Clarkesworld Anthology 2012 (47 page)

“Sure, it killed some bad guys,” he says. “That’s what a good spy does. He sacrifices a few on his side to make him look golden in the enemy’s eyes.”

I have no strength.

“You can’t have gone far,” he tells the alley. “We’ll drop ordinance in here, take you out with the rats.”

I cannot fight.

“Or you can show yourself to me,” he says, the angry face smiling now. “Reveal yourself and we can talk.”

Ridiculous sobs.

What is very easy is remembering the moment when she picked up me out of the bricks and dust and bloodied bits of human meat.

He gives my sack another good kick, seeing something.

And for the first time in my life, I pray. Just like that, as easy as anything, the right words come out of me, and the man bending over me hears nothing coming and senses nothing, his hands playing with my pieces when a fleck of laser light falls out of the sky and turns the angriest parts of his brain into vapor, into a sharp little pop.

I’m still not breathing normally. I’m still a long way from being able to think straight about anything. Gasping and stupid, I’m kneeling in a basement fifty meters from where I nearly died, and Prophet is suckling on an unsecured outlet, endangering both of us. But he needs power and ammunition, and I like the damp dark in here, waiting for my body to come back to me.

“You are blameless,” he says.

I don’t know what that means.

He says, “You fed the proper codes into me. But there were other factors, other hands, and that’s where the blame lies.”

“So you are a trap,” I say.

“Somebody’s trap,” he says.

“The enemy wanted those civilians killed,” I say, and then I break into the worst-hurting set of coughs that I have ever known.

He waits.

“I trusted you,” I say.

“But Ridiculous,” he says.

“Shut up,” I say.

“Ophelia,” he says.

I hold my sides, sipping my breaths.

“You assume that this war has two sides,” he says. “But there could be a third player at large, don’t you see?”

“What should I see?”

“Giving a gun to their enemies is a huge risk. If the Americans wanted to kill their political enemies, it would be ten times easier to pull something out of their armory and set it up in the insurgency’s heart.”

“Somebody else planned all of this, you’re saying.”

“I seem to be proposing that, yes.”

“But that man who came with me today, the one you killed…he said the Secretary showed us a lot with her body language. She knew the attack was coming. She knew when it would happen. Which meant that she was part of the planning, which was a hundred percent American.”

“Except whom does the enemy rely on to make their plans?”

“Tell me,” I say.

Talking quietly, making the words even more important, he says, “The Almighty.”

“What are we talking about?” I ask.

He says nothing, starting to change his shape again.

“The Internet?” I ask. “What, you mean it’s conscious now? And it’s working its own side in this war?”

“The possibility is there for the taking,” he says.

But all I can think about are the dead people and those that are hurt and those that right now are sitting at their dinner table, thinking that some fucking Canadian bitch has made their lives miserable for no goddamn reason.

“You want honesty,” Prophet says.

“When don’t I?”

He says, “This story about a third side…it could be a contingency buried inside my tainted software. Or it is the absolute truth, and the Almighty is working with both of us, aiming toward some grand, glorious plan.”

I am sort of listening, and sort of not.

Prophet is turning shiny, which happens when his body is in the middle of changing shapes. I can see little bits of myself reflected in the liquid metals and the diamonds floating on top. I see a thousand little-girl faces staring at me, and what occurs to me now—what matters more than anything else today—is the idea that there can be more than two sides in any war.

I don’t know why, but that the biggest revelation of all.

When there are more than two sides, that means that there can be too many sides to count, and one of those sides, standing alone, just happens to be a girl named Ophelia Hanna Hanks.

