Comrade then about the note in the fridge, but we were still not talking
about that day.
“He tapped into Playroom?” Comrade fitted input clips to the spikes on his
neck, linked, and played back the house files. “Zayebees. He was already here then. He piggybacked on with you.” Comrade slapped his leg. “I can’t
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understand how he beat my security so easily.”
The roombrain flicked the message indicator. “Stennie’s calling,” it said.
“Pick up,” I said.
“Hi, it’s that time again.” Stennie was alone in his car. “I’m on my way over
to give you jacks a thrill.” He pushed his triangular snout up to the camera
and licked at the lens. “Doing anything?”
“Not really. Sitting around.”
“I’ll fix that. Five minutes.” He faded.
Comrade was staring at nothing.
“Look, Comrade, you did your best,” I said. “I’m not mad at you.”
“Too plugging easy.” He shook his head as if I had missed the point.
“What I don’t understand is why Montross is so cranky anyway. It’s just a
picture of meat.”
“Maybe he’s not really dead.”
“Sure he is,” I said. “You can’t fake a verification grid.”
“No, but you can fake a corpse.”
“You know something?”
“If I did I wouldn’t tell you,” said Comrade. “You have enough problems
already. Like how do we explain this to your mom?”
“We don’t. Not yet. Let’s wait him out. Sooner or later he’s got to realize
that we’re not going to use his picture for anything. I mean, if he’s that
nervous, I’ll even give it back. I don’t care anymore. You hear that, Montross, you dumbscut? We’re harmless. Get out of our lives!”
“It’s more than the picture now,” said Comrade. “It’s me. I found the way
in.” He was careful to keep his expression blank.
I did not know what to say to him. No way Montross would be satisfied
erasing only the memory of the operation. He would probably reconnect
Comrade’s regulators to bring him back under control. Turn him to pudding.
He would be just another wiseguy, like anyone else could own. I was surprised
that Comrade did not ask me to promise not to hand him over. Maybe he just
assumed I would stand by him.
We did not hear Stennie coming until he sprang into the room.
“Have fun or die!” He was clutching a plastic gun in his spindly hand,
which he aimed at my head.
“Stennie, no.”
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He fired as I rolled across the bed. The jellybee buzzed by me and squished
against one of the windows. It was a purple, and immediately I smelled the
tang of artificial grape flavor. The splatter on the wrinkled wall pulsed and
split in two, emitting a second burst of grapeness. The two halves oozed in
opposite directions, shivered, and divided again.
“Fun extremist!” He shot Comrade with a cherry as he dove for the closet.
“Dance!”
I bounced up and down on the bed, timing my move. He fired a green at
me that missed. Comrade, meanwhile, gathered himself up as zits of red
jellybee squirmed across his window coat. He barreled out of the closet into
Stennie, knocking him sideways. I sprang on top of them and wrestled the
gun away. Stennie was paralyzed with laughter. I had to giggle too, in part
because now I could put off talking to Comrade about Montross.
By the time we untangled ourselves, the jellybees had faded. “Set for twelve
generations before they all die out,” Stennie said as he settled himself on the bed. “So what’s this my car tells me, you’ve been giving free rides? Is this the cush with the name?”
“None of your business. You never tell me about your cush.”
“Okay. Her name is Janet Hoyt.”
“Is it?” He caught me off-guard again. Twice in one day, a record. “Comrade,
let’s see this prize.”
Comrade linked to the roombrain and ran a search. “Got her.” He called
Janet Hoyt’s DI file to screen, and her face ballooned across an entire
window.
She was a tanned, blue-eyed blonde with the kind of off-the- shelf looks
that med students slapped onto rabbits in genoplasty courses. Nothing on her
face said she was different from any other ornamental moron fresh from the
OR—not a dimple or a mole, not even a freckle. “You’re ditching me for
her?” It took all the imagination of a potato chip to be as pretty as Janet
Hoyt. “Stennie, she’s generic.”
“Now wait a minute,” said Stennie. “If we’re going to play critic, let’s scope
your cush, too.”
Without asking, Comrade put Tree’s DI photo next to Janet’s. I realized he
was still mad at me because of her; he was only pretending not to care. “She’s
not my cush,” I said, but no one was listening.
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Stennie leered at her for a moment. “She’s a stiff, isn’t she?” he said. “She
has that hungry look.”
Seeing him standing there in front of the two huge faces on the wall, I felt
like I was peeping on a stranger—that I was a stranger, too. I could not
imagine how the two of us had come to this: Stennie and Mr. Boy with cushes.
We were growing up. A frightening thought. Maybe next Stennie would get
himself untwanked and really look like he had on Playroom. Then where
would I be?
“Janet wants me to plug her,” Stennie said.
“Right, and I’m the queen of Brooklyn.”
“I’m old enough, you know.” He thumped his tail against the floor.
“You’re a dinosaur!”
