Mind Over Ship (10 page)

Fred had been wondering that himself, but he never slowed down. “Get out of my way,” he growled. When the bee persisted in blocking him, he said, “Desist!” and the mech complied, closing its frame and flying outside his privacy zone.

But ten more talking heads replaced it and peppered him with questions: Did Applied People collude with you in infiltrating the clinic? Have you talked to officer Dell since you strangled him? Where did you acquire the black market identikit? Is it true you were on the Starke payroll during the twenty-first century?

“Desist! Desist!” Fred shouted and tried to bat the mechs out of the air with his duffel. They retreated from his privacy zone, but the main body of bees had returned, and everywhere Fred turned, they blocked his way and roared questions at him. A miniature diorama opened at his feet displaying a clearing in a wooded area where two men struggled in desperate combat. One of the figures was a pike wearing a Roosevelt Clinic uniform and the other was a russ. The ground around them was littered with blasted splinters of tree branches. The russ knocked the pike down and straddled him, grabbing up a sharp stick and jamming it into his ear. The pike screamed and stopped struggling, but the russ only shoved the stick in deeper. He rocked back and forth against the fallen man, his crotch bulging with excitement.

“No!” Fred shouted over the din. “That’s a lie! It wasn’t like that at all!”
He covered his head with his arms, but the bees pressed closer, and a new picture opened. In it Fred was beating a fallen russ with a baton. Again and again he struck him, though his brother made no effort to defend himself. Fred pummeled his head, his back, his ribs, until he swung so hard the carbon fiber club splintered, something impossible in real life. “Stop that!” Fred cried. “Stop!”

“Desist!” Mary shouted. She was at Fred’s side. “Desist, desist, desist!” she kept shouting until she had cleared a little bubble of free space around them. Then she took Fred’s hand and led him through the melee back to the limo. “Desist! Desist!” But when they reached the car, a veil of bees hung between them and the door and stubbornly and illegally ignored her demand to move.

Suddenly the tiny mechs began to drop from the air like pebbles. They fell in waves all around the hapless couple and beat their wings spastically against the concrete floor. When the way was clear, the limo door gulled open, and Mary urged Fred inside. The jewel-like fallen mechs crunched under their feet with every step. At first Mary was appalled—the cost!—but she remembered who she was, Mary Skarland, the evangeline, and she giddily ground a fortune of hardware under her elevated heels.

More mechs were arriving when Fred and Mary entered the limo, and Mary ordered the door to shut. It lowered but did not shut completely until a bluish blur flew inside. It was a solitary bee, larger than most; it alighted on Mary’s shoulder and crawled under the lapel of her suit.

Fred said nothing, only looked around the interior of the limo: five pods, each a safe harbor for two people, each seat an overstuffed lap of luxury. He fell into the nearest one and allowed the harness to snake over his shoulders and around his waist. It buckled with a decisive snap.

Mary took the seat next to his in the same pod, and when the car released its brakes and began to roll to the injection ramp, she said, “We’ll go to Provo for our own car.”

“No, don’t bother,” Fred said, all the fight gone out of him. “Like you said, it’s just a car.” To the car he said, “Chicago, APRT 7.” Mary bit her lip.

The car rolled down the ramp. It descended several levels to the transcontinental grid, gaining speed, and suddenly they were pressed against their seatbacks as they were shot into the pneumatic stream. The tube walls outside their windows blurred into a smooth umber streak before dimming to blackness.

As gently as she could, Mary said, “You know, Fred, since neither of us
were employed by Applied People anymore, they asked me to move out of the APRT.”

He turned to her, his outrage rekindled. “They fired you because of me? They put you out on the street? Why didn’t you tell me this?”

“No, Fred, it’s nothing like that. I
wanted
to quit. I don’t
have
to work anymore, remember? I own a hollyholo character, a unit of the Leena line. I have my own independent income, I told you about that. I quit Applied People on my own.”

He seemed confused. “Yes, I remember about the Leena, but did you tell me about quitting Applied People? About moving out of the APRT?”

