“About an hour. Oumou Prescott told me you’d gone to Licktown, so I guessed you’d be back late. Did you have some trouble?”
I held on to the first mouthful of whiskey, felt it sear the internal cuts where Kadmin had put the boot in, and swallowed hastily. I grimaced.
“Now why would you think that, Mrs. Bancroft?”
She made an elegant gesture with one hand. “No reason. Do you not want to talk about it?”
“Not particularly.” I sank into a huge lounger bag at the foot of the crimson bed and sat staring across the room at her. Silence descended. From where I was sitting she was backlit by the window and her face was deep in shadow. I kept my eyes leveled on the faint gleam that might have been her left eye. After a while she shifted in her seat and the ice in her glass clicked.
“Well.” She cleared her throat. “What would you like to talk about?”
I waved my glass at her. “Let’s start with why you’re here.”
“I want to know what progress you’ve made.”
“You can get a progress report from me tomorrow morning. I’ll file one with Oumou Prescott before I go out. Come on, Mrs. Bancroft. It’s late. You can do better than that.”
For a moment I thought she might leave, the way she twitched. But then she took her glass in both hands, bent her head over it as if in search of inspiration, and after a long moment looked up again.
“I want you to stop,” she said.
I let the words sink into the darkened room.
“Why?”
I saw her lips part in the smile, heard the sound her mouth made as it split.
“Why not?” she said.
“Well.” I sipped at my drink, sluicing the alcohol around the cuts in my mouth to shut down my hormones. “To begin with, there’s your husband. He’s made it pretty clear that cutting and running could seriously damage my health. Then there’s the hundred thousand dollars. And after that, well, then we get into the ethereal realm of things like promises and my word. And to be honest, I’m curious.”
“A hundred thousand isn’t so much money,” she said carefully. “And the Protectorate is big. I could give you the money. Find a place for you to go where Laurens would never find you.”
“Yes. That leaves my word, and my curiosity.”
She sat forward over her drink. “Let’s not pretend, Mr. Kovacs. Laurens didn’t contract you, he dragged you here. He locked you into a deal you had no choice but to accept. No one could say you were honor bound.”
“I’m still curious.”
“Maybe I could satisfy that,” she said softly.
I swallowed more whiskey. “Yeah? Did you kill your husband, Mrs. Bancroft?”
She made an impatient gesture. “I’m not talking about your game of detectives. You are . . . curious about other things, are you not?”
“I’m sorry?” I looked at her over the rim of my glass.
Miriam Bancroft pushed herself off the window shelf and set her hips against it. She set down the glass with exaggerated care and leaned back on her hands so that her shoulders lifted. It changed the shape of her breasts, moving them beneath the sheer material of her leotard.
“Do you know what Merge Nine is?” she asked, a little unsteadily.
“Empathin?” I dug the name out from somewhere. Some thoroughly armed robbery crew I knew back on Harlan’s World, friends of Virginia Vidaura’s. The Little Blue Bugs. They did all their work on Merge Nine. Said it welded them into a tighter team. Bunch of fucking psychos.
“Yes, empathin. Empathin derivatives, tailed with Satyron and Ghedin enhancers. This sleeve—” She gestured down at herself, spread fingers brushing the curves. “—this is state-of-the-art biochemtech, out of the Nakamura Labs. I secrete Merge Nine, when . . . aroused. In my sweat, in my saliva, in my cunt, Mr. Kovacs.”
And she came off the shelf, shawl sliding off her shoulders to the floor. It puddled silkenly around her feet, and she stepped over it toward me.
Well, there’s Alain Marriott, honorable and strong in all his myriad experia incarnations; and then there’s reality. In reality, and whatever it costs, there are some things you don’t turn away from.
I met her halfway across the room. Merge Nine was already in the air, in the scent of her body and the water vapor on her breath. I drew in a deep breath and felt the chemical triggers go off like plucked strings in the pit of my stomach. My drink was gone, set aside somewhere, and the hand that had held it was molded around one of Miriam Bancroft’s jutting breasts. She drew my head down with hands on either side, and I found it there again, Merge Nine in the beads of sweat webbed in the soft down that ran in a line down her cleavage. I tugged at the seam of the leotard, untrapping the breasts pressed beneath it, tracing and finding one nipple with my mouth.
