‘There’s an eating house called Mona’s at the corner of Engraft Street,’ he said. I’ll be there at three after noon, the day after tomorrow. Can I look forward to seeing your man?’
Jadper fastened his left hand back on with a click. ‘I’ll let you know if he can’t make it.’
‘How many more gadgets have you got in that hand?’ Mast asked, idly curious. ‘No – don’t show me. It doesn’t matter. As our business seems to be concluded for the moment I’ll be on my way.’
Hesitantly he stepped towards the door. Jadper raised the prosthetic hand in farewell.
‘Good luck attend you!’ he grinned.
As Mast passed through the doorway a bag of flour emptied over him from above. Jets of coloured fluid attacked him from several directions and he heard Jadper giggling and snorting behind him.
The step on the threshold gave way beneath his feet. He hurtled down a chute, where he felt metal fingers picking and tugging at him in the confused darkness. Seconds later he popped up again and found himself standing on the pathway some yards from the villa. He was wearing enormous pink pantaloons with purple spots, and an oversize baby’s bib.
He tore the foolery from him, wiped his face free of flour and mush, and after a last acrimonious glance at the villa, dodged the flailing arms of the jack-in-the-box and fled towards the gate.
Peder braced his legs against the acceleration of the slim private elevator as it raced up the shaft to the summit of the 300-storey Ravier Building. The elevator was his very own now that he had rented the penthouse on the skyscraper’s roof. It was one of several private shafts which served various levels of the tower.
The elevator slowed, giving him a momentary feeling of free fall, then slid smoothly to a stop. He stepped into the spacious main room of his apartment.
The view through the great curved window was still novel enough to cause him to pause to take it in. Gridira lay spread out below, sparkling in the sun. The River Laker curved round the south side of the city in the distance, glinting here and there where it became visible between buildings.
Definitely an improvement on Tarn Street!
He crossed the lounge to his desk. The vid had received a number of messages in his absence, mostly relating to his new business ventures. He replied to a few of these, giving instructions to his broker, to the manager of the new store he was opening in Gridira’s main shopping avenue, and to his financier.
That done, he poured himself a glass of chilled mango liqueur and sauntered back and forth before the view window, his feet falling silently on the deep pile of the glowing carpet. It seemed to him as if he could fly through that window and wing over the cityscape, so perfect was his new-found sense of freedom and space.
A few months ago it would have seemed unbelievable that he could have made such swift progress. Yet facts were facts. Doors opened for him wherever he went. Possibilities became actualities. Bank managers offered credit. High-class social clubs did not refuse him membership out of hand.
He stopped to admire himself in the full-length mirror. ‘No hesitation,’ he murmured, repeating a private litany. ‘No self-doubt, no solecisms.’ It was true what he had read once in a book on practical psychology. If you maintained a positive attitude to the world it heaped benefits upon you.
The vid chimed. A red-lipped, violet-eyed face appeared on the plate, smiling at him. ‘Hi.’
He drank in the curly black hair and curvy soft neck. In his imagination her perfume was practically wafting to him out of the picture plate. ‘Hi.’
‘I had no luck after you left the club last night,’ she pouted. ‘You took it all with you.’
‘Well, it was my luck, wasn’t it?’ He recalled giving her his vid number when playing at the Coton, one of Gridira’s most distinguished gambling clubs.
He had been learning to gamble with skill lately. It reminded him anew of how much things had changed for him, that he could now look forward to possessing so poised a creature and regard it as normal. Only weeks before he would have considered her quite unattainable.
Half an hour later she arrived in the penthouse. Peder offered her mango liqueur, and some smooth small-talk. It was not long before he fell on that delicious neck, nuzzling towards the source of her heady perfume.
In the bedroom he hesitated when it came to undressing. This is always the moment of uncertainty. Without the suit his old feeling of lumpish inadequacy came back, at the very time when he most needed confidence in himself.
But he flung his clothes from him and dived on to the big bed. ‘No hesitation, no self-doubt, no solecisms,’ he breathed in a private prayer, before his limbs entwined with hers.
Later, when the light had faded somewhat, they awoke from a drowsy sleep and she began to tease him. His body responded, but by this time he felt somehow unequal to her kittenish repartee.
On the ottoman, his Frachonard suit glowed softly in the dusk, as if calling to him.
6
Events perplexed Alexei Verednyev. They perplexed him not least of all because he was still alive. By now he should certainly be dead, killed by the cyborgs in some hideous and fiendish manner.
He must have slept, because there had been confused, horrible dreams. Then, when the cyborg had entered his prison, he had determined to sell his life dearly and had attacked and destroyed the monster. But the aftermath had not been what he had expected, because he was now being asked to believe that the other cyborgs, the new type with the missing organs, did not wish him any harm at all. Or at least, so the voice said. The female voice, which spoke his own language, but with odd pronunciation and strange words. The new cyborgs, she insisted, did not even come from Shoji; the cyborg he had killed had been their prisoner, just as he was. They had put it in his chamber just to see what the two of them would do. In fact, she said, the cyborgs of the space-cave were not the cyborgs at all. They were more akin to his own people, and had come from the distant stars.
‘You are cyborgs.’ Alexei had contradicted. ‘I have eyes, I can see. You have altered yourselves a little, that is all. You have altered yourselves, as cyborgs are able to do, and have learned the Sovyan language, so as to trick me into giving you information about Homebase.’ The more he thought about this the more obvious it seemed. The cyborgs were apt to roam uprange at this time, when Shoji and Sovya were in conjunction, and he should have been more careful.
Besides, it was common knowledge that cyborgs had no feelings and the female, like all other types of cyborg, was deaf and dumb on the emotional wavebands. His radio sense registered nothing at all from her in that respect, so her understanding of how Sovyans communicated was seriously deficient. She did not even respond to the insulting feelings of revulsion, disgust and defiance he was beaming at her.
Apart from that, these denizens of the space-cave were even more physically repulsive, if anything, than the usual vermin that came crawling up out of Shoji, were even more squishy, and resembled nothing so much as big mobile foetuses or internal core-organs. They were nauseating.
She showed him a picture of a new-born infant. ‘You recognize this as a baby, don’t you?’ she challenged.
He turned away from the sight. He was squeamish about such things. They were only for doctors and nurses to see.
‘This is how my own kind look at birth, too,’ she said. ‘It’s certain the cyborgs look the same.’
‘You are wrong. The young cyborg resembles the adult. The cyborgs cut their females open and operate on the foetuses.’
‘Really? That’s fascinating. But doesn’t it all go to prove what I’ve been trying to tell you – that you, we and the cyborgs all belong to the same biological species?’