The Selling of Suzie Delight

by Holly Lisle

  Charlie didn’t the hear Suzee’s last few words, however.

  She was out the door and shooting herself onto the Longview’s passenger bridge transport, screaming, “I need to speak to the owner, I need to speak to the owner now!”

  Shay, the owner’s representative, was on the bridge waiting for her when the passenger transport unlocked.

  “Suzee Delight is selling herself to the highest-bidding Death Circus now,” Charlie shouted.

  Both the captain and first mate looked back at the two of them.

  Shay looked startled, then pleased. “Oh, that’s excellent. You and I will go to the owner’s quarters, Charlie. His condition is bothering him again, so he won’t meet with you personally, but you and I will talk, and he’ll watch us and relay suggestions to me.” She paused. “I’m assuming that you’ve brought this to me because you hope the owner will buy Suzee Delight's execution.”

  “Of course.”

  “Because you want to be the one to witness it?”

  Shay's suggestion was as far from Charlie's truth as it was possible to get.

  But Charlie shrugged and nodded. “That... is as good an explanation as any.”

  The corners of Shay's mouth twitched. “You have good entrepreneurial instincts. Come with me, then. I’ll let the owner know we have an investment opportunity for him.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Suzee Delight

  I’M LOCKED INSIDE A LARGE Senso recording studio with four moleibond walls, a moleibond ceiling, and a moleibond floor. My captors are recording every instant of my captivity, and are selling the feed at several price-points, the least expensive being “Suitable for all viewers,” and the most expensive, which does not include any blurring or decency shielding, and which does include full-Senso connectivity, being “Live Suzee Delight’s Last Days: Credit Rating A and above only.”

  My cell contains a luxurious transparent bathtub and non-bubbling body wash; a Nestor Insta-Dress wardrobe programmed to instantly create any of thousands of exotic costumes for me—all of them see-through; a silk-sheeted bed; my musical instruments and art supplies and the necessary equipment to use them; a transparent dining table and chair; a small but elegant reconsta unit with Bailey’s Irish Reconsta—because the Senso viewers would complain and rate the Senso badly if they had to taste sub-par reconsta while living inside my skin with me—and a set of specific instructions on what I am to do with myself while I wait to be sold.

  Before I was locked in my cell, my final Pleasure Master told me exactly what will happen to me while I’m waiting if I do not obey that list. It will not be pleasant, but there are certain Senso buyers who will pay a premium for the experience, should I decide to indulge them by being disobedient.

  They are not the buyers I ever hope to entertain.

  So I am still doing the work I hate. Making prison Sensos for Suzee Delight fans—and making one last fortune for the Pact Worlds.

  Because it amuses the Pleasure Masters who have caged me to let me know how much money the Pact Worlds are making from my imprisonment and will make from my execution, they’ve placed a sales board for the feed and Senso on the control corridor. I can always see it, but the viewers and Senso fans cannot. To people looking at my world through my eyes, it will be edited to read as a pretty wall.

  Three hours after the Death Circus bidding opened, my imprisonment recordings are already outselling everything else I've ever done.

  It hurts me that the same people who claimed to love me are leaping at the opportunity to indulge in my destruction.

  I entertain them as I’ve been told to do, and I watch the boards.

  The Death Circus bidding has already started, too—three hours in, low bids from small Death Circuses I’ve never heard of have given way to bigger and more profitable circuses.

  The name of the ship I’m hoping to see has not yet flashed across the board, though. Three hours in, twenty ships have dropped out of a field of over a hundred. His ship is not among them—and wasn’t even in the showing early on.

  He told me his ship was a successful Death Circus, but I have no idea how successful. Perhaps it will not be able to afford to bid on me.

  He told me if I ever found a need to escape, he would find his way to me. And maybe he meant that, but something is standing in his way.

  Unlike many of my clients, he never made a pretense of love. But he expressed great admiration for my skill and intelligence. Perhaps he was only being kind.

  Perhaps—like the words of so many others—his words had nothing behind them.

  Perhaps he wasn't as important or powerful as he claimed to be, and now that I had put myself in his hands, they were tied, and he could do nothing to get his ship to me.

  Perhaps I believed him simply because he never hurt me.

  And perhaps I’ll never know the truth.

  I murdered the five chief Pact Worlds Administrators because it was the right thing to do. I do not regret it.

  But in the back of my mind, I held as my private reward the promise that I would escape punishment for my crime.

  And perhaps—like every other part of my life but one—this last piece of my existence will betray me.

  Charlie

  CHARLIE SAT ACROSS FROM SHAY at the owner’s table.

  Shay was still arguing that the execution of Suzee Delight would be profitable enough to consider as a major investment, and though Charlie couldn’t hear the owner’s end of it, Shay’s reactions demonstrated that he wasn’t convinced of the value of this expense.

  Charlie was looking through the Pact rules for some sweetener that would get him involved. She had her reasons for wanting him to win the bidding, none of which were what she’d claimed to Shay. But her incentive was enormous, so even though the cause seemed lost, she kept digging.

