being fair to him but so what. And anyway, he’d keep his eyes shut, he was the type. Lady Clare shook her head fiercely, drops splashing around her like water from the coat of a spaniel. Lady Clare Fabio smiled and turned to find the boy watching her curiously.

  Maybe he wasn’t the type, after all.

  “Your coat,” Lady Clare told him, holding out her hand. The cloth was soft, woven in fine wool and lined with Italian silk decorated with baroque flowers, the kind of pattern you found stuccoed to villa walls in Calabria. The boy’s family had money or they’d had it once. The coat’s cut might be military but the quality definitely wasn’t, not even for the guards. It looked one thing, but was really another. Appearance and reality, the hobbled twins. She’d always lived between them both, preferring to hide in the gaps that S3’s demimonde provided.

  “So why are you here?” Lady Clare demanded struggling into a small black dress — Dior — one of dozens. Usually she also wore sheer nanopore stockings, not to cover up her skin but just to soft-focus the slight imperfections. But she was out of clean pairs. Actually, she was out of everything except black Dior dresses and matching footwear.

  “The Prince Imperial...” The boy stopped and then struggled to start again. Whatever it was he wanted to say, he wasn’t finding saying it easy.

  Lady Clare lifted one foot and slipped on a black court shoe. It would be worse than useless within minutes, its wafer-thin leather disintegrated to misshapen rags, but it was what she had...

  “Paris,” the boy said hesitantly, approaching the problem from a different direction.