I had my best team look it over. They went away with the diagrams and the notes they found on interdimensional space. They even had a stat of some figures scribbled on a tabletop.
Sometimes I plug into the monitor and look at the Cube sitting in the empty, locked studio, and I wonder.
Where are they?
5
For almost two years after Madelon and Mike disappeared I was a sort of robot, going through the motions of being Brian Thorne, being
But the flesh would tug at me and I would break the shell and emerge, racing to the fleshpots, popping sensoids, pushing my body to the limit, overdosing on sex and high speeds and variety, variety in everything. Once I selected a girl named Millicent Abigail Fletcher as my consort simply because her chocolate skin contrasted so well with a golden body jewelry design I had seen. I changed her name to Juno and never let her wear anything but the totally revealing costume, even when we made love. My guilt over making her a nonperson sent me back into another retreat, this time into the Himalayas.
I came back from the snows, impatient with the weather-domed Shangri-La, and dropped into the real world again with a large splash. I acquired a pair of identical twins, blonde and tanned and almost grotesquely voluptuous, and made them my constant companions, calling them Left and Right, and dressing them in a mirror image of each other. I stood on a balcony at the New Metropolitan, waiting for Stephanie and Harold, flanked by my shimmering voluptuaries, and I commented that the nude was an art form invented by the Greeks in the fifth century.
“Before that it was religious sex,” I said.
“Oh, I am devoutly sexual,” Left said.
“Me, too,” Right said huskily, the nipple ornament of her left breast denting my jacket, going on automatic with any mention of sex. The next day I had them signed with a good agent and I was in Berlin. I was moody and unhappy and sorry for myself. An idle comment to Von Arrow that a certain artist was lousy because he traced his nudes almost destroyed the man’s career.
It was while I was in these moods that I studied hardest at
I rose to walk barefoot along a curving Tahitian beach in the early dawn and by the time the nameless, forgettable girls had awakened to a breakfast of fruit, I was at a conference table a thousand kilometers away, discussing interest rates and tax credits.
I do not think I have been callous in my treatment of the young beauties who, in effect, sell themselves to me, or at least rent. They are pleasant companions, and the wisest of them know the time spent with me is an investment. I make outright gifts of stock or jobs, and I open investment opportunities for brothers and fathers, and sometimes husbands. Our relations are businesslike, a bartering process in laughter and sex and companionship.
By no means were all of my female friends in this classification, although I have become friends with many women I met in this manner. Many of my friends are the wives and mistresses or companions of friends, wise and wonderful women whose friendship I value as much as that of any man.
But there is always the matter of sex. Sex has a beginning, a middle, and an end, both in individual acts and in affairs. When the time came that a woman no longer interested me, or I no longer interested her, I might make a suggestion to a film producer, if she was the right type, and wanted it. She might go from my bed to having her name across every teleset on four continents. I might bring some rich-bodied, hot-mouthed wench together with a sensatron artist like Coe, give the necessary commission, and the aid of my Publitex firm to “glorify” it, and another star would be born as payment for a week in Madagascar or several delightful days of rutting in the Atlantis undersea world. It was incidental that my publicity company made money, that an artist was helped, that the sensatron could be donated, and that my Voyage Productions had a new star. I might do the same sort of thing for someone who had merely pleased me, or someone I admired, without any sex or ego-caresses. It was something I seemed to do by reflex, separating the wheat from the chaff, plucking the good from the poor and making it better.
All this was because of my money, and my money was, in part, because of all this. Money, beyond a certain point, is only wealth. Wealth, after a certain point, is pointless. It’s there, you know it’s there, but you don’t