She nodded.

“But you work for Ellen Starke, don’t you? You live there now and borrow her limo whenever you like?” He spoke with strained calm, as though asking her if she had a lover.

She could tell how much he wanted to be told he was wrong, but lying would gain them nothing. Still, it was too soon to have this conversation. “We’ll have plenty of time to decide where and how we’ll live, Fred. For the next few days, why don’t we just stay in a hotel.”

She could see how ready he was to fight—he must have thought she was taking him to Starke Manse. Fortunately, Lyra piped up and said,
We’ve reserved you a suite at Cass Tower.

“Why don’t we stay in Cass Tower, Fred? I’ve reserved a suite there.”

He nodded but wasn’t able to let it drop completely. “Cass Tower? Are you an aff then?”

She chuckled. “You don’t have to be an aff to stay a few nights at Cass Tower.” But, in fact, you did. Not even her hollyholo’s sizable income would afford that address for long. “You don’t mind?” she said. “Just until the dust settles?”

“What’s to mind?” he said, staring at his reflection in the darkened window. “Living like an aff.”

WHEN THEY ARRIVED at Cass Tower, the limo bypassed the public depot and entered a lift stack that took them directly to their floor. Their suite was on the 630th floor, but its tony altitude was offset by the fact that it was far from any exterior wall, just like their old APRT efficiency. But when they entered and Mary saw how nice it was, she thought it would do.

Their things, which Georgine had sent over, were arranged on shelves and in closets. There was no kitchen but a recessed nook with a kulinmate and wet bar. Fred walked around the living room, taking it all in. He opened
bathroom drawers and seemed pleased to recognize things inside. In a bedroom closet he found his favorite bathrobe. The faithful old slipper puppy roused itself to drag out his felt moccasins. He bent down and patted the slipper puppy on its head and was actually grinning when he closed the closet door. He went back to the bathroom and called up archival images of himself in the mirror. They were all there. “I’m still handsome,” he called out to her. Finally, Fred wandered to a stout-looking door on a wall of the main room. “Another closet?”

“I don’t think so,” Mary said.

The door was sealed like an airlock hatch and seemed much too heavy-duty for what he found inside. “A sauna?”

“Look closer.”

Fred climbed into the sauna, fully clothed, and sat on a bench to ponder what was clearly a second hatch on the inner wall. Mary came in and sat opposite him. After a while Fred said, “Well, this is unexpected.”

“Think we’ll be safe from the nasty old nitwork in there?” She expected him to laugh and say yes. But he took her question seriously.

“I think so, Mary,” he said at last. “For a while at least.”

“Then we should probably use it as soon as possible, don’t you agree?” Mary pulled off her shoes and unfastened her blouse.

Fred watched with growing interest.

They set the sauna controls and climbed out. They helped each other undress, Fred grinning like an idiot. The blue bee was still under her jacket lapel. “Your little chaperone will have to wait out here,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

They each drank a liter of expressing visola before entering the sauna and sealing the outer hatch. They were naked, and they brought nothing in with them. The floor started to hum beneath their feet as motors and pumps came to life. A bluish fog entered through ceiling ports and grew so thick in the tiny space that for a little while they couldn’t see each other. And then the itching began. At first, only Mary’s arms itched, and she was able to keep herself from scratching. Then there was a fizz up her nose that made her snort and pinch her nostrils. Then the skin at her ankles began to itch very aggressively, and she fought to keep from clawing at herself.

Fred said, “The nits?”

“I hate this part.”

“It shouldn’t last much longer.” Fred didn’t appear uncomfortable at all, which wasn’t fair.

Mary remained strong for as long as she could, and when her scalp
erupted in flames and an army of ants marched up her legs, Fred leaned over and grabbed her hands. “Just a little,” she pleaded, but he held her until the nits had worked themselves out of her skin. Then he kissed her hands and let them go. He ladled water on the furnace rocks, which hissed and billowed steam.

