"Wow." Janice digested all this. "I appreciate your candor, Mr. Stake. Can I ask your first name?"
"Jeremy."
"Jeremy," she repeated, staring at him so raptly that he couldn't stop himself from flicking looks at her eyes again and again, despite how much he had trained himself.
The waitress returned to ask if they were enjoying their coffee and if they needed anything else. Her eyes, in a field of yellow flowers rippled by a summer breeze, looked confused, as though she thought another customer had come in to replace Stake. The woman's twin brother, perhaps.
Janice dismissed the waitress, and then whispered to Stake, "Hey, do you want to get out of here?"
She still hadn't let go of his hand.
He had been wandering around her living room, admiring her collection of paintings (they apparently paid teachers unusually well at the Arbury School), but he rejoined her at the bar. "What would you like?" she asked. He noticed a bottle of bright yellow Ha Jiin wine; he could tell by the giant centipede coiled inside the bottle, preserved by the alcohol. He tapped the bottle with a finger, and Janice poured some into a small glass. "Be careful, it's very potent. And did you know it's supposed to be an aphrodisiac? I'm sure that long, thick centipede has nothing to do with the belief."
He sipped the barest few molecules of his drink but it still took his breath away. He hadn't had any of this in a few years; not since angry vets had protested it being stocked at the bar in the Legion of Veterans Post 69. Why put money in their former enemies' pockets? This, in spite of the fact that it was probably their allies, the Jin Haa, who had exported it.
He noticed a bottle of sake amongst the diverse collection of bottles. "How well do you know Mr. Fukuda?" he asked in an offhand way.
"How well does anyone know anyone, Jeremy?"
She was being playful, or evasive. He turned around, and she was standing close, too close, a glass of white wine in her own hand. He knew his face held onto the change, a little or a lot. When he concentrated on it, his mind could reach out and tell. He could also activate the mirror feature on his wrist comp's screen to look and be more sure- and he could even call up his natural face on that screen, and pore over it until he slipped this mask-but he did not raise his arm. He was a little embarrassed to do so. To show that it bothered him that much. He had revealed enough vulnerability already.
"I like it," Janice purred. She set her glass down on the mini bar.
"Like what?"
"That you look like me now. I don't know; I find it very intriguing." She took the glass from his hand, rested it beside hers, and then her arms went around him. Their twinned mouths came together.
In her bed, she straddled him with her full breasts swaying down heavily in his face. He sucked at one of them as if to feed, his craving making him an infant. It had been a while since a woman had gone to bed with him. And the last time had been a prostie. Not many women found his turbulent flesh so "intriguing." As she undulated atop him, Janice said huskily, "When I was thirteen, I used to kiss my reflection in the bathroom mirror as I-you know-touched myself. Huh. I guess I sort of lost my virginity to myself." Her eyes didn't leave his face. "Look at me. please," she said.
His closed eyes dutifully opened and stared up at her. She leaned lower and dragged her nipples across his cheeks. She grinned, her shaggy hair falling about her face.
"We're all narcissistic," she said in a lustful voice, more like panting. "We're all just masturba-tors."
Yes, thought Stake. Because we're all alone. Even when we're together.
And that made him think of Thi. And it was a good thing he did not change his appearance simply by thinking of another person, as some who suffered his disorder did. Or right now, Janice would wonder why he was beginning to resemble a Ha Jiin woman instead of herself.
She dug her fingers into his breasts, which had swelled up in a fair imitation of her own, and her undulations grew more intense. Beneath him, under her driving weight, Stake felt her sheets rub against him. When she had led him by the hand into her bedroom and pulled back the blankets, she had revealed that her bed linens were sheets of pink, living skin. A thin flexible tube ran from both the mattress sheet and the cover sheet to a nutrient tank in the corner that kept the bio-engineered flesh alive. Stake had never been in a bed with sheets of this nature before. It made him feel all the more infantile and helpless. Inside a womb.
Their entanglements grew more varied. Finally becoming more actively involved, less passive, Stake shifted behind Janice. He preferred looking at the back of her head, felt strengthened by the break in their eye contact. He remained there until he climaxed hard against her. They collapsed to the bed together, he on top of her, sucking at air. Janice had squeezed the mattress sheet in her fists, and when she unclenched her hands she saw that her nails had dug into the smooth skin. Beads of blood rose from the little wounds. "Damn," she said.
Stake lifted his head to look. "I'm sorry." She reached up behind her to stroke his face. "Don't worry, it will heal."
CHAPTER SIX
shadow city
Beneath Punktown there was, in effect, a shadow version of itself. When they'd run out of room to build sideways or upwards, city planners had looked downwards instead. This underground district had come to be known as Subtown. Its borders were not nearly as extensive as those of the city proper overhead, but it still encompassed a sizable area.
The rays of the sun did not reach down here; its citizens, many of whom might not venture above-ground for months at a time, lived and worked under the artificial glow of lamps set into a concrete sky. As evening fell, some of these lamps dimmed and others were shut off completely, to give something of the effect of night (though Subtown was not made so dark as to give criminals undue cover for their activities). Because of the limits set by the ceiling, buildings were smaller, tending toward flat-roofed tenement structures, often with shops on the ground floor. There were factories and warehouses, too, but these had not been safe in their subterranean shelter when financial plagues had swept through the city, and manufacturers had migrated in flocks to the Outback Colony or even to overcrowded and much-blighted Earth in a reverse colonization. Wherever labor was cheaper, or perhaps restrictions were laxer about how many living workers companies were required to employ to balance out their automatonic laborers, whom they didn't have to pay at all.
Behind the Perez Valve Company there was a pair of loading docks, but these had been claimed by other street people, who had used scrap material from the derelict factory's inoperative trash zapper to build enclosed shelters upon the elevated platforms. So last night, the homeless person had simply lain against the factory's graffiti-splashed flank, using his bent arm for a pillow. He didn't have to worry about being rained upon, after all, and the temperature was regulated down here, always comfortable unless there was the occasional glitch in climate control. Therefore, he didn't really need to build a shelter. He simply slept in this alley or that, at most pulling a plastic tarp over himself. When he had first found the blue plastic tarp, he had dragged it behind him loosely in his wanderings, but later he realized that it was better to roll it in a tube and carry it with him that way during the hours that corresponded with daylight. Finally, he had had the notion to tear a hole in the center of the sheet and wear it over his head like a long poncho, covering his previously naked body.
He had awoken hungry, as he did every day. So hungry. Yesterday he had seen two street people scrounging through a trash zapper behind an Indian restaurant. The spicy smells of cooking from inside had made his innards gurgle, but when he had shambled toward the two men to join them, they had yelled and thrown trash at him to chase him off. Forlornly, he had moved away.