She nodded and looked down.
Many years later Neil realized, as he scanned this memory, that it was at this moment that he no longer considered Pulse as an alternative to problems he faced in life.
"Where are you from?"
"Scandia."
"How"d you get here?"
"My parents send me for their retirement."
"I can send down for a vig-toner drink," Charity offered.
They were lying in Neil"s bed. He had been trying for hours to make love to his house servant. The windows of his bedroom were open to the sound of the ocean. The impossibly bright three-quarter moon was their only light.
"No thanks," he said. "All I"d do is think about Nina."
Charity lifted his limp p.e.n.i.s with the fingertips of both hands. She gave it a light kiss.
"I like how the skin of your p.e.n.i.s is so dark compared to the rest of your body. It"s so much better than pink or red."
"That tickles," Neil said.
"Is Nina your wife?"
"No."
"Girlfriend?"
"Sometimes."
"What does that mean?"
"She"s, she"s a free spirit, a wild thing is what she calls it. I see her a lot but sometimes she goes away for a night or two . . . to get wild s.e.x with strange men or women."
"Is she very beautiful?" Charity asked wistfully.
"No. Actually she"s kind of ugly."
"No!" Charity blurted. She laughed and punched Neil playfully on the arm.
"Yeah, she is. I mean she"s real s.e.xy and there"s something about her . . ."
Charity seemed to be paying very close attention to him.
She pushed Neil"s chest with both her hands hard enough to knock him over on the bed.
"You lie," she said. "A rich man like you would not have an ugly girl."
"Yeah," Neil said, putting his hand against his chest. "Sit up," she said.
Neil did. He was enjoying their banter.
Suddenly she slapped him very hard across the face. "Ow! Why"d you do that?"
"Look," she replied, pointing at his groin.
He looked down to see that he"d begun to have an erection. When he looked back up at Charity, she slapped him even harder and pushed him down on his back.
The days pa.s.sed on Maya. Neil wandered the crowded streets looking into shops where items were actually for sale rather than lease. When he was tired of the mult.i.tudes he would have Oscar drive him to the private access suite beach. There he could wander alone for hours only rarely coming across some billionaire and his house servant.
Whenever he was alone he"d remember the last communication he had with Un Fitt. He decided that the rogue controller was a megalomaniac, some demented genius who trapped unsuspecting prods in his illegal designs.
For the first time in his life Neil read the electric news. The INA, the Western Wynde, even the Daily Dump were available on a flat screen that popped up on his breakfast table every morning. The first few days he just scanned the headlines, looking for the escapades of sports heroes and vid stars. He was also drawn to spectacular murders and great disasters. It was only by chance that he saw the name Arnold Roth reported as one of the victims of a Common Ground riot in the Bronx.
There had been a three-day food shortage, something about a delivery schedule foul-up and the subsequent lock-down of CG-109, the largest Common Ground facility in the twelve fiefs. Roth had stayed in his sleep slip to avoid trouble, the INA reported, but out-of-control rioters had thrown a Molotov c.o.c.ktail and the smoke suffocated the innocent cycler.
The Daily Dump had a completely different scenario for the death of Arnold Roth, Neil"s only friend before he came to work for GEE-PRO-9. M Roth, the Dump reported, was demanding food or freedom with thirty thousand other displaced unemployed persons when they were dispersed by sonic cannons, a standard antiriot tool of the NYSP. To prove this claim the Dump supplied a vid clip that showed Arnold yelling and brandishing his fists along with many others. Later, the Dump a.s.serted, Roth was forced into a tunnel where rioters were to be quelled with disorientation gas. Arnold was one of the unlucky few who got pressed into a lower slip. There he suffocated.
The end of the article was punctuated by a low-res electronic photo of a jumble of corpses jammed into a sleep tube. Arnold Roth"s pudgy face lolled over another dead M"s rump.
The news of his friend"s death greatly disturbed Neil, though he didn"t feel sadness or loss. Neil liked Arnold, but he"d always known that his friend was destined to become a Backgrounder. Roth could never stay on a job cycle for more than a few months. In the last year Neil hadn"t responded to Arnold"s calls. He was afraid that he might let some secret slip about GP-9. He never trusted Arnold, he hadn"t missed his company in the past year, but still he identified with the dead prod. Neil saw himself in the brown pajama uniform of Common Ground, shaking his fists in the face of the Social Police. He saw himself pressed into a hole and suffocated.
That night he sat up with his Scandian housegirl and talked about how his mother hadn"t called him in the whole year that he worked for GEE-PRO-9.