“A good idea combining a null lock with a sauna,” he said. “Sweat all the crap out of you.”

He was right, and they spent a half hour in the heat as the in-lock completed its cycle. At last, a draft of cool, purified air rushed in, and the inner hatch to the null suite unbolted with a clank.

Mary was delighted to discover that the null suite was not a cramped space with only a cot and port-a-potty but a full mini-suite in its own right. Full kulinmate, bath, closets, a resident arbeitor and house cleaning scuppers, and, dominating the main room, a bed large enough to stretch out in.

Fred opened cupboards and the oversized refrigerator. “We have provisions for a month,” he said, amazed. He took out a couple of liter bottles of Orange Flush and opened one for her. “First things first.”

They found bathrobes, and they toured the suite as they forced down the sweet diuretic concoction. Fred’s erection hadn’t flagged since Mary removed her shoes in the sauna, and she allowed herself to feel optimistic.

While they were waiting for the effects of the Orange Flush to kick in, they took a shower together. They soaped each other and rinsed away all the tiny broken machinery littering their skin. Then they had a picnic on the bed in their bathrobes. They drank liters of ’Lyte and dashed to the toilet every few minutes. After an hour or so of this, their urine ran clear and the urgency subsided. They each took a memorable dump, like quicksilver sausages. Finally, with their bodies purged inside and out, their thirst and hunger satisfied, there was only one urge left to appease.

Mary said, “Are the nits watching us?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Are we completely, absolutely alone?”

He opened her robe and ravaged her with his gaze. “Thank you, Mary, for this gift.”

For all the pent-up desire, the forced separation, the long tube ride from the prison, the nudist intimacy of the sauna, and especially the utter privacy of the null suite, their first intercourse was brief and to the point. Merely a down payment on later, more tender lovemaking. And so it was, with full belly and empty bladder, Fred plowed into Mary like a moose through a windshield.

Soon thereafter, they fell asleep under a silken cover in the middle of the bed in the unwatched room. They both stirred continuously throughout the night and got no rest at all. Never once did their bodies lose contact with each other. They lay rump to rump or knee to knee. Sometimes in a full body spoon. Sometimes by wisps of hair, but always in contact. Their unsleeping skin demanded it.

MARY STIRRED SUDDENLY, crying “Oomph!” The force of her awakening was transmitted through her knees directly to Fred, who sat up and said, “Uhh?”

“Nothing,” Mary whispered. “A dream. Go back to sleep.”

He lay down. A dream. The room was so quiet his ears rang. “Tell me,” he said. When she didn’t, he slithered closer and wrapped himself around her. “The first dream in an unfamiliar bed is important,” he quoted her from long ago. “Tell me.”

She snuggled in his big, familiar arms. “I know you’re humoring me. You don’t give a rat’s ass for dreams.”

“Not true,” he yawned.

“Liar!” But after a little while, she said, “It was one of those anxiety dreams where you’re running as fast as you can, but you don’t seem to be getting anywhere, and you’re late. Horribly, horribly late.”

The floor provided the room a low-lumen glow; otherwise, it was darker than his cell. He said, “You’re probably stressed out because of me.”

“Because of all the bees,” she replied, and that was probably most of it. But in the dream she had been running up steps, wide, shiny, marbelite steps like in a museum or a court house. Up, up, unable to catch her breath.

“Well, we’re safe now,” Fred said and squeezed her. What she said about the rat’s ass was true, but he knew that you ignored an evangeline’s dreams at your own peril. This one seemed innocuous enough, and he was asleep before he knew it and having a dream of his own. A big dream. He awoke
with a start. The ceiling was dawning, and everything in the room appeared in shades of gray, except the black pinpoints of her eyes.

“You were dreaming,” she said.

“Was not.”

Mary tsk-tsked. “Fred Londenstane, please remember who you’re talking to.”

Fred scooped her up and drew her to him. “Now I remember,” he said and stole a kiss, but she would not be distracted. “All right, all right. It was only an anxiety dream, like yours.”