About the Author

Robert has had eleven novels published, starting with The Leeshore in 1987 and most recently with The Well of Stars in 2004. Since winning the first annual
L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future
contest in 1986 (under the pen name Robert Touzalin) and being a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer in 1987, he has had over 200 shorter works published in a variety of magazines and anthologies. Eleven of those stories were published in his critically-acclaimed first collection, The Dragons of Springplace, in 1999. Twelve more stories appear in his second collection, The Cuckoo’s Boys [2005]. In addition to his success in the U.S., Reed has also been published in the U.K., Russia, Japan, Spain and in France, where a second (French-language) collection of nine of his shorter works, Chrysalide, was released in 2002. Bob has had stories appear in at least one of the annual “Year’s Best” anthologies in every year since 1992. Bob has received nominations for both the Nebula Award (nominated and voted upon by genre authors) and the Hugo Award (nominated and voted upon by fans), as well as numerous other literary awards (see Awards). He won his first Hugo Award for the 2006 novella “
A Billion Eves
“. He is currently working on a Great Ship trilogy for Prime Books, and of course, more short pieces.

Synch Me, Kiss Me, Drop

Suzanne Church

When my nose stopped aching, I smiled at Rain. She had snorted a song ten minutes before me, and I couldn’t quite figure why she waited here in the dark confines of the sample booth.

“Rain?” I said. “You okay?”

“Do you hear it, Alex?” she said, not really looking at me. More like staring off in two directions at once, as though her eyes had decided to break off their working relationship and wander aimlessly on their own missions. “It’s so amaaazing.”

She held that “a” a long time. I should’ve remembered how gripping every sample was for her, as though her neurons were built like radio antennae, attuned to whatever channel carried the best track ever recorded. I needed to get her ass on the dance floor before I got so angry that I ended up with another Jessica-situation. I still had eight months left on my parole.

“Do you hear it?” Rain nudged me, hard on the shoulder. “Alex!” Her eyes had made up and decided to work together, locking on me like I was the only male in a sea of estrogen.

“Yeah, it’s awesome,” I lied. For the third time this week, I’d snorted a dud sample. My brain hadn’t connected with a single, damned note.

Beyond the booth, the thump, thump of dance beats pulsed in my chest. Not much of a melody, but since they’d insisted I check my headset with my coat, I couldn’t exactly self-audio-tain.

I grabbed her arm, feeling the soft flesh and liking it. Loving it. Maybe the sample
was
working on some visceral level beyond my ear-brain-mix. “Let’s hit the dance floor.”

“In a minute. Pleeease.”

Over-vowels were definitely part of her gig tonight.

“Wait for the
drop
,” she said, stomping her foot.

“Right.” I watched her sway back and forth, in perfect rhythm with the dance music coming from the main floor. The better clubs brought all the vibes together, so that every song you sampled was in perfect synch with the club mix on the speakers. When the drop hit, everyone jumped and screamed in coordinated rapture.

I would miss the group-joy here in this tiny booth, with this date who was more into her own head than she would ever be into me. If I could get Rain out on the floor, I could at least feel the bliss, whiff all the pheromones, feel all those sweaty bodies pressed against mine, soft tissues rubbing together.

“Yeaaaah!” She shouted and grabbed my hand, squeezing it. Harder. Her eyes pressed shut, her mouth wide open, she leaned her head way back.

The drum beats surged, and then, for a fraction of a second they paused. Everyone in the club inhaled, as though this might be the last lungful of air left in the world and then…

Drop.

But
drop
doesn’t say it all. Not even close. Because when it happens, it’s like the most epic orgasm of all time and pinching the world’s biggest crap-log at the same moment.

Rain opened her eyes and pressed her hand against the side of my cheek. Lunging with remarkable speed for a woman who over-voweled, she kissed me. Her tongue pressed against my lips.

I tasted her. Wanted her. An image of Jessica popped into my head: the look of terror on her face when I accidentally yanked her under.

The euphoria gone, I closed my mouth and turned away from Rain.

“Whaaat?” she said.

For a second, I thought about explaining what I had done to Jessica. Spewed on about how the drop isn’t always built of joy. Instead, I went with the short, obscure answer. “Probation.”

Rain looked at me funny, like she couldn’t quite figure out how the judicial dudes could mess with our kiss-to-drop ratio. Finally, she smiled, and said, “Riiight.”

Desperate to avoid another over-vowel, I shouted, “Let’s dance!” This time, when I grabbed her arm, she followed along like a puppy.

