And then the motion.

The second time took longer, and the empathin lent it an air that was more aesthetic than sexual. Taking her cue from the signals gusting out of my sensorium, Miriam Bancroft settled into a slow churning motion while I watched her taut belly and outthrust breasts with detached lust. For no reason I could discern, the Hendrix piped a slow, deep ragga beat in from the corners of the room, and a lighting effect patterned the ceiling above us with swirling blotches of red and purple. When the effect tilted and the swirling stars came to dapple our bodies, I felt my mind tilting with it and my perceptions slid sideways out of focus. There was only the grinding of Miriam Bancroft’s hips over me, and fragmented glimpses of her body and face wrapped in coloured light. When I came, it was a distant explosion that seemed to have more to do with the woman shuddering to a halt astride me than with my own sleeve.

Later, as we lay side by side, hands milking each other through further inconclusive peaks and troughs, she said, “What do you think of me?”

I looked down the length of my body to what her hand was doing, and cleared my throat.

“Is that a trick question?”

She laughed, the same throaty cough that I had warmed to in the chart room at Suntouch House.

“No. I want to know.”

“Do you care?” It was not said harshly, and somehow the Merge Nine leached it of its brutal overtones.

“You think that’s what it is to be a Meth?” The word sounded strange on her lips, as though she were not talking about herself. “You think we don’t care about anything young?”

“I don’t know,” I said truthfully. “It’s a point of view that I’ve heard. Living three hundred years is bound to change your perspectives.”

“Yes, it does.” Her breath caught slightly as my fingers slid inside her. “Yes, like that. But you don’t stop caring. You see it. All sliding past you. And all you want to do is grab on, hold on to something, to stop it all. Draining away.”

“Is that right?”

“Yes, it is. So what do you think of me?”

I leaned over her and looked at the young woman’s body she inhabited, the fine lines of her face and the old, old eyes. I was still stoned on the Merge Nine, and I couldn’t find a flaw anywhere in her. She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I gave up the struggle for objectivity and bowed my head to kiss her on one breast.

“Miriam Bancroft, you are a wonder to behold, and I would willingly trade my soul to possess you.”

She staved off a chuckle. “I’m serious. Do you like me?”

“What kind of a question—”

“I’m serious.” The words were grounded deeper than the empathin. I pulled in some control and looked her in the eyes.

“Yes,” I said simply. “I like you.”

Her voice lowered into her throat. “Do you like what we did?”

“Yes, I like what we did.”

“Do you want more?”

“Yes, I want more.”

She sat up to face me. The milking motions of her hand grew harder, more demanding. Her voice hardened to match. “Say it again.”

“I want more. Of you.”

She pushed me down with a hand flat on my chest and leaned over me. I was growing back to somewhere near a full erection. She started to time her strokes, slow and sharp.

“Out west,” she murmured, “about five hours away by cruiser, there’s an island. It’s mine. No one goes there, there’s a fifty-kilometre exclusion umbrella, satellite patrolled, but it’s beautiful. I’ve built a complex there, with a clone bank and a re-sleeving facility.” Her voice got that uneven edge in it again. “I sometimes decant the clones. Sleeve copies of myself. To play. Do you understand what I’m offering you?”

I made a noise. The image she had just planted, of being the focus for a pack of bodies like this one, all orchestrated by the same mind, tightened the last notches on my hard-on, and her hand slid up and down its full length as if machined there.

“What was that?” She leaned over me, brushing her nipples across my chest.

“How long?” I managed, through the coiling and uncoiling of my stomach muscles, through the flesh and mist tones of the Merge Nine. “Is this fun park invitation good for?”

She grinned then, a grin of pure lechery.

“Unlimited rides,” she said.

“But for a limited period only, right?”

She shook her head. “No, you don’t understand me. This place is mine. All of it, the island, the sea around it, everything on it. Is mine. I can keep you there as long as you care to stay. Until you tire of it.”

“That might take a long time.”

“No.” There was a hint of sadness in the way she shook her head this time and her gaze fell a little. “No it won’t.”

The pistoning grip on my penis slackened fractionally. I groaned and grabbed at her hand, forcing it back into motion. The move seemed to rekindle her, and she went to work again in earnest, speeding up and slowing down, bending to feed me her breasts or supplement her strokes with sucking and licking. My time perception spiralled out of sight to be replaced with an endless gradient of sensation that sloped upward, excruciatingly slowly, towards a peak I could hear myself begging for in drugged tones somewhere far away.

As the orgasm loomed, I was vaguely aware through the Merge Nine link that she was sinking fingers into herself, rubbing with an uncontrolled desire completely at odds with the calculation with which she manipulated me. Fine-tuned by the empathin, she brought on her own peak a few seconds before mine and as I started to come, she smeared her own juices hard over my face and thrashing body.

Whiteout.

And when I came to, much later, with the Merge Nine crash laid across me like a lead weight, she was gone like a fever dream.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

When you have no friends, and the woman you slept with last night has left you with a screaming head and without a word, you have a limited number of options. When I was younger I used to go out looking for squalid brawls in the streets of Newpest. This got a couple of people stabbed, neither of them me, and led in turn to my apprenticeship in one of the Harlan’s World gangs (Newpest chapter). Later on, I upgraded this kind of retreat by joining the military; brawling with a purpose, and with more extensive weaponry, but as it turned out, just as squalid. I don’t suppose I should have been as surprised as I was—the only thing the marine corps recruiters had really wanted to know was how many fights I had won.

These days I’ve evolved a slightly less destructive response to general chemical malaise. When a forty-minute swim in the Hendrix’s underground pool failed to dispel either the longing for Miriam Bancroft’s torrid company or the Merge Nine hangover, I did the only thing I felt equipped for. I ordered painkillers from room service, and went shopping.

Bay City had already settled into the swing of the day by the time I finally hit the streets, and the commercial centre was choked with pedestrians. I stood on the edges for a couple of minutes, then dived in and began to look in windows.

A blonde marine sergeant with the unlikely name of Serenity Carlyle taught me to shop, back on the World. Prior to that I had always employed a technique best described as precision purchase. You identify your target, you go in, get it and come out. You can’t get what you want, cut your losses and get out equally fast. Over the period that we spent together, Serenity weaned me off this approach, and sold me her philosophy of consumer grazing.

“Look,” she told me one day in a Millsport coffee house. “Shopping—actual, physical shopping—could have been phased out centuries ago if they’d wanted it that way.”

“They who?”

“People. Society.” She waved a hand impatiently. “Whoever. They had the capacity back then. Mail order, virtual supermarkets, automated debiting systems. It could have been done and it never happened. What does that tell you?”