Inherit the Earth - Brian Stableford [7]
In the beginning, Diana’s habit of lashing out had added a certain excitement to their passion, but Damon had now reached a stage when the storm and the stress were nothing but a burden—a burden he could do without. He had given up streetfighting; he was an artist now, through and through. He had hoped that Diana would share and assist his adaptation to a new lifestyle and a new philosophy—and he had to give her some credit for trying—but the fact remained that their move into polite society had never really come close to working out. Diana even got steamed up when the elevator took leave to remind her of the small print in the building rules.
It’s over, Damon told himself again as he picked up the third box of groceries. He was testing himself, to see whether anxiety or relief would rise to the surface of his consciousness.
Diana was all ready to fight when he came back through the door, but Damon wasn’t about to oblige her. He put the box he’d carried from the elevator on the floor and stepped back to collect another. She knew that he was buying time, but she let him go back for the third without protest. The expression in her blue-gray eyes said that she wasn’t about to calm down, but she hadn’t gone back for another knife, so he had reason to hope that the worst was already over.
Once the last box was inside the apartment and the door was safely closed behind him, Damon felt that he was ready to face Diana. Fortunately, her tremulous rage was now on the point of dissolving into tears. She had dug her fingernails into her palms so deeply that they had drawn blood, but they were unclenching now. With Diana, violence always shifted abruptly into a masochistic phase; real pain was sometimes the only thing that could blot out the kinds of distress with which her internal technology was not equipped to deal.
“You don’t want me at all,” she complained. “You don’t want any living partner. You only want my virtual shadow. You want a programmed slave, so you can be absolute master of your paltry sensations. That’s all you’ve ever wanted.”
“It’s a commission,” Damon told her as soothingly as he could. “It’s not a composition for art’s sake, or for my own gratification. It’s not even technically challenging. It’s just a piece of work. I’m using your body template because it’s the only one I have that’s been programmed into my depository to a suitable level of complexity. Once I’ve got the basic script in place I’ll modify it out of all recognition—every feature, every contour, every dimension. I’m only doing it this way because it’s the easiest way to do it. All I’m doing is constructing a pattern of appearances; it’s not real.”
“You don’t have any sensitivity at all, do you?” she came back. “To you, the templates you made of me are just something to be used in petty pornography. They’re just something convenient—something that’s not even technically challenging. It wouldn’t make any difference what kind of tape you were making, would it? You’ve got my image worked out to a higher degree of digital definition than any other, so you put it to whatever use you can: if it wasn’t a sex tape it’d be some slimy horror show . . . anything they’d pay you money to do. It really doesn’t matter to you whether you’re making training tapes for surgeons or masturbation aids for freaks, does it?”
As she spoke she struck out with her fists at various parts of his imaging system: the bland consoles, the blank screens, the lumpen edit suite and—most frequently—the dark helmets whose eyepieces could look out upon an infinite range of imaginary worlds. Her fists didn’t do any damage; everything had been built to last.
“I can’t turn down commissions,” Damon told her as patiently as he could. “I need connections in the marketplace and I need to be given problems to solve. Yes, I want to do it all: phone links and training tapes,