Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [205]
‘Well,’ she said. ‘Lucky me.’
Everybody trooped outside to send the new couple on their way. They’d cunningly called a taxi, and left behind a car covered with shaving foam and lipstick for the rain to wash.
Then more dancing, and more talking, and a long taxi ride to Annette’s flat, with Irene’s dress draped across our knees. As I paid the driver she ran to the steps of her house, laughing, her hems bunched in one hand and the other dress flying out behind her like a comet. I caught up with her as she unlocked the outer door. We went down the stairs and into her darkened flat, noisily trying to be quiet.
She took me straight to her bedroom, hooked the wedding-dress on its hanger over a wardrobe door facing the foot of her bed, and turned to me. I caught the tapes of the bow at her waist, yanked them and she twirled around, catching the pinafore as it came off and sending it sailing into a corner. I fumbled with buttons down the back of the dress, found a concealed zip and opened it. The dress fell around her feet. She stepped out of its circle in a long nylon slip, and deftly undid every button of my shirt while I got rid of my footwear, trousers and Y-fronts as fast as possible. The slip slid down to her feet with a rattle of static electricity. The rest of her underwear took enjoyably longer to remove.
I cupped her breasts in my hands and buried my mouth between them. Her skin tasted of talc and salt. Holding her away to look at her and holding her close to touch her led to a closer, quicker rhythm as we tumbled onto her bed.
‘Hey, hey, hey,’ she said. She put her hand on my shoulder and held me away, reached behind her head and waved a small foil package in front of my face. Then she tore the package open with her teeth.
‘Get that on, you irresponsible bastard.’
‘Wouldn’t want to be responsible for bastards,’ I agreed. I rolled the condom onto my cock. ‘I do have some with me, I just forgot.’
‘If you ever say anything as feeble to me again you’re outa here, Jon Wilde.’
I tried for a moment to think of some reply, and then put my tongue to a better use.
I woke in a room dim in the curtained light of mid-morning, my limbs still tangled with Annette’s, and was momentarily startled by the apparition of the white gown looming over the end of the bed, its falls of lawn and drifts of lace protected by a shimmering forcefield of polythene, like a ghost from the future.
5
Ship City
We take, first, a long view (longer than it looks) and catch the planet as it swings by from a hundred thousand kilometres out. It’s red – no surprises there – but it’s mottled with dark spills of blue and stains of green, and those spills and stains are beginning to be connected up by…channels, by…(and the thought is as fleeting as the glimpse) canali, so that New Mars really does look like the original Mars, really, didn’t. (But didn’t we wish.)
Flip the viewpoint to a thousand kilometres…up, now, not out…and we’re crawling past it at a satellite’s eye-level, taking in the whorled fingerprints of water-vapour, the planet’s curving faceplate of atmosphere steamed-up with breath, the scrawled marks of life and the ruled lines of intelligence: yes, canals.
Dropping now, to a structure as unmistakably artificial as it’s apparently organic: at first sight a black asterisk, like a capital city on a map, then (as the viewpoint hurtles in and the view reddens, bloodshot by the flames of air-braking) like a starfish stranded on the sand.
Cut, again, to a more leisurely airborne vantage, drifting above what is now clearly a city, its radial symmetry still its major feature but with its five arms visibly joined by the black threads of roads, streets, canals; and, at another level, invisible from the outside, by the cobweb cabling of the nets.
And we’re in. That old TCP/IP transaction protocol is still valid (from way back