“Myself,” she said, evaluating and assessing. Pig, sober, would just about fill her needs. Pig, drunk, wasn’t even on the cards. “Just my wonderful self, fat boy. Where’s Fi?”
Pig grunted and took a big swig from his glass. Swaying, he spilled some of it down his chin. “Next cell over.” Grunt. “Had bad day thinking too hard this-morn. ’M’I dumb yet?”
She stared at him. “What’s the cube root of 2,362?”
“Mmm … six-point-nine … point-nine-seven … point-nine-seven-one…”
She left Pig slowly factoring his way out of her trap in a haze of Newtonian approximation and drifted on into the night, a pale-skinned ghost dressed in artful black tatters. Fancy dress, forgotten youthful death cults. She allowed herself to feel a bit more mellow toward Pig, even condescending to think fondly of him. Pig’s wallowing self-abasement made her own withdrawn lack of socialization feel a bit less retarded. The world was full of nerds and exiles. The hothouse of forced brilliance the Septagon system produced also generated a lot of smart misfits, and even if none of them fit in individually, together they made an interesting mosaic.
There were people dancing in the next manufactory cell, accelerated bagpipes, feedback howls, a zek who’d hacked himself into a drum-machine trance whacking on a sensor grid to provide a hammering beat. It was an older crowd, late teens/early twenties, the tail end of high school. There were fewer fashion victims than you’d see at a normal high school hop, but wilder extremes; most people dressed — or didn’t — as if they picked up whatever was nearest to their bed that morning, plus one or two exaggeratedly bizarre ego statements. A naked, hairless boy with a clanking crotch full of chromed chain links, dancing cheek to cheek with another boy, long-haired, wearing a swirling red gown that left his pierced and swollen nipples visible. A teenage girl in extreme fetish gear hobbled past; her wasp-waist corsetry, leather ball gag, wrist and ankle chains were all visible beneath a transparent, floor-sweeping dress. Wednesday ignored the exhibitionist extremals: they were fundamentally boring, attention-craving types who needed to be needed and were far too demanding to make good fuck-friends.
She headed for the back of the unit, hunting real company. Fiona was sitting on top of a dead cornucopia box, wearing black leggings and a T-shirt locked to the output from an entropy pool. She was chatting to a boy wearing a pressure suit liner with artfully slashed knees. The spod clutched a nebulizer, and was gesticulating dreamily. Fi looked up and called, “Wednesday!”
“Fi!” Wednesday leaned forward and hugged her. Fiona’s breath was smoky. “What is this, downer city?”
Fi shrugged. “Sammy said make it dumb, but not everyone got it.” (On the dance floor Miss Ball Gag was having difficulty communicating with some boy in a black rubber body-stocking who wanted to dance: their sign language protocols were incompatible.) Fi smiled. “Vinnie, meet Wednesday. You want a drink, Wednesday?”
“Yeah, whatever.”
Fi snapped her fingers and Vinnie blinked slowly, then shambled off in the direction of the bar. “Nice guy, I think, under the dumb layer. I dunno. I didn’t want to get wasted before everybody else, know what I mean?”
Wednesday hitched up her sarong and jumped up on the box beside Fi. “Ack. No uppers? No inverse-agonists?”
Fiona shook her head. “House rules. You want to come in, you check your IQ at the door. Hear the jammers?”
“No.” When she said it, Wednesday suddenly realized that she could: the pink noise field was like tinnitus, scratching away at the edges of her implant perceptions. Does Herman talk to Sam? she wondered. “So that’s what’s got to Pig.”
“Yeah. He’s cute when he’s thick, isn’t he?” Fi giggled a bit and Wednesday smiled — sepulchrally, she hoped, because she didn’t really know how Fi expected her to respond. “ ’Sa good excuse. Get dumb, get dumber, stop thinking, relax.”
“You been at it already?” Wednesday kept her voice down.
“Yeah. Just a bit.”
“Too bad. Was hoping to talk about—”
“Shh.” Fi leaned against her. “I am going to get in Vinnie’s pants tonight, see if I don’t!” She pointed at the spod who was swaying back and forth, and working his way toward them. “Ass so tight you could drop him and he’d bounce.”
The music was doing things to him and to Fi that sent a stab of jealousy all the way from Wednesday’s amygdala to her crotch. She smoothed her skirt down. “What do you expect to find in his pants? A catfish?”
Fi giggled again. “Listen, just this once! Relax. Let go, ducky. Stop thinking, fuck like a bunny, learn the joy of grunt. Can’t you switch off?”
Wednesday sighed. “I’ll try.” Vinnie was back. Wordlessly he held out a can of grinning neural death. She took it, hoisted a toast to higher cerebral shutdown, tried to chug it — ended up coughing. The night was young, the air full of augmentation jammers and neuroleptics and alcohol, and the party was just beginning to mix down to the right level of trancelike zombie heaven that high-pressure synthetic geniuses needed to switch off and groove.
A long way down to the unthinking depths. She briefly wondered if she’d meet Pig down there and find him attractive.
In the end it wasn’t Pig; it was a boy called Blow, green skin and webbing between his fingers and toes — but not his cock and balls — and she ended up on his arm giggling at a string of inane puns. He’d slipped a hand into the slit in her skirt but politely gone no farther and left it to her to pop the question, which she did for reasons that escaped her in the morning except that he’d been clean and well-mannered, and none of her usual fuckfriends were around and free, and she felt so tense …
… and the poor lad had ended up staying with her half the night just to give her a back rub, after she’d finished screaming and clawing his buttocks in one of the antisound-curtained alcoves at the sides of the dance floor.
“You’re really tight,” he said in amazement, kneading away at one shoulder.
“Oh, you bet.” Her jacket had crawled into one corner and curled protectively around the rest of her gear. She lay facedown on the pad, damp and sweaty and postorgasmic and a bit stoned, trying to let go and relax, as he worked on her upper back. “Aaah.”
He paused. “Want to talk about it?” he asked.
“Not really,” she mumbled.
After a moment he went back to prodding at the sore patch on her left shoulder blade. “You should relax.” Rub. “It’s a party. Was it someone here? Or someone else?”
“I said I don’t want to talk about it,” she said, and he broke off from trying to get her back to relax.
“If you don’t want to talk about it, what do you want?” he asked, beginning to sound annoyed. “I could be out there.” He didn’t sound as if he believed it.
“Then go.” She reached backward and grabbed his thigh blindly, contradicting herself. “Stay. I’m not sure.” She was always bad at handling this, the difficult morning-after socializing that went with a one-off fuck with someone who she didn’t know. “Why do you have to talk?”
“Because you’re interesting.” He sounded serious, which was a bad sign. “I haven’t met you before. And I think I like you.”
“Oh.” She glanced over at the dance floor, legs moving in irregular strobing flashes of light only a meter or two from their sweaty nest. He smelled of some kind of musk, and the faint tang of semen. She rolled over on her back, fetching up against the padded back of the recess, and looked at him. “You got something else in mind?”