Blue Champagne

by John Varley

She shrugged. "They won't be fooling around. They'll keep it up until they find me. It's only a question of time."

  "Can they get me in trouble?"

  "They'd love to. But I won't let them."

  "Thanks."

  "It's the least I could do."

  "So my room is out. First place they'd look."

  "No, they'd check my room first. It's better equipped for playing cards."

  He was mentally kicking himself. She was playing games with him, he knew that, but what was the game? If it was just sex, that was okay. He'd never made love with a woman in a sidekick.

  "About your nickname..." she said, leaving the sentence unfinished to see how he would react. When he said nothing, she started over. "Is it your favorite swimming distance? I seem to recall you were accused of never exerting yourself more than the situation required."

  "Wouldn't it be foolish if I did?" But the label still rankled. It was true he had never turned in a decent time just swimming laps, and that he seldom won a race by more than a meter. The sports media had never warmed to him because of that, even before he failed to win the gold. For some reason, they thought of him as lazy, and most people assumed his nickname meant he would prefer to swim races of no more than a quarter of a meter.

  "No, that's not it," was all he would say, and she dropped the subject.

  The silence gave him time to reflect, and the more he did, the less happy he was. She had said she could keep him out of trouble, but could she? When it came to a showdown, who had more clout with BCE? The Golden Gypsy, or her producers? He might be risking a lot, and she was risking nothing at all. He knew he should ditch her but, if he spurned her now, she might withdraw what protection she could offer.

  "I sense you don't care for your nickname," she said, at last. "What should I call you? What's your real name?"

  "I don't like that, either. Call me Q.M."

  "Must I?" she sighed.

  "Everybody else does."

  He took her to Eliot's room because Eliot was in the infirmary and because Montgomery and company would not look for them there. They drank some of Eliot's wine, talked for a while, and made love.

  The sex was pleasant, but nothing to shout about. He was surprised at how little the sidekick got in his way. Though it was all over her body, it was warm and most of it was flexible, and he soon forgot about it.

  Finally she kissed him and got dressed. She promised to see him again soon. He thought she said something about love. It struck him as a grotesque thing to say, but by then he was not listening very hard. There was an invisible wall between them and most of it belonged to her. He had tried to penetrate it—not very hard, he admitted to himself—but a good ninety-nine percent of her was in a fiercely-guarded place he was sure he'd never see. He shrugged mentally. It was certainly her right.

  He was left with a bad post-coital depression. It had not been one of his finer moments. The best thing to do about it was to put it behind him and try not to do it again. It was not long before he realized he was doing uncommonly well at that already. Reclining naked on the bed, gazing at the ceiling, he could not recall a single thing she had said.

  What with one thing and another, he did not get back to his room until late. He did not turn on the light because he did not want to wake Anna-Louise. And he walked with extra care because he was not balancing as well as he might. There had been a few drinks.

  Still, she woke up, as she always did. She pressed close to him under the covers, her body warm and humid and musky, her breath a little sour as she kissed him. He was half-drunk and she was halfawake, but when her hands began to pull and her hips to thrust forward insistently he found to his surprise that he was ready and so was she. She guided him, then eased over onto her side and let him nestle in behind her. She drew her knees up and hugged them. Her head was pillowed on his arm. He kissed the back of her smooth scalp and nibbled her ear, then let his head fall into the pillow and moved against her slowly for a peaceful few minutes. At last she stretched, squeezing him, making small fists, digging her toes into his thighs.

  "How did you like her?" she mumbled.

  "Who?"

  "You know who."

  He was pretty sure he could pull off a lie, because Anna-Louise couldn't be that sure, and then he frowned in the darkness, because he had never wanted to lie to her before.

  So he said, "Do you know me that well?"

  She stretched again, this time more sensually, to more of a purpose than simply getting the sleepiness out of her system.

  "How should I know? My nose didn't give me a chance to find out. I smelled the liquor on your breath when you came in, but I smelled her on my fingers after I touched you."

