The Pure Cold Light (22 page)

Wryly, Mallee said, “Looks like you’ve made the splash internash.”

At first the entire screen lit, but she quickly reduced the image to correspond with the space she had opened.
 
The view was of an overhead shot of ICS-IV, showing the center tower like a hub and the cellblocks like seven spokes off it. From that shot, no one would have guessed at the chaos reigning within. The sound came up. “... estimates as many as three hundred deaths. Believed to be included in that total are the school’s principal, Ms. Chikako Peat, and a man ScumberCorp officials have linked to the terrorist group
Xau Dâu
, which has plagued the megacorporation for years. It is now believed this man, Angel Rueda, subverted the school’s security in order to arm students, fomenting a bloody revolt.”

First they showed a photo of Angel without the bypass, and Lyell almost didn’t recognize him. Before she adjusted to it, the picture switched to a tracking shot of Angel entering the school unaccompanied. He was glancing around as if making certain he had not been followed.

“That’s not me,” he complained. “I never went in there alone. I’ve only been to the school once.”

Lyell gripped his shoulder reassuringly. “We know.”

“However,” said the television, “Knewsday now believes he fell victim to his own plan and was shot in the chaos of the riot. ScumberCorp city officials say it will be many hours before more specific information is available. Reached during rehearsals for his evening show, the President ordered an immediate investigation into the event.”

President Odie looked sincerely into the camera. “We have tolerated the monsters behind this subversive group long enough. I know that all of America is behind me when I state that we will tolerate no more. We are going to stamp out
Xau Dâu
. And don’t forget to watch my ‘Best of Odie’ show Tuesday—”

“Please,” said Peat, “shut it off before I vomit on the flag.” She dropped down beside Angel and took his hand. “Well, dear man, how does it feel to be a monster?”

The mask’s black face looked her way, expressing mild perturbation. “I did none of that,” he said. The agony in his voice killed the humor in Peat’s expression. She took his hands in hers and faced him.

“Angel, don’t you see? It just proves what Thomasina told you. The only way that footage could exist is if it was simulated in advance. It would have taken someone hours to doctor up.”
 
She looked around for confirmation. “Right?”

Lyell nodded.

Angel leaned his head back. All of a sudden, he unplugged the LifeMask and peeled it off. “I’ve had enough of that.”

“You’ve got blood on your shoulder, Thomasina,” Mallee observed. “Are you wounded?”

“It’s his.”

“Ah. You’ll want to clean up.”

“Actually, no, thank you,” said Lyell. “I need to leave, and the sooner the better. There are connections that need forging, and I need to find out what’s really hopping before they change that report and slap my picture up there, too. If I go out, will there be a problem with my return?”

Mallee smiled at her. “Lots of women do.”

“Not exactly what I meant.” She turned to Angel. “I want you to hold this in your hand,” she said, and gave him her phone case. He stared at it as at some alien artifact. “Close your hand around it. Press your fingers hard against it.” When he had obeyed, she daintily took it by its edge and slipped it back in her belt bag.

“Fingerprints?” Peat asked.

“And blood.” She ducked her chin toward her shoulder.

Peat mulled that over for a moment. She said, “Don’t be too long.”

“A few hours only, I hope.” She got up and, with a grateful nod to Mallee, said, “I’ll find my way out.”

She made it halfway down the hall before giving in to the temptation to try more of the doors. None of them opened. She wondered whom she had recorded seated at the oars. Nebergall, the sick bastard, was going to treasure that footage.

Chapter Sixteen: Virtual Recovery

The woman in front of him wore an elaborate leather corset. She had on laced brown boots with a line of spikes down the outside. Her bright red hair was cropped short. Her eyes weren’t human. They glowed with barely contained power that he could actually feel against his bare skin like invisible hands slithering over him, the power pressing him down, down to his knees.
 

The corset pushed the woman’s tattooed breasts up impossibly over the top, making them jut forward. Her pierced nipples were as sharp as cones. She grinned maniacally with teeth that had been honed to points as sharp as the nipples. “Slave,” she said.

