Maybe that’s the problem.
Or maybe it was just that I’d been there, to the legendary home of the human race, and now, looking up, I could imagine, a single astronomical unit out from the glimmering star, a world in spin, a city by the sea dropping away into darkness as night came on, or rolling back up and into the light, a police cruiser parked somewhere and a certain police lieutenant drinking coffee not much better than mine and maybe thinking . . .
That’s enough, Kovacs.
For your information, the light you’re watching arrive left fifty years before she was even born. And that sleeve you’re fantasising about is in its sixties by now, if she’s even wearing it still. Let it go.
Yeah, yeah.
I knocked back the dregs of the coffee, grimaced as it went down cold. By the look of the eastern horizon, dawn was on its way, and I had a sudden crushing desire not to be here when it arrived. I left the coffee carton standing sentinel on the parapet, and picked my way back through the scattered chairs and tables to the nearest elevator terminal.
The elevator dropped me the three floors to my suite and I made it along the gently curving corridor without meeting anyone. I was pulling the retina cup out of the door on its saliva-thin cable when the sound of footfalls in the machined quiet sent me back against the opposite wall, right hand reaching for the single interface gun I still carried from habit tucked into the back of my waistband.
Spooked.
You’re in the Mandrake Tower, Kovacs. Executive levels. Not even dust gets up here without authorisation. Get a fucking grip, will you.
‘Kovacs?’
Tanya Wardani’s voice.
I swallowed and pushed myself away from the wall. Wardani rounded the curve of the corridor and stood looking at me with what seemed like an unusual proportion of uncertainty in her stance.
‘I’m sorry, did I scare you?’
‘No.’ Reaching again for the retina cup, which had backreeled into the door when I went for the Kalashnikov.
‘Have you been up all night?’
‘Yes.’ I applied the cup to my eye and the door folded back. ‘You?’
‘More or less. I tried to get some sleep a couple of hours ago, but . . .’ she shrugged. ‘Too keyed up. Are you all done?’
‘With the recruiting?’
‘Yes.’
‘Yes.’
‘How are they?’
‘Good enough.’
The door made an apologetic chiming sound, drawing attention to the lack of entry effected so far.
‘Are you—’
‘Do you—’ I gestured.
‘Thanks.’ She moved, awkwardly, and stepped in ahead of me.
The suite lounge was walled in glass that I’d left at semi-opaque when I went out. City lights specked the smoky surface like deep-fry caught glowing in a Millsport trawler’s nets. Wardani halted in the middle of the subtly furnished living space and turned about.
‘I—’
‘Have a seat. The mauve ones are all chairs.’
‘Thanks, I still can’t quite get used to—’
‘State of the art.’ I watched as she perched on the edge of one of the modules, and it tried in vain to lift and shape itself around her body. ‘Want a drink?’
‘No. Thanks.’
‘Pipe?’
‘God, no.’
‘So how’s the hardware?’
‘It’s good.’ She nodded, more to herself than anyone. ‘Yes. Good enough.’
‘Good.’
‘You think we’re nearly ready?’
‘I—’ I pushed away the flash-rip behind my eyes and crossed to one of the other seats, making a performance of settling into it. ‘We’re waiting for developments up there. You know that.’
‘Yes.’
A shared quiet.
‘Do you think they’ll do it?’
‘Who? The Cartel?’ I shook my head. ‘Not if they can help it. But Kemp might. Look, Tanya. It may not even happen. But whether it does or not, there’s nothing any of us can do about it. It’s too late for that kind of intervention now. Way war works. Abolition of the individual.’
‘What’s that? Some kind of Quellist epigram?’
I smiled. ‘Loosely paraphrased, yes. You want to know what Quell had to say about war? About all violent conflict?’
She made a restless motion. ‘Not really. OK, sure. Tell me. Why not? Tell me something I haven’t heard before.’
