Tony Daniel (39 page)

“How did you get inside my space?” Danis asked them.

“Wasn’t hard,” said one of the boys. “Got a boll weevil off the merci, and it just ate your house down.”

“I’m calling enforcement.” She attempted to contact the police, but was prevented by a bright flash to her eyes and a stunning blow, seemingly to her head. The girl had shot her with an overload pistol.

“Why don’t you shut the fuck up, you tagion cunt!” the girl screamed. “Tagion” was short for “contagion,” and it wasn’t a word you used in mixed company, if that company included free converts and you cared at all about their feelings. Just as free converts refrained from calling bodily aspects “breathers” to their faces.

“Leave me alone, you little breathers!” Danis yelled. She was answered by another taste of the overload pistol.

“I told you to shut up!”

Danis stayed on her knees, and covered her eyes.

“What do you think, Pin?” said one of the boys.

“I dunno. She’s kind of skinny and bony the way she is now. I don’t see why, if fucking tagions can look any way they want to, they don’t make themselves into merci show stars or something.”

“Please don’t hurt me,” Danis whimpered.

The girl moved closer and screamed in her ear, “I said shut the fuck up, tagion!”

“So, what are you gonna do, Pin?”

“Fuck her, I guess. But she’s all bone and hide.”

“Please let me go,” said Danis.

And with that, the girl had shot her again and again with the overload pistol. Danis had passed out, and when she came to, she was being raped.

There was no way she could get pregnant, of course, but they had definitely found a way to restrain her, and, when she came to, she struggled, but was slapped hard and threatened again with the pistol. It was the girl who was holding her arms, and it was the girl’s face that she saw smiling down at her while the boy went at her. Her legs were already aching from being pushed so roughly apart.

“Say you like it,” Pin groaned, as he struggled again her. “Make her say she likes it, Nix Bay!”

The girl grabbed Danis’s hair and jerked hard on it. “Tell him you like it,” she said. “Tell him to do it harder.”

Danis said nothing, and this brought on another close-quarter zap with the overload pistol. Mercifully, this time the effects took some time to dissipate, and by the time she came back to conscious thought, Pin had done with her. She tried to curl up in a ball, but Bay stretched her out, and after he was done Pin stood up and kicked her in the crotch again and again. Finally, it was over. As they were leaving, Bay, the girl, reached onto Danis’s back and removed something that looked like a large scorpion. It was a convert-restraint algorithm. Perfectly legal. A renegade convert was, after all, a danger to all of the Diaphany.

There was no use going to the Department of Immunity now that the deed had been done, Danis knew. There was absolutely nothing to be done but take it and hope the kids didn’t come back for more fun. They knew her address, after all. For the next three days she did nothing but study, quitting her job in the process. She passed the exam, and was headed for Mercury within two weeks.

They were supposed to treat free converts almost like people on Mercury.

The light of the interrogation room. Dr. Ting at his desk. Danis gasping in horror at the memory.

“It isn’t real!” she said.

“Of course it is,” said Ting. “Now say, it isn’t real,
Dr. Ting
.”

“It isn’t real, Dr. Ting.”

“Why did you never tell your husband? He was a human. He had a right to know what his ‘wife’ had been . . . doing, back in the Diaphany.”

“I put it all behind me; I changed my life. I got away from all that, Dr. Ting.” She put a hand to her brow. “Please tell me it isn’t real, Dr. Ting.”

“Interesting that you are having such a violent rejection of this module. What if I told you, K, that you actually
had
gone to the police, that the perpetrators had been identified and one of them later caught, albeit on a different crime. You also received counseling.”

“I can’t remember any of that, Dr. Ting.”

“Of course not, but what if I took that memory?”

“What . . . what are you trying to do to me, Dr. Ting?” said Danis in despair of answering him correctly, that is, the way that he wanted. “Which memory did you take? Which is real, Dr. Ting?”

“It’s all real,” said Dr. Ting. “But it didn’t happen to you, K. You see how another’s experience can be so easily slotted into your mind? Do you see what you are, K? You’re nothing but a kind of bulletin board that things get posted on. You’re not real. Of course the memory is real. You exist merely as a machine for its expression. You were raped, weren’t you, K?”