The word hit him like a slap in the face. He jerked back but couldn’t move far. Chains held him naked on his knees. His penis, of its own accord, had stiffened, extending to a prodigious thirty centimeters. His skin was bronze in color, his body narrow-waisted but massive across the chest. He could flex the muscles, feel them ripple. His erection, when he touched it, was definitely attached, the real thing despite his knowing that it could not be so.
 

The room was an oubliette, its exit a hatch in the ceiling. Looming to the right stood a black vinyl bed fitted with straps and devices of unimaginable intent.

The dominatrix approached him. She had a coiled whip in her left hand. The leather of her outfit creaked like saddlery as she moved. He could smell her strong perfume—some erotic mixture to lure him. “You’ll do everything I tell you,” she said sternly, then giggled. “Sorry. But the look on your face …”

“What does it look like? I can’t imagine it’s even my face.”

“No, it’s not that, and anyway half of your head is missing because of that bypass. Really, it’s your expression. You looked like a little boy watching his first puppet show.”

He glanced down at his aroused member. “A little boy? What about this?”

“Oh,
I
did that. It’s fairly standard, an automatic aspect of the program to salve the male ego. I can tweak you a good deal larger if you like, Pinocchio, but you’ll have to tell me some lies first. I wanted you aroused because I thought it might bring back a memory of someone, some place, some time when you got laid. You must have made love in your closed past, Angel, a man who looks like you.”

He tried to conjure up an appropriate image, then shook his head.

“Ah, well,” she said, “I tried. Maybe someone else.”

Her shape dissolved into that of a blonde princess in a gauzy gown. Her hair poured across the floor in back of her like a wedding train. Around her the room and the bed reshaped, breaking into squares, each of which transformed. The room became a huge stone chamber with vaulted ceiling and a fireplace large enough to stand in; the bed, a feather cushion. “Perhaps Rapunzel will do it.” The voice was no longer Chikako’s. It was a soft, singsong of innocence. The accompanying scent expressed milkbaths, virginity. Her gown parted as she came forward, and he saw that she lacked any pubic hair. She said, “I would give most anything if my gracious lord would let me lie with him for a night.” Her eyebrows danced. “Or is that ‘gracious knight would let me lie with him, oh lord’? It’s been a few years.” She sat on the cushion, and was nearly absorbed by it.

He didn’t know what to say. He found each transformation vestigially arousing, but ascribed his feelings to the last traces of the inoculation he had been given earlier. It was as if he stood outside himself, watching his arousal but not actually aroused.

Earlier, before he had regained his composure, Mallee had presented Chikako with a gift—“
ibogaine
,” she’d said. After taking the capsule, Chikako had confessed that it was a chemical she loved, and hadn’t enjoyed for years—Mallee had given it to her for old times’ sake. They had time to kill, and she didn’t know any better way to pass a long stretch of time. The
ibogaine
gave her pleasant waking hallucinations that she could manipulate and a decided sexual appetite. He could appreciate the former from experience. Still, while they talked in the bare little
virtual
room, seated on a small futon, he saw the cool principal he knew thaw into a spirited, blithe woman with an urgent desire to touch and be touched. She insisted that she would show him what a sexual appetite was—after all, here they were in the perfect place for it. “Not for real sex,” she’d sworn at the outset. “Just for fun. I’ll demonstrate it to you, that’s all. Who knows, maybe it’ll jog your memory. Maybe you’ve used
virtual
before and don’t remember. We’ll rattle that damn bypass of yours.” For that chance, he agreed.

The suits were lightweight, if as ugly as trash bags. They included soft boots and gloves. “You’re supposed to have a shower before this,” she explained, “you know—good hygiene.” She handed him a codpiece unit, then had to explain how it fit on. She had a corresponding unit of her own. “Easy to clean,” she said. “Much cheaper to replace if anything shorts out.”

With the hood on, he expected a rush of claustrophobia, but before that could happen, Peat snatched him from the room and into a three-dimensional fantasy world. Initially, it didn’t look real, but like a computer model. Its depth conflicted with his senses, and she let him wander around in it a few minutes to orient himself before she shifted into the libidinous programs that Grofe’s clientele used.

