The afternoon passed, and once again night began to fall. All through the fair, men jammed blazing torches into iron sconces on tall poles. Still Maryam led the woman from tent to tent, but the woman no longer enjoyed the spectacles. She was filled with a sense of impending catastrophe. She felt an urgent need to escape, but she knew she couldn’t even find her way out of the infinite fairgrounds.
And then a shrill, buzzing alarm sounded. “What’s that?” she asked, startled. All around her, people had begun to flee.
“Yallahl” cried Maryam, her face stricken with horror. “Run! Run and save your life!”
“What is it?” the woman shouted. “Tell me what it is!”
Maryam had collapsed to the ground, weeping and moaning. “In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful,” she muttered over and over again. The woman could get nothing more sensible from her.
The woman left her there and followed the stream of terrified people as they ran among the tents. And then the woman saw them: Two immense giants, impossibly huge, hundreds of feet tall, crushing the landscape as they came nearer. They waded among the distant mountains, and then the shocks from their jolting footsteps began to chum the water in the lake. The ground heaved as they came nearer. The woman raised a hand to her breast, then staggered backward a few steps.
One of the giants turned his head slowly and looked straight at her. He was horribly ugly, with a great scar across one empty eye socket and a mouthful of rotten, snaggled fangs. He lifted an arm and pointed to her.
“No,” she said, her voice hoarse with fear, “not me!” She wanted to run but she couldn’t move. The giant stooped toward her, fierce and glowering. He bent to capture her in his enormous hand.
“Marîd!” the woman screamed. “Please!” Nothing happened. The giant’s fist began to close around her.
The woman tried to reach up and unplug the moddy link, but her arms were frozen. She wouldn’t escape that easily. The woman shrieked as she realized she couldn’t even jack out.
The disfigured giant lifted her off the ground and drew her close to his single eye. His horrid grin spread and he laughed at her terror. His stinking breath sickened the woman. She struggled again to lift her hands, to pull the moddy link free. Her arms were held fast. She screamed and screamed, and then at last she fainted.
My eyes were bleary for a moment, and I could hear Chiri panting for breath beside me. I didn’t think she’d be so upset. After all, it was only a Transpex game, and it wasn’t the first time she’d ever played. She knew what to expect.
“You’re a sick motherfucker, Marîd,” she said at last.
“Listen, Chiri, I was just — “
She waved a hand at me. “I know, I know. You won the game and the bet. I’m still just a little shook, that’s all. I’ll have your money for you tonight.”
“Forget the money, Chiri, I — “
I shouldn’t have said that. “Hey, you son of a bitch, when I lose a bet I pay up. You’re gonna take the money or I’m gonna cram it down your throat. But, God, you’ve got some kind of twisted imagination.”
“That last part,” said Courane, “where she couldn’t raise her hands to pop the moddy link, that was real cold.” He said it approvingly.
“Hell of a sadistic thing to do,” said Chiri, shivering. “Last time I ever touch a Transpex with you.”
“A few extra points, that’s all, Chiri. I didn’t know what my score was. I might have needed a couple more points.”
“You finished with 941,” said Shaknahyi. He was looking at me oddly, as if he were impressed by my score and repelled at the same time. “We got to go.” He stood up and tossed down the last slug of his soft drink.
I stood up, too. “You all right now, Chiri?” I put my hand on her shoulder.
“I’m fine. I’m still shaking off the game. It was like a nightmare.” She took a deep breath and let it out. “I got to get back to the club so Indihar can go home.”
“Give you a ride?” asked Shaknahyi.
“Thanks,” said Chiri, “but I got my own transportation.”
“See you later then,” I said.
“Kwa heri, you bastard.” At least she was smiling when she called me that. I thought maybe things were okay between us again. I was real glad about that.
Outside, Shaknahyi shook his head and grinned. “She was right, you know. That was a hell of a sadistic thing. Like unnecessary torture. You are a sick son of a bitch.”
Maybe, I thought as we headed back to the station house. But if ever I decided that I no longer liked my true personality, there was an almost unlimited supply of artificial ones I could chip in.
I leaned back in my seat and stared out the window. I’d managed to heal the bad feelings between Chiri and me, and I was getting a handle on this cop business. All that remained was Angel Monroe, and a solution to that problem would occur to me soon. I was sure that Laila had a Perfect Mother moddy in her shop. Of course, my mom’s skull wasn’t amped like mine, but I could take care of that for her, even if I had to wire her brain myself with a jackknife and a coat hanger.
See? Life is hard, all right, so you’ve got to take help wherever you can find it. I thought about that as I scratched my scalp around my corymbic implant. As Shaknahyi swung the patrol car into the garage, I thought, what’s the point of sexy new technology if you can’t find some way to pervert it?
Introduction to
Slow, Slow Burn
One of George’s best stories, it was one of a number that he sold to Playboy magazine over the years. The version printed here, from his own file copy of the story, differs slightly from the way it originally appeared in Playboy, and is his preferred version.
In a way the whole story is a logical extrapolation of Georges theory about the relationship of technology and pornography: If sex moddies do exist, there has to be someone who makes the best — and what does the use of sex moddies do and mean to the consumer, the producer, and the artist. And at the back of all the technology there’s still someone, some single human being, whom everyone in the world now fantasizes about.
From start to finish of the story, Honey Pilar remains as opaque as the image in the moddy. look at me, touch me, have sex with me, BE ME WHILE I’M HAVING SEX…marry me…But you still don’t know one single solitary thing about me.
A capsule version of how women appear to men?
And the beauty of the story is that by its end, we know that Honey Pilar is more than a match for any of the men who think they know who she is and what she’s about. Did she get rid of Husband #4 because of the quarrel, or because after five years’ trial she decided his control of her career is what’s causing her sales to decline? Is it Kit (as in, “put together from a — “) who’s having the slow, slow burn, or is it Honey, the real woman observing from behind that sweet and stupid facade?
George both loved women and liked them, and was, I think, fascinated by them: Honey is a marvelous creation.