“I’m not doing any harm,” Anna said. “You could all have ignored me, if you’d wanted to.”
“I believe that was the gist of the argument which prompted the legalization of prostitution,” the other replied, mustering a sarcastic edge far sharper than Kitty’s. “It does no harm, they said, and anyone who disapproves only has to ignore it. When the cosmetic engineers progressed from tinkering with shape and form to augmenting bodily fluids they said much the same thing. The new aphrodisiacs are perfectly safe, they said, it’s all just for fun, they’re definitely not addictive—and anyone who disapproves can simply stay away from the new generation of good-time girls, and let the fun-lovers get on with it. In the end, though, the rot crept in, the way it always does. It all went horribly wrong. Isn’t it bad enough that we had to lose Alan, without having to suffer a personal appearance by his own particular angel of death?”
She felt something stirring in the depths of her consciousness, but the comfort blanket of her medication was weighing down upon it. It was easy to remain tame and self-possessed while the doctors’ drugs were winning the battle against her own perverted psychochemistry. “I’m sorry,” she said, effortlessly. “I didn’t mean to cause distress.” Like hell I didn’t, she thought, by way of private compensation. I came here to rub your turned-up noses in it, to force you to recognize how utterly and horribly unfair the world really is.
“You have caused distress,” the man said, accusatively. “I don’t think you have the least idea how much distress you’ve caused—to Alan, to Kitty, to the boys, and to everyone who knew them. If you had, and if you had the least vestige of conscience, you’d have cut your throat rather than come here today. In fact, you’d have cut your throat, period.”
He’s a punter, Anna thought, derisively. Not mine, and not the House’s, but someone’s. He fucks augmented girls, and the juices really blow his mind, just like they’re supposed to, and he’s afraid. He’s afraid that one fine day he, too, might find that he just can’t stop, and that if and when his favorite squeeze goes bad, it’ll be cold turkey, forever and ever, amen. Like every man alive his prayer has always been “Lord give me chastity but please not yet!”—and now it’s too late.
“I’m sorry,” she said, again. The words were the purified essence of her medication, wrought by a transformation every bit as miraculous as the one which had run its wayward course within her flesh and her spirit. The real Anna wasn’t sorry at all. The real Anna wasn’t sorry she had come, and wasn’t sorry she was alive, and wasn’t sorry that this black-clad prick saw her as some kind of ravenous memento mori.
“You’re a degenerate,” the black-clad prick informed her, speaking not merely to her but to everything she stood for. “I don’t agree with those people who say that what’s happened to you is God’s punishment for the sins you’ve committed, and that every whore in the world will eventually go the same way, but I understand how they feel. I think you should go now, and never show your face here again. I don’t want Kitty thinking that she can’t bring the boys to visit Alan’s grave in case she meets you. If you have a spark of decency in you, you’ll promise me that you’ll never come here again.”
The clichés begin to flow in full force, Anna thought—but even the medication balked at sparks of decency. “I’m free to go wherever I want to, whenever I wish,” she asserted, untruthfully. “You have no right to stop me.”
“You poisonous bitch,” he said, in a level fashion which suggested that he meant the adjective literally. “Wherever you go, corruption goes with you. Stay away from Alan’s family, or you’ll be sorry.” She knew that he meant all of that quite literally too—but he had to turn away when he’d said it, because he couldn’t meet the unnaturally steady stare of her colorless eyes.
She stayed where she was until everyone else had left, and then she walked over to the open grave and looked down at the coffin, onto which someone had dribbled a handful of brown loamy soil.
“Don’t worry,” she said to the dead man. “Nothing scares me. Not anymore. I’ll be back, and I’ll get that wreath one way or another.”
She had no wristwatch but the church clock told her that she had five hours in hand before they’d be expecting her at the hospital.
Anna hadn’t been to the Euroterminal meat-rack for seven years, but it didn’t take long for her to find her way around. The establishment of Licensed Houses had been intended to take prostitution off the streets but it had only resulted in a more complicated stratification of the marketplace. It wasn’t just the fact that there were so many different kinds of augmentation available, or the fact that more than three-quarters of them were illegal, or even the fact that there were so many girls whose augmentations had ultimately gone wrong or thrown up unexpected side effects; the oldest profession was one which, by its very nature, could never be moved out of the black economy into the gold. Sleaze, secrecy, and dark, dark shadows were marketable commodities, just like psychotropic bodily secretions.
She didn’t bother to try for a managed stand; she’d spoken the truth when she’d told her dead lover that nothing scared her anymore, but she hadn’t time to get into complicated negotiations with a pimp. She went down to the arches where the independents hung out. There was no one there she knew, but there was a sense in which she knew all of them—especially the ones who were marked like her. It didn’t take long to find one who was a virtual mirror image in more overstated makeup.
“I’m not here to provide steady competition,” she said, by way of introduction. “I’m still hospitalized. I’ll be back on the ward tomorrow, but I need something to get me through today. Fifty’ll do it—that’s only one substitution, right?”
“Y’r arithmetic’s fine,” the mirror image said, “but y’got a lot of nerve. Demand’s not strong, and I don’t owe y’anything just ’cause we’re two peas from the same glass pod. It’s a cat-eat-cat world out here.”
“We aren’t two peas from any kind of pod,” Anna informed her, softly. “Symptoms are all on the surface. They used to say that all of us were sisters under the skin, but we were never the same. Even when they shot the virus vectors into us, so that our busy little epithelial cells would mass-produce their carefully designed mind expanders, it didn’t make us into so many mass-produced wanking machines. One of my doctors explained to me that the reason it all began to go wrong is that everybody’s different. We’re not just different ghosts haunting production line machines; each and every one of us has a subtly different brain chemistry. What makes you you and me me isn’t just the layout of the synaptic network which forms in our brains as we accumulate memories and habits; we tailor our chemistry to individual specifications as well. You and I had exactly the same transformation, and our transplanted genes mutated according to the same distortive logic, but fucking you never felt exactly the same as fucking me, and it still isn’t. We’re all unique, all different; we offered subtly different good trips and now we offer subtly different bad ones. That’s why some of our clients became regulars, and why some got hooked in defiance of all the ads which promised hand-on-heart that what we secreted wasn’t physically addictive. You don’t owe me anything at all, either because of what we both were or because of what we both are, but you could do me a favor, if you wanted to. You’re free to say no.”
The mirror image looked at her long and hard, and then said: “Jesus, kid, y’really are strung out—but y’d better lose that accent if y’re plannin’ on workin’ down here. It don’t fit. I was goin’ for a cup of coffee anyway. Y’got half an hour—if y’don’t score by then, tough luck.”