Above me I felt her mouth gasp open, and knew the empathin was working its way into my sleeve’s brain, tripping dormant telepath instincts and sending out feelers for the intense aura of arousal that this woman was generating. Knew, as well, that she would be beginning to taste the flesh of her own breast in my mouth. Once triggered, the empathin rush was like a volleyed tennis ball, building intensity with every rebound from one inflamed sensorium to the other, until the merge reached a climax just short of unbearable.
Miriam Bancroft was beginning to moan now, as we sank to the floor and I moved back and forth between her breasts, rubbing their springy resistance over my face. Her hands had turned hungry, grasping and digging softly with nails at my flanks and the swollen ache between my legs. We scrabbled feverishly at each other’s clothing, mouths trembling with the need to fill themselves, and when we had shed everything we wore, the rug beneath us seemed to lay individual strands of heat on our skin. I settled over her, and my stubble rasped faintly over the sprung smoothness of her belly, my mouth making wet Os on its path downward. Then there was the deep salt taste as my tongue tracked down the creases of her cunt, soaking up Merge Nine with her juices and coming back to press and flick at the tiny bud of her clitoris. Somewhere, at the other end of the world, my penis was pulsing in her hand. A mouth closed over the head and sucked gently.
Blending, our climaxes built rapidly and with unerring concurrence, and the mixed signals of the Merge Nine union blurred until I could find no distinction between the excruciating tautness of the prick between her fingers and the pressure of my own tongue somewhere indistinct up beyond its feasible reach inside her. Her thighs clamped around my head. There was a grunting sound, but whose throat it came from I was no longer aware. Separateness melted away into mutual sensory overload, tension building layer after layer, peak after peak, and then suddenly she was laughing at the warm, salty splash over her face and fingers and I was clamped against her corkscrewing hips as her own simultaneous crest swept her away.
For a while there was trembling release, in which the slightest movement, the sliding of flesh against flesh, brought sobbing spasms from us both. Then, gift of the long period my sleeve had been in the tank, the sweaty images of Anemone pressed against the glass of the biocabin, my penis twitched and began to tighten again. Miriam Bancroft nudged at it with her nose, ran the tip of her tongue along and around it, licking off the stickiness until it was smooth and taut against her cheek, then swung around and straddled me. Reaching back for balance and hold, she sank down, impaling herself on the shaft with a long, warm groan. She leaned over me, breasts swinging, and I craned and sucked hungrily at the elusive globes. My hands came up to grasp her thighs where they were spread on either side of my body.
And then the motion.
The second time took longer, and the empathin lent it an air that was more aesthetic than sexual. Taking her cue from the signals gusting out of my sensorium, Miriam Bancroft settled into a slow churning motion while I watched her taut belly and outthrust breasts with detached lust. For no reason I could discern, the Hendrix piped a slow, deep ragga beat in from the corners of the room, and a lighting effect patterned the ceiling above us with swirling blotch
es of red and purple. When the effect tilted and the swirling stars came to dapple our bodies, I felt my mind tilting with it, and my perceptions slid sideways out of focus. There was only the grinding of Miriam Bancroft’s hips over me, and fragmented glimpses of her body and face wrapped in colored light. When I came, it was a distant explosion that seemed to have more to do with the woman shuddering to a halt astride me than with my own sleeve.
Later, as we lay side by side, hands milking each other through further inconclusive peaks and troughs, she said, “What do you think of me?”
I looked down the length of my body to what her hand was doing, and cleared my throat.
“Is that a trick question?”
She laughed, the same throaty cough that I had warmed to in the chart room at Suntouch House.
“No. I want to know.”
“Do you care?” It was not said harshly, and somehow the Merge Nine leached it of its brutal overtones.
“You think that’s what it is to be a Meth?” The word sounded strange on her lips, as though she were not talking about herself. “You think we don’t care about anything young?”
