We had the cab let us off on the near end of the block, so we could walk the length of it and check the menus in each joint. The price was important; payday was two days away for both of us. I made three times as much as she did, but the Mexican excursion had brought me down to less than a hundred bucks. And Amelia was flat.
There were more jills than pedestrians. Some of them offered to join us in a three-way. I hadn't known that was possible. It sounded more confusing than alluring, even under good conditions. And being more intimately linked to the jill than to Amelia would be a disaster.
The place with the best double uni deal was also one of the nicest, or the least sleazy. It was called Your World, and instead of car crashes and executions, it offered a menu of explorations-like the French tour I'd taken in Mexico, but more exotic.
I suggested the underwater tour of the Great Barrier Reef.
"I'm not a good swimmer," Amelia said. "Would that make a difference?"
"Me neither; don't worry. It's like being a fish." I'd done this one. "You don't even think about swimming."
It was a dollar a minute, cash, or two minutes for three dollars, plastic. Ten minutes up front. I paid cash; keep the plastic for emergencies.
A stern-looking fat lady, black with a springy forest of white hair, led us to the booth. It was a small cubicle just over a meter high, with a padded blue mat on the floor, two jack cables hanging from the low ceiling.
"Time start' when the first one plug in. You all want to take your clothes off first, I s'pose. Place been sterilized. You-all have a good time, now."
She turned abruptly and bustled away. "She thinks you're a jill," I said.
"I could use a second income." We entered the place on our hands and knees and when I shut the door the air conditioner started to whir. Then a white-noise generator added a steady hiss.
"Does the light make a difference?"
"It goes off automatically." We helped each other undress and she lay down the right way, on her stomach facing the door.
She was rigid and trembling slightly. "Relax," I said, kneading her shoulders.
"I'm afraid nothing will happen."
"If nothing happens, we'll try it again." I remembered what Marty had said-she really should start off with something like jumping off a cliff. Well, I could tell her that later.
"Here." I slid over a diamond-shaped pillow that supports your face on the chin, cheekbones, and forehead. "This'll help your neck relax." I stroked her back for a minute, and when she seemed looser, I moved the jack interface into place over the metal socket in her head. There was a faint click and the light went out.
Of course after thousands of hours, I didn't need the pillow; I could jack standing up or hanging upside down. I groped for the cable and stretched out so we were touching, arm and hip. Then I jacked in.
The water was warm as blood and it tasted good, salt and seaweed, on my lips, as I breathed it in. I was in less than two meters of water, bright coral formations all around, tiny fish with brilliant colors ignoring me until I came close enough to be a danger. A small green moray eel, face like a cartoon villain, stared at me from a hole in the coral.
Volition is strange when you're jacked like this. I "decided" to go off to the left, although there was nothing obvious there, just a plain of white sand. Actually, the person who had recorded the trip had a good reason to check it out, but the customer wasn't in contact with him or her at that level; nothing but the sensorium, amplified.
Sunlight refracting through the ripples on the surface made a pleasant shimmering pattern on the sand, but that wasn't why we had come here. I hovered over two eye-stalks that poked out of the sand, twitching, agitated. Suddenly the sand exploded underneath me, and to the left and right, and a tiger-striped manta ray flew out from where it had been hiding, under a few centimeters of sand. It was huge, easily three meters wide. I shot forward and grabbed a wing, before it had time to gather speed.
One powerful flap of the wings and we surged forward; another, and we were going faster than any merely human swimmer, the water churning smoothly down my body...
And hers. Amelia was there, definitely but faintly, like a shadow inside me. The turbulence from the fast water made my genitals flutter, but part of me didn't have that; for that part of me the water flowed smoothly tickling between her legs.
Intellectually, I knew that they'd had to merge two strings to create this, and wondered how hard it had been to find a large manta for both the man and the woman or how they'd gotten around it. But mainly I focused on that particular dual sensation and tried to make contact with Amelia through it.
I couldn't, quite. No words, no specificity; just a vague "isn't this thrilling" gestalt that I felt reflected with a different twist, Amelia's personality. There was also a faint different excitement that must have been her realization that we were in contact.
The sand surface fell away in an underwater cliff and the manta dived, the water suddenly cool and the pressure increasing. We lost our grip and went tumbling alone in the dark water.
As we slid slowly upward I felt little butterfly flutterings that I knew were Amelia's hands on me, back in the cubical, and as I became erect it was wetness that wasn't the imaginary ocean around me, and then the ghostly clasp of her legs and a faint pulsing up and down.
It wasn't like Carolyn, where I was her and she was me. It was more like a compelling sexual dream that possessed you while you were half awake.
The water above was like beaten silver, and three sharks scudded there as we floated up. There was a little shiver of fear, though I knew they were harmless, since the string wasn't rated D or I; death or injury. I tried to project to Amelia not to be scared, but I didn't feel any fear from her. She was preoccupied. Her physical presence grew stronger in me, and she wasn't exactly swimming.
Her orgasm was faint but long, radiating and pulsating in that strange-but-familiar way that I hadn't felt in the three years since I lost Carolyn. The ghosts of her arms and legs rocked me left and right as we rose up toward the sharks.
It was one large nurse shark and two dogfish, no danger. But as we passed them I felt myself go soft and slip out of her. It wasn't going to work, not this time, not for both of us.
Her hands on me were like feathers, coaxing, pleasant but not enough. There was a sudden faint loss of something, dimensionality, that meant she had come un-jacked, and then she was using her mouth, cool and then warm, but it still wouldn't work. Most of me was still in the reef.
I felt for the cable and unjacked myself. The lights went on and I immediately started to respond to Amelia's ministrations. I slipped my arms around her slipperiness and rested my head on her hip and didn't think about Carolyn, and worked a couple of fingers between her legs from behind, and in a minute we both came at once.
We were allowed about five seconds' rest, and then the lady was pounding on the cubicle door, saying we had to get out or pay rent; she had to clean it up for the next customers.
"The meter stops running when we both unjack, I guess," Amelia said. She nuzzled me. "I could pay a dollar a minute for this, though. You want to tell her that?"
"Nah." I reached for our clothes. "Let's go home and do it for free."
"Your place or mine?"
"Home," I said. "Your place."
JULIA AND AMELIA SPENT the next day moving and cleaning house. Since it was Sunday, they couldn't get any paperwork done, but they didn't expect any problems. There was a waiting list for singles who qualified for Julian's efficiency, and Amelia's place was rated for two, or even two adults and a child.
(A child was something that was never going to happen. Twenty-four years before, after a miscarriage, Amelia had opted for voluntary sterilization, which gave her a monthly cash-and-coupon bonus until age fifty. And Julian's view of the world was so sufficiently dark that he wasn't eager to bring a new person into it.)