  Digging through the two-hundred-screen subsection of the Selling Of Execution Rights amendment of the Pact Covenants addenda, she finally struck gold.

  “Shay!” she whispered, “I’ve got it. If he bids in the top one percent of all prisoner execution bids ever, he’ll get exclusive control over the content, packaging, formatting, distribution, and reselling of the entire execution, plus relevant explanatory or investigative content produced or repurposed by bidders’ contractors.”

  Shay said, “Wait, mado, we’ve just discovered the perfect investment format for you.” And to Charlie, she mouthed the words, “How much?”

  Charlie was streaming the numbers even as Shay asked. “The aggregate of the top one percent of bidded executions right now is $753,884,600 rucets. Rounding up.”

  “Less than a billion rucets total, then. So a one-billion-rucet bid will force the execution into a private rights situation, mado,” Shay said. “If you win this bid, you will acquire all presentation and resale rights of the entire execution, from start to finish, in whatever format you wish to offer it, along with related content you wish to have created.” She listened, then turned back to Charlie. “He wants to know if rights include choice of location of execution, type of execution, and disposal of remains? He’s asking about her genome rights, physical copyrights, and possibilities for entertainment cloning.”

  “It’s an all-rights package,” Charlie said after a quick search. “The remaining Pact Administrators won’t love the idea of him offering physical copies of her—her being a five-strike murderer who killed their kind—but if he pays the money and wins, he gets the rights.”

  Shay passed that on, and a big smile spread across her face. “He’s bidding now. One billion rucets. It may not be the final bid, but he’s determined to have her. He’ll pay whatever he needs to pay to get her.” Shay paused, looked thoughtfully at Charlie, and said, “Helping us like this isn’t going to create a problem between you and your employers, is it?”

  “I just got a minimum one-billion-rucet bid on a criminal for my controller, who gets to claim income I generate as his credit. In no universe would that get me in trouble.”

  She kept her mo
uth shut about the thing that would.

  Kagen

  THE LAST THING KAGEN REMEMBERED was the faceplate of a core unit on the Longview sliding shut above him, and the captain standing over him saying, “Inhale slowly and count backwards from ten.”

  He awoke in a bed. An uncomfortable one, with a hard, thin mattress, worn sheets, and a view that consisted of water-stained acoustic ceiling tiles.

  His nose itched.

  Drowsily, he tried to scratch it, and discovered that his hands were tied to the bed.

  He was instantly and fully awake. Scared, he began shouting, and voices to either side of him bellowed, “Shut up, you lunatic!”

  He tried to turn his head, and discovered that he couldn’t do that either.

  “Hey!” he yelled. “Hey! Someone! Help me!”

  That elicited a response. He heard footsteps, and after a moment a woman dressed in gray striped coveralls moved into his field of vision.

  “Did you shout?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Where am I?”

  She didn’t answer his question. Instead she spoke into a bead implanted on her wrist. “305-C is conscious.”

  The voice on the other end of the bead said, “Combative?”

  “Not this time. Seems like he might have come out of it.”

  “Get a history if you can. I’ll be down in five.”

  “On it.” She turned to him, and stroked her finger across the bead. It began to glow. She dropped her wrist and said, “Ellah Tan, adding to case history on Jondo-305-C-K7491-Smithside.” Her eyes focused on him and she said, “My name is Ellah Tan. I'm your repair rep. State your name and ident.”

  “I’m Kagen...” He paused. Kagen was his crew name, and went with his ident as Longview crew. But he’d lost his place on the Longview over a woman he’d known as We-T74G, whose new name was Lithra.

  He had volunteered for long sleep in a core unit just to have a chance at being with her again.

  To the best of his knowledge, he no longer had a crew name or ident—but his original name and ident would connect him back to People’s Home of Truth and Fairness 14-B, the world that had sentenced him to volunteer his own death either through starvation or by stepping into the vacuum of space.

  The woman was studying him. “Jondo, now that you’re awake I need your name and ident to clear you and get you back into the real world. I can see in your eyes that you know who you are, but if you don’t tell me, you’re stuck here with no ident. Someone found you on a side street down in Smithside, and as far as we can tell, you don’t exist. Until you exist, you stay with us. So. Do you want to stay tied to this bed?”

  He didn’t. He decided an out-of-date ident was better than none. “Name: Kagen. Longview crew ident: Rebus-47-Cargo.”

  “Kagen R-47-C, that’s a short ident.”

  “Not a lot of crew on the Longview.”

  “Thank you.” She told him, “You’re in the Smithside Emergency Center. When you were found, you had no drugs or intoxicants in your system, you had no money or ID on you, and whoever you ran into took the time to pound you into a pretty fine paste. What were you doing in Smithside?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never heard of Smithside. I don’t have any idea where I am. I was supposed to be in a sleeper unit on the Longview.”

  “And the Longview is...?”

  “A space transport for convicted capital-offense criminals.”