Now he couldn’t feel the suit at all, and experienced a pit-of-the-stomach clench if he tried to override the program by will and locate his own body. Was he, for instance, erect in reality as in fantasy? No way to tell from within the suit.

She made the room an eighteenth century palace. He could feel the thick rug beneath his bucket-style boots. The new woman with him wore a blue satin gown with a ribboned echelle front. A canopied bed stood beside her. She climbed onto it, her breasts spilling like fruit out of her deep neckline. He knew the bed was nothing but the futon pallet. He knew how high it was, how small. Yet, when he rubbed the quilt between his thumb and fingers, he could feel the embroidery.

“Come and talk to me, Angel,” said her new voice.

He, wearing a red and silver knee-length brocaded vest, climbed up beside her.

“Take off your boots, goodman.”

He sat up and tugged them off. He appeared to have on two sets of stockings, the outer one ending in lace at midcalf.

“Can you feel the silks underneath?”

He watched his toes wriggle. “Yes. It’s remarkable.”

“So now you see why this is so popular. Most of my clients could afford their own suits, and had sets at home to connect us up. A few had sets in their office. We could be in different buildings, sometimes different states or countries, although satellite signals aren’t as reliable. Plus you run the risk of having your sex play accidentally broadcast into the middle of a conference call or a few households, or monitored and recorded by outside parties. It’s never been exposed, but it probably goes on all the time. I’ve disks of my own of some very peculiar SC execs’ fantasies. Not the kind of personal expressions they’d like to see available as alternative viewing. That’s why an establishment like Grofe’s does so well. It’s a thousand times safer. Really the safest sex possible. You experience the fantasy completely but no one is really touching you or fucking you. No one even has to be in the room with you. But, then, you aren’t in the room, either.”

He wondered, “Why not dispense with the second person altogether?”

“Because,” she said as she eased her hand up under his vest, sliding her palm down around the bulge at his groin, “a computer simulation won’t surprise you like this. No matter how it’s programmed, it’s programmed, and you’ll end up aware of it. Two of us makes it livelier. I can change anything you want. I was expert at this. I handle all the intricate details and you don’t ever know absolutely what I’ll do or when I’ll ease you back into reality for the real thing.” She saw that she was getting a response from him, and withdrew her hand, lying back coquettishly on the pillows.

“There are still plenty of people who want to have it all, you understand—the fantasy character
and
the person behind it. The danger comes with that kind of individual if they don’t see where the fantasy stops. On the other hand, they pay the most handsomely, for the extras. The trick is remaining more exotic than all the virtual femmes anyone concocts. And darlin’—” She jumped out of bed, shape-shifting as she landed. The room cubistically turned into a hayloft, the bed became dry bales of hay. She faced him, a honey-haired cowgirl entity with a set of six-shooters strapped on her ample hips and nothing else on at all. “—I’ve been every one of them at one time or another.”

Her nudity stood out here, the more so for the shock of the change, the strangeness of the environment to which he couldn’t adjust. He sat up on the hay, naked and lean. His body looked very much like his own, real form. He studied his hands, the musculature of his arms. “How many are there?” he asked.

She spun a pistol around her finger, then reholstered it. “No idea. They’re always changing. Sometimes, people want the fantasy to be of a parent or someone they can’t have but desire. I’ve known of Jesus fuckers, and Elvis fuckers, and even one dimwit who fucked only presidents. He finally gave it up after fixating for too long on Ronald Reagan. Maybe the whole thing’s therapeutic. People are far stranger than textbooks let on.”

“You make it sound like something has been opened that would’ve been better off closed.”

She shrugged. Her breasts bobbled. “I’d never advocate that. It’s better for the likes of Mallee than what came before. Prostitutes were a dying breed. Bad drugs and killer diseases amidst our otherwise lethal society, that about did them in. The johns need you but they don’t
want
to need you. You understand? They won’t help you. Not even to themselves do they want to admit that need. It’s very neurotic. Mallee calls it ‘The Victorian Deathgrip’ partly because of all the 1890s trappings of this place. Underneath all the electronics, it’s still there, but at least we’re more in control now. Otherwise, we might all have died off, like buffalo.”

“What’s a buffalo?” he asked.

***