Scents smacked at us as we pushed our way through the seething mass on the floor. This week’s freebie at the door was
Octavia
, some new perfume marketed at the twenty-something set. It was heavy on Nasonov pheromones, some bee-juice used to draw worker-buzzers to the hive. When the drug companies cloned it, the result was as addictive as crack and as satisfying as hitting a home run on a club hook-up.

My nostrils still ached from snorting a wallop of nanites, but scent doesn’t only swim in the nose. The rest is all neurons, baby, and I had plenty to spare. Apparently so did Rain, because she was waving her nose in the air like a dog catching the whiff of a bitch in heat. The sight of her made me want to take her and do her right there on the floor.

But
Conduct
was a high-end club. The bouncers would toss us both if they caught us in the act anywhere on the premises, so I kept it in my pants. I still had another two hundred in my pocket. Enough for three more samples. Maybe I’d pick up a track from an indie-band this time. Top forty drivel never seized my brainstem.

Unlike Rain.

The beats were building again. This time, with a third-beat thump, like reggae on heroin. I could feel the intensity from my fingertips to my teeth to my dick. Even if I couldn’t hear more than the background beats, I anticipated the drop. Rain opened her mouth again, raised both her hands in the air with everyone else, like a crowd of locusts all swarming together.

Pause.

Drop.

My date kept her eyes closed, her hands on her own breasts as she milked the release for all it was worth. Any decent guy should’ve watched her, should’ve wanted to, but I caught sight of a luscious creature, near the high-end sample booth, in the far right corner of the club. The chick was about to slip between the curtains, but she caught me staring.

Her eyes glowed the purple of iStim addiction, reminding me of Jessica.

She had grown up in the suburbs, her allowance measured in thousands not single dollars. The pack of girls she hung with had all bought iSynchs when they first hit the market. The music sounded better when they could all hear the same song at the same time. For the first time in more than a hundred years, getting high was not only legal, but ten times more amazing than it had ever been before. We all lived in our collective heads, the perfect synch of sound and sex.

I should’ve turned away from the sight of the purple-chick, should’ve reached out to Rain and kissed her again. Close tonight’s deal. Instead, I approached her swaying body, and next to her ear shouted, “Back in five.”

She nodded.

Fueled by fascination, and the two hundred burning a hole in my pocket, I headed for the high-end booth.

One of the bald bouncers with tribal tattoos worked the curtains. Yellow earplugs stuck out of both ears, so conversation, or in my case, pleading, wasn’t an option. Feeling in my pocket for the two hundred, I scrunched the bills a bit, trying to make the wad appear larger than its meager value, then pulled out the stack in a flash. I had never dealt with this particular bouncer.
Conduct
was more Rain’s club than mine, so I hoped the bills would get me past. The guy didn’t even acknowledge me, as though he could smell my poverty, or maybe my parole. His eyes stared straight ahead.

My head scarcely came up to his bare chest, so I was uncomfortably close to his nipple-rings, but I held my ground, and pointed at the curtains.

He remained statue-like. More boulder-like. Then a woman’s cream-colored hand with purple nails ran from the guy’s waist to his pecs and he turned to the side, like a vault door.

Purple-chick stood in the gap between the curtains. Her black dress was built of barely enough fabric to meet the dress code. Her hair stood on end like a teenager’s beard, barely there and oddly sexy. She must have dyed it every night, because the stubble matched her eyes and nails. A waking wet dream.

“Come in.” She pointed beyond the curtains.

“In what?” I mumbled to myself.

“Very funny.”

“You’re not laughing.”

My body neared hers as I moved past into the sample booth. I carried my hands a little higher than would have passed as natural, hoping to cop a feel of all that exposed flesh on my way by. But she read me like a pheromone and dodged back.

A leather bench-seat lined the far wall of the booth. Three tables were set with products in stacks like poker chips. The first was a sea of purple, tiny lower-case “i’s” stamped on every top-forty sample like a catalog from a so-called genius begging on a street corner for spare music. The second was a mish-mash of undergrounds like
Skarface
,
Audexi
, and
Brachto
.