Mother of Storms

by John Barnes

  “We are better at friendship than you are, and we make better beer. On the other hand, you still have the best hamburgers and the best cop movies.” José says that with such pompous solemnity that Jesse all but falls back into his chair laughing. As his laughter subsides, José stands, completes the pile of cash on the table, and says, “Let’s walk together part of the way.”

  As they go up the brightly lighted avenida, north along the side of the Zócalo, Jesse begins, for the first time, to really look back at some of the women looking at him; that seems to create flurries of giggles and looking away. He suspects that if he smiled at one in particular, they’d all stop looking at him entirely.

  José notices and touches his shoulder gently. “You see how much easier it is to recover when you do it like a Mexican.”

  They part company a block after leaving the Zócalo, and Jesse is pleasantly surprised to realize that he is not at all drunk and that he will probably get a lot of sleep tonight; it’s just barely time for early cena, and he’s not hungry, so he decides to go straight back to the little bungalow and get some sleep.

  As he turns into one dim street, he sees that the woman coming his way has red hair. This is odd enough for him to turn and look at her in the light; thus he sees that she’s wearing a very loose flannel shirt over a big, floppy denim skirt and a pair of sandals. She looks like she’d fit right in at one of the centers or schools in the area, but Jesse knows practically every norteamericano for fifty kilometers around—the different social services outfits throw everyone together frequently—and he doesn’t recall seeing her.

  Of course she just might be a tourist, but nobody wears the Left Uniform anymore unless they mean it, and nobody Left goes anywhere as a tourist—they always go somewhere to take a workshop or to work for some service. So chances are overwhelming she’s new… and if Jesse is any judge, one reason for the floppy clothes is that she’s built at least as well as Naomi. It’s not so much that a plan forms in his brain as that he sees an opportunity and jumps at it before it has time to slip away. “Hey, you’re not from around here,” he says, in English, taking the main chance that she’s from the States, Ontario, Pacificanada, or Alaska, rather than Quebec.

  “No shit,” she says, but she smiles at him as she says it. There’s something familiar about the smile, and he takes a step closer to see if maybe it’s just someone he didn’t recognize.

  She takes a step back and for a moment he thinks he’s frightened her—or then again maybe she doesn’t want him to see her clearly, since she’s just thrown a long shadow over her face. He can now see that her hair, backlit by the streetlight, is extremely red, one of those shades you get only by injection.

  He doesn’t come any closer, but he does say, “Are you with any of the organizations operating down here? Everybody parties together all the time, so I’d have thought I’d recognize you, unless you’re new.”

  “Well, I’m not new down here—I’ve been here for quite a while on vacation,” she says, “and the truth is that I’m wearing this outfit because it really hides my body, and I’ve got the kind that gets a lot of attention from the real machos around here, especially when you add in the hair and the pale skin. It’s just that usually I can take a walk in the evening, if I stick to safe streets, without getting bothered.”

  “Oh—um, sorry,” Jesse says, and turns to go.

  “That’s okay, I didn’t mean you, particularly. But if by any chance my figure is what caught your eye, I should probably tell you I’m an old woman. Past thirty—not even close to what you’re looking for.” She steps forward now, and Jesse sees that even though she’s obviously had them abraded regularly, there are little crow’s feet around her eyes, and some lines around her mouth, and—well, more than that, there’s something in her expression that just says she’s lived a while and a few things have hit her pretty hard. He suddenly feels like he’s three feet tall and wearing Dr. Denton’s.

  She’s still great looking, though, and he finds himself blurting out, “Uh, I guess I’m too young if you say I am, but you are definitely not too old.”

  That one gets a grin from her, and it’s so warm and friendly that he smiles back and relaxes. This little encounter might be kind of strange but it’s fun in its way.

  The redhaired woman takes another step closer, and she’s flirting with him, but not in the way that he’s used to from girls his own age, with all the come here-go away come here-go away. The smile is open and warm, and he has a strange feeling that she might be more interested than he is; and he’s pretty interested.

  “That’s a really sweet thing to say,” she says to him. “Can I ask—uh, this will sound arrogant and stupid—do you know who I am?”

