once, horn and stick player both now into reeds and gongs and
pipes, the ghostly singing voices gone nasal, and the dancer-
percussionist laying out raw clicks and hollow boomings, cicada
sounds and a thousand drums.
The crowd clapped and whistled and called, except for the
group from the Interface Collective. 'Hoot,' they said in unison.
'Hoot hoot hoot.' Very loud. Lizzie was smiling; Diana sat rapt,
staring into space, and Gonzales got a sudden chilly rush: this
was what she looked like when she was blind.
'Hoot,' said the Interface Collective, 'hoot hoot hoot.' And
the whole group had made a long chain or conga line, each person's
hands on the hips of the person in front. They shuffled forward
until a circle cleared, then surrounded the drummer, the whole
line still moving, most of them still calling out rhythmic hoots.
Back-and-forth and side-to-side, they swayed as the line lurched
ahead, and the drummer continued her dervish dance.
When the night had filled with all the sounds, the drummer
broke through the line, then finished the song with a series of
rolls and tumbles that brought her next to the other two
musicians, where she came to her feet and flung her arms up to the
sound of an orchestral chord, then down to chop it the sound, up
and down again and again, and so to the end.
The drummer climbed up the backs of the two men, who stood
with their arms linked; balancing with one foot on each of their
shoulders, she brought her palms together beneath her chin and
bowed to the audience, then raised her arms above her head and
somersaulted forward to land in front of the other two.
'Hoot hoot hoot,' said the collective, their line now broken.
The three musicians stepped together and bowed in unison.
Gonzales caught Lizzie looking at him, and their gazes
crossed, held for an extra, almost unmeasurable instant, and she
smiled.
The musicians bowed for the last time to the Interface
Collective's hooting chorus. Okay, thought Gonzales. I like it.
Hoot hoot hoot.
#
Lying in her bed, Lizzie turned from side to side, lay on her
back and stretched.
The two from Earth seemed okay. Gonzales she would keep an
eye on, of courseaccording to Showalter, the man was Internal
Affairs and wired to a SenTrax comer, a board candidate named
TraynorChrist knew what script he was playing from. Diana
Heywood she didn't worry about: the woman was into something
stranger than she probably knew, but that was her problem, hers
and Aleph's.
As Showalter and Horn were her problem. They would yank the
plug on this one if anything looked like going wrong. In fact,
they would never have let it happen if Aleph hadn't insisted.
Aleph and the collective saw Jerry Chapman's condition as an
opportunity to extend Aleph's capabilities, but the whole business
just made Showalter and Horn edgy.
Aleph itself troubled herit had been unforthcoming about
the project and those involved in it, almost as if it were hiding
something from her why? with regard to a small project like
this, one apparently unimportant to Halo's larger concerns? What
was the devious machine up to?
So Lizzie lay, her thoughts spinning without resolution, and
she gave in and called her Chinese lover.
He wore a black silk robe embroidered across the front with
rearing crimson dragons; his straight ebony hair fell over his
shoulders. When he let the robe fall away, his skin shone almost
gold under lamplight, and his muscles stood with the clear
definition of youth and endowment and use.
Coarse white sheets slid away from her shoulders and breasts
as she rose to greet him, and she felt her desire rising through
her abdomen and bursting through her chest like the rush of a
needle-shot drug.
She pressed against him, and his rough, strong hands moved
across her body. She lay back as he ducked his head between her
legs, and she spread her legs and felt his first light, hot
caresses.
After she had come for the first time, she moved up to sit
astride him, then for some timeless time the two moved to the
exact rhythms of her needcock and lips and tongue and fingers
playing on her body.
Physically satiated, she dismissed him then, ghost from the
sex machine, and pulled the plugs from the sockets in her neck.
Then she lay alone, silent in her bed in Halo Cityisolated by
her job and, she supposed, by her temperament, dependent on
machines for love.
Maybe it was time to find a human lover.
#
Exhausted by travel and novelty, lulled by food and drink,
Gonzales fell quickly into sleep, and sometime later he dreamed:
He was with a lover he hadn't seen in years. In the
background violin and piano played, and the night was warm; all
around, artificial birds with golden, glowing bodies sang in the
trees. They leaned across a table, each staring into the other's
face, and Gonzales thought how much he loved every mark of passing
time on her facethey had taken her from a young girl's
prettiness to a mature woman's beauty. He and she said the things
you say to a lover after a long absencehow often I've thought of
you, missed you, how much you still mean to me. Aimless and
binding, their talk flowed until she excused herself, saying she'd
be back in just a minute, and she left. Gonzales sat waiting,
watching the other tables, all filled with loving couples,
laughing, caressing. As the hours went on, the others began to
whisper to each other as they looked at him, and then the birds
began to sing that she was not coming back, and he knew it was
