"Let me speak frankly, though," said Mira, turning Hirata toward her.
Mira smiled when she saw the woman's face. Hirata's eyes were as glassy as ever. The metallic glow of the Vaddum in the dark, silent room had only deepened her trance.
"No artwork is complete without the artist. Isn't it so?"
The woman's eyes were transfixed on Mira's breasts, where the soothing whorls of the dress's pattern had concentrated themselves.
"But Robert is dead…" she muttered.
"Not really dead," Mira answered. She paused for a moment, squeezing Hirata's hands with the edges of her fingernails. A panicked look came into the woman's eye. Mira released the pressure. "His art lives on."
Relief again. A smile and a nod.
Mira let the calm return and deepen in her willing victim, touching cheeks, forehead, the tiny hollow between nose and upper lip. Coated with its substance, the tips of Mira's fingers danced with the seductive patterns of the dress, impressing promises directly onto Hirata's flesh. As an experiment, Mira kissed the woman softly on the lips. Hirata simply smiled in return, the breach of social protocol lost in the warm glow of hypnosis.
"I so wish that I had met him. That I could have talked to him," Mira said, a plaintive note entering her voice. She felt the coating on her hands heat slightly, undergoing a change to become slightly caustic. She touched Hirata on the temples, the lips, and watched a frown bloom.
"Just a few words, a few essential questions about his art," Mira murmured.
She grasped Hirata's wrist, the nail of her thumb pressing harder and harder into soft flesh. In her peripheral vision, she saw the patterns of her dress intensify, become dizzyingly fast. A small, pained sound came from between Hirata's lips.
"But, of course, I never can," Mira added, nodding with acceptance. Again, the dress, her voice, the agents she had released upon Hirata's body soothed the woman, nudged her back toward a relaxed state. Mira reduced her pressure on the captive wrist, and felt a slight movement on her thumb, a fleck of matter crawling from her. She had broken Hirata's skin just enough to admit a tiny splinter of the dress into her bloodstream. It would work there to follow the subtle shifts of tension and release, of itch and scratch, of Vaddum alive and Vaddum gone.
Mira touched Hirata some more, kissed her a few times on the neck and arms, her lips now alive with a host of tiny whirlpools. Hirata waited, silent, for the next change. She was wanting it now, addicted in some small measure to the ebb and flow, needing it as if a pulsing, cycling music held her in its charms.
"But just to see his eyes," Mira said. "Have you ever seen his eyes?"
"Yes." A whisper in the dark.
"Is he alive?" A wave of subtle irritants, pains, tensions, nagging memories of things left undone, of potential unfulfilled. Hirata shook her head, no, no.
"Were they lively eyes?"
Relax. Relax.
You are in good hands.
Darling carried his young rider through the forest, the sun dappling the ground with shadows and reflections cast from the metal trees. The leaves shimmered in the light breeze of the protected basin, and he realized that the new Vaddums were not indoor pieces; they were designed to dance in this measured wind. He saw far better now the trajectory of Vaddum's work, the assembled sculptures providing the missing links between the sculptor's pre-Blast work and the piece in Flex's gallery.
Darling was amazed that so much had been accomplished in seven years. An advantage of being thought dead, he supposed. Or perhaps the whole project was older than the Blast, a hidden garden never offered for sale.
As they walked, Darling detected a presence in the forest. An artificial was following them cautiously, wrapped in military stealth alloys, its AI core so carefully shielded that he could only sense its space-curving effects indirectly; the thin copper leaves of the trees returned only the subtlest clues of its passage.
"Do you feel her?" asked Beatrix when Darling extended his sensory strands. "I thought only I could feel her."
Darling frowned. The child's limited sensory apparatus shouldn't be able to detect the creature. It skirted his probes like a trick of the imagination.
"She follows me, sometimes," Beatrix said. "She's a secret, too, like the sculptor. My secret twin."
More secrets, Darling thought. He kept walking, and the unknown creature followed them.
It took longer than expected.
Hirata Flex must have held the sculptor's confidence for many years, perhaps since before the Blast Event, a conspirator in Vad-dum's copying. The old habit of lying died hard.
After forty-five long minutes, Mira asked Hirata if she wanted to try on the dress. Mira withdrew the offer and extended again a few times, until Hirata was begging for it with her dark eyes, stripping to nothing in the cold storage space. Mira held the woman then, the patterns on her own breasts whirling against Hirata's erect, wine-colored nipples. Hirata could barely speak by now, answering Mira's pressing questions with panting monosyllables. When the intelligent frictions of the dress met the soft skin of her belly, Hirata began to say, "Yes, yes… yes."
But to nothing in particular.
Mira was burning with lust by now, having seduced and hypnotized herself in the bargain. When Hirata's pale-as-moonlight flesh tumbled out into the darkness, Mira knew she had to take her. But Mira's discipline kept her from breaking the spell; she let her tongue taste the salt of Hirata's armpits, belly, and loins, but denied herself the prying, grasping, scratching she wanted so badly. She allowed her fingers to worry the woman's full, shaved labia, brought Hirata's panting response into the game of tension and release.
Finally, Mira commanded her dress to flow from her body and wrap itself around Hirata. It spread itself thin to cover every centimeter of flesh, to push into Hirata's now hungry mouth and entrap her tongue, where it produced the intense flavors of burning peppers alternated with sweet, cool relief. Mira knelt over her, staring into Hirata's face through its encompassing but transparent raiment, her interrogator's calm lost as she jammed her own fingers into her now naked loins.
Mira cupped her own orgasm in her palm, held it steady and bare millimeters distant as Hirata's sweat condensed within the now torturous, now soothing wrap, and shouted at her, "Tell me, damn you, if he's alive!
"I beg you! Just say it!"
Hirata's eyes were bright with her answer, and she cried through the spiderweb of the pulsing garment/weapon/intelligence:
"Yes! He lives on the broken hill." She wept coordinates.
And finally, the dress gave Hirata what she wanted, resolving every itch, every burn, every raw desire. The woman screamed with the agony of the wait, with the relief of it. And Mira rode the screams to the conclusion of her own sweet pleasure, wrapping her legs around the mewling cocoon of dancing whorls. The two pressed together hard, and rocked away the threads of their lust until they were hoarse and spent.
When they separated, the weapon/garment/objet d'art returned to its rightful owner, slipping across the dusty floor to reform, clean and unwrinkled on Mira's body; just a dress again.
Mira looked at Hirata, naked, dirty and exhausted on the floor, and wondered if what she had done were so different from the torture Darling had asked her to avoid. Perhaps it hadn't been so violent, but in sheer intensity, in disregard for the subject's will, this was much the same as her usual methods. But tomorrow would tell. Instead of being broken, traumatized, permanently scarred, Hirata would feel ten years younger. And Mira felt that the woman's memory might be rather selective in how it painted these unlikely events: Odd, but refreshingly direct, those Home Cluster art dealers.