  “It doesn’t sound arrogant or stupid,” he says, taking another step. “You do look like someone I ought to know, maybe someone I knew a long time ago—”

  “Did you ever experience the news via Rock or Quaz?”

  His jaw drops; he’s never had that particular sensation before, but he’s lucky it’s only his jaw muscles that go loose, because he also feels weak in the knees and he just might want to faint.

  “You’re Synthi Venture?” He can’t believe he’s asking her that, or that this is happening in a dusty little side street in Tapachula, of all places.

  “At the moment I’m Mary Ann Waterhouse, and I’m on vacation. But yeah, that’s what I do for a living. So have you ever… um…” She stands with her legs a little apart and puts her hands behind her back; it thrusts her huge breasts forward and sways her pelvis as if to move it against him.

  He’s glad it’s dark, because though he never thought anyone could make him blush, his skin is burning hot right now; he feels like a little boy. His voice comes out as sort of a dry squeak—“You were my favorite in high school.”

  “And that was what, only three or four years ago?” she asks, a teasing smile opening up her face to him. “You know they do a light fuzzing on the images, don’t you, so that I still look only about twenty in those things?”

  “Uh, you still look… um, really good—”

  “Compliments are always welcome, but not too many on the state of my preservation, please.” Then, amazingly, she presses the shirt down on her stomach, so that he can see how huge, and how high, her breasts really are; she’s kind of a freak, and he’s not quite as turned on as he was a second before. “So are they any better in real life?”

  “I—” He gulps. “I really…”

  “Your line is ‘I really like them.’ Followed by a hint that you’d like to go somewhere alone with me.” She winks at him and licks her lips; her hands brush her thighs, pulling the skirt inward, and Jesse feels completely like a kid. Now she steps closer to him and says, “You do like the way I look, don’t you?”

  He nods, confused and not sure at all what else he’s feeling.

  “Then why don’t you come back to my place, so we can fuck?”

  His first thought is that this is a prostitute who has had herself biomodified into a copy of Synthi Venture, and his second thought is that if so, she’s a good enough copy to be worth blowing a month’s salary on. But a high-priced celeb-copy prostitute isn’t likely to be in a backwater Mexican town and certainly wouldn’t be coming on to him like a streetwalker—hell, she’s cruder than the streetwalkers in front of his place.

  But if it really is Synthi Venture—and the closer he stands to her, the surer he is—

  She reaches up, takes his face in her hands, pulls his mouth down to hers, and kisses him, a big, wet, slobbery kiss with her lips completely open and slack and her tongue sliding deep into his mouth. He wasn’t ready for it, and he’s not sure he likes it, especially not when she begins to thrust against his leg, but at the same time he can feel an erection shoving against his jeans. He stops resisting and lets her do what she wants; her hand is inside his shirt, her fingers playing with his nipples, and then back outside, sliding over his belt, slim fingers tapping lightly on the thick denim, just enough
so that he can feel her hand on his penis. He presses his crotch against her and she whispers, “Now, no talking. Back to my place. We’re going to do everything you always wanted to do with me, and then we can talk. Or not. I don’t really care if you don’t want to do anything except the physical.”

  She takes his hand and he trails along like a zombie; it’s as if somehow he had just walked right out of real reality and into XV without noticing. This is the kind of thing that happens to Rock, maybe, or happened to Rock when he was younger—in fact, it’s almost exactly what happened to Rock in Assignment in Singapore, the long documentary in which Rock went undercover to investigate the trade in very-high-priced Caucasian prostitutes. But that was with Starla, the one whose career was cut short when she was murdered while plugged in, the “forbidden wedge” everyone claims to know someone who can get.

  Distracted, trying to understand it all, he takes as much note as he can of the surroundings, as if one small unreal something, somewhere, might persuade him that he’s just having a vivid dream. The street is soft with dust—it’s been a day or two since it rained—and the air is warm, as evenings always are here. The houses stand back from the street and in this middle-class district of small, whitewashed houses behind white garden walls, they might as well be in Los Angeles—if LA were ever this quiet, or if you could ever see the stars between the lights there.

