‘Would you like a drink, lady?’
‘I would,’ she says distantly. ‘Dark Star.’
Parris’s quick, almost obsequious smile can’t quite conceal his momentary grimace at her taste in liquor, but he goes over to a drinks cabinet and a fridge and prepares the mixture. He brings it over, ice clinking, and touches her glass with his own of chilled wine.
Parris smiles as she drains her glass. He discards his kimono. Under it he’s wearing deeply unoriginal bondage gear, a costume of belts and clips. His cock is straining against what looks like a painfully tight jockstrap, ‘strap’ being the operative word.
Ax, to her surprise, drops on all fours and scampers across the room to a big wardrobe. He nudges the bottom of the door with his head, and the door swings open to reveal an apparatus of chains and straps. Dee slams her (fortunately solid) glass down on the most expensive and delicate table-surface within reach, and turns on her heel and looks at Parris.
‘I understand,’ she says coldly, ‘that you have been a very wicked man.’
Parris nods. His eyes are shining, in a face that’s become a flushed mask of humility.
Dee lets the Sex program play out the scene. She slaps his face, a little harder than he perhaps expects.
‘I have come to judge you,’ she says. She pretends to think, scrutinising him. She looks around the room, until her glance lights on the open cupboard. Ax is squatting beside it, his tongue hanging out. Dee’s eyes widen in mock surprise. She points to the cupboard.
‘Over there,’ she orders. Parris walks towards it. He flashes her a servile, collusive smile.
‘Eyes down!’ Dee yells.
Parris obediently bows his head and walks to the door.
Dee has the whole protocol mapped out in her head, but she’s not really into this sort of thing (being, if truth be told, more sub than dom) and she gives the finicky business of shackling and binding him perhaps less attention than it deserves. It ends with her squeezing his cheeks until he opens his mouth. She pops a rubber ball into his mouth, closes his jaws with a finger on his nose and a thumb on the point of his chin, and slaps a piece of insulating-tape (of a suitably shiny black) across his mouth.
She drops out of character for a moment.
‘OK?’
Parris nods. Dee checks the restraints. They’re secure.
Ax, who all the while has been working his way slowly up from the man’s toes to his knees with playful nips of his teeth, suddenly stands up and steps back. Dee steps back too, and together they look at the man hanging in the cupboard.
Ax smiles into Parris’s suddenly troubled, puzzled stare. He reaches behind his neck, and the long knife is in his hand. He tosses it sideways into the other hand, and then back. He inspects the edge. The side of the blade catches flashes of sunlight; the edge betrays only the faintest flicker, as if even photons slide off it.
He looks again at Parris.
‘Woof,’ he says.
Wilde had more than one cigarette-stub at his feet by the time he saw the girl striding towards him through the market crowd. He straightened up from leaning on the mainframe.
‘Tamara Hunter,’ the machine said over his shoulder as the girl stopped and stuck out her hand. ‘Jonathan Wilde.’
She cocked her head sideways and looked him over as he shook her hand.
‘My God,’ she said. ‘You really are him.’
Wilde grinned. ‘You look somehow familiar yourself.’
‘The pub last night,’ Tamara reminded him. ‘Mind you, if ever anyone had eyes only for one woman, it was you.’
‘Ah, of course,’ Wilde said. ‘You were with…Dee.’
‘Yes,’ Tamara said. She looked about. ‘Where’s your robot?’
‘Hah!’ Wilde snorted. ‘You and I are supposed to be on the same side, according to this electric lawyer here, so don’t you go saying “your robot”. I’m damned if I’ll admit it’s my robot. The fact is, it’s fucked off on its own somewhere.’
‘Oh,’ Tamara said. She glanced at the Invisible Hand mainframe. ‘We’re going for a private discussion,’ she told it.
‘Very well,’ the machine said. ‘I shall proceed with the technical aspects of the case.’
Tamara turned to Wilde. ‘Talk about it over a beer?’
‘God, yes.’
They wended their way between stalls and under trees. The market boomed around them. When they were – as far as it was humanly possible to tell – out of Invisible Hand’s earshot, Wilde asked, ‘Just as a matter of curiosity, is that piece of legal machinery self-aware?’
Tamara laughed. ‘Nah, it’s just an expert system. It has its little quirks, mind.’
‘Yeah, you could say that.’ He looked at a cluster of tables around an array of counter, refrigerator and grill, all small and all scorched. A tall Turk stood in the middle, his hands dealing out drinks and sandwiches for greasy wads of money. ‘Here?’
Tamara nodded, with an appreciative smile at his good judgement. Wilde ordered two litres of beer. They sipped for a minute from the beaded brown bottles, in thirsty silence, and checked each other out.
‘Smoke?’ Wilde said, retrieving a now battered pack.
‘No thanks,’ Tamara said. ‘But go ahead.’
Wilde smiled at her. ‘This is my first pack for centuries,’ he said as he lit up. ‘Not that that’s much of an excuse. For one thing, to me it all happened the day before yesterday, and for another it’s smoking that got me killed.’
Tamara frowned. ‘The books tell different stories, but I thought you died in some shoot-out.’
‘That was it,’ Wilde nodded. ‘Tried to run faster than a bullet, but –’ He looked ruefully at the cigarette, and took another drag as Tamara laughed.
‘This is weird,’ she said. ‘I’ve talked to some people who were in the ship, and who actually came from Earth – hell, my grandparents did – but they never talk about having been dead. They talk about having been “in transition”.’
‘Yeah,’ Wilde said sardonically. ‘“In denial” is the technical term for that frame of mind.’
‘But you do…and you being, like, a historical character. Wow, fuck!’ She studied his features judiciously. ‘You look different in the pictures. Older.’
‘In what pictures?’ Wilde demanded.
Tamara reached into an inside pocket, and passed to Wilde a plastic wallet containing a set of cards.
‘I, um, collect them,’ she explained as Wilde began to spread them out. ‘They come free with, uh, a cereal that gets made in this area.’
‘Harmony Oats!’ Wilde shouted with laughter. He spread out the wood-cut portraits. ‘Let’s see…Owen, Stirner, Proudhon, Warren, Bakunin, Tucker, Labadie, Wilson, Wilde. They’ve got the ancestry right, but I doubt I deserve such exalted company. I’m not sure whether to be flattered or appalled.’
He looked down at the scored lines of the iconic faces, and passed a hand over his own fresh features. He shook his head.
‘When I first looked like I do now I was far from famous,’ Wilde said. His voice sounded sad for a moment, cheerier as he added: ‘Perhaps it’s just as well.’
‘Dead right!’ Tamara looked around. ‘You’re going to be famous all over again, when this gets out. Which it will, when the court case starts, if not sooner.’
Wilde shrugged. ‘I’d like to delay it as long as possible. My grasp of the politics of this place isn’t strong enough to handle publicity to my advantage.’
‘OK,’ said Tamara. ‘We have a more immediate problem. Before I learned that you were involved, I got a message from David Reid. You…knew him?’
‘Sure did. Once.’
‘Right, well he’s suing me to get the gynoid, Dee, back. Fair enough, I expected that. I want to make a case of it. Invisible Hand has just told me you were being sued too, and that you wanted to combine forces. As a matter of fact you don’t have much choice, as it’s all part of the same case in actuality, so no other court is going to touch yours while ours is outstanding, and we’d have to bring you into it anyway, so you might as well go in on your own terms.’