Back inside the bedroom, rain‐wet and chilled, they organize a hot bath and a nap.
blow me up boopsie, not
The sex is good. Not as good as he remembers it, but good. And there are compensations.
He asks himself again: What's missing from their lovemaking? In a way he can't express clearly, it's akin to what's missing in a night of Jack Daniels and easy on the water. The hangover was an integral part of the experience, back when people could have hangovers. As Leary used to tell people, when he came up with a real hangover, one of the fifty‐megaton numbers, it always made him horny as heck. It made him wonder, till somebody told him why: "It's instinct, or genes, or something." The friggin' genes let you know, deep down inside your cells, you're going to die any minute, and your body's trying to tell you to spread your seed quick, before it's too late. That's the survival of the species. An instinct stronger than hangovers. And maybe the notion you're going to be dead one day is the spice that's missing from sex in Aeolia.
Whatever. He has to count his blessings. This is Ellie, no question. Never mind she's an ebee, he can make love to her all he wants with no sense of guilt, no unease, no feeling he's messing with some Blow Me Up Boopsie.
In fact, in this world, this Aeolia, he can make love to her all he wants, as often as he wants, and that's a fact. Will marvels never cease? Here's Leary, himself a friggin' ebee, and happy to be one under the circumstances. And so is Ellie, but she gives Leary nothing except pure joy. So what surprises him, when he thinks about it, is that he doesn't want to do it as often as he can. His body is as young as he needs it to be, but maybe there's some irreversible decline in his lust for life. Though in every other respect he's as happy as he has ever been. Especially after the crippling isolation of all those years in his ESSEA Mall cell. Ellie says she's happy as well, and she looks it.
Anyway, it's nice that wet scendents can still sleep. Rumor has it that the composite scendents, the "posits," cannot. They have no need of it. Leary buries his face in Ellie's hair and inhales. She sighs and turns to snuggle into his armpit.
Leary sniffs her hair again, and again. It was true, back in mondoland, that it took three deep inhalations to fully appreciate a scent, to confirm a pig farm upwind of where you drove along a country road, to check whether it was time to toss a shirt in the laundry, to set up the first sip from a glass of fine bourbon. To celebrate your joy, in the dark of night, at knowing the woman you loved lay there beside you. And this woman lying beside Leary now, his Ellie, is that very person. The same age she was when they lived together in the mondoland version of Bangkok with the toddler Cisco. Just before she died. She looks the same as he remembers. She feels the same. She's really there when they talk—her wisdom, her sometimes zany perspective on things, her good sense and rock‐solid strength when it's needed. But there's something missing in her scent. Qubital magic hasn't entirely reproduced the natural fragrance of her scalp and hair, of her skin or her sex. It's good, of course. It's close to what he remembers and it is very good. Nevertheless, it doesn't perfectly join who they are now with who they were then.
He isn't complaining, mind you. He is grateful for what they have, which is an unbelievable lot more than he had any reason to expect such a short time ago. He takes another breath through Ellie's hair, runs a gentle hand over her smooth haunch, and falls toward slumber.
•
Wet scendents can dream. In his dream, he's in bed with Sky, who is actually MOM. She's cold. She's made of stone. Snakes writhe out of her head where the hair ought to be, and she has ten arms like tentacles. "This is horrible!" Leary yells at her. "This isn't sex." Her voice, when she replies, is hollow and as frigid as the touch of her many hands. "That's because you can't have good sex without knowing one day you'll die," she says. "And I can make it happen, Leary. I can see that you die."
"What is it? What's wrong?"
Leary is trying to remove Sky's head with a hacksaw, a procedure to which she's curiously indifferent, when he opens his eyes to see Ellie's face, full of concern. One hand is warm upon his brow; her other hand is shaking his shoulder.
"Just a dream," Leary says, and pulls her down in a gentle embrace. She smells good. Plenty good enough. Ebees aren't merely ebees, not necessarily.
swingin' dicks
Boom and Keeow, two of Boon Doc's prime ebeegirls, take turns on the little wooden stool. They step up to perch on the porcelain hand basin and wash their bits.
"Go on, now," Brian tells them. "Bugger off."