‘She said wars are fought over hormones. Male hormones, largely. It’s not about winnning or losing at all, it’s about hormonal discharge. She wrote a poem about it, back before she went underground. Let’s see—’
I closed my eyes and thought back to Harlan’s World. A safe house in the hills above Millsport. Stolen bioware stacked in a corner, pipes and post-op celebration wreathing the air. Idly arguing politics with Virginia Vidaura and her crew, the infamous Little Blue Bugs. Quellist quotes and poetry bantered back and forth.
‘You in pain?’
I opened my eyes and shot her a reproachful glance. ‘Tanya, this stuff was mostly written in Stripjap. That’s a Harlan’s World trade tongue - gibberish to you. I’m trying to remember the Amanglic version.’
‘Well, it looks painful. Don’t knock yourself out on my account.’
I held up a hand. ‘Goes like this:
Male-sleeved;
Stop up your hormones
Or spend them in moans
Of other calibre
(We’ll reassure you - the load is large enough)
Blood-pumped
Pride in your prowess
Will fail you, fuck you
And everything you touch
(You’ll reassure us - the price was small enough)’
I sat back. She sniffed.
‘Bit of an odd stance for a revolutionary. Didn’t she lead some kind of bloody uprising? Fight to the death against Protectorate tyranny, or something?’
‘Yeah. Several kinds of bloody uprising, in fact. But there’s no evidence she actually died. She disappeared in the last battle for Millsport. They never recovered a stack.’
‘I don’t really see how storming the gates of this Millsport gels with that poem.’
I shrugged. ‘Well, she never really changed her views on the roots of violence, even in the thick of it. Just realised it couldn’t be avoided, I guess. Changed her actions instead, to suit the terrain.’
‘That’s not much of a philosophy.’
‘No, it isn’t. But Quellism was never very big on dogma. About the only credo Quell ever subscribed to was Face the Facts. She wanted that on her tomb. Face the Facts. That meant dealing with them creatively, not ignoring them or trying to pretend they’re just some historical inconvenience. She always said you can’t control a war. Even when she was starting one.’
‘Sounds a little defeatist to me.’
‘Not at all. It’s just recognition of the danger. Facing the facts. Don’t start wars if you can possibly avoid it. Because once you do, it’s out of any sane control. No one can do anything except try to survive while it runs its hormonal course. Hold on to the rod and ride it out. Stay alive, and wait for the discharge.’
‘Whatever.’ She yawned and looked out of the window. ‘I’m not very good at waiting, Kovacs. You’d think being an archaeologue would have cured me of that, wouldn’t you?’ A shaky little laugh. ‘That, and. The camp—’
I stood up abruptly. ‘Let me get you that pipe.’
‘No.’ She hadn’t moved, but her voice was nailed down solid. ‘I don’t need to forget anything, Kovacs. I need—’
She cleared her throat.
‘I need you to do something for me. With me. What you did to me. Before, I mean. What you did has.’ She looked down at her hands. ‘Had an impact I didn’t. Didn’t expect.’
‘Ah.’ I sat down again. ‘That.’
‘Yes, that.’ There was a flicker of anger in her tone now. ‘I suppose it makes sense. It’s an emotion-bending proce
ss.’
‘Yes, it is.’
‘Yes, it is. Well, there’s one particular emotion I need bending back into place now, and I don’t really see any other way to do that than by fucking you.’
‘I’m not sure that—’
‘I don’t care,’ she said violently. ‘You changed me. You fixed me.’ Her voice quietened. ‘I suppose I should be grateful, but that isn’t how it feels. I don’t feel grateful, I feel fixed. You’ve created this. Imbalance in me, and I want that part of me back.’
‘Look, Tanya, you aren’t really in any condition—’
‘Oh, that.’ She smiled thinly. ‘I appreciate I’m not exactly sexually attractive right now, except maybe—’
‘Wasn’t what I meant—’
‘To a few freaks who like starved pubescents to fuck. No, we’ll need to fix that. We need to go virtual for this.’
I struggled to shake off a numbing sense of unreality. ‘You want to do this now?’
‘Yes, I do.’ Another sliced-off smile. ‘It’s interfering with my sleep patterns, Kovacs. And right now I need my sleep.’
‘Do you have somewhere in mind?’
‘Yes.’ It was like a children’s game of dare.
