until his fingers rub her ribs, just above the threshold of a tickle. Tongues
plunge. For a moment this is too much and she breaks the kiss and noses the
hollow of his neck, shuddering.
Minstrel is not the most lovely and stimulating she has ever had, but she
is so astonishingly consistent with him. Surprise, warmth, expectancy, and
then the final salt: Minstrel prefers men. Alice has a special command, a leave
he gives few other women, if any. She specks him with his male lovers, wonders
whether she would have the same effect on them; likely not, doesn't matter,
the warm fantasy is well away now, sailing with courses full.
They clasp tight from breasts to knees. He intrudes between her thighs and
friction again becomes oily smoothness, but he does not press or angle. Minstrel
knows her times and frequencies. He is an instinctive lover. She might shiver
a muscle here, under his palm, and he adjusts the momentary mix of pressings
and withdrawals to suit her as a horseman adjusts to his mount.
The comparisons are becoming more and more basic, the sweetest and deep-es{
of cliches. She will ride, float, flow, sit in the waves, feel the high warm
sun; all images in her mind, most from past joins, some never real, all falling
like drowsy rivers of fine hot sand down her spine.
"Why, Cuntia," he murmurs. "So long lacking?"
"Shh," she says into his ear. Their motion more pronounced. Francis forgotten,
hooks ignored, though she makes sure not to rub the transponders
loose as she brushes her temples against his chest. She disengages, though she
20 GREG BEAR
by withholding. She rubs him down his stomach with her cheeks, lips, high
sensual definition against the tight skin.
"Good," Francis says.
Close-up, curls and the sweetly ugly rise, more beautiful than kittens; she
adores him. Minstrel is all-valuable, all-honored; she suffers no disgrace by
doing anything for him. She does not know what willingness he will take
advantage of. Sometimes he assumes brusque anger, a delicate but dominant
brutishness that toes a thin thread yet never goes beyond earnest play. But
today Minstrel is infinitely gentle and this also falls within her range of surprise
and expectancy.
"Wicked as Lucrezia," he says.
His languor is reward enough for the minute she thinks she has. Sure
enough, at the end of a minute, he takes her head between his palms and
removes her, and she leans back on the stiff pallet, knowing she need do
nothing but react, and that none too vigorously. Among the men she has had,
the many hundreds of encounters long and short, professional and personal,
Minstrel needs the least indication of her fulfilled desire. He already feels what
she feels from the shivers and twitches of her knees and the texture of the skin
of her hips and ribs and the muscles beneath.
"Good," Francis says.
"Under Labia's disguise, Glans finds shy Clitoris," Minstrel whispers into
her ear. His weight is a surge of southern air; his breath and sweat musk. She
can smell his body, a whiff of zoo, nervous but not weak; this is the part she
savors most, reaching a man's deep concerns. After all their years, Minstrel
wonders whether she will approve. Since she knows she will approve, his concern
is a delight. Poor good men, all the good lovers, always this stretch of
nerves before the partaking. A laugh even of delight might be misunderstood.
Seconds pass before she shows anything other than complete and unquestioning
acceptance.
"Good," Francis says. "And..."
She clutches Minstrel, presses his butt down with her nails, feels the slipping
entrance, sucks in him and an uneven breath, simultaneously.
Francis quotes again:
"With sword in hand, and with the old man went;/Who soon him brought
unto a secret part,/Where that false couple were full closely ment/In wanton
lust and lewd embracement;/Which when he saw, he burnt with gealous fire,/
The eye of reason was with rage yblent,/And would have slaine them in his
furious ire,/But hardly was restrained of that aged sire..."
Minstrel shudders.
"Enough. Cut."
He holds, withdraws. Alice's eyes dart around the stage. "What?" she says.
Cross Knight. You are a Spright, a Succubus, not a true female. Everything
/
SLANT 21
Minstrel lies back, flushed. Alice wants to climb onto him but that would
not be professional. Of all things in her life that would keep her from him, it
is this isinglass membrane of her working self-respect.
Francis monitors Leni, his eyes glazing over. Alice looks on the camera as a
kind of dragon, a ravenous audience suspended in a line through all future
time behind the camera's many senses.
"Perfect, both of you," Francis says, returning and smiling. "Good enough
to earn a credit. Your followers will love this."
Minstrel smiles back wearily. The muscles of his jaw tighten. The spell is
broken and he is thinking of the sooty world.
Minstrel leans over her. "Glans would ask dear Cuntia to marry him," he
says, "but the pressures of royal life.., you know how it is."
"Cuntia would accept," Alice replies.
"We shouldn't leave this unfinished," Minstrel says.
Alice is puzzled. "No."
Francis shouts for the stage to be cleared.