"You good man," says Boom, and Keeow adds her testimonial: "Han'some man. Young. Strong too mutt." Boom wads the grayish bath towel and dabs at herself before passing it to Keeow, who suggests to Brian, "You take we two nex' time, na? We be good for you too mutt."
Brian grabs the damp bath towel away from Keeow and snaps it at Boom's ass, but she's too quick for him. Even the simplest ebees are capable of learning.
Hee, hee. Brian winces. Then he giggles some more. Hee, hee, hee. Sweetie, always partial to a nice mix of sex and pain, momentarily emerges front and center.
The girls slip into G‐strings, halter‐tops and high‐heeled platform shoes. They take turns checking themselves out in the badly tarnished mirror over the dresser, going "Cannot see; cannot see." They always do that, just like in the old days, and it's comforting.
"Bye‐bye," they say, and make their exit, clumping down the dark wooden stairs to the bar below.
Given Brian's mood, it takes real effort to get off the bed. He sits a minute on its edge listening to water slosh back and forth against the headboard, and looks down at the running shorts and tanktop on the floor at his feet. "Fuck it," he says and leaves them where they lie. This is his world.
Halfway down the squeaky old staircase, he stops to savor the odors of roach powder and must. Brian cups his hand over his mouth to inhale Boom's aroma, another iota of cheer in this grim little world, the current limits of which—the radius of his "magic circle"—are his own body plus the sounds from the bar below, an old Rod Stewart song and a couple of the girls telling customers, in identical tones, how young and handsome they are.
It used to be true, and this remains enshrined in the program, that the older and more decrepit the man, the louder and more insistent the claims that he was both young and irresistible to any right‐thinking woman. And Brian should know, having been a habitué of the original Boon Doc's bar for quite some years, growing very old indeed, sitting there in his own chair, a wheelchair, since from birth he had had no legs and refused prosthetics. But now he has legs like mighty oaks. Fuck the wysiwyg. And he looks about forty years old. What does "age" mean here in Aeolia, anyway, where everybody gets to live forever? In what important sense will he ever be older than a hundred and thirteen, now, no matter how long he lives? He can appear any way he wants to, and have as many legs as he likes. Or as big a dick as he can carry. Brian cups his tackle and lifts it.
•
Brian has never before walked totally bare‐assed into Boon Doc's or, come to that, any other bar. But why shouldn't he? This is his world, after all, and he's the only real person in here. He goes over to his usual table, the one that gives him a view of the door to the street as well as the bar and the go‐go cage. None of the girls gives him a second look. Big Toy is slumped behind the cash, her empty shotglass on the counter, maybe too apathetic to fill it. Dinky Toy is wiping glasses with a dingy towel. A woman of many talents, Keeow is already shuffling around the go‐go cage in rough time to something by Police. Boom is parked halfway down the bar with a tattooed asshole, probably an American enjoying R&R from an oilrig offshore Indonesia. Dim figures sit in the gloom at a couple of the tables on the far side of the room.
Brian takes a table by himself up near the roughneck. "You!" he says.
"Me?" The big guy turns toward him.
"Yeah, you," Brian says. "What do you think you're gawking at?"
"What are you talking about?"
"Who the fuck do you think you're lo
oking at, eh?"
"I'm not looking at you. I'm watching the dancer." Big Guy turns back toward the cage. There's a pause between songs, and Keeow stops shuffling to slouch against the go‐go pole and look bored. Wow, who could be Keeow's twin, comes swiveling over aboard eight‐inch platforms to take her shift.
"Look at me when I'm talking to you."
"You want me to look at you, and you don't want me to look at you. Which is it, dipstick?"
Brian stands up, now. He bends at the knees and flexes his thigh muscles. The muscles in his similarly over‐developed forearm ripple as he points a finger at Big Guy. "You think you can fuck with me?"
Big Guy is wearing a cheap cotton tanktop that reads "Singha Beer," and he has tattoos of eagles and snakes and babes with big tits decorating his arms and shoulders. "You reckon you're pretty tough, don't you?" he says to Brian.
"I know I'm pretty tough." Boredom washes over him even as he utters the words. Surely he could think of a better line than that. But it has its predictable effect, and Big Guy launches himself away from the bar straight at Brian. Up by the cash, Big Toy, who is a high‐rez ebee, shows not much more life than she ever did in the real world, though she does rouse herself to yell: "Now, don't you young men go breaking anything." Then she shoots back a fresh hit of tequila, bites into a wedge of lime, and subsides into the depths of her chair till, once again, only her head is visible behind the bar.
