“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 spiralled out of sight to be replaced with an endless gradient of sensation that sloped upward, excruciatingly slowly, towards 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 centre 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 coffee house. “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 marginalised poor. But you’ve also got a massive proliferation of commercial hives and speciality markets in food and crafts which people physically 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 flicking 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 skip 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 armourer.
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 visitors blurb about the area, but I skipped it. Larkin & Green, Armourers since 2203 was a discreet corner façade, extending less than a half dozen metres 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 storeys of tall windows. The first 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.
A black steel face appeared over the gallery rail. Green photo-receptors burned in place of eyes. “May I be of assistance, sir?”
“I’m Takeshi Kovacs. I’m here from Laurens Bancroft,” I said, tipping my head back to meet the mandroid’s gaze. “I’m looking for some hardware.”
“Of course, sir.” The voice was smoothly male and devoid of any sales subsonics I could detect. “Mr. Bancroft told us to expect you. I am with a client, but I shall be down presently. Please make yourself at home. There are chairs to your left and a refreshments cabinet. Please help yourself.”