"She moved to Baltimore," Neil told Charity. "Joined an Infochurch commune that took out a twelve-year lease on a vacant warehouse there. I only know because I called her on Christmas to invite her out to dinner. If I didn"t ask her she wouldn"t have even told me that she"d moved."
The next day Neil read all three papers looking for information on Arnold. But there was no mention, not even in the Dump.
Neil read articles on every social disturbance, hoping for some new information on the Common Ground riots. The Dump claimed that MacroCode America was behind the riots but that made no sense to Neil.
There was nothing else about CG-109. The Cincinnati police department had dispatched a unit to New York, but that was because of some group defrauding their city"s treasury. A large number of Itsies had escaped Common Grounds around the world and emigrated to Jesus City, an International Socialist enclave in the Caucasus Mountains. Rioting in Boston had erupted because of a new law the FemLeague had pushed through banning self-circ.u.mcision in women.
Neil dreamed about the news. He lived out the riots and the deaths. He waded through fields of corpses, was locked in a sleep slip underground. He searched battlefields, hospitals, and graveyards for Arnold Roth. He awoke with headaches and loose bowels like in the old days before GEE-PRO-9.
"So did you f.u.c.k her?" were the first words out of Nina"s mouth when he called her on the ninth day after he"d arrived on Maya.
"What?"
"I know you got a housegirl with your place."
"Why would you care, Nina? You always get mad at me when I ask you that kinda stuff."
"I do not. And I tell you whatever it is I"m doing."
"Yeah," he said. "Yeah, I did."
"Oh," Nina said in a small voice. "How was it?"
"Nice."
"Is she pretty?"
"She doesn"t have any hair. No hair at all."
"But is she pretty?"
"She"s nice."
"So why don"t you bring her home with you if you like her so much? I"m sure she"d wanna come to New York. Why don"t you do that?"
"Nina, what"s wrong? You always said that we have to be free s.e.xually. Is it just because I"ve never done it before?"
"Don"t try and get psychological with me, M. I never seen n.o.body more than one night. Except those s.e.x-worker girls, but they"re women and that makes it different."
"Nina, Charity comes with the room," Neil said.
"So she has a name, huh?" Nina"s face contorted into a rage that Neil had never seen in her before. "f.u.c.k you!" she cried and then broke off the connection.
He tried to call her back but there was no answer at her home, the job, or on her portable unit. He wondered what it was that he had done to get her so mad. He thought about that for a while but then his mind wandered back to Un Fitt"s megalomania, Arnold Roth"s death, and his mother.
"I love you, Neil," Charity said to him later that night. The sting of her slaps were still on his cheeks, both upper and lower.
"You do?"
"I like the way you submit to me, how I found out how to get you hot and how you let me. And . . ."
"And what?"
"You"re really funny and nice. Most rich men don"t even see you. Even if they f.u.c.k you they don"t remember your face. You knew my name after the first time I said it. That"s why I wanted to make you excited, because I wanted to make you feel good."
"I don"t know what to say."
"And how you said that your girlfriend was ugly but that you loved her. How she does what she wants and you aren"t even mad at her."
"I don"t act like a rich man "cause I"m not, Charity. I"m just a guy who won a free vacation for doing a good job for a crazy boss."
"Can I come home with you anyway? I don"t want to be rich."
"I don"t know how."
"Is it because of my hair? I could get new roots put in. I could have any kind of hair you want."
"Let"s talk about it in the morning, okay?"
"You don"t want me."
"I, I, I . . . I need to think about it, that"s all. I need to think about what I could do."
"I could work for you, make you money. I"m a trained Eros-Haus girl. And Nina wouldn"t even know I was there."
9.
The vid made a loud bubbling sound at three in the morning. Neil had decided to sleep alone and asked Charity to take the servant"s quarters for the night.
"Sir?" a bodiless voice inquired.
"Who is it?"
"The front desk."
"What time is it?"
"Three, sir. I"m sorry to bother you, but there"s a gentleman down here who says that he has urgent business with you."
"What gentleman?"
"He calls himself Blue Nile."
"Hey, Neilio," the diminutive prod from GEE-PRO-9 said with a smile. He was stretched out across a pink couch near the registration desk.
"What are you doing here?"
"No time for talkin", this place is walkin"," Blue Nile replied as he rose to his feet. He took Neil by the hand as he had done the first day they met over a year before.
The grand lobby of the Crimson Chalet was nearly empty at that time of morning. There was one open bar with an obstinate group of partyers drinking and laughing loudly.
"Walk where?"
"Into the night and out of sight."