  “It’s a good thing Longview’s dock records confirm you as crew. We’d hate to have to treat you as a capital-offense criminal.” She shrugged. “All right. I’ll check to see if the ship is docked, and if it is, we’ll get you back aboard. But if it’s gone, you’re going to be marooned here on an indigent pass. We don’t keep indigents. Which means the city will give you temporary room and board, but from the day you move into quarters, you have exactly thirty days to start earning enough money to cover your room rent and your food, and six months from there to get out of temporary housing and into your own accommodations. If you fail, you’ll be put aboard the first spaceship that docks that’s taking strays.”

  Kagen knew all about his odds if he ended up being designated a stray. Bad, and worse.

  “I'll find work. I have skills," he said, then asked, “Where am I?”

  “You got lucky,” she said. “Whoever dumped you didn’t hate you. You’re in the City of Furies.”

  He couldn’t believe what she’d said. “There really is one?” He sounded like an idiot, and he guessed the expression on his face made him look like a man who’d just discovered he’d won his own spaceship in a contest he hadn’t even entered. But... “Really?” he whispered.

  The woman—Ellah—smiled for the first time. “Good reaction. You might do all right here.”

  Ellah returned just moments later to tell Kagen the Longview had left a few days earlier, and that it would not return until the ship had another special delivery for the Pinnacle. She told him no ships were permitted to include the City of Furies on a regular route, so it could be weeks, months, or years before the Longview came around again.

  He was classed as Visitor, Trial Period 30.

  Ellah told him he wouldn't be charged for his Medix repairs because the city had been unable to identify and arrest the person or persons who had damaged him. So to his benefit, at least he had no starting debt.

  She turned him over to the indigent liaison for the Emergency Center. He set up Kagen’s housing, fused a temporary com bead onto his left wrist and embedded an eario, and provided him with a thirty-day provisional pass to the city. Then he called transport for Kagen, and told the vehicle to use Tour Guide mode before taking him home.

  The sleek red one-seater floated Kagen up into the traffic lanes, above a small but glistening city, colorful and complex, surrounded by an octagon of shining gold walls.

  He realized he had seen a painting of the city during a recreational leave. He couldn't remember where he'd been at the time, but he remembered stopping to look at it, to trace its broad walkways and admire the details of its airstream traffic and the artist's focus on the beauty of its buildings and landscapes. No one had suggested the little city was real.

  “Welcome to the City of Furies,” the Tour Guide said. “We’ll begin at the Pinnacle, and spiral outward through the Eight Arms, and I’ll tell you about the most important buildings below us and how they affect the operation of the city as we pass over them. Should you miss important details, you may access this program again at any time during your stay via your com bead, and take a walking tour or hire an aerovan to see each location. On your right...”

  Kagen lost the voice, let the words flow over him without hearing any of them. He was in the City of Furies, which was credited as the home of many of Settled Space’s most controversial artists, musicians, writers, scientists, engineers—hell, anyone who created anything that didn’t fit with some government’s or religion’s Truth was rumored to end up there.

  But no world claimed the City of Furies. No ships booked passage there. Most people—and Kagen had numbered himself among them—believed the city didn’t exist. Reasonable people assumed it was a name concocted by the wishful downtrodden, who needed to believe there was some place in the universe where people were truly and fully free and where someone gave a damn about them.

  “To your left, the long alabaster building is the Open University of Unconventional Studies...”

  People said that the City of Furies manufactured and exported free thinking—and those products, stories, songs, holos, and other creations rumored to come from the city were always better-made and better-functioning than products from known origins. They were also always subversive in one way or another.

  They required that users look at themselves and their lives differently in order to make their purchases work—and those new ways always reminded users that their lives and desires were meaningful and valuable to them. That the skills they’d learned belonged to them to use for their own survival first. That their thoug
hts were worthwhile even if they mattered only to the individual thinking them.

  City of Furies products told people they mattered, not as parts of some bigger whole, but as individuals. Not as cogs in a machine, but as people.

  Kagen had thought it was a clever marketing scheme. He had not been a believer.

  And now he was in the city.

  “The bright red building below and to your right is the Howert Building. It began manufacturing...”

  The City of Furies wasn’t some imaginary place, a figment of wishes and dreams. It was real, with real deadlines and real demands—and his first deadline was to pull himself together, understand how this place worked, and then advance within its rules toward... something. Maybe something that could someday let him earn his way back to his dream of becoming the captain of his own TFN transport.

  He needed to get on track quickly, because the kinds of ships that took on strays usually sold them to slavers. He’d found freedom too wonderful to conceive of losing it again.

  He did a mental inventory of his skills. He was intelligent. He was competent. He was willing to work hard, so long as he was able to reap the benefits of his work.

  He didn’t let himself linger too long on the question that was first in his mind: Why had the Longview dumped him?

  He had no sense of time having passed, but he realized that ten minutes or a thousand years could have gone by while he was suspended in the core unit, and it would have been the same to him.

  If significant time had passed, perhaps Lithra had died.

  Or perhaps she had been freed.

  Most likely, she was still in her core unit on the Longview. Most likely, he had been offloaded because the owner needed his unit for someone else.

  But when he was on his feet, he would search for Lithra. Maybe he could find a way for them to be together.

  CHAPTER 3