Big Guy swings at Brian with the full momentum of his charge behind the punch. This part of it still gives Brian a buzz. He steps forward, inside the attack, to grab the guy's arm and turn with the punch, tripping Mr. Tattoos at the same time he whacks him hard up against the side of his head with an elbow. Big Guy goes down in a sprawling crash of tables and chairs and lies there. Brian stomps one of the fellow's knees, twisting it and eliciting both a yelp of pain from his victim and a hee, hee from Sweetie. "Shut up, Sweetie," he says, to all appearances talking to himself. Brian stands there, hose in hand; he feels it swell.
"You!" he tells Big Guy. "Hee, hee. Suck my dick."
"What?"
"You heard me." Brian giggles some more and winces. "Get up on your knees."
"Jesus …"
"Hee, hee, hee." Even as Brian listens to himself, he goes limp. He slaps at himself and watches it swing. Sweetie'll do that to him. "Fuck it," he says.
"What?"
"Forget it."
Dinky Toy and Keeow have started setting the furniture to rights, but it's suddenly all too much for Brian. "Go take a nap, for Christ's sake," he says. Then he gestures, and the tables and chairs right themselves and draw together in neat circles, shards of ashtray reassemble atop one of the tables, and the broken Kloster beer bottle simply disappears. Brian leaves Big Guy lying where he is.
He sits back down and looks glum. He flexes his right arm and watches the corded meat jump and twitch. Wow clambers up with no discernible enthusiasm to relieve Keeow in the cage, while Big Toy pours herself yet another tequila. Soon Dinky Toy and Keeow are draped side by side on the tatty old upholstered bench by the window, half asleep. Everything's back to normal, just like the old days.
•
Wow steps down from the cage to make way for Noi's shift. A miniature forest of joss‐sticks smolder and smoke, burned down to stubs on a shelf high up the wall near the ceiling. Noi wais this shrine, bowing with hands together to her forehead, before she mounts a stool to add a garland to the strings of fragrant blossoms that already festoon the shelf and its various adornments, including plaster figurines, lipsticks, a toy car, this and that. A bottle of Mekhong whiskey and a grilled chicken leg.
Two other men at the bar suck at beer bottles and watch Noi. "Wallpaper." That's what Leary calls this grade of basic ebee. Big Guy is also wallpaper. Strictly dim, only there for effect. The lot of them are little more than three‐dimensional images in a turn‐of‐the‐century video game. As are the girls, except they're higher‐rez, descended from wet masters by way of teleps in the old Worlds, so they include a shitlode of data. They're experienced. Never mind Leary would still call them wallpaper, Brian's wallpaper fucks like minks.
Brian checks out the two ebees sitting at the table in the corner farthest from the go‐go cage. These guys are different. Finally, eh? Something different. That should be good. So why does Brian feel so uneasy?
It's time to flee the scene for a spell. Have another go at thinking things out.
despatch from hell ~ the tour
Brian Finister here, and welcome to my world.
Many were the years I frequented the original mondoland Boon Doc's, and I've overseen its serial reincarnation over the past eight decades, first in Worlds UnLtd and now here in Aeolia. Downstairs, the bar looks much the way it always has. But I've customized my current upstairs room. Let me give you the tour of what I call home. My lair. Boon Doc's 3.0 or thereabouts.
•
Note the minimalist décor. I don't like clutter. Especially with the mental shambles I've had to deal with since waking up in Aeolia. Fucking Sweetie, eh? And Rabbit.
"Hee, hee." There. I'll write it in: I've just tittered. It came out of my own mouth, if you can believe that. "Shut the fuck up, Sweetie," I tell the actual agent of said titter. Not a peep from Rabbit, which is good.
That's another thing about the qubital hideyhole I've established inside my GR retreat, here. There's less Rabbit and there's less Sweetie. I get a cleaner copy of myself behind the Looking Glass, here in Harry's Hat. Which doesn't make any sense, but there you go, eh? And let me tell you, that in itself makes this a holiday from the inner circle of hell. Mind you, I have to worry that one or the other of them is going to let the cat out of the bag, sometime we're not safely stashed behind the Looking Glass. Sweetie, for one, isn't what you'd call reliably discreet.
