John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

And Jeanne. Lying on the bed, on her tummy, nude but for the prescription dark-blue sunglasses, reading Bataille’s Historie de l’Oeil. Small, this creature, small-breasted and only five two, but full-hipped, softly dimpled all around. Straight, Cleopatra-cut raven hair, bangs over her tinted glasses like the fringe in a funeral limo’s window. She knew he sometimes liked to see her wearing only the blue glasses.

And her skin. He never tired of it. Alabaster, touched with rose pink here and there. Her black hardened-plastic carbine—plastic but quite real, quite lethal—leaning against the bed, within reach. Jeanne.

And Marion. Watching a rock TV show without the sound on. As usual. Half Puerto Rican. Short and busty. Heavy kohl on her brown-black eyes. Two little rings in one nostril, gold wire stitched up and down the edges of her ears. Short auburn hair, spiky, each spike tipped with a different color. Made him nostalgic for the college-circuit punk shows he’d gone to in his early twenties. Long time ago. All that shared and hopeless anger… Marion wearing a black neoprene bikini—amazing that she could sleep comfortably in that thing—and a black lace brassiere. You could see nipples through it the color of dried blood. Spike heels that looked as if they’d been carved of volcanic glass. Black painted finger- and toenails. She was, culturally if unconsciously, a part of her own little demographic tribe. Her submachine gun, one of those transparent jobs that showed off its bullets, lying across her knees, under her hands. Her hands reposing like black-beaked doves on it.

Sometimes he thought: Maybe I should do it. Actually make love to them. Physically do it. Maybe they’re disappointed I never actually do it. That I just like to have them there to look at, play with, pet a little.

Probably not. They were hired escort-bodyguards, expensive ones; courtesans who could fight and shoot. They were his own secret service and, in an austere way, his companions. They were professionals, and to them it would be just more work if he wanted to actually have sex with them.

He was having sex with them, after his fashion. Just watching them move about. Knowing that he could fuck them if he wanted to. They were available. Profoundly available. They were there for him, eternally waiting. Sometimes he made them strike poses. Spread their legs, torquing this way and that. Jut their bosoms, tease him with their expressions. Sometimes he put his face close to them, so close he could feel the body heat of the girl on his lips. Sometimes he’d put on the freshly laundered silk gloves and pet them a little. He’d order them to make love to one another; combine and recombine them as he watched from a chair by the bed. They were all bisexual. And he paid them breathtakingly well.

So they didn’t mind if he chose their clothing and their unclothing; their perfume and their bath soap; their makeup and their cold creams. Their lingerie and their weapons.

He was convinced that if he actually had sex with them, it would be a let-down. Any one of them, he didn’t doubt, was quite proficient. But the act itself had always been a disappointment to him. The excellence, the exquisite essence of sex, for Witcher, was in the contemplation of it. The anticipation. The almost. The allure. That was the high. His refinement of voyeurism was an esthetic achievement, really, an art form that he was proud of. Was he making them into objects? Sex objects? Partly. Making them into art objects, more truly, with his mind the gallery for his art. That’s how he felt about it. Arranging them around him like the parts of a living erotic collage.

But sometimes… he felt oppressed by their mocking nearness; near and yet far. Their availability and tenderness—but underneath it, they always maintained an emotional distance.

How could he expect anything else?

He couldn’t. And sometimes that depressed him.

It helped to get away from them for a while when he felt that way. As he was beginning to, now.

“I’m going to have breakfast in the main office,” he said. “Need to talk to old Lockett. He gets flustered when he sees you. You want your breakfast on the balcony?”

“Yes, please.” Jeanne didn’t took up from her book.

“Thanks, Dad,” Aria said, as she did her t’ai chi.

“That’s be great, Dad.” Marion absently reached over, toyed with Jeanne’s ass.

They called him Dad, and he encouraged it. He wasn’t sure why.

“I’ll have it sent down. Then take a patrol around, check out the grounds, will you?”

“Sure thing, Dad.”

“You got it, Dad.”

“We got it covered, Dad.”

Witcher’s isolated beachfront estate on the Hawaiian island of Kauai was watched over by a dizzying variety of reconnaissance devices; by satellites and motion-assessment cyber-eyes; by vibration sensors and overflight recon birds; by a variety of cameras and human guards. Aria, Jeanne, and Marion were just three of fourteen bodyguards.

But it was Witcher who saw the thing first, just looking out his window.

“It can’t go on,” Witcher’s accountant was telling him, shortly before Witcher saw it. “It simply can’t go on!” Mincing through the sentence. Lockett—who was on a video display, his image sat-shot from New York—pursed his lips in his prissy way, and as usual Witcher thought of Lockett’s closing lips as the shutting of a clutch purse. “Your capital outlay is just not matched in the—”

“There are other issues here besides financial convenience,” Witcher said. He was standing at his breakfast bar, picking at the remains of his morning’s organically grown fruit salad, gazing absently out the window as he talked to Lockett. The sea was restless today. Thin clouds skied ahead of the wind, and below the clouds a single aircraft flecked the azure. “The NR is an important step in the direction that I…”

Witcher’s voice trailed off.

The aircraft had birthed something out of itself. It was too far away to make it out clearly. But it was growing…

“Jesus!”

He ran for the hurricane cellar.

“Now, look…” Lockett was saying from the monitor behind him. “You can’t pretend it’s going to go away… this kind of debt…”

The voice diminishing, lost as Witcher half dove, half ran down the steps—then grabbed at the railing as the world roared and the building rocked around him.

A missile. He couldn’t believe it. How dare they.

He watched a crack make its way across the concrete basement wall ever so slowly. Crick. Crick-crick. He waited for the building to come down around him.

But the crack stopped spreading; the building quieted down. Whatever was left of it was going to stand.

Slowly, on wobbly legs, he climbed the stairs, into smoke and shouting, flickering light. A few shards of glass tinkled from the crust remaining in the frame of the picture window. Flame licked down the hallway; gray smoke collected under the cracked ceiling. The monitors were blacked out; two of them cracked, one caved in.

Maynard, his new chief of Security, a whip-thin black man in a sky-blue jumpsuit, came in wearing a gas mask but coughing underneath it. Witcher felt his spine freeze, and asked, “Did they nerve-gas us?”

Maynard shook his head. “No, I’m wearin’ the mask against smoke.” He pulled it off, and his face was sheathed in blood from a cut on his forehead. He was gasping, leaning against the tilted breakfast bar. “You okay, Mr. Witcher?” When Witcher nodded, Maynard went on. “There were two more missiles, but we got those, they went down in the ocean. The one that got through hit the sun veranda, took out the whole south wing. The aircraft is gone. We didn’t get a clear make on it. We’d better get you out of here.”