John Barnes - Mother of Storms

“Oh, um—” He blushes almost purple. Clearly he did mean that way.

“Well, uh, let’s see. Quaz is very well-informed. Stride is kind of the bad boy of the lot, and he’s rude, but—well, he’s really hot when we’re, you know. He knows a lot about being satisfying. Rock… well, he’s a very warm, down-to-earth kind of guy. I guess there’s more affection there than the other two.”

The bellhop’s eyes are full of gratitude.

“That’s important to you—the being likable part, isn’t it?” Mary Ann asks, hoping to keep the puzzlement out of her voice. “Being likable,” after all, is a pretty basic set of acting tricks, ever since Petrokin developed the Sincere Mode Technique twenty years ago.

“Yeah. I mean, I’d like to be as smart as Quaz, or as—uh, you know—as Stride, but it’s that kind of warm feeling that Rock has around him that… oh, well. I guess you know what I mean. I’d rather have people like me than anything else.” He smiles a little. The way he smiles—quite unconsciously, she’s sure—is a not-quite-right (because it’s just a bit exaggerated) copy of Rock’s Sincere Mode smile.

They talk for another minute or so, and she explains that yes, she really did get to be Synthi Venture just by going to the right audition, but she had six years of acting school before that, and she waited a lot of tables, played in a lot of Equity Showcases, and did a lot of data patterning before she got the break. It’s a nice story, happens to be true, and who knows, maybe he’ll get famous and tell it.

After he goes, she realizes that she is going to eat the whole huge breakfast. It’s not quite as perfect as a big breakfast used to be at three in the morning when they’d just closed and struck a Showcase Uncle Vanya, in a café full of theatre people and Lefties and random street lunatics, but it’s still pretty good, and it isn’t any of the overpriced, overseasoned weird stuff Synthi eats. She finishes breakfast without reading more, and gives herself a good scrub all over. Two hours of her time off are now gone as she towels off.

She looks at herself in the full-length mirror, and damn if she isn’t going to cry again. One problem with XV is that it comes at the experiencer through a thick curtain of emotional gauze; that’s why a melodramatic character like Synthi comes through more clearly, and why newspom, with its acute physical pain and terror, is such a big seller. So there, in the mirror, is the evidence of the “lovemaking” with Quaz the night before. Big blotchy bruises on the perfectly shaped breasts and long scratches from his nails—practically his claws—on her thighs and belly. They gave her a pain block, like they always do, but it doesn’t override the memory of having her jaw forced painfully wide open and him biting her tongue till she bled.

Of course, the experiencers got something much less intense, and they never knew… or did they? She looks more closely, under the bruises and scrapes, touching where she can feel her soreness like an echo through the pain blocks, and she sees the fine little lines the laser leaves, sees that where a healthy woman with big breasts would have a bit of extra skin, her armpits have been fitted with something that works like a tiny accordion, that the skin where they take marks and scars off her breasts twice a year is a kind of raw, callused pink—she can’t even feel her own long thumbnail scraping it, and her trim and tidy labia show all kinds of scar tissue.

How can anyone get excited by a woman who’s sewn together like a Frankenstein monster?

She lets her mind catch the edges of memory, and she realizes they are in no better shape than she. Quaz has scar tissue visible on his neck from all the biting, and his back, clawed so often by Synthi (and Flame and Tawnee and Giselle… ), looks like he’s been whipped. Rock, Stride, and Quaz all have penises mangled in a way analogous to cauliflower ear. The needle marks from the muscle stimulators are visible all over their arms, chests, and abs.

She has a vision of the Bride of Frankenstein, of sewn-together corpses thrusting and tearing at each other, falling into heaps of mangled parts, and she thinks she may just lose that fine breakfast, but then she draws a deep breath and says, “I am going to demand a vacation, and if they fire me, I will just have to content myself with being richer than I ever thought I could be. But I am not going to do this even once more until they tell me when I get time off, and it’s going to be soon, because I can’t go on doing this. Not until I’m a lot more rested and feel a lot better.”

At that, she breaks down, sobbing so hard that she can feel her Mary Ann Waterhouse muscles wrenching and twisting against her Synthi Venture tummy sheath.

John Klieg is awake early, as always, and by the time dawn is washing over the old Kennedy Space Center spread out below his control tower, he’s rubbing his hands together and chuckling. A naive visitor might think that all the flashing screens around him are part of his pleasure because he is so thoroughly on top of the operations of GateTech, but in fact they are just decorations. Klieg doesn’t even look at them—he pays people to look at them and to think about what’s on them, and for every screen you see here (and for thousands more that are too dull to make good decorations), there are at least a couple of employees who know much more about it than Klieg ever will.

There are also more than a hundred employees who know more about all the screens than Klieg does. If he were his own employee, he’d have to fire himself, he supposes, and the thought makes him smile.

They make a good decoration because most people who’ve been to Kennedy just came out to look at the big plaque that says various lunatics allowed themselves to be shot into orbit on top of barely controlled bombs from here. A few more determined sorts will go out and look at the little plaques on the crumbling concrete or by the partially collapsed gantries and the towers with the DANGER—UNSTABLE STRUCTURE signs, the small plaques that mention names and dates.

But most people don’t come out here at all. To the extent that they know about it, they look, a few times, at the video clips in their history lessons, and what they see, besides rockets rising into the sky on long pyramids of fire, are immense rooms full of screens, screens that somehow, by their sheer numbers, gave the impression that everything was under control and everything was being taken care of. (It must have been an interesting problem in PR, keeping people from thinking of every screen as something that was liable to go wrong and had to be watched all the time, Klieg thinks.) So as the Man Who Bought Cape Canaveral, he has this row of screens here as a sort of trophy, and he puts what he wants on it—and that’s the data that flows through his empire.

“Empire” is not a bad term for it, either, Klieg thinks—and why is he getting so philosophical today? Not that he undervalues getting philosophical either. One advantage he has always had over the competition has been a certain rigorousness of thought that keeps him focused on what he’s actually doing, not on some image of it. He knows in his bones that he is not a captain of industry (in that nothing he does is very much like what the captain of a ship, an infantry company, or a basketball team does), nor a facilitator of work (work does not cause money; getting paid causes money), nor a seeker of vision (you should know where you are going, but if it is anywhere worth getting to, most of the time and effort goes into the trip). No, philosophic clarity has been a key to his life in business, and he doesn’t fall for facile or self-flattering descriptions—not even, usually, for the self-flattery of thinking he is immune to self-flattery.