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she'd put up over herself, which was why she was cold to the touch, and inside
there was Opal Sellers, who was one of the ugliest girls I'd ever seen, and
she knew that was what I thought, and she didn't wait a minute, but put her
thumb in her mouth and started mumbling around it... but nothing happened.
Then she went completely out of her head and started screaming that she'd
passed on the power to
me, and she couldn't do a thing about me, and she ran out the door.
I took off after her, and she went off the edge and kept going straight away
like the Viking and the
Stuka and the Hun and all the rest of them, which I guess she'd sent to liven
things up for me so I'd feel heroic.
And that's it.
Gone. Just went. Where, I have no idea. I'm not leaving here, that's for sure,
but I don't know what to do about it.
Somebody ought to say I'm sorry to her, I mean she's a nice girl and all.
It's just I'm here and I'm comfortable, and who can ask for more than that.
She was always talking about love. Well, damn, that wasn't love.
I don't think.
But what do I know? Girls always got tired of me very quickly.
I'm going to teach myself how to make pizza.
Gull Lake, Hickory Corners, Michigan/1973
3 KISS OF FIRE
He drank ice crystals laced with midnight and watched their world burn. A
greenperson floated up beside him, and touched his sleeve. There was static
electricity in the compartment; a tiny spark.  Mister
Redditch, when you have a moment, the Designer would like to disturb air with
you.
Redditch looked down. The greenperson's eye was watering.  Tell him I'll be
along. The greenperson's flaccid skin went to an ivory-gray hue, capturing
the disquiet and weariness in Redditch's voice. He floated away, adjusting his
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hue exactly, so the message could be transmitted without the slightest
semantic misinterpretation.
Redditch turned back to the teleidoscope, the tanger, the sensu, the catcheye
and the straight black tunnel that showed him their world burning. The solar
prominences had died away to self-satisfied blandness; unctuous. There was
little out there now but smoldering ash, but the sensu was still getting a
reading high into the nines and the teleidoscope was turning it, turning it,
combining colors and sending them back in some new spectral spectrum. He
raised the drink to his lips, but he could not taste it. The tanger overrode,
even in the control compartment. It was the smack of salt-rising bread and
salamanders.
A rolling checker came out of its bay and made its way through the coils of
readout sheets littering the deck. Redditch had designed and combined and set
up the nova with great care, and the sheets had endlessly tongued out of the
aesthetikon and he had let them lie. The checker got through the tangle and
palmed open the hookup compartment and re-attached the feed to stateroom 611.
But it hardly mattered:
the clients in 611 had played gin rummy straight through the program. The
checker returned to its bay.
Redditch downed the last of his drink, ran his tongue around the rim of the
hollow crystal, and set it down on the console. He sighed and rubbed his
weary, itching eyes. He was tired from the inside-out to the very tips of his
fingers. And now, the Designer...
When he emerged from the dropshaft and walked through the theater lounge, a
blustery purple-
class voyager and a fat duchess with sausage fingers and noisy rings greeted
him, congratulated him on the performance, offered him social congress. The
man was probably a salesman of myth-sticks, and the woman was clearly a
remittance relative. He smiled and thanked them and hurried on through the
theater. A
clique still plugged into their tunnel applauded him, and he acknowledged
their appreciation with a vague gesture of his sensor hand. It sparkled with
reflected light from the overhead inkys.
Whores were busily trying to drum up some business, trying to catch a few
voyagers who had absorbed the empathy of the programmed death and who were, at
least for the moment,  alive.
They were having a rough time of it. One lithe creature with a charged ring
through the lips of her vagina, was trying with all the powers at her command
to get a thin, salivating messenger to buy her favors.
She was bent over him, her hand inside his chiton, massaging his privates. But
his eyes were rolled up in their sockets and Redditch would have taken odds
her till and her ring would go empty.
A tag-team, two black-and-ochre Sedalians, had a suety emissary trapped deep
in his formfit. One of them had pulled off his embassy pouch and sash, and had
lowered herself onto his body. It seemed unlikely she would be able to get him
erect enough for insertion, and her sister was tonguing one of the several
underarm vaginas the man had had surgically added to his grotesque bulk. While
they worked over
him, Redditch passed and heard the man mumbling,  Don't be ridiculous, this is
ridiculous, my sperm brings a thousand a decaliter, I'm certainly not going to
give it away and pay you for the privilege.
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Redditch quite agreed. He wondered why the ship's comptrollers continued to
hire on whores; they were virtually an anachronism, holdover from centuries
before. They certainly couldn't be doing enough business to warrant their
continued employment.
He kept walking. Once, after a long programming, he had passed through the
theater and one of the new whores, a lanky young man with pustules, had
propositioned him. Redditch had laughed and there'd been some repercussions
with the Guild, until the Designer had straightened out the matter.
He saw her sitting alone, and when she looked up at him as he approached, the
singular beauty contained in her face, particularly her slanted eyes, made him
slow his pace. Her right arm was lying along the rest, and she bent it at the
elbow, raising the slim-fingered hand. It was enough to stop him.
 You programmed the death? she said, with no rising inflection. He nodded,
smiling in a sudden rush of anticipation of her congratulations. She looked
away.
He felt as though something had been stolen from him.
The Designer was lying out in a leaf chair that moved idly in its free-fall
nimbus. Every eye in his forehead row was closed, but Redditch could tell he
was perceiving his surroundings by the fibrillation of root threads that
spiked his cheek-pouches. Crystals of ergonovine sparkled amid the threads.
The
Designer's backers were seated around the observatory suite.
 Come in, the Designer said. The leaf chair moved.
 I'm in. He slumped into a composeat and punched out tranquilizers and an
antacid. He wanted to stay calm through it all. Outside the observatory cycle
ports the nova phased through from yellow ochre to gold as he watched.
'.Something on your mind, Keltin?
The Designer opened three yes eyes.
 Where must your mind be? He said it with carefully chilled contempt. A
greenperson hovered just beyond the nimbus, unnecessarily translating the tone
in colors.
Redditch yawned.  Madison Square Garden, a 1932 Paramount Pictures release
starring Jack
Oakie, Marian Nixon, Zasu Pitts, William Boyd and Lew Cody.  A romantic,
dramatic story of three men and two girls fighting desperately to rout the
mechanism of unseen forces.' Running time, seventy-six minutes.
One of the backers threw his drink at the bulkhead. He started to shout
something, but a checker emerged from its bay and caught the crystal before it
hit, sucking up every drop of fluid before it could stain the grass. The
backer turned away in frustration.
The Designer opened a no eye.  There are clauses in your contract, Redditch.
Redditch nodded.  But you won't use them. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]