I climbed out of the car, made sure it was alarmed, and wandered across the street. A couple of the dealers were seated cross-legged on the hood of a car, shielded from the rain by a static repulsion unit set up between their feet, and they glanced up as I approached.
“Sell you a disc, man? Hot spinners out of Ulan Bator, House quality.”
I gave them one smooth sweep, shook my head unhurriedly.
“Stiff?”
Another shake. I reached the robot, paused as its multiple arms snaked down to frisk me, then tried to walk over the threshold as the cheap synth voice said ‘clear’. One of the arms prodded me gently back at chest height.
“Do you want cabins or bar?”
I hesitated, pretending to weigh it up. “What’s the deal in the bar?”
“Ha ha ha.” Someone had programmed a laugh into the robot. It sounded like a fat man drowning in syrup. It cut off abruptly. “The bar is look, but don’t touch. No money down, no hands on. House rule. That applies to other customers too.”
“Cabins,” I said, anxious to get away from the mechanical barker’s software. The street dealers on the car had been positively warm by comparison.
“Down the stairs, to the left. Take a towel from the pile.”
I went down the short metal-railed flight and turned left along a corridor lit from the ceiling by rotating red lights like the ones on the autocabs outside. Incessant junk rhythm music thrashed the air as if this was the ventricle of some massive heart on tetrameth. As promised, there was a pile of fresh white towels in an alcove and beyond it the doors to the cabins. I walked past the first four, two of which were occupied, and stepped into the fifth.
The floor was satin-sheened padding, about two metres by three. If it was stained, it didn’t show because the only illumination came from a single rotating cherry like the ones in the corridor. The air was warm and stale. Under the sweeping shadows cast by the light a battered-looking credit console stood in one corner, stalk painted matt black, red LED digital display at the top. There was a slot for cards and cash. No pad for DNA credit. The far wall was frosted glass.
I’d seen this one coming and drawn a sheaf of currency through an autobank on the way down through the city. I selected one of the large denomination plastified notes and fed it into the slot. Punched the commence button. My credit flashed up in LED red. The door hinged smoothly shut behind me, muffling the music, and a body thudded against the frosted glass ahead with an abruptness that made me twitch. The display digits flickered to life. Minimal expenditure so far. I studied the body pressed against the glass. Heavy breasts pressed flat, a woman’s profile and the indistinct lines of hips and thighs. Piped moaning came softly through hidden speakers. A voice gusted.
“Do you want to see me see me see me …?”
Cheap echo box on the vocoder.
I pressed the button again. The glass unfrosted and the woman on the other side became visible. She shifted, side to side, showing herself to me, worked out body, augmented breasts, leaned forward and licked the glass with the tip of her tongue, breath misting it again. Her eyes locked onto mine.
“Do you want to touch me touch me touch me …?”
Whether the cabins used subsonics or not, I was getting a definite reaction from it all. My penis thickened and stirred. I locked down the throbbing, forced the blood back out and into my muscles the way a combat call would do. I needed to be limp for this scene. I reached for the debit button again. The glass screen slid aside and she stepped through, like someone coming out of a shower. She moved up to me, one hand slid out, cupping.
“Tell me what you want, honey,” she said from somewhere in the base of her throat. The voice seemed hard edged, deprived of the vocoder effect.
I cleared my own. “What’s your name?”
“Anenome. Want to know why they call me that?”
Her hand worked. Behind her, the meter was clicking over softly.
“You remember a girl used to work here?” I asked.
She was working on my belt now. “Honey, any girl used to work here ain’t going to do for you what I am. Now, how would you—”
“She was called Elizabeth. Her real name. Elizabeth Elliott.”
Her hands fell abruptly away, and the mask of arousal slid off her face as if it was greased underneath.
“What the fuck is this? You the Sia?”
“The what?”
“Sia. The heat.” Her voice was rising. She stepped away from me. “We had this, man—”
“No.” I took a step towards her and she dropped into a competent-looking defensive crouch. I backed up again, voice low. “No, I’m her mother.”
Taut silence. She glared at me.
“Bullshit. Lizzie’s ma’s in the store.”
“No.” I pulled her hand back to my groin. “Feel. There’s nothing there. They sleeved me in this, but I’m a woman. I don’t, I couldn’t…”
She unbent fractionally from her crouch, hands tugging down almost unwillingly. “That looks like prime tank flesh to me,” she said untrustingly. “You just come out of the store, how come you’re not paroled in some bonebag junkie’s sleeve?”
“It’s not parole.” The Corps’ deep-cover training came rocketing in across my mind like a flight of low-level strike jets, spinning vapour-trail lies on the edge of plausibility and half-known detail. Something inside me tilted with the joy of mission time. “You know what I went down for?”
“Lizzie said mindbites, something—”
“Yeah. Dipping. You know who I Dipped?”
“No. Lizzie never talked much about—”
“Elizabeth didn’t know. And it never came out on the wires.”
The heavy-breasted girl put her hands on her hips. “So who—”
I skinned her a smile. “Better you don’t know. Someone powerful. Someone with enough pull to unstack me, and give me this.”
“Not powerful enough to get you back in something with a pussy, though.” Anenome’s voice was still doubtful, but the conviction was coming up fast, like a bottleback school under reef water. She wanted to believe this fairytale mother come looking for her lost daughter. “How come you’re cross-sleeved?”
“There’s a deal,” I told her, gliding near the truth to flesh out the story. “This … person … gets me out, and I have to do something for them. Something that needs a man’s body. If I do it, I get a new sleeve for me and Elizabeth.”
“That so? So why you here?” There was an edge of bitterness in her voice that told me her parents would never come to this place looking for her. And that she believed me. I laid the last pieces of the lie.
“There’s a problem with re-sleeving Elizabeth. Someone’s blocking the procedure. I want to know who it is, and why. You know who cut her up?”
She shook her head, face turned down.
“A lot of the girls get hurt,” she said quietly. “But Jerry’s got insurance to cover that. He’s real good about it, even puts us into store if it’s going to take a long time to heal. But whoever did Lizzie wasn’t a regular.”
“Did Elizabeth have regulars? Anyone important? Anyone strange?”
She looked up at me, pity showing in the corners of her eyes. I’d played Irene Elliott to the hilt. “Mrs. Elliott, all the people who come here are strange. They wouldn’t be here if they weren’t.”
I made myself wince. “Anyone Important?”
“I don’t know. Look, Mrs. Elliott, I liked Lizzie, she was real kind to me a coupla times when I got down, but we never got close. She was close with Chloe and…” She paused, and added hurriedly,“Nothing like that, you know, but her and Chloe, and Mac, they used to share things, you know, talk and everything.”