“I don’t know,” I said truthfully. “It’s a point of view that I’ve heard. Living three hundred years is bound to change your perspectives.”
“Yes, it does.” Her breath caught slightly as my fingers slid inside her. “Yes, like that. But you don’t stop caring. You see it all sliding past you. And all you want to do is grab on, hold on to something, to stop it all from draining away.”
“Is that right?”
“Yes, it is. So what do you think of me?”
I leaned over her and looked at the young woman’s body she inhabited, the fine lines of her face, and the old, old eyes. I was still stoned on the Merge Nine, and I couldn’t find a flaw anywhere in her. She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I gave up the struggle for objectivity and bowed my head to kiss her on one breast.
“Miriam Bancroft, you are a wonder to behold, and I would willingly trade my soul to possess you.”
She staved off a chuckle. “I’m serious. Do you like me?”
“What kind of a question—”
“I’m serious.” The words were grounded deeper than the empathin. I pulled in some control and looked her in the eyes.
“Yes,” I said simply. “I like you.”
Her voice lowered into her throat. “Do you like what we did?”
“Yes, I like what we did.”
“Do you want more?”
“Yes, I want more.”
She sat up to face me. The milking motions of her hand grew harder, more demanding. Her voice hardened to match. “Say it again.”
“I want more. Of you.”
She pushed me down with a hand flat on my chest and leaned over me. I was growing back to somewhere near a full erection. She started to time her strokes, slow and sharp.
“Out west,” she murmured, “about five hours away by cruiser, there’s an island. It’s mine. No one goes there, there’s a fifty-kilometer exclusion umbrella, satellite patrolled, but it’s beautiful. I’ve built a complex there, with a clone bank and a resleeving facility.” Her voice got that uneven edge in it again. “I sometimes decant the clones. Sleeve copies of myself. To play. Do you understand what I’m offering you?”
I made a noise. The image she had just planted, of being the focus for a pack of bodies like this one, all orchestrated by the same mind, tightened the last notches on my hard-on, and her hand slid up and down its full length as if machined there.
“What was that?” She leaned over me, brushing her nipples across my chest.
“How long,” I managed, through the coiling and uncoiling of my stomach muscles, through the flesh and mist tones of the Merge Nine, “is this fun park invitation good for?”
She grinned then, a grin of pure lechery.
“Unlimited rides,” she said.
“But for a limited period only, right?”
She shook her head. “No, you don’t understand me. This place is mine. All of it, the island, the sea around it, everything on it, is mine. I can keep you there as long as you care to stay. Until you tire of it.”
“That might take a long time.”
“No.” There was a hint of sadness in the way she shook her head this time, and her gaze fell a little. “No, it won’t.”
The pistoning grip on my penis slackened fractionally. I groaned and grabbed at her hand, forcing it back into motion. The move seemed to rekindle her, and she went to work again in earnest, speeding up and slowing down, bending to feed me her breasts or supplement her strokes with sucking and licking. My time perception spiraled out of sight to be replaced with an endless gradient of sensation that sloped upward, excruciatingly slowly, toward a peak I could hear myself begging for in drugged tones somewhere far away.
As the orgasm loomed, I was vaguely aware through the Merge Nine link that she was sinking fingers into herself, rubbing with an uncontrolled desire completely at odds with the calculation with which she manipulated me. Fine-tuned by the empathin, she brought on her own peak a few seconds before mine, and as I started to come, she smeared her own juices hard over my face and thrashing body.
Whiteout.
And when I came to, much later, with the Merge Nine crash laid across me like a lead weight, she was gone like a fever dream.
CHAPTEr ELEVEN
When you have no friends, and the woman you slept with last night has left you with a screaming head and without a word, you have a limited number of options. When I was younger I used to go out looking for squalid brawls in the streets of Newpest. This got a couple of people stabbed, neither of them me, and led in turn to my apprenticeship in one of the Harlan’s World gangs, Newpest chapter. Later on I upgraded this kind of retreat by joining the military: brawling with a purpose, and with more extensive weaponry, but as it turned out, just as squalid. I don’t suppose I should have been as surprised as I was—the only thing the Marine Corps recruiters had really wanted to know was how many fights I had won.
