She gives him a hard shake. “Come on,” she says. “I hit you with enough serotonin reuptake blockers to depress a hyena.” He feels a hard tug at his throat, and she holds up a small blowdart for him to examine. “I know you’re out of the god-box.”
Huw opens his mouth to say something, and finds himself sobbing. “You took away my god-self,” he says, snotting down his three-day beard and horking back briny mouthfuls of tears and mucus.
Bonnie produces a hankie from up one sleeve of her church-modest gown and wipes his face. “Sha,” she says, stroking his hair. “Sha. Huw, I need you here and now, okay? We’re in a lot of trouble, and I can’t get us out on my lonesome. The god feeling was just head-in-a-jar stuff. You weren’t being God, you were just feeling the feeling of being God. You hate that—it’s how they feel in the cloud, once they’ve uploaded.”
Huw snuffles miserably. “Yeah,” he says.
“Yeah. Baby, I’m sorry, I know it hurts, but it’s how you want to live. If I know one person who’s equipped to cope with the distinction between sensation and simulation, it’s you. Jesus, Huw, other than these maniacs, you’re the only person I know who thinks there is a distinction.”
Huw struggles to his feet and teeters in his ridiculous trousers. Bonnie giggles.
“What are you wearing?” she asks.
Huw manages to crack a fractional smile. “They’re all the rage in the American Outback,” he says. “What’s that you’re wearing?”
“A disguise. Doubles as a biohazard shield.” She swivels her hips, setting kilograms of underskirts swishing. “We’re both a bit overdressed for the occasion; let’s skin off and I’ll introduce you to the Bishop. Go on, you get started.”
Huw begins the laborious unlatching process and gradually shucks the pants. The teapot clatters free, drawing a raised eyebrow from one of the sexually ambiguous catamites twined around a sofa arm. The vibration kicks some erratic connection back into life: Ade’s image glows softly through the deep pile carpet.
The little avatar wrinkles its nose. “Bugger me sideways,” says Ade. “Place looks like an Italian whorehouse, only less charming and hygienic.” He turns and looks Huw up and down. “You look a little more like your usual cheerless self, though, mate. Should I assume that you’ve joined us again in the land of the cognitively unimpaired?”
Huw nods miserably. “I’m back,” he says. “No thanks to you. Those two assholes know you—they do business with you!”
Adrian’s avatar has the good grace to look faintly embarrassed. Bonnie leans past Huw with a creak of whalebone and picks up the teapot. “Did I hear that right?” she asks. “You been selling stuff again?”
“Uh.” Ade looks unrepentant. “Yeah, I guess so.”
“What kind of stuff?” Bonnie says, her eyes narrowing.
“Um ... stuff. Mostly harmless.”
“What kind of mostly harmless stuff are we talking about here?” Huw asks, mustering up a faint echo of interest. The blissed-out resistance cadre on the sofa are showing signs of interest too.
“Oh, the usual, sunshine. Telescope lenses, tinfoil hats—okay, Faraday cage helmets—formicide spritzes, tactical nuclear weapons, Bibles, contraceptive implants, tinned spam, that kind of thing.”
“And in return they’re paying you in—,” Huw begins; then Bonnie interrupts him.
“—No, wait. What else are you smuggling, you dogfucker? Don’t try to hide it from me. Those neverglade-living lowlifes were so eager to hand Huw over to the Fallen Congregations that they had to be trying to cover something up. Like, oh, whatever the fuck you were doing with them. What was it, Ade? Resurrection on the installment plan? Banned downloads? Are we going to get that fucking mad crow descending on us?”
“Oh, I say!” someone says behind them, but Bonnie is so worked up, she doesn’t notice. Huw glances over his shoulder and sees one of the miscellaneous perverts standing nearby, a hand clasped over his/her mouth. The perv is fish-belly pale and wears nothing but very complicated underwear. “Did you say—?”
“Just a few small downloads, lass,” Ade says. “Nothing to get worked up about, keep your hair on.”
“Downloads. Shit.” Bonnie breathes deeply. She’s looking pale. “Pusbuckets, that’s all I need,” she says. She puts the teapot down. “Right, we’ll have to take this up later, Huw. Right now we’ve got to go see the Bishop, and that means skin. Help me out of this thing.”
Huw fumbles for a while with the complex catches and clasps on her dress, fuzzily aware that he’s standing very close to her and he’s not wearing any trousers. As she steps out of her costume, she grabs him around the waist, squeezes him tight, and kisses him fiercely on the mouth. She’s nervous, vibrating like a live wire, and something squirms around in his throat, wanting to comfort her. “Why do we have to be naked?” he asks when she surfaces for air. “Who is this Bishop, anyway?”
“The Bishop of the First Church of the Teledildonic. It’s a dissident: lives in a baptismal pond, says we’ve got it all wrong and time is flowing in reverse. We’ve passed the Tower of Babel—that’s the cloud —and the Flood—warming—and now we’re ready to move back into the Garden of Eden. So we’ve got to stop wearing clothes and start fucking like innocent bunnies.”
“But—” Huw can feel his brain trying to twist out through his ears as he attempts to accommodate this deviant theology to what he knows about the Fallen Baptist Congregations. “—what’s that got to do with anything? With these folks?”
“I say, hold it right there, pardner!” says the pale perv, running drowned-looking hands through his/her long green hair. The effect would almost be sexy if not for the medium-sized potbelly and the black rubber hedgehog-apparatus that conceals his/her crotch, studded with silvery transducers: “You’ve got it all wrong!” He/she waves a finger at Bonnie. “This isn’t the Garden of Eden, it’s the Garden of the Son of God, after the Rapture, the hundred and forty-four thousand saved souls living in paradise on Earth, free from sin—”
“What’s that, then?” asks Huw, rudely prodding in the direction of the strap-on.
The perv draws itself up to a haughty meter-fifty: “I’ll have you know that this is the finest model chastity phallus money can buy,” s/he says, voice cracking and descending an octave: “’S got all the sensory inputs of the real thing, wired right into my spine, but because little feller himself is tucked out of sight behind it, there’s no actual genital contact. No skin, no sin.” He fondles the thing happily and whimpers. Another of the prosthetically enhanced worshippers is sitting up on the sofa behind him and showing signs of interest.
Huw backs away slowly. Get me out of here, he mouths at Bonnie. She nods, then reaches out and strokes the perv’s pristine love machine. “Now.” Bonnie leads him around the perv—who doubles over in ecstasy at her touch—toward a pair of pornographically decorated hardwood doors at the rear of the room.
Bonnie takes a deep breath. “Wish I could stay,” she calls to the three or four temple whores on the bed, “but we’ve got to see Their Grace. It’s urgent. If I were you, I’d get to a safe house before the gendarmes arrive.”
“Give the Bishop our love,” one of the omnisexuals calls as they depart.