"Hee, hee," she says again. Could be she thinks I'm expressing affection or something. I'm not.
So listen up, Sweetie. Or read it. Whatever. I want you to remember: If Sky tumbles to our secret hideaway here, you will never, ever, get to lode the rest of your data. Do you understand? You demented ditz. You fuckwitted old floozy. On the other hand, you play your cards right and maybe we can make you whole again. Believe it. Your only chance is playing along with me. That goes for you too, Rabbit. Are you paying attention?
Rabbit has dummied up. Though I did get a flash of acute anxiety just now, like we're all fucked and it's too late to do anything about it. That's classic Rabbit.
So how can I talk this way and not have MOM terminate me forthwith? Therein lies a tale, by God. And I'll tell that story in due course. Suffice it to say, for now, that what I'm giving you is a tour of what I call Harry's Hat, which is the spitting image of my official room upstairs at Boon Doc's. My real headquarters, my world. And neither Sky or any other part of MOM has any idea it's here.
That's because it isn't here. It isn't anywhere, as I'll explain presently.
•
For now, let's get back to the tour of my spartan abode. Aside from a few wire hangers on a wooden rail, that wardrobe over there against the wall stands empty. The straight‐backed wooden chair beside my waterbed doubles as a night table. On the chair rests the 15 July 1984 Bangkok Post. Already been there and done that, eh? Long ago. But for some reason, now I'm shacked up in Heaven, here, I enjoy the occasional hit of ancient history. Check out that Mekhong whiskey girlie calendar hanging from a nail on the back of the door, Miss July 1984, front and center, a soft‐focus firecracker of maybe legal age sprawled naked on a divan. Sweet.
I may have actually known her, back then. To tell the truth, I can't remember. I probably balled her mother too. Maybe even her daughter, if she ever had one. Anyway, her ebee is freely available to me now if I want it.
The dresser includes a big mirror that's about as useful as the original, back in mondoland Bangkok. It's so tarnished I can hardly see myself in it. That's looking at it from the Aeolian room on its other side; right now I'm on this side of the Looking Glass, in this
duplicate room that is nowhere.
Here's another funny thing, aside from the lesser Sweetie and Rabbit infections here in my quantum deke, this existential loophole. From this side, I can see through the mirror. Not too clearly, of course, because it's still all tarnished to shit. Sometimes I use it to play peeping tom. Upon occasion, I fill the room with ebeegirls and then watch to see what they do. Which is mostly nothing, unless I tell them to do something, and that spoils the voyeur effect no end. Besides which, trying to peer through the tarnish is a pain in the ass. It's easier to watch porno movies. But I digress.
The only luxuries, aside from this knock‐off La‐Z‐Boy, are that queen‐sized waterbed with teak frame and headboard and the antique cathode‐ray color TV, which carries the old television shows and movies, not to mention a closed‐circuit view of the bar downstairs. (I don't watch that much, just a quick check on events now and then. I'm down there anyway, much of the time, and watching myself in the process of being myself can mess with my head.)
I also get two dozen porno channels, each with its own specialty. I guess we can say the ceiling mirror, which isn't tarnished, is also a luxury. Hey, I admit it. Why shouldn't I? Porno satisfies me in a way even the most slavish ebeegirls cannot. There's a different level of intensity, an even greater sense of control. As I say, why not? I'm not hurting anybody. Not really. And how is this different from when Sky, back in the Worlds and here in Aeolia too, plays with her wet‐scendent sensorama channels? Banging every test pilot left in existence. Never telling them she wasn't just another mallster telep having herself, or sometimes himself, a ball. These ebeegirls, on the other hand, are basically no more sensitive than that chair. Not a lot more sentient, either.
The wash basin in the corner doubles as a pissoir‐cum‐bidet, just like in the old days, when I couldn't be bothered to use the hall toilet, which was most of the time. These days I don't need this sort of facility. Still, I like to splash water on my face in the morning. And the program specifies the occasional good piss, complete with bladder about to burst. There's nothing like a good pee. Even when it's only turning GR beer into GR piss. I love to listen to the splatter and splash in the sink, to feel the flood of glorious relief displace the pain.
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