  "Come on."

  "Don't get mad." She reached around to pat his buttocks while at the same time pressing herself back against him. "Okay, so I guessed at the identity. It didn't take much intuition."

  "It was lousy," he admitted.

  "I'm so sorry." He knew she really was, and did not know if that made him happy or sad. It was a hell of a thing, he thought, not to know something as basic as that.

  "It's a damn shame," she went on. "Fucking should never be lousy."

  "I agree."

  "If you can't have fun doing it, you shouldn't do it."

  "You're one hundred per cent right."

  He could just see her teeth in the darkness; he had to imagine the rest of her grin, but he knew it well.

  "Do you have anything left for me?"

  "There's a very good chance that I do."

  "Then what do you say we just skip the next part and wake up?"

  She shifted gears so fast he had a hard time keeping up at first; she was all over him and she was one of the strongest women he knew. She liked to wrestle. Luckily, there were no losers in her matches.

  It was everything the encounter with Galloway had not been. That was no surprise; it always was.

  Sex with Anna-Louise was very good indeed. For that matter, so was everything else.

  He lay there in the dark long after she had gone to sleep, their bodies spooned together just as they had begun, and he thought long and hard and as clearly as he could. Why not? Why not Anna- Louise? She could care if he gave her the chance. And maybe he could, too.

  He sighed, and hugged her tighter. She murmured like a big, happy cat, and began to snore.

  He would talk to her in the morning, tell her what he had been thinking. They would begin the uncertain process of coming to know each other.

  Except that he woke with a hangover, Anna-Louise had already showered, dressed, and gone, and someone was knocking on his door.

  He stumbled out of bed and it was her, Galloway. He had a bad moment of disorientation, wishing that famous face would get back on the television screen where it belonged. But somehow she was in his room, though he did not recall standing aside to admit her. She was smiling, smiling, and talking so fast he could barely understand her. It was an inane rattle about how good it was to see him and how nice the room was, as her eyes swept him and the room from head to toe and corner to corner until he was sure she knew Anna-Louise better than he did himself, just from the faint traces she had left on the bare impersonal cubicle.

  This was going to be difficult. He closed the door and padded to the bed, where he sank gratefully and put his face in his hands.

  When she finally ran down he looked up. She was perched on the edge of the room's only chair, hands laced together on her knees. She looked so bright and chipper he wanted to puke.

  "I quit my job," she said. It took a while for that to register. In time, he was able to offer a comment.

  "Huh?" he said.

  "I quit. Just said screw this and walked out. All over, ka-put, down the toilet. Fuck it." Her smile looked unhealthy.

  "Oh." He thought about that, listening to the dripping of the bathroom faucet. "Ah... what will you do?"

  "Oh, no problem, no problem." She was bouncing a little now. One knee bobbed in four-four time while th
e other waltzed. Perhaps that should have told him something. Her head jerked to the left, and there was a whine as it slowly straightened.

  "I've had offers from all over," she went on. "CBS would sacrifice seven virgin vice-presidents on a stone altar to sign me up. NAAR and Telecommunion are fighting a pitched battle across Sixth Avenue at this very moment, complete with tanks and nerve gas. Shit, I'm already pulling down half the GNP of Costa Rica, and they all want to triple that."

  "Sounds like you'll do all right," he ventured. He was alarmed. The head movement was repeating now, and her heels were hammering the floor. He had finally figured out that the whining noise was coming from her sidekick.

  "Oh, bugger them, too," she said easily. "Independent production, that's for me. Doing my own thing. I'll show you some tapes. No more LCD, no more Trendex. Just me and a friend or two."

  "LCD?"

  "Lowest common denominator. My audience. Eight-year-old minds in thirty-one-point-three-sixyear- old bodies. Demographics. Brain-cancer victims."

  "Television made them that way," he said.

  "Of course. And they loved it. Nobody could ever underestimate them, and nobody could ever give them enough crap. I'm not even going to try anymore."

