We were falling together laughing.
‘Yes,’ she said.
And then it had all been said, and we were just standing together at the bar, having a drink.
Irene, the bride, clicked up to us in high heels and a smart blue two-piece, gave me a wary smile and whispered to Annette.
‘See you in a few minutes,’ Annette said. I bowed to them both – and to this necessity – and watched their whispering progress out of sight.
Annette returned about a quarter of an hour later.
‘Everything okay?’ I asked, sliding her a G&T. She looked a bit preoccupied.
‘Basically yes. Thanks,’ she said, sipping carefully. ‘I just spent ten minutes hanging about in reception with Irene’s wedding-dress in a plastic bag over my shoulder. Finally got someone to stash it till I leave. Couldn’t leave it in the room. Some mix-up with keys.’
‘So it’s not all fun, being a bridesmaid.’
‘Ha, ha. Little do you know.’
‘I think I’d rather not –’
I realised the music had stopped and somebody was trying to make himself heard above a hubbub.
‘Hey, come on!’
Annette swirled about and dashed away to the nearest exit, where Irene and her man were backing out of the doorway with a kind of female scrum going on around them –
Something sailed over the heads of the scrum. As I looked up, startled, Annette shot her hand in the air like an eager pupil with an answer, and caught it. She brandished the bouquet as she turned slowly around, acknowledging cheers and catcalls, and faced me with a broad smile.
‘Well,’ she said. ‘Lucky me.’
Everybody trooped outside to send the new couple on their way. They’d cunningly called a taxi, and left behind a car covered with shaving foam and lipstick for the rain to wash.
Then more dancing, and more talking, and a long taxi ride to Annette’s flat, with Irene’s dress draped across our knees. As I paid the driver she ran to the steps of her house, laughing, her hems bunched in one hand and the other dress flying out behind her like a comet. I caught up with her as she unlocked the outer door. We went down the stairs and into her darkened flat, noisily trying to be quiet.
She took me straight to her bedroom, hooked the wedding-dress on its hanger over a wardrobe door facing the foot of her bed, and turned to me. I caught the tapes of the bow at her waist, yanked them and she twirled around, catching the pinafore as it came off and sending it sailing into a corner. I fumbled with buttons down the back of the dress, found a concealed zip and opened it. The dress fell around her feet. She stepped out of its circle in a long nylon slip, and deftly undid every button of my shirt while I got rid of my footwear, trousers and Y-fronts as fast as possible. The slip slid down to her feet with a rattle of static electricity. The rest of her underwear took enjoyably longer to remove.
I cupped her breasts in my hands and buried my mouth between them. Her skin tasted of talc and salt. Holding her away to look at her and holding her close to touch her led to a closer, quicker rhythm as we tumbled onto her bed.
‘Hey, hey, hey,’ she said. She put her hand on my shoulder and held me away, reached behind her head and waved a small foil package in front of my face. Then she tore the package open with her teeth.
‘Get that on, you irresponsible bastard.’
‘Wouldn’t want to be responsible for bastards,’ I agreed. I rolled the condom onto my cock. ‘I do have some with me, I just forgot.’
‘If you ever say anything as feeble to me again you’re outa here, Jon Wilde.’
I tried for a moment to think of some reply, and then put my tongue to a better use.
I woke in a room dim in the curtained light of mid-morning, my limbs still tangled with Annette’s, and was momentarily startled by the apparition of the white gown looming over the end of the bed, its falls of lawn and drifts of lace protected by a shimmering forcefield of polythene, like a ghost from the future.
5
Ship City
We take, first, a long view (longer than it looks) and catch the planet as it swings by from a hundred thousand kilometres out. It’s red – no surprises there – but it’s mottled with dark spills of blue and stains of green, and those spills and stains are beginning to be connected up by…channels, by…(and the thought is as fleeting as the glimpse) canali, so that New Mars really does look like the original Mars, really, didn’t. (But didn’t we wish.)
Flip the viewpoint to a thousand kilometres…up, now, not out…and we’re crawling past it at a satellite’s eye-level, taking in the whorled fingerprints of water-vapour, the planet’s curving faceplate of atmosphere steamed-up with breath, the scrawled marks of life and the ruled lines of intelligence: yes, canals.
Dropping now, to a structure as unmistakably artificial as it’s apparently organic: at first sight a black asterisk, like a capital city on a map, then (as the viewpoint hurtles in and the view reddens, bloodshot by the flames of air-braking) like a starfish stranded on the sand.
Cut, again, to a more leisurely airborne vantage, drifting above what is now clearly a city, its radial symmetry still its major feature but with its five arms visibly joined by the black threads of roads, streets, canals; and, at another level, invisible from the outside, by the cobweb cabling of the nets.
And we’re in. That old TCP/IP transaction protocol is still valid (from way back to the Mitochondrial Eve of all the systems) so we can hear, feel and see. But the big! numbers still count, so encryption hides much of the data in catacombs of dark. What we can access, on the open channels, is more than enough to show:
Four of the city’s five arms are non-human domains. They look as if they were intended for human habitation, but nobody’s home, except machines. There’s a basic stratum, a sort of mechanical topsoil, where things are doing things to things. Simulacra of intelligence are going through the motions, bawling and toiling: empty automatic barges plough algae-clogged canals, servitor machines struggle to sweep dust from the floors of corridors whose walls are already thick with mould. In the streets it’s a creationist’s caricature of natural selection: half-formed mechanisms collide and combine and incorporate each other’s parts, producing unviable offspring which themselves propagate further grotesque transitional forms.
This mindless level is preyed upon by more sophisticated machinery, which lurks and pounces, gobbles and cannibalises for purposes of its own. Artificial intelligences – some obsessive and focused, others chaotic and relaxed, some even sane – haunt a fraction of these machines. It’s hard to identify the places where such minds reside. Lurching, unlikely structures may be steered by a sapient computer no bigger than a mouse, while some sleek and shining and, even, humanoid machine may well be moronic or mad.
The whole groaning junkyard is persistently pillaged by human beings, who risk everything from their fingertips to their souls in venturing into this jungle of iron and silicon. They have their mechanical allies, scouts and agents; but if machines, in general, have no loyalty to each other, they have even less to human friends or masters. It remains easier to reprogram a machine than to subvert a human.
And through it all, like germs, the minute molecular machinery of stray nanotechnology goes about its invisible and occasionally disastrous work. Immune systems have evolved, the equivalent of medicine is practised; public health measures are applied (they are not, exactly, enforced). But the smallest are the swiftest, and here evolution’s race is most ruthlessly run.