Engineman - Eric Brown [167]
Fuller thought of the city, of the life and the energy there. He turned and watched the silver vehicle drive from the estate, carrying away the woman who was no longer human.
//Big Trouble Upstairs
I'm on the Barrier Reef pleasure 'plex, looking for a year-wife. Someone small and dark this time - Oriental maybe. The jacuzzi lagoon is foaming around me and my lover, a cute Kampuchean fluxer, when my handset goes ber-leep. I wade into the shallows, the kid big-eyed on my hip, and take the call.
"Sorry to come between you and your fun, Isabella." Massingberd stares up from the back of my hand, playing the chaperone. "But you're on."
The spacer senses the goodbye and lays a soft cheek against my breast. I enter her head, tone down the love I've been promoting thus far, damp her synaptic fires.
"Give it me, Mass," I sigh.
"You're gonna love this one," he begins, and gives me a big wink.
There's a laser-slayer loose on the Carnival Sat, wasting innocents like mad-crazy. The bastard zero'd the security team first, along with the mechanical defences - and he has a dozen workers imprisoned on the satellite, to pick off at his leisure.
"It's your kind of job, Is. You're going in there alone."
"Say, thanks..."
"A shuttle's on its way," he says, and signs off.
Soo-Lee clutches me. "Isabella..."
"There'll be other times," I say. But not with me... Why do I do it - why? It was love at first sight. I felt that yearning, gut pang the second I set eyes on Soo-Lee a week back. She was picking scabs from her new hand-jack on the beach outside my villa. Of course, she wouldn't have given me a second glance, but I have ability.
Ten years ago I tested psi-positive and had the cut - but the operation went wrong. It was too successful. Instead of coming out plain telepathic, I emerged mega-telepathic. Which meant that, as well as being able to read minds, I had the power to control a subject's thoughts, make them do just whatever the hell I wanted. Pretty neat, okay.
I was the first of a new line.
We're a dozen now, closely supervised.
And I have this thing about kids. Whenever I see one I like I get in there and tamper, fix, and soon they're all gooey-eyed, eager.
This past week on the 'plex we made a striking couple: an anorexic, slit-eyed Enginegirl and a six-six eighteen-year-old Rwandan Watusi with scarified cheeks and dreads. That's me.
The love I promote is doomed, of course. I can't sustain that degree of adoration in a subject for long. The past few years I've instilled ersatz-love for the period of a six-month or one-year marriage contract - then withdrawn. It's kinder that way, to both parties. A year is long enough to live a lie, even when you're in love.
I dump Soo-Lee on the golden sand and sluice apathy around her frontal lobe, and by the time I step into my villa she's beginning to wonder what she ever saw in me. Soon Isabella Manchester will be nothing more than a pleasant event in the memory of her youth, and then not even that.
Massingberd knows. He was the only person I could bring myself to tell. He once asked me why I didn't turn my ability on myself. "Why don't you cure yourself, Is? Fix your head so you don't lust after these kids..."
It's no longer illegal, but oldsters like Mass have throwback morality.
"'Cos if it wasn't kids it'd be women or men. I'd be no better off, just the same. I need love, okay? I guess I'm insecure. I can't change what I am because of why I am-" And stopped there.
I didn't even know Massingberd well enough to tell him why I am.
"I need love and it's so easy for me to get it," I'd often say. "But how can that be love?"
Skip six hours and I'm aboard the shutt on autopilot, heading away from the plane of the ecliptic towards the Carnival Sat. And mine's the only vessel going thisaway: all the other traffic is streaming Earthwards, sunlit specks corkscrewing down the gravity-well like gene-data