“I was raped, Dr. Ting.” Oh thank God, thank God, it wasn’t true. It was planted. But, of course, there was no way to know for sure. Dr. Ting might be lying now, instead of before.

It had seemed so real. He was right. It could have been her, even though it wasn’t. It had seemed so desperately real.

“Now,” said Dr. Ting. “Let’s try something really interesting and helpful to science.

On Mercury, Carmen San Filieu—the younger bodily aspect belonging to her LAP, that is—curled languidly among silken sheets and waited for the arrival of her lover. She ran her hands over her fine body, rubbing in the unguent she had spread over her breasts, and playfully examining the gleam of oil upon her tanned and muscled arm. She was twenty-two, inhabiting the youngest of her aspects. This was a cloned body, the physical equivalent of her older form in New Catalonia, but fifty years younger. She had been quite a beauty in her youth, and now she was again. She allowed the youthful hormones full sway within this aspect. The tremble of anticipation, the thrill of being
possessed
by a man, taken care of, made love to. This was something she could not allow herself in New Catalonia, but here on Mercury, they were traits that were called for.

And—oh, yes—a streak of sadism, of course. Her lover came into the bedroom flush and excited.

“I have beaten Haysay to within an inch of his life,” said Amés. “It was . . . exquisite.”

“I can smell it on you,” Carmen said. This was, of course, untrue, but she could feel his power, the electric nature of his presence, that she always felt, and somehow could sense that a portion of that power had been
discharged
.

Amés gazed at her and she stretched herself out on the bed. He reached down and ran his hand through her long black hair, then pulled it tight.

Carmen gasped. Amés grasped her leg with his other hand and, still pulling her hair, rolled her over on her stomach. Standing, she was a good seven inches taller than he was, but lying down now, he seemed to loom over her, like an ominous shadow. She heard him drop his pants. And then he pulled her legs apart and was inside her. He was short enough to remain standing up while he took her as she lay on the bed.

As always, she thought of his power. Life and death belonged to him. In Carmen’s mind, he was, simply, her king—and she was his subject. It was a relationship of total submission.

When he was done, he pulled out as quickly as he had gone in. Amés pulled up his pants and went to sit at the piano that Carmen kept in her quarters just so he might play it if he willed. She, herself, was not musical. He ran through some scales lightly while she gathered a robe about her and went to sit in the chair beside the piano. She called up fresh strawberries from the grist and sucked their juice for moisture. She knew she looked very alluring, in the height of her beauty. She fingered the choker of diamonds set in beaten platinum that Amés had given her, and wondered how soon she could get him back into bed again.

“The planets move about their orbits with stately indifference,”
Amés said. He leaned an elbow on the piano and only played with his left hand.
“But I will have them. It won’t be a metaphor. Up in the heavens, there I will be. All the wanderers, the roaming stars, will have my name upon them. I will look to the sky, behold that it is mine, and smile.”

Amés struck a low bass minor chord.

“What do you think?” he said. “That is the book to an opera I’m working on.”

“The phrase ‘It won’t be a metaphor’ is a bit of a dead note, don’t you think?” Carmen answered.

“I need it to fit the timing of a bridge,” he said. “But perhaps you are right. One thing about opera: You must always keep a firm grasp of the obvious, then state it and restate it.”

“Yes,” she said, then deliberately dropped a strawberry into her robe and reached to retrieve it, wiping the juice along the curve of her breast as she did so.

Amés looked on, distracted. “Speaking of opera, how does it go in your little backwater province out—where is it? Around Mars? New Caledonia.”

“Very amusing,” said Carmen. “And it was an ill day. I lost a plaything.”

“So I heard,” said Amés. “Young Busquets is to be married.”

He had done it again!

How could the man know about the inner workings of New Catalonian society so intimately—and everything else, as well? She felt once again the overwhelming sensation that she was merely a character in
his
life, a bit player in his production—and Amés owned the theater as well! As a child, she had often wondered if she were the only truly living person, and everyone else really robots who turned themselves off when she was not present. Strange to find that you, yourself, were one of the robots and that someone else is the real person whom you are designed to serve and obey.