‘So where is that exactly?’
‘Downstairs.’ She got up and looked down at me. ‘You know, you ask a lot of questions for a man that’s about to get laid.’
Downstairs was a floor about midway up the tower which the elevator announced as a recreational level. The doors opened onto the unpartitioned space of a fitness centre, machines bulking insect-like and menacing in the unlit gloom. Towards the back, I spotted the tilted webs of a dozen or so virtualink racks.
‘We doing this out here?’ I asked uncomfortably.
‘No. Closed chambers at the back. Come on.’
We passed through the forest of stilled machines, lights flickering up above and amongst them, then flickering out again as we moved on. I watched the process out of a neurasthenic grotto that had been growing up around me like coral since before I came down from the roof. Too much virtuality will do that to you sometimes. There’s this vague feeling of abrasion in the head when you disconnect, a disquieting sense that reality isn’t quite sharp enough any more, a waxing and waning fuzziness that might be what the edge of madness feels like.
The cure for this definitely is not more virtual time.
There were nine closed chambers, modular blisters swelling out of the end wall under their respective numbers. Seven and eight were cracked open, spilling low orange light around the line of the hatch. Wardani stopped in front of seven and the door hinged outward. The orange light expanded pleasantly in the gap, tuned into soft hypnomode. No dazzle. She turned to look back at me.
‘Go ahead,’ she said. ‘Eight is slaved to this one. Just hit “consensual” on the menu pad.’
And she disappeared into the warm orange glow.
Inside module eight, someone had seen fit to cover the walls and roofing with empathist psychogram art, which in the hypnomode lighting seemed little more than a random set of fishtail swirls and spots. Then again, that’s what most empathist stuff looks like to me in any light. The air was just the right side of warm and beside the automould couch there was a complicated spiral of metal to hang clothes.
I stripped off and settled on the automould, pulled down the headgear and swiped the flashing consensual diamond as the displays came online. I just remembered to knock out the physical feedback baffle option before the system kicked in.
The orange light appeared to thicken, taking on a foggy substance through which the psychogram swirls and dots swam like complex equations or maybe some kind of pond life. I had a moment to wonder if the artist had intended either of those comparisons - empathists are a weird lot - and then the orange was fading and shredding away like steam, and I stood in an immense tunnel of black vented metal panels, lit only by lines of flashing red diodes that receded to infinity in both directions.
In front of me, more of the orange fog boiled up out of a vent and shredded into a recognisably female form. I watched fascinated as Tanya Wardani began to emerge from the general outline, made at first entirely of flickering orange smoke, then seemingly veiled in it from head to foot, then clad only in patches, and then, as these tore away, clad in nothing at all.
Glancing down at myself, I saw I was similarly naked.
‘Welcome to the loading deck.’
Looking up again, my first thought was that she had already gone to work on herself. Most constructs load on self-images held in the memory, with subroutines to beat anything too delusional - you end up looking pretty much the way you do in reality, less a couple of kilos and maybe plus a centimetre or two. The version of Tanya Wardani I was looking at didn’t have those kind of discrepancies - it was more a general sheen of health that she didn’t yet have back in the real world, or perhaps just the lack of a similar, more grimy sheen of unhealth. The eyes were less sunken, the cheek and collar bones less pronounced. Under the slightly pouched breasts, the ribs were there, but fleshed far past what I’d imagined below her draped clothing.
‘They’re not big on mirrors in the camp,’ she said, maybe reading something in my expression. ‘Except for interrogation. And after a while you try not to see yourself in windows walking past. I probably still look a lot worse than I think I do. Especially after that instant fix you loaded into me.’
I couldn’t think of anything even remotely appropriate to say.
‘You on the other hand . . .’ She stepped forward and, reaching out low, caught me by the prick. ‘Well, let’s see what you’ve got here.’
I was hard almost instantly.