  She guides his hand onto her shoulder, and this is almost like walking with Naomi or a dozen other girls—except that none of them took a hard, rude grip on one of his buttocks like that. He shies, but she slides farther under his arm, pulling his hand down onto the top of her breast.

  He has a strange, strangled urge to laugh when he realizes that it is as big as her head. He just wishes that something so ridiculous weren’t also so exciting. “Ever squeeze a celebrity tit?” she asks him.

  “N—no. Why are we—”

  “Shh. No why just yet. See those two men coming?”

  “Yeah.” They look like any two regular guys in this regular working town, he thinks to himself; probably they’ve just finished up work, gone home to play with the kids and talk to the wife a little, now they’re out for a little light meal and some beer together—

  He really hopes she won’t involve them in this weirdness, whatever it is.

  One voice in the back of his mind is pointing out that she doesn’t have him at gunpoint or anything, he can just say, “Uh, Synthi, Miss Waterhouse, whatever you’re calling yourself, this is just too weird and I’m going to walk away from it—”

  And he knows he should, on another level. This kind of thing is okay in XV, but in the first place even though he has all his shots up to date, there are new kinds of AIDS and SPM and ARTS showing up every few months and he figures he’s never met anyone so likely to introduce him to the latest variety, from the way she’s acting. Shit, beside the risks, if she’s doing this, she’s at least half crazy, and god knows what she might do when they’re alone—hurt him, or pull out a Self Defender, a razor, or anything. He wonders what would happen if they found a Leftie with a bullet hole in him, a big XV star with traces of his sperm in her, and she said she did it after he raped her. Do the cops here even pick up the radio burst from a Self Defender?

  He shudders, slightly, and she uses the motion—suddenly his hand is down inside her shirt, under her bra. He has a startled moment of realizing that it doesn’t feel soft and tender, like most big breasts, or even full and ripe the way Naomi’s do—it feels like a slightly underinflated automobile tire. He can feel a ridge or two under the skin that must be the artificial ligaments they put in there to keep these things up.

  She bumps up against him, and the two men notice the way she’s moving and stare at them as she goes by. She’s squirming around, and she whispers to Jesse, “Come on, reach in.” As if he’s hypnotized, Jesse slides his hand forward, bringing that big mass of red hair close to his face—it smells funny and he realizes that she’s perfumed it with something, and used too much—and finds he is clutching a nipple as big as a Ping-Pong ball.

  She squeals, straightens up under his arm, moans and gasps. Her hand, outside her shirt, closes over his underneath, and she rubs up and down, panting and then groaning.

  The two men stare at them. Jesse wants to look at the dirt at his feet, but if he does, his attention will concentrate on the moaning in his ear and the huge tough-surfaced breast under his hand. So he does look up, and he sees the carefully polished shoes, the tailored pants, the spotless ironed white shirts—and the fascinated stare. They aren’t excited, particularly, or eager, or anything like that—what they are doing, he knows, is looking at another rude gringo couple that has no idea how to behave in public.

  Synthi seems to be having a full-blown orgasm; they stare at her as if she were part of a sideshow, and one of them waves, almost shyly, at Jesse, as if in salute at his conquest. He wants to tell them this is not him, this is not what he’s like or who he is—but they’ve turned and gone already.

  She subsides and takes his hand in hers again, holding it over her shoulder. “God, it feels good to fake an orgasm and not have ten million people over my shoulder knowing it’s fake. So how do you like the industrial knockers?”

  “I, they’re—”

  “They don’t feel much like real ones, do they? But wait till you see them slapping up and down while I ride you. Come on, the house I’m renting is right around the corner. Mind you, the servants are not going to approve—Mrs. Herrera is a dear, but really twentieth, and her husband Tomás is much more a gardener than a butler—no wink-and-nudge ability at all, if you know what I mean—”

  He’s pulled around the corner, still not sure what he feels about all of this. The feeling in his stomach is mostly butterflies, as if he were going to throw up, and his legs feel rubbery, but on the other hand he can’t remember ever being this erect.