“Hey, just because I got twanked doesn’t mean my dick fell off.”
“So do it then.”
“I’m going to. I will, okay? But . . . this is no good.” Stennie waved
impatiently at Comrade. “I can’t think with them watching me.” He nodded
at the windows. “Turn them off already.”
“N’ye pizdi!” Comrade wiped the two faces from the windows, cleared all the screens in the room to blood red, yanked the input clips from his neck
spikes, and left them dangling from the roombrain’s terminal. His expression
empty, he walked from the room without asking permission or saying anything
at all.
“What’s his problem?” Stennie said.
“Who knows?” Comrade had left the door open; I shut it. “Maybe he
doesn’t like girls.”
“Look, I want to ask a favor.” I could tell Stennie was nervous; his head
kept swaying. “This is kind of embarrassing, but . . . okay, do you think maybe your mom would maybe let me practice on her lovers? I don’t want Janet to
know I’ve never done it before, and there’s some stuff I’ve got to figure out.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Ask her.”
But I did know. She would be amused.
People claimed my mom did not have a sense of humor. Lovey was huge, an
ocean of a woman. Her umbilical was as big around as my thigh. When she
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walked, waves of flesh heaved and rolled. She had beautiful skin, flawless and
moist. It did not take much to make her sweat. Peeling a banana would do it.
Lovey wa
s as oral as a baby; she would put anything into her mouth. And
when she did not have a mouthful, she would babble on about whatever
came into Mom’s head. Dear hardly ever talked, although he could moan and
growl and laugh. He touched Lovey whenever he could and shot her long
smoldering looks. He was not furry, exactly, but he was covered with fine
silver hair. Dear was a little guy, about my size. Although he had one of
Upjohn’s finest penises, elastic and overloaded with neurons, he was one of
the least convincing males I had ever met. I doubt Mom herself believed in
him all that much.
Big chatty woman; squirrelly, tongue-tied little man. It was funny in a bent sort of way to watch the two of them go at each other. Kind of like a tug
churning against a supertanker. They did not get the chance that often. It
was dangerous; Dear had to worry about getting crushed, and poor Lovey’s
heart had stopped two or three times. Besides, I think Mom liked building up
the pressure. Sometimes, as the days without sex stretched, you could almost
feel lust sparkling off them like static electricity.
That was how they were when I brought Stennie up. Their suite took up
the entire floor at the hips, Mom’s widest part. Lovey was lolling in a tub of
warm oil. She liked it flowery and laced with pheromones. Dear was
prowling around her with a desperate expression, like he might jam his plug
into a wall socket if he did not get taken care of soon. Stennie’s timing was
perfect.
“Look who’s come to visit, Dear,” said Lovey. “Peter and Stennie. How nice
of you boys to stop by.” She let Dear mop her forehead with a towel. “What
can we do for you?”
The skin under Stennie’s jaw quivered. He glanced at me, then at Dear,
and then at the thick red lips that served as the bathroom door. Never even
looked at her. He was losing his nerve.
“Oh, my, isn’t this exciting, Dear? There’s something going on.” She sank
into the bath until her chin touched the oil. “It’s a secret, isn’t it, Peter?
Share it with Lovey.”
“No secret,” I said. “He wants to ask a favor.” And then I told her.
She giggled and sat up. “I love it.” Honey-colored oil ran from her hair and
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slopped between her breasts. “Were you thinking of both of us, Stennie? Or
just me?”
“Well, I . . .” Stennie’s tail switched. “Maybe we just ought to forget it.”
“No, no.” She waved a hand at him “Come here, Stennie. Come close, my
pretty little monster.”
He hesitated, then approached the tub. She reached for his right leg and
touched him just above the heelknob. “You know, I’ve always wondered what
scales would feel like.” Her hand climbed; the oil made his yellow hide glisten.
His eyes were the size of eggs.
The bedroom was all mattress. Beneath the transparent skin was a screen
implant, so that Mom could project images not only on the walls but on the
surface of the bed itself. Under the window was a layer of heavily vascular
flesh, which could be stiffened with blood or drained until it was as soft as
raw steak. A window dome arched over everything and could show slo-mo or
thermographic FX across its span. The air was warm and wet and smelled like
a chemical engineer’s idea of a rose garden.
I settled by the lips. Dear ghosted along the edges of the room, dragging his
umbilical like a chain, never coming quite near enough to touch anyone. I
heard him humming as he passed me, a low moaning singsong, as if to block
out what was happening. Stennie and Lovey were too busy with each other
to care. As Lovey knelt in front of Stennie, Dear gave a mocking laugh. I did
not understand how he could be jealous. He was with her, part of it. Lovey
and Dear were Mom’s remotes, two nodes of her nervous system. Yet his pain
was as obvious as her pleasure. At last he squatted and rocked back and forth
on his heels. I glanced up at the FX dome; yellow scales slid across oily rolls of flushed skin.