"But we have to." Minstrel smiles. "Better for the next time."
This is their third dry embrace in the past six months. They are nearly
always in shadow, backmind layering now, never up front in the fulfilled
lUX.
"I'll be waiting," Alice says, and Minstrel strokes her cheek before climbing
the stairs to get dressed.
Ahmed stares at her, flushed and awed.
"You're new, aren't you?" Alice asks too sweetly. She puts on her robe and
climbs the stairs after. At the top, she hears her pad chime in a loop of her
street clothes. Minstrel is half-dressed. Times past, they might have finished
their business up here, neither of them believing pent-up passion to be healthy,
but she can see Minstrel's heart and mind are elsewhere.
The courtesies have fled. They've peaked and both know it.
She pulls the small pad from her purse and takes the call. "Alice here."
"I couldn't leave a message or let our homes talk to each other. This is
Twist."
Twist is younger than Alice by six years but already a veteran. They met
two years ago and took a quick liking to each other. Twist--if she calls at
all--treats Alice as a kind of mother.
"Hello, Twist. I'm just getting off a plug for Francis."
"Something's queer, Alice."
"What?"
"I'm acting really queer. I need to see somebody."
"How queer?"
"I'm obsessing all over the place, about David."
Fuck artists, like most sex care workers, take on so many partners, Alice
can not immediately remember just who David is. She thinks they might have
22
GREG BEAR
"I'm not a therapist, Twist."
"I called my mother, Alice," Twist says. "Before I called you. You know what
that cost me?"
Twist often hints at the monstrosity of her mother. Alice has taken it all
with a few grains; even therapied, Twist never flows the straight pipe.
Alice sits on a bench and crosses her legs. Minstrel gives her an exaggerated
grimace and twinkle-wave with his fingers, picks up his bag. Alice watches
him go with a small sharp sadness.
"All right, why not go straight to a therapist?"
"Because David took me out of the agency," Twist says. "I'm out of the
payment grid. He was getting me jobs. He has connections."
"Ah," Alice says, suddenly remembering David. The David, Twist called
him: a small, thin man with dark hair. Alice had instantly specked him as a
scheming litter scrawn desperately trying to make up for being born a runt,
always sure he had the answers. Twist adores him, hangs on his every reedy
word.
"Well, I'm sure the agency--" Alice begins.
"David won't let me. He's gone aggly, too."
"What do you mean?"
"I feel like I felt when I began therapy. I was thirteen, Alice. I was a bad
case, a real mess. It's all back now, only worse." She gives a painful, nervous
giggle. "David says it must have never really took."
"Why don't you come to my apt and let's talk," Alice suggests. "I can be
there in half an hour--"
"I don't know that David will let me."
Alice takes a deep breath. Some new fluffers are coming up the stairs. Francis
is working overtime.
"I do need to talk, Alice. Going to be home tomorrow?"
"Morning, yes."
"I'll be there at ten. I'll set up David with somebody. Cardy's fuckish for
him. Then I can get free for a couple of hours."
Alice cringes. That word--Minstrel's tetragrammaton--sounds too hard on
Twist's lips. Twist is like a little girl in so many ways. Alice realizes this is
uncharacteristic; sex words hard or soft generally do not bother her, whatever
her private opinions. She is darked by the scrim of others. "I'll see you in the morning," Alice says.
"Yeah. Love you, Alice."
"You too." She closes the link and stands among the four new fluffers, none
of whom she knows. They all wear butterfly colors; they come from Sextras,
now the top Yox temp agency for fuck artists. They smile at her; they know
who she is. She used to be heat made flesh.
She smiles back, polite and a little condescending, shakes a few hands,
tongue-kisses one of the bold males, and then is down the stairs, where Ahmed
/ SLANT 23
The monstrosity of this technological era is indescribable. A man can
carry armies of progeny within his testicles, none of them his own...
some perhaps not purely human. A woman can bear within her unnatural
"artworks" quickened by science and surely as soulless as stones. We sicken
and despair. There is nothing of God in these machines and machine-men.
The Mother Church has nothing to offer the time into which we have been born but a
warning that sounds like a curse: As you sow, so shall you reap!
mPope Alexander VII, 2043
From: Anonymous Remailer
To: Pope Alexander VII
Date: December 24 2043
"You're just a Catholic Dickhead, you know that? Come to my town (wouldn't
you like to know you shit) sometime and I'll show you a GOOD TIME. Let your
bodiguards know I'm about seven feet tall and dresed like the Demans in NUKEY
NOOKY which I bet youve plaid too you asswipe hippocrit!!!!! Have a nice
day!!!!!"