  Abstractly, he thinks maybe it’s just a matter of years and years of programming to want this instead of a woman, and that if he could just step back for a minute and think, he wouldn’t be anywhere near this—

  Another part of him is growling that this might be his only chance and he has to know what it’s really like.

  The “little house” she is renting might make an apartment building for four Tapachulan families in the better part of town; in fact, he’s walked by here many times and if he’d thought about it that’s what he’d have assumed it was. As they approach the door, it opens—apparently the small, muscular, beautifully dressed man who opens the door has nothing more pressing to do than watch the path.

  Despite her warning, the servant appears neither surprised nor disapproving; he nods and says, “Miss Waterhouse. Will you be—”

  “We’re going directly to the master bedroom, Señor Herrera,” she says, “and after that, perhaps the gentleman will be staying to a late dinner.”

  To Jesse it seems that they float up the long marble staircase, and into the big room that looks like nothing so much as an old movie set. There’s a lot of red velvet around, and maybe that was sexy once but what it looks like to him is a restored movie theater, the kind they fix up in Oaxaca or San Cristóbal for the tourist trade. His head is spinning—maybe he had a little more beer than he thought he did, and they went up that staircase pretty fast.

  One advantage Jesse found out about long ago with what Leftie girls wear—it comes off in a flash and there are a lot of ways to get a hand under it. In this case it seems to take Synthi Venture, if it’s really her, only a breath to kick off the sandals, undo three or four buttons, and then whip off the shirt, unfasten the front catch on the bra, and yank down skirt and underwear together.

  Jesse is stunned; the hair really is red, not the shade of normal human hair and not rough like most dye jobs make it, but natural, soft, wavy human hair the color that red hair is in an old comic book, and the little tuft of it that doesn’t quite hide her labia is a shade brighter. She gives a loud giggle, and for the first time he realizes that she’s r
eally drunk, or high on god knows what (she can probably afford and get anything), or maybe she has just cranked up the happy center in her brain into the red zone, supposedly XV stars are wired to do that.

  She does a little pirouette, and now he sees the thin white scars on her ass and her thighs where they sewed her into the “perfect” shape, and as she turns around he sees, ever so faintly, a kind of strange surface under the skin of her belly and knows that they put a sheath in there to hold her tighter than her own abdominal wall can.

  And now that they are out in the open, the enormous, outsized breasts have visible scars too, places where they were reshaped and rebuilt. At fifty feet, or in dim light, or through the sort of vague gauze that is imposed by XV, she would look impossibly, magically perfect; but here, up close, in the plain light of the overdone bedroom, he can see how the trick is done, and once you’ve seen how it’s done the magic is over.

  He thinks for an instant that he will lose his erection, and then he looks into her eyes. They are pale blue, and under the abraded crow’s feet, he sees a strange set to them, a kind of desperate look, and somehow or other the thought that forms in his mind is that—god knows why, but there it is—what she wants is him, that she’s so hungry for him that she’ll do anything, that if he turns and goes now she’ll weep for hours, and that she will be grateful if he just uses her.

  She is coming on like a cheap whore behind schedule, not because she’s enjoying it but because she has to know whether he will reject her. All this comes to him in an instant, before he knows how he knows it.

  He wants to think it’s empathy, that he can relate to rejection fear because of Naomi, but that’s not true at all. It’s knowing how little Naomi would approve of this, that it would make her feel shoddy to know that this crude horny old bitch was going to give him at least as much pleasure as all her sensitive gentleness.

  It’s knowing that feeling of power, knowing that if he wanted to he could call Synthi a horny old bitch and she’d still do whatever he wanted just so he would take her in any way at all. And a part of him that he’d never thought about, too, is that he knows that in a month this woman can have more of everything than he can ever have in his life, that things he would have to plan and work for years to do, she can do on a whim—just plain sheer envy that she can get all that, and get it mostly from people like him, entirely with her cartoon body and crude acting. There’s the thought of at least making her pay for it by, just once, really giving him what he’s dreamed about through Rock and Quaz and all the others for so much of the last ten years.