I yawned. I had always found sex kind of dull. Besides, this was all on the
record. I could have Comrade replay it for me anytime. Lovey stopped
breathing—then came four or five shuddering gasps in a row. I wondered
where Comrade had gone. I felt sorry for him. Stennie said something to her
about rolling over. “Okay?” Feathery skin sounds. A grunt. The soft wet slap
of flesh against flesh. I thought of my mother’s brain, up there in the head
where no one ever went. I had no idea how much attention she was paying.
Was she quivering with Lovey and at the same time calculating insolation
rates on her chloroplasts? Investing in soy futures on the Chicago Board of
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Trade? Fending off Weldon Montross’s latest attack? Plug Montross. I needed to think about something fun. My collection. I started piling bodies up in my
mind. The hangings and the open-casket funerals and the stacks of dead at
the camps and all those muddy soldiers. I shivered as I remembered the empty
rigid faces. I liked it when their teeth showed. “Oh, oh, oh!” My greatest hits dated from the late twentieth century. The dead were everywhere back then,
in vids and the news and even on T-shirts. They were not shy. That was what
made Comrade’s photo worth having; it was hard to find modern stuff that
dirty. Dear brushed by me, his erection bobbing in front of him. It was as big
around as my wrist. As he passed, I could see Stennie’s leg scratch across the
mattress skin, which glowed with blood-blue light. Lovey giggled beneath
him and her umbilical twitched and suddenly I found myself wondering
whether Tree was a virgin.
I came into the mall through the Main Street entrance and hopped the
westbound slidewalk headed up Elm Street toward the train station. If I
caught the 3:36 to Grand Central, I could eat dinner in Manhattan, far from
my problems with Montross and Comrade. Running away had always worked
for me before. Let someone else clean up the mess while I was gone.
The slidewalk carried me past a real-estate agency, a flash bar, a jewelry
store, and a Baskin-Robbins. I thought about where I wanted to go after New
York. San Francisco? Montreal? Maybe I should try Elkhart, Indiana—no one
would think to look for me there. Just ahead, between a drugstore and a
take-out Russian restaurant, was the wiseguy dealership where Mom had
bought Comrade.
I did not want to think about Comrade waiting for me to come home, so
I stepped into the drugstore and bought a dose of Carefree for $4.29.
Normally I did not bother with drugs. I had been stunted; no over-the-
counter flash could compare to that. But the propyl dicarbamates were all
right. I fished the cash card out of my pocket and handed it to the stiff
behind the counter. He did a double take when he saw the denomination,
then carefully inserted the card into the reader to deduct the cost of the
Carefree. It had my mom’s name on it; he must have expected it would trip
some alarm for counterfeit plastic or stolen credit. He stared at me for a
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moment, as if trying
to remember my face so he could describe me to a cop,
and then gave the cash card back. The denomination readout said it was
still good for $16,381.18.
I picked out a bench in front of a specialty shop called The Happy Hippo,
hiked up my shorts, and poked Carefree into the widest part of my thigh. I
took a short, dreamy swim in the sea of tranquillity and when I came back
to myself, my guilt had been washed away. But so had my energy. I sat for a
while and scoped the display of glass hippos and plastic hippos and fuzzy
stuffed hippos, hippo vids and sheets and candles. Down the bench from
me a homeless woman dozed. It was still pretty early in the season for a
weather gypsy to have come this far north. She wore red shorts and droopy
red socks with plastic sandals and four long-sleeved shirts, all unbuttoned,
over a Funny Honey halter top. Her hair needed vacuuming and she smelled
old. All grown-ups smelled that way to me; it was something I had never
gotten used to. No perfume or deodorant could cover up the leathery stink
of adulthood. Kids could smell bad too, but usually from something they
got on them. It did not come from a rotting body. I rubbed a finger in the
dampness under my arm, slicked it, and sniffed. There was a sweetness to
kid sweat. I touched the drying finger to my tongue. You could even taste
it. If I gave up getting stunted, stopped being Mr. Boy, I would smell like the woman at the end of the bench. I would start to die. I had never understood
how grown-ups could live with that.
The gypsy woke up, stretched, and smiled at me with gummy teeth. “You
left Comrade behind?” she said.
I was startled. “What did you say?”
“You know what this is?” She twitched her sleeve, and a penlight appeared
in her hand.
My throat tightened. “I know what it looks like.”
She gave me a wicked smile, aimed the penlight, and burned a pinhole
through the bench a few centimeters from my leg. “Maybe I could interest
you in some free laser surgery?”
I could smell scorched plastic. “You’re going to needle me here, in the
middle of the Elm Street Mall?” I thought she was bluffing. Probably. I hoped.
“If that’s the way you want it. Mr. Montross wants to know when you’re
delivering the wiseguy to us.”
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“Get away from me.”
“Not until you do what needs to be done.”
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