  She stood up, turned at the waist, and knocked the door off its hinges. It clattered into the hallway, teetering around the deep dimple her fist had made in the metal.

  ALL that would have been bizarre enough, but when the noise had finally stopped she still stood there, arm extended, fist clenched, half turned at the waist. The whining sound was louder now, accompanied by something resembling the wail of a siren. She looked over her shoulder.

  "Oh, darn it," she said, in a voice that rose in pitch with every word. "I think I'm stuck." And she burst into tears.

  Cooper was no stranger to the ways of the super-rich and super-famous. He had thought he understood clout. He soon learned he knew nothing about it.

  He got her calmed in a few minutes. She eventually noticed the small crowd that had gathered beyond the space where his door had been, whispering and pointing at the woman sitting on Cooper's bed with her arm stuck in an odd position. Her eyes grew cold, and she asked for his telephone.

  Thirty seconds after her first call, eight employees of BCE arrived in the hallway outside. Guards herded the audience away and engineers erected a new door, having to remove two twisted hinges to do so. It was all done in less than four minutes, and by then Galloway had completed her second call.

  She made three calls, none of them over two minutes long. In one, she merely chatted with someone at the Telecommunion Network and mentioned, in passing, that she had a problem with her sidekick.

  She listened, thanked the person on the other end, and hung up. The call to GM&L, the conglom that owned Sidekick, Incorporated, was businesslike and short.

  Two hours later a repairman from Sidekick knocked at the door. It was not until the next day that Cooper realized the man had been on the Earth's surface when he got the call, that his trip had involved a special ship boosting at one gee all the way and carrying no cargo but himself and his tool kit, which he opened and plugged into the wall computerminal before starting to work on the sidekick.

  But in those two hours...

  "If you'd like me to leave, I'll leave," she said, sipping her third glass of Cooper's wine.

  "No, please."

  She was still frozen like a frame from a violent film. Her legs worked and so did her right arm, but from her hips all the way up her back and down her left arm the sidekick had shorted out. It looked awfully uncomfortable. He asked if there was anything he could do.

  "It's okay, really," she said, resting her chin on the arm that crossed in front of her.

  "Will they be able to fix it?"

  "Oh, sure." She tossed down the rest of the wine. "And if they can't, I'll just stay here and you'll have a real conversation piece. A human hatrack." She picked her shirt off the couch beside her and draped it over her frozen arm, then smiled at him. It was not a pretty smile.

  He had helped her get the shirt off. It had been like undressing a statue. The idea had been to check the sidekick core for hot spots and visible cracks, which would necessitate the quick removal of the apparatus. It was clearly a project she did not relish. But as far as he had been able to see the thing was physically intact. The damage was on the electronic level.

  It was the closest look he had yet taken at the technological marvel of the age, closer even than the night before, when he had made love to her. Then, manners had prevented him from staring. Now he had a perfect excuse, and he used it.

  When he thought about it, it was frightening that they could pack so much power into a mechanism that, practically speaking, was hardly even there. The most massive part of the sidekick was the core, which was segmented, padded in flesh-toned soft plastic, and hugged her spine from the small of the back to the nape of her neck. Nowhere was it more than three centimeters thick.

  Radiating from the core was an intricate network of gold chains, bands, and bracelets, making such a cunningly contrived system that one could almost believe it was all decoration rather than the conductors for energized fields that allowed her to move. Woven belts of fine gold wire crisscrossed like bandoliers between her breasts and just happened to connect, via a fragile gold chain, with the sinuous gooseneck that was concealed by her hair before it attached to the back of the golden tiara that made her look like Wonder Woman. Helical bands fashioned to look like snakes coiled down her arms, biting each other's tails until the last ones attached to thick, jewel-encrusted bracelets around her wrists, which in turn sprouted hair-fine wires that transformed themselves into finger rings, one for each joint, each inset with a single diamond. Elsewhere the effect was much the same. Each piece, taken by itself, was a beautiful piece of jewelry. The worst that could be said about Megan Galloway in the "nude" was that she was ostentatiously bejeweled. If one didn't mind that, she was absolutely stunning: a gilded Venus, or a fantasy artist's Amazon in full, impractical armor. Dressed, she was just like anyone else except for the tiara and the rings. There were no edges on her sidekick to savage clothes or poke out at unnatural angles. Cooper guessed this was as important to Galloway as the fact that the sidekick was a beautiful object, emphatically not an orthopedic appliance.