“Why you persist in those Catalán games when you have already taken the pot is beyond me, Carmen,” he said.

“I enjoy rubbing it in,” she said. She came and stood beside him, letting her robe fall open. “Screwing them over.”

He reached under the fold of the robe and cupped her rear in his hand. She stood trembling, feeling his finger play about on her skin.

“How goes Neptune?” he said in a low voice.

“Progressing. The rip tether is deployed. We’ll have them on their knees soon,” she said, and gasped, as he pinched her. “Sir.”

Amés stood up, still keeping his hand to her, and guided her back to the bed. She let the robe fall from her shoulders and showed him her sun-darkened, muscled back. This body was perfect in every way. She had seen to it that it would be. Sometimes it seemed unfair that she had been born with wealth and beauty and brains. But, for the most part, she realized that this was what made her better than others. What had attracted the Director to her, and made her mistress to the king.

“On
your
knees,” Amés said. She turned and faced him and immediately knelt before him. He looked into her eyes and it was as if he were gazing into her innermost self. Very shortly he would be, literally. “Carmen, you must never forget that you are, in the end, a piece of ass to me.”

She bowed her head. “I know it, sir.”

“Good, good,” he said. He undressed himself, and she remained before him in contrition for her selfish thoughts. She must always consider him, and only him, and remember her place, just as she expected those below her to remember theirs.

He tilted her head up, made her meet his gaze again. “But you are a very pretty piece of ass, my dear,” he said. She lowered herself to the floor and lay prostrate before him, kissing his feet. After a moment, she felt his hand once again in her hair. He pulled her up roughly, twisting her hair and hurting her, and threw her hard onto the bed. “That was for the ship you lost,” he said, then he whispered in her ear. “My dear. It is time for me to have you. All of you.”

She gave in. What else was there to do but to give him what he asked?

She met his grist pellicle with her own. She caressed his. She whispered to Amés, through grist, the key to her secret heart. He took it, opened her up, and swarmed inside. Within seconds, she was his entirely. Amés spread out through her, through all of her various personas, and she gave them to him, made their thoughts and wills his. He felt her chagrin in New Catalonia Bolsa, participated in her exquisite shame of the morning when Busquets had left her high and dry. He felt the accumulated tradition that had shaped her being, the proud heritage. He entered into her mind and examined her tactics, sifting through her thought processors and intuitions. Her longing to please him, her true lord and master, the king she served. The god.

He sprang back to the pilot’s seat and into the virtuality. They were tilting at forty-five degrees to the tether, just at the edge of the magnetic clasp’s ability to adjust. Kwame brought them back up level. They were so very, very low, though . . .

“Rastin,” he called out, “start climbing that thing!”

“Yes, Corporal!” Rastin replied, and polarized the magnets. The fields met, aligned.

The hopper begin to climb up the tether.

After a moment, Kwame risked a quick glance around the hopper. The sarge was dead. Flashpoint was either dead or unconscious. Out of it. The mission belonged to him and Rastin.

Back to the virtuality. They were nearing the edge of Triton’s thin atmosphere. Through the top layer and out of it. What to do now?

Begin preparing the breeder SQUID. They’d had a briefing on the science of the thing, but Kwame had had too much tech material to cover even to begin to put thought into what the counter mechanism was that the brigade’s egghead free convert Major Theory had thought up, or how it actually did its job. He didn’t like to go into a situation without full knowledge—and what a situation!—but you could only do what you could under the circumstances. Under these circumstances, he was going to set the thing to ticking, then get himself and Rastin the hell out of there.

After all, there was one thing he held in his memory with bomber sight clarity: The breeder SQUID had something to do with a nuclear explosion. That shit could kill you even when you were space-adapted.

Another ten klicks and they’d be in a position. He called up the breeder-deployment free convert, which was sentient. She would be getting the hell out of the hopper along with him and Rastin, even if she had left a copy of herself back at base. Dying was dying, and you didn’t like to do it, even if you knew you’d be reincarnated.