EMAIL Archive (ref Security Inv, Re: Thread: Encyclical 2043, Vatican Library
Cultural Tracking STAFF/INDA 332; reverse track through Finland> ANONYM
REMAIL Code REROUTE> SWITZERLAND/ZIMBABWE> ACCT HDFinster >
Harrison D. Finster ADDRESS 245 W. Blessoe Street Apt 3-H Greensboro, NC,
USA. PROFILE> 27 years of age at time of message, >CONCLUSION: FLAME
PROFILE No action necessary, ref Vatican Internal Investigator comments:
"Young, shit for brains.")
3 ALLOSTASIS
For Martin Burke, life has become anaspace, all motion but no engagement,
no interaction, no sense of progress. And yet he is not unsuccessful.
He moved from the combs of Southcoast two years ago. He had set himself
up as a design consultant for miniature therapy monitors, microscopic implants
that roamed freely in the body and brain, regulating balances and adjusting
natural neurochemical concentrations. All of the delayed but no less painful
publicity about his involvement with the mass-murderer and poet Emanuel
Goldsmith had put an end to this new career; no corporation wanted to be
associated with him after that, though they still license and manufacture from
24 GREG BEAR
Since moving to Seattle, he has worked in special mental therapy, out of
the third floor of an old, dignified building off Pioneer Square.
Outside it is a rare cloudless winter morning, though at eight o'clock still
dark. On the Southcoast of California, at the end of his last career, the sun had
seemed inhumanly probing and constant. Martin had yearned for change,
weather, clouds to hide under...
Now he yearns for sun again.
Strangely, away from California, the publicity has actually brought in new
clients; but in balance, it also ended the love of his life. He has not seen or
heard from Carol in a year, though he keeps in touch with his young daughter,
Steplanie.
Martin enters the round lobby and pushes open the door to his office, slinging
his personal pad and purse onto their hooks on an antique coat rack. He
has resisted the expense of installing a dattoo or skin pad, with circuitry and
touches routed through mildly electrified skin, preferring instead a more old-fashioned
implement, and keeping his body natural and inviolate into his forty-eighth
year.
His receptionist, Arnold, and assistant, Kim, greet him from their half-glass
cubicle at the center of the lobby. Arnold is large and well-trained in both
public relations and physical restraint. Kim, small and seemingly shy, is a
powerhouse therapeutic psychology student with a minor in business relations.
He hopes he can keep them working for him for at least the next year, before
their agency fields better offers.
Tucked out of sight, a year-old INDA sits quietly on a shelf overlooking
the reception area, monitoring all that happens in the office's five rooms.
He prepares for the long day with a ten-minute staff meeting. He goes over
patient requests for unscheduled visits. "Tell Mrs. Danner I'll see her at noon
Friday," he instructs Arnold.
"I'm off that day," Arnold says. "She's a five-timer." Martin looks over Mrs.
Danner's record. She's a five-time CTR--core therapy reject--with a long
criminal record. "Want me to be here?"
"She's not violent," Martin says. "Klepto mostly, inclined to hurt herself
and not others. Enjoy your day off."
Martin has expanded his business by taking referrals from therapists who
can't handle their patients. After relieving himself of his own demon, he has
a special touch with people who are still ridden.
"And Mr. Perkins--?" Arnold asks.
Martin makes a wry face. Kim smiles. Mr. Perkins is much l
ess difficult
than Mrs. Danner, but less pleasant to deal with. He is unable to establish
lasting relations with people and relies on human-shaped arbeiters for company.
Three previous therapists have been unsuccessful treating him, even with
the most modern nano monitors and neuronal enhancement.
"Third request in a week," Martin says. "I suppose he's still having trouble
/
SLANT 25
The patient log floats before Arnold's face like a small swarm of green insects. "His wife, he calls her."
"He can't bear to deactivate the old personality. That passes for kindness in
him, I suppose." Martin smirks. "I'll see him Monday. So who's up for this
morning?"
"You have Joseph Breedlove at nine and Avril de Johns at ten."
Martin wrinkles his forehead in speculation. Neither Breedlove nor de Johns
are difficult patients; they fall into that category of unhappy people who regard
therapy as a replacement for real accomplishment. Therapy to date can only
make the best of what is already available. "I have an hour free at eleven?"
"Of course."
"Then all is in order. It's eight-thirty now. I have a half-hour until Mr.
Breedlove. No touches until nine."
"Right," Arnold says.
Martin takes his pouch and walks down the narrow hallway to the back
office. Sa,ctz/m Sa,ctorm. Sometimes he sleeps here, since there is little to go
back to at home. He missed the chance for the island sharehold on Vashon--damnable
Northwest offishness, thirty-year residents and born-here's discriminating
shamelessly against the fresh arrivals--and so Martin's home is a condo