Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [196]
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