She leaned toward him confidingly and took his left hand in hers: “If we succeed, I can give her back to you, Franz. There’s a medical replicator in the medical suite aboard the CG-52. My support ship. It’s expensive and against normal operational procedure, but they can clone her a new body and download her into it. You can have her back again if that’s what you want. As long as you’re willing to do some things for me.”
“Things?” Franz felt himself leaning toward her, drawn by the terrible force of her will and by the abominable hope she dangled in front of him. Bring Erica back? In return for … what? His stomach churned with hope and dread.
“They’re not the sort of jobs I can give an ordinary subordinate. They’re jobs that only someone who’s lived among feral humans for several years can do.”
“What jobs?”
She pulled his hand close, placing it palm down on her thigh. “You fell in love, didn’t you? That’s still supposed to be possible for us, but I’ve never heard of two ReMastered who did it to each other at the same time. So you’ll have a better grasp of how to use the phenomenon to manipulate ferals than anyone else here.” She smelled of floral extracts, and something else: the musk of power, sebaceous glands expressing pheromones that were only switched on in alpha ReMastered.
It was exciting and frightening and made him angry. He dropped his glass and pulled back, away from her. “I don’t want—”
She was on her feet, then leaning over him. “I don’t care what you want,” she said coolly. “Unless it’s U. Erica. In which case you’ll do as I say with a shit-eating grin for the next three months, won’t you?”
He stared at her breasts. Under the thin layers of silk he could see her nipples, aureoles flushed and crinkled with dominance. The dizzying smell was getting to him. His own traitorous hope prevented him from resisting. “Love is a grossly underrated tool within the Directorate, Franz. You’re going to teach me how to use it.”
“How—”
“Hush.” She pulled up the skirts of her gown, bunched them around her waist, and sat down on his lap. He couldn’t get away, much less force himself not to respond to her dominance pheromones. He grew stiff and felt his face flush as she unbuttoned his comic-opera jacket and rubbed her breasts against him. “I want you to teach me about love. It’s going to take a few sessions, but that’s all right — we’ve got time for a first lesson right now. How did you do it with her? Did she start it, or did you, or was it something else?” She began to work at the buttons of his trousers. “If you want to see her again, you’ll show me what you did for her…”
HOLD THE FRONT PAGE
The Times of London — thundering the news since 1785! Now brought to you by Frank the Nose, sponsored by Thum und Taxis Arbeitsgemeinschaft, Melting Clock Interstellar Scheduling Specialists PLC, Bank Muamalat al-Failaka, Capek Robotica Universuum, and The First Universal Church of Kermit
Let’s talk some more about the Moscow disaster and its inevitable fallout — this time from the point of view of the people at ground zero, staring down the flight path of the oncoming bullets. These people are edgy and unhappy, and you should be, too — because what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, and if we allow this slow-motion atrocity to set a precedent, we might be the next bird on the block.
New Dresden is not a McWorld: it’s a shitty little flea hole populated by pathologically suspicious Serbs, bumptiously snobbish Saxons, three different flavors of Balkan refugee, and an entire bestiary of psychopathic nationalist loons. The planetary national sport is the grudge match, at which they are undisputed past masters. I say “past masters” for a reason — they’re not as bad as they used to be. The planet has been unified for the past ninety years, since the survivors finished merrily slaughtering everyone else, formed a federation, had a nifty little planetary-scale nuclear war, formed another federation, and buried the hatchet (in one another’s backs).
For most of the past forty years, New Dresden has been ruled by a sinister lunatic, Colonel-General Palacky, chairman of PORC, the Planetary Organization of Revolutionary Councils. Most of Palacky’s policies were dictated by his astrologers, including his now-notorious abolition of the currency and its replacement with bills divisible by 9, his lucky number. Palacky was a raving egomaniac; he renamed the month of January after himself and fixed the rest of the calendar, too, except for November and December (his mother-in-law got August, for some reason). However, toward the end, he became a recluse, seldom venturing beyond the high iron gates of the presidential palace. There he presided over an endless party, providing fire-eaters, wrestlers, tribal dancers, drag queens, and prostitutes for his guests, while dwarfs balancing silver platters loaded with cocaine on their heads patrolled the corridors to ensure all his protégés had a good time. Needless to say, the palace gates were topped with the decaying skulls of those army officers and PORC delegates who disagreed with the Colonel-General over such fundamental policy issues as the need to feed the people.
The inevitable revolution — which finally came four years ago, in the wake of the Moscow scandal — saw Palacky thrown from his own executive ornithopter and installed a more pragmatic junta of bickering, but not entirely insane, PORC apparatchiks. Thus proving some point about it being bad form for any one PORCer to hog the entire trough.
Anyway, that’s the dark picture. On the bright side, they’re not as remorselessly reactionary as Gouranga, as totalitarian and oppressive as Newpeace, as boringly bucolic as Moscow used to be, as intolerantly Islamic as Al-Wahab, or … you get the picture. A planet is a big place, and even the excesses of the PORC junta can’t really damage the economy too badly. Given a couple of decades of civilization and a few war crimes tribunals, New Dresden will be well on the way to being the sort of place that rational tourists don’t automatically cross off their itineraries with a shudder.
In fact, as long as you don’t question the political wisdom of a system with sixteen secret police forces, thirty-seven ministries with their own militias, four representative assemblies (three of which are run on single-party-state lines by different single parties and all of which have veto power over one another), and above all, as long as you don’t mention the civil war, New Dresden can be a welcoming place for visitors. Just as long as your purpose in visiting is to buy the pretty rustic souvenirs and quaint quantum nanocomputers, ooh and aah at the wonderful reconstructed ethnic villages in Chtoborrh Province, and drink the fine laagered ales in the alpine coaching houses, you can’t go wrong.
Life isn’t that bad for the ordinary people, as near as I can tell. I couldn’t get close enough to be sure, because to do that I’d have to spend twenty years as a deep-cover mole. I wasn’t exaggerating the national suspicion toward strangers. It’s a survival trait on New Dresden; they’ve been breeding for paranoia for centuries. But from outside, the standard of living is clearly rising and looks pretty damned good compared to a clusterfuck like the New Republic.
These people have got automobiles — real fuel-cell-powered people movers, no messing around with boilers or exploding piston motors — and they’ve got music-swapping networks and cosmetic surgery and package holidays on the moons and seven different styles of imported extraplanetary fusion cuisine. Wealthy people have less time and energy for shooting each other to bits, so mostly the grudges fester on in the form of elaborate social snubs rather than breaking out in revolutions. And there are only 800 million people, so they’ve got a lot of potential if they can break the violent cycle of the past two and a half centuries.