Nearly two hundred kilos of meat & serviceable hide but I'm exhausted. Childe took some leavings. Swears she can keep him placated & downwind as long as need be. Hope so. Don't want rebel blood on my hands. But if Lufo should try what I see in his glance, I'd whistle in a second.
Wouldn't I?
CHAPTER 18
Ten minutes after the plush executive hoverbus whirred from its lair under the IEE tower, Eve Simpson saw the southernmost tip of the Great Salt Lake pass on her right. That meant the bus was making better time since she'd urged Mills to wangle a police-freq. trip plotter. Once Eve tasted the lucullan comfort of the big fandriven bus, she refused to visit the desert lab in anything else. Besides, it needed no driver, skating smoothly above the potholed freeway with its onboard plotter in command.
With her police module, of course, other traffic was shuttled aside for Eve's passage, countermanding whatever other ideas the drivers might have. That way Eve could whirl along at. absolute top speed and the hell with optimum energy trip plots.
The hoverbus drew on narrowcast power transmitters along the freeway until Eve passed Nephi. After that it would automatically receive LOS — line-of-sight — recharges from the transmitters that began to dot high points in the heartland of Zionized, Streamlined America. Those LOS recharges were frequent, for Eve's demands on everything she used were rarely less than the maximum. She had punched in the Nephi-Salina-Green River route, for example, instead of the more direct Provo-Price-Green River route because she did not enjoy the faint side-loads on her great bulk when the bus took a twisty course.
Her chosen route was longer and took more power. So what? Eve had power to burn. If Marengo — poor haunted, hairy, heavy-hung Marengo — was as good as his word, she'd have still more power soon. And he'd damned well better come through or she'd cut his dose of dreamstuff. She liked to think Marengo Chabrier enjoyed her sexuality as much as he enjoyed taking a nice long hit; and therefore that was what she did think.
At Salina she adjusted the lounge pneumatics, lit a filtertip joint, selected a porn cassette from her shoulder bag and lay back, her own vastness diminished by the room-sized insulated compartment. The fact that viewing such salacious stuff was now punishable, and ownership of it a felony, only heightened its charm for Eve. Since that stupid fiasco in Santa Fe she'd been horny as a rhino and not much easier to please. Her demand for sexual acceptance to counter that event was not entirely subliminal; with Chabrier, she knew, she could slake her thirsts. If it hadn't been so much trouble, she'd have plotted some revenge on that emerald-eyed young hit-man, Quantrill. But there was plenty of time. Sooner or later he would wander across her right-of-way, an ant on her freeway, and then…
The little holodrama unfolded before her, the voluptuous cowgirl, Patty, flirting with the wrangler but clearly more interested in the erection of her pony. Presently the heroine — for in a sense she had to be one — found a way to rig a sling under her little stallion.
Eve began to enjoy herself — more so when she perceived the vibration that rose under her bass-fiddle buttocks when she sat in the right position. She toyed with the pneumatics. The vibration toyed with Eve.
Patty toyed with her trusty, lusty steed; and as the hoverbus neared the highway summit it occurred to Eve that a lot of summits were approaching simultaneously.
Eve reached down with tender sausage fingers; womanipulated herself, laughing at the holo and at the world. She flicked off the audio and, in a fit of whimsy, began to sing an ancient ballad, 'Always,' in her clear sweet soprano. In this context of purest narcissism, every phrase seemed funnier than the last and, once she'd sung "… need a helping hand…" Eve rolled in her couch gasping with laughter and orgasmic release.
She flicked the pornodrama off then, suspecting fakery in the action. She wasn't sure it was possible to make it with a horse. Even if it was, she'd leave this little Cow Patty electronically stranded in mid-hump.
It was a concept as silly, as willful, as tacky as the holoporn itself. Eve gloried in that because she could afford to do it when most citizens did not dare even watch such things. Pleasure without consequences: the goal and the province of power.
Eve had reached a pillowy mellow before the bus passed a road sign: NO SERVICES NEXT 170 KM., and whipped down the grass-obscured surface of an ancient ranching road near Green River, Utah. Five klicks South of that turnoff, a decrepit-looking gate of steel pipe accepted a signal from the trip plotter and swung open until the bus whooshed by flinging its broad flat wake of dust and weed seed.
It never occurred to Eve that the bus might someday have a breakdown, leaving her stranded. Her position in such matters was that no machine would dare risk such wrath as hers.
Forty klicks further, beyond the warning signs, Eve spied the P-beam obelisks that defined and protected IEE's San Rafael desert lab. The bus did not pause, or need to. Finally she saw the two-story chain-link fence and the earthen berm inside. The lab, dug into the desert floor, was perfectly placed, roughly midway between three geographic features. They were called Goblin Valley, Dirty Devil River, and Labyrinth Canyon. The names were old and apt. As Boren Mills had once drily remarked, it was no tourist trap.
The last automatic gate swung aside and then Eve's hoverbus settled on concrete, near the elevator platform atop the berm. Chabrier waited for her, alone on an electric cart, wearing his bright tragic smile that she knew so well.
A tongue of ramp slid from the side of the bus and Chabrier, familiar with Eve's desires, backed the cart up onto the deep pile carpet. Only then did he step down, making his slight continental bow. "You are early, madame," he murmured.
Eve warmed to the attentions of Marengo Chabrier. His deepset gray eyes were hooded by eyebrows so thick and black that they met in a ledge above the strong nose. His lashes were luxuriant, his cheekbones Scythian, his mouth sensuous and as small as Eve's own. The open collar of his beige IEE coverall revealed what seemed to be a tee-shirt of black fleece, but was body hair. The stocky Chabrier was marvelously endowed with hair except, as Eve knew, the top of his head and two bare islands flanking his backbone. Eve envied Cow Patty for her pony a bit less; she herself had access to a gentle ape with two doctorates and a tongue that could clean a mayonnaise jar.
"I couldn't wait to test your magic, curly," she vamped, letting him help her to her feet. "Let me see it."
The long lashes flickered over his sad sheep eyes. "Here?"
She nodded, chins aquiver, then emitted a volley of giggles as he reached for his coverall closure. "Not that, you fool," she said, staying his hand, rubbing the mat of curls over his sternum. "That I can see in your rooms — and I intend to." The pun-took on a hint of rasp: "Isn't the amulet ready?"
"Ah." His open palm indicated the cart seat. "That is in my rooms as well. M'sieur Mills has many devices to monitor and I should be sorry to be recorded aboveground with such a thing. You however are a law unto yourself, n'est ce pas?"
"C'est tout dire," she agreed, and vented a whoop as Chabrier sped his cart down the ramp. She clutched her bag in her lap. In it lay much of her charm: the drugs for which Chabrier, as lab administrator, was responsible.
Inside via the elevator to the first level, then down ramps between backlit walls, fat tires squalling on clean linoleum, the air cool and tasting faintly of sidewalks after summer rain. Once during the trip — Eve knew he was taking this route as an informal patrol when they could have gone directly to the lowest level by elevator — a lank mongol hesitated in the passage to let them pass. On his middle-aged face was no trace of recognition that they were anything but machinery. He might have been a machine himself.