‘Oh yes,’ Dee says brightly. ‘I have a mind in here called Secretary. She has precedents coming out of my ears.’
‘Well,’ Ax says firmly, rising, ‘I suggest you go back over them. It’ll all seem very different, I can tell you that for nothing.’
‘OK,’ Dee says. Ax holds the door open, waiting. Dee stands up.
‘What now?’
He looks her down and up. ‘Shopping, I think.’ His voice conveys an epicene disdain.
She picks up her purse, sticks the pistol back in the top of her skirt, and glances around. She’s left nothing.
‘Nice room.’
‘Mine,’ Ax says. ‘I’d be very happy to share it with you.’
The outer door of the building booms behind them. ‘Stay,’ Ax commands it. Magnetic bolts set it ringing again. Ax grins at her and sets off to the left. Dee glances around as she strolls beside him. The house they’ve just come out of is four storeys tall, and narrow. So are all the others around here, in classic crowded canal-bank style, but there are no weathered brick walls or contrast grouting, no sills or window-boxes. Everything’s concrete, a skin slapped up in a hurry on webs of wire-mesh over iron bones, graffiti its only – and appropriate – decoration. The city’s spicular towers loom like construction cranes above the buildings, reducing them to on-site huts.
Smoke rises from among the stalls, steam from the pavements. Mist hangs along the canal surface. The spray-paint on the walls gets more and more vehement, reaching a climax of clenched fists and rockets and mushroom-clouds and dinosaurs at the entrance to an alley.
Ax stops and waves inward. ‘This way.’
The alley is no more than three metres wide but it’s a shopping street in its own right, and unlike what Dee has seen of the neighbourhood so far, it has a worked-for charm, the names of the shops painted in painstaking emulation of the clean calligraphy of twenty-first-century mall-signs. At the first window display Ax waits impatiently as Dee surveys a fossil diorama, allegedly of the fauna of one of the planet’s ancient sea-beds. Scientist has other views, and Latin names Dee doesn’t know float distractingly across her sight. Inside the shop, fossils are being worked into amulets and ornaments. A girl at a grinding-wheel raises her face-plate, gives Dee an inviting smile and returns – puzzled or baffled by Dee’s Scientist-masked response – to her work. The volatile smells of varnish and polish, glue and lubricant waft through the doorway along with the screech of carborundum on stone.
There’s a shop selling drugs and pipes; a newspaper stand where Dee sees copies of The Abolitionist and more obscure titles like Factory Farming, Nano Mart, Nuke Tech; a stall stacked with weathered junk identified as ‘Old New Martian Alien Artifacts’; at all of which Dee’s critical dawdling has Ax muttering and smoking. Dee enjoys this refusal, trivial though it is, to adapt to a human’s priorities; an exercise of free will.
But she shares Ax’s evident delight when they reach the first boutique, a cave of clothing and accessories. He leads her in, and they’re there for an hour that passes like a minute and then out again into other clothes-shops, and cosmetics-artists’ little studios and jewellers’ labs. All the while Ax fusses around her with an unselfconscious intimacy which doesn’t vary with her state of dress or undress. She can tell that the pleasure he takes in her is aesthetic, not erotic. The software of Sex is sensitive to such distinctions: it can read the physiology of a flush, time the beat of a pulse and measure the dilation of a pupil, and it knows there’s no lust in this boy’s touch.
At the far end of the alley is a café. They sit themselves down there under the sudden light of the noon sun above the narrow street, sip coffee, and smoke, surrounded by their purchases. Dee’s cast off her sober style for something dikey and punky. She preens in leather, lacing and lace; satin and silk, spikes and studs. A look that would have most twelve-year-old boys unimpressed, most men stimulated. Ax looks at her as a work of art he’s accomplished, which at the moment she is.
Dee fidgets with her lighter, looks up under the fringe of her restyled hair. She’s about to say something, but she doesn’t know what to ask.
‘Let me spare you,’ Ax says. ‘If embarrassment is in your repertoire, that is. Sexually speaking, I’m not in the game. On the game, sometimes, perhaps.’ He flicks fingertips. ‘Not gay, not neuter. Just a boy: a permanent pre-pubescent.’
‘Why?’ Dee asks. ‘Is it an illness?’
‘Terminal,’ Ax grins. ‘Something down where the genes meet the little machines: a bug. A virus. Something my parents picked up on the long trip. Fortunately it doesn’t kick in unless I go through puberty. So I’ve fixed my biological age a bit younger than most.’
‘And there’s no help for it?’
Ax turns down the corners of his mouth. ‘If there is, it’s with the fast minds. Best advice would be to forget it, in other words. But I couldn’t forget it. One reason I got into abolitionism…’ He laughs. ‘My chances of becoming a man are right up there with the dead coming back and the fast minds running again. Pffft.’
‘Hmmm.’ Dee feels sad. What a waste. A brighter thought comes to her. ‘You could grow up as a woman,’ she says.
‘Well, thank you,’ Ax replies, pouting and posing for a moment. ‘I’d consider it, but the fixers tell me the bug reacts to the hormones of either sex. So I’m stuck with neither, and after the predictable raging and sulking I decided I might as well make a career of being someone a jealous male could trust alone with his female.’ He draws in smoke and exhales it elegantly. ‘Freelance professional eunuch and part-time catamite.’
While Dee’s still thinking about this, and wondering if Ax’s lot isn’t, all things considered, any worse than hers, he adds:
‘Before I found out about my condition, I was quite a normal little lad.’ He sighs. ‘The effeminacy’s just a pose, Dee, just a pose. And in case anyone forgets, I can also be extremely violent.’
‘Why didn’t you specialise in that? Be a guard or a fighter or –’
‘And risk getting killed?’ Ax guffaws. ‘Do I look stupid?’
‘No.’ Dee gives him a friendly, sisterly (now that she’s figured out their only possible relationship) smile, but she stops feeling sorry for him. She reckons he’s doing all right. Queer as a coot, she finds herself thinking, and as they get up to leave she sets Scientist grumpily searching ancient, inherited databases to find out what the fuck a coot is.
‘So I made it to the ships,’ Wilde said. He raised himself on one elbow and peered around the room, in which he’d been lying awake for ten minutes.
‘Good morning,’ said the machine. It was resting on the floor in the corner of the room. The room was upstairs in the Malley Mile, cheap to rent and containing a wash-stand, a chair and a bed. It was remarkably free of dust, due to machines about the size and shape of large woodlice that scuttled about the floor.
Wilde stared at the machine. ‘What have you been doing all night?’
‘Guarding you,’ the machine said. It stretched out its limbs momentarily, then folded them back. ‘Scanning the city’s nets. Dreaming.’
Wilde remained leaning on one elbow, looking at the machine with a suddenly reckless curiosity. ‘I didn’t know machines dreamed.’
‘I also reminisce,’ said the machine. ‘When there’s time.’
Wilde grinned sourly. ‘I suppose time is what you have plenty of, thinking so much faster –’
‘No,’ the machine snapped. ‘I told you. I’m a human-equivalent machine. My subjective time is much the same as yours. No doubt my connections are faster than your reactions, but the consciousness they sustain moves at the same pace.’