found it. When Sarah was fourteen she'd run with the first boy who'd promised
her a place free from pain; two years later, when she'd bought her way out of
her first contract and come back for him, Daud had been shattered beyond
repair, the needle already in his arm. She'd led him to the new house where
she worked-it was the only place she had-and there he'd learned to earn his
living, as she had learned in her own time. He is broken still, and as long as
they are in the streets, there is no way of healing him.
If she hadn't cracked, if she hadn't run away, she might have been able to
protect him.
She won't crack again.
She returns to the other room and sees Daud lying on the sofa, one sandal
hanging with the straps tangled between his toes. Tobacco smoke drifts up from
his nostrils. Jackstraw is sitting next to him on the sofa and drinking one of
his beers. He glances up.
"You look like you're limping," Jackstraw says. "Would you like me to rub your
legs?"
"No," Sarah says quickly; and then realizes she is being too sharp. "No," she
says again, with a smile. "Thank you. But it's a bone bruise. If you touched
me, I'd scream."
ARTIFICIAL DREAMS
The Plastic Girl is a hustler's idea of the good life. There is a room for
zonedance, and there are headsets that plug you into euphoric states or
pornography or whatever it is you need and are afraid to shoot into your
veins. Orbital pharmaceutical companies provide the effects free, as
advertising for their products. There are dancers on the mirrored bar in the
back, a bar equipped with arcade games so that if you win, a connection snaps
in one of the dancer's garments and it falls off. If you win big, all the
clothes fall off all the dancers at once.
Sarah is in the big front room: brassy music, red leather booths, brass
ornaments. She does not, and will probably never, rate the quiet room in the
back, all brushed aluminum and a lot of dark wood that might have been the
last mahogany tree in Southeast Asia-that room is for the big boys who run
this fast and dangerous world, and though there isn't a sign that says NO
WOMEN
ALLOWED, there might as well be. Sarah is an independent contractor and rates
a certain amount of respect, but in the end she is still meat for hire, though
on a more elevated plane than she once was.
But still, the red room is nice. There are holograms, colors and helixes like
modeled DNA, floating just above eye level, casting their variegated light
through the crystal and sparkling liquor held in the patrons' hands, and there
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are sockets at every table for comp decks so that the patrons can keep up with
their portfolios, and there are girls with reconstructed breasts and faces who
come to each table in their tight plastic corsets, bring you your drink, and
watch with identical and very white smiles as you put your credit needle into
their tabulator and tap in a generous tip with your fingernail.
She is ready for the meet with Cunningham, wearing a navy blue jacket
guaranteed to protect her against kinetic violence of up to 900 foot-pounds
per square inch, and trousers good for 750. She has invested some of the
endorphins and bought the time of a pair of her peers. They are walking loose
about the bar, ready to keep Cunningham or his friends off her back if she
needs
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d.txt it. She knows she needs a clear head and has kept the endorphin dose
down. Pain is making her edgy, and she still can't sit. She stands at a small
table and sips her rum and lime, waiting.
And then Cunningham is there. Bland face, brown eyes, brown hair, brown suit.
A whispery voice that speaks of clean places she has never been, places bright
and soft against the black and pure diamond.
"Okay, Cunningham," she says. "Business."
Cunningham's eyes flicker to the mirror behind her. "Friends?" he asks.
"I don't know you."
"You've called the Hetman?" [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]