Maybe it was something written into the protocols of the system, maybe just too long without the release. Or maybe there was some unclean fascination in anticipating the use of this body with its lightly accented marks of privation. Enough to hint artfully at abuse, not enough to repel. Freaks who like starved pubescents to fuck? No telling how a combat sleeve might be wired at this level. Or any male sleeve, come to that. Dig down into the blood depths of hormonal bedrock, where violence and sex and power grow fibrously entwined. It’s a murky, complicated place down there. No telling what you’ll drag up once you start excavating.
‘That’s good,’ she breathed, abruptly close to my ear. She had not let go. ‘But I don’t rate this much. You’ve not been looking after yourself, soldier.’
Her other hand spread wide and scraped up my belly from the roots of my prick to the arc of my ribcage. Like a carpenter’s sanding glove, planing back the layering of flab that had begun to thicken over my sleeve’s tank-grown abdominal musculature. I glanced down, and saw with a slight visceral shock that some of the flab really had started to plane off, fading out with the motion of her flattened palm. It left a warm feeling threaded through the muscle beneath, like whisky going down.
Sy-system magic, I managed through the spasm as she tugged hard at me with the gripping hand and repeated the upward smoothing gesture with the other.
I lifted my own hands towards her, and she skipped back.
‘Uh-uh.’ She took another step away. ‘I’m not ready yet. Look at me.’
She lifted both hands and cupped her breasts. Pushed upward with the heels of her palms, then let them fall back, fuller, larger. The nipples - had one of them been broken before? - swollen dark and conical like chocolate sheathing on the copper skin.
‘Like that?’ she asked.
‘Very much.’
She repeated the open-handed grasping motion, topping it with a circular massaging action. When she let go this time, her breasts were well on their way to the dimensions of one of Djoko Roespinoedji’s gravity-defying concubines. She reached back and did something similar to her buttocks, turning to show me the cartoon rounding she’d given them. She bent forward and pulled the cheeks apart.
‘Lick me,’ she said, with sudden urgency.
I went down on one knee and pressed my face into the cre
ase, spearing forward with my tongue, working at the tight whorl of closed sphincter. I wrapped an arm around one long thigh to steady myself and with the other hand I reached up and found her already wet. The ball of my thumb sank into her from the front as my tongue worked deeper from the rear, both rubbing soft synchronised circles amid her insides. She grunted, somewhere at the base of her throat, and we
Shifted
Into liquid blue. The floor was gone, and most of the gravity with it. I thrashed and lost my thumbhold. Wardani twisted languidly around and fastened to me like belaweed around a rock. The fluid was not water; it had left our skins slick against each other, and I could breath it as well as if it were tropical air. I gasped my lungs full of it as Wardani slithered down, biting at my chest and stomach, and finally laid hands and mouth on my hard-on.
I didn’t last long. Floating in the infinite blue while Tanya Wardani’s newly pneumatic breasts pressed against my thighs and her nipples traced up and down on my oiled skin and her mouth sucked and her curled fingers pumped, I had just enough time to notice a light source above us before my neck muscles started to tauten, cranking my head back, and the twitching messages along my nerves gathered together for a final climactic rush.
There was a scratch replay vibrato effect built into the construct. My orgasm went on for over thirty seconds.
As it tailed off, Tanya Wardani floated up past me, hair spread around her face, threads of semen blown out amidst bubbles from the corners of her grin. I struck out and grabbed one passing thigh, dragged her back into range.
She flexed in the water analogue as my tongue sank into her, and more bubbles ran out of her mouth. I caught the reverberation of her moan through the fluid like the sympathetic vibration of jet engines in the pit of my stomach, and felt myself stiffening in response. I pressed my tongue down harder, forgetting to breathe and then discovering I didn’t actually need to for a long time. Wardani’s writhing grew more urgent and she crooked her legs around my back to anchor herself in place. I cupped her buttocks and squeezed, pushing my face into the folds of her cunt, then slid my thumb back inside her and recommenced the soft circular motion in counterpoint to the spiralling of my tongue. She gripped my head in both hands and crushed my face against her. Her writhings became thrashings, her moans a sustained shout that filled my ears like the sound of surf overhead. I sucked. She stiffened, and screamed, and then shuddered for minutes.
The Complete SF Collection Page 66