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‘How do I look?’ she asked. ‘Sort of normal for this area?’

She still thought of Norlonto as basically a vast bohemian slum, where expensive gear could incite suspicion or robbery.

‘If you walked around in nothing but that fancy corset of yours,’ Kohn said, ‘nobody’d look twice.’

‘Thanks a bunch.’

8

The Virtual Venue

Jordan laid his rucksack on the ground and leaned against the small and unoccupied bit of wall between a telesex shop and a dive called The Hard Drug Café. He felt every face that passed as a soft blow against his own, and a vague, guilty nausea, like a boy after his first cigarette. Ever since he’d walked up that hill and on to the Broadway he had been sent reeling by the bizarre and decadent impressions of the place. It was wilder than his wildest imaginings, and this was just the fringe. Neon and laser blazed everywhere, people did things in shop windows that he never suspected anyone did in a bedroom, fetches and hologhosts taunted and flaunted through the solid bodies around him. The bodies themselves astonished him, even after he had stopped gawping at the women, some of whom wore clothes that exposed their breasts, buttocks and even legs. A space-adaptee cut across the pavement in an apparatus spawned from a bicycle out of a wheelchair which he vigorously propelled with arms and – well, arms, which he had as lower limbs. Now and then, metal eyes with no iris or pupil met his glance and sent it away baffled. This, he knew, was known as culture shock. Knowing what it was didn’t make it go away.

After several people had broken stride as they passed and looked at him as if expecting something he realized that all he’d have to do would be to hold out a cupped hand, and they would put money in it. Furious, he straightened his back, then stooped and lifted his pack again. He was a businessman, not a beggar, and he had business to attend to.

The Hard Drug Café looked a good place to start.

Its name was traditional, a bad-acid flashback to an earlier time. The only drugs going down here were coffee by the litre, amphetamines by the mil and anti-som by some unit of speed. Steamed wall-mirrors multiplied the place’s narrow length; virtual presences fleshed out its sparse clientele to a crowd. Looks from behind glades glanced off him as he picked his way to the counter; then they returned to their animated conversations. He took a pleasure more perverse than any he’d seen so far in being thus accepted. Another nerd.

He ordered a coffee and a sandwich whose size didn’t quite justify its name, Whole Earth; declined the offer of smart or fast drugs. He lowered the pack and himself into a corner seat, and familiarized himself with the table modem while the order was being prepared. When it arrived he sat eating and drinking for a few minutes.

It felt weirdly like starting work in the morning…Then the thought of how different it was gave him a jolt and a high which he was sure must be better than any drug on the menu could have given him. He took from his pocket a tough plastic case, opened it and lifted a set of glades and a hand-held from the styrofoam concavities inside. He’d bought them at the first hardware shack he’d reached. They still had an almost undetectable friction that indicated, not stickiness, but the absence of the ineradicable microslick of human oils on plastic. His fingertips destroyed as they confirmed the certainty that they were the first to touch them. He eased them on and looked around to find nothing visibly different but his reflection in the mirrors. Wiping the wall beside him with his sleeve he inspected himself sidelong. For a giddy moment he was drawn into the image of his own reflection in the reflected glades. Then he pulled back and indulged a brief surge of vanity over how much more serious and dangerous and mysterious he looked.

He caught a passing smirk, and turned away.

He brushed his hand back through his bristly hair, then felt behind his ear for a tiny knob