These days I’ve evolved a slightly less destructive response to general chemical malaise. When a forty-minute swim in the Hendrix’s underground pool failed to dispel either the longing for Miriam Bancroft’s torrid company or the Merge Nine hangover, I did the only thing I felt equipped for. I ordered painkillers from room service, and went shopping.
Bay City had already settled into the swing of the day by the time I finally hit the streets, and the commercial center was choked with pedestrians. I stood on the edges for a couple of minutes, then dived in and began to look in windows.
A blonde marine sergeant with the unlikely name of Serenity Carlyle taught me to shop, back on the World. Prior to that I had always employed a technique best described as precision purchase. You identify your target, you go in, get it, and come out. You can’t get what you want, cut your losses and get out equally fast. Over the period that we spent together, Serenity weaned me off this approach and sold me her philosophy of consumer grazing.
“Look,” she told me one day in a Millsport coffeehouse. “Shopping—actual, physical shopping—could have been phased out centuries ago if they’d wanted it that way.”
“They who?”
“People. Society.” She waved a hand impatiently. “Whoever. They had the capacity back then. Mail order, virtual supermarkets, automated debiting systems. It could have been done and it never happened. What does that tell you?”
At twenty-two years old, a Marine Corps grunt via the street gangs of Newpest, it told me nothing. Carlyle took in my blank look and sighed.
“It tells you that people like shopping. That it satisfies a basic, acquisitive need at a genetic level. Something we inherited from our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Oh, you’ve got automated convenience shopping for basic household items, mechanical food distribution systems for the marginalized poor. But you’ve also got a massive proliferation of commercial hives and speciality markets in food and crafts that people physicall
y have to go to. Now why would they do that, if they didn’t enjoy it?”
I probably shrugged, maintaining my youthful cool.
“Shopping is physical interaction, exercise of decision-making capacity, sating of the desire to acquire, and an impulse to more acquisition, a scouting urge. It’s so basically fucking human when you think about it. You’ve got to learn to love it, Tak. I mean you can cross the whole archipelago on a hover; you never even need to get wet. But that doesn’t take the basic pleasure out of swimming, does it? Learn to shop well, Tak. Get flexible. Enjoy the uncertainty.”
Enjoyment wasn’t exactly what I was feeling at the moment, but I stuck with it and I stayed flexible, true to Serenity Carlyle’s creed. I started out vaguely looking for a heavy-duty waterproof jacket, but the thing that finally pulled me into a shop was a pair of all-terrain walking boots.
The boots were followed by loose black trousers and a crossover insulated top with enzyme seals that ran all the way from waist to a tight crew neck. I’d seen variations on the outfit a hundred times on the streets of Bay City so far. Surface assimilation. It would do. After brief hungover reflection, I added a defiant red silk bandanna across my forehead, Newpest gang style. It wasn’t exactly assimilative, but it went with the vaguely mutinous irritation that had been rising in me since yesterday. I dumped Bancroft’s summer suit in a trash bin on the street outside and left the shoes beside it.
Before I left it, I searched through the jacket pockets and came up with two cards—the doctor at Bay City Central and Bancroft’s armorer.
Larkin and Green proved to be the names not of two gunsmiths but of two streets that intersected on a leafy slope called Russian Hill. The autocab had some visitor’s blurb about the area, but I skipped it. LARKIN AND GREEN—ARMORERS SINCE 2203 was a discreet corner facade, extending less than a half-dozen meters along each street, but bordered by blinded units that looked as if they had probably been annexed. I pushed through well-cared-for wooden doors into the cool, oil-smelling interior.
Inside, the place reminded me of the chart room at Suntouch House. There was space, and light flooding in from two stories of tall windows. The upper floor had been removed and replaced with a wide gallery on four sides overlooking the ground level. The walls were hung with flat display cases, and the space under the gallery overhang hosted heavy, glass-topped trolleys that performed the same function. There was the faint tang of an ambient modifier in the air, scent of old trees under the gun oil, and the floor under my newly booted feet was carpeted.