  "It's unique," she said. "One of a kind."

  "I didn't mean to stare."

  "Heavens," she said. "You weren't staring. You are so pointedly not staring that your fascination must be intense. And no... don't say anything." She held up her free hand and waited for him to settle back in his chair. "Please, no more apologies. I've got a pretty good idea of the problem I present to somebody with both manners and curiosity, and it was shitty of me to say that about not staring.

  That puts you in the wrong whatever you do, huh?" She leaned back against the wall, getting comfortable as she could while waiting for the repairman to arrive.

  "I'm proud of the damned thing. Cooper. That's probably obvious. And of course I've answered the same questions so many times that it bores me, but for you, since you're providing me a refuge in an embarrassing moment, I'll tell you anything you want to know."

  "Is it really gold?"

  "Twenty-four carat, solid."

  "That's where your nickname comes from, I presume."

  She looked puzzled for a moment, then her face cleared.

  "Touche. I don't like that nickname any more than you like yours. And no, it's no more correct than yours is. At first, I wasn't the Golden Gypsy. The sidekick was. That was the name of this model sidekick. But they've still only made one of them, and before long, the name rubbed off on me. I discourage it."

  Cooper understood that too well.

  He asked more questions. Before long the explanations got too technical for him. He was surprised that she knew as much about it as she did. Her knowledge stopped short of the mathematics of Tunable Deformation Fields, but that was her only limit. TDF's were what had made the Bubble poss
ible, since they could be made to resonate with particular molecular or atomic structures. The Bubble's fields were turned to attract or repel H2O, while the fields generated by Galloway's sidekick influenced gold, Au197, and left everything else alone. She went on to tell him far more than he could absorb about the ways in which the fields were generated in the sidekick core, shaped by wave guides buried in the jewelry, and deformated ("Physics terms are usually inelegant," she apologized), to the dictates of nanocomputers scattered throughout the hardware, operating by a process she called "augmented neuro-feedback holistitopology."

  "The English of which is..." he pleaded.

  "...that I think of pressing the middle valve down, the music goes round and round and it comes out here." She held out her hand and depressed the middle finger. "You would weep to know how many decisions the core made to accomplish that simple movement."

  "On the other hand," he said, and rushed on when he remembered what had happened to her other hand, "what goes on in my brain to do the same thing is complex, but I don't have to program it. It's done for me. Isn't it much the same with you?"

  "Much. Not exactly. If they made one of these for you and plugged you in right now, you'd twitch a lot. In a few weeks you'd patty-cake pretty well. But in a year you'd not even think about it. The brain re-trains itself. Which is a simple way of saying you struggle day and night for six or seven months with something that feels totally unnatural and eventually you learn to do it. Having done it, you know that learning to tap-dance on the edge of a razor blade would be a snap."

  "You say you've heard all the questions. What's your least favorite?"

  "God, you're merciless, aren't you? There's no contest. 'How did you hurt yourself?' To answer the question you so cleverly didn't ask, I broke my fool neck when me and my hang-glider got into an argument with a tree. The tree won. Many years later I went back and chopped that tree down, which just may be the stupidest thing I ever did, not counting today." She looked at him and raised one eyebrow. "Aren't you going to ask me about that?"

  He shrugged.

  "The funny thing is, that's the question I want you to ask. Because it's tied up with what we did yesterday, and that's really what I came here to talk to you about."