Ellen Datlow - Off Limits

She stayed where she was until everyone else had left, and then she walked over to the open grave and looked down at the coffin, onto which someone had dribbled a handful of brown loamy soil.

“Don’t worry,” she said to the dead man. “Nothing scares me. Not anymore. I’ll be back, and I’ll get that wreath one way or another.”

She had no wristwatch but the church clock told her that she had five hours in hand before they’d be expecting her at the hospital.

Anna hadn’t been to the Euroterminal meat-rack for seven years, but it didn’t take long for her to find her way around. The establishment of Licensed Houses had been intended to take prostitution off the streets but it had only resulted in a more complicated stratification of the marketplace. It wasn’t just the fact that there were so many different kinds of augmentation available, or the fact that more than three-quarters of them were illegal, or even the fact that there were so many girls whose augmentations had ultimately gone wrong or thrown up unexpected side effects; the oldest profession was one which, by its very nature, could never be moved out of the black economy into the gold. Sleaze, secrecy, and dark, dark shadows were marketable commodities, just like psychotropic bodily secretions.

She didn’t bother to try for a managed stand; she’d spoken the truth when she’d told her dead lover that nothing scared her anymore, but she hadn’t time to get into complicated negotiations with a pimp. She went down to the arches where the independents hung out. There was no one there she knew, but there was a sense in which she knew all of them—especially the ones who were marked like her. It didn’t take long to find one who was a virtual mirror image in more overstated makeup.

“I’m not here to provide steady competition,” she said, by way of introduction. “I’m still hospitalized. I’ll be back on the ward tomorrow, but I need something to get me through today. Fifty’ll do it—that’s only one substitution, right?”

“Y’r arithmetic’s fine,” the mirror image said, “but y’got a lot of nerve. Demand’s not strong, and I don’t owe y’anything just ’cause we’re two peas from the same glass pod. It’s a cat-eat-cat world out here.”

“We aren’t two peas from any kind of pod,” Anna informed her, softly. “Symptoms are all on the surface. They used to say that all of us were sisters under the skin, but we were never the same. Even when they shot the virus vectors into us, so that our busy little epithelial cells would mass-produce their carefully designed mind expanders, it didn’t make us into so many mass-produced wanking machines. One of my doctors explained to me that the reason it all began to go wrong is that everybody’s different. We’re not just different ghosts haunting production line machines; each and every one of us has a subtly different brain chemistry. What makes you you and me me isn’t just the layout of the synaptic network which forms in our brains as we accumulate memories and habits; we tailor our chemistry to individual specifications as well. You and I had exactly the same transformation, and our transplanted genes mutated according to the same distortive logic, but fucking you never felt exactly the same as fucking me, and it still isn’t. We’re all unique, all different; we offered subtly different good trips and now we offer subtly different bad ones. That’s why some of our clients became regulars, and why some got hooked in defiance of all the ads which promised hand-on-heart that what we secreted wasn’t physically addictive. You don’t owe me anything at all, either because of what we both were or because of what we both are, but you could do me a favor, if you wanted to. You’re free to say no.”

The mirror image looked at her long and hard, and then said: “Jesus, kid, y’really are strung out—but y’d better lose that accent if y’re plannin’ on workin’ down here. It don’t fit. I was goin’ for a cup of coffee anyway. Y’got half an hour—if y’don’t score by then, tough luck.”

“Thanks,” said Anna. “I appreciate it.” She wasn’t sure that half an hour would be enough, but she knew she had to settle for whatever she could get.

She’d been on the pitch for twenty-three minutes when the car drew up. In a way, she was grateful it had taken so long. Now, she wouldn’t be able to go back afterward.

The punter tried to bargain her down to thirty, but the car was a souped-up fleet model whose gloss shouted to the world that he wasn’t strapped for cash, and there was no one else on the line with exactly her kind of spoliation.

The client was a wise guy; he knew enough about the chemistry of his own tastes to think he could show off. It probably didn’t occur to him that the doctors had taken pains to explain to Anna exactly what had happened to her, or that she’d been better able to follow their expert discourse than his fudged mess. Nor did it occur to him that she wouldn’t be at all interested in the important lessons which he thought were there to be learned from the whole sorry affair. She didn’t try to put him right; he was paying, after all, and the torrent of words provided a distraction of sorts from the various other fluxes generated by their brief and—for her—painful intercourse.

“That whole class of euphories should never have been licensed, of course,” he opined, after he’d stumbled through a few garbled technicalities. “It’s all very well designing fancy proteins by computer, but just because something’s stable in cyberspace doesn’t mean it’s going to behave itself under physiological conditions, and physiological conditions is a politer way of putting it, when we’re referring to the kind of witch’s cauldron you get up a whore’s you-know-what. They say they have programs now that will spot likely mutation sites and track likely chains of mutational consequence, but I reckon they’re about as much use as a wooden fort against a fire-breathing dragon. I mean, this thing is out of control and there’s no way to lock the stable door now the nags have bolted. Personally, I’m not at all distressed—I mean, I’ve had all the common-or-garden stuff up to here. I never liked whores wired up for the kind of jollies you can get from a pill or a fizzy drink. I mean, it’s just stupid to try to roll up all your hits into one. It’s like praying mantises eating their mates while they fuck—no sense to it at all. Me, I like things spread around a bit. I like it sour and sweet, in all kinds of exotic combinations. People like me are the real citizens of the twenty-first century, you know. In a world like ours, it ain’t enough not to be xenophobic—you have to go the other way. Xenophilia is what it takes to cope with today and tomorrow. Just hang on in there, darling, and you’ll find yourself back in demand on a big scale. Be grateful that they can’t cure you—in time, you’ll adapt, just like me.”

She knew that in her own way she had adapted, and not just by taking her medication regularly. She had adapted her mind and her soul, and knew that in doing that she had adapted her body chemistry, too, in subtle ways that no genetic engineer or ultra-smart expert system could ever have predicted. She knew that she was unique, and that what Alan had felt for her really did qualify as love, and was not to be dismissed as any mere addiction. If it had been mere addiction, there wouldn’t have been any problem at all; he would simply have switched to another girl who’d been infected with the same virus vectors but had proved to be immune—so far—to the emergent mutations.

The punter wasn’t a bad sort, all things considered. Unusual tastes weren’t necessarily associated with perverted manners. He paid Anna in cash and he dropped her right outside the door of Lambeth North tube station. It was, he said, pretty much on his way home—which meant that he could conceivably have been Isabel’s next-door neighbor. Anna didn’t ask for further details, and he wouldn’t have told her the truth if she had